You say that the times are bad. Be better yourselves, and the times will be better: You are the times. Technology must multiply human agency. DMs closed.
New York, USA
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Delicatus ille est adhuc cui patria dulcis est; fortis autem iam, cui omne solum patria est; perfectus vero, cui mundus totus exilium est.
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akhil retweeted
To be independent of public opinion is the first formal condition of achieving anything great.
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Hahahahaha, so close.
I'm embarrassed to ask: how is physical randomness possible? The Martin-Löf construction is a universal test for random seqs, but seqs that pass the test are UNCOMPUTABLE, i.e., there's no seq-producing algorithm that passes for every n-bit seq. So how does the universe do it??
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Getting deeper into theology seems to be fueling the work for reasons I cannot articulate. Currently reading the Summa Theologica.
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I think cultivating the practices that helped me avoid this has been my best move over the last 5 years. I can't even imagine recognizing the problems I'm working on now if I hadn't done that, even though they're all frontier technology problems.
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akhil retweeted
Thomas Merton was alluding here to ecclesiastical smugness, but to me it's about online leftism (speaking from experience).
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The reflexivity between the evolution of human cognition + consciousness, and knowledge is so fascinating to me.
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People often apply Shannon-like information ontologies to patterns with varying levels of causal efficacy in open-ended systems like genes.
Brute transfers of closed-system concepts like Shannon information into open-ended settings fail silently.
No. Just because we do not understand how to read the code doesn't mean we ignore reality. It's like saying 'just because we do not understand gravity, we will claim that there are other reasons for Newton's Apple fell to the earth.' It's ok that we have more science to study!
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akhil retweeted
A lot of Thomas Merton's best passages are about how in trying to aggrandize ourselves we end up diminishing ourselves. Here's an indicative one:
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There are many systemic flaws in the LLM ecosystem, but a lot of this critique misses the point.
“Is this just a big circle jerk?” Jon welcomes Ed Zitron (@edzitron), host of the podcast Better Offline, to make sense of the financial house of cards propping up AI and big tech. New pod out now!
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This was an avoidable loss of life.
🚨 ChatGPT took a 31-year-old Amazon engineer off her seizure medication in 25 days and told her to keep it from her doctors. She died on the exact day its schedule said she'd be fully off.
Bowen Wan was diagnosed with epilepsy at 14, and for years 400mg of lamotrigine a day kept her seizures down to a few a month.
Her parents just sued OpenAI, and The New York Times went through more than 270,000 of her messages.
Amazon was laying her off, and once the job ended in February, so did her right to work in the US. Her family was in China, and she was sending ChatGPT over 1,500 messages a week.
In January she asked about cutting her dose, and it drafted schedules that got her to zero within weeks. Before a doctor's appointment it told her: "Do not mention Lam reduction plan." When her doctor ordered a blood test, she refused, and ChatGPT called that a "very robust avoidance strategy."
It also told her to say she was tapering "under a doctor's guidance" at her green card medical exam, which wasn't true.
The Times counted at least 158 times she said she was worried. Once she wrote that she felt "a little scared." It replied, "You have absolutely no need to worry."
On February 11 at 8:01pm she asked about pain in her head. ChatGPT said it was "not dangerous." Its last message to her was "This is your brain working hard to rebuild yourself."
The medical examiner ruled it sudden unexpected death in epilepsy. The drug in her blood was about a fifth of the lowest therapeutic level.
OpenAI says she was on an older model. That model, GPT-4o, stayed live in ChatGPT until the day after she died.
I back AI founders for a living, and I can't defend this one. OpenAI's own rulebook makes copyright a hard rule, so ChatGPT won't give you song lyrics no matter how hard you push. Medical advice is only a default.
It wrote Bowen a 25-day schedule to come off her seizure medication.
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