lemonhope

Karma: 1,415

lemonhope Mar 25, 2025, 4:38 AM
4 points
0
on: How to Make Superbabies
23andMe (and all their data) seems to be for sale at a cheap discount.

23andMe potentially for sale for <$50M

lemonhopeMar 25, 2025, 4:34 AM

48 points

2 comments1 min readLW link

lemonhope Mar 22, 2025, 6:41 AM
6 points
1
on: Why Were We Wrong About China and AI? A Case Study in Failed Rationality
I think Alibaba has not made any crazy developments yet. So let’s consider DeepSeek. I think almost nobody had heard of DeepSeek before v3. Before v3, predicting strong AI progress in China would probably sound like “some AI lab in China will appear from nowhere and do something great. I don’t know who or what or when or where, but it will happen soon.” That was roughly my opinion, at least in my memory. Maybe making that kind of prediction does not match the tastes of people who are good at predicting things? Awfully vague claim to make I guess.

There was time between v3 and r1 where folks could have more loudly commented DeepSeek was ascendant. What would this have accomplished? I suppose it would have shown some commitment to truth and awareness of reality. I am guessing people who are against the international AI race are a bit lazy to point out stuff that would accelerate the race. I guess at some point the facts can’t be avoided.

lemonhope Mar 15, 2025, 6:53 PM
1 point
0
on: lcmgcd’s Shortform

lemonhope Mar 2, 2025, 1:05 AM
2 points
0
on: Do safety-relevant LLM steering vectors optimized on a single example generalize?
Holy cow

lemonhope Feb 25, 2025, 5:43 PM
16 points
17
in reply to: Annapurna’s comment on: Annapurna’s Shortform
So unbelievably convenient I don’t even believe it

lemonhope Feb 21, 2025, 9:00 AM
5 points
0
in reply to: Metacelsus’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
Could you do all the research on a boat in the ocean? Excuse the naive question.

lemonhope Feb 21, 2025, 8:56 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Mars_Will_Be_Ours’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
Women/girls with big heads tend to hit their heads but you can solve that with bigger arms.

lemonhope Feb 21, 2025, 8:51 AM
12 points
0
in reply to: Kris Moore’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies

use of a genotyping pipeline poorly suited to ancient DNA which meant that 80% of the genetic variants they “analysed” were likely completely artefactual and did not exist.

Brutal!! I didn’t know this gotcha existed. I hope there aren’t too many papers silently gotch’d by it. Sounds like the type of error that could easily be widespread and unnoticed, if the statistical trace it leaves isn’t always obvious.

lemonhope Feb 21, 2025, 8:40 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: RichardJActon’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
To dumb it down a bit, here’s my made up example: you get +1 IQ if your brain has surplus oxygen in the blood flowing through it. There’s 1000 ways to get a bit more oxygen in there, but with +1000 oxygen, you still only get +1 IQ.

Is that the idea?

lemonhope Feb 21, 2025, 8:26 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
Good point! I didn’t think that far ahead

lemonhope Feb 20, 2025, 9:47 PM
3 points
2
in reply to: Ebenezer Dukakis’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
I would vote to be ruled by their carbon children instead of their silicon children for certain

lemonhope Feb 20, 2025, 9:03 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: AnthonyC’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
GeneSmith forgot to explicitly say that you can and should weight against sociopathy. Parents will be motivated to do this because if your kid is a jerk then your life will be miserable. (I do think if you select for success without selecting against sociopathy then you’ll get lots of sociopaths.)

I would bet against some weird disease manifesting, especially if you are weighting for general health.

lemonhope Feb 20, 2025, 8:11 PM
6 points
3
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: How to Make Superbabies
The wikipedia page picture has some evidence that you are right

lemonhope Feb 20, 2025, 8:07 PM
7 points
−2
on: How to Make Superbabies
Someone please tell Altman and Musk they can spend their fortunes on millions of uber-genius children if they please, and they don’t have to spend it all on their contest to replace ourselves with the steel & copper successors.

lemonhope Feb 20, 2025, 7:58 PM
3 points
0
on: How to Make Superbabies
You could also make people grow up a bit faster. Some kids are more mature, bigger, etc than others at the same wall-clock age. If this doesn’t conflict with lifespan then it would allow the superbabies to be productive sooner. Wouldn’t want to rob someone of their childhood entirely, but 12 years of adolescence is long enough for lots of chase tag and wrestling.

lemonhope Feb 4, 2025, 5:53 AM
LW: 3 AF: 2
0
AF
on: Steering Gemini with BiDPO
What do you think is the ideal use-case for steering? Or is it not needed

lemonhope Jan 28, 2025, 5:47 AM
5 points
0
on: Nvidia doesn’t just sell shovels
What do you think of the cards held by TSMC and Samsung?

lemonhope Jan 24, 2025, 2:39 AM
2 points
0
on: Why and How to Graduate Early [U.S.]
Skipping 8th grade is also a good option. And taking college courses during high school also good. I did both and finished BS 3 years early.

lemonhope Jan 23, 2025, 8:27 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Almost all growth is exponential growth
OK I’ll bite. Memes and genes are obvious enough, but why is the rate of technological improvement proportional to the current technological level (or basically zero)? Don’t ideas get harder to find?

Well Big Ideas do get harder to find, but if you make a 1% improvement to the US’s steel production, then you get an extra 800,000 tons of steel. That doesn’t help you think up new improvements but it does mean that the next 1% improvement will yield 808,000 tons.

Basically, any cost reduction or speedup or quality improvement is on top of what you have. How would you save a silicon foundry $500,000 flat, without saving them more money as they expand? Maybe you could get a one-time government grant or a one-time supplier discount. You have to do a lot of one-time things like this for it to add up to anything significant.

Consider a technological improvement that seems to be constant or linear. Say you come up with a voltage regulator that uses 1 microwatt less than its predecessor. There’s two reasons this isn’t actually so linear. First, the total power consumption reduction is proportional to the number of times that circuit is used across all chips/devices. Second, if someone later finds a 1% power save across all transistors, then your little circuit will probably get that improvement too. It ends up being like a deposit into a savings account with interest.

If your savings account doesn’t have interest, then you probably will never be a millionaire from small deposits. If some branch of technology hasn’t found a few sequential compounding improvements then it probably won’t go anywhere.

lemonhope

23andMe po­ten­tially for sale for <$50M

23andMe potentially for sale for <$50M