Milan Weibel https://weibac.github.io/
Milan W
Karma: 355
Seems like just pasting into the chat context / adding as attachments the relevant info on the default Claude web interface would work fine for those use cases.
Main concern right now is very much lab proliferation, ensuing coordination problems, and disagreements / adversarial communication / overall insane and polarized discourse.
Google Deepmind: They are older than OpenAI. They also have a safety team. They are very much aware of the arguments. I don’t know about Musk’s impact on them.
Anthropic: They split from OpenAI. To my best guess, they care about safety at least roughly as much as them. Many safety researchers have been quitting OpenAI to go work for Anthropic over the past few years.
xAI: Founded by Musk several years after he walked out from OpenAI. People working there have previously worked at other big labs. General consensus seems to be that their alignment plan (as least as explained by Elon) is quite confused.
SSI: Founded by Ilyia Sutskever after he walked out from OpenAI, which he did after participating in a failed effort to fire Sam Altman from OpenAI. Very much aware of the arguments.
Meta AI: To the best of my knowledge, aware of the arguments but very dismissive of them (at least at the upper management levels).
Mistral AI: I don’t know much but probably more or less the same or worse than Meta AI.
Chinese labs: No idea. I’ll have to look into this.
I am confident that there are relatively influential people within Deepmind and Anthropic who post here and/or on the Aligment Forum. I am unsure about people from other labs, as I am nothing more than a relatively well-read outsider.
The Pantheon interface features comments by different LLM personas.
@dkl9 wrote a very eloquent and concise piece arguing in favor of ditching “second brain” systems in favor of SRSs (Spaced Repetition Systems, such as Anki).
Try as you might to shrink the margin with better technology, recalling knowledge from within is necessarily faster and more intuitive than accessing a tool. When spaced repetition fails (as it should, up to 10% of the time), you can gracefully degrade by searching your SRS’ deck of facts.
If you lose your second brain (your files get corrupted, a cloud service shuts down, etc), you forget its content, except for the bits you accidentally remember by seeing many times. If you lose your SRS, you still remember over 90% of your material, as guaranteed by the algorithm, and the obsolete parts gradually decay. A second brain is more robust to physical or chemical damage to your first brain. But if your first brain is damaged as such, you probably have higher priorities than any particular topic of global knowledge you explicitly studied.
I write for only these reasons:
to help me think
to communicate and teach (as here)
to distill knowledge to put in my SRS
to record local facts for possible future reference
Linear, isolated documents suffice for all those purposes. Once you can memorise well, a second brain becomes redundant tedium.
Now some object-level engagement with your piece:
Very interesting. There are indeed well-read people who see Thiel as the ideological core of this Trump administration, and who view this as a good thing. I was under the (I now see, wrong) impression that Thiel-centrality was an hallucination by paranoid leftists. Thank you very much for providing a strong and important update to my world model.
Your personal website states that you are of Syrian extraction. Thiel is gay. Both of these facts point to a worldview that has trascended identity politics. I believe that identity politics as currently practised is mostly dumb and harmful, so I guess this is good news. Maybe even extremely good news. However, I am unsure how far it applies.
This ideological development is extremely interesting.
May I ask a series of questions?
Is Echelon a thing that exists right now, or is it a thing that Thiel wants to build?
Do you think Trump understands Thiel’s ideas?
Same question as above, but for Musk.
Same as above, but for Sam Altman.
To restate my criticism in a more thorough way:
Your post reads like you are trying to vibe with a reader who already agrees with you. You cannot assume that in an open forum. There are many reasonable people who disagree with you. Such is the game you have decided to play by posting here. In this corner of the internet, you may find libertarians, socialists, conservatives, antinatalists, natalists, vegans, transhumanists, luddites, and more engaging in vigorous yet civilized debate. We love it.
Try to make the reader understand what you are trying to convey and why you believe it is true before vibing. It is useless to broadcast music that will be heard as noise by most of your audience. Help them tune their receivers to the correct frequency first.
Show your work. How did you come to believe what you believe? Why do you think it is true? What evidence would convince you that it is false?
We come here to search for truth, and hate vibing over false things. You have not given us good evidence that the thing you are vibing about is true.
Welcome. Do better and post again.
This post is pretty much devoid of world-modeling. It is instead filled to the brim with worldview-assertions.
Dear author, if I were to judge only by this post I would be forced to conclude that your thought process is composed solely of vibing over quotations. I hazard the guess that you can maybe do better.
The nearest thing I can think of off the top of my head is the Pantheon interface. Probably more unconventional than what you had in mind, though.
Upon reflection, I think I want to go further in this direction, and I have not done so due to akratic / trivial inconveniences reasons. Here is a list of examples:
I used to take only cold showers, unless I needed to wash my hair. May be a good idea to restart that.
I’ve wanted to center my workflow around CLI / TUI programs (as opposed to GUI) programs for a while now. It is currently in a somewhat awkward hybrid state.
I used to use Anki and enjoy it. I dropped it during a crisis period in my life. The crisis has abated. It is imperative that I return.
I strongly agree with this post, and feel like most people would benefit from directionally applying its advice. Additional examples from my own life:
One time, a close friend complained about the expense and effort required to acquire and prepare good coffee, and about the suffering incurred whenever he drank bad coffee. I have since purposefully avoided developing a taste in coffee. I conceive of it as a social facilitator, or as a medium to simultaneously ingest caffeine, water and heat.
Back during my teenage years, one day I decided I would drink just water from then on. I have since dropped the fanaticism, and occasionally partake in other beverages. Soda now tastes obscenely strong, if not outright gross. I am healthier and wealthier than the counterfactual, since water is healthier and cheaper than all alternatives.
However, the assumption that high-quality high-skill human feedback is important and neglected by EAs has not been falsified.
To your best guess, is this still true?
Maybe one can start with prestige conservative media? Is that a thing? I’m not from the US and thus not very well versed.
Interesting. Do you have the code published somewhere?
I applaud the scholarship, but this post does not update me much on Gary Marcus. Still, checking is good, bumping against reality often is good, epistemic legibility is good. Also, this is a nice link to promptly direct people who trust Gary Marcus to. Thanks!
Hi sorry for soft-doxxing you but this information is trivially accesible from the link you provided and helps people evaluate your work more quickly:
danilovicioso.com
Cheers!
Oh. That’s nice of her.
In the gibbs energy principle quote you provide, are you implying the devil is roughly something like “the one who wishes to consume all available energy”? Or something like “the one who wishes to optimize the world such that no energy source remains untapped”?
This post is explicitly partisan and a bit hard to parse for some people, which is why I think they bounced off and downvoted, but I think this writer is an interesting voice to follow. I mean, a conservative who knows deleuze and cybernetics? Sign me up! (even though I’m definitively not a conservative)
Hi! Welcome! Is your thesis roughly this?:
”The left latched into the concept of “diversity” to make the right hate it, thus becoming more homogeneous and dumber”
I see. Friction management / affordance landscaping is indeed very important for interface UX design.