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biophysboyon The No Kings Takedown Is Why You Shouldn't Rent Your Megaphone from Zuck

If only we had all had such principled foresight. Thank you for this great lesson.

biophysboyon Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day

It is not an ad account - the other reply is stupid. I am saying ad accounts deal with this crap from FB all the time. Add this instance to the pile. It is the price of surrendering comms and marketing to a gigantic behemoth.

biophysboyon Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day

Autobans happen to ad accounts on FB all the time.

biophysboyon Zuckerberg's Meta Takes Down No Kings Instagram During Protest Day

I am 99% sure it was an automated system false positive, but it is annoying that we all have to rely on these capricious systems. That is in itself a problem with massive scale platforms. It confirms my silly hot take that all online communities should not be bigger than 10k people. That keeps the number of bad eggs legible to an actual human moderator, and keeps the discussion less mob like

biophysboyon I know why the mathematicians weep

Yes, and I think over time there will be a blatant inequality in who is commoditized and who isn’t.

If AI engineers didn’t create the data to produce the models, and they increasingly don’t write the code to produce the models either, then why are they treated as the agents of change rather than the subjects of change, like mathematicians are?

biophysboyon Muse Wonder

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biophysboyon The gap in shared understanding of LLM capability is widening

I have been kind of disappointed by AI science-wise. I was anticipating more advancement. Experiments do take time, so I suppose they could be pending.

biophysboyon Opus 5.5 agents discover two room-temperature magnetic semiconductor candidates

What attracted you to the field? (I’ll see myself out)

biophysboyon Anthropic wants your thoughts on AI

Same experience. The question "what is your most memorable experience" also kind of annoyed me, because I see AI mostly as a tool. It is like asking me what my most memorable experience with my iphone is. I'm sure I could cook up something, but it felt like they were mining users for happy PR.

biophysboyon I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken

People start with this prior in the examples you gave when they are completely uncertain and have no better mental model. It is not a good starting point for an event that has never happened and can only happen once.

biophysboyon I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken

Uninformative priors are a part of Bayesian models, which are useless if they cannot be updated with real or simulated data?

biophysboyon OpenAI safety leader quits, warning AI company's culture is 'broken'

> But research has shown that people translate vague phrases like "a decent chance" into probabilities in inconsistent ways.

That is not a bad thing. It captures uncertainty, unlike the fake number.

> For an ML researcher who is already used to dealing in next-token probabilities that aren't rigorously determined, just stating a probability estimate directly is very natural.

Exactly, it is a rhetorical device to persuade a technically-inclined audience. It works because it implies that a quantitative model exists. I want a clear, incisive set of mathematical arguments. Otherwise, I’m ignoring predictions as the ramblings of arrogant idiot rich kids.

biophysboyon OpenAI safety leader quits, warning AI company's culture is 'broken'

I think the reason for this is that the group who has the authority to do the former is much larger than the group that can do the latter. The group who could actually build safeguards seems to have no free time and is constantly being whipped to go faster and win the race.

biophysboyon I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken

There’s nothing wrong with bold predictions, but they should be paired with good methods. The doom predictions are not paired with good explanation.

biophysboyon I quit OpenAI because its culture is broken

Where does 50% come from? It is meaningless if the probability model is not explained.

biophysboyon We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything

My org has a leaderboard for AI spending each month, and I have found it interesting how fast the distribution decays, just within the top 10 users. I often think “what did these people do with all those tokens?” It’s interesting to think the answer to that question is “maybe not a lot?”

biophysboyon LeCun has "zero concerns" about AI wiping out humanity, recent "rogue" incidents

Why should I believe this 2.8B matters relative to the trillions put into the AI buildout? All of the "coordinated actions" from this camp - public resignations, hacking scandals, joint calls to "pause" - don't seem to have done anything. So far, it has been a lot of ineffectual hyperventilating.

In any case, I agree the p(doom) sci-fi is annoying secular milleniarianism. SV hyperfixates on imaginary futures. If they actually cared about safety, they would be using all this money to strengthen global cybersecurity, instead of writing LessWrong posts that gives kids in their 20s ulcers.

biophysboyon AI Makes Me Sad

There are two things that make me sad about AI:

1) the mass proliferation of low-effort content. A thing can be implemented quickly and correctly but still be badly designed. When people say "oh this will go away as the models improve", I think they are making a category error. The AI cannot read your mind.

2) we really have no idea what to do about how this transforms society. As a result, the debate has been captured by quasireligious doomsday cultists and self-interested accelerationists. Obviously we should improve our cybersecurity and synthetic biology regulations (although I'm a skeptic on the bioterrorism risks). But we had no idea how much time people would pour into social media feeds when they were invented. I am sure we will be careless with this technology as well in this 2nd gilded age.

biophysboyon AI Makes Me Sad

Can you give an example? I'm not dismissing - I just can't think of one myself

biophysboyon Ask HN: What are you reading?

I enjoyed the book too, but as I read it, I felt more and more like he could have just as easily found examples where making a system simpler and more legible led to massive improvements.

biophysboyon Ask HN: What are you reading?

I’m reading William Vollmann’s Imperial (a book about the eponymous county in CA) , Richard White’s “The Republic for Which it Stands” (a history of reconstruction and the gilded age), and Paul Starr’s “Social Transformation of American Medicine”.

biophysboyon First Principles Thinking

“First principles thinking” is a Silicon Valley cliche. It is a tell for me

biophysboyon Who Aligns the Aligners?

> As my regular readers will be aware, I have been engaged, on behalf of my clients, in legal combat with Internet censors around the world, agencies who think that they have both the standing, the competence, and the right to tell American companies what software they can write and run, for the better part of 18 months.

Is this supposed to make me trust their opinions on tech regulation?

biophysboyon David Sacks: OpenAI and Anthropic Don't Need Regulations to Pace Frontier Models

David Sacks is one of the most predictable VCs in Silicon Valley. He could have written "I still have the same thoughts; here's a link to my first and only opinion" and the post would have communicated the same amount of info.

biophysboyon On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

I understand that AI is not just cut and paste, but some documents will have more influence than others w/ power law scaling. I would be very surprised if this distribution were not extremely steep for arcane math

biophysboyon OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

Well the argument is that B is no longer sustainable because of the scenario you describe in A. If you do a bunch of work on Navier Stokes but then OpenAI gets all the press, then what was the point?

biophysboyon OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

I know this happens, but my impression during my phd was that many labs use popular methods to test popular questions, leading to a lot of simultaneous work. You see this in history as well.

biophysboyon OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem

https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/117237320796901560

Terrence Tao recently published an interesting take that zooms out from the details of the Navier Stokes drama.

Its an interesting observation he makes, because it is not dissimilar from the relatively common phenomenon of one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).

biophysboyon On the Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem

Why is a "normie" better off if he hyperventilates like this? In that scenario, they would be screwed AND anxious. If it really is as transformational as you say, then no amount of preparation or awareness matters. You are infinitesimally more ready then they are. Luckily for all of us, there is more to knowledge work then technical implementation.