skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on Culture is the mass-synchronization of framings in ~life

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    This reminds me of a conjecture that the fear of social isolation comes from the threat of getting eaten by a lion: https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-meaning

    This reminds me of a conjecture that the fear of social isolation comes from the threat of getting eaten by a lion:

    Humans are obligatorily social animals. Before we killed off all the cave lions, an isolated human in Southern France was a snack. A band of humans with spears could usually intimidate predators into leaving them alone.

    Being part of something bigger than yourself—a protective clan, at minimum—is essential to human survival, and the human way of being, and of relating to meaningness. Partly this pre-dates humanity; chimpanzees have similar social structures, as presumably did our common ancestors millions of years ago. It’s likely that our overgrown brains developed mainly to understand and exploit social relationships.

    Especially critical is maintaining your social role within the clan. That is the basis of social significance: you are valued enough that the clan chief will risk his life, and his warriors’, to save you from cave hyenas. You are valued enough that the chief gives a meaningful purpose to your life, even if it is only sharpening spears and scraping hides.

    When you lose that purpose, when you lose your social significance, then the clan abandons you—and then you are alone in the night, and will die of cold, hunger, or predation within hours or days. That pitiless evolutionary selection pressure underlies our contemporary craving for purpose and significance. (Or that’s my story, anyway. I don’t have specific evidence for it.)

    https://meaningness.com/no-cosmic-meaning

  2. Comment on The Possessed Machines: Dostoevsky's Demons and the coming AGI catastrophe in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    For three years, I worked at one of the organizations you might expect—I will not say which, for reasons that will become apparent, though the cognoscenti will likely guess. I left in early 2024, and I have spent the months since reading and rereading a novel that was first published in 1872, searching for something I sensed but could not name. What I found there was so uncanny, so precisely calibrated to our present moment, that I began to suspect Dostoevsky of a kind of prophecy.

    [...]

    I will argue that Dostoevsky understood, with terrifying precision, the psychological and social dynamics that emerge when a small group of people convince themselves they have discovered a truth so important that normal ethical constraints no longer apply to them. He understood the particular madness of the intelligent, the way abstraction can sever conscience from action. He understood how movements that begin with the liberation of humanity end with its enslavement. And he understood—this is the critical point—that the catastrophe comes not from the cynics but from the believers.

    [...]

    I am not suggesting that AI safety is a conspiracy in any sinister sense. I am observing that the social dynamics of the movement share structural features with Dostoevsky's revolutionaries. The same information asymmetries, the same reliance on reputation rather than verification, the same exploitation of these features by bad actors.

    One of the recurring features of the AI labs is the vast gulf between public statements and internal reality. The safety teams are presented externally as powerful internal voices shaping company direction. Internally, their actual influence varies from minimal to nonexistent, depending on the organization and the moment. The people who could reveal this gap have strong incentives not to. Their careers, their equity stakes, their social standing within the community—all depend on maintaining the illusion.

    [...]

    What is the central point? It is that neither "safety" nor "acceleration" is actually what drives the behavior of the people in power. What drives them is more immediate: the competitive dynamics of the industry, the career incentives of individual researchers, the political pressures from governments and investors, the personal relationships and rivalries that shape decision-making. The ideological debates are largely epiphenomenal—they provide vocabulary and justification, but they do not determine outcomes.

    [...]

    The AI researchers have the same mobility. If Anthropic becomes too restrictive, there's OpenAI. If OpenAI becomes too chaotic, there's Google. If the Bay Area becomes too weird, there's London. The ability to exit reduces the incentive to push for change from within—why fight a difficult political battle when you can simply leave? But it also means that the problems are never confronted, only redistributed. The researcher who leaves Lab A because of safety concerns may find the same concerns at Lab B, because the same people, with the same assumptions, are building the same systems.

    [...]

    The labs compete on certain dimensions: time to market, benchmark performance, talent acquisition. But they do not compete on the fundamental question of whether to build increasingly powerful AI systems as quickly as possible. On that question, they are aligned. The uniparty consensus is that AI development should proceed, that the benefits outweigh the risks, that the people currently in charge are the right people to be in charge.

    [...]

    The same dynamic applies to the AI companies themselves. Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta—they all fund safety research, internally and externally. They have genuine reasons to want such research to succeed, but they also have genuine reasons to want it to succeed in ways that do not threaten their core business. The researchers funded by these companies are not bought in any crude sense, but they operate in an environment where certain conclusions are easier to reach than others.

    [...]

    This is, I think, the most accurate description of what has gone wrong in the AI industry. The possession is not by ideology but by capability—by the extraordinary power to build things that work, to solve problems that seemed unsolvable, to extend human reach in ways that feel like magic. This capability is genuinely intoxicating. I felt it myself. The experience of making a neural network do something it was not supposed to be able to do is genuinely thrilling.

    But the capability is developing faster than the wisdom to direct it. We can build systems that generate human-quality text, that create images from descriptions, that engage in extended reasoning. We cannot reliably make these systems do what we want, or predict what they will do, or understand why they do what they do. We are possessed by our own creations in the most literal possible sense: they act on us as much as we act on them.

    [...]

    A striking feature of Demons is how little intentions matter. The characters have various intentions—good, bad, mixed, confused—but the outcomes seem almost independent of them. The catastrophe happens not because anyone intended it but because the system had that catastrophe as its attractor.

    This is perhaps the most discomfiting lesson for the AI industry. There is intense focus on the intentions of the developers: are they trying to benefit humanity? Are they adequately safety-conscious? Are they motivated by altruism or greed? These questions matter, but Dostoevsky suggests they may not matter as much as we assume.

    [...]

    The collective behavior of the industry points toward something like a goal, even if no individual endorses that goal. The goal seems to be: maximize capability, externalize risk, capture value, and maintain optionality for as long as possible. This is not anyone's explicit objective, but it is what the system is actually doing.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    If that day ever comes it's going to be like school shootings x1000. In the American and French Revolution they didn't have automatic rifles and drones.

    If that day ever comes it's going to be like school shootings x1000. In the American and French Revolution they didn't have automatic rifles and drones.

    3 votes

  5. Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Sometimes all you need to become wealthy is to be working for the right company at the right time and to not do anything stupid. There's nothing fair about this, but that's how Silicon Valley...

    Sometimes all you need to become wealthy is to be working for the right company at the right time and to not do anything stupid. There's nothing fair about this, but that's how Silicon Valley often works. There's a lot of luck involved.

    There are also people who inherited their wealth. This is common for people who grew up middle class in California because real estate prices went up so much.

    Then there are people who bought Bitcoin on a whim and for some reason didn't sell and actually remember where they put the private key. They're not necessarily any smarter or dumber or more virtuous or more evil than anyone else. It's more like buying a lottery ticket.

    Life: not fair. Capitalism: not fair either.

    I judge people more on what they do after achieving that wealth.

    18 votes

  6. Comment on Zohran Mamdani reverses campaign promise to expand rental assistance in New York City in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    "Abundance for everyone" necessarily means reducing the cost of housing. If prices are still too high then we haven't reached "abundance" yet. The way we measure progress towards achieving...

    "Abundance for everyone" necessarily means reducing the cost of housing. If prices are still too high then we haven't reached "abundance" yet. The way we measure progress towards achieving abundance is by seeing what prices are doing.

    If housing prices in New York City actually start declining then that's a good start on solving housing affordability. It's still a very long way from the city "dying." Maybe someday that will be a problem, but I don't think it will be any time soon.

    Housing prices are based on both supply and demand. Increasing supply is great. Reducing demand: also great, if it means some people found a good place to live somewhere else.

    5 votes

  7. Comment on Zohran Mamdani reverses campaign promise to expand rental assistance in New York City in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yeah, I remember a joke about retiring to Miami Beach, but it was a very old one and I wasn't sure it was still a thing.

    Yeah, I remember a joke about retiring to Miami Beach, but it was a very old one and I wasn't sure it was still a thing.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    The music producer eventually sold the house and moved. Maybe they hoped that the next buyer would find these home features worth paying for?

    The music producer eventually sold the house and moved. Maybe they hoped that the next buyer would find these home features worth paying for?

    3 votes

  9. Comment on The mega-rich are turning their mansions into impenetrable fortresses in ~finance

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    It seems like it's gotta be for entertaining. Too lonely otherwise. How big are these parties though?

    It seems like it's gotta be for entertaining. Too lonely otherwise. How big are these parties though?

  10. Comment on Gwtar: a static efficient single-file HTML format in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...]

    From the article:

    Gwtar is a new poly­glot HTML archival for­mat which pro­vides a sin­gle, self-contained, HTML file which still can be ef­fi­ciently lazy-loaded by a web browser. This is done by a header’s JavaScript mak­ing HTTP range re­quests. It is used on Gwern.net to serve large HTML archives.

    [...]

    We in­tro­duce a new for­mat, Gwtar (⁠⁠logo⁠; pro­nounced “gui­tar”, .gw⁠tar.html ex­ten­sion), which achieves all 3 prop­er­ties si­mul­ta­ne­ously. A Gwtar is a clas­sic fully-inlined HTML file, which is then processed into a self-extracting con­cate­nated file of an HTML + JavaScript header fol­lowed by a tar­ball of the orig­i­nal HTML and as­sets. The HTML header’s JS stops web browsers from load­ing the rest of the file, loads just the orig­i­nal HTML, and then hooks re­quests and turns them into range re­quests into the tar­ball part of the file.

    Thus, a reg­u­lar web browser loads what seems to be a nor­mal HTML file, and all as­sets down­load only when they need to. In this way, a sta­tic HTML page can in­line any­thing—such as gigabyte-size media files—but those will not be down­loaded until nec­es­sary, even while the server sees just a sin­gle large HTML file it serves as nor­mal. And be­cause it is self-contained in this way, it is forwards-compatible: no fu­ture user or host of a Gwtar file needs to treat it spe­cially, as all func­tion­al­ity re­quired is old stan­dard­ized web browser/server func­tion­al­ity.

    4 votes

  12. Comment on Communities are not fungible in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Whoever runs an online community provides governance and infrastructure. This is still true for small communities like Tildes or a Mastodon server. There are plenty of disputes between people who...

    Whoever runs an online community provides governance and infrastructure. This is still true for small communities like Tildes or a Mastodon server. There are plenty of disputes between people who run servers in the Fediverse. I think having decent moderation sometimes requires making decisions that might seem pretty questionable from the outside, and transparency is not feasible because it would turn into something like a public trial of whether someone ought to be banned, which is not fun and will turn people off.

    The Bluesky folks have a goal of making themselves inessential but it’s work in progress. It requires other people to do a lot of work, and they can’t do it themselves, because the whole point is that someone else should be doing it and have the power that comes from that. There are promising signs, though, so maybe this year we will see it happen?

    Another trend is towards encrypted group chat, which can be seen as a way for a service provider to get out of the moderation business, at least to some extent. These communities will have their own governance issues, though. There will also be communities run by people you hate and they will be unaccountable to anyone.

    6 votes

  13. Comment on Zohran Mamdani reverses campaign promise to expand rental assistance in New York City in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    And yet, a social security check, or whatever other subsidies they might have, would likely go further in lots of places? I think “having nowhere to go” is part of the issue, though. Although in...

    And yet, a social security check, or whatever other subsidies they might have, would likely go further in lots of places?

    I think “having nowhere to go” is part of the issue, though. Although in theory you could move to lots of places, if there were some common destinations where New Yorkers often move to after retiring then maybe it would be less like something you have to figure out in your own?

    But another issue, for some people, is of course being rooted in a community. Will you find community that you like where you’re moving to? That uncertainty makes it harder to move.

    Imagine they built a satellite retirement community in New Jersey or Delaware or something, connected by a train line, and made it really welcoming?

    5 votes

  14. Comment on Zohran Mamdani reverses campaign promise to expand rental assistance in New York City in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Right, and I’m saying that it would probably make sense for NYC to encourage this. It’s often not a bad thing.

    Data suggest otherwise as NYC is losing retirees, likely due to high cost of living, rough weather in the winter, etc.

    Right, and I’m saying that it would probably make sense for NYC to encourage this. It’s often not a bad thing.

    8 votes

  15. Comment on Communities are not fungible in ~tech

    skybrian
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Whenever I changed jobs, there were some people I kept in touch with and others I didn’t. After leaving high school, I lost touch with most people. Many of us reconnected after Facebook became a...

    Whenever I changed jobs, there were some people I kept in touch with and others I didn’t. After leaving high school, I lost touch with most people. Many of us reconnected after Facebook became a thing, but much like with a high school reunion, when you meet again you don’t necessarily choose to hang out much. Similarly after moving, you don’t always remain in touch with your neighbors.

    What I’m getting at is that maybe a lot of communities aren’t meant to last forever. It’s okay to have transient communities, like the people you meet in college. Online communities are nice because they let us hang out for years with people we know slightly, but often these relationships aren’t that strong and we don’t really make an effort to maintain them. Maybe that’s okay?

    If you don’t know someone well enough to exchange email addresses and phone numbers, how strong a relationship is that really?

    Facebook lets you keep in touch with people just out of inertia, for years or decades. It seems like a good thing, better than what we had before in the sense that I at least I have some contact with people I might have entirely lost touch with otherwise.

    If you quit Facebook over politics, you lose something, but many people don’t seem to mind it that much? Presumably they find other ways to keep in touch or do without.

    The longest-lasting community that I’ve been a part of is The Well. I still have an account there and show up once a year. I’m younger than the original crowd and a lot of people I knew slightly have died.

    There is little reason for young people to care about The Well. They’re doing other things in their own communities.

    7 votes

  16. Comment on Zohran Mamdani reverses campaign promise to expand rental assistance in New York City in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I think high rents probably have to do with a lot of people (some of them wealthy, or have wealthy parents) wanting to live in a small area and maybe it would be more cost-effective to provide...

    I think high rents probably have to do with a lot of people (some of them wealthy, or have wealthy parents) wanting to live in a small area and maybe it would be more cost-effective to provide moving assistance for people who want to move somewhere cheaper? This seems like a cycle-of-life sort of thing; after retiring you don’t need to worry about commutes anymore.

    9 votes

  17. Comment on Zohran Mamdani reverses campaign promise to expand rental assistance in New York City in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    https://archive.is/iaquE From the article: [...] [...] [...]

    https://archive.is/iaquE

    From the article:

    Expanding a New York City program to help struggling tenants pay rent seemed like an obvious campaign promise for Zohran Mamdani, who staked his insurgent candidacy last year on making life more affordable in the five boroughs.

    Now, confronting a grim fiscal picture in his second month as mayor, Mr. Mamdani no longer intends to back the growth of the $1 billion-plus initiative known as CityFHEPS, despite a plan passed by the City Council and upheld in court.

    [...]

    During a recent news conference, as the mayor lamented a looming budget deficit that on Wednesday he pegged at $7 billion over two years, he suggested the program’s full expansion may be too expensive.

    [...]

    CityFHEPS is one of the largest rental assistance programs in the nation and works similarly to the Section 8 housing voucher program. Renters contribute 30 percent of their income to rent, with the city covering the rest.

    As the city’s affordable housing shortage has worsened, its cost has grown substantially, from about $25 million in 2019 to more than $1.2 billion in 2025.

    Most of that increase took place before the Council passed its expansion into law in 2023. The legislation made people eligible for vouchers if they had received written demands from their landlords for rent owed and raised the income level for voucher eligibility.

    “This program is growing at an unsustainable clip,” said Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a nonpartisan budget watchdog, which has raised concerns about the program’s cost for years.

    Mr. Mamdani’s predecessor, Eric Adams, said he would not enforce most of the bills passed by the Council, citing worries about their cost. When Legal Aid, representing tenants, brought a lawsuit to compel Mr. Adams to implement the laws, he fought back.

    As a candidate, Mr. Mamdani admonished Mr. Adams for the pushback. “What a ridiculous waste of time during a housing crisis,” Mr. Mamdani said in a social media post last July, when he was the Democratic nominee for mayor.

    “Zohran will drop lawsuits against CityFHEPs and ensure expansion proceeds as scheduled and per city law,” his campaign website read.

    [...]

    By moving to settle the lawsuit, Mr. Mamdani is signaling he will not comply with the bills the Council passed into law to widen the program.

    City officials are projecting that even without the expansion, the program will cost nearly $2.4 billion more than Mr. Adams budgeted for the remainder of this fiscal year, which ends June 30, and the next one.

    6 votes

  19. Comment on CIA investigated secret ‘Havana syndrome’ weapon experiment in Norway in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...]

    From the article:

    Working in strict secrecy, a government scientist in Norway built a machine capable of emitting powerful pulses of microwave energy and, in an effort to prove such devices are harmless to humans, in 2024 tested it on himself. He suffered neurological symptoms similar to those of “Havana syndrome,” the unexplained malady that has struck hundreds of U.S. spies and diplomats around the world.

    The bizarre story, described by four people familiar with the events, is the latest wrinkle in the decade-long quest to find the causes of Havana syndrome, whose sufferers experience long-lasting effects including cognitive challenges, dizziness and nausea. The U.S. government calls the events Anomalous Health Incidents (AHIs).

    [...]

    Those aware of the test say it does not prove AHIs are the work of a foreign adversary wielding a secret weapon similar to the prototype tested in Norway. One of them noted that the effects suffered by the Norwegian researcher, whose identity was not disclosed by the people familiar, were not the same as in a “classic” AHI case. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject’s sensitivity.

    But the events bolstered the case of those who argue that “pulsed-energy devices” — machines that deliver powerful beams of electromagnetic energy such as microwaves in short bursts — can affect human biology and are probably being developed by U.S. adversaries.

    [...]

    Much about the Norway test remains obscured by its highly classified nature. People familiar with the events declined to identify the scientist or the Norwegian government agency he worked for.

    The results were all the more shocking because the Norwegian researcher had earned a reputation as a leading opponent of the theory that directed-energy weapons can cause the type of symptoms associated with AHIs, those familiar with the events said. Trying to dramatically prove his point, with himself as a human guinea pig, he achieved the opposite.

    “I don’t know what possessed him to go and do this,” one of the people said. “He was a bit of an eccentric.”

    10 votes