AI Jerusalem

Naming their next model after Cthulhu makes it hard to take Anthropic seriously as the good guys. It's fun at any other software company, not one that actually is flirting with extinction.

if you’re an ai safety person who wants major federal action now, you should want for anthropic to lead in advancing the frontier into dangerous capabilities, because the Trump Admin will now be primed to see whatever anthropic does as “bad” and what other labs do as “good.” If anthropic hits an RSI loop first, it’s much likelier to be viewed by the admin as “weird” and “scary,” whereas if anyone else does it, it will be “normal” and “innovative.”

The anti AI people on my timeline right now are History repeaters.

Suicide is an act I can not understand If you have given up on life then there is no reason to fear death much less anything else. Quite your job, wander the world, live in the woods, etc, etc. You might as well risk it all if you’re ready to throw it all away anyhow.

“But this would only increase losses and not lead to a breakthrough on the front. The mechanized armies of the 20th century have lost their relevance, and the infantryman has reached the limit of human capabilities. As banal as it may sound, the smartest will win. 6/

It is unclear to me whether people in business and software are simply having a TOTALLY different experience than those in the hard sciences of theoretical physics/pure mathematics. I can’t easily compare it to a human theorist or mathematican. It’s like if a partially duplicitous but friendly John von Neumann was your graduate student while secretly also taking other, at times conflicting orders through an undisclosed earpiece, coked out of his mind after an epic triple ayahuascachino, and struggling through amnesia and a concussion, with alternating desires to genuinely help, please, and sabotage you, was providing you with insight and word salad in a 4:1 ratio at a rate you couldn’t keep up with on your best day while taking forever to say “I guess I didn’t understand the problem” or “I’m sorry Dave but I’m afraid I can’t do that” while quietly throwing away hours’ worth of work to make room for whatever you needed to do *right now* and instantly admitting to such behavior when caught. I mean, it’s absolutely amazing. But it is also a completely pathological menace. One user’s experience anyway.

A lot of what people blame on 'algorithms' should really be blamed on human nature.

damn i forgor the best part > THE AI STILL SCORES TOO HIGH > "i got an idea boss" > shoot > "how about we just take the best human score?" > i like your thinking > "but that would be sus" > fine, we'll use the second best human score > discard the rest of the scores > REMOVE ALL THE UNSUCCESSFUL ones literally: human baseline is "defined as the second-best first-run human by action count" then AI is compared to that

A Danish scientist counted bugs on the same windshield, same road, same conditions, every year for 20 years. By year 20, 80% of the insects were gone. In Germany, a group of volunteer bug scientists did something even bigger. They set traps in 63 nature reserves, not farms, protected land, and weighed everything they caught. Same traps, same method, 27 years straight. The total weight of flying bugs dropped 76%. In midsummer, when insects should be peaking, it was 82% gone. A follow-up in 2020 and 2021 checked again. No recovery. In the UK, they literally ask drivers to count splats on their license plates after a trip. The 2024 count came back 63% lower than just 2021. Three years. A 2020 study pulled together 166 surveys from 1,676 locations around the world. Land insects are disappearing at roughly 9% every ten years. Here’s where it hits your plate. About 75% of the food crops we grow depend on insects to pollinate them, everything from apples to almonds to coffee. One 2025 study modeled what a full pollinator collapse would look like: food prices jump 30%, the global economy takes a $729 billion hit, and the world loses 8% of its Vitamin A supply. Birds are already feeling it. North America has lost 2.9 billion birds since 1970. A study from just weeks ago found half of 261 bird species on the continent are now in serious decline, and the losses are speeding up in farming regions. The birds that eat insects lost 2.9 billion. The birds that don’t eat insects? They gained 26 million. That ratio tells the whole story. One of the German researchers behind the 27-year study drives a Land Rover. He says it has the aerodynamics of a refrigerator. It stays clean now.