@enjoyurble @Playerinthgame "Yea I agree I’m against racing and scaling and want to throw sand in the gears."
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Timothy B. Lee
106.5K posts
Timothy B. Lee
@binarybits
Reporting on AI and the future of the economy. Computer science masters degree from Princeton. @arstechnica alum. Subscribe to my AI newsletter!
Washington, DC Katılım Mart 2008
1.6K Takip Edilen49.7K Takipçiler
@binarybits @Playerinthgame I've been (mostly civilly I think?) tweeting back and forth with Dustin on BlueSky over this weekend? Lol. The idea that they're "whole thing" is AI-fears is ridiculous. They're absolutely "tech-forward" almost across the board.
bsky.app/profile/moskov…
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You’re paid to make that baseless claim by Dustin Moskovitz and Holden Karnofsky, whose wife is Daniela Amodei, President of Anthropic
Andy Masley@AndyMasley
I really think that the public's understanding of how data centers physically interact with their communities is bordering on a low level mass delusion. The actual numbers and impact just do not at all bear out how people feel about them.
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@Playerinthgame Yes, the work they fund is mostly but not entirely skeptical of AI. Still not seeing why this would be a reason for skepticism of Andy's work.
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@binarybits “…some have mistakenly understood us to be broadly opposed to AI development or technological progress generally. We want to correct that misconception.”
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@Playerinthgame "Mainly focused on reducing the risks of the technology."
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@binarybits BS. CG is strongly pro-technology. They believe that if handled correctly, AI will be the most important development in human history, potentially curing all diseases and ending poverty
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@Romy_Holland It's the latter. The Boomers' parents behaved the same way 30 years ago.
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okay so i think the boomer conversational trait at the root of many problems is a total failure to even attempt to model whether the people around them care about what they’re saying.
they tell the same old stories 100x and deep down they definitely know you’ve heard it, but it just feels so good to be talking that they go for it. in the absence of the thought process “would this person enjoy hearing this story?” the only factor that matters is how it feels for them to talk.
same thing for the constant narration of everything that’s happening and the constant questions about tiny stuff and the random pieces of mundane information about ppl you don’t know. toddlers do the same thing before they develop complete theory of mind.
idk if this is the consequence of some sort of old age cognitive regression or if boomers were just socialized really poorly.
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@Myzidya Right, and backslash is basically never used on the modern Internet outside of the use cases I mentioned.
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@binarybits Um.. "/" is slash (solidus), and "\" is backslash (reverse slash, reverse solidus, backslant, slosh, or whack). These two symbols are not the same.
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Public service announcement: Any time you are tempted to say "backslash," say "slash" instead. The only exceptions are (1) Windows file system paths, (2) even more obscure uses that only programmers have to think about.
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@AndyXAndersen @Miles_Brundage I expect the current architecture will get us pretty far but if we're trying to get to "AI scientists" or whatever I strongly suspect we will need a new architecture.
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@binarybits @Miles_Brundage Somewhere in between Claude Opus 4.5 and 4.7 context management went from terrible to really good.
It is becoming clear this is not a show-stopper and hierarchical memory management is the way to go, rather than retraining or new architecture.
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Compaction works much better than many implicitly predicted via emphasizing continual learning as a huge blocker
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@Miles_Brundage I think it's both true that compaction has worked better than I would have predicted a couple of years ago and also that it's far from adequate for solving continual learning well enough to get to "AI scientists" or whatever.
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@Miles_Brundage Funny I am currently putting the finishing touches on an article more or less arguing the opposite.
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@OldNewYork1664 @mattyglesias 10 miles square is a maximum not a minimum.
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@mattyglesias So my question is where the new capital district would be placed, as we are constitutionally mandated to have one at least 10 square miles in size?
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Why would statehood for DC and Puerto Rico make it unlikely that Republicans could win an election for decades?
Mike Lee@BasedMikeLee
Democrats aren’t joking They’ll nuke the filibuster Then pack the Supreme Court Then award statehood to DC and Puerto Rico, making it unlikely that Republicans will ever win another election for decades Let’s nuke it now and just creat an even playing field
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I'll restate: I have a principled opposition to wind subsidies, which have been a genuine boondoggle (for example: in the US it is common replace major, good-condition parts of extent wind turbines just to keep them subsidy-eligible). And were it not for subsidies, this technology would barely exist. So my principled opposition to wind is not literally to the physics of wind turning a turbine, but instead by way of the subsidies.
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I have truly never understood how solar-maxis intend to deal with this reality; I expect there to be data centers 100 times this nameplate power draw in the nearish future. What you see below is 100mw.
The response I usually get is "America has a lot of land," which is just bleak. Indeed, it turns *me* into a doomer, invoking as it does the notion of machines papering over our soil (which powers us) to power themselves.
And it's not just data centers. In a world with electric freight trucks, a *truck stop* might require as much solar as you see pictured here, if not much more. A truck stop!
Solar is fine; I do not have a principled opposition to it (which I do to eg wind). But solar's lack of energy density makes the solar-maximalist future a "loser premise," to borrow a phrase--at least it is a "loser premise" for human dignity.
The good version of the future is of course a mix of many energy sources, but with a heavy bent toward fusion/fission and geothermal.
Andrew Côté@Andercot
This is the footprint ratio of data center to solar panels in the sunniest country in the world. Yeah, I think we're gonna have to go nuclear.
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@john_malone And ever since then a critical mass of normies have been confused enough to do it wrong some of the time, which then perpetuates the confusion.
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@john_malone My guess is that people started getting confused in the 1980s, when DOS/Windows was the most popular computing platform and it really was an open question whether it made sense to use a slash or a backslash.
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@john_malone It doesn't seem like "never say backslash" should be a hard rule to remember. But I just heard an ad on a mainstream podcast that used backslash in a URL.
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@_aidan_clark_ I felt similarly recently recently when I read this passage claiming that in 2012, Nvidia was obscure while ImageNet was famous.
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Absolutely crazy to me there is a whole generation of people who know what a transformer is but might not know what an RNN is (not meant to be a comment on Helen). Is this what getting old is like?
Helen Toner@hlntnr
Never forget @karpathy training a recurrent neural net (precursor to transformers) to imitate @paulg in 2015—a thing of syntactic and semantic beauty:
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I’ve never had a near miss with a pedestrian who was walking on the right, paying attention, and keeping kids/dogs/bags supervised and close
People who choose to be completely fucking oblivious on the other hand…
Jordan Weissmann@JHWeissmann
Well, a fucker riding one of those Lime bikes down the sidewalk collided with my 3-year-old daughter then rode off. And of course there’s no hope of finding him.
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Never trust financial analysis from a guy who thinks Feb 30 is a thing.
Timothy B. Lee@binarybits
Also, check out this train wreck of a spreadsheet Ed made to estimate Anthropic's revenue for 2025. He doesn't count February 1-10, counts March 1-10 twice, counts August 21-October 21 as one month instead of two, and doesn't count October 21-November 1.
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