Jacob G-W

Writing and thinking clearly is very important orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-fou…

A statement from Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, on our discussions with the Department of War. anthropic.com/news/statement…

Maybe *you* should apply to work with me and @cloud_kx on Team Shard in MATS. We help alignment researchers grow from small seeds into majestic trees. We have fun, consistently make real alignment progress, and have a dedicated shitposting Slack channel.

Thought real machine unlearning was impossible? We show that distilling a conventionally “unlearned” model creates a model resistant to relearning attacks. 𝐃𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐤𝐞𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥.

The Trump Administration is doing some horrendous stuff right now. This is not what America should stand for.

1) AIs are trained as black boxes, making it hard to understand or control their behavior. This is bad for safety! But what is an alternative? Our idea: train structure into a neural network by configuring which components update on different tasks. We call it "gradient routing."

@laurgao This happens to me ~33% of the time I meditate.

every time i meditate, i burst out laughing like a maniac

New blog post dropped: jacobgw.com/blog/quizbowl/…

There's so much alpha in Focusmate for college students

@NathanpmYoung @Aransentin Multiverse, therefore if you die, there will always be a version of you that survives. So you will never actually perceive dying and will live forever. (I've simplified it, but the general idea is the same and the consequences should be)

@Aransentin I don't understand what that is and I'm not gonna look right now. Want to explain it to me?

AMA with a difference Tell me one specific point to change my mind on. I’ll say how I’d change as a result. (Or how I guess I would) eg “God is real” “AI is safe” “capitalism is bad” I’ll do a few

Idea for Apple Vision Pro app: Fire Kasina meditation. It displays very nice and realistic candle with minimal flickering for 5 mins. Then it turns it off and you go to total darkness and meditate for 10. Then back to candle. Real candles are annoying (speaking from experience)!

@Vincent81603819 It is standardized while also having a good ui. medium ui is terrible. I think they just tried really hard to execute and succeeded. But the comments UI is still too slow and janky :( I still prefer having my own blog.

@MiniUlisse Have you read the chapter in *Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman!* about this? When he was an undergrad, Feynman did this experiment on himself and had very interesting results. Very entertaining also.

@MiniUlisse Yes. A few times I have noticed myself falling into a dreamlike state where I have stories playing in my head that are indistinguishable from dreams. However, once I notice that this is happening, I immediately snap out of it and I'm not falling asleep anymore.

Anyone able to pay close attention to your experience falling asleep and remember it? How was it? I've been trying but haven't succeeded yet

@bitterjello Not totally sure. My guess is that they were trying to do some sort of analogy to thermodynamics.

@jacoblevgw wow!! why that terminology? why not invent a new word entirely, or just call it "randomness"

Wait, I'm big stupid Why does the temperature matter so much

@Vincent81603819 Maybe a good first step would be to start asking stupid questions a la danluu.com/look-stupid/

i keep hearing about how many really successful people were very good at not being afraid to fail and using that as a superpower to learn faster. i'm very bad at this and want to tap into it

The problem with notes is that they don't capture intuition — they capture content. You can make notes capture intuition, but doing it in Anki is so much more efficient. Here's an example of a card that captures intuition:

I think I have figured out a way to fully counteract this by writing Anki cards that build intuition during the lecture. Then when I review them, the intuition comes back.

You know that feeling where you go to a lecture and everything they are saying makes perfect sense but then when you leave you realize you can replicate nothing?