Timothy B. Lee

@kevinroose Legal threat in 3, 2, 1...

calling for a 6-month pause on AI journalism until we can overcome urgent alignment challenges such as "are EA and rationalism the same thing?" and "is Gary Marcus a credible source?"

@four_score_and @Aria_Babu I agree. But we might be in the minority.

@binarybits @Aria_Babu I think makeup is inauthentic and unattractive, especially if you wear it everyday

Most women underrate how much men care about looks. And when they do try to get more attractive they waste time and effort on tanning, contouring their face, getting their nails done. Instead, almost everyone could be considered attractive if they lost weight, grew their hair long, and cleared up their skin. All these things are within your control. There's other basic advice that should be obvious. Wear makeup everyday and go for a youthful, dewy look. Remove your body hair. Ditch your glasses. For the extreme looksmaxxers, focus on your body. Your face is probably fine and hard to change. Get a boob job, precisely control your weight, and do hourglass-enhancing exercises. You are no longer stuck with the looks God gave you. ariababu.co.uk/p/get-sexier

@BeatrizGietner Isn't there a danger of a New Coke effect, where the characteristics that turn heads or get you a first date are different from the ones that make someone more interested in marriage?

@jaybee484 haha yes. Big if true.

@binarybits It's all a diversion from the far bigger news story that Feb apparently had 30 days last year

In a recent legal filing, Anthropic said that its revenue "exceed[ed] $5 billion to date." @edzitron says other Anthropic statements indicate it was more than $6 billion and that "these two statements do not match up." But, um, $6 billion exceeds $5 billion?

@JeffLadish I think that if and when we get to the point of building billions of humanoid robots, those could pose serious safety threats. I just think building those robots is likely to take years, probably decades, and until we get there LLMs are not very dangerous.

I just don't understand how AI could kill everyone. I get how AI companies will build robotic factories that will make robots which will make more factories and data centers and power plants, and how all of that will expand to consume most of earth's resources to build even more robotic factories and rockets and von neumann probes. Like totally. Infinite money glitch. Of course AI companies will do that. But can someone explain the part where humans all die as a result? Seems pretty implausible. Is it the robotic factories that kill the humans? Or the robots the factories build? Or is it supposed to be some side effect of all the rockets that are launching? It doesn't make sense. Even if the AIs did want to kill all the humans, how would they actually accomplish that? They'll only have control over a few million autonomous factories and a few billion industrial robots and power plants across the earth and then a few trillion von neumann probes leaving the solar system. Even if there were a problem I don't see why we couldn't just pull the plug. Anyway, if someone could explain I'd find this helpful.

Hilariously, as @FifthRocket pointed out to me, the spreadsheet references "Feb 30." Tens of thousands of people are getting financial analysis from this person.

@MattBruenig @ModeledBehavior Also there is path dependency — in a world where there were more major search engines, there would also be a more competitive market for crawl data. A new entrant could more easily license crawl data from a competitor while it was building its own crawling infrastructure.

@MattBruenig @ModeledBehavior I think this is looking at thing too literally. LLMs maybe don't have that specific pro-concentration factor, but this factor would not have been obvious to people thinking about search engines in 2001.

Is the argument that AI won’t have huge concentrated winners any different than the argument that search engines won’t have any huge concentrated winners?

@FifthRocket Lol, the best analysis.

@binarybits What’s Feb30th?

@pitdesi @EthanChoi7 @edzitron To be clear I am not.

@binarybits @EthanChoi7 @edzitron How are people taking Ed seriously

@monoesque Audited might be the wrong term.

@binarybits If you think companies prepare quarterly audited financials, much less monthly audited, you should stop speaking about economics

@theaichbee @Aria_Babu Trying to extrapolate in that way is analogous to the New Coke mistake.

@theaichbee @Aria_Babu To put this another way: attraction is context-specific and culturally mediated. So the kind of woman they like to look at in porn isn't necessarily the kind of woman they are going to ask out on a date.

@BPujanauski Oops that shoul dbe $500 million thanks.

@binarybits Billion or million?

We had a private email conversation last week where I pointed out some of the problems with his spreadsheet. He never responded, which makes me wonder if he actually cares about getting these details right.

Anyway I mostly try to ignore Ed Zitron but people keep sending me his stuff. I wish more people understood how ignorant, innumerate, and sloppy he is.

@Aria_Babu I like being married to a woman who feels like she has better things to do with her time than apply makeup every morning. I can't prove that other men are "worse husbands," but it seems possible that men with my attitude will be a better fit for at least some women.

@binarybits What are you implying? That only bad husbands like young faces?