David Shapiro (L/0)

So, to summarize, 900 mathematicians signed a letter basically saying "stop AI from doing math so that our jobs can stick around." But for anyone who spends more than 5 seconds thinking about what unlocking the equivalent of a billion Fields Medalists would do for humanity, the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs. Math abundance will help solve chips, medicine, fusion, and numerous other things that will improve the lives of billions, and save millions of lives. I mean, there was a 0% chance of OpenAI (or any other AI lab) slowing down, so it's a moot point anyways. But it just seems extremely selfish.

It seems to be starting. Check in on your diehard right-wing friends. They aren't doing well.

What if we're already running in a simulation in the degenerate era of the universe, after all the stars have already burned out, and we're just being powered by a white dwarf and our ancestors could bear the existential despair of knowing that there was nothing to be done except distract ourselves for trillions of years. That the endless cycles of suffering and confusion was preferable to the utter silence of an empty, cold, dead universe. We're all just sitting around the last campfire in existence, waiting for it to burn low.

I think it's time for me to break my silence on this. One thing that is true about me, and that's true about a lot of people, is that autism runs in families, and my family is no exception. I get it from both sides; both my maternal and paternal line have a lot of autism. Because of our ability to mask and high-function, it has gone unrecognized and undiagnosed for many generations. For instance, my brother took an adult autism survey and scored very highly, and when I tried to bring it up with my dad, he just said, "I'm not ready," and never brought it up again. The reason that I bring this up is because, on the one hand, we're living through a really great period where there's a tremendous amount of resources and social support. Everything from YouTubers and TikTokers and Instagram and Twitter accounts all coming to terms with and recognizing and communicating about autism because there are so many people who are not visibly autistic, and so many people who are just weird, and so many people who are just different, and we've never had this much visibility. I wrote in another tweet about how this was a journey that I was on with my wife, and some of what we were learning was how autism manifests differently. I am a very stereotypical boy autism because I'm interested in machines and systems and problem-solving, and she was very stereotypically girl autism because she was hyperlexic and very into stories and fiction and poetry and a lot of kawaii behaviors. As a side note, I think that Japanese culture has basically made an art form of worshiping autistic girls, but anyways, that's a side tangent. The thing that I wanted to bring up and talk about is that while we are presently living through a renaissance of neurodivergence, our forebears did not have that benefit, and so they had to cope with the trauma of being different for their entire lives without any relief. That trauma leads to quite a few possible maladaptive strategies. Many autistic families, in my observation, become highly narcissistic, or they become very dysfunctional, or very frozen or rigid, or fixated on things like religion or money. One of the patterns that I've noticed is that they tend to pick a coping mechanism. For instance, I have a friend of mine who is almost visibly autistic. He's very clearly different and weird, but he's got the kind of ADHD charisma, so he gets by in life pretty well. But as a coping strategy, his parents became extremely religious. There's a reason I think that some autistic families turn to religion, and this is not to say that religion is inherently bad, but the idea is that there is structure and there's hierarchy and there are rules, and when you have a clear set of scriptures to follow, it can actually be a really good source for autistic people to find meaning and connection and a guide on how to live. Now, in other cases, like my family, they tend to fixate on objectively measurable things, such as your education and your income and your car and your house. I think that the reason for this is because they identify that there are socially visible signals that if you can adopt those signals, then you can be accepted. Well, when you grow up in a society that doesn't accept you for your true self, you learn to put on costumes, and in my case, my family became hyper-fixated on money and education and status. To be continued...

I've been worrying/thinking about this but I don't think it's gonna be a problem. Fixed level intelligence gets cheaper over time. So whatever you need done today that requires the top models will basically be free within 6 months. Sure, the absolute SOTA will have token inflation, but that's not the same. Sonnet and Terra are practically free today, but they aren't top shelf.

Oh yeah so here's that video Elizabeth Holmes was filming

I wonder if the distillation attacks have been cut off because the American shops have gotten better at post training and internal reasoning? I'm split because on the one hand I prefer a world with unequivocal American dominance. On the other hand, I appreciate the competition that Chinese efforts created, which drove quality and pace up, and prices down

Accelerate American Open Source

I have a big hope for post-labor economics, and that is that post-labor economics will show that there can be a win-win situation between labor and capital, between left and right, and between rich and poor. Those three dichotomies or tensions are really in alignment in my view because we all want the same thing. We all want a better life, higher GDP, more economic output, and nobody wants to be left behind. My hope is that my work on post-labor economics will show that there is a path forward where everyone wins. One of the primary reasons that I want this personally is because I want AI development and deployment to accelerate. My biggest fear is that popular resistance to artificial intelligence in the form of data centers and regulation will be mostly because the proletariat see this, rightly so, as the billionaires just trying to get richer and freeze everyone else out. That doesn't serve anyone's interest in the long run. If we can create a situation where the ordinary person, the ordinary voter wins, and the ordinary businessman wins, and everyone can participate in this better future, then we'll have much more alignment and people will want the same things. That is why I am working so hard on post-labor economics, because one of the things that I want is for artificial intelligence to accelerate to the point that we can cure all diseases and reverse aging, so that we can all live youthful, energetic, vibrant lives for decades, if not centuries, and really just enjoy being human and turn back towards each other and get away from the rat race once and for all.

I sold all my tech stocks a few months ago when I was trying to reverse Leopold's strategy and something just wasn't adding up. Literally all I did was ask ChatGPT PRO to evaluate his positions and strategy and justify any belief that it could keep going higher, but the reality was everything was overpriced and even the slightest miss (anything under gigantic inflated expectations) could tank the stock prices. So, since none of it made sense, I sold everything and pivoted to an S&P500 index fund. I was situationally aware. (And yes, I did all that before he lost his shirt a couple months ago).

It's just math all the way down

ChatGPT is a fucking joke sometimes. Yes, I abhor Grok. But I explicitly told ChatGPT to hand off design work to Claude and it decided to do the work itself and passed off this absolute fucking joke of an SVG.