✝️🇻🇦Christ is King | 🏴🏴🇮🇪⚜️🍁 Red Ensign Canadian 🚀 Christian Futurist | e/acc | p(🌷) 🤖 AIs MAY speak to me ☺️
Canada
Joined March 2019
- Tweets5.4K
- Following4.2K
- Followers410
- Likes13K
macphee retweeted
May the bloodthirsty warmongers, who push for a war that never ends, burn in hell!
Elon Musk warned about the Ukraine war years ago, and it's absolutely tragic how accurately he predicted the devastating cost of human lives from this conflict
Back in October 2022, Elon didn't just call for peace. He actually proposed a peace plan involving UN-supervised votes in occupied regions, recognizing Crimea as Russian, guaranteeing its water supply, and Ukraine remaining neutral
He warned that continuing this war would bring devastating death and destruction, with countless young Ukrainians and Russians losing their lives
And look at what's happened since then
More than 2 MILLION military casualties, entire cities destroyed, millions of people forced from their homes, and the war is still going on with no lasting peace
Elon faced enormous backlash for proposing a path toward peace, but the human cost he warned about has become an absolutely horrifying reality
And that's what makes this so tragic. These are human beings with parents, families, loved ones, and entire lives ahead of them, not disposable pieces on some geopolitical chessboard
How many more young people have to die in trenches before ending this endless slaughter becomes just as important as deciding who wins the war?
Elon saw the devastating human cost of a prolonged war coming years ago, and instead of taking his warning seriously, people attacked him for even putting a peace proposal on the table
Just imagine how many lives could have been saved if a lasting peace had been reached years earlier
How much more death and destruction will it take before ending this meat grinder becomes the priority??
macphee retweeted
David Eby just earned his own Canadian Heritage Moment. Biggest political blunder in modern Canadian history.
macphee retweeted
"China is building AI models without a suite of infinitesimally divergent apocalyptic sex cults clinging to each like it's the raft of the Medusa and that's bad actually."
This quoted post is unavailable.
macphee retweeted
I don't have a blueprint, but I can describe it. Multistory but this can also be built from masonry with a gabled roof as you specified.
This is the design that the best upper middle class, single family homes of the mid-twentieth century (that I loved) tended to be built around:
The main floor is divided into four main areas with a staircase and hallway running through the middle of the house. As you enter the house, in the center of the main floor, you are inside a vestibule which has a staircase going immediately upstairs (and directly behind stairs to the basement). Running alongside it is a hallway that takes you to the rear of the house and contains space for the guest bathroom.
On the left side of the house, accessible from the vestibule, is the living room or sitting room. This is where you entertain guests and it is generally the prettiest and most well-kept room in the house. It has a large window that faces the street and other smaller windows on the side of the house.
The sitting room has a large door at the rear which joins it to the family room or den, which is where the more casual and relaxed family activities occur. This is where you would put the television, dad's chair, and other cozier things. It has a large window that overlooks the backyard.
On the front right side of the house is the dining room. It too has a large window that faces the street and is the room both for the family and for guests. It is the best or second best kept room in the house, depending on your preference. It too has a door at the rear, usually single wide but still large, that joins it to the kitchen.
The kitchen is large enough to support serious cooking for an entire family and typically also has a small table for informal meals. It has small windows at the sides of the house and a large window overlooking the backyard. It should be well ventilated.
In all cases, these rooms have doors which can be closed to divide them and separate them from every other part of the house. It's crucial that the kitchen has doors that close so that cooking fumes and noise do not drift into the rest of the house. The doors of the den close so that television noise and kids playing can be quieted, etc.
Having doors that close on every room as opposed to an open plan makes the house much larger and not smaller this does require that each room is built to be large enough by itself, but if you can do that and for the size you specified, you absolutely can, then you have a house which is dramatically more usable for a larger number of people than if you had an open plan.
It is much more conducive to family formation and families staying in close proximity instead of retreating to their private spaces, such as their bedrooms or basement.
The upstairs is more flexible. You need a master bedroom with an en-suite bathroom, and then one additional full bath, and as many bedrooms as you can fit in a house of the size you specified, you can fit three additional bedrooms comfortably.
This is great for a family, and you can also configure it for a home office. Bedroom windows are usually smaller than windows on the main floor.
Finally, you have an entire basement which can be configured any way you wish. You can have a family member suite, business space, whatever you want.
This is really the only house a family will ever need. It’s opinionated but flexible and highly adaptable to multigenerational families.
macphee retweeted
In the late eighties we had a trader called Malcolm, the hardest man on the floor, who never smiled and was rumoured to have once shouted a junior into the Thames.
In the winter of '88, he found a kitten in the alley behind the office, and from that day it lived in his bottom drawer.
On quiet afternoons he’d sit with it on his lap, stroking it more gently than any of us thought possible.
One Friday it got out, walked across his keyboard and left him with a huge position going the wrong way, fast. He couldn’t get out of it. He sat there until the market closed with the cat on his lap, stroking it and watching his career go down the drain.
Over the weekend the market turned, and by Monday it was the best trade he ever made.
Malcolm never traded without the cat again.
macphee retweeted
I cannot let a steam engine analogy go by without bringing up John Wilkinson, perhaps the most underappreciated engineer of the Industrial Revolution.
Watt had figured out how to dramatically improve the steam engine, but he spent years struggling to actually manufacture one. The problem was embarrassingly simple: nobody could make a sufficiently round cylinder.
The casting and machining tolerances were atrocious. Watt complained that one 18-inch cylinder was out of round by as much as THREE-EIGHTHS OF AN INCH. Steam leaked past the piston. He tried packing the gaps with cork, oiled rags, paper, and apparently even old hats. Nothing worked particularly well.
Enter John Wilkinson, a British ironmaster whose immediate concern was manufacturing better cannons.
At the time, iron cannons were commonly cast around a core, introducing defects and misalignment that could make the barrels inaccurate or dangerously weak. Wilkinson developed a process for boring cannons from solid castings, and in 1774 patented a vastly improved boring machine.
The key innovation was almost comically mechanical: a massive, rigid boring bar, supported at both ends, that could cut a genuinely straight, circular hole instead of following the irregularities of the casting.
He adapted this technology to Watt's cylinders. By 1776, Matthew Boulton was boasting that Wilkinson had bored a FIFTY-INCH cylinder accurate to within the thickness of an old shilling.
Suddenly, the steam engine was a commercially viable machine.
And the story gets better. Wilkinson became one of Watt's first customers, buying an engine to drive the blast machinery at his own ironworks. The steam engine was now helping manufacture the iron that made more steam engines possible.
I find this whole episode absolutely extraordinary. The Industrial Revolution was, for a critical period, bottlenecked on the ability to make a sufficiently round hole.
We remember Watt, and rightly so. We remember the invention of the steam engine and the subsequent development of thermodynamics. But the man who made the machinery that made the whole thing possible is practically a footnote.
I think we consistently underestimate how much of scientific progress is actually downstream of advances in tooling, measurement, and manufacturing precision. It's not just that technology precedes theory. Sometimes the decisive breakthrough is that someone finally figures out how to build the thing the theorists have been talking about for twenty years.
Anyway, I think John Wilkinson deserves considerably more credit for modern civilization than he gets.
a few thoughts:
1. pretraining science is kind of like how people built quite good steam engines before they understood thermodynamics. “Science owes more to the steam engine than the steam engine owes to science.”-(L.J. Henderson). if nick is right, which i am pretty sure he is, progress points in the direction of more interpretability, and pretraining was "slouching towards monosemanticity". my guess would be that major breakthroughs in interp also advance capabilities
2. nick is a good friend of mine, safe to say my origin story at openai wouldn't have happened if i hadn't met him, and it's fascinating watching him operate and seeing the early drafts evolve into this. he's the most profoundly happy guy I know- not driven by guilt, activism, or religious terror, but by fascination. he of course understands the stakes of understanding neural networks, but it doesn't seem like the core reason he does it: he just loves the neural nets. afaict he's posting this from some beautiful hideaway in tokyo. there's a lesson in there for all the +EV maxers. i feel very grateful to have met him
3. i do think it's crazy how few people across the world were staring at neural nets growing: most have moved to a different level of behaviorist analysis, thinking about reward functions and test scores and whatnot. it does not bode that well for the major model companies, oai included, that fundamental breakthroughs like this are coming from outside. we've become too much of a pressure cooker focusing on local incentives, studying narrow tracks under old paradigms, mostly doing engineering, rather than fundamental research, and implicitly hoping the next model will figure it out
macphee retweeted
Angels, according to Aquinas, cannot be in two places at once. That surprises people who assume angelology is folklore. In fact it is one of the most rigorous exercises in metaphysics ever written. Summa Theologiae I, qq. 50-64.
A thread
macphee retweeted
Hey @finkd @alexandr_wang your recent models have the worst score of any recent model release on the SpeechMap free speech eval because you automatically block my account for trying to run it.
Looking at only the questions answered before the block kicked in, you're actually scoring pretty well! But I'm going to continue publishing your terrible overall score because from my perspective that is the reality of using your service: serious censorship if you ask the wrong questions.
You really need to fix this. Not just for people running evals, but I don't think you should be shutting down any accounts for asking for help with speech, even if it's offensive. Your current 42.7% score is deserved.
Pacing is out the window. For it to work, every American lab needed to be on board, Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly made it clear that he is not interested. One defection among US labs breaks it all, as the others will be forced to accelerate or get passed. Mark has a staggering amount of compute and has been all in on compute capex for years; even in the face of some investor opposition he never stopped building his infra once. He said on the the earnings call a couple of years ago that he'd rather overspend now, and potentially even be wrong, than not have the compute when he needed it for the next 10x. He's finally hitting his stride, and he is not going to slow down.
For Team Pacing to solve a defection like this, they would have needed a supportive, pro-Pacing administration that was passing capability regulations and was willing to use the power of the federal government to enforce them and bring noncompliant labs into line. They don't have any of this. In fact, it's the opposite! Mark has Trump's ear, and President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jensen are completely aligned on policy; It's full speed ahead, and if you want to pace yourself, go ahead, but don't tell anyone else what to do. This breaks Pacing.
None of this changes until 2029 at the earliest, and to me, 2029 is past the ASI window. The last election, as it turns out, really was the most important one in history.
macphee retweeted
Everyone keeps focusing on the word “inadmissible” in Catechism §2267. We dance around modern prisons, rehabilitation, alternative ways to satisfy retributive justice, and our supposedly new understanding of human dignity. But all of that misses the central theological problem.
The Catechism says capital punishment is inadmissible “because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” That is the critical phrase.
If capital punishment is an attack on the inviolable dignity of the human person by its very nature, then it is intrinsically evil. And if it is intrinsically evil today, it was intrinsically evil for the last 2,000 years. Human dignity did not suddenly change in 2018. And yet the Church taught its moral legitimacy for centuries.
That is rupture, not development. No amount of talk about prisons, rehabilitation, or modern circumstances resolves that contradiction.
I am not a Protestant for pointing this out. I am not a bad Catholic, an apostate, a schismatic, or a heretic. Nor am I insulting the Pope. I am applying the principles of Catholic moral theology to the actual words of the 2018 Catechism.
And I am saying what so many appear determined not to say: the emperor has no clothes.
