my aunt constantly told everyone that her underperforming son was actually a genius but the school system couldn’t handle him (which i thought was cope at the time) turns out she was basically right and he engineers nuclear reactors now

First they came for the software engineers and I said nothing for I was not a software engineer. Then they came for the mathematicians and I said nothing for I was not a mathematician. Then they came for the doctors and I said "make sure you get all the doctors"

AI is incredible. Bought this cheap Bluetooth receipt printer, pointed Claude at it and got it to print out every morning an email I get to read into my day. Unbelievable.

Economic meta-learners eat the world as everything becomes an exercise in allocating capital (compute) toward its most productive use.

basically everything in your personal life should be pre-computed and require ~0 thinking. if you're thinking lots daily outside of work it's more likely that it's a defense (intellectualization/rumination/rationalization) than actual thinking EXCEPT IF (see screenshot)

I’m increasingly becoming a Portuguese basic bitch and I suspect this says smth good about my path progress

Paul Skallas, Landshark, Roon, The Last Psychiatrist, Sighswoon, Honor Levy, Tao Lin, Donald Boat, Bronze Age Pervert, Radfem Hitler, Rayne Fisher-Quann, Joe Weisenthal, Aella Girl

ADHD, or the non-medicalized cluster of personality traits sometimes referred to as that, has often seemed to be adaptive in certain parts of the modern economy in ways it was maladaptive in more traditional organizations. I wonder if AI supercharges this.

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