Upon the altar of God, eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man
San Francisco, CA
Joined April 2009
- Tweets70.7K
- Following808
- Followers164K
- Likes17.7K
Joscha Bach retweeted
What if there is no hard problem? @Plinz
Joscha Bach retweeted
Computer, visualize earth across 400M years
Computer built an interactive globe of Earth's 4.5 billion years from 14 open datasets, with its own engine moving 258 plates across 109 paleo-elevation maps.
Drag the timeline, or type a city to see where it sat 400 million years ago.
deeptime.pplx.app/
Joscha Bach retweeted
A new airplane only makes sense if it's at least 15% more efficient than what's already flying. Better aerodynamics and carbon fiber get you part of the way. The rest has to come from a new engine. Who are the best engine startups right now?
Joscha Bach retweeted
"Assessing AI Consciousness" is now available as a book: hutter1.net/ai/bayesconsc.ht… It develops a Bayesian framework separating theoretical credence from empirical evidence, providing a precise, scalable method for calibrated assessments (with online tool and code): ai-cognition.org/cacophony-t… Happy Halloween.
Joscha Bach retweeted
I concur with Scott Alexander that some parts of AI safety, especially slowdown & awareness raising oriented parts, have started behaving more like a mass political movement, with associated bad epistemics.
nitter.gq/jessi_cata/status/2109…
AI Impacts’ 2024 press release claimed the median AI expert gave a 5% chance of extinction. The survey actually asked about extinction OR similarly permanent and severe disempowerment.
So the misleading framing wasn’t just from journalists.
aiimpacts.org/wp-content/upl…
Joscha Bach retweeted
"Which company, which committee, do you trust to police your thoughts? Or do you simply want the thoughts of others policed, and not your own?"
- Erik Voorhees
@ErikVoorhees
We’ve trained Claude to flag potential misuse in conversations, a technique we call self-assessment. Right after it responds, Claude gives a preliminary safety assessment of the conversation.
Since we began using self-assessment in June, it has surfaced misuse that our other safeguards weren’t designed to catch.
Because Claude has already read the conversation, self-assessment is very efficient. And unlike classifiers, which target a discrete set of harms, it draws on Claude’s own judgment, so it gets more accurate as our models improve.
Read more on our new Safeguards blog:
safeguards.anthropic.com/202…
Joscha Bach retweeted
I'm now building an "improvements" feature into all of my personal vibecoded applications: a freeform text input that's hooked up to an agent that yolo implements whatever is submitted.
It's an interesting experience -- the activation energy barrier to sanding any rough edge or implementing any new feature becomes extremely low. Someone else who uses one of the applications I created has already implemented 150 improvements over the course of a few days. This pattern feels like a new kind of tool -- liquid software? -- and every application that doesn't have this feature now has a slightly rigid and anachronistic flavor. Why can't I just tell it how I want it to be different?
Now, it's not obvious to me how this pattern can or should scale. Does it become unmaintainable after a while? (Maybe model intelligence improvement outstrips my feature appetite such that it's fine?) How does collaborative software work in this model? Can software designed this way be secure and reliable?
Whatever the larger questions about broader deployment, it definitely works great in a personal context. It reminds me a little of the visions of Lisp/Lisp machines, Smalltalk, and HyperCard -- systems that the user can take control of and modify. Those visions never quite worked, though: the vast majority of software today is not end-user modifiable in any useful way. So, while this "liquid" affordance is a very small touch, the way it changes one's relation to the software feels a bit transgressive and empowering in a Lickliderian and Engelbartian way.
Joscha Bach retweeted
Curious indeed. K3 and GLM 5.3-s coincide with Claude Fable in personality. This, I understand.
But. What the hell is going on with DeepSEek? It has this… shape that's not like other Chinese models.
Joscha Bach retweeted
people calling things they don't like a "public health problem" is a rapidly emerging public health problem
Joscha Bach retweeted
After ten years leading Foresight, Allison Duettmann is joining our Board of Directors as she transitions out of her role as President and CEO. Co-founder Christine Peterson will serve as interim President while our board has begun the search for Foresight’s next CEO.
Under Allison’s leadership, Foresight became the organization you know today: six focus areas, a fellowship that has supported 266 researchers, a multi-million-dollar grants program, Vision Weekends on three continents, and AI for Science and Safety Nodes in San Francisco and Berlin, built on her conviction that open science needs open compute.
And the team she built: 12 people across San Francisco and Berlin, running grants, fellowships, seminars, AI Nodes, Vision Weekends, and shaping what comes next – Karolina Eklöw, Lydia La Roux, Amber Duettmann, Madeleine Sarah, Beatrice Erkers, Martina Pepiciello, Bradley Clark Royes, Rachel Farley, Tara Padovan-Hickman, Madeleine Ahlström, Lisa Stenvinkel.
So thank you, Allison, for making Foresight what it is today. We look forward to seeing you, and all of you, at Vision Weekend in November, where you’ll meet the team and we’ll unveil what the future holds!
Joscha Bach retweeted
People keep saying there’s no aesthetic to the 2020’s but I’d firmly disagree. It was an honor to work with Cho Gi-Seok and his amazing team on my album visuals (one of the great innovators of the 2020's). We've been thinking about our work as 'sci fi thru the female gaze'. A visual landscape that I think has been slowly crystallizing thru culture for the last decade. I think it's starts with DIY aesthetics like cyber sigilism (good examples being Glyphomancer (who does my tats). ethereal, elven and ornate, - rooted in anime and fantasy but then still manifesting as sharp modern and Cyberian. Prevalent in spaces like douyin and in cosplay (I personally love some tangents of Chinese furry culture that I think capture this), I feel like the more polished end of this aesthetic is done masterfully in k pop and Cho is one of the greatest imo. Projects like Aespa can sometimes fall into this creative legacy imo.
I’ll write more on this later, cuz I feel like u can actually trace this back to a re-establishment of where we left off in art nouveau and art deco when world war 1 hit and killed the vibe. (See: Erte, romanticism etc)
I feel like we have no art critics anymore so we’re cheapening everything by decontextualizing everything and just seeing things as posts rather than a beautiful conversational visual language . I’d call this HYPERGAIA in an homage to Lovelock who’se ideas seem like a beautiful synthesis of the ethereal ancient and the shiny new. Just my two cents so prob many wud disagree with my read on most of this
When I have more time I want to write more about what’s winning in the current creative landscape because I see a lot of unfounded nihilism about it.
Ps this statue is real, Cho’s amazing team made it.
Xx G
