I have a vague hypothesis that I am utterly unprepared to make rigorous that the more of what you take into your mind is the result of another human mind, rather than the result of a nonhuman process operating on its own terms, the more likely you are to have mental issues.

On the low end this would include the documented protective effect of natural environments against psychotic episodes compared to urban environments (where EVERYTHING was put there by someone’s idea). But computers… they are amplifiers of things put out by human minds, with very short feedback loops. Everything is ultimately in one way or another defined by a person who put it there, even it is then allowed to act according to the rules you laid down.

And then an LLM is the ultimate distillation of the short feedback loop, feeding back whatever you shovel into it straight back at you. Even just mathematically - the whole ‘transformer’ architecture is just a way to take imputed semantic meanings of tokens early in the stream and jiggling them around to ‘transform’ that information into the later tokens of the stream, no new information is really entering it it is just moving around what you put into it and feeding it back at you in a different form.

Shortly after he goes on the Better Offline podcast

I am amused by people who cannot believe that one of the actual attendees isn’t an opponent doing a parody

Commentary straight from some of the sources

lesswrong.com/…/stone-age-billionaire-can-t-words…

Comments are fun

You know what they say. Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake, as this can allow them to continue their errors and lead to their own downfall

I mean I dunno if any internal numbers are meaningful at all as anything but accounting fictions. But the cost of the falcon 9 is on the believable end of things, even if they are potentially subsidized by funding rounds, and impressive. Near as I can tell it comes from accepting trade-offs: they accept low specific impulse and thus declining performance at high velocity for cheap engines, they accept an overpowered oversized upper stage to have only one engine assembly line and to shift some of the burden to the upper stage that optimally would be on the first, they accept that entering at 2 km/s is way easier than entering at 8 km/s and don’t try to recover the second stage, they accept the steep payload penalty of recovering the first stage. Starship on the other hand tries to brute-force through every trade-off - meaning theyre trying to push their engines through all sanity, the second stage is heavy and bulky and comically oversized, and theyre trying to have a big empty fuel tank be a heat shield which not even the shuttle ever tried.

Acosta, the guy who cut him his sweetheart deal in 2007, is quoted as saying he was told to back off on prosecuting Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence”.

I mean Starship is a VERY questionable financial decision the way they are running it. The falcon program is another matter. It’s actually remarkable how the two of them are almost diametrically opposed in how they are run.

So.

How much of this is folding all the meme stocks into the one thing that actually produces a product that people all over the world demonstrably want to pay for over the competition to keep their stupid plates spinning?

And how much is religious psychosis, advancing along the singulatarian eschatology from AI to dyson sphere to rebuilding the universe in His Image?

I can’t tell.

Does (deservedly) mercilessly bullying Slopya Nadella actually work?