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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • The bill mandates safety testing of advanced AI models and the imposition of “guardrails” to ensure they can’t slip out of the control of their developers or users and can’t be employed to create “biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, as well as weapons with cyber-offensive capabilities.” It’s been endorsed by some AI developers but condemned by others who assert that its constraints will drive AI developers out of California.

    Man, if I can’t even build homemade nuclear weapons, what CAN I do? That’s it, I’m moving to Nevada!



  • I’ve thought about a similar idea before in the more minor context of stuff like note-taking apps – when you’re taking notes in a paper notebook, you can take notes in whatever format you want, you can add little pictures or diagrams or whatever, arranged however you want. Heck, you can write sheet music notation. When you’re taking notes in an app, you can basically just write paragraphs of text, or bullet points, and maybe add pictures in some limited predefined locations if you’re lucky.

    Obviously you get some advantages in exchange for the restrictive format (you can sync/back up things to the internet! you can search through your notes! etc) but it’s by no means a strict upgrade, it’s more of a tradeoff with advantages and disadvantages. I think we tend to frame technological solutions like this as though they were strict upgrades, and often we aren’t so willing to look at what is being lost in the tradeoff.



  • My main thought reading through this whole thing was like, “okay, in a world where the rationalists weren’t closely tied to the neoreactionaries, and the effective altruists weren’t known by the public mostly for whitewashing the image of a guy who stole a bunch of people’s money, and libertarians and right-wingers were supported by the mainstream consensus, I guess David Gerard would be pretty bad for saying those things about them. Buuuut…”