Tag: Social Media

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Startups

Day 1516 and It Has To Be Carefully Taught

I love science fiction. The current generation building artificial intelligence builds on decades of thought experiments (aka science fiction) on how we might responsibly build and interact with a machine intelligence.

So it’s exciting watching testable premises arise that give hope that what is being built can be done so in ways that reflect our shared values. That is at least broadly the project of alignment.

An interesting paper from Owain Evans and a group of researchers on emergent misalignment caught quite a bit of attention today.

They finetuned GPT4o on a narrow task of writing insecure code. Having finetuned GPT4o to write insecure code they then prompted it with various neutral open-ended questions. It gave misaligned answers 20% of the time, while original GPT4o never did

You can see the work and verify the numbers yourself here. The discussion is interesting because they aren’t sure why model shows broad misalignment after a narrowly negative task like making insecure code. But it’s pretty interesting right?

Without getting into the politics of doomers, Elizer Yudkowsky believes this experiment to be a positive finding.

If you train the AI to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it’s got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil. Elizer Yudkowsky

The moral valence of intelligence is an open question and whether the values we have as humans will follow through into an alien emergent intelligence raised all kinds of questions.

But if we can teach values simply through conduct that has bad intent it might mean we can and in fact capable of teaching what we see as the right conduct.

But for all your sloppy coders out there be warned. Writing bad code leads to Nazism. Nobody tell Curtis Yarvin.

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Internet Culture Media

Day 1514 and Informational Ravine

I hate to add fears that we will face a “dead internet” but increasingly we lack shared context in our online spaces. As context collapses so too does culture. Bad behavior proliferates.

Without shared values we cannot find purchase on the informational ravine of the open web. Competing narratives and interests buffet your mind as you try to sense-make your way into a firmer grip. It’s easy to slip and find yourself unsure of what is up or down.

The vibes are bad. People have entirely different interpretations when presented with something as innocuous as an email asking “what did you get done this week?” If you discuss a particularly contested space it quickly becomes a hostile information environment. Many retreat.

If you are tempted to argue with me about whether that action is in fact innocuous you have to wonder how far apart you and I are from each other as we try to climb through the great ravine to the other side.

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Reading Startups

Day 1510 and Turning It On

Almost two years ago I sent a Twitter DM to a young founder named Isaiah. He was intellectual, curious and humble and I was impressed by his authenticity.

He was strong enough and driven enough to ask for hard feedback. So I told him the truth when he asked. I hated his first idea, gave a prediction about how it would go and said I’d invest in him on whatever he did next.

Lucky for me that feedback turned out to be accurate. We talked for months as he worked through a plan for his true passion for abundant clean nuclear energy.

I was blessed to be put in a position where I could commit as his first investor. His progress since then been extraordinary. Their goal is to make the world’s energy by building nuclear reactors at planetary scale. Today Valar Atomics announced they raised a 19m seed round.

When I say extraordinary I really mean it.

First, we have completed the construction and pressure certification of our thermal prototype, Ward Zero, at our Los Angeles facility—the fastest in history a thermal test unit has been developed and built. Ward Zero will be unveiled next week at an exclusive event in LA. Isaiah Taylor

We are in an age of acceleration. To be able to design and test a prototype this fast is a sign that we can expect better solutions to arrive and quickly if we should so will it. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are able to turn on a working reactor in the near future. If you are interested in Valar (working for them or investing in their growth) hit me up on DM.

Reading

Leading Edge newsletter “What Woo Works?”

Spooky, scary, technology is witchcraft

Media

Want to see an android art direct as if it were in the cremaster cycle? The Protoclone is a faceless, anatomically accurate synthetic human with over 200 degrees of freedom, over 1,000 Myofibers, and 500 sensors. Clearly they are doing this just to scare us into giving them attention so here you go. I hope they don’t execute as swiftly as Valar.

Protoclone, the world’s first bipedal, musculoskeletal android
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Culture Media

Day 1505 and Warping Reality

We are all avoiding reality to some measure. Be grateful that our egos can cushion the horrors of the world at all. I’m unsure how removed one can be from reality anymore but as an American I’ll probably one of the last to find out.

Rationalist and all-around Twitter in-group personality Aella went on a podcast called “whatever” which I’d wrongly believed was a marketing funnel for OnlyFans creators.

It turns out the host is some sort of debater Christian and this is a popular podcast for feeling better about the state of the gender wars. In some of the ensuing debate Kim Ono (I’ve lost the link) said something very insightful.

The whole business model is warping reality to comfort the fearful

Whether it is dim men dunking on sex workers, panicked liberal women on MSNBC, or Fox Blondes screaming at Boomers, our entire media environment is about making sure you can’t see what’s real while simultaneously pandering that your fear is justified. Nervous systems be damned!

I find reality to be plenty terrifying but I try to avoid needing my own version of reality to cope with it. Not to say I don’t have my own biases and priors (and I’ve written about them at left) but the world is such a jumble at the moment I very much need to confidently act in the face of warped realities.

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Media Politics

Day 1498 and Reformation

When things get noisy on our global commons it’s good to step back. I live in elder millennial neighborhood that is American Twitter which is a bustling place. I still manage that “by hand” as it were.

I spend time on forums and Discords but increasingly my interactions within the commons has some kind of artificial intelligence layer between me and “the noise” as the slop drowns out. What to believe and how to keep it updated to reality?

An informational reformation is part of what you could see as a wider political elite power struggle. The uni-party of Washington Consensus and prestige media are not containing the rebel information hordes at bay. Consensus is at risk. Zoomers are learning the Treasury doesn’t control the Fed. Welcome to the audit kids.

The centralized narrative window of a top editorial page or an interview on Bloomberg remains the bounds of propriety for now.

But it’s going to get weirder. Many a teenage hacker with fighting words on Discord servers is likely to be sacrificed in this war of elites as permanent Washington fends off the populist revolt. It just happens to be that some hackers under the banner of Musk are in this coalition. Crusades probably always involve baroque racism.

With all of that as background I started watching Wolf Hall which is a BBC Drama with Damien Lewis as Henry VIII and Claire Foy as Ann Boleyn. What could be more relevant than a time when an elite decided he should decide his own fate and not the Holy Roman Emperor.

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Media Politics

Day 1494 and Back to Chaos

The Zoomers have so little institutional memory. They don’t remember the first Trump administration. Imagine having no memory of the pitched battles of institution versus ego. I envy them.

The Zoomers I talk to seem to have some memory of a good boom year but then their memories are strongly colored by the many traumas of the panic. Persistent online worlds with a global shutdown didn’t do right by them.

Now that we are back to the chaos of a Trump presidency I have no fond simulated idea of nostalgia for Trump for myself.

In 2016 our politics broke my assessment of what was possible and I did not like where the chaos would lead. I definitely could not predicted how much my own position on issues would change though. I still don’t know the best path but I have ironically opened my eyes to the scale of the issue. They used to call that being “woke” but like the term a lot has changed.

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Media Politics Preparedness

Day 1489 and Foggy Frosty

I felt it was very important to get off the internet and soak in some restorative aesthetics. We are in a shock and awe moment almost anywhere you look from national politics to geopolitical technology competition. And everyone is jangling for narrative.

We’ve been a fog of informational war so long we forget we are all subject of multiple intersecting and independent actors who want your attention to be on their issues and their terms. We are living in context collapse hell.

Ans it’s not going to get any better. Many independent minded citizens are arising in these challenging times and they all operate with mindful caution. We have to invent our way out of the most challenging information environment of our lives.

Americans don’t realize we are subject to political and industrial competition and it plays out across social media. Don’t think because you know it is being done that you aren’t heavily affected. America has foreign enemies and quite a few domestic ones.

Extremism exist in some very weird bubbles. I am concerned seeing rationalist singularity cultists. But I’m also concerned about high frequency hedge funders who manipulate markets. We are in a great power competition and I’m sure we all have totally sensible opinions about open source artificial intelligence models. Right?

It’s all very cyperpunk. Manipulation of financial markets is as grey zone a tactic as sniping the telecoms pipeline from Helsinki to Tallinn. And we should be concerned about being competitive. We’ve been snowblind before

It’s a nuisance as neither you nor I have a clear line of view. Some of us maybe have a few months heads up. The lead feels less and less even as I am as much a part of shaping narratives as anyone. I was using DeepSeek in the fall.

When I was in fashion we had this website called “don’t believe the hypebeast” to mog those overly concerned with cool. Don’t get mogged. The same principle applies here. Don’t try to figure it all out.

Go read something with soul, listen to some Bach, and be with your family. Be frosty in the fog and exist in the real while you still can.

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Internet Culture Politics Startups

Day 1487 and Gell Mann Amnesia

It’s a busy day for competitive narratives on social media (and in the markets) as normies are belated reacting to news about a new open source artificial intelligence model from a Chinese quantitative hedge fund called DeepSeek.

The new model been available since Wednesday though many of us open source fans have been using prior versions for quite some time.

DeepSeek even powers the skincare bot my friend Kasra and I have been playing with for fun. We used all the open source models We are early days and hyperscalers have different games they play than us tinkerer types.

I have no hot takes for you on what it means geopolitically or otherwise. You can doomscroll for Jevons Paradox, the possibility of a Sputnik moment for the West, and the benefits of constraints for creativity.

What I think is most useful to remember about media narratives is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. Coined by Michael Crichton of Jurassic Park fame it helps remind experts to not expect expertise from normal people.

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.


In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

Michael Crichton

I am passionate about the right to compute because new technologies should not be in the hands of only giant corporations or controlled by nation states.

Most of the commentary you will see on any given topic of media interest will be a fog of war mismash of competing narratives and ambitions.

Just remember that it’s wise to be wary of any certainty when it comes to what’s going on. What we know changes on what we know and it’s odd how easily we forget that.

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Chronic Disease Politics

Day 1486 and Odds and Ends and Migraines

It was a busy week. I felt physically well through most of it, but yesterday and today I am struggling. I’m in bed with a migraine that I think I accidentally kicked off by enjoying a quiet walk on sunny snowpack.

Amusing that people think we don’t get enough sun for solar power

While I prefer to have illness strike on a weekend, I feel irritated that I often get my personal time used up by health issues. I very much prioritize using my good hours for work.

Which on that note, I’d love for folks to check out a bill in Montana to secure a right to compute. What started as an idea has now officially been introduced into the legislative process. It’s a big victory to have this under consideration.

I was also in the New York Times this week in a column by James Pogue. It’s my second time being interviewed by him and I think quite highly of his reporting.

A few quotes in the New York Times on the tech right, the H1B debate, and a general sense of getting back to business

Categories
Media Politics Startups

Day 1485 and A New Pogue on Technology

The paper of record just doesn’t know what to make of a political constituency that it has been determined to view as a billionaire bad boys club. And so after almost a decade of hostility between media and Silicon Valley, it is clear the vibe shift has come in the house style at the New York Times as it is dedicating a lot of ink to “Tech Right” and how it views the world.

A new narrative of technology is emerging. Veterans like Maureen Dowd alternate between mean jabs and fawning over “the high school oligarchy.” Ezra Klein’s podcast this week worries over tech’s relationship to Trump 2.0.. The right leaning institutionalist Ross Douthat interviewed Marc Andreessen on how Silicon Valley came to leave the Democratic Party.

The editors appear to sense the shift of power. And with new beats come new talent. The Grey Lady has hired an opinion columnist James Pogue who actually does reporting with these elusive new right and tech right figures.

Old timer readers might appreciate that this new talent shares a name with a past technology columnist. Pogue. David Pogue reviewed gadgets from 2000 to 2013.

Despite being millennial, James Pogue is an old school reporter. His popularity derives from his deep reporting. He picks up the phone and talks to people. He shows up to events and reports on what he sees. He does it with verve and style but lets his subjects speak for themselves.

James Pogue’s author photo

James is having something of a moment judging both by my group chats and the most shared analytics. Not only is his New York Times opinion column going gangbusters but he is also going viral for his long form gonzo essays in Vanity Fair.

If you enjoy learning how the media sausage gets made Isaac Simpson has an interview with James Pogue on his newfound status, his reporting style and how he ended up at the center of the political and cultural moment.

It is here I do full disclosure myself and say I’ve been interviewed by him twice and we have social relationship that includes being on a very similar professional and social circuit. Because he actually goes to report on things in person we’ve seen a lot of each other over the years. A reporter grows with their beat.

If you are interested in what establishment media has to say about this new power base of new right, tech right and a rising counter cultural elite and prefer your news to be deeply reported then make yourself familiar with James Pogue and his work.

He has a nuanced understanding of the personalities, always his homework, and incredible access to his sources. I guess this is what happens when you ask questions and then let your subjects speak for themselves. If anyone has the secret to the media rebuilding its trust with readers my money is on James Pogue.