Another example is risk compensation: You make an activity safer (yay) and participants compensate by taking more risks (oh no).

Interesting, it felt less messy to me than, say, rationalist-adjacent research retreats.

lsuser says that as a result of his spiritual journey, "now if there is so much as a cardboard box on my kitchen counter, it bothers me". Has your spiritual practice changed your tolerance of clutter?

In other words, the zero-information oblivion that produced you once can produce you again, maybe in a different form.

Huh, that's Epicurus's argument against fearing death. But while Epicurus assumed there is no afterlife, you're using it to argue there is one!

Re: safety, it depends on exactly where you are, your skill in assessing strangers' intentions from a distance, and probably the way you carry yourself.

Speaking of which, I'd be interested in playing some improv games with you at less.online, if you want to do that!

I'd like to know what Holden did while serving on the board, and what OpenAI would have done if he hadn't joined. That's crucial for assessing the grant's impact.

But since board meetings are private, this will remain unknown for a long time. Unfortunately, the best we can do is speculate.

Of course, Karpathy's post could be in the multimodal training data.

12 years ago, in The state of Computer Vision and AI: we are really, really far away, Andrej Karpathy wrote:

The picture above is funny.

But for me it is also one of those examples that make me sad about the outlook for AI and for Computer Vision. What would it take for a computer to understand this image as you or I do? [...]

In any case, we are very, very far and this depresses me. What is the way forward? :(

I just asked gpt-4o what's going on in the picture, and it understood most of it:

In this image, a group of men in business attire are seen in a locker room or a similar setting. The focus is on two men, where the taller man is standing on a scale. The shorter man, who appears to be playfully pressing down on the taller man's shoulders to increase his weight on the scale, is creating a humorous situation. Both men and those observing in the background are smiling or laughing, indicating that they are enjoying the lighthearted moment. The man pressing down seems to be taking part in a playful prank or joke, adding a sense of camaraderie and fun to the scene.

That does look like a rough commute, the kind that can use up the mental energy you want to spend on learning. One thing you could consider is staying in a hotel overnight near your school sometimes.

Also, consider wearing ear protection on the Transbay Tube. I wish I had done that when I commuted that way for a year.

I suppose if you had more hidden states than observables, you could distinguish hidden-state prediction from next-token prediction by the dimension of the fractal.

If I understand correctly, the next-token prediction of Mess3 is related to the current-state prediction by a nonsingular linear transformation. So a linear probe showing "the meta-structure of an observer's belief updates over the hidden states of the generating structure" is equivalent to one showing "the structure of the next-token predictions", no?