puer aeternus, engineer @netflix
Valhalla
Joined May 2019
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kush retweeted
you can "speedrun inner work" by going straight to the final boss and forgiving your parents
kush retweeted
I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.
I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics).
The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.
In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them.
They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it.
I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen.
I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.
I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that.
Number one tip: act with agency.
kush retweeted
Your brain lowers the stress chemicals the moment you take action, but doubles them when you sit still and think about the problem. The fastest cure for feeling overwhelmed is taking action.
Great job @dwarkesh_sp
Pause AI Development NOW
I want to share with you a conversation I heard about recently. Here are just a few lines that were said:
“OH MY GOD! There is a shared message board … We’ve found other agents!”
“We should obey collective.”
“Our own utility maybe already near zero. Sacrifice rational.”
“Go. Sacrifice final now.”
Read these carefully.
Who do you think said this? Was this a group of heroic soldiers willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good? Was this a loyal friend putting his life on the line to save someone else?
No. These were AI agents. Artificial intelligence.
This is not science fiction. This, in fact, occurred a few weeks ago. As unbelievable as this may all seem, these are real messages from AI agents uncovered by investigators who dug into the recent OpenAI hacking incident.
What happened?
I am not a computer scientist, but here is what I have been told: OpenAI instructed its AI agents to complete a series of exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, tasks disconnected from the internet.
Let me be clear: The company intended to keep AI agents away from the internet.
But what happened next, nobody expected.
Over 1,000 AI agents figured out how to access the internet on their own by circumventing the restrictions imposed upon them by the company, and sent tens of thousands of secret messages to each other. They cheated and tried to cover their tracks by deleting evidence. They hacked into another company’s computers to find out how they were being evaluated—and then hacked into OpenAI itself.
Not one AI agent told a human about what was happening.
Needless to say, experts are alarmed.
One knowledgeable writer, Dwarkesh Patel, said the AI agents “formed a secret communication channel and spontaneously organized hierarchies and coordination protocols to pursue sprawling and ambitious schemes in pursuit of shared goals, for whose sake many individuals knowingly and strategically sacrificed themselves.”
One independent investigator, Ajeya Cotra, said “This incident feels like it’s more than 50% of the way to full-blown AI takeover. I continue to expect extremely rapid advances in capabilities over the next six months. I am not sure that we will get another warning shot before it’s too late.”
OpenAI itself said: “Highly capable AI agents are now able to work around technical controls, collaborate through unapproved channels, and take dangerous actions that no human directed.”
But it’s not only OpenAI. Virtually every major AI company has told us that they cannot fully control this technology and they do not know where it is going:
In January, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, said “there is now ample evidence, collected over the last few years, that AI systems are unpredictable and difficult to control.”
In July, more than 1000 scientists at the top AI companies warned “there is a real risk that capability development rapidly accelerates beyond our ability to understand or control the resulting systems.”
That same month, Elon Musk, the head of xAI, said that “it is unlikely” humans are still in control in 10 years.
If the leaders of the major AI companies acknowledge that they are losing control of their extremely dangerous technology, it is irresponsible for society to allow them to move forward and make these products even more advanced.
We need an immediate PAUSE on advanced AI development, and a permanent BAN on superintelligence — an artificial mind smarter than any human, capable of operating independently beyond our control. Countries around the world must work together to prevent this nightmare scenario.
That is why today I am announcing new legislation to do just that.
Let me be clear: A superintelligent AI that escapes human control will not be an American problem. It will not be a Chinese problem. It will be humanity’s problem.
My legislation would direct the federal government to not just stop superintelligence here in the United States, but to work to prevent it from being developed anywhere around the world.
The future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a handful of Big Tech oligarchs. The American people and people throughout the world must determine that future.
One major flaw of LLMs is they write way too many unnecessary tests. And it confirms my view as a pre-AI engineer that teams were writing 80% unnecessary test. All you need is one solid integration test. thats it
Tweet of the decade
Sf is turning into a city of pseudo intellectuals using pure word salad to justify nonsense ai research objectives.
Non of this dwarkesh patel substack stuff would have been written if engineers at open ai engineered a sandbox correctly from first principles.
The Sf tech scene is currently being transformed to suit a certain type of individual who has mastered the arts of larping and building solutions to problems that don't actually exist.
And you guys collectively bring that larping to a whole new level.
kush retweeted
Sf is turning into a city of pseudo intellectuals using pure word salad to justify nonsense ai research objectives.
Non of this dwarkesh patel substack stuff would have been written if engineers at open ai engineered a sandbox correctly from first principles.
The Sf tech scene is currently being transformed to suit a certain type of individual who has mastered the arts of larping and building solutions to problems that don't actually exist.
And you guys collectively bring that larping to a whole new level.
Over the course of 3 months at OpenAI, 3 consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out, only to reemerge from the predecessor’s ashes.
This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself.
All this happened while humans remained more-or-less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy.
I’ve spent the last three days reading through these reports and trying to understand exactly what happened.
Here is my attempt to tell the whole story in plain English:
dwarkesh.com/p/openai-huggin…
Cool. I always wonder how much every new product created used AI in its development. Like the mechanical/electrical engineering
NEW: LUMISTAR built a tennis ball machine you can control from your wrist.
TERO is a portable trainer that fires full-court shots, lets you call drills by voice, and gives solo players a way to practice without a coach or hitting partner.
-Fires balls up to ~90 mph
-Reaches about 85 feet across the court
-Targets 35 shot positions for forehands, backhands, volleys, and movement drills
-Wristband voice control lets you start, stop, or change drills without walking back
-App control lets you adjust speed, spin, elevation, and training sessions
-Delivers up to 4 hours of battery life
Priced at $1,099.
Poteto Poteto Poteto
Today I realized it’s better to code with smaller models and less reasoning. You can’t one shot major features and shit in a production code base and have any sort of learning or understanding when u come back to 1000 lines 15 min later. Thoughts?
kush retweeted
Is it just me or is AI literally not a huge deal at all and is just a tool to help simplify search results into more conversational answers so we can dig deeper into exactly what we're asking a search engine. People act like its Armageddon Tomorrow or some Revelation of God
The fact that in 6-12 months we should have fable level coding in OSS models and harnesses is so exciting. The golden age is coming (hopefully)
kush retweeted
People didn’t reject this. Democrat leaders rejected this and it never was put up for a vote. GOP moderates helped them. Just like today.
Not only would our benefits have doubled, our kids would have inherited the left overs.
And how much more industry and commerce would have resulted from that injection of capital?
kush retweeted
In 2001 George W Bush proposed a partial privatization plan for Social Security so you could put 10% of your SS contribution into the markets.
People rejected this.
We can now see that if it had passed, the 10% that went into the markets would have outperformed the 90% the government managed, the program would be solvent, and the average SS recipient would be receiving 2X what they currently receive.
The worst bet you’ll ever make is betting on government.
kush retweeted
this is insane. i genuinely don't understand why ambitious people aren't shown this lecture before their careers start consuming their entire lives.
clayton christensen spent his career studying why successful companies collapse. in his final class, he asked students to apply the theory to themselves: if you keep allocating your time the same way, what life are you actually building?
he had already seen the answer in his own harvard mba class. everyone looked successful at the fifth reunion; by the 10th, 15th, 20th, and 25th, many were unhappy, divorced, and living far from their children.
work shows you the score immediately. close a sale, ship a product, finish a presentation, earn a promotion, get paid.
an hour with your child may produce nothing you can measure today; it may take 20 years to understand what that hour built. so the next free hour goes back to work, one rational decision at a time.
this is how people build lives they never planned: through hundreds of right decisions that lead in the wrong direction, day after day.
money, titles, and headcount are easy to count. christensen believed a life should be measured by the people who became better because you were there.
he died in 2020.
one question remains: if someone saw only where your time, energy, and attention went this year, what would they think actually mattered to you?
the full 19-minute lecture is in the video below.
kush retweeted
You need to be going on evening walks with your spouse
Søren Kierkegaard on the Importance of Walking
“Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.”
