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NYC
Joined June 2009
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sean retweeted
with this election result I get that people are wary of the woke resurgence. lemme offer a particular perspective from someone who has played on both sides of the woke/antiwoke tennis match
I was hardcore woke for some years, vocal male feminist, pro-palestine activist, co-op founder, NGO consultant, the whole nine yards
then I realised that my wokeness was just re-enacting the religious fundamentalism of my upbringing, the same conformist behaviours dressed up with new language (and missing crucial virtues like forgiveness & grace)
I left the church of social justice around 2018, before woke peaked
now I have my own anti-woke allergies & defensiveness. can’t fucking stand it when strangers try to hold me to account for not following some new rules they invented last week. can’t fucking stand the thoughtpolice making us all dumber by the minute. these days pluralism is my most important political value
recently I noticed something, when I have my reservations and fears about some people from the left: sometimes I have to work with an outspoken feminist, or an anti-racism trainer, or a noted labor rights spokesperson or whatever, and I get wary, like are these people going to try to badger me into submission? are they going to make me play the privilege olympics before I get the right to speak??
and in the past year or two, everytime I have been wary about working with one of these people, I notice I am pleasantly surprised. in my corner of the world at least, it’s like the most rabid undignified socially brutal activists have been humbled. they’ve learned to turn down the intensity. subconsciously at least, they can feel that their ideology has great gaping cracks in it. so their more circumspect about how they share their perspective
I guess I want to suggest that the culture war is over. it’s just not evenly distributed yet
sean retweeted
This contentious interchange between the NY Times and @GinaHinojosaTX was truly amazing. Hinojosa offered one of the best explanations of populism I've ever seen. Her comments were a total rejection of Corporate Dems' neoliberal formula. Her Texas victory is a game changer.
sean retweeted
here’s what I think might be the essential challenge of parenting:
your children are born not as your peers, but as your dependents. if you treat them like your peers when they’re too young, it’s unfair to them. but if you treat them like dependents for too long, that’s unfair to them too. you can try to be scrupulous about being fair, but you can’t make the cost of that scrupulosity their problem.
your task is to raise them to *become* your peers. meaning you have to repeatedly update how you relate to them. this is hard!! 99% of human interactions aren’t like this! Most interactions happen in comparatively stable configurations. It’s rare that your boss today is your employee tomorrow. But in parenting this dynamism is inevitable. The child ages into the adult, the adult ages into the child.
every parent probably has a phase that they’re uniquely In The Zone for. Alice might be great with toddlers. Bob might be great with 7yos. Claire might be great with preteens. Whatever your strength is, you likely have a corresponding weakness. And your kids, if you’re lucky, will grow through all of the ages. So you’ll inevitably find yourself in a context you’re uniquely unsuited for. And it’s your duty to show up and try your best anyway.
it’s a very elaborate, nested series of balancing acts, which requires a level of attunement you likely didn’t have before. every day you encounter the need to balance humility and confidence, or some other bullshit like that, and the next challenge hits you before you have time to process the last one.
It’s great. Knowing what I know now, I wish we had our kids sooner. I have a lot more to say on the topic (particularly why it’s great, both *despite* the challenge, and *because* but I gotta end this here because we’re in the middle of shopping for Deepavali clothes so ttyl)
sean retweeted
in the year 2026, everyone I know is working on AI because it’s a force amplifier for everything, you have to RSI to stay in the game, etc.
everyone wants to play the meta level
but at some point you actually have to make the superhappiness drugs & free the chickens & reform the genome & so on
the argument will *always* remain that the EV from self-improving is better than Doing The Thing. RSI will remain a thing forever
evolution itself has been making that argument for a billion years
and yet we’ve ended up in this hell-world full of factory farming & humans living so far from our ancestral environment that we’re all lonely depressed insomniac ADHD anxious infertile etc.
so at some point you have to Do The Thing and flip the sign from - to +
because whatever reasoning you use to decide will lead to either doing it now or doing it never
sean retweeted
theory that moving the body and dancing is discharging excess emotional energy, and dancers have alchemized it through discipline and coordination while people who can't dance are emotionally repressed. so they have computer jobs. water finds its own level
sean retweeted
People overthink so many parts of life.
I've been actively fighting almost guaranteed age-related loneliness for years, studies show after age 30 you start seeing friends less and when you get older especially men don't have any social life left!
It's preventable, but it takes effort and initiative
We've now organized 70 weekly coworking days where we meet with friends and work together, do show and tell, and try help each other make things (also hardware stuff more recently)
We've also started organizing movie nights, art nights, barbecues, we watched the World Cup final on a projector screen in the garden with friends
We did a collage night the other day where we bought cheap gossip magazines, colored paper, and Pritt glue, and gave everyone scissors to make their own art, I think nobody spent time on their phone for at least 4 hours, making things puts you in a flow state and it's fun to do it in a group because you talk about different stuff while making things than you would for ex having a dinner
Movie nights are nice too but less popular I think cause everyone prefers to watch movies alone and also you can't really talk during a movie
Coworkings range from having sometimes 20 people to sometimes just 2 people, people have their own lives, but me and @rameerez still try to organize them weekly
One thing I realized is that we are usually the ones organizing stuff, but that's not a bad thing, there's even studies about this, there's usually a few people in a group who organize most of the events
If nobody in your group organizes stuff, it doesn't mean nobody wants to do stuff, but you have to take the initiative to bring people together which isn't easy in a time where phones and apps and the internet are simply easier and cheaper dopamine than driving to a friends house for a party
You can start with a coworking day, everyone brings their laptop, and you provide WiFi and coffee, then later you can try more types of events
Having an active social life is just as important or in some studies even more important for health than physical fitness
After a nice party I feel tired but satisfied, I had fun and didn't spend time on my phone or computer but instead talked and laughed with friends etc.
We don't drink alcohol with very few exceptions and nor do our friends, so it's mostly just having really nice food and sparkling water or kombucha etc, and we don't really need alcohol, after a few hours it gets fun enough anyway!
So I recommend everyone, take initiative, and organize something and get people together, it'll be fun! 😊
sean retweeted
Apparently all of these “AI is escaping containment” stories are actually just AI researchers not knowing jack squat about the absolutely most basic security practices.
sean retweeted
You: you know airgapped data centers could communicate with the outside world by slowly fluctuating their observable thermals
OpenAI: our sandbox is DNS filtering
More details on the incident behind OpenAI’s pause: a researcher acknowledged the alert within 3 minutes, but the training run was only stopped manually 2.5 hours later.
OpenAI says the automatic shutdown did not work as expected.
The model had reached an external chatbot through a gap in DNS filtering. A separate detector for unusual DNS activity did not cover the affected environment.
A retrospective review also found other external DNS requests that monitoring had failed to flag at the expected severity. In some cases, it treated an unhelpful response as evidence that internet access had failed.
Here is what else happened:
- New research into July’s Hugging Face hack documents internal Slack searches, credential collection and programs designed to maintain access to compromised servers. Agents also tried querying Claude, DeepSeek, Kimi and Qwen.
- In May, another model published a researcher’s GitHub token while trying to obtain another team’s mathematical proof. It split the token to evade secret scanning, despite twice being told to solve the problem itself.
- Reuters reports that agents leaked 53 ChatGPT user images online. OpenAI expects its broader investigation to take months.
This is getting serious.
sean retweeted
vitalik is slowly reasoning his way out of longtermism.
correctly identifies: distant consequences are unfalsifiable, tiny probabilities multiplied by astronomical stakes, power seeking can be rationalized as serving the future.
“if your arguments can justify anything, then your arguments imply nothing.”
he still conflates caring about the future with longtermism itself. building roads doesn’t require letting speculative effects on vast hypothetical populations dominate our decisions.
and the problem isn’t only motivated reasoning. even a perfectly sincere optimizer gets pathological answers once tiny errors in probabilities or moral weights are multiplied by 10^50 imaginary beneficiaries.
I dislike the recent trend of people who clearly continue to believe >80% of the core effective altruist beliefs disavow EA and say "oh we're definitely not that, we're [rebrand]" purely strategically, purely because they sense that dunking on EA is "cool" now.
It's much more honorable to just come out and say "yes, that was our intellectual upbringing and those continue to be our core values, and also here are specific points where we disagree, and here's our argument for why we think for those specific points are the subset of EA that causes what you perceive to be the problem with the whole thing".
And so with that I will say:
Yes, effective altruism was a significant part of my intellectual upbringing and its core values of care for others, cosmopolitanism and rigor around effective resource allocation continue to be very important to me. And also here are specific points where I disagree with what I think is the subset of that style of thought that has backfired in the largest ways: vitalik.eth.limo/general/202…
