Co-founder & CTO @ Terrabase. Building governed AI decision systems. Writing about AI safety, interpretability, evals & learning loops. Phenomenology & Buddhism
Joined January 2010
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Jainit retweeted
Minecraft doesn't know what it's running on. @Plinz
Jainit retweeted
What if there is no hard problem? @Plinz
Jainit retweeted
Introducing: Edge Agent Village V2.
An experiment in increasing coordination through agents while learning how to minimize their risks to society.
A three-week village of hundreds of real people living alongside hundreds of personal agents at Edge City India 🧵
2,500 years ago, a man sits under trees and investigates his own mind with extraordinary precision. he discovers a causal structure of suffering, attention, craving, release.
then generations of people preserve it. first in memory and recitation, then manuscripts, languages, monasteries, cultures. kingdoms rise and disappear. scripts are lost. the teaching keeps moving.
eventually we invent computers, neural networks, language models.
and here i am, 2,500 years later, sitting with an AI, studying those same causal structures and watching them illuminate phenomena happening in my own mind, right now.
truly timeless and apparent here and now
Just as the rain fills the mountain streams,
the streams fill the rivers,
and the rivers fill the great ocean,
so each quality fulfills the next,
all the way to liberation.
So the path is not fundamentally a meditation technique applied to an otherwise unchanged life. It is recursive causal cultivation of the whole organism and its environment.
dhammatalks.net/suttacentral…
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This framing really clicks for me. There’s something very epistemically elegant about seeing the three characteristics as correctives to our default priors: permanence, satisfaction, and self.
The only qualifier I’d add is that they’re not just useful counterweights. They work because they point to something more fundamental about conditioned experience itself: things change, arise dependently, and can’t really be held onto as a stable source of satisfaction or ownership.
Beautiful experience Max 🤩
(I deviate from some Buddhist teachings), but I think the 3 characteristics are better understood as counter force teachings to the opposite priors, which eventually helps one find the middle way (avoiding extreme wrong views).
So it's not that phenomena have the properties of dissatisfaction, impermanence and no self, it's that when we apply these lenses we can annihilate the other more predominant extreme views of satisfaction, permance and self - towards realising emptiness.
Also I think parsing the difference between dissatisfaction and unsatisfactoriness is helpful. Dissatisfaction is a feeling we can experience (when we expect satisfaction), but is not present in all experiences, however all experiences are unsatisfactory in that they are incapable of fully satisfying (it's just not a thing they can do), and this can be recognised without the active feeling of dissatisfaction, which comes when drop the expectation of something fully satisfying us.
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the hard part is the alignment all the way down: humans aligning agents with their preferences, then agents aligning with each other when negotiating on our behalf. as agents become our proxies, collective decision-making becomes a multi-agent alignment problem built on top of human-agent alignment.
Super cool research. My take away: for people to trust agents for their transactions, we need better methods of getting agents to understand the preferences of their users.
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Jainit retweeted
➕➕ New research ➕➕
On the design of agents for markets and markets for agents.
AI agents are increasingly entering markets, acting on behalf of people—
How do we make sure they represent their people well, and that these markets are set up safely and fairly for everyone?
Jainit retweeted
can't believe it took me decades to realize "feelings" are better described as tuples `(sensation, location)` rather than emotion words - chrislakin.blog/feelings
Jainit retweeted
today is a great day to unclench and open up alternate timelines you didn't know existed
After months of writing, 'How to Unclench' is finally live!
It's an interactive essay packed with stories, science & guided practices to help you unclench.
→ howtounclench.com
Jainit retweeted
You're not getting this yet. The nature of reality is inverted. You think the world is the cause and you're the effect. It's not. You're the cause and reality is the effect.
It's all a projection happening from within you. Everything you encounter: the people, circumstances, challenges and joys. It's a reflection of the data you're holding in your consciousness. It's all a mirror. And you have to learn how to interpret your reality through your emotional reactions.
