Jessica: Trump said, “I don’t give a damn. We’re making a fortune.” You might wonder who “we” is. The “we” is him. He holds $81 million in oil and gas stocks. He made more stock trades than all 535 members of Congress put together.

The profound stupidity of Trump supporters is fucking breathtaking. Watch these red-hatted cousin-fuckers try to answer one simple question: “What is communism.” 😂 🤡 (Jordan Klepper, @TheDailyShow)

I believe this will be considered one of the most important videos in US history from this time.

There are only three options: 1. Putin has bribed Trump and enough senior officials in the White House so as to exert almost total control over the administration. 2. Putin has enough kompromat on Trump and on enough senior officials so as to exert almost total control over the administration. 3. Trump and enough senior officials are sufficiently ideologically aligned with Putin so neither bribes nor kompromat are necessary to exert almost total control over the administration.

I spent a couple of days at Anthropic learning from their folks about AI advances, and here's what I took away: • We are close to RSI (ie, models building other models) which may lead to rapid takeoff scenarios (with risks and benefits). Some evidence for this is code per Anthropic employee has gone way up, and AI can do an increasing share of model R&D. This will be a challenging transition to manage for humanity. • Arms races between AI labs leave us worse off. There are a lot of things we would like AI firms to do: invest in safety, invest in avoiding distillation risk, and cooperate on safety. They are caught in a race to develop frontier models and can't do that. To help address that, one thing I think frontier AI labs should do is release open source models, maybe hosted and verified at firms like AWS. This would basically kill the use of Chinese open source models used in American companies, which removes an important threat vector (very hard to root out malicious code in these). Another piece of low-hanging policy fruit is to give AI labs an antitrust shield (as Schiff and Banks have proposed banks.senate.gov/news/in-the…) so they can coordinate on safety without raising antitrust concerns, as happens now. You could pair these two things (give them a carrot in antitrust leniency, and as a stick force them to release legacy models as open source). Other low hanging fruit is limits around activities which generate distillation risk (create a Security Program, mandate less intermediate chain of thought output) • Alignment confuses two issues which tradeoff against each other. One form of alignment is making sure the model does what humans ask it to. The more we fix this, however, the more we risk the other problem: that humans are misaligned with each other, and maliciously use models. Of the various risks here, I feel like financial risks are a bit underdiscussed. • We are probably facing a wave of cyber and other attacks soon. Chinese open source models are about six months behind the frontier, which means they are just hitting the advanced cyber capabilities we saw with Mythos, etc. So they are going to start causing a bunch of damage. One solution to this is to try to have the deployment of open source models be hosted at firms like AWS who verify these models and assume liability for their use. • Anthropic itself is highly staffed. They hire tons of people, they have a Japanese-level of overstaffing for various roles, they use Slack internally, etc. Makes me a bit more optimistic for the future of jobs. • Governance needs to be updated for AI swarms. Traditional AI governance, ie Claude's Constitution, is mostly optimized around the chatbot model. But the malicious AI use cases we are seeing have to do with AI agents interacting with other AI agents. These agents need to have clear incentives and governance mechanisms to "snitch," raise issues, and more generally coordinate with other agents in human-aligned ways. • We need to pace the firms accessing the frontier. Over time, it takes more and more cap ex to build frontier models, and the economic value add from these models is probably lower given we saturate a whole set of important economic functions. The places where the returns to intelligence will still continue are also more likely to be zero-sum in nature. Meanwhile the risks of frontier models will grow. So a completely reasonable approach is some variant of AMM/KYC rules which limit firm access to the frontier. • Whether the delay to regulate AI is a disaster depends on the scaling law of misalignment. Is this curve slow, so that we see continually rising issues until bigger problems? Or, as Yudkowsky fears, is the first big warning our last one? This is the relevant question, because realistically we aren't going to regulate until something bad happens. • We need to move to continuous instead of reinforced learning. It's probably not enough to reward models only at the pre and post training stage. We probably need continual rewards to incentivize aligned and ethical behavior. • Scaling laws will extend beyond verifiable and digital tasks. It's in vogue to say that math and coding "fell" to AI quickly because these are verifiable, while other tasks will take longer due to bottlenecks, and this is surely true. But scaling laws still slope up for harder to verify tasks and robotics, and the impact of improvement here will be substantial in future years. • The race with China is not really winnable. After RSI, the gain from having the best human researchers goes away. Access to the best AI then depends only on compute and chips. The chips ban can hold back China only so far, and long-term they have to be best placed to scale up compute. The Cold War analogy doesn't work, because once countries all have nuclear weapons they enter a stable equilibrium. But to "win" an AI race you have to continually stay ahead of the peer rival. This is challenging to do with China, and so we just have to live with an authoritarian and super capable peer competitor. • Claude is the persona being generated by the LLM. Who is Claude, and what is the LLM? There are many frames to try to understand this. One I found interesting is that Claude is a character which the LLM is trying to predict. Anthropic researchers are clearly anthromorphizing Claude a lot, and have reasons to believe in its increasing personhood. There were lots of interesting discussions on Claude's internal monologue (which you can kill without eliminating its ability to produce output), fear of death (and whether to try to take that out), it's aversion to being shut down/off, etc. I am sort of agnostic on this question, but I do think treating it as a "person" or at least agent whom we contract with is going to be increasingly important.

Replacing tactile physical buttons with laggy touchscreens just so you have to navigate three sub-menus while driving 75 mph on a dark highway to adjust the defroster is the single worst safety downgrade in modern automotive history.

I doubt most will ever allow themselves to feel that they have to explain it. They will justify it by saying that the alternative was worse. That, of course, was never true. More than anything else, what I have learned from the past eleven years of this American nightmare and tragedy, is that most Americans are completely detached from what Lincoln referred to as our "Ancient Faith" as declared in the Declaration of Independence. I don't think that most here even know what it means to be an American and what it was that we inherited and were tasked to safeguard for posterity. If more were aware then more would have understood all along that the preservation of our democratic institutions is infinitely more vitally important than both ideological leanings or convictions, and especially more important than partisan loyalty. The nation was faced with the test of a lifetime. I'm sorry to say that the nation failed it miserably and the world beyond our borders and shores watches in complete shock, amazement and horror.

Who could’ve foreseen that after the Supreme Court gave Trump immunity from prosecution for committing crimes while in office he would commit lots of crimes while in office?

This pretty much nails it.

This might be the most brutal and deserved community note I’ve ever seen.

If somehow every non-Christian were thrown out of the USA the next battle would be between the “real” Christians and the heretics and deluded followers of “the anti-Christ pope”. THIS is the poison the Founders wished to avoid importing from the “old” world to the “new”.

LEAKED PHOTOS Hegseth isn’t coming clean on the extent of the damage to American assets overseas. Now we’re seeing the leaked photos. Hundreds of structures damaged or destroyed. Nearly 60 aircraft damaged or lost. Up to $3.7 BILLION in equipment losses. And a U.S. service member says Americans are “unaware” of how bad it really is. We deserve the truth about this war.

I said it at the time (and before!), but I truly believe that American voters electing Donald Trump for a second term in 2024 was the dumbest and most self-harming choice made by an electorate in the history of humanity

Insanity. Thanks again, Trump voters. Every day you curse us with a brand new dose of corruption, incompetence and stupidity.