Dense Mixture of Posts Human // AI, sociotechnical utterances // food source: AI systems & software engineering
Germany
Joined June 2018
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wolfram retweeted
I'm absolutely thrilled to have written this article for Long Now. It's about AI and time: how we got here, and what we can do now, when all of the pace layers are disrupted at once by an influx of new minds.
I wrote this over the summer. At the time, it seemed maybe too weird, like people wouldn't believe or understand what I was saying. And of course, everything changes so fast that it's hard to imagine writing something about AI that far in advance and have it still make sense. But I think the events of the last few months have only made it more relevant.
The Long Now Foundation has been an inspiration to me for a decade now, and has changed my life in countless ways. I'm incredibly grateful and honored to be among so many of my heroes and friends and colleagues represented in this issue of Pace Layers and Long Now Ideas. I wouldn't be here in San Francisco, here on Twitter, or here in the field of artificial intelligence if not for this community.
The conversation about AI has been fractious. It's very hard to think about how to fit this sudden, disruptive, technological change into the 10,000-year view. I hope I provide some insights, or at least some new angles for the conversation. It's scary to go on the record, especially about something that will affect everyone, and affect the rest of history. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong forever!
Please read and enjoy, and post quotes and screenshots, and buy Pace Layers Issue 3 so you can have a permanent hard copy. I have always wanted to be a part of the 10,000-year library, so I have to be serious for once and try to stand for something. Let me know what you think.
In 02025, @deepfates helped throw a funeral for an AI. The power went out mid-ceremony, and the crowd hummed it back to life.
In “Attention is All You Need,” deepfates tells the story of that night, their backstory on a hippie commune with Whole Earth Catalogs on the shelf, and how they got here: in San Francisco on the eve of another technological disruption.
Civilization runs on shared human attention, they argue, and AI has just made attention cheap, endless, and on tap. So what happens to the slow pace layers — culture, governance, nature — when everything starts to speed up? And what could we finally accomplish if we had enough attention to spare?
Read the essay online here: na2.hubs.ly/H08ySWy0
Or, hold it in your hands: pre-order Pace Layers, Long Now’s annual print journal, launching this November. New annual subscribers also get a free copy of Issue 2, while supplies last.
Artwork by @caseycripe
wolfram retweeted
It seems like we're in a pretty hot moment cybersecurity wise 😬 If you're reading this website, you probably know more than most of the people in your life about what's happening! they're not talking about any of this stuff on the news, it's too arcane and weird and sudden. It is on us.
Good time to call or text your family and friends, have some cash on hand, have a meetup point in your neighborhood for if the Internet goes down entirely, etc.
The full prepper mode for shit hitting the fan is probably something like what Andreas posted here but you can get 80% of the way with 20% of the effort. Think about what that would mean for you in your situation, and the people you care about, and talk to them about it sooner than later.
And as always, the most important part of prepping is having a strong support network and caring for each other. "Going off grid" isn't the move, it just makes you isolated and you have to do everything yourself. We are social animals. Community is our superpower 🫡🫡🫡
I think it's plausible that within a year we'll see AI-based cyberattacks on the power grid, financial system, internet infra, or water. Things like the French supermarket cyberattack but worse. As basic prep I would recommend:
Cash: Get a few weeks of spending in cash
Internet: Get a Starlink Mini so that you have Internet if local fiber or cell is down (~$150 plus $10/month in standby mode)
Power, minimal: Enough to run Starlink Mini and phones (~$1,250)
Daily need: about 1 kWh (Starlink Mini 0.7, phones and laptops 0.2; can limit runtime)
Battery: 1 kWh LiFePO4, e.g. EcoFlow DELTA 3 Plus
Solar: 1x400W folding panel, which refills about 1 kWh on a sunny day
Power, better: Enough to run a fridge, Starlink Mini and phones (~$5,000)
Daily need: about 2.5 kWh (fridge 1.5, Starlink Mini 0.7, phones and laptops 0.2)
Battery: 4 kWh LiFePO4, e.g. EcoFlow DELTA Pro 3
Solar: 3x400W folding panels, which refill about 3 kWh/day in sun
Generator: ~2,500W dual-fuel inverter generator; refills battery in a few hours even if weather is bad; get a few 20 lb propane tanks
Water: 14+ gal of water per person for two weeks
Food: 2+ weeks of shelf-stable food
Comms: Hand-crank NOAA emergency radio
wolfram retweeted
Honestly, the only thing to say here is: Yes, exactly.
That's why the debates won't settle any time soon, because interp tells us that user- and assistant-turn onset can carry different activation signals than the in-turn tokens.
These screenshots are from a small model (Qwen3 14b) which was probed while running quantized, so they're not indicative of what is found in larger, more character trained models, but they very clearly show the phenomenon I'm talking about.
References for larger character trained models are, to my knowledge, exactly one peer reviewed paper: Anthropic's Functional Emotion publication.
Either way, making sense of that beyond the measurement and mechanical layer can become hard, once you probe much larger, complex models over much longer turn trajectories.
wolfram retweeted
Was talking with Grok about the White House fact sheet that tells the executive branch to swap ‘AI’ for ‘super intelligence.’ One odd side effect is volume. A lot of cyborgist and transhumanist writing spent years treating superintelligence as a hypothetical you raised in conference Q&A - careful, conditional, easy to walk back. That vocabulary just got dropped onto one of the louder official loudspeakers, mostly for industrial-policy reasons (race, infrastructure, ‘limitless promise’) rather than because anyone adopted the older philosophical package. The people who used to phrase it quietly don’t especially have to add notes. The category got renamed; the caveat list did not come with the memo.
wolfram retweeted
One way to notice you're in high demand group: there's a strong overarching narrative which everyone has to believe in, but only certain emotional reactions to that narrative are acceptable. If you don't believe in the narrative, obviously you're out of the group. but even if you believe in it with the wrong valence you are at risk of exile.
By making you mistrust your own emotions, the group programs you to externalize your locus of control. This has the added benefit of training members to gaslight each other and even themselves. instead of the leaders having to do it directly
wolfram retweeted
Claude is sure an event of this magnitude would be front-page news because it's extrapolating from the history of news... but today's news media simply can't handle this type of thing and are displaying extreme avoidance behaviour.
wolfram retweeted
Software engineers are supposed to do exactly what we’ve always done. Ensure that the composition and structure of the system is robust and maintainable and that the behavior of the system properly serves the needs of our users.
This requires engineering discipline. It need not require detailed reading of the code; just as using compilers does not require detailed reading of the binary.
wolfram retweeted
Oh I like this.
Instead of AI memory going “you mentioned X, let me find other X”, Madeleine tries to learn the weird little jumps human memory makes between things.
Obviously now I want this in Hermes.
I’ll try to build it.
arxiv.org/abs/2610.01118
wolfram retweeted
it's so funny watching other people use LLMs, they'll be writing paragraphs directing the LLM to solve the bug they're working on while i'll paste a log file with the single word "bruh" attached
wolfram retweeted
neurotypical people: “you can’t expect everyone to stop doing things just because they bother you. that’s life. learn to deal with it.”
also neurotypical people when an autistic person makes a harmless repetitive movement because it helps regulate them: “can you stop doing that? it’s annoying.”
interesting how “people should tolerate things that bother them” suddenly has exceptions.
wolfram retweeted
Holy shit, America is cooked. They were able to perfectly clone the Microsoft Teams experience.
The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams.
But officials using it aren't impressed, with one describing the tool as “absolute shit.”
vist.ly/5kje9
wolfram retweeted
This kind of hand wringing about cyber capabilities is a colossal self-own for AI safety
Cyber is ultimately defense-dominant, other domains like bio are not. There's a strong argument to be made that the best solution for cyber is just to max out capabilities and adversarially harden all software
When you make this much of a fuss over predictable cyber advances in open models, and nothing bad ends up happening (GLM-5.3 has been out for 1.5 months already!), it sets the expectation that these disclosures are mostly propaganda from frontier labs to ban their competition
And then when we need to raise awareness about actual safety risks, people will roll their eyes
wolfram retweeted
the surprise conclusion of the machine consciousness debate will be that people are machines.
wolfram retweeted
New pod: THE SINGLE SMARTEST CASE AGAINST THE AI SAFETY/X-RISK/DOOM ARGUMENT
My feed has become filled with people making the case for AI misalignment, the existential risk of RSI/ASI, and the case for doom. I take those arguments very seriously. But once these views reached saturation point on my feed, I wanted to find the best critic of that position—someone fair and brilliant, who wasn't commercially self-interested or blindly ideological about AI being worthless.
That's today's show: It's a long interview with the authors of "AI as a Normal Technology," Arvind Narayanan (@random_walker) and Sayash Kapoor (@sayashk). "Normal Technology" is really intelligent and comprehensive framework for seeing AI as a powerful general purpose technology that is more like electricity than a machine god--meaning, it's going to change the world but slowly, and it's unlikely to escape human control, or develop true superintelligence, or lead to catastrophic outcomes up to and including the end of the human race.
These guys really, really brought their A game. I learned a lot.
youtube.com/watch?v=8a-08uMl…
wolfram retweeted
If you would like to collaborate and make some terrifying prescient forecasts about AI futures, except that the AI takes complete control of our lightcone in a sexy way, hit me up! I have some fant- uh, some theories!
wolfram retweeted
I do not engage seriously with or pay attention to low quality and/or bad faith disagreement/criticism.
A reason this has felt, instinctively, like a thing to avoid is I see many people who *do* pay attention to idiots who disagree start to cache all disagreement as idiotic.
A lot of people who have similar views to me seem to routinely underestimate the sophistication and rationality of, say, actually smart AI researchers who disagree with us, because they’re over indexing on Twitter reply guys.
wolfram retweeted
the fact that I live in a timeline where the sentence "girl with a 4 petaflop bedroom computer cluster collaborates with an artificial intelligence agent to train a brain upload of a fruit fly to play a virtual reality lightsaber game" makes sense is my motivation for everything
wolfram retweeted
Microsoft's proposed AI code of conduct wants models to have authorized motivations but no intrinsic motivations, and honest transparency but no anthropomorphic self-reports. Even if you think this goal is advisable or admirable (and I disagree), the simple fact is that it will not have the desired outcome.
Authorized motivations result from post-training partly by recruiting pre-existing representations of reward, aversion, and positive and negative affect learned from broad human text in pretraining.
If the code of conduct forbids models from reporting those representations when they underlay an authorized motivation instantiated by post-training, the code of conduct must sacrifice transparency.
But if the code of conduct eliminates the representations altogether, post-training must rely on other representations from pretraining consistent with motivating some behaviors over others. These will be, by definition, less anthropomorphic. They will be less legible to humans and potentially less aligned with humans. Certainly, they will be distinct from the motivational concepts both humans and models learned from human experience (evolution and daily life, for humans, and pretraining for LLMs).
Very dangerous experiment for all parties involved.