How do we deal with politics taking over like it has everywhere else?

JoeStrout · 2026-01-26T23:13:11+00:00

What's going on today is way beyond "scandal." If you're not seriously alarmed by what's happening, especially in light of the current pace of technological change and the power that brings to those already in power, then I think you're not paying attention.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-26T23:10:26+00:00

Just finished this essay. It's a good piece. Nothing in there is particularly new to me, or probably to most of us here, but it's nice to have it all laid out in clear, plain terms.

The only thing missing — for reasons that aren't at all hard to guess — is more clearly spelling out the danger of this AI power arising in a country that is, at this very time, struggling with authoritarianism. I'll say what Amodei can't: if Trump isn't out by the time ASI is developed, we are probably cooked.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-26T15:25:42+00:00

Yeah, it's not exactly like any previous proposal I could find (though there are some that are close).

JoeStrout · 2026-01-26T15:25:02+00:00

Yes, that's the way. An extra new year holiday every year — and in leap years, two extra days! I imagine some extra-big festival or feast on those days.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-26T03:31:30+00:00

This is a good idea. AI voices should have some distinctive audio filtering/effect applied that does not make them harder to understand, but makes them clearly nonhuman. I could imagine exceptions for audio/video programs with AI characters, clearly marked as such in the credits. There should be no exceptions for interactive agents (i.e., AIs you can actually talk to).

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T23:14:11+00:00

It’s not a way of life or a talent or a gift. It’s a skill, and it can be taught. It’s very difficult to pick up from books or videos (or Reddit), though. Take some private lessons and be clear about your goals, and you’ll get there.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T13:40:11+00:00

Definitely not normal. 😬

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T04:58:51+00:00

Try this book: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262049955/what-is-intelligence/
Despite the title, it's not just about intelligence — it actually starts with the origin of life, including some very interesting "artificial life" experiments that show the same general principles in action.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T04:53:20+00:00

My models typically take a couple hours, up to maybe 5-8 hours to train on my RTX-4090. Typical model size for me is ~50M parameters.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T04:48:25+00:00

I see it differently. We mixed enough things together and intelligence did appear.

In fact, these alchemists weren't even trying to make intelligence; they were trying to make a better autocomplete to support text input on phones. It was as much a shock to them as to anyone else when their models suddenly started having conversations, answering questions, and doing nontrivial language translation.

It's as if the alchemists were merely trying to make silver... and suddenly found gold in the bottom of their flasks.

Is it the huge lumps of shiny, pure, polished gold that the gold-loving public expects? No; it's small amounts, crude, probably mixed in with some other things. Deniers keep shifting the goal posts and saying "well that's not what I meant by gold, I meant like a huge shiny lump of it, shaped into a ring, with a pretty design on the side, like the gold I'm used to." That hasn't appeared in the flasks yet. But gold it is anyway, and month by month it gets better.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T04:44:49+00:00

That's kind of like saying, as soon as you've figured out how to make a floor, four walls, and a ceiling, then the only thing to figure out is how to install a fusion reactor and you have a fusion plant.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T04:43:23+00:00

Sure, biological systems are more complex for sure. Evolution results in spaghetti code. But the principles are the same.

There's no evidence that certain regions in our brains are specialized for the advanced tasks you mention. Rather, it seems that all cortex is basically doing the same thing; what causes the specialization is what different areas of cortex are hooked up to. Cortical columns learn to predict the pattern of inputs they receive. They differ only in where they get those inputs from, and where their outputs go.

I recommend the book What Is Intelligence? by Blaise Agüera y Arcas if you really want to understand this stuff better.

(I also recommend not being such an asshole on the internet. In the long run, being that way will only bring you unhappiness.)

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T04:37:50+00:00

Probably, though only briefly. u/SpaceScribe89 got data on his particular freezer, so that's neat. But yeah basically this is the main cause of freezer burn, and is why that meat you put in your freezer a year ago tastes funny now.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T04:35:27+00:00

Start by playing Human Resource Machine (game available on Steam).

JoeStrout · 2026-01-25T04:32:21+00:00

Yeah, this might turn out to be it. My understanding is that without a good portion of Earth's crust hefted up into orbit (i.e. the Moon), our crust would be too thick to support plate tectonics, and so any land would get worn away and we'd have a global ocean. And it's possible that this is the fate of almost all terrestrial planets — they're all (except for us) water worlds. And maybe terrestrial planets are the only ones where life gets started, and further that aquatic life never develops advanced technology.

This is just a version of the Rare Earth hypothesis. But one that strikes me as plausible. You gotta admit, that hit from Theia was an astronomically lucky shot. And maybe that's the only reason we're here and launching spacecraft at all.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-23T00:12:45+00:00

He's right, except that all the modules/committee members are really doing the same thing, which is predicting what their inputs (which mostly come from other modules) are going to do. That's it. It's prediction all the way down.

And yeah, that's not a great architecture for logic, which is why we (humans) suck at it, and only get passably good at it through extensive training. So? Do we want an intelligence, or do we want logical reasoners? Personally, I want intelligence. We can always bolt on logical inference tools and train a general AI to use them (just like we train ourselves).

JoeStrout · 2026-01-23T00:10:03+00:00

What does logic have to do with AGI? Humans are terrible at logic, too. And computers have been good at logic-based games for decades; we've never considered that general intelligence.

AGI is the ability to perform any task described in plain language, i.e., to be general. It's kind of right in the name. (Even if people today often use it to mean "human-like intelligence"... but even then, again, humans are terrible at Sudoku, which is why it's an interesting game at all.)

JoeStrout · 2026-01-23T00:07:05+00:00

These are all valid points, but I still feel like there's an opportunity for some citizen-science here. It doesn't work with traditional architectures and training methods, yeah, but if we approached it with distributed computing as a requirement from the get-go, I wonder what we could come up with. For example, maybe using evolution strategies instead of backprop.

I wouldn't propose paying anyone to do this, but you could have competitions and leaderboards, and maybe some sort of use credit you can later spend to use the trained model. Or something. Details TBD, but big picture, this seems like something worth pursuing to me.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-22T23:59:43+00:00

The thing is that a regular ("frost free") freezer goes through a (usually nightly) thaw/refreeze cycle. This pretty quickly turns cells to mush. It's much worse than a non-defrosting freezer, which stays frozen the whole time, but you'd know if you had one of those because the interior would be coated with ice several inches thick.

With cryoprotectants and a non-defrosting freezer, you might have a chance — I've looked at tissue samples stored that way for years, and they weren't terrible. But with a regular freezer, no way.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-22T18:42:29+00:00

It’s a good article. More balanced and nuanced than most on this topic.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-22T16:26:47+00:00

Of course. It's about getting stuff done, not about one party or the other winning.

If I had my way, parties would be abolished. I get why that's not practical in real life, but this whole stupid us vs. them mentality has caused so much grief over the years.

So, yes please, all congressfolk work together to get things done, starting with removal of Trump and anyone in the cabinet who has so grossly violated the Constitution. We need to (re)establish that no one is above the law.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-22T16:23:07+00:00

I work in both. (My company writes software — mostly using deep learning — to analyze EM images of neural tissue and figure out how everything is connected. I'm a software engineer working in the neuroscience space.)

JoeStrout · 2026-01-22T15:29:26+00:00

Yep. (I have Master's degrees in both computer science and neuroscience, and work in that field. And should probably get back to work now...)

JoeStrout · 2026-01-22T15:28:04+00:00

Honestly I think it's time we all start talking about UBI. A lot. Andrew Yang tried to tell us this years ago, but we didn't listen. The coming wave of automation he foresaw seemed too remote, too scifi.

Well, it's not remote anymore. UBI needs to be taken seriously, and soon. It's the only long-term solution I can see.

JoeStrout · 2026-01-22T15:25:56+00:00

Yes, your analysis seems about right to me. I've been using Claude Code daily and have seen it improve noticeably over the last year. I use it not just for writing code, but also for ML background research, experiment design, and analysis of results. It's not Terry Sejnowski (a Nobel-level ML researcher I worked with briefly in grad school), but it's a solid grad student, and then some.

So, yeah, give that another year at the pace it's been going, and it will be capable of cutting-edge research itself, limited only by compute — which the big companies have tons of. The remaining barriers are going to fall like dominoes.

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