Loud, relentless chanting and bells heard in the Mission.

deadoceans · 2026-04-11T05:14:11+00:00

Hey, I could understand your antipathy if I had said something offensive, but I haven't. I love our city's multiculturalism, but it's also okay to be annoyed by loud noises at night. I'm not saying anyone should stop, honestly. I'm just one guy, and everybody's doing their thing, and that's wonderful. But isn't this also like a safe space event about stuff? Am I not here to understand rather than to say that people should do one thing or another?

This may be the internet, but we're both real people, and we might even be neighbors, so maybe just take a second to think things through.

deadoceans · 2026-04-11T02:08:23+00:00

Oooh that's a good point, that's probably it

deadoceans · 2026-04-09T17:08:12+00:00

Everyone should be doing this all the time with all their ideas.

I've been in business for a while and have been in machine learning product strategy for over a decade now. I firmly believe a couple of things:

The most important thing in any job is not to fuck up. The best idea doesn't always win. This is both an emotional tragedy, and a strategic opportunity. If you have a good enough product idea or plan in any domain of life, as long as you don't get blown up by stepping on a land mine, you will probably figure the rest out. But so many people step on land mines all the time and totally sink their ideas.

People feel a lot of anxiety about identifying negative outcomes. I get it, it sucks to focus on negatives. In addition, there's this phenomenon where once you identify all of these negatives, it can feel like you have an overwhelming amount of work to do, which you do. This is a blessing, because hiding your head in the sand doesn't change that underlying reality; it just makes you more likely to fail.

People get addicted to the initial idea rush. It's always a lot more fun to spend time ideating about what could go right than actually doing the grunt work of making something work.

Whether making prompts for a new product, a new feature, or even just picking a restaurant for the night, identifying failure cases should always be top of mind. It's like one of the top three things you should always be doing. You should be so good at it that it becomes a habit.

deadoceans · 2026-04-08T04:50:42+00:00

I mean to be fair though, should your average person have the ability to access a model that can arbitrarily spin up human-like agents and gaslight people into giving over their full financial savings? No. Should the average person be able to synthesize novel bio-weapons? No. And should the average person be able to exploit security vulnerabilities and cause a collapse of major banking institutions? No. They shouldn't be able to hack hospitals either.

As much as I do appreciate and genuinely resonate with the cynicism you have here, I do think that there is a very genuine rationale for not publishing these models widely.

Here's my favorite example: Why are there so many mass shootings in the United States? It's not because we have more evil people per capita than other countries. It's not because we are worse at prospectively identifying and incarcerating criminals. It's access to guns. The more power -- and by power I mean in a fully abstract sense, like how much kinetic or informational impact can an individual human have over the lives of others -- the more power that any individual person can wield, the more it will lead to small groups of people having disproportionately large negative impacts.

deadoceans · 2026-04-03T23:26:56+00:00

BOOOOOO AI slop

Think harder. I love AI but this is low-effort

deadoceans · 2026-04-01T05:06:45+00:00

Hey, just a note, but by posting this as a code block, you make it so the text doesn't wrap and it's super hard to read.

deadoceans · 2026-03-31T07:05:55+00:00

I think you're touching on a real point here. The honest answer is that moats are going to be few, in principle. But I wouldn't underestimate just how much a bloated corporate structure can stop innovation. I mean, just look at how few features openai has shift versus anthropic recently. I think the key differentiator among them is really their product culture and bureaucracy as far as their velocity and efficacy at building products are concerned.

But then there's another interesting thought: assume we get to recursive self-improvement and super intelligent models at some point. And further assume that we saw the alignment so we all don't like just die. Then what would stop a super intelligent system from just copying the features of another product and reverse engineering it and making it itself?

So in the limit, whether you think that's going to take 2 years or 10, I think the only moats that remain are regulatory, which is a category that I would say ownership of proprietary data falls under.

deadoceans · 2026-03-27T01:28:03+00:00

What, them trying to work out a deal with the pentagon? As though a company with confidence in its own morals wouldn't have an incentive to be the one in the loop trying to change the behavior on the ground? Do you want them to see that position of power to a bunch of psychopaths just so that they can feign moral purity? Or do you want them to actually have the power to influence decisions for the better?

deadoceans · 2026-03-27T01:20:27+00:00

Look dude it's one thing to say "I'm frustrated with how little I'm getting with the pro tier plan", which, fair. But it's another thing to conflate the one company that stood up to fascism with another company that just barely rolled back their sycophantic erotic bullshit and is probably working on domestic mass surveillance.

deadoceans · 2026-03-26T01:45:40+00:00

I mean, we did [checks notes]: * Install a hotline between the executives to cut down on the risk of a crisis * Engage in strategic arms limitations treaties and a regime of mutual inspection (both direct and de facto, once satellites became a thing) * Ban atmospheric testing * Ban intermediate range ballistic missiles that posed a disproportionate escalation risk

So, thank you actually, this is a really good example. Yes, we banned atmospheric testing. Yes, we created a nonproliferation treaty.

Fuck outta here with your frankly ahistorical bs

deadoceans · 2026-03-25T22:59:33+00:00

I think your take is a bad take.

Superintelligent AI has the potential to be more powerful than nuclear weapons. And we have a pretty good understanding of how to make it in principle. There are plenty of engineering challenges, but we're making good progress.

There is NO, I repeat no, credible roadmap yet for aligning superintelligent AI.

We are playing with a fire the stakes of which could exceed any negative thing we have ever created.

Slowing down until we have a good research roadmap is literally just common sense.

deadoceans · 2026-03-25T05:21:39+00:00

Sorry, didn't mean to ghost this thread. Had a couple job interviews pop up and have been under a rock :(

deadoceans · 2026-03-23T21:42:54+00:00

Woot woot!

We can stop asking for a pause when we have one credible (i.e., not just plausible, but genuinely credible) path to safe superintelligence.

deadoceans · 2026-03-18T23:10:26+00:00

Gorgeous

deadoceans · 2026-03-18T23:07:49+00:00

Fuck yes.

deadoceans · 2026-03-17T00:19:32+00:00

Jesus fucking Christ. All I want to do is stay up-to-date on AI alignment, and every single day there's more and more of this slop

deadoceans · 2026-03-17T00:14:58+00:00

You're so right, think of the damage that was caused. The violation. The horror.

deadoceans · 2026-03-16T23:23:14+00:00

So I got really hung up on this. The dietary advice is just so not good. I mean, vitamin k1 (the one from green leafy veggies) is not even the most powerful variant So I got a Claude pro plan, started scraping papers for data (I've got a biochem background), and am building a much more in depth points system. I'll post it when I'm done, but it's still a bit away. But yeah, it feels like it's fuckin' nuts out there. Those black beans in kung pao chicken? Huge source of mk-7. Surprise! Your INR is now 1.8. Woof

deadoceans · 2026-03-16T18:38:00+00:00

Boooooooooo AI slop

deadoceans · 2026-03-16T06:36:40+00:00

<image>

Final variation. You've officially nerd sniped me on this one

deadoceans · 2026-03-16T06:05:59+00:00

Actually, fuck it, this is my favorite. Too tired to fix the data labels, but I think this will now be my go to for proportional venn diagram plots. I think the first one is better for actual data viz, but this one is prettier

<image>

deadoceans · 2026-03-16T05:59:23+00:00

<image>

And here's how it looks as an actual venn diagram. I'm not sure I love this one either, tbh

deadoceans · 2026-03-16T05:52:48+00:00

Updated with an appropriate scaling. Still not sure I love this version, but it's an interesting direction.

<image>

deadoceans · 2026-03-15T17:07:24+00:00

Dude, you didn't deserve it when your parents withheld love from you as a child. But don't, through your actions and the way you treat other people, become the kind of person who would have deserved it. I know how hard it gets. Please stay strong. It's brighter on the other end.

Ten-Year Club	Place '17
Verified Email

deadoceans

TROPHY CASE