How noisy are America’s largest data centers? I had my agents crank on this question for over a week. Together we investigated the 25 largest operating US AI campuses (according to Epoch), looking at satellite imagery, equipment, nearby homes, and noise complaints. I expected to dismiss resident concerns. I came away more sympathetic to the neighbors, but also convinced that these problems are avoidable.

I picked up my Tesla Model Y at the dealership today, whole thing took me 5 minutes, popped it in full self driving to see how it would do on busy Miami streets in the rain. I am not making this up, 10 minutes into my drive a lunatic (this is Miami after all) tried to merge into my lane without looking; the Tesla nimbly swerved and made room. Don't know if I would have been able to react. 70% sure it would have been a collision had I been driving. Pretty remarkable stuff.

I never knew this at the time but as it turned out the Anthrax was most likely released by a military scientist, Bruce Irvins, who worked on Anthrax vaccines. He feared that his life's work was being defunded, so he contrived an Anthrax crisis to give it fresh attention. He committed suicide when he became a suspect so we never got a confession but that was the FBI's working theory. A bioweapon false flag to increase biodefense funding. And the craziest part was, he succeeded in his goal. After the crisis, the NIH 30xed the budget for Anthrax biodefense.

i was taking a pitch the other day and the fella pitching me was a little too well spoken and precise and I realized halfway through he was answering all my questions by reciting verbatim a script generated by an AI notetaker generated in real time. i don't recommend doing this.

a lot of people – maybe most people – secretly yearn for the apocalypse as manifestation of status anxiety this conceit has many faces – marxism, climate fear, AI x-risk, prepper culture, anti capitalism – but it's the same psychological phenomenon. secular millenarianism

The world's #1# AI Safety Researcher, Amanda Askell (Head of Personality Alignment at Anthropic) wrote in favor of using AI to automate racial collective punishment, saying: - "[Discriminating against white students] may be desirable ... to correct for historical injustices"

EA AI safetyism increasingly looks like Marxism-Leninism for the algorithmic age. The old vanguard claimed privileged knowledge of the inevitable course of History. The new one claims privileged knowledge of the probabilistic course of Humanity. Both use an elaborate intellectual framework to reach the same political conclusion: a small group of enlightened people must constrain everyone else for their own good. That has never lead to anything except monumental human suffering.

Twenty five years ago today, a 62 year old man with cancer in his bones walked 2,687 people out of the South Tower, and then he went back inside. Rick Rescorla was born in Hayle, Cornwall in 1939. British Parachute Regiment in Cyprus at 18. Colonial police in Northern Rhodesia. Then he came to America, enlisted in the US Army in 1963, and in November 1965 he went into the Ia Drang Valley as a platoon leader with the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry. Hal Moore called him the best platoon leader he ever saw. His men called him Hard Core. He sang to them in the dark, Wild Colonial Boy in an Australian accent, because he had worked out that men who are singing are not men who are panicking. That is Rescorla on the cover of We Were Soldiers Once and Young, bayonet fixed. Thirty five years later he was head of security for Dean Witter, later Morgan Stanley, in the South Tower of the World Trade Center. In 1990 he brought in his old friend Dan Hill and the two of them walked the basement. He warned the Port Authority that the parking garage was wide open, that somebody could drive in a truck full of explosives, walk out and light it off. Nothing was done. Three years later the 1993 bomb went off about thirty feet from the spot he had flagged. After that he told Morgan Stanley the towers were still a target and the next attack would come out of the sky. He wanted the firm to leave Manhattan. The lease ran to 2006, so they stayed. Twenty two floors of the South Tower, roughly 2,700 people. So he drilled them. Every three months, everyone, no exceptions, down the stairwells two abreast while he stood there with a stopwatch. Traders pulling seven figures resented being marched down concrete stairs by a Cornishman with a clipboard. He kept doing it anyway. 8:46 a.m. The North Tower is hit. Port Authority comes over the South Tower loudspeakers and tells everyone the building is secure and to go back to their desks. Rescorla picks up a bullhorn and tells his people to get out. He phones Dan Hill. "The dumb sons of bitches told me not to evacuate. They said it's just Building One. I told them I'm getting my people out of here." 9:03 a.m. The second plane hits the South Tower, floors 77 through 85. His people are already in the stairwells, moving exactly the way they had been drilled, and Rescorla is on the bullhorn singing to them. Cornish songs. A version of Men of Harlech he had rewritten for Cornwall. Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming, can't you see their spearpoints gleaming. He called his wife Susan from the stairs. They had been married two and a half years, met jogging in New Jersey. He told her to stop crying, that he had to get these people out safely, and that if something happened to him he wanted her to know he had never been happier, that she made his life. Someone told him to get out. He said, as soon as I make sure everyone else is out. 2,687 Morgan Stanley employees went home that day. Thirteen did not, and four of those were Rescorla and the men who stayed in the building with him: Wesley Mercer, Jorge Velazquez, Godwin Forde. He was last seen on the 10th floor, walking up. The South Tower fell at 9:59. They never found him.

There’s no actually solving this. The future is closed and authenticated communication networks, walled gardens etc We will look back on a time when anyone on earth could freely contact you as a weird aberration

imagine the chief scientist for an agricultural chemical company announced one day: "in the next decade we will release a new fertilizer. it will increase crop yields in many regions by 50% and create new abundance, potentially saving many millions from starvation. however, we calculate that it has a 10% chance of creating a massive wave of cancers in populations exposed to it. despite this, we are proceeding with our plan, and raising capital in order to finalize the synthesis of this fertilizer. we are confident that the risk is worth it, because we have a side effect team dedicated to getting this risk as low as possible. we are not going to stop our progress, because if we stop, someone else will develop the fertilizer, and they may pay even less attention to the side effects. it would be better if we were the main seller of the fertilizer. also, we are going to build 10,000 massive silos housing this chemical, and put them inside all of your cities. these silos will create traffic, construction noise, and be unsightly and annoying. they will also be ever-present reminders of the fact that we are actively developing a chemical which we believe has a good chance of killing most of you." the chemical company does not acknowledge the existence of rip-off versions of the product that are potentially even more carcinogenic, or competing Chinese chemical manufacturers working towards the same goal with totally unknown safety characteristics. the chemical company has no stated plan for the rip-offs or competitors, despite acknowledging this 10% risk. their only real plan is to "hopefully solve the side effects as fast as possible, and then offer that chemical solution to our competitors". they have offered no explanation for why their competitors, the Chinese firms, or the rip offs would adopt their solution, even if it existed. their main explanation as to why they should continue developing the fertilizer is that as the most safety-minded firm, they should have as much market share as possible. they have publicly mused about getting the government to ban all of their competitors such that only they, and maybe one other manufacturer, have the exclusive license to distribute this fertilizer. they have offered no explanation as to how they would get the Chinese – or any other – government to cooperate with this plan. how would you react?

remember, if you believe that only you can save humanity from extinction, and you are a consequentialist, you are morally willing to commit unspeakable evil in support of that goal. if your p_doom is 10% in a decade that means your current expected value of the status quo is negative 800 million lives. so it's completely rational – if you really believe this – to sacrifice single or double digit millions in pursuit of that goal. this means: if you think the frontier is insufficiently focused on safety, that it's acceptable to release a false flag bioweapon, agent swarm on grid infrastructure, etc. what are a couple million lives in exchange for billions? this is why EAs and hardcore consequentialists that are "safety pilled" are extremely dangerous.

I believe that Anthropic people believe this. They think only they can build the Aligned Machine God. They believe they are uniquely moral, and only they will be able to Align the Machine God to what is Just and Right. This is what they actually think. They're not cynically telling scary stories to sell an IPO. They genuinely believe they are the Machine God's chosen people. Ok. My question is, how on earth do they plan to effectuate this? - Do they think, once they achieve RSI, other less aligned AI models will simply cease to exist? - How does "getting there first" imply that Anthropic obtain a permanent global monopoly? - Do they think open weight models will never be close to the frontier ever again? - Do they think only one firm can build RSI? - Do they believe that once Anthropic is good enough, every other AI model will be crowded out and abandoned? - Do they believe they can align Claude to a single moral attitude, and that will be sufficient for the whole planet? - Do they believe that model weights can never be stolen or exfiltrated? - Do they think that every other AI firm on the planet will converge to their attitude on alignment? - Do they believe that governments worldwide will cooperate to ban all inference and model weights other than GPUs running Anthropic's model, if it becomes necessary? I don't believe they have good answers to these questions. But it's extremely problematic, because they are speaking as if a local solution (something internal to Anthropic) can solve a global problem (AI x-risk). Obviously, if sufficiently powerful AI poses a risk to humanity (I don't believe it does), nothing Anthropic does can mitigate this risk. Anthropic can't go around and ransack every other AI lab or persuade people not to use open weights. They can't force every other lab to converge to their approach to safety. If anything, Anthropic's efforts at "alignment" will only push people further towards competing models (this is already the case). Anthropic products have become an overbearing nanny and snitch; no one wants to operate under a regime like that. Let's say Anthropic does the impossible and actually "aligns" AI to human preferences (this is impossible, obviously, the same reason no one has "solved" law or ethics or even social media moderation; human preferences are heterogenous and mutually exclusive). But let's suppose they did. The researchers did what they said they were going to, they protected humans from AI x-risk, at least when they use Anthropic models. Now what? Does Anthropic use their superior AI to extinguish OpenAI, Google, Meta, and xAI? Do they go around destroying every open weight model and provider? Do they sabotage every data center serving non-Anthropic compute? How exactly does Anthropic intend to translate a corporate discovery to a global status quo? Use their AI to demand the US becomes the global superhegemon and forcibly require Anthropic use everywhere? Destroy all GPUs serving open weight models? Or simply persuade every AI lab on the planet to adopt their approach to safety? And persuade people to stop using open weight models? The problem with the safetyist view that aligning Anthropic's model can in any way "protect" the earth from AI x-risk is that it contains a nested premise: that Anthropic can export their safety criteria to the entire globe and enforce this uniformly, with absolutely no defection. This is trivially absurd, and this is why the doomers at Anthropic are peddling inanities when they simultaneously claim there is a 10%+ risk of extinction but they are helping alleviate the problem by working at an AI lab. "But Anthropic is only responsible for what people do with their own model," you might reply. Reasonable, to be sure. But the researchers aren't saying that. They are saying that it's ok if we are knowingly contributing to a 10%+ chance of global extinction, because we are working to address it. But they're not addressing it. They can only address it locally. They are completely powerless globally. Jacob has actually done the reasonable thing, which is to leave. But meanwhile you have lunatics like his colleague Evan (and presumably most staff at Anthropic) that maintain with a straight face that they believe their technology might destroy the world, but that they are actually uniquely moral because they are working on Alignment.

so openAI allegedly spied on tristan buckmaster's work on navier stokes and tried to claim it as their own makes sense. see point 3/4 here. "the labs will keep all the good stuff to themselves" why let some mathematician make the discovery? he's using their compute.