supern0va
FYI, Nick/Goodfire used the models extensively in their work, so it's very possible that there were some similarities in their work. I'm really curious to see his response to this.
...also, it's probably their own PlayStation, that their kid uses. Speaking from personal experience.
The AI doing self-checks through sub-agents (or outsourcing to other models) is a form of review looking for errors, akin to getting a code review for your PRs. You don't need an outside firm or auditor. You need different incentives (a reviewer whose goal isn't to finish the work, but to find problems) and/or different blind spots (trained differently than the model doing the work, which might be more inclined towards that error).
We generally assume that humans can make mistakes and institute mechanisms to flag and correct those mistakes, but that doesn't mean we take that to the level of auditing every discrete action a human at a given job takes.
Likewise for agents, particularly as/if their error rate becomes lower than humans at the given task. They'll get a level of review tied to the importance of their work. And yes, if that's bookkeeping, then they'll probably need a proper audit, just like the humans directing them.
Also, fun fact: they are literally held together with large metal zip ties.
This is actually what I was thinking of when I made this comment. I witnessed someone in some position of authority (from either DPW/Artery/someone else clearly sent to check it out) on the first day talking to one of the artists. They were literally watching people climb it and were like "yep, that looks pretty dangerous" and then went on their way.
It felt safe-ish to climb at first, until about halfway up when you could feel it swaying back and forth in the wind. I am usually the "climb dumb shit at Burning Man" type, but had my stomach drop about 3/4 of the way up and had to abort. It was very easy to grip, nothing felt insecure, etc, so it was definitely "safe" if you knew what you were doing. But if you ate it off the top of that, you'd be fucked.
There's a focus on LNT, not vague environmentalism. It is not materially worse than flying to another country in terms of environmental impact.
> There’s talk of safety but then they will literally kick you out of camp as soon as someone says you’re making them feel unsafe because of some normal thing you did. YES, it did literally happen to someone I know. It felt like a public lynching.
Oh boy, I can only imagine what sort of personality you are to have gone through this. I've seen this archetype before.
That said: Burning Man is a platform/blank slate that people bring things to. There are many camps with different ethos. Personally, I think the best way to burn is to get a group of friends and do a thing together.
Just dropping into a camp of people you don't know is bound to have the potential for complicated interpersonal dynamics, particularly in one of the harsher environments on the planet. Everything there is more difficult, and that extends to relationships.
> It’s supposed to be camping together but then there’s pages of rules, documents, charity companies, and letters written by lawyers (yes, still the above).
This is a choice. If you're part of a 200+ person theme camp, yes, you're opting into some bureaucracy needed to make sure the requisite cats get herded and the mission of that camp happens. Grab three friends to do your own thing and you can live blissfully paperwork free, if you so choose. Camps are not a one-size-fits-all model.
This is like joining a FAANG and then complaining about layers of management. Don't like it? Startups are callin'. Or even something in-between.
> It’s a celebration in mediocrity. Most things that happen are very mediocre at best. They just do it because you’re supposed to give something, so they give something mediocre.
Doing literally anything in that environment is hard, so mediocrity is sort of par for the course. That said, the best hot dog I've ever had was in many ways the shittiest hot dog. But it appeared out in deep playa when I was tired and starving and far from camp, and felt like a small miracle. It teaches you to appreciate the simple things and the kindness of strangers, if you let it.
> Obviously most of it is all about seeing and being seen, engaging in the pleasures of sensual experiences on offer.
I'm not sure how you managed to make it out there twice and come away thinking that this is the point. I feel like if you spent fifteen minutes reading about the burn, you'd immediately dispel yourself of this.
> The best thing about it imo is the cycling around where you can mostly just get away from the degeneracy that exists.
Reading between the lines at your conservatism, I can't really help but wonder what you thought you were going to get out of a counter-culture event that emphasizes freedom of expression. You didn't think us queerdos were going to be up in that shit makin' you uncomfortable, or telling you not to creep on your campmates? And then you did it TWICE? Big oofs.
Burning Man still enables and allows dangerous art that you can fuck up your shit on. The organization has an interesting take on this: they allow dangerous art, so long as it looks as dangerous as it is. They don't want participants to be surprised that something was dangerous, because they want you to be able to do your own reasonable risk assessment.
(Though, I think the really impressive installations are the ones that look/feel more dangerous than they actually are.)
For what it's worth, I think this is a great exercise that should be undertaken now and again: you may not realize the ways in which a system is good or bad until you endeavor to tear it down and rebuild it from scratch.
In the case of Burning Man, there's structure that let's people be mostly safe by default, while supporting some reasonable risk taking. In the case of crypto, I think we've seen use cases where there's value in having a means of storing and transferring wealth outside of government control, which we saw the benefits of early on as governments tried to financially wall off groups like Wikileaks.
Does that mean we want all of the safe guards gone? No. Does that necessarily mean society and its structures are perfect and should never change? I think obviously, also no.
As far as I can remember, this has been fairly common in tech (or at least where I've worked) for some time, though it's possible that my memory here is a bit fuzzy. I will say that my spouse has often commented that "Claude talks like you", which I suspect is because it is trained on a lot of language specific to the tech world.
>My question is, does your conception of data models in the abstract come from a formal academic course, like an algo’s & data structures course, or from trade-knowledge acquired through the practitioner grapevine?
I have worked for over a decade on the telemetry for a specific major product that most people have probably used, and shepherded it through a major re-architecture, so most of this is from my career. I came in right after it was built and witnessed the pain as things had been layered on over a long period of time as the product evolved, so I've just witnessed all the pointy bits where naive early decisions can come back to bite you later.
Sort of, actually. I think we humans actually have some intuition that we'd be more effective if our cognition were augmented more directly by machine strengths: the ability to run precise calculations, more memory, ability to look facts in some sort of knowledge graph.
I think we're on the right track, but instead of augmenting humans with machine strengths, we're building intelligence in hardware in a way where it can access that augmentation. Plus, then we can quickly distribute updates, run parallel instances, etc.
If intelligence is compression, and hallucinations are essentially loss, then as the models grow in size performance (at least as far as hallucinations) should reduce. Or we'll get things fast enough that we can afford to stop relying on model weights for memory and check an increasingly larger set of discrete facts as part of reasoning.
Right now, the models are making trade-offs. As compute grows, and inference gets faster, we can make fewer of those trade-offs and start to use the unique strengths of machines to fill the gaps we're seeing, I suspect.
I was working on a side project recently. I had spent months designing the data model in my spare time, thinking through how to make it as elegant and durable to change as possible in the long term, since (if I launched it) the repercussions for getting it wrong would be significant.
Once I had a working design, it probably would have been several more months to build a working prototype and start testing it.
Instead, Claude knocked out the prototype for me in an afternoon. And it immediately became clear that it didn't work: not because the data model didn't solve all the problems I wanted it to solve, but because it didn't fit the shape of how I quickly learned a normal person would need/want to interact with the product. I was so focused on the long term, that I never thought about what the first five minutes of a user with hands on the thing would need. And the changes needed would be significant.
Maybe there's some variable reward mechanism. But I sure was glad to be able to pull that particular slot machine handle and learn that than waste even more of my time on what was a dead end.
Yes, but the vast, vast majority of decisions you make either don't take place via an inner monologue, or include details that were not actively/consciously "thought" and reasoned with in your inner monologue.
And yet, when asked why you did something, you're not likely to respond "sorry, that decision was made subconsciously". Instead, you use your inner monologue to try to backfill in a reason why. That reason may be correct, or it may not be. You don't actually know, since you have new data that may be updating your own internal state as you try to rationalize it after the fact.
Right, but these articles are referring to a blog post and other press materials that do not currently exist / aren't published on OpenAI's site yet.
Suggesting that an entire industry is in cahoots to invent and participate in an entirely new fraud-like scheme, including companies that have lots of wealth and growth and much to lose from such an exposure...seems awfully conspiratorial, don't you think?
This is precisely the sort of feedback an LLM could provide him before he hits the publish button, funny enough.
It wouldn't surprise me if we start to see minimal performance gains from incremental changes to base models. It seems like the gains from the Opus 4.5+ incremental updates were a result of Anthropic learning a lot about post-training, the gains from RLVR, etc.
If new post-training techniques are seeing diminishing returns, we could just be back to waiting for new large pretraining runs at larger sizes for gains (even if those ultimately end up getting distilled down into smaller models because the economics for serving anything larger than Fable isn't practical).
I started by going to a regional burn (or what some people call a "ten principles event") because a girlfriend had a bunch of friends that wanted to go. I had always been a bit in awe of the art and such from BM itself, but weary of the drugs/party culture (I was a nerd that made the annual trip to San Diego Comic-Con, PAX, etc) and didn't think it'd be my scene.
Without going down an entire rabbit hole: it changed the entire trajectory of my life. I've made the best friends I've ever had and now spend a good chunk of my time working on large art projects, helping run a theme camp, and being involved in this group of weirdos year round.
A few years of being involved locally made the desert seem like an inevitability, and when I finally went, it wasn't the life changing experience everyone told me it'd be: because it already was, even without me being there. But it did quickly become one of my favorite places in world.
My honest advice? If you're anywhere near a Burning Man regional event, find a way to get involved and check that out first. I think that's a great way to see if you vibe with the culture around the event, and it'll give you a sense of whether trekking out to the desert is a good fit.
Also, as an aside on the wealthy tech/finance front: one of the first camps I shacked up with was mostly a bunch of blue collar types who liked to work hard, with two retired grandmother-type figures who helped run camp logistics. Tech money (including mine) certainly helps fund things (because the city is expensive to build), but at least in the scene I run in, the tech types are not the majority, and sure don't act like your typical tech bros.
FWIW, for a lot of us, the magic is still there. Most of the city exists outside of the shiny Instagram influencers that seem to dominate the narrative. We're still there being gross and building shit for the joy of it with our friends.
Another read: Ed provides great content to help people afraid of AI self-soothe and pretend that it's not going anywhere.
This is the thing: let's just reason it out. What if OpenAI and Anthropic both fail and end up in bankruptcy? What is the impact to the hyperscalers?
...they just start selling open weight model inference to businesses, or whatever other entity picks up the scraps from the collapsed labs.
It's abundantly evident that there's major demand for compute, and that it isn't going anywhere.