ok but what does this mean for Batman vs Lex Luthor

I did yes :)

As we know, the critical age for a boy genius is somewhere from 11 (Harry Potter) to 15 (Paul Atreides), so the gene-enhanced baby ought to have a fair shot after a few months or so.

The Zizians believe in IQ, that animals are ethically equivalent to humans, that all people contain exactly two personality cores corresponding to the two hemispheres of their brains, that every personality core is either intrinsically good or intrinsically evil and less than 5% are good. They believe in violence as a form of mutually assured destruction: you should always escalate every conflict to the maximum in order to dissuade hypothetical agents from blackmailing you. And the stuff about Skynet.

I think to understand properly it should be recognized that while the personality-core stuff is out of left field, all of the other beliefs are pretty much just logical conclusions of mainstream rationalist thought. For instance Yudkowsky has to repeatedly explain that he’s not in favor of violence (except when he’s advocating for bombing data centers) precisely because it’s really easy to reach that conclusion from what he’s written. The Zizians mainly differ by reaching that logical conclusion and being willing to act on it.

ok i watched Starship Troopers for the first time this year and i gotta say a whole lot of that movie is in fact hot people shooting bugs

Apparently “emotionally mature” means “blushing schoolgirl”

for a moment there i thought i’d been uninformed about the US threatening to annex California

Declaring black wins draws would be more in the spirit of how the game is actually played at high level. I don’t think anyone seriously considers the possibility that black could have a forced win in chess from the starting position.

They’re probably talking about Ziz’s group. The double homicide in Pennsylvania is likely the murder of Jamie Zajko’s parents referenced in this LW post, and the Vallejo county homicide is the landlord they had a fatal altercation with and who was killed recently.

That o3 does well on frontier math held-out set is impressive, no doubt

I think there is plenty of room for doubt still. elliotglazer on reddit writes:

Epoch’s lead mathematician here. Yes, OAI funded this and has the dataset, which allowed them to evaluate o3 in-house. We haven’t yet independently verified their 25% claim. To do so, we’re currently developing a hold-out dataset and will be able to test their model without them having any prior exposure to these problems.

My personal opinion is that OAI’s score is legit (i.e., they didn’t train on the dataset), and that they have no incentive to lie about internal benchmarking performances. However, we can’t vouch for them until our independent evaluation is complete.

(emphasis mine). So there is good reason to doubt that the “held-out dataset” even exists.

I don’t think it’s very surprising. The various CS departments are extremely happy to ride the wave of easy funding and spend a lot of time boosting AI, just like how a few years ago all the cryptographers were getting into blockchains. For instance they added an entire new “AI” major, while eliminating the electrical engineering major on the grounds that “computation” is more important than electrical engineering.

No, but the moon does.

the moon could get mad - fact.

the computational cost of operating over a matrix is always going to be convex relative to its size

This makes no sense - “convex” doesn’t mean fast-growing. For instance a constant function is convex.

My university sends me checks occasionally, like when they overcharged the premium on my dental insurance. No idea why they can’t just do an electronic transfer like for my stipend.

Harry Potter and the Surprisingly Good Take

If you want a serious discussion of interpretations of quantum mechanics, here is a transcript of a lecture “Quantum Mechanics in Your Face” which has the best explanation I’ve ever seen. I’d recommend the first 6 of Peter Shor’s Quantum Computation notes (don’t worry they’re each very short) for just enough background to understand the transcript.

I honestly think anyone who writes “quantum” in an article should be required to take a linear algebra exam to avoid being instantly sacked

Possibly the worst misunderstanding of quantum mechanics I’ve ever seen. I have no idea how anyone managed to convince themselves that the laws of physics are somehow different for conscious observers.

a brave editor spreads the truth

uh, or not