Replying toMy journey to the microwave alternate timeline

My journey to the microwave alternate timeline

I did order a microwave browning dish based on this post and look forward to experimenting. Missed opportunity for an affiliate link or Kickstarter, because I'd totally have given the money to you.

Microwave cooking is a little odd, the non-thermal effects are not super well understood, but could be significant: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9607893/ Using a browning dish means you get all the known issues with cooking with fire, plus all the non thermal microwave effects.

For poached eggs, the method I like the most is the sous vide stick and eggs in shell. Not perfect, but a good enough effort/quality tradeoff for me.

Replying toWhy You Don’t Believe in Xhosa Prophecies

RedMan1d

Why You Don’t Believe in Xhosa Prophecies

Yay support for (Thanks @Mitchell_Porter) my Joan of Acc hypothesis:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pGhpav45PY5CGD2Wp/ai-girlfriends-won-t-matter-much?commentId=XhTwFBw6Rf4i4y9Pa

Culture has been pretty severely fragmented by the Internet, and if AI tools become widely available, I expect this trend to intensify. A 'joan of acc' incident could happen with a small but extremely committed group rallying around a meme, but I think a truly mass movement like the xhosa cattle killing meme is probably something that gets less likely over time as widespread access to AI fragments mass culture.

A lot of my media consumption is AI stuff I generated myself, I expect that to be more true for more people over time.

Replying toAnswer in your head

RedMan6d

Answer in your head

The Brunet method of reconsolidation therapy (writing) works decently well for ptsd: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK595367/

The patient writes their traumatic memory, then on later sessions, takes propanolol (beta blocker, to prevent physiological anxiety symptoms) and recopies their writing. There is no requirement at any point for anyone but the patient to review the writing.

RedMan6d

Many people (self included) have the experience of doing manual labor, standing next to an industrial machine that could move the dirt that sits idle because their hands and backs are cheaper than gasoline.

Replying toWhere's the $100k iPhone?

RedMan9d

Where's the $100k iPhone?

Press said the US president at one point liked to receive his secret briefings on an ipad. I met the person who ran the contract to take ipads, and modify them so they could be used in this role. I don't remember exactly the number he told me, but it was pretty shocking, I can't remember if it was 10k+, 100k+, or 1m+ though. The work was interesting and while there was a profit margin, my understanding is that it wasn't just graft, they actually had to do a lot of hardware and software work.

Replying toAnthropic’s “Hot Mess” paper overstates its case (and the blog post is worse)

RedMan10d

Anthropic’s “Hot Mess” paper overstates its case (and the blog post is worse)

I pretty much strongly agree with this sentiment:

"Our results are evidence that future AI failures may look more like industrial accidents than coherent pursuit of goals that were not trained for. "

I have agreed for years, so maybe it's my bias talking. I think control theory based approaches (STAMP, STPA) will be able to mitigate these risks.

-11

RedMan11d

Just going to focus on the first one to get my opinion down: Will Automating AI R&D not work for some reason, or will it not lead to vastly superhuman superintelligence within 2 years of "~100% automation" for some reason?

I think that there are diminishing returns on 'intelligence', and that while something with a testable IQ that 'maxes out' any available test may well come along in the next few years, possibly by surprise, the net effect, while transformative, will not be an intelligence explosion that destroys the planet and human race with its' brilliance.

I think there's a bit of a conceit that 'with enough smarts, someone doesn't have to be bossed around by idiots', when in practice this seems to rarely happen.

How many people pay for the google extreme AI package, and how helpful has it been in terms of amassing resources and professional advancement?

Replying toAI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero-days (while curl cancelled its bug bounty)

RedMan11d

AI found 12 of 12 OpenSSL zero-days (while curl cancelled its bug bounty)

A cursory examination of the vuln and fix for CVE-2025-9231 shows a few things. The bug was introduced by a Huawei engineer—or at least, a git user with a Huawei email address. The "speed optimization" that introduced the bug was "like 10%" of the code in the libcrypto file. The fix was basically to blow away the custom code.

"Midpoint passive key recovery and decryption" is generally considered to be the holy grail of a SIGINT capability. The placement by a Huawei engineer in a speed optimization provides an additional layer of cover; was it an honest mistake, did he do it on behalf of his employer, or was he on someone else's... (read more)

Replying toAre there lessons from high-reliability engineering for AGI safety?

RedMan12d

Are there lessons from high-reliability engineering for AGI safety?

I think I've talked about Nancy Leveson's STAMP, STPA, and CAST frameworks for using control theory to prevent industrial accidents here. I think it's relevant to AI safety, you don't necessarily need to overspecify every little thing the system does, you just need to carefully specify the unwanted outcomes, and the states of the system where that outcome is possible due to things outside the control of the system.

Eg: 'my thing can't be allowed to get hit by lightning, so if the system's state is 'outside during a thunderstorm', we consider that as something the system should have been engineered to prevent'.

Replying toAll Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild

RedMan2mo

All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild

I think my comment has aged well: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.09643

An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions

"The number of objects in orbit is rapidly increasing, primarily driven by the launch of megaconstellations, an approach to satellite constellation design that involves large numbers of satellites paired with their rapid launch and disposal. While satellites provide many benefits to society, their use comes with challenges, including the growth of space debris, collisions, ground casualty risks, optical and radio-spectrum pollution, and the alteration of Earth's upper atmosphere through rocket emissions and reentry ablation. There is substantial potential for current or planned actions in orbit to cause serious degradation of the orbital environment or lead to catastrophic... (read more)

LessOnline saved my life. Now how do I let go of this house?

RedMan

8mo

I was at LessOnline, it was awesome.

When I got home, I discovered that there was a shooting (two random people were violently attacked by a gang of '4-6 people') in a parking lot near my house Sunday evening. That parking lot serves two of my favorite restaurants and my preferred bank.

Looking through my location history, there was a double digit probability of me being in that parking lot at the time of the shooting (I often go out to eat on Sunday evenings).

I wasn't there because I was at LessOnline. Rationally, I consider this a 'near miss'. The attackers appear to have intended to kill the victims, there wasn't any relationship,... (read more)

IOSCO - AI in Capital Markets: Use Cases, Risks, and Challenges

RedMan

10mo

Given that 'Seize control of the capital markets and use that unlimited funding to...' is on the critical path for a number of superintelligence doom scenarios, this paper might be interesting to the safety community.

IOSCO is an international body for coordinating capital market regulators, so this represents their collective view on the challenges presented by AI tech in the near to medium term.

https://www.iosco.org/library/pubdocs/pdf/IOSCOPD788.pdf

Looking to check my reasoning here.

I'm currently doing a term employment for the Feds that ends in a little over a year, the work I'm doing is important (in my opinion), but team just hit a major milestone (LWers would likely approve of the outcome) that basically covers what I came into this position to accomplish.

I've got the fork in the road email from Elon sitting in my inbox, possibly in error (I'm not a permanent employee, I'm turning into a pumpkin in Q1 2026 no matter what I do).

I can do a lot with an eight month paid vacation in terms of upskilling and independent work.

I'm thinking I... (read more)

App-Based Disease Surveillance After COVID-19

RedMan

With the smartphone apps for location and contact tracing being normalized for fighting coronavirus, it opens up space for using the same techniques to fight other diseases.

HIV, Syphilis, and drug resistant gonorrhea are obvious candidates because they do not have non-human hosts.

Instrumentation would be easy. Generate a database entry when an individual is diagnosed with one of these pathogens, acquire phone data via disease surveillance authorities, use machine learning directed at that data to identify plausible intimate contacts, and send notifications with testing requirements, thrown against a database of most recent tests.

Mandate response (in the usa this would be analogous to a subpoena) to a notification (appearing at a clinic for

RedMan

I have a dangerous idea which, unlike most of my dangerous ideas, is unencumbered by any laws or non-disclosure agreements, so I can dispose of it as I wish.

In order to demonstrate that I do in fact have a dangerous idea, I would obviously have to disclose it, but disclosure would not prompt the development of countermeasures other than 'wow, hope nobody else thinks of that'. Any implementation of the idea would probably result in its full disclosure to the world, meaning, no entity could both implement the idea, and keep enough of the idea a secret to prevent others from using it.

I believe implementation of the idea by myself to be

... (read 179 more words →)

-11

[Question] How should I dispose of a dangerous idea?

I have a dangerous idea which, unlike most of my dangerous ideas, is unencumbered by any laws or non-disclosure agreements, so I can dispose of it as I wish.

RedMan

I need help getting out of a logical trap I've found myself in after reading The Age of Em.

Some statements needed to set the trap:

If mind-uploading is possible, then a mind can theoretically exist for an arbitrary length of time.

If a mind is contained in software, it can be copied, and therefore can be stolen.

An uploaded mind can retain human attributes indefinitely.

Some subset of humans are sadistic jerks, many of these humans have temporal power.

All humans, under certain circumstances, can behave like sadistic jerks.

Human power relationships will not simply disappear with the advent of mind uploading.

Some minor negative implications:

Torture becomes embarrassingly parallel.

US states with the death penalty may adopt death plus... (read 193 more words →)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

RedMan

LessOnline saved my life. Now how do I let go of this house?

Unethical Human Behavior Incentivised by Existence of AGI and Mind-Uploading

IOSCO - AI in Capital Markets: Use Cases, Risks, and Challenges

App-Based Disease Surveillance After COVID-19

RedMan

LessOnline saved my life. Now how do I let go of this house?

IOSCO - AI in Capital Markets: Use Cases, Risks, and Challenges

App-Based Disease Surveillance After COVID-19

How should I dispose of a dangerous idea?

Unethical Human Behavior Incentivised by Existence of AGI and Mind-Uploading

RedMan

LessOnline saved my life. Now how do I let go of this house?

Unethical Human Behavior Incentivised by Existence of AGI and Mind-Uploading

IOSCO - AI in Capital Markets: Use Cases, Risks, and Challenges

App-Based Disease Surveillance After COVID-19

RedMan

LessOnline saved my life. Now how do I let go of this house?

IOSCO - AI in Capital Markets: Use Cases, Risks, and Challenges

App-Based Disease Surveillance After COVID-19

How should I dispose of a dangerous idea?

Unethical Human Behavior Incentivised by Existence of AGI and Mind-Uploading

An Orbital House of Cards: Frequent Megaconstellation Close Conjunctions