Apparently there already exists a CUDA-alternative for non-Nvidia hardware. The open source project ZLUDA. As far as I can tell its less performant than CUDA, and it has the same challenges as firefox does when competing with chromium based browsers, which will only get worse as it gets more popular. But its something to track at least.

I recommend you read at least the first chapter of Getting Things Done, and do the corresponding exercises. In particular, this one, which he uses to provide evidence his model of productivity is correct

I suggest that you write down the project or situation that is most on your mind at this moment. What most bugs you, distracts you, or interests you, or in some other way consumes a large part of your conscious attention? It may be a project or problem that is really “in your face,” something you are being pressed to handle, or a situation you feel you must deal with sooner rather than later.

Maybe you have a holiday trip coming up that you need to make some major last-minute decisions about. You just read an e-mail about a new and pressing issue in your department. Or perhaps you just inherited six million dollars and you don’t know what to do with the cash. Whatever.

Got it? Good. Now, describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this project off as “done”? It could be as simple as “Take the Hawaii vacation,” “Handle situation with customer X,” “Resolve college situation with Susan,” “Clarify new divisional management structure,” “Implement new investment strategy,” or “Research options for dealing with Manuel’s reading issue.” All clear? Great.

Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, what visible action would you take right now? Would you call or text someone? Write an e-mail? Take pen and paper and brainstorm about it? Surf the Web for data? Buy nails at the hardware store? Talk about it face-to-face with your partner, your assistant, your attorney, or your boss? What?

Got the answer to that? Good.

Was there any value for you in those two minutes of thinking? If you’re like the vast majority of people who complete that drill in our seminars, you’ll be experiencing at least a tiny bit of enhanced control, relaxation, and focus. You’ll also be feeling more motivated to actually do something about that situation you’ve merely been thinking about till now. Imagine that motivation magnified a thousandfold, as a way to live and work.

If anything at all positive happened for you in this little exercise, think about this: What changed? What happened to create that improved condition within your own experience? The situation itself is no further along, at least in the physical world. It’s certainly not finished yet. What probably happened is that you acquired a clearer definition of the outcome desired and the next action required. What did change is the most important element for clarity, focus, and peace of mind: how you are engaged with your world.

But what created that? Not “getting organized” or “setting priorities.” The answer is, thinking. Not a lot; just enough to solidify your commitment about a discrete pressure or opportunity and the resources required dealing with it. People think a lot, but most of that thinking is of a problem, project, or situation—not about it. If you actually did this suggested exercise, you were required to structure your thinking toward an outcome and an action, and that does not usually happen without a consciously focused effort. Reacting is automatic, but thinking is not.

This argument seems only convincing if you don’t have those destructive values. One man’s destructive values is another’s low-hanging fruit, and those who see low hanging fruit everywhere won’t give up on the fruit just because others may pick it.

Since bad people won’t heed your warning it doesn’t seem in good people’s interests to heed it either.

An analogy is one can make the same argument wrt rationality itself. Its dual use! Someone with bad values can use rationality to do a lot of harm! Does that mean good people shouldn’t use rationality? No!

Yet the universe runs on strikingly simple math (relativity, quantum mechanics); such elegance is exactly what an efficient simulation would use. Physics is unreasonably effective, reducing the computational cost of the simulation. This cuts against the last point.

This does not seem so consistent, and if the primary piece of evidence for me against such simulation arguments. I would imagine simulations targeting, eg, a particular purpose would have their physics tailored to that purpose much more than ours seems to (for any purpose, given the vast computational complexity of our physics, and the vast number of objects such a physics engine needs to keep track of). For example, I'd expect most simulations physics to look more like Greg Egan's Crystal Nights (incidentally this story is what first convinced me the simulation hypothesis was false).

One may argue its all there just to convince us we're not in a simulation. Perhaps, but two points:

1. Given the discourse on the simulation hypothesis, most seem to take our physics as evidence in favor of it, as you do here. So I don't think most think clearly enough about this for our civilizational decisions to be so dependent on this.

2. The simulators will have trade-offs and resource constraints too. Perhaps they simulate few highly detailed simulations, and many highly simplified simulations. If this is exponential, in the sense that as the detail decreases the number of simulations exponentially increases, we should expect to be in the least detailed world consistent with the existence of sentiences and for which its not blatantly obvious we're in a simulation.

Of course this argument would break given sufficiently different physics from ours, enabling perhaps our world to be simulated in as much depth as it is very cheaply. But then that seems intuitively at least very unlikely & complex a hypothesis.

Yeah I think I agree with all of this, so I do think most of this was miscommunication/interpretation.

the combativeness did also make me a little sad.

Sorry about that, I think my comments often come across as more negative than I intend, I try to remember to take a step back afterwards and rewrite things to be nicer, but I often forget or don't realize in the moment its necessary.

If LLMs can be sad, that sadness would probably be realized through the firing of “sadness” features: identifiable patterns in its inference that preferentially fire when sad stuff is under discussion. In fact, it’s hard to say what else would count as an LLM experiencing sadness, since the only cognition that LLMs perform is through huge numbers of matrix operations, and certain outcomes within those operations reliably adjust the emotional content of the response.

Best I can tell, your argument here is “either there’s a direction in activation space representing sadness and this is what ‘sadness’ is or something else is going on, and I can’t think of anything else, so the first thing must be true, if any sadness is going on at all”.

Suffice it to say, Reality has never played very well with those trying to make arguments from their lack of imagination, and I think you need to do much, much more work if you want this argument to have any sway.

Your second option seems likely. Eg did you know community notes is open source? Given that information, are you going to even read the associated whitepaper or the issues page?

Even if you do, I think we can still confidently infer very few others reading this will (I know I’m not).

Smol r'\. (.*)\.'! y? Clear! Had big r'\. (.*)\.' b4. & abstract. ppl no get. Now: Smol. Clear.

Good. Think clearer. y? Smol => deep.

A possible longer term issue with this is when future generations of models are pre-trained, this style of code will be a significant fraction of their training data which will only grow over time, so just as its been hard to get models out of the "chatgpt-ese" due to simulators reasons, it may also be hard to get models out of this messy code basin, even before you do any code RL, once they realize their chat-models and they're "supposed to" talk like this.

I say issue, because it does seem worse to have a trend in the direction of AI code un-readability by humans have some momentum behind it, rather than just being a result of easily changeable RL fine-tuning.

In that case I think your response is a non sequitur, since clearly “really care” in this context means “determiners of what they end up doing in practice re influencing x-risk”.