Epistemic Status: I really only did a fairly surface level skim of Baudrillard’s actual work mostly cribbed from secondary sources, so I could very well be misrepresenting core things about what he actually said. On the other hand, Baudrillard really just functions here as a jumping off point into my...
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Taking the Singularity Seriously
Author’s note: More mystical than usual. A vibe rather than a point.
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Understanding Functional Decision Theory as Program Search
Epistemic note: Probably already known or obvious, but this treatment seems clearer to me than the standard treatment in e.g. the FDT paper.
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Preliminary Notes on Colonizing the Universe
Author’s note: Roughly correct as far as I know but I’m not a physicist so there certainly might be mistakes or things that I have missed. Obviously extremely speculative about far-future scenarios, but I think this provides an interesting high level ‘timeline of the far future’ to start thinking through....
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Distillation Ain't What It Used To Be
Recently I have been seeing a number of takes that most Chinese AI progress is dependent upon distillation from closed US models, especially from OpenAI and Anthropic, and that therefore if their access to these models were cut off their progress would cease or substantially slow down. I strongly disagree...
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