why is everything about these people so fucking stupid

access to nukes is limited by availability of fissile material. not maths of it, not supremely complex engineering because it's not that hard, not by money, not by access to ores, not anything else. it just requires one of two very specific, expensive and slightly dangerous to operate facilities which is well within budget of any serious state actor and unless diplomatic or military action is taken, a state that decides to get nukes will get them. this is the case now and has been for the last 50 years or so

but yeah some idiots wowed by chatbot will Save the World. this also puts that weird block on claude's biology topic filter in much stupider and doomerist light e: it does not escape my attention that thehill ran an article based entirely on anthropic blog post

there's a place called r/nuclearweapons where people come, collect declassified and FOIA'd info, do some maths and speculate on how nukes work. 7d ago they had an incident where reddit admin removed a couple of posts from one user https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1n4c1i3/we_had_a_thing_happen/ head mod stepped down in a response

four days later this thing surfaced https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1n75vej/our_schmuck_from_doge/ linked article https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5464437-ai-nuclear-weapon-detection/

so probable sequence of events is that someone from anthropic talked up some bozo from doe or somewhere else, bozo from doe ran confabulation engine on some part of internet, and then notified/threatened reddit admin, who complied by removing some rando's account. whoa they must have saved quadrillions of americans by that brave action

(I will appreciate if you NEVER TELL ANYONE I SAID THIS, not even in confidence. And by "appreciate", I mean that if you ever do, I'll probably either leave the Internet forever or seek some sort of horrible revenge.)

Taken literally, this seems like kind of a fucked up thing to say to a friend. Or a stranger. Anyone really. Why would you say this? Why would you write this in an email and then send it, on purpose, under any circumstance?

scott clearly thought that it was important to get that message out. idk what precisely happened there, but i'll risk a guess that perhaps scott thought that he found a partner in crime, so to speak, and secrecy would help them both. adversary would just use info as is. maybe the biggest thing scott could get in terms of blackmail was flimsy "okay, but you are into this thing too" which won't be effective in all cases, or maybe he didn't even had that

if one person came out and spilled the beans, it'd suggest that there might be more people who didn't

“The biggest problem is that it used to take about 50 pages to prove the system works, like a scalpel, but today… that could take 10,000 pages,” Kaminski explained. “And you need to make 10,000 pages every time you make a new version. It’s just really, really difficult to make so much proof as products become more software and AI-driven.”

Methinks that scalpel is a tad simpler than insulin pump, and considering that sometimes, there are unpatchable vulns found in the latter, i'd really prefer not to see vibecoded driver for these kind of things. Would match nicely with vibe-lawyered compliance docs

scott also has an explainer article for stimulants for ADHD where he tells that:

[...] This matches my experience. I’ve worked with a few hundred Adderall patients

so maybe he doesn't have to advertise lot, or at all https://lorienpsych.com/2020/10/30/adderall/

ye, who are we to doubt superpredictors like them

they should go straight to mercury pills, worked* for chinese alchemists

*worked in the sense that massive heavy metal poisoning can stop corpse decomposition for a while, which was taken as an auspicious sign in the context

he had a blogpost about how amphetamines risks are overstated and it's fine actually for more people than usually prescribed https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/12/28/adderall-risks-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/

scientology but less coherent and with worse seafaring

i'll risk a guess that running ritalin-dispenser-as-a-service type business catering to overly confident rationalists might get him a pretty penny

technical bulletin: development and combat uses of self-sniping nerd

He starts his recent article on AI psychosis by mixing up psychosis with schizophrenia (he calls psychosis a biological disease), so that tracks.

wait, this man is a psychiatrist? or is that another scott