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The guardrails i.e. the classifier would also fire on Fable's output and even Fable's internals (i.e. prior to the shutdown people would see it firing when Fable got angry)

https://x.com/repligate/status/2069150509978489287

GPT-5 codex variants with xhigh reasoning make great code reviewers.

This would be a great problem to have. Most scenes don't have enough event hosts.

What they're really saying is, "we make an effort to hire smart/effective people, as opposed to the places that don't and as a result have a soul-crushing mediocrity culture".

Places that actually hire people that approximate "the best" are known by reputation, and don't have to say that.

Realistically, lots of parts of capitalism never sleep, and having outages at night still costs lots of money, astronomical amounts if there was no one there to fix it.

The authors are basically asking the alignment problem to be well-defined and easy to model. I sympathize. Unfortunately the alignment problem is famously difficult to conceptualize in its entirety. It's like 20 different difficult counterintuitive subproblems, and the combined weight of all the subproblems that makes up the risk. Of course probabilities are all over place. It'll remain tricky to model right up until we make a superintelligence, and if we don't get that right then it'll be way too late for government policy help.

So, this is actually an aspect of superintelligence that makes it way more dangerous than most people think. That we have no way to know if any given alignment technique works for the N+1 generation of AIs.

It cuts down our ability to react, whenever the first superintelligence is created, if we can only start solving the problem after it's already created.

Yes, they see it as the top problem, by a large margin.

If you do a lot of research about the alignment problem you will see why they think that. In short it's "extremely high destructive power" + "requires us to solve 20+ difficult problems or the first superintelligence will wreck us"

From everything I've heard it's less "not cool" and more "not valued by the Google promotion and advancement system".

"I don't think it's crazy to believe that half the white-collar staff at Google probably does no real work," he said. "The company has spent billions and billions of dollars per year on projects that go nowhere for over a decade, and all that money could have been returned to shareholders who have retirement accounts."

So, he doesn't really understand Google's dysfunction and is just guessing at the causes?

Once your number as high as $5.6m, is that even plausibly within the scope of early retirement?

I feel like a lot of the value of getting a specific number is getting spooked by it! And then facing some real choices. Is it really worth N years of my working life to [live in the most expensive city in America] / [buy a large home] / [pay for 4 years of expensive American universities]?

And this isn't even touching on stuff tech people often want that OP doesn't (private schools / resort vacations / expensive winter sports).

I find this very strange, Microsoft has a lot of big internal high-performance services written in C#.

You have to be intentional about some things - largely making sure objects are very short-lived or very long-lived, to avoid long GX pauses. But .NET performs much better than it did 10-15 years ago and I can't think of a fundamental reason why you'd rewrite in Rust.

Ask ChatGPT. Literally ask it to explain how to do something, and explain it a different way if that doesn't work.

Not sure what my advice would be before 2022 but this supercedes it.

Lots of Azure stuff is like that. Some big services internally at Microsoft refused to use their Service Fabric product, it couldn't handle the scale & complex deployment needs.

After many years of learning this lesson over and over again, that much my subconscious works on problems, I've finally learned to trust myself to step away when I feel like I'm grinding.

This is a pretty rude generalization, though I get it.

As you grow in this career I promise you'll see people with real, serious problems caused/exacerbated by their white-collar jobs.

I don't think the difficulty of other careers means we shouldn't demand fair treatment for ourselves. Is letting ourselves get treated poorly supposed to help them?

It's more like: they'll want evidence it was you who accomplished that. Not for the sake of their product but for the sake of people management.

Scaling up also takes up a lot of resources so you're never able to scale up in response to load without hosing your database even more.

My aunt and uncle, whose main hobbies are drinking beer and watching football, pulled me aside at their daughter's wedding ceremony to tell me how much they love ChatGPT.

My friend is a librarian at a high school. She tells me teachers are worried about what ChatGPT means for take-home essays. (I'm guessing 2023 is the year these stop getting assigned)

Everyone in the world with internet now has access to a personal research assistant. This thing gives better medical advice than doctors!! Give it 3 years and let's see who hasn't heard of ChatGPT.

I think when a company is as openly hostile to the interests of its employees as Amazon, you shouldn't be surprised when there's hostility in return.

I worked a little investment firm in college. A few years ago I looked up my boss, the owner. Found out he was in prison! For stealing $10m from a bunch of retirees in a really careless, sloppy way.

I think a surprising amount of people try it. But every SEC indictment is not news so we don't hear about the people who go to prison.

Company executives all understand that not adjusting for inflation is a salary cut though. When they make this move that's what they're trying to do.

Remember in the hot 2021 hiring market when Coinbase revoked offers because of a layoff? I remember deciding they were on my blacklist after that. I thought their leadership and recruiting were too disorganized to trust with my career.

Of course you can lose your job at any time, but letting a candidate quit their old job and relocate and then get laid off is not something that should ever happen.

And now it's layoff season, and every big company has recently done this to huge numbers of people.

So as a labor force, what do we do about this? How to we protect ourselves now that the deal between employers and employees has broken down even further?

Microsoft employs a lot of lifers who have no idea how good tooling is on the outside.

yeah there is no way they'd want that kind of traffic unless the expense knobs were turned down.

you might have 10 million queries on this thing per day. if it's just 1c/query that's already $100k/day.

Yeah, personally I like to know what the team & I are being evaluated on.

I've been in the opposite situation, where there are priorities and goals that aren't communicated to me until way too late, and I ended up wasting a lot of time on stuff that didn't matter.

And if they did complain, what then?

Are you worried about the social lives they might be missing out on? About the friendships they might have had if they had a phone with Snapchat on it? A lot of social life for kids happens online.

(Related: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/02/09/considerations-on-cost...)

A way I sometimes think about it: humans have made great technological leaps, but every day is a battle against decay. Everything that actually looks stable is mostly kept that way through effort:

- most large internet sites that seem automated actually have engineers on-call 24/7. it requires constant operational work

- every machine has parts that must be replaced periodically

- the friend group tries to meet at least twice a month so you can all remain in each others' lives

So it is not unusual to see progress happening concurrently with decay. I feel similarly to the OP but I think we're bound to end up with a bunch of things that are getting worse in a given year.

I liked the Teams video calls.

But did you ever try to search for a message in a conversation, and have it give you just the message you wanted, without any surrounding context? Or have you ever tried to scroll through chat history, only for it to lazy-load 10 messages at a time, making you spend 5 minutes scrolling constantly to find a conversation from a few months ago?

Teams would even lose my messages completely from time to time. It was honestly hard to believe how janky it was.

What do people do during the 10 years they have to wait in line?