[I haven't independently verified each link. On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them, and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this.] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/links-for-february-2025
Full Episode
Welcome to the Astral Codex X podcast for the 28th of February 2025. Title, links for February 2025. This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack. If you like it, you can subscribe at astralcodex10.substack.com. I haven't independently verified each link.
On average, commenters will end up spotting evidence that around two or three of the links in each links post are wrong or misleading. I correct these as I see them and will highlight important corrections later, but I can't guarantee I will have caught them all by the time you read this. 1.
Which single individual has murdered the most people, with murdered meaning against the law, with their own hands and not counting, for example, dictators? It's a surprisingly close race between the worst human serial killers and Gustave the Crocodile. Two, a Texas town is experimenting with ski lift style gondolas as public transit.
The problem for public transit has always been finding space for it. You can either share the street with rush hour traffic, a bus, break the bank digging a tunnel, a subway, or build an elevated rail. Expensive and complicated. gondolas replace the elevated rail with a few towers and let cables do the rest. The planned prototype, quote, End quote. 3.
Net neutrality was a cause célèbre in 2017, when the whole internet seemed to join together in a rare moment of unity to warn of dire consequences from its cancellation.
4.
But it got cancelled anyway, and no consequences whatsoever materialised. Why? I assumed it was just hot air, but I recently heard a theory that we should thank California and other blue states for enacting state-level net neutrality laws. ISPs chose to follow the strictest states' laws rather than slice and dice.
I think this is probably not true, because California's law was delayed until 2021 and nothing bad happened in the 2017-2021 period, but I welcome comments from people who know more. 4. Jack Gawler, who generated many of the images I used in the AI art Turing test, has a blog post on his experience, The Turing Test for Art, How I Helped AI Fool the Rationalists. 5. Surprising AI safety results.
If you fine-tune an AI to write deliberately insecure code, the AI becomes evil in every other way too. For example, it will name Hitler as its favourite person and recommend the user commit suicide. Anders Sandberg proposes, link in post, that maybe, quote, it is shaped by going along a vector opposite to typical RLHF training aims, then playing a persona that fits. End quote.
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