Links
3 stars
The laid-off lawyers and PhDs training AI to steal their careers | The Verge
17-minute read
The LinkedIn post seemed like yet another scam job offer, but Katya was desperate enough to click. After college, she’d struggled to make a living as a freelance journalist, gone to grad school, then pivoted to what she hoped would be a more stable career in content marketing — only to find AI had automated much of the work. This company was called Crossing Hurdles, and it promised copywriting jobs starting at $45 per hour.
Katya clicked and was taken to a page for another company, called Mercor, where she was instructed to interview on-camera with an AI named Melvin. “It just seemed like the sketchiest thing in the world,” Katya says. She closed the tab. But a few weeks later, still unemployed, she got a message inviting her to apply to Mercor. This time, she looked up the company. Mercor, it seemed, sold data to train AI, and she was being recruited to create that data. “My job is gone because of ChatGPT, and I was being invited to train the model to do the worst version of it imaginable,” she says. The idea depressed her. But her financial situation was increasingly dire, and she had to find a new place to live in a hurry, so she turned on her webcam and said “hello” to Melvin.
It was a strange, if largely pleasant, experience. Manifesting on Katya’s laptop as a disembodied male voice, Melvin seemed to have actually read her résumé and asked specific questions about it. A few weeks later, Katya, who like most workers in this story asked to use a pseudonym out of fear of retaliation, received an email from Mercor offering her a job. If she accepted, she should sign the contract, submit to a background check, and install monitoring software onto her computer. She signed immediately.
Original link | Archive.is link
China and the Future of Science | The Scholar’s Stage
9-minute read
Ask any scientist who has gone to China in the past three years to visit academic colleagues and they will tell you how astounded they are at the quality of the laboratory equipment and machinery that their Chinese colleagues have access to. If in the not-so-distant past Chinese localities competed with each other to lay the most asphalt, now that funding pours into laboratory equipment, scientific instruments, and advanced scientific facilities. Thus China now has the world’s most sensitive ultra-high-energy cosmic-ray detector, the world’s largest and most sensitive radio telescope, the world’s strongest steady-state magnetic field, the world’s fastest quantum computer by computational advantage, and the world’s most sensitive neutrino detector. Just yesterday an attendee at this conference informed me of another I should add to my list: the world’s largest primate medical research center.
Now I can already hear some of your objections. “Tanner, these measures don’t include classified research. They don’t include the proprietary research by private companies—that is the stuff that actually pushes technology forward. American companies are not publishing billion-dollar trade secrets in the latest journals. The Chinese scientists are under insane publish or perish pressures—they are far more likely to lie and cheat. Don’t you know Chinese scientists take part in citation cartels? Haven’t you read those bitter critiques of the new system written by China’s own disgruntled scientists?”
My main response to this: you guys have lost the thread. I am reminded of a similar style of argument we often see in AI development. Every time a new model is released people play around with it for a bit and then start to catalog the flaws of this model. But the real story, the story historians will tell a generation from now, is never about the model of the moment. What matters is movement between those moments. History is made by the trend-line. What capabilities did the models have four years ago? What capabilities do they have now? What might they reasonably be expected to have in a decade hence?
Something similar might be said for science and China.
In search of Banksy | Reuters
16-minute read
The British street artist’s identity has been debated, and closely guarded, for decades. A quest to solve the riddle took Reuters from a bombed-out Ukrainian village to London and downtown Manhattan — and uncovered much more than a name.
Our radical plan to replace the NBA draft | Silver Bulletin
13-minute read
What if you could penalize tanking, decrease randomness, reduce perverse incentives, and give teams more control over their fate? There’s one big catch: you have to ditch the draft for an auction.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m excited about the NBA playoffs. But my interest in the NBA regular season has been flagging in a way that it hasn’t in a long time. There’s a simple reason: it’s the tanking. A full third of the league — five teams in each conference — basically gave up on the season at some point between October and February. The identities of the 10 playoff and play-in teams in each conference were practically locked in a few weeks ago — and they’re literally locked in now.
The NBA is acutely aware of the issue, though it’s unclear whether the league considers it a real problem or just a PR issue. (Here’s why it’s an actual problem: about half the games on any given night “feature” a tanking team. I’m not about to pay $200 a ticket to see a team that isn’t even trying to win play the Knicks at MSG.) And the solutions it has proposed are mostly tinkering around the edges with the current rules, full of the same kinks and quirks that will be exploited by future Sam Prestis and Daryl Moreys.
2 stars
Did New Zealand’s Pink and White Terraces Survive? The Search for the Eighth Wonder of the World | Now Voyager
14-minute read
May 31, 1886, began like any other day for Sophia Hinerangi. She woke early at the steep-roofed whare where she lived, and gathered her touring party from their lodgings. From there she took them on a short walk from the village of Te Wairoa to the shore of New Zealand’s Lake Tarawera, where they would navigate on a pair of paddle-powered whaleboats.
For some of the travellers, this was the final leg of a voyage that had lasted months. They’d made long journeys on ocean liners and steamboats and stagecoaches from homes all over the world to one of the British Empire’s farthest-flung frontiers. These were, arguably, the world’s first ecotourists, and they were there to glimpse a geothermal marvel unlike any other, known widely as the eighth wonder of the world.
[...]
Sophia herself had noticed long-dormant geysers and hot springs sputter back to life. Later, she told the historian Ellen Massy that she’d feared something dreadful was about to happen.
It was in this febrile atmosphere that Sophia and her touring party reached Lake Tarawera’s shore one morning that May—only to discover it was dry, and that the whaleboats were stuck in mud. After a moment, she wrote, the water returned “with a crying, moaning sound.” The boats floated, then dropped as the water receded again. Then the water returned, its level higher than before. Everyone was scared, but they’d made it too far to turn back. After some discussion, the party pushed out across the water.
My Mother’s Dying Wish Took Me on a Trip I’ll Never Forget | New York Times
2-minute read
On the ship I boarded at the bottom of Argentina with the three men I love most, I put my socks in a drawer, my sweaters on a shelf and my mother’s ashes in the cupboard above the minifridge. They were in a clear plastic bag inside a blue plastic box I’d ordered from Amazon, emblazoned with stickers that said “Cremated Remains” and “Fly Safe.”
[...]
One morning we awoke to a grayscale landscape: rock, ice, cloud. In the photo I took of Mom on our balcony, her hands are balled into fists, pressed to her heart, her smile tremulous. When we first stepped ashore, she said she wanted to kiss the briny pebbles under her boots. She wanted to do everything. She hiked in the snow; she kayaked. She fell in love with penguins, especially the saucy, knee-high gentoos with thick white markings above their eyes like Ernest Borgnine brows. I was chastened by the peninsula’s austere, extreme beauty. Here, like the Ross, was a place that would kill you without noticing, a place that made you feel tiny and vulnerable, its fearsome grandeur offering access to the sublime. When we sailed north, away, Mom embraced me in our cabin and cried. When she got home, she ordered a vanity license plate for her car that read: “GENTOO1.”
Original link | Archive.is link
Artemis II Is Not Safe to Fly | Idle Words
6-minute read
Is Orion’s heat shield really safe? New NASA chief conducts final review on eve of flight | Ars Technica
7-minute read
The trouble is that the heat shield on Orion blows chunks. Not in some figurative, pejorative sense, but in the sense that when NASA flew this exact mission in 2022, large pieces of material blew out of Orion’s heat shield during re-entry, leaving divots. Large bolts embedded in the heat shield also partially eroded and melted through.
NASA’s initial instinct was to cover up the problem. In early press releases, they stressed that both rocket and spacecraft had performed exceptionally, while declining to publish the post-flight assessment review. The first mention of heat shield damage came from Orion program manager Howard Hu on a call with reporters in March of 2023. Hu said: “we observed there were more variations across the heat shield than we expected; some of the expected char material that we would expect coming back home ablated away differently than what our computer models and what our ground testing predicted.”
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In a nutshell, Camarda argues that NASA is demonstrating the same dysfunction that led to the Columbia and Challenger disasters. Faced with an unexpected engineering failure, it has built toy models to convince itself that the conclusion it wants to reach (it’s safe to fly) are supported by evidence. These toy models are not grounded in physics, but because they appear to be quantitative, they create a false sense of security and understanding, an epistemic fig leaf for management to hide behind.
Isaacman made it clear at the outset that, after reviewing the data and discussing the matter with NASA engineers, he accepted the agency’s decision to fly Artemis II as planned. The team had his full confidence, and he hoped that by making the same experts available to Camarda and Olivas, it would ease some of their concerns.
What followed was a spirited discussion, with Camarda sparring regularly with the presenters and Olivas asking questions more infrequently. The engineering team in Houston, led by Luis Saucedo, went through dozens of charts and presented reams of data that had not been made public before.
“That level of openness and transparency is exactly what should be expected of NASA,” Isaacman said after the meeting.
Original link | Archive.is link
An Adrenaline Junkie Millionaire’s Quest to Become a Cocaine Kingpin | 404 Media
9-minute read
Immediately something was wrong. People on the ground saw the Venom’s wings rock back and forth shortly after its sluggish takeoff, a sign that it might be caught in the wake of the first plane. One video showed the Venom started to make a shallow left turn, and the plane’s engine sound decreased and then rapidly increased. Black smoke billowed. The plane stalled. As the aircraft barely reached 200 feet, it started to descend with its nose still pointed upwards.
[...]
The man in tears on the phone was Ylli Didani, a now convicted cocaine trafficker who orchestrated massive shipments of drugs into the UK and multiple European ports. Tibbitts, it turned out, had a secret life. Without the knowledge of his family, Tibbitts worked closely with Didani to become an aspiring international drug lord. The pair commissioned the construction of an elaborate underwater drone that would be stuffed with cocaine and latch onto ships with magnets. Tibbitts was the money and brains behind the operation, funding the submarine’s design and development. In messages with Didani, he referred to himself as Tony Stark, the alter ego of the millionaire inventor and superhero Ironman. According to investigators, Didani’s cocaine trafficking business was worth tens of millions of dollars. Didani had now lost his business partner and friend.
Original link | Archive.is link
Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other | Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
13-minute read
An important lesson from history is that people living in relatively stable and functional societies seldom understand how rapidly things can deteriorate and plunge into catastrophe, violence, and mass murder.
A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.
He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.
Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.
Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.
Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.
When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.
Apple’s 50 Years of Integration | Stratechery
10-minute read
More generally, Apple’s market share in all of its markets, including the phone, continues to increase over time, not decrease. This is happening despite the fact that Apple is not investing at a meaningful level — at least compared to its Big Tech peers — in AI server capacity, and has yet to ship the new AI-empowered Siri it promised nearly two years ago. The reason it doesn’t matter is that no matter how powerful AI becomes, you still need to access it with a device, and Apple, thanks to its integration of hardware and software, makes the best devices.
Transference in the Afternoon | Granta
22-minute read
A friend sent me the newspaper story. NYC hedge funder says shrink ‘seduced’ him into office sex sessions – and charged $250k in ‘mistress money’. The hedge funder, Michael Pollack, was suing his former therapist, Heidi Kling, for having sex with him nearly every week for ten years, all while accepting regular payments in cash.
Pollack did not claim that Kling had physically forced him to have sex. He had been an active participant in the sexual relationship for a decade. Only later, after they had stopped their meetings, did he come to view the experience as non-consensual, the destructive result of a force he called ‘erotic transference’. The lawsuit, filed in February 2023, claimed Kling’s actions left Pollack with severe emotional distress and panic attacks; landed a ‘debilitating’ blow to his self-confidence; and permanently damaged his relationship with his wife and sons.
Kling claimed that Pollack’s story was all wrong. She did not dispute the existence of a sexual relationship, but said she had terminated Pollack’s therapy before it began. In other words, even if she continued to meet Pollack in her office, what followed was not medical malpractice but an extramarital affair. Kling’s argument raised questions about Pollack’s motivations: if he had wished to break off the relationship without shouldering the blame, wouldn’t being a victim of mismanaged transference be the perfect alibi?
Original link | Archive.is link
Being John Rawls | Astral Codex Ten
14-minute read
“My theory of charity,” said John Rawls Visionary, “centers on nine words: there but for the grace of God go I. Society is a contract where we agree to help the less fortunate, knowing that if the shoe were on the other foot, they would help us in turn.”
“You have a rosy view of human nature,” said John Rawls Banker, in the same tone of voice he might use to say You have a bug on your face. A waiter came by, and brought each of them a glass of expensive wine.
“I don’t,” said John Rawls Visionary, “and that’s exactly what I bring to the table. My theory of charity is that we should only give to those poor people who, in the counterfactual where they were rich and we were poor, would give to us. I’ve been working on a pharmacological solution to the problem. This is what I’ve got.” He held up a vial of a colorless liquid. “Here. Take it as a souvenir. It’s one part sodium thiopental, one part LSD, and one part calea zacatechichi, the lucid dreaming herb of the Chantal Indians - plus a secret ingredient of my own devising. When a person drinks it, they enter a highly suggestible state. If a trained psychologist provides hypnotic keywords during their trip, they can sculpt an immersive dream where the patient lives an entire lifetime in a situation of the hypnotist’s choosing. The patient narrates their experience, letting us extract information. You can see the utility. When poor people ask us for money, we induce the trance and make them think we are poor, they are rich, and they’re being asked to donate to us. Then, we give money only to those beggars who would help us if the roles were reversed.”
“Astounding,” said John Rawls Banker.
“Can I pencil you in for a starting donation of $100,000?”
“I’m afraid not,” said John Rawls Banker. “I am certainly impressed with what you’ve accomplished, but it doesn’t change my fundamental position that the poor should work to better their own lives.”
Claude Dispatch and the Power of Interfaces | One Useful Thing
4-minute read
AIs are already far more capable than most people realize. A large part of this so-called capability overhang comes not from the limits of AI (though, of course, they still have many limits), but from how people interact with it. The vast majority of people access AI through chatbots, and usually the free versions with less capable models. A chatbot is fine for a quick question, but it is a bad way to get real work done.
In fact, recent research suggests that we pay a mental tax when using chatbot interfaces for work.
1 star
The fascinating insights of Robert Trivers | Optimally Irrational
9-minute read
Trivers was one of the most—perhaps the most—influential evolutionary biologists of the 20th century. His work should be much more widely known in social and behavioural sciences, in particular in economics, as Trivers’ intellectual approach is very much in line with a game theoretic understanding of social interactions.
It is hard to overstate the importance of his work.
[...]
Evolution is often conceived as implying that people should be selfish and cynical. This view is mistaken. As early as Darwin, evolutionary thinkers have suggested that cooperation was fully compatible with evolution. That being said, how cooperation evolved was, for a long time, an unresolved problem. One seemingly intuitive answer was proposed by Vero Wynne-Edwards: altruism is good for the group and hence altruism will be selected to help the group survive. Some old animal documentaries illustrated this idea, describing the old wildebeest allowing itself to be caught and eaten by the lion so that the younger ones in the herd could survive.
This idea, now labelled “group selection”, does not work. Selection operates at the individual level. If altruists sacrifice themselves for the group, the group might benefit, but the altruists in it will tend to disappear over time. So, self-sacrificial altruism is not something that we would expect to be selected.
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Trivers’ insights align closely with those of game theory on the rationality of cooperation in repeated interactions. Indeed, Trivers was aware of the game-theoretic results and mentions them in his article.
Reciprocal altruism has become one of the main explanations of the emergence of cooperation between non-kin. Cooperation does not require society to be populated by saint-like figures; it works with humans as they are, warts and all. It is indeed the blend of cooperation and conflict in social interactions that explains the rich nature of our social emotions and the many mini intrigues layered into our social relations.
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Trivers uses differential parental investment to explain a number of patterns observed across the animal kingdom: the greater tendency of males to desert their partners, the greater choosiness of females, who typically decide with whom to mate from a pool of pretenders, and the greater, sometimes violent, competition between males. More broadly, this framework also helps explain associated sex differences, such as higher male mortality and greater male body strength in species where success depends on winning intra-male competitions.
Our possums are a problem. Could Selena Gomez be the solution? | The Spinoff
4-minute read
Last year, American pop star, actor and beauty mogul Selena Gomez launched a surprising new expansion of her empire: Oreos. The chocolate and cinnamon limited-edition creme cookies, described as “flavour-forward and horchata-inspired”, popped up in hypnotic displays in supermarkets across the country in July, complete with a giant rotating cookie that simply read “Oreo Selena Gomez”. The promotional material claimed the cookies were “great for movie night, and make wonderful birthday treats and music awards watch party snacks”.
What neither Selena Gomez nor Big Oreo could ever have anticipated is that these cookies, which feature music-themed designs including “Selena in the Studio” and “Play Your Heart Out”, would become a crucial weapon in the war against one of Aotearoa’s most infamous pests.
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News of the Selena Gomez-based success soon started to spread across social media after the results of Hickling’s trial were published on Predator Free 2050’s website, and caught the attention of Ian McNeill from the Herald Island Environmental Group in Tāmaki Makaurau. The small urban island had been entirely possum free for over five years, but a handful had snuck back over from the mainland in December last year. “I could see them on the camera. In fact, I caught them mating on the camera at my home, giving me the right royal finger,” says McNeill.
A Buddhist Sun Miracle? | Astral Codex Ten
4-minute read
In 1917, some Portuguese children started seeing visions of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin told them she would enact a great miracle on a certain day in October, and a crowd of 100,000 gathered to witness the event. According to eyewitness reports, newspaper articles, etc, they saw the sun spin around, change colors, and do various other miraculous things. At least a hundred separate testimonies of the event have come down to us, with only two or three people saying they didn’t see it. Catholics continue to bring this up as one of the best-attested miracles and strongest empirical proofs of the faith - including here on Substack, where there was a spirited debate about the event last fall.
[...]
The setting is the Dhammakaya Temple, a culty Buddhist megachurch in Bangkok.
On September 6 1998, a crowd of 20,000 gathered for a ceremony. Someone cried out that they saw a vision of the sect’s founder, Luang Pu Sodh, in the sky, with the sun at his heart. The crowd turned and focused on the sun.
[...]
This replication of Fatima in an “uncontaminated” context pushes me further towards believing that sun miracles are neither true divine intervention nor vague hypnotic suggestion, but some particular illusory/psychological phenomenon which necessarily manifests as the sun spinning and changing color, and which can occur independently even among people who aren’t primed to expect it.
Retirees receive six times as much in federal dollars as young people | Washington Post
2-minute read
Considered per capita, the ratio between generations only grows. Retirees received the equivalent of about $43,700 per person — 10 times the amount that children and young adults received, at about $4,300 per person. Working-age adults received about $7,300 per capita, according to Penn Wharton’s analysis.