“Anything worth doing, is worth doing right.”

― Hunter S Thompson

“Be not professional in what you do, rather be excellent. Excellence has life in it — it has colors in it — it has sweetness in it — whereas professionalism is a dead corpse exuding the disgusting smell of obedience. Excellence requires no obedience, yet in excellence you act your best, without all the life-sucking efforts.”

― Abhijit Naskar

“Excellence is the result of caring more than others think is wise, risking more than others think is safe, dreaming more than others think is practical, and expecting more than others think is possible.”

― Ronnie Oldham

“I must address the topic of whether the effort required for excellence is worth it. I believe it is — the chief gain is in the effort to change yourself, in the struggle with yourself, and it is less [...]

---

Outline:

(01:40) The feeling of caring about excellence

(03:29) Caring about excellence and caring about growth

(04:05) Excellence and x-risk

(05:55) On not making the perfect the enemy of the good

(08:09) Why excellence matters

(09:35) The pursuit of excellence

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Things went very wrong on Friday.

A bugged CrowdStrike update temporarily bricked quite a lot of computers, bringing down such fun things as airlines, hospitals and 911 services.

It was serious out there.

Ryan Peterson: Crowdstrike outage has forced Starbucks to start writing your name on a cup in marker again and I like it.

What (Technically) Happened

My understanding it was a rather stupid bug, a NULL pointer from the memory unsafe C++ language.

Zack Vorhies: Memory in your computer is laid out as one giant array of numbers. We represent these numbers here as hexadecimal, which is base 16 (hexadecimal) because it's easier to work with… for reasons.

The problem area? The computer tried to read memory address 0x9c (aka 156).

Why is this bad?

This is an invalid region of memory for any program. Any program that [...]

---

Outline:

(00:31) What (Technically) Happened

(03:38) Who to Blame?

(06:58) How Did We Let This Happen

(12:41) Regulatory Compliance

(18:14) Consequences

(19:54) Careful With That AI

(29:34) Unbanked

The original text contained 2 images which were described by AI.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

The coalitional frame

Earlier in this sequence I laid out an argument that the goals of increasingly intelligent AIs will become increasingly systematized, until they converge to squiggle-maximization. In my last post, though, I touched on two reasons why this convergence might not happen: humans trying to prevent it, and AIs themselves trying to prevent it. I don’t have too much more to say about the former, but it's worth elaborating on the latter.

The best way to understand the deliberate protection of existing goals is in terms of Bostrom's notion of instrumental convergence. Bostrom argues that goal preservation will be a convergent instrumental strategy for a wide range of agents. Perhaps it's occasionally instrumentally useful to change your goals—but once you’ve done so, you’ll never want to course-correct back towards your old goals. So this is [...]

---

Outline:

(00:07) The coalitional frame

(06:20) Some intuitions favoring the coalitional frame

(09:54) Next steps

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

I've noticed that when trying to understand a math paper, there are a few different ways my skill level can be the blocker. Some of these ways line up with some typical levels of organization in math papers:

• Definitions: a formalization of the kind of objects we're even talking about.
• Theorems: propositions on what properties are true of these objects.
• Proofs: demonstrations that the theorems are true of the objects, using known and accepted previous theorems and methods of inference.

Understanding a piece of math will require understanding each of these things in order. It can be very useful to identify which of type of thing I'm stuck on, because the different types can require totally different strategies.

Beyond reading papers, I'm also trying to produce new and useful mathematics. Each of these three levels has another associated skill of generating them. But it seems to me that [...]

---

Outline:

(01:29) Understanding

(01:42) Definitions

(03:28) Theorems

(04:55) Proofs

(07:29) Generating

(07:52) Proofs

(08:58) Theorems

(10:08) Definitions

(12:50) Skill improvement

(14:24) Paradigm formation starts at the end

The original text contained 2 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

The original text contained 1 image which was described by AI.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Henry George's 1879 book Progress & Poverty was the second best-selling book in the entire world during the 1880s and 1890s, outsold by only the Bible. Nobody knows exactly how many copies it sold during those two decades since nobody was keeping track, but it definitely sold at least several millions of copies for sure. The Progressive Era is literally named after the book itself.

Georgism used to have millions of followers, and many of them were very famous people. When Henry George died in 1897 (just a few days before the election for New York City mayor), an estimated 100,000 people attended this funeral.

The mid-20th century labor economist and journalist George Soule wrote that George was “By far the most famous American economic writer,” and “author of a book which probably had a larger world-wide circulation than any other work on economics ever [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

Work done in Neel Nanda's stream of MATS 6.0.

Epistemic status: Tried this on a single sweep and seems to work well, but it might definitely be a fluke of something particular to our implementation or experimental set-up. As there are also some theoretical reasons to expect this technique to work (adaptive sparsity), it seems probable that for many TopK SAE set-ups it could be a good idea to also try BatchTopK. As we’re not planning to investigate this much further and it might be useful to others, we’re just sharing what we’ve found so far.

TL;DR: Instead of taking the TopK feature activations per token during training, taking the Top(K*batch_size) for every batch seems to improve SAE performance. During inference, this activation can be replaced with a single global threshold for all features.

Introduction

Sparse [...]

---

Outline:

(01:05) Introduction

(01:53) BatchTopK

(02:36) Experimental Set-Up

(03:47) Results

(05:39) Inference with BatchTopK

(07:44) Limitations and Future Work

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

New paper from the Google DeepMind mechanistic interpretability team, led by Sen Rajamanoharan!

We introduce JumpReLU SAEs, a new SAE architecture that replaces the standard ReLUs with discontinuous JumpReLU activations, and seems to be (narrowly) state of the art over existing methods like TopK and Gated SAEs for achieving high reconstruction at a given sparsity level, without a hit to interpretability. We train through discontinuity with straight-through estimators, which also let us directly optimise the L0.

To accompany this, we will release the weights of hundreds of JumpReLU SAEs on every layer and sublayer of Gemma 2 2B and 9B in a few weeks. Apply now for early access to the 9B ones! We're keen to get feedback from the community, and to get these into the hands of researchers as fast as [...]

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

This article contains more than fifty uses of logical or mathematical notation, so an audio narration would be too hard to follow. You'll find a link to the original text in the episode description.

---

First published:

Source:

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.