It’s not an accident that all the big sites are cracking down at the same time.

Interest rates went up, the VC spigot closed off, and now all those sites have to actually make money somehow.

Each ones ability to pull this shit is also partially gated by their substitute good—each other. Once one takes the plunge, the next one loses less customers to its bullshit, it jumps, and so on.

A smarter, less money hungry social media site could take advantage of this, but social media is already full of firms living at the edge of hunger.

The first half of this is right.  The second half is low-interest-rate thinking.

Basically every social media company is money-hungry right now, and there’s a reason for that.  

One way to get money is to be profitable right now.  None of the sites we care about are.

Another is to have a story about how you’ll be profitable very soon.  That’s what Reddit and Twitch etc. are trying to do.

A third is to argue that you’ll be profitable eventually.  And in a low-interest-rate environment that’s a decent sales pitch.  But in a high-interest-rate environment, you need to be making money reasonably soon, so that doesn’t work.

Rates have been low since at least 2008, and basically since 2000.  That means essentially the entire modern internet has only ever existed in a low-interest-rate environment.

And in that sort of environment, long speculative plays make sense.  And so people invest on “sure, we’re making money now, but we’re growing our user base and surely that will pay off eventually”.  That’s basically what you’re suggesting here.  A company that wasn’t money-hungry could continue to sacrifice profitability to grow its user base.

But “we can spend money to grow our user base” isn’t a compelling proposition to investors right now, so they’re not going to fund it.  They want some story about how their investment is going to start paying off soon.  Because that’s what high interest rates mean.  And with the free spigot of money to fund userbase growth cut off, all these companies are scrambling to find a way to actually make money.  

For my entire adult life, some of my consumption has been subsidized by VC’s throwing cash at growth opportunities.  And now that’s ending.

… you are mostly right in the theory you are trying to point out. I just don’t think you’re actually right on the object level. Yes! High interest rates have been part of a sea change in SV about how it sees investments and the future. But we are not actually talking about any direct way any of these companies suddenly ran out of money because they or anyone they relied for funding were directly competing with T-bills. It’s all animal spirits. (Comparison to SVB, which really did collapse as a direct result of interest rate changes.)

There was a sea change in VC and tech-executive culture. Musk followed Thiel, and Reddit is following Musk. Once one high profile tech leader was willing to be the Grinch, then all the other lemmings followed them into the sea. One of their reasons was the interest rates, but the ideology of it had been building for a while, and is as much “hangover from the party lasting too long” as it is related to extrinsic factors.

Yeah, none of them literally ran out of cash, but you don’t, like, wait until you’re down to your last twenty to pivot.

Now you’re also right that many of the companies I’m looked at aren’t immediately pressured by something immovable.  Twitch, for instance, is owned by Amazon, and can burn money as long as Amazon allows it—but Amazon may not allow it any more.  Twitter, on the other hand, is in a very deep hole with the debt financing, and needs to change something ASAP.  

Reddit is I think somewhere in the middle; it’s not about to run out of cash, but it is looking at an IPO and that’s a lot like going to VCs to raise money.  The potential IPO investors don’t want to put up cash for a long-range speculative thing in this market.

So yes most of the companies don’t have a gun to their head with an immediate deadline, but the shorter interest rates change everything up and down the market.  Everyone is less willing to make or back speculative bets at every point up or down the chain.

So this must be a good time to offer to buy Reddit for three meelion dollars, right? Greedy when others are fearful, etc.

Nah, the structural factors that apply to the VCs also apply to all of us.

Reddit is bleeding cash.  That means that you buy it for Three Meelion Dollars, and also a commitment to pay out millions of dollars every year to keep the lights on.  

And if you’re paying that on the expectation that it will eventually become profitable and pay you back, then you have to weigh that against other things you can do with your money.  And that’s harder now that interest rates are higher.

(Similarly if you want to debt-finance it then that’s more expensive with higher interest rates.  That’s why Elon is making a billion-dollar coupon payment for Twitter every year.)

Now if you’re a billionaire and want to just put up twenty million in operating expenses every year, or whatever, because you want your favorite toy to keep working, then that’s one thing.  But that’s a very small set of people to talk to.

All of that should be priced in! That's why you're paying 3 mellons instead of like 10 mellons!

Financially, now is just as good a time as any to buy Reddit, fairly valued in terms of its discounted future cash flows, but if you have reasons to buy Reddit other than treating it as strictly a financial product, it means you have to deploy fewer assets to do so.

And basically the only reason people acquire 100% of a company is because they have these sorts of motivations. For example, a lot of leveraged buyout investors buy companies not strictly for what they are expected to return financially, but for what they will return financially after the new owners make a number of changes to the fundamentals, which they will be able to do once they have control over the company by buying it.

so, yes, if you wanted to buy Reddit now would be a good time to do so

Sure, we don't know that no possible neural network implements an optimizer. In fact, I'll go farther: it seems like if it's possible to write one, which it probably is, we should probably be able to encode one in a large neural network. It's just a very flexible framework for a model.

(Of course that flexibility is also the weakness: if it could be anything it has no strong pressure to be a specific thing.)

But I can say something stronger and also dumber than that, right? If an optimizer exists, then it's possible that if I have my computer spit out 10TB of random bits and then interpret that as the source code to a C program, it will compile to that optimizer. It's just...unlikely.

Large neural networks like GPT are not attempting to create optimizing agents. The training process is (outer-)optimizing for something, and the thing it's optimizing for is very much not an (inner-)optimizer.

So this argument is something like, maybe writing an extremely powerful optimizer is so easy that we'll do it by accident. And then not only will we create one, but it will be so powerful that it can out-optimize us, even if we're trying to stop it, even though that's if anything counterproductive to what we were training the model to do. That's not impossible but it seems extremely unlikely.

(In contrast, I don't think we "stumbled into" world models exactly; they are something we were more or less explicitly trying to get for the past couple years. This is part of Sarah's point: people are trying to get world models, but they aren't trying to get ontological stability or train inner optimizing loops basically at all.)

In practice it looks like they do implement optimizers? https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559

I've been putting off reading this paper for months so maybe the intro is misleading but my understanding is that these folks are finding optimization circuits inside transformers

That doesn't surprise me that much. But also isn't what I unclearly and ambiguously meant when I talked about "optimizers".

If that abstract is correct, it looks like GPT is producing a miniature gradient descent model that it uses in the process of answering questions. And that's cool!

But like, give me like thirty minutes and I can also produce a gradient descent model. So can you, I bet. That's not scary.

But in the context of the original post, an optimizer is something much stronger than that. It has a world model, and a causal model, and a sufficiently stable ontology that it can pursue stable goals across varied representations and circumstances. You and I have all those things; the Yudkowskian superintelligence has those things; and a gradient descent algorithm does not.

Sarah's observation was that the Transformer and GPT seem capable of producing world models, and also people want to produce those, so we're getting them. Causal models are somewhat harder and somewhat less useful. Stable ontologies are very hard, in the sense that we have no fucking idea how to produce one, and also no one is trying to produce them, so we're unlikely to get them.

That doesn't make it impossible that some GPT iteration will produce one as a side-effect of something else, but it does make it very unlikely. We're not training for stable ontologies and we are training for things that probably weigh against them a little bit. And also they're very very hard.

Ah, thanks for clarifying. FWIW I agree with the broad "is” argument made in here, even if I don’t follow her to the “ought”. (Why should I be concerned about AI killing us, but then --- upon updating to a longer timeline --- be unconcerned about AI killing all of our (great? grand?) children?)

Sure, we don't know that no possible neural network implements an optimizer. In fact, I'll go farther: it seems like if it's possible to write one, which it probably is, we should probably be able to encode one in a large neural network. It's just a very flexible framework for a model.

(Of course that flexibility is also the weakness: if it could be anything it has no strong pressure to be a specific thing.)

But I can say something stronger and also dumber than that, right? If an optimizer exists, then it's possible that if I have my computer spit out 10TB of random bits and then interpret that as the source code to a C program, it will compile to that optimizer. It's just...unlikely.

Large neural networks like GPT are not attempting to create optimizing agents. The training process is (outer-)optimizing for something, and the thing it's optimizing for is very much not an (inner-)optimizer.

So this argument is something like, maybe writing an extremely powerful optimizer is so easy that we'll do it by accident. And then not only will we create one, but it will be so powerful that it can out-optimize us, even if we're trying to stop it, even though that's if anything counterproductive to what we were training the model to do. That's not impossible but it seems extremely unlikely.

(In contrast, I don't think we "stumbled into" world models exactly; they are something we were more or less explicitly trying to get for the past couple years. This is part of Sarah's point: people are trying to get world models, but they aren't trying to get ontological stability or train inner optimizing loops basically at all.)

In practice it looks like they do implement optimizers? https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.10559

I've been putting off reading this paper for months so maybe the intro is misleading but my understanding is that these folks are finding optimization circuits inside transformers

link

*grabs both your hands in gesture of sincerity*

Don't let this die. Taylor Swift is the Pollution Queen now. We need meme edits with her photoshopped onto backgrounds of wildfire-ravaged landscapes and oil refineries chugging out black smoke.

Photo of smudgy black eye shadow? That's THE Taylor Swift-inspired look now, it represents fossil fuels.

We need parodies of Taylor Swift songs about pollution and killing polar bears.

Give her representatives a full-time job for the rest of their lives defending her from the phrase "Pollution Queen." Make this meme a the figurehead of an entire fleet of other celebrity-terrorizing memes.

"But this doesn't dismantle the system that—" Shut. Don't care. Isn't it great that such a huge portion of environmental damage is being done by human individuals with egos, whose feelings can be hurt when people are mean?

Money can save you from physical harm, but can it save you from looking ridiculous?

I mean she's a blonde white lady so she does kinda look like Dr. Blight from Captain Planet . . .

Was thinking of this exact connection before I scrolled down and saw it

here’s stablediffusion’s interpretations

So I was taught a lesson in how to get rid of a migraine in 30 seconds and omfg listen my migraines don’t go away ever but I was shown what part of my body to touch and like???????????????

It’s witchcraft????????? Like I would be burned at the stake if I lived in ye olde days knowing that information?????

What the fuck??????

Spill it! Lol….Hooooowwwww?? Had migraines since age 9….😓😓😓

Its called the T4 push, but I literally can’t find the info online????? I guess I’m not searching good enough? These medical fuckers are holdin out on us lol.

It’s best to have someone do this for you while you stand up and relax your muscles as best you can, but if you’re alone, a tennis ball and a flat surface will probably work. Alternatively you can lie on the edge of a bed at the pressure point. (But no really do try to find someone to do it for you)

Find the area in your spine between either the first, second, third, or fourth vertebrae. It should be sore and uncomfortable to press down on, so look for the one that’s most painful, and press down with as much pressure as you can on that area for 30 seconds.

Realize that 80% of your pain has magically disappeared and keep the info secret if you live in a small puritan town, lest you be tried for witchcraft.

If you don’t have to worry about being burned or hanged, then share the info with your migraine suffering friends.

As someone who wrote a 10k word paper on pressure points for a high belt ranking test in her martial arts class, I can tell you that you just found a pressure point used in acupressure and acupuncture to relieve pain, particularly that in the head. :)

Hand to god we discovered this by accident when my husband was rubbing my neck and I nearly collapsed it felt so good

This post was sent by literal angels??? I’ve had a persistent low-level headache for nearly 24hrs and now it’s gone??? In 30 seconds? What gods did you sacrifice to for this information!?!?

As a medical massage therapist, I thought I would give my two cents.

This is good for tension migranes and normal migraines, but actually pretty useless for sinus migraines. It’ll help for a hot second, but quickly come back. (These are usually the migraines behind your eyes, in your ears, and behind your forehead. Sometimes it can feel like jaw pain or TMJ) for sinus migraines, behind the ear in a divot. Press down firmly and pull towards your collarbone. That’ll drain your sinuses. Also, pressing around the eye socket on the cheekbones help. There is also a little triangle up away from the eye in the eyebrow bone. Press and hold pretty hard and that’ll relieve that behind the forehead pain. Also, ear pulling is great to help move sinuses around.

Don’t forget the temples too! Press firmly and hold. Open and close your jaw while holding your temples. It’ll feel weird, but it’ll help with jaw pain. It’ll work a similar way if you hold the jaw joint under your cheekbone.

And never underestimate the power of a foot massage!! Give minutes can be all the difference!! Our feet are our base. If they hurt even a little, somewhere else in your body will hurt. Treat your feet and sinuses kindly!

Reblogging to save my own life and maybe yours too.

@deadcatwithaflamethrower for when you get migraines that are not allergy-related?

I use all of these tricks already, and they truly do help. Just not long-term for me–I get visual migraines that seem to be based on the fact that I am a double-blue-coned person living in a tri-cone person’s world, i.e. staring at monitors definitely not built for that. After a while my eyes just get fed up, even with professional photography-level calibration done to the screen.

(My tension headaches are because I will fuck up my ENTIRE BACK due to old childhood habits of tensing all the way up because my ex-mother made life…stressful. I can soothe them with the T4 spot but unless the other tension is addressed it’ll flare back up later that day.)

All of the sinus tricks listed above do help. Here’s an extra:

SINUS HEADACHE SUFFERS! Boil water. Pour said water into a bowl that is large enough to hold the water, and that you can put your whole face over it. Add 2 bags of chamomile, 2 bags of blackberry, and 2 bags of mint tea. Toss a towl over your head and lean over the bowl (make sure you’re leaning so your head is tilted down and forward, like your chin is trying to rest on your chest). You are now in the process of steam-cleaning your sinuses, and @jabberwockypie​ will angrily confirm for anyone who asks that yes, this method does indeed work.

If you do chamomile by itself (if you’re not allergic to ragweed anyway) it’ll help to open/clean your pores.

-Jorge Luis Borges, butting in on the dubs vs subs debate back in 1945

*grabs both your hands in gesture of sincerity*

Don't let this die. Taylor Swift is the Pollution Queen now. We need meme edits with her photoshopped onto backgrounds of wildfire-ravaged landscapes and oil refineries chugging out black smoke.

Photo of smudgy black eye shadow? That's THE Taylor Swift-inspired look now, it represents fossil fuels.

We need parodies of Taylor Swift songs about pollution and killing polar bears.

Give her representatives a full-time job for the rest of their lives defending her from the phrase "Pollution Queen." Make this meme a the figurehead of an entire fleet of other celebrity-terrorizing memes.

"But this doesn't dismantle the system that—" Shut. Don't care. Isn't it great that such a huge portion of environmental damage is being done by human individuals with egos, whose feelings can be hurt when people are mean?

Money can save you from physical harm, but can it save you from looking ridiculous?

I mean she's a blonde white lady so she does kinda look like Dr. Blight from Captain Planet . . .

Was thinking of this exact connection before I scrolled down and saw it

This is the best description I’ve heard for this method, I always thought it was bullshit because I never heard a description that actually explained how to do this other than “tap your head 20 times”.

I have anxiety-induced hissing, which sounds/feels different from sound-induced tinnitus (which I have also experience). Sound-based tinnitus actually sounds like you’re “hearing” something in your ears, whilst the hissing I have feels like it’s “inside my head”, if that makes sense. But this technique still helps!!

Here’s a visual I found because I couldn’t understand the instructions well

My ringing just went away for the first time in years. What is this blissful quiet.

wait wait i gotta try this, i don’t think i’ve had Actual Silence since i was like 5

HOW THE FUCK

Reblogging to save a life, and also because, even if you don’t have tinnitus, this is totally worth trying if you like new sensory experiences.  

my friend just told me that there's a secret second dashboard that solely contains posts from people you've turned on post notifications for, and when i click the link in the messages it opens it within the tumblr app, so the tumblr app also has a secret second dashboard for post notification blogs, and the only way to access it is to open the link for it within the app.

i literally love tumblr

i have a private pinned post that just has a link to this dashboard on it, it's great. two dashboards for life

wow! i was really hoping someone would organically reverse-engineer this and find that dash.

here are a few other "secret" dashboards:

these are all just taking existing feeds of content and putting them in a dashboard-like format... the "Stuff for you" tab/feed is the same idea.

Did anyone notice how quickly the internet turned into a Lovecraftian horror scenario?

Like we’ve got this dimension right next to ours, that extends across the entire planet, and it is just brimming with nightmares. We have spambots, viruses, ransomware, this endless legion of malevolent entities that are blindly probing us for weaknesses, seeking only to corrupt, to thieve, to destroy.

Add onto that the corrupted ones themselves, humans who’ve abandoned morality and given up faces to hunt other people, jeering them, lashing out, seeing how easy it is to kill something you can’t touch or see or smell. They’ll corrupt anything they think could be a vessel for their message and they’ll jabber madly at any who question them. Their chittering haunts every corner of the internet. They are not unlike the spambots in some ways.

Add on top of that the arcane magisters, who are forever working at the cracks between our world and the world we made. Some of them do it for fun, some of them do it for wealth, others do it for the power of nations unwise enough to trust them. There are mages who work to defend against this particular evil, but they are mad prophets, and their advice is almost never heeded, even by those who keep them as protection.

All people know several spells to use the internet. Facebook asks you for the magic words to log in, so does your email, so does your twitter and on and on. The spells are words or a gesture with the hand, some use the colour of your eyes, or the shape of your finger. Our chief of security joked about requiring users to give a drop of blood before they could log in. Many do not understand the humour of mages.

The cracks between the two are breaking. IP cameras filled our world with eyes and the magisters learned how to open almost all of them. We all carry magic slabs of glass that if you hold it up to your ear can sing to you with a loved one’s voice, but if you look at it with your eyes, can show you a corrupted human with bleeding orange skin scream the profane with a thousand voices. The other day I saw someone hack a moving vehicle. At one point they made it stop. At another they made it so it couldn’t stop. Some of our best and brightest are going to create an army of four winged bats hovering throughout every city and we are going to connect them directly to the dimension where the nightmares live.

I’m not saying it’s all bad, but I am saying Cthulhu lies deathless dreaming in this web we built him and he is waking up.

The hold music for my primary care provider’s office is “In The Hall Of The Mountain King” which is pretty fitting because right now I’m fighting with them to stop fucking around and bill the correct insurance for a visit I had six months ago

Man I hate it when people use the pronoun “you” as a singular pronoun in an informal setting. “You” is plural, unless thou dost speak to an unfamiliar person. The correct singular second person pronoun is “thou” in most cases. Grammar never changes. Pronouns must always stay one way until the end of time. Learn thy proper English. *sigh* Kids these days.

If thou this mistake shouldst make on thine own blog, then know, villain, that thou art a dirty descriptivist, and no friend of mine. Ne'er should language itself alter, it doth remain fixèd as such, untouch’d by change. Wouldst thou, vile descriptivist, that we forget the heritage of our great tongue? Nay, say I. Thou art but a dickhead who sayest so.

stynt ðy clappe! beoð ðo writerris be wetleas knafen. ðy langag o engelond diffoulened be, ille usenid bi sclaundrous novelri.

I may be profoundly weird and moderately functioning at best but I'm also an autistic woman obsessed with the Federal Reserve

I may be profoundly weird and moderately functioning at best but I'm also

the Federal Reserve

Programming is very Kafkaesque. You're dealing with this arbitrary system that no one will explain to you because no one actually understands all of it. There are bugs.