I assure you that Chinese researchers have a diversity of philosophical and political alignment, much the same as other researchers. I also assure you that top researchers as a whole are not all Chinese, though the ones that are that I know are all very thoughtful.

A company might choose to avoid erotica because it clashes with their brand, or avoid certain topics because they're worried about causing harms. That is very different than centralized, unilateral control over all information sources.

15 years later I'm still using it. My dissertation not so much.

Procrastination is (sometimes) awesome.

(I'm not sure this is true or not, but seems plausible. I agree with the author that we should get better data to resolve these questions).

Intuitively, some tokens are harder than others. There may be "crux" tokens in an output, after which the remaining tokens are substantially easier. It's also possible to recover from an incorrect token auto-regressively, by outputting tokens like "actually no..."

Maintaining great READMEs, documentation, onboarding docs, etc, is a lot of work. If Auto Wiki can make this substantially easier, then I think it could flip the calculus and make it much more common for teams to invest in these artifacts. Especially for the millions of internal, unloved repos that actually hold an org together.

If the warning shot is from an internal red team, then higher likelihood that it isn't reported. To address that I think we need to continue to improve the culture around safety, so that we increase the odds that a person on or close to that red team blows the whistle if we're stepping toward undisclosed disaster.

I think the bigger risk isn't that we don't hear the warning shots though. It's that we don't get the warning shots, or we get them far too late. Or, perhaps more likely, we get them but are already set on some inexorable path due to competitive pressure. And a million other "or's".

But what's striking to me as the biggest difference is the seeming lack of ideological battles in this Moon story. There were differences of opinion on how much precaution to take, how much money to spend, how to make trade offs that may affect the safety of the astronauts, etc. But there's no mention of a vocal ideological group that stands outright opposed to those worried about risks -- or a group that stands opposed to the lunar missions entirely. They didn't politicize the issue and demonize their opponents.

Maybe what we're seeing with the AI risk discussion is just the outcome of social media. The most extreme voices are also the loudest. But we desperately need to recapture a culture of earnest discussion, collaboration, and sanity. We need every builder and every regulator thinking holistically about the risks and the rewards. And we need to think from first principles. This new journey and its outcomes will almost surely be different in unexpected ways.

The analysis was instead "with various methods we can be reasonably confident the Moon is sterile, but the risk of getting this wrong is very high, so we're going to be extra careful just in case." Pressing forward while investing in multiple layers of addressing risk.

Anyway, I suppose we're reading tea leaves and engaging in palace intrigue. Back to building.

The idea that the universe is discrete/computational is a fine idea, but underspecified and useless on its own. There's an infinite array of computable rules to choose from. But the fact that with a few assumptions on the rules you can then limit to both GR and QM is very non-trivial and, in my opinion, pretty surprising.

To your point, does it prove that this is _the_ correct theory? Definitely not, and metering language around the claims is important. Still, the result feels novel, surprising, and worthy of further investigation, alongside the other popular models being explored. I think it's a shame that Wolfram's demeanor turns people off from the work.