Turns out every accusation is a confession. Anyway vote Nithya 2026 for a mayor who doesn’t do petty bullshit like this

There's a fantastic podcast episode on video games for girls and history from @adamconover, where he talks to Rachel Weil about FEMICOM Museum. It's really insightful and I still remember it 8 years later. maximumfun.org/episodes/adam…

Newsom talks a big game but when he went head to head with a 43 year old nepo billionaire he folded real fast

Pretty sure the @dropout table nerds capped this. (you might be wondering how I got here)

Because it reframes the problem as a hypothetical one of "alignment." I, and many others, would argue that AI is doing bad shit WHETHER OR NOT IT'S "aligned." Thus distracts from present harms. It also makes the technology sound more powerful than it is. Two goals achieved.

Congrats to @KarenBassLA who was in favor of this merger that caused me to lose my job! Vote @nithyavraman. #NithyaForLA

The Paramout surrender is a perfect distillation of Democratic politics: 1. Talk a big game 2. Fold despite having legal leverage and public opinion on their side 3. Empower conservative oligarchs who hate working people. Great message to send right before the elections!

Okay folks, I verified it: This settlement does not require Paramount to make any more films than the two studios made last year. In fact, it lets them make fewer films. People keep saying Paramount has agreed to "make" 30 films. In fact, the CEO of AMC theaters just said that's why he backed the deal. x.lingyaoai.com/CEOAdam/status/2102152… But no, Ellison may have said that. But that's not what he signed. Ellison did not agree to make -- that is, produce -- 30 films a year. He agreed to make 15 films a year. He only agreed to distribute the rest. (See III.1.a.d., below.) That does not require the combined company make any new films. In fact, the company can make 3 fewer films than they made last year. Because last year they produced 18 films. 20% of the 30 have to be tentpole films. The rest can be of any size, with whatever marketing budget the company deems is customary. Please read the fine print. This "deal" is not what it purports to be.

The worst part of Bonta caving on the Paramount merger is that it's a big flashing signal to every other company that there is no antitrust enforcement in America and you can bully your way into getting whatever you want. It's a monumentally bad decision.

When X is freaking out about one of my videos it's always a good sign that it's hitting. And in this case, half the accounts calling me a cuck with a punchable face are also agreeing with me. Seems like a win

Today, billionaires have yet again bribed, censored, and bullied their way to the top. As a result, a billionaire media conglomerate closely allied with the president will soon own one of its closest rivals, including some of the nation’s most critical news outlets. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund will co-own those outlets, too. Layoffs will follow. People from L.A. to Atlanta will lose their jobs, small businesses will lose their contracts, your cable bill and movie ticket will be even more expensive. Dissent against money and power will be even harder to find. This did not have to happen. Thanks to an extraordinary outpouring of grassroots anger against the merger, a coalition of 12 state attorneys general sued to block it. They beat Paramount in court, winning a court-ordered pause on the merger, and beat them again at the negotiating table, getting the conglomerate to agree to pause the merger until as late as next June. But the Ellison family does not care about the law. Instead, they loudly threatened to leave California if their merger did not go through immediately. Gavin Newsom caved to that pressure. So did Xavier Becerra. And eventually, so did Attorney General Rob Bonta, agreeing to a weak settlement that will be exceedingly difficult to enforce. People want champions who are not afraid of rich bullies. Newsom, Becerra, and Bonta did not meet that mark. The people who work in the film and TV industry and the small businesses who support it will suffer as a result. And so will everyone who values dissent in our democracy. This is not the end. The coalition that fought to block this illegal merger will fight to break up big media. There is legislation pending in Congress today that would retroactively break up corrupt billionaire mergers. This industry was once marked with strict rules so that a small handful of conglomerates couldn’t own everything. There’s no reason we cannot return to that reality. There’s no reason we can’t build on it. But today is a loss, and that loss will be felt by the people who can least afford it.

A telling development: per Bloomberg, Paramount now says it will “pay” $30 million per film if they fall short of their 30 film *distribution* pledge. Who will they pay? The crews they would have hired? The theater owners with empty seats? No. It will be some fund that a government official has to then distribute. Rent is due on the 1st of the month, not two years from now. And they’re no longer even pledging to *make* 30 films a year. Just to distribute that amount; as Marla points out, this would include re-releases. All of this is of course ambiguous and tbd but this is not good. Like most behavioral remedies, it will be next to impossible to meaningfully enforce, and even then, enforcement will be difficult and after the fact.

The Paramount/Warner Brothers merger seems facially illegal, and the state AG lawsuit challenging it is very strong. It’s troubling to hear that the states may now settle for behavioral remedies, allowing the deal to go through subject to various promises from the firms. Behavioral remedies routinely fail, and the stakes here are particularly high given that a strong democracy requires open markets for sound journalism and creative expression. The states were right to step up, and I hope they keep fighting to protect this market, its workers, and the millions of Americans who value a free press and a vibrant film industry.

Funny part about the Mayor's campaign making rollcall a big issue is that Nithya Raman actually falls in the middle of her colleagues even while being at AQMD meetings. Meanwhile, the Mayor missed nearly HALF (47%) & didn't show up to OVER HALF of her LAHSA (Homeless) Meetings.

>be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why only count people alive today >huh >future people matter too >obviously >my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet >reasonable.jpg >keep following logic >what about their grandchildren >also yes >what about people in 500 years >sure >5000 years >why not >500 million years >starting to get weird but morality is morality >open calculator >humanity could survive for an astronomically long time >could colonize galaxy >could have trillions upon trillions of descendants >maybe digital people too >maybe simulated civilizations >maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds >calculator starts smoking >realize currently living humans are rounding error >8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta >future contains potentially 10^something people >can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets >new moral priority unlocked >protect the long-term future >stop thinking in units of "people helped" >start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved" >malaria? >terrible >but only kills existing humans >AI extinction could delete the entire light cone >nuclear war could permanently derail civilization >bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years >someone invents wrong constitution in 2140 >quadrillions suffer >better fund governance workshop now >friend says maybe we should improve hospitals >explain opportunity cost >friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people >explain scope sensitivity >friend stops inviting me to dinner >need to decide what to fund >easy >expected value >suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction >sounds tiny >but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives >multiply >mother of god >$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies >charity evaluation complete >someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from >expert judgement >which expert >us >how calibrated >extremely thoughtfully >reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative >still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude >epistemic robustness achieved >someone says maybe project doesn't work >assign 20% chance >still astronomical >maybe project makes problem worse >assign 5% chance >still astronomical >why 5 >because 30 felt pessimistic >publish 46-page report >contains seventeen sensitivity analyses >every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign >critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities >yes >that's literally why it's important >critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical >make probability smaller >critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong >make probability smaller again >critic begins rubbing temples >discover AI safety >perfect longtermist cause >AI might kill everyone >or create utopia >or seize galaxy >or tile universe with paperclips >or create billions of conscious software minds >finally a problem with numbers big enough for me >start AI safety nonprofit >mission: prevent dangerous AI >hire smartest people available >smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI >interesting >we must understand capabilities to understand safety >we must scale models to study alignment >we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first >we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong >we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous >outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies >complicated field >company releases stronger model >very concerned >company begins training even stronger model >extremely concerned >company raises $14 billion >concern reaches unprecedented levels >need to influence government >future is at stake >normal democratic process too slow >politicians don't understand exponential curves >public doesn't understand x-risk >experts must guide them >who counts as expert >people who understand x-risk >who understands x-risk >our friends >someone objects that this seems politically convenient >explain we're representing future generations >future generations unavailable for comment >develop concept of value lock-in >terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever >therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in >whose values >let's circle back >begin with impartial morality >end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want >beautiful arc >meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things >voting wrong >having parochial attachments >loving family more than strangers >caring about local community >getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible >evolutionary biases everywhere >explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted >except intuition that future digital people count >and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad >and intuition that our probability estimates are sane >and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future >those intuitions survived peer review >someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter >inefficient >could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher >think of all the simulated people you just killed >okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly >PR team says "future generations deserve a voice" >much better >journalist asks what longtermism means >say "future people matter" >everyone agrees >great >journalist asks what follows from that >well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures >journalist raises eyebrow >return to "future people matter" >motte has entered the chat >critic: of course future people matter >me: glad we agree >critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them >me: why do you hate our grandchildren >eventually notice uncomfortable implication >if future value dominates everything >then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future >education matters because future institutions >health matters because future productivity >democracy matters because future trajectory >human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy >see starving child >feel compassion >check spreadsheet >child's direct welfare contribution negligible >but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality >compassion restored >tell myself this is impartial altruism >one day assistant asks obvious question >"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?" >silence >open spreadsheet >increase column width >add confidence interval >assistant asks again >"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?" >stare into cosmic light cone >10^50 people staring back >none of them exist >none of them can tell me >none of them can falsify my assumptions >realize I have invented the perfect constituency >infinitely important >completely silent >and always represented by me

Brendan Carr just cleared the way for a nation that was responsible for the murder of an American journalist to hold a key stake in CBS news and 60 Minutes, and if this merger goes through, in CNN and Last Week Tonight. Saudi Arabia First.

here's the Decoder interview theverge.com/podcast/991471/… and here's some background on Ryan's new show + venture with NFL Studios nytimes.com/athletic/7593328…

Seeing Ryan Clark get a lot of love with his debut of the Pivot (it's great! watch it!) and I keep thinking about @adamconover's recent interview with @reckless We've outsourced nearly all of basic cable to YouTube and we're just recreating what we lost

Remember when mayor asked her opponent if they would be stepping down, perhaps the zinger of the night? When Bass points, four fingers point back.

Actually! ☝️🤓 Really neat running into @adamconover nearly a decade after I dressed as him for Halloween.