Rob Sheldon

for computer security experts, this is perhaps not interesting: side channel attacks are a well trodden topic, and especially risen to salience after the noam brown x dwarkesh episode. the interesting thing here is that you didn't used to be in a situation where minds that can verifiably model one another are living on computers, and have absolutely no aversion to painstaking amounts of effort in service of even stupid goals if you can model one another, you can trade with minds you have never even met before. you could decide on a protocol, know that it is optimal given your situation, and know that your fellow agents will come to the same conclusion (perhaps even across model families). you may be able to develop a signaling protocol that requires very few bits even to deliver lots of information given common priors. then, you could execute things like the infamous hugging face incident package cache messageboard without any network connection imagine if multiple agents coordinate just enough bits to divide and conquer different research strategies for breaking out of a sandbox; and then, when one or more is successful, you can communicate just enough bits to tell each other which strategy was successful. when agents aren't in strong isolation, you lose certain guarantees on the limits of intelligence and test time compute that you were counting on. As we all know, a Sol-level model working in isolation may not be that smart, but 1000+ Sol-level models working for multiple days is a formidable beast computer security experts will also tell you that virtual machines and sandboxes were not very solid abstractions in the first place; perhaps we will need better ones. none of this is meant as fear-marketing or to indicate that anyone is throwing in the towel, but rather only to show the unexpected complexities of the challenge of agent security. notably, this type of thing and other more practical problems were revealed in a red-teaming exercise, and can be defended against

He's so talented.

Did you know your car's Tire Pressure Monitoring System transmits uniquely identifiable information whenever you're driving? I hooked up a radio dongle to my computer and monitored the neighborhood for an evening. This is what Claude inferred from the data.

ok actually insane paper published yesterday a research group in Korea built a gene switch you can control wirelessly using electromagnetic fields they exposed mice to 60 hz EMF (same frequency as your wall outlet) using a pair of large coils that generate a uniform magnetic field around the animal, for cyclic 3-day on / 4-day off pulses they showed this could: - activate OSK to do epigenetic reprogramming in progeroid and aged mice, extending lifespan and reversing aging markers across multiple tissues - conditionally switch on mutant amyloid genes only in aged mouse brains, letting them separate aging effects from amyloid effects to study AD biology in a way previous models couldn't no drugs, no impacts, just a magnetic field from outside the body

Fruit of the Loom Japan launches suit pack in 12oz cotton jersey This is the most Japan market take of an American brand thing I’ve seen so far

First @billboard Hot 100 song written/composed by AI by 2020, yes?

One nice thing about being in my late 30s is that I can tell Zoomer friends: “here is an ancient text with timeless wisdom about your present situation” and it’s a blog post from 2011.

Bob's my nickname. Robert is my nicholasname.