At the centers of galaxies, supermassive black holes reside. This image of the central region of galaxy Messier 87 comes in the X-ray, via NASA’s Chandra X-ray observatory. The central, supermassive black hole is blasting out energetic particles at 99%+ the speed of light, which produces X-rays visible for up to 18,000 light-years from the galactic center. It is often easier to see these features in extragalactic objects than in our own galaxy, due to the large amount of obscuring material present within our own galaxy. Credit: NASA/CXC/SAO/B.Snios et al. But seeing into the Milky Way’s heart, especially from within it, presents challenges. Even the Milky Way, a relatively quiet galaxy with a relatively small central supermassive black hole, exhibits giant geysers of charged particles emanating from the galactic center. They can be revealed by radio telescopes, such as this image constructed with data from the Parkes radio telescope, a.k.a. The Dish. Credit: A. Mellinger (C. Michigan), E. Carretti (CSIRO), S-PASS Team, E. Bressert (CSIRO) Our galactic plane is rich in dust and gas: opaque …

Scott Alexander at Astral Codex Ten: AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI have long mentioned the possibility that their products could be existentially dangerous, but this has recently crescendoed into even more dire warnings, including suggestions that we have to pace the frontier, ie coordinate to slow AI progress. In response, cynical commentators have suggested this is a conspiracy to boost the companies’ stocks. The exact motives imputed vary from person to person. Some say the companies are hyping the product by talking about how dangerous it is; if AI is smart enough to kill all humans, it must be smart enough for your business workflow. Others say they’re trying to distract from near-term harms; every inch of newspaper space devoted to human extinction is one less inch that can be spent on plagiarism and water use. But the most popular story involves regulatory capture: if the product is unsafe, maybe it can only be trusted to a few big politically-connected companies, and everyone else should be banned. Many debates about AI are complicated and …

Could removing light be a key to discovering who you really are? That’s one idea behind dark retreats*, an experience that’s about as close to a complete sensory deprivation chamber as you can get. Participants spend extended periods in total darkness, stripping away the inputs and distractions of everyday life.  Andrew Holecek, an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner in Tibetan Buddhism and other nondual wisdom traditions, believes in the transformative power of dark retreats.  Holecek says in today’s society, we’ve become “light junkies,” addicted to the constant distraction of phones, tablets, emails, texts, and everything else competing for our attention. But beneath it all, many feel a sense of emptiness, as if something’s missing and whatever we have is never enough.   “We’re so pulled apart from who we are, we’ve lost touch,” Holecek says. “Who you think you are is defined by what you do. Who you really are is revealed when you finally stop doing. The very structure of the self is radically threatened when it’s sent into the dark.” The shock of doing nothing Holecek compares …

“What do we lose if LLMs kill the journal system? Nothing but some heavy ass chains, and a few weak heuristics for assessing CVs quickly that were never worth the outrageous amounts of time and labour the journal system wasted anyway.” . That’s Jonathan Weisberg (Toronto), who knows a little bit more than the average philosopher about the journal system, having co-founded Ergo. With AI and “a little human guidance,” he says, you can crank out the kind of papers that make up 95% of what we publish in a few hours. Soon (already?), human guidance may not even be necessary. Do I find this depressing? Just the opposite. Sure, I built my career on this skill, honed it for decades, and now a computer can do it in a hundredth of the time… But this was always a goofy way of making a living… [I]t’s always been a drag dealing with bafflingly slow journals, maddeningly lazy referees, and typesetters so incompetent it must be a bit. The publication process puts years of frustrated waiting, …

Various parties concerned about the risks that artificial intelligence (AI) pose to humanity have called for a pause in its development. But such a call faces a difficult collective action problem. Can it be solved? I have been skeptical (and suggested an alternate type of approach to AI safety here). But a new report argues that a pause is indeed possible. Drafted by the Working Group on AI Pause Feasibility, an interdisciplinary group led by statistician William Fithian and philosopher Wesley H. Holliday (both of Berkeley), the report‘s focus is: a scenario in which world leaders would prefer pausing to not pausing if they could be confident that others were also pausing or that defections from a pause would be detected within a reasonable timeframe. In such a pause-willing scenario, is a pause for at least a decade feasible? Their answer is that a “hardwired pause” is feasible. What is a hardwired pause? A hardwired pause would stop the production of training-capable AI chips, which are needed to develop more powerful AI models. Over time …