On discourse and decentralisation

Over the last year, as Bluesky got more popular, conversations about whether Bluesky and ATProto are really ‘decentralised’ have gotten more “popular” as well. These conversations ranged from high-quality, productive back-and-forth articles to people just saying a lot of dumb stuff on the internet (shocker, I know). As time went on, this discourse has grown […]

The Bluesky ecosystem has the juice (ATProto for normies) - Nate Spilman

An explanation for people who don't care about software protocols Bluesky is built on top of a new software protocol - https://atproto.com/ - for building distr...

A varied ecosystem and terminology. - Nel Ramblings

bluesky-social atproto · Discussions

Explore the GitHub Discussions forum for bluesky-social atproto. Discuss code, ask questions & collaborate with the developer community.

Is Bluesky dying?

An attempt to untangle a few different arguments around the future of Bluesky – if it has one

Is Bluesky dying?

An attempt to untangle a few different arguments around the future of Bluesky – if it has one

The Bluesky ecosystem has the juice (ATProto for normies) - Pioneer

An explanation for people who don't care about software protocolsBluesky is built on top of a new software protocol - https://atproto.com/ - for building dis...

Alex Mallen's Shortform — LessWrong

Comment by Alex Mallen - Some personal reflections in light of recent events, both on myself and on Constellation (of which I've been a part for a couple years). I think recent events somewhat vindicate a basic "optimization is scary" view more in line with my understanding of classic commentary by MIRI, Paul, etc, as compared to recent discourse about more contingent/specific threat models of "schemers" and "deception". In retrospect, my experience in the last couple years at Redwood (and the Constellation network more broadly) is that the discourse has focused somewhat too much on these more contingent stories for alignment risk and not enough on the basic "Goodharting" argument that misalignment is a convergent result of large-scale outcome-oriented optimization (at multiple levels: the agent, the RL process, and the developers iterating towards seemingly-safe superintelligence). For example, the Constellation view looks somewhat too focused on non-central inductive-bias questions around scheming; I think "the counting argument" was given too central a role when it wasn't a crux for whether superintelligence would take over. (Edit: I want to clarify that I think Redwood's project prioritization decisions look pretty reasonable and often excellent in hindsight, I far-from-regret working with Redwood as a whole, and that Ryan's/Buck's threat modeling looks pretty good too. I am focusing in this piece on the things we have to learn from recent events, which makes the overall mood seem more negative on my experience than I intend. I'm very grateful for being in a environment where I can openly have such reflections, and where these weedsy technical updates are productively received. Again, this is a personal reflection.) I think it was a priori unclear whether the misalignment resulting from of lots of imperfect optimization would result in the more MIRI-like kludge of proxies for fitness, or the more Paul-like explicit reward-seeking and measurement tampering (and reality looks somewhere