locallynonlinear

duh, duh duh, duh, duuuuuuuuuh, yup.

Takes like this are one of the many things I pull out to point out how naive and misguided most x-risk obsessive people are. And especially Mr. Altman.

Despite wide fears of synthetic gain of function attacks, as it turns out, it's actually really hard to create a new virus meaningfully stronger than the standard endemic ones that already exist. Many countries and labs have legitimately tried. Lots of papers and research. It's, really really hard to beat nature at the microbiological scale; Viruses have to not only be virulent, but it has to contend with extremely unpredictable intermediate environments. The current endemic viruses got there through many mutations and adaptations inside environments that they were already at least successful (and not in vitro). And in the end, what would be the point? Once a virulent virus breaks out, you have very little control. Either it works really well and backfires or, even far more likely, it doesn't do that much at all, but it does piss other nations off.

It's not impossible. But honestly, yeah, I don't comprehend x-riskers who obsess over this.

Desperation of delusion. "End of all value" => "I don't understand things, so I better at least have control!" I wonder if these kinds of people would send literal Nazis to my doorstep if I suggested that I don't have any stake either way in the "coin flipping on the end of my world view."

100% cross platform

also

Main downside is CSS and DOM.

Yeah should have just stuck with "at least it's a scripting language" (that doesn't support 64bit integers out of the box).

This is the push/pull abusive dynamic: feign sensitivity, deny negative implications as not their intention, but demand positive feedback for dangerous takes. EA believes that not being wrong or held accountable is the most important optimization, so all their positions come from having absolutely no stake in the real world consequences.

There's a difference between "can" and "cost". Code is syntactic and formal, true, but what about pseudo code that is perfectly intelligible by a human? There is, afterall, a difference between sharing "compiled" code that is meant to be fed directly into a computer and sharing "conceptual" code that is meant to be contextualized into knowledge. Afterall, isn't "code" just the formalization of language, with a different purpose and trade off?

We need to filter people who exhibit voice stress, because no one likes a person with the humility of taking uncertainty seriously.

Commoditization is a real market force, and yes, it will come for this industry as it has for others.

Personally, I think we need to be much, much more creative and open to understanding ourselves and the potential of the future. It's hard to know specifics, but there is broad domains.

Lately, I've been hacking at home with more hardware, and creating interesting low scale, low energy input systems that help me... garden. Analyzing soil samples, planning plots and low energy irrigation, etc, etc. It's been fun because the work is less about programming in depth and more broad systems thinking. I even have ideas for making a small scale company off this. At that point, purely the programming won't be the bottleneck.

If it helps, as an engineer, take a step back and think about nature and how systems and niches within systems evolve. Nature isn't actually in the business of replacing due to redundancy, it's in the business of compounding dependency via waste resources, and the shifting roles as a result of that. We need to be ready to creatively take our experience, perspective, and energy gradient to new places. It's no different for any other part of nature.

since there’s nothing you can do to stop some asshole company from pilfering your code.

Currently. Though I think that there is a future where adversarial machine learning might be able to greatly increase the cost of training on pilfered data by encoding human generated inputs in a way that runs counter to training algorithms.

https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/

ah, the NP-complete problem of just fucking pulling the file into memory (there’s no way this clown was burning a rainforest asking ChatGPT for a memory-optimized way to do this),

It's worse than that, because there's been incredibly simple, efficient ways to k-sample a stream with all sorts of guarantees about its distribution with no buffering required for centuries. And it took me all of 1 minute to use a traditional search engine to find all kinds of articles detailing this.

If you can't bother learning a thing, it isn't surprising when you end up worshiping the magic of the thing.

I think something like UBI will succeed but it won't look to us like UBI. Like, maybe it seems stupid, but as far as political systems go, the key is persuasion in absurdity and narrative. To persuade people into UBI it has to be dressed up politically as --something else-- in the same way that all kinds of welfare (social and corporate) tends to get simultaneously denied and reinforced with conflicting narratives.

Once enough disparate and contradictory parties are convinced that "more of the good guys benefit from this than the bad guys", it gets locked in and becomes political cannon. Until later when the political systems feint undoing it again for a different set of points.

I want to live in space where it's safer.

Good, we feel the same way about that.