Does something technical in the Boston (MA, US) area. He/him.
There’s the kind of regular who’s been thinking seriously about AI safety and alignment since pre-2022, who have passing to intimate familiarity with the funding ecosystem, the Sequences, and various conferences that happen at Lighthaven. Let’s call them rationalists.
… Let’s not, because a bunch of us here fit all those descriptions, yet are clearly not “rationalists”. The way that they use that term makes it synonymous with Orthodox (“right practices/thinking”).
This will work if you use emacs or vim. The problem is helix.
Ah, one of those “good news” bits that means the opposite.
Don’t worry too much, none of their timelines, even for things that they are actually working on as opposed to hoping/fundraising/scamming that someone will eventually work on, have ever had any relationship to reality.
Since nobody else has mentioned it:
The (fictional) Ringworld is an immensely old mega-engineering project, requiring super-strength materials to put a habitable ring around a sunlike-star; a day-night cycle is provided by solar-collecting shadow squares in a smaller (thus faster-moving) orbit, connected by super-strength wire.
This is an unstable arrangement, and requires repeated adjustments every century or so. Naturally, that system broke down (via capitalists grabbing the expensive fusion power plants for their own purposes) and the backup system was destroyed by a bioengineered weapon.
The resolution to all this depends on psychic luck produced by evolutionary processes over the course of a handful of generations on Earth.
Truly, “hard SF” means that enough details have been given that you can be sure it won’t work.
This inspires the feeling of hating both sides of a fight and hoping that they do as much damage to each other as possible before it ends.
Nah, they all consider themselves justified in sociopathic behavior.
Worm is great at what it does, which is to lure in people wanting to read power fantasies about being a superhero and then smashing every trope. (All the powers involve deep trauma. Everyone needs a therapist. Very few get any therapy. The world ends because we can’t take care of each other nicely.)
Every competent apocalyptic cult leader knows that committing to hard dates is wrong because if the grift survives that long, you’ll need to come up with a new story.
Luckily, these folks have spicy autocomplete to do their thinking!
I was going to make a comparison to Elron, but… oh, too late.
Convincing people in San Francisco Bay Area that you’re about to invent Star Trek technology is basically the national pastime there.
Ding! Ding! Ding! Upvote.
“Rationalism” is to normal logical thinking what blindfolded multi-board speed chess is to tic-tac-toe: you can only see in retrospect how anyone could get there from here. The things which occupy a Rationalist’s mind are completely divorced from ordinary concerns like ethics. Nobody would or could have predicted this quantity or quality of lunacy.
Seems reasonable. I assume one of your lights is on the left and another on the right, not two on the left.
Better sound recording would definitely be your best upgrade; you may be able to pipe your phone camera in to your PC as a video source (search DroidCam), in which case you can set up for simultaneously recording audio through some better channel – your initial capture determines the extent of what you can do with it, so a good mic -> USB is probably what you want.
Explanatory spoiler for those who don’t want to read Worm, a million words of deconstruction/reconstruction of superhero comics:
The source of superpowers is a pair of gigantic multidimensional alien creatures. Their eternal mission involves finding a planet with intelligent life, infesting them with powers via brain tumor neural links, and encouraging them to fight so as to generate new ideas – the aliens are profoundly uncreative, even stupid by human standards, but immensely powerful – and when the planet is no longer producing, they reincorporate all the changed and combined powers, then eat the local sun to power their next FTL hop.
When their experimental subjects aren’t moving fast enough, they open up their archive and resurrect the Endbringers – superpowered kaiju which provide a stimulus for cooperation by destroying cities on a schedule. Each Endbringer is unique. The Simurgh, or Ziz, takes the form of a giant statue of a woman covered in angel wings, and wings-on-wings, and so forth. Ziz has primarily psychic powers: telekinesis; a ‘scream’ or ‘song’ that drives people to violent insanity over the course of an hour or so; and mind-control that seems limited to slowly changing supers into creative serial killers and mad scientists and so forth. Ziz floats in orbit, preventing space travel, and periodically descends to the surface to terrorize a city.
Everything escalates. Every trope is explained.
Sure, but then you have to generate all that crap and store it with them. Preumably Github will eventually decide that you are wasting their space and bandwidth and… no, never mind, they’re Microsoft now. Competence isn’t in their vocabulary.
You must prove yourself in the Outer Circle before being granted leave to study the Inner Mysteries. Or at least attend the right parties.
Tchah! Decker does not go far enough!
It is clear that there must be people better suited to raise children than a dimwit like him! He should arrange for his genetic superiors to breed, then give the babies to the perfect parents, and he should give them the one thing he has of value: money!
(and please have nothing else to do with children ever again, k thx bye)
It’s not just going to return quotes! It will return distorted quotes! I suspect you can get it to totally reverse a Singer position within five or six interactions.
With luck, you can then show it to Singer and cause him to die of shame.
We don’t have that much luck, though.
I have seen some controversy about whether white-passing people of Jewish ancestry count as “white”
Let me clear that up: the people who ask if someone is actually white are racists.
This article has an astonishing amount of almost-self-awareness, where only one vital step is missing in order to answer all their questions.