I've made an app that would greatly benefit from being open source in order to allow users to write their own plugins. How do I make it open source while still satisfying my capitalist rent-seeking exploitative desires?

I have some software I am thinking about packaging up and releasing as open-source, but I'd like to gauge how interesting it is to people other than me.

The software is a highly useable implementation of arithmetic encoding. AE completely handles the problem of encoding, so in order to build a custom compressor for some data set, all you have to do is supply a probability model for the data type(s) you are compressing (I call this "BYOM" - Bring Your Own Model).

One of the key technical difficulties of data compression is that you need to keep the encoder and decoder in exact sync, or the whole procedure goes entirely off the rails. This problem is especially acute for the use case of AE, where you are potentially changing the model in response to every event. My software makes it very easy to guarantee that the sender/receiver are in sync, and at the same time it reduces the amount of code you have to write (basically you don't write a separate encoder and decoder, you just write one class that is used for both, depending on the configuration).

I think the point is that if extinction is not immediate, then the whole civilisation can't exploit big world immortality to survive; every single member of that civilisation would still survive in their own piece of reality, but alone.

Yeah. I meant that I don't find the roulette scenario very relevant since I believe that we're much more likely to experience some other scenario where this property of the quantum multiverse becomes relevant, like the terminal illness one I described. Most of us won't play the roulette.

Anyways, there's a flaw in lisper's original argument: death is not unavoidable even after wrists have been slit.

(This comment is a reply to another branch of this discussion as well.)

Yes, God will be able to see that there is a you that survived the process and went on to live the life of Riley. But whether or not you will be able to see that is a very open question

I disagree. To keep things simple, let's suppose that the bullet, if it hits, really will kill the participant with practically 100% certainty and will do so practically immediately (I'll come to this a bit later). In that case the only outcome the participant can expect to experience, and that they will experience with certainty, is that the gun didn't fire. This is exactly what happens if you take the mortal's-eye-view; God, as you mentioned, will notice that elsewhere in the multiverse, the participant did get hit. Now, whether the participant cares about their loved ones or the copies that die in the attempt is a matter of preferences, but if we're simply talking about which outcome to experience, this is how it goes, I think.

Note that playing quantum roulette successfully depends crucially on the speed with which you can kill yourself. Trying to play by slitting your wrists, for example, doesn't work because once you see that your wrists are slit you can't roll that back. So the success of the enterprise depends entirely on killing yourself fast enough that you don't become aware of your imminent and (in the relevant branches of the multiverse) unavoidable death. How fast is fast enough? Well, that is (literally!) the sixty-four-million-dollar question. Unless you have an answer that you are very confident is the correct one, it seems to me like an imprudent risk to take.

With this I agree, which is why I think the quantum Russian roulette or quantum suicide scenarios are mostly interesting as a thought experiment, as they're intended to be. But there are practical situations that are somewhat analogous: think, for example, about a terminally ill patient who faces an almost certain death within several days. Should they expect to survive or continue to experience things, and if so, in what way? My understanding is that according to quantum mechanics, there are all kinds of weird scenarios with non-zero probability that make "survival" possible, such as simply surviving one more day indefinitely despite all odds, being miraculously cured, or maybe being resurrected by a hyper-advanced future civilization in a simulation. Note that, in principle, this probably applies to any possible life-and-death situation.

I used the word "experience" a number of times there, which brings me to a point you made in another comment:

Notice (!) that when you start to talk about "noticing" things you are tacitly bringing consciousness into the discussion, which is a whole 'nuther can o' philosophical worms.

I don't think this can of worms is that bad. We have a pretty good grasp of what it means to be conscious, even if we can't define it exactly; and also we're (at least I am) pretty confident that it's a purely physical phenomenon with nothing supernatural and thus subject to the laws of QM. I think that's enough. Where it does get a bit problematic is when we're talking about scenarios like the one with the terminally ill patient; presumably there's also a possibility that the patient's consciousness degrades until it no longer makes sense to call them conscious, since there's probably no clear line anywhere separating conscious and non-conscious in this way. (This might also imply that if we should expect to die, we should expect to do so by very slow decay, like patients with Alzheimer's, which doesn't sound too good to me.)

Doesn't the QIT you describe make the exact same predictions, also the Russian roulette you mentioned?

Nope.

But there's no single privileged future you, right?

There is no single privileged future me now, but when my future becomes my present there will be. (Also, see note below.)

You can actually do this experiment: listen to a geiger counter, or tune an old-school TV to an inactive channel and watch the snow on the screen. The math says that during this process there are an inconceivably vast number of you's being split off every time the geiger counter clicks (or fails to click) or every time you perceive a light or dark pixel on the screen. But you will only ever experience being one of those you's. Yes, all those other you's do exist, but the you that you perceive yourself to be can never interact with any of them, so they may as well not exist for the one you that you perceive yourself to be. And so the one you that you perceive yourself to be may as well live your life as if all those other you's didn't exist even though they really do.

(NOTE: there is really no such thing as "now", and you don't even have to go quantum to see that. Simultaneity gets tossed out the window with special relativity. There is my "now" and there is your "now" and they will not, in general, be the same.)

That we want to stop AI research. We don’t. Current AI research is very far from the risky areas and abilities. And it’s risk aware AI researchers that are most likely to figure out how to make safe AI.

Is it really the case that nobody interested in AI risk/safety wants to stop or slow down progress in AI research? It seemed to me there was perhaps at least substantial minority that wanted to do this, to buy time.

This sounds like an excellent idea if you can get good number of countries represented. Could you clarify a couple things?

• Is that €70 per night or for the whole weekend (and with 2 breakfasts)?
• How many participants can attend?
• How many are signed up already?

I'm going to have to pass on this one, but I'd like be interested to see comments about how it went. Hopefully this becomes a regular thing in Amsterdam / Utrecht.

Would this be the first Less Wrong meetup in Amsterdam? Sounds worth a try.