All of DanArmak's Comments + Replies

It's impossible to prove that an arbitrary program, which someone else gave you, is correct. That's halting-problem equivalent, or Rice's theorem, etc.

Yes, we can prove various properties of programs we carefully write to be provable, but the context here is that a black-box executable Crowdstrike submits to Microsoft cannot be proven reliable by Microsoft.

There are definitely improvements we can make. Counting just the ones made in some other (bits of) operating systems, we could:

• Rewrite in a memory-safe language like Rust
• Move more stuff to userspace.

Addendum 2: this particular quoted comment is very wrong, and I expect this is indicative of the quality of the quoted discussion, i.e. these people do not know what they are talking about.

Luke Parrish: Microsoft designed their OS to run driver files without even a checksum and you say they aren’t responsible? They literally tried to execute a string of zeroes!

Luke Parrish: CrowdStrike is absolutely to blame, but so is Microsoft. Microsoft’s software, Windows, is failing to do extremely basic basic checks on driver files before trying to load them and

Addendum: Crowdstrike also has MacOS and Linux products, and those are a useful comparison in the matter of whether we should be blaming Microsoft.

On MacOS they don't have a kernel module (called a kext on MacOS). For two reasons; first, kexts are now disabled by default (I think you have to go to recovery mode to turn them on?) and second, the kernel provides APIs to accomplish most things without having to write a kext. So Crowdstrike doesn't need to (hypothetically) guard against malicious kexts because those are not a threat nearly as much as malicious... (read more)

Did Microsoft massively screw up by not guarding against this particular failure mode? Oh, absolutely, everyone agrees on that.

I'm sorry, this is wrong, and that everyone thinks so is also wrong - some people got this right.

Normal Windows kernel drivers are sandboxed to some extent. If a driver segfaults, it will be disabled on the next boot and the user informed; if that fails for some reason, you can tell the the computer to boot into 'safe mode', and if that fails, there is recovery mode. None of these options require the manual, tedious, error-prone... (read more)

About the impossibility result, if I understand correctly, that paper says two things (I'm simplifying and eliding a great deal):

1. You can take a recognizable, possibly watermarked output of one LLM, use a different LLM to paraphrase it, and not be able to detect the second LLM's output as coming from (transforming) the first LLM.

2. In the limit, any classifier that tries to detect LLM output can be beaten by an LLM that is sufficiently good at generating human-like output. There's evidence that a LLMs can soon become that good. And since emulating human

OpenAI post with more details here.

Charles P. Steinmetz saw a two-hour working day on the horizon—he was the scientist who made giant power possible

What is giant power? I can't figure this out.

So we can imagine AI occupying the most "cushy" subset of former human territory

We can definitely imagine it - this is a salience argument - but why is it at all likely? Also, this argument is subject to reference class tennis: humans have colonized much more and more diverse territory than other apes, or even all other primates.

Once AI can flourish without ongoing human support (building and running machines, generating electricity, reacting to novel environmental challenges), what would plausibly limit AI to human territory, let alone "cushy" human te... (read more)

Thanks for pointing this out!

A few corollaries and alternative conclusions to the same premises:

1. There are two distinct interesting things here: a magic cross-domain property that can be learned, and an inner architecture that can learn it.
2. There may be several small efficient architectures. The ones in human brains may not be like the ones in language models. We have plausibly found one efficient architecture; this is not much evidence about unrelated implementations.
3. Since the learning is transferable to other domains, it's not language specific. Large

Thanks! This, together with gjm's comment, is very informative.

How is the base or fundamental frequency chosen? What is special about the standard ones?

the sinking of the Muscovy

Is this some complicated socio-political ploy denying the name Moskva / Moscow and going back to the medieval state of Muscovy?

I'm a moral anti-realist; it seems to me to be a direct inescapable consequence of materialism.

I tried looking at definitions of moral relativism, and it seems more confused than moral realism vs. anti-realism. (To be sure there are even more confused stances out there, like error theory...)

Should I take it that Peterson and Harris are both moral realists and interpret their words in that light? Note that this wouldn't be reasoning about what they're saying, for me, it would be literally interpreting their words, because people are rarely precise, and mora... (read more)

Also known as: the categories were made for man.

When Peterson argues religion is a useful cultural memeplex, he is presumably arguing for all of (Western monotheistic) religion. This includes a great variety of beliefs, rituals, practices over space and time - I don't think any of these have really stayed constant across the major branches of Judaism, Christianity and Islam over the last two thousand years. If we discard all these incidental, mutable characteristics, what is left as "religion"?

One possible answer (I have no idea if Peterson would agree): the structure of having shared community beliefs ... (read more)

They are both pro free speech and pro good where "good" is what a reasonable person would think of as "good".

I have trouble parsing that definition. You're defining "good" by pointing at "reasonable". But people who disagree on what is good, will not think each other reasonable.

I have no idea what actual object-level concept of "good" you meant. Can you please clarify?

For example, you go on to say:

They both agree that religion has value.

I'm not sure whether religion has (significant, positive) value. Does that make me unreasonable?

Epistemic status: wild guessing:

1. If the US has submarine locators (or even a theory or a work-in-progress), it has to keep them secret. The DoD or Navy might not want to reveal them to any Representatives. This would prevent them from explaining to those Representatives why submarine budgets should be lowered in favor of something else.

2. A submarine locator doesn't stop submarines by itself; you still presumably need to bring ships and/or planes to where the submarines are. If you do this ahead of time and just keep following the enemy subs around, they

Now write the scene where Draco attempts to convince his father to accept Quirrel points in repayment of the debt.

"You see, Father, Professor Quirrel has promised to grant any school-related wish within his power to whoever has the most Quirrel points. If Harry gives his points to me, I will have the most points by far. Then I can get Quirrel to teach students that blood purism is correct, or that it would be rational to follow the Dark Lord if he returns, or to make me the undisputed leader of House Slytherin. That is worth far more than six thousand gall... (read more)

I don't see an advantage

A potential advantage of inactivated virus vaccine is that it can raise antibodies for all viral proteins and not just a subunit of the spike protein, which would make it harder for future strains to evade the immunity. I think this is also the model implicitly behind this claim that natural immunity (from being infected with the real virus) is stronger than the immunity gained from subunit (eg mRNA) vaccines. (I make no claim that that study is reliable, and just on priors it probably should be ignored.)

direct sources are more and more available to the public... But simultaneously get less and less trustworthy.

The former helps cause the latter. Sources that aren't available to the public, or are not widely read by the public for whatever reason, don't face the pressure to propagandize - either to influence the public, and/or to be seen as ideologically correct by the public.

Of course influencing the public only one of several drives to distort or ignore the truth, and less public fora are not automatically trustworthy.

Suppose that TV experience does influence dreams - or the memories or self-reporting of dreams. Why would it affect specifically and only color?

Should we expect people who watch old TV to dream in low resolution and non-surround sound? Do people have poor reception and visual static in their black and white dreams? Would people who grew up with mostly over the border transmissions dream in foreign languages, or have their dreams subtitled or overdubbed? Would people who grew up with VCRs have pause and rewind controls in their dreams?

Some of these effects... (read more)

Epistemic status: anecdote.

Most of the dreams I've ever had (and remembered in the morning) were not about any kind of received story (media, told to me, etc). They were all modified versions of my own experiences, like school, army, or work, sometimes fantastically distorted, but recognizably about my experiences. A minority of dreams has been about stories (eg a book I read), usually from a first person point of view (eg. a self insert into the book).

So for me, dreams are stories about myself. And I wonder: if these people had their dreams influenced by ... (read more)

He's saying that it's extremely hard to answer those questions about edge detectors. We have little agreement on whether we should be concerned about the experiences of bats or insects, and it's similarly unobvious whether we should worry about the suffering of edge detectors.

Being concerned implies 1) something has experiences 2) they can be negative / disliked in a meaningful way 3) we morally care about that.

I'd like to ask about the first condition: what is the set of things that might have experience, things whose experiences we might try to unders... (read more)

Title typo: cvoid.

Let's take the US government as a metaphor. Instead of saying it's composed of the legislative, executive, and judicial modules, Kurzban would describe it as being made up of modules such as a White House press secretary

Both are useful models of different levels of the US government. Is the claim here that there is no useful model of the brain as a few big powerful modules that aggregate sub-modules? Or is it merely that others posit merely a few large modules, whereas Kurzban thinks we must model both small and large agents at once?

We don't ask "what

Finding the percentage of "immigrants" is misleading, since it's immigrants from Mexico and Central America who are politically controversial, not generic "immigrants" averaged over all sources.

I'm no expert on American immigration issues, but I presume this is because most immigrants come in through the (huge) south land border, and are much harder for the government to control than those coming in by air or sea.

However, I expect immigrants from any other country outside the Americas would be just as politically controversial if large numbers of them s... (read more)

immigrants are barely different from natives in their political views, and they adopt a lot of the cultural values of their destination country.

The US is famous for being culturally and politically polarized. What does it even mean for immigrants to be "barely different from natives" politically? Do they have the same (polarized) spread of positions? Do they all fit into one of the existing political camps without creating a new one? Do they all fit into the in-group camp for Caplan's target audience?

And again:

[Caplan] finds that immigrants are a tin

bad configurations can be selected against inside the germinal cells themselves or when the new organism is just a clump of a few thousand cells

Many genes and downstream effects are only expressed (and can be selected on) after birthing/hatching, or only in adult organisms. This can include whole organs, e.g. mammal fetuses don't use their lungs in the womb. A fetus could be deaf, blind, weak, slow, stupid - none of this would stop it from being carried to term. An individual could be terrible at hunting, socializing, mating, raising grandchildren - non... (read more)

When you get an allele from sex, there are two sources of variance. One is genes your (adult) partner has that are different from yours. The other is additional de novo mutations in your partner's gametes.

The former has already undergone strong selection, because it was part of one (and usually many) generations' worth of successfully reproducing organisms. This is much better than getting variance from random mutations, which are more often bad than good, and can be outright fatal.

Selecting through many generations of gametes, like (human) sperm do, isn't... (read more)

I propose using computational resources as the "reference" good.

I don't understand the implications of this, can you please explain / refer me somewhere? How is the GDP measurement resulting from this choice going to be different from another choice like control of matter/energy? Why do we even need to make a choice, beyond the necessary assumption that there will still be a monetary economy (and therefore a measurable GDP)?

In the hypothetical future society you propose, most value comes from non-material goods.

That seems very likely, but it's not a... (read more)

I think that most people would prefer facing a 10e-6 probability of death to paying 1000 USD.

The sum of 1000 USD comes from the average wealth of people today. Using (any) constant here encodes the assumption that GDP per capita (wealth times population) won't keep growing.

If we instead suppose a purely relative limit, e.g. that a person is willing to pay a 1e-6 part of their personal wealth to avoid a 1e6 chance of death, then we don't get a bound on total wealth.

you imagine that the rate at which new "things" are produced hits diminishing returns

The rate at which new atoms (or matter/energy/space more broadly) are added will hit diminishing returns, at the very least due to speed of light.

The rate at which new things are produced won't necessarily hit diminishing returns because we can keep cannibalizing old things to make better new things. Often, re-configurations of existing atoms produce value without consuming new resources except for the (much smaller) amount of resources used to rearrange them. If I inve... (read more)

I agree, and want to place a slightly different emphasis. A "better" education system is a two-place function; what's better for a poor country is different from what's better for a rich Western one. And education in Western countries looked different back when they were industrializing and still poor by modern standards.

(Not that the West a century ago is necessarily a good template to copy. The point is that the education systems rich countries have today weren't necessarily a part of what made them rich in the first place.)

A lot (some think most) of Wes... (read more)

Great point, thanks!

Please see my other reply here. Yes, value is finite, but the number of possible states of the universe is enormously large, and we won't explore it in 8000 years. The order of magnitude is much bigger.

(Incidentally, our galaxy is ~ 100,000 light years across; so even expanding to cover it would take much longer than 8000 years, and that would be creating value the old-fashioned way by adding atoms, but it wouldn't support continued exponential growth. So "8000 years" and calculations based off the size of the galaxy shouldn't be mixed together. But the or... (read more)

in their expected lifespan

Or even in the expected lifetime of the universe.

perhaps we don’t need to explore all combinations of atoms to be sure that we’ve achieved the limit of value.

That's a good point, but how would we know? We would need to prove that a given configuration is of maximal (and tile-able) utility without evaluating the (exponentially bigger) number of configurations of bigger size. And we don't (and possibly can't, or shouldn't) have an exact (mathematical) definition of a Pan-Human Utility Function.

However, a proof isn't needed to... (read more)

In the limit you are correct: if a utility function assigns a value to every possible arrangement of atoms, then there is some maximum value, and you can't keep increasing value forever without adding atoms because you will hit the maximum at some point. An economy can be said to be "maximally efficient" when value can't be added by rearranging its existing atoms, and we must add atoms to produce more value.

However, physics provides very weak upper bounds on the possible value (to humans) of a physical system of given size, because the number of possible p... (read more)

The OP's argument is general: it says essentially that (economic) value is bounded linearly by the number of atoms backing the economy. Regardless of how the atoms are translated to value. This is an impossibility argument. My rebuttal was also general, saying that value is not so bounded.

Any particular way of extracting value, like electronics, usually has much lower bounds in practice than 'linear in the amount of atoms used' (even ignoring different atomic elements). So yes, today's technology that depends on 'rare' earths is bounded by the accessible a... (read more)

The rate of value production per atom can be bounded by physics. But the amount of value ascribed to the thing being produced is only strictly bounded by the size of the number (representing the amount of value) that can be physically encoded, which is exponential in the number of atoms, and not linear.

By "proportionately more" I meant more than the previous economic-best use of the same material input, which the new invention displaced (modulo increasing supply). For example, the amount of value derived by giving everyone (every home? every soldier? every car?) a radio is much greater than any other value the same amount of copper, zinc etc. could have been used for before the invention of radio. We found a new way to get more value from the same material inputs.

For material outputs (radio sets, telegraph wire, computers), of course material inputs are ... (read more)

GDP growth is measured in money, a measure of value. Value does not have to be backed by a proportional amount of matter (or energy, space or time) because we can value things as much as we like - more than some constant times utilon per gram second.

Suppose I invent an algorithm that solves a hard problem and sell it as a service. The amount people will be willing to pay for it - and the amount the economy grows - is determined by how much people want it and how much money there is, but nobody cares how many new atoms I used to implement it. If I displace ... (read more)

Sorry, who is GBS?

Also: if Orwell thought vegeterians expected to gain 5 years of life, that would be an immense effect well worth some social disruption. And boo Orwell for mocking them merely for being different and not for any substance of the way they were different. It's not as if people eating different food intrudes on others (or even makes them notice, most of the time), unlike e.g. nudists, or social-reforming feminists.

I strongly agree that the methodology should have presented up front. lsusr's response is illuminative and gives invaluable context.

But my first reaction to your comment was to note the aggressive tone and what feels like borderline name-calling. This made me want to downvote and ignore it at first, before I thought for a minute and realized that yes, on the object level this is a very important point. It made it difficult for me to engage with it.

So I'd like to ask you what exactly you meant (because it's easy to mistake tone on the internet) and why. Cal... (read more)

In addition to this there is the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist and feminist in England.

It's interesting to see how this aged. 85 years later, sex-maniacs and quacks are still considered 'cranks'; pacifism and nudists are not well tolerated by most societies, whereas sandal... (read more)

The link to "Israeli data" is wrong; it goes to the tweet by @politicalmath showing the Houston graph you inlined later.

1. Does the cost to get a drug approved depend on how novel or irreplaceable it might be? Did it cost the same amount to approve Silenor for insomnia as it would cost to approve a really novel drug much better at combating insomnia than any existing one?

   If the FDA imposes equal costs on any new drug, then it's not "imposing [costs] on a company trying to [...] parasitize the healthcare system". It's neutrally imposing costs on all companies developing drugs. And this probably does a lot more harm on net (fewer drugs marketed) then it does good (punishes so

Bullshit is what comes out of the mouth of someone who values persuasion over truth. [...] The people with a need to obscure the truth are those with a political or social agenda.

Almost all humans, in almost all contexts, value persuasion over truth and have a social agenda. Condemning all human behavior that is not truth-seeking is condemning almost all human behavior. This is a strong (normative? prescriptive? judgmental?) claim that should be motivated, but you seem to take it for given.

Persuasion is a natural and desirable behavior in a social, coop... (read more)