All of jhuffman's Comments + Replies

People that code at 60 wpm without even stopping to consider their algorithms, data structures or APIs, but manage at the end of an hour to have a tight, unit-tested, efficient and readable module.

I've never seen this or even imagined it can happen. I can't even write comments or pseudo-code that fast (without pause) because I can't design that fast.

I interpret this as pandering to people who cannot presently comprehend how you can be alive without a body. I doubt it is a serious plan. But I think its more likely there is no plan to do anything but get funded.

So you would contrive to make it illegal and/or impossible for an upload to do any productive work? At least none that they receive more benefit from than the average of all others?

I still find myself tempted to make fun of people who are just today learning the lesson of that comic - e.g. those original down-voters.

This "mechanism" provides no facility for spontaneous generation of new matter and energy resources.

You probably shouldn't spend 100% of your time exploring even very high quality counter arguments. Rather, you should probably spend some time on it.

I'm interested in your ideas for such an app - how would you interact with it? The only ideas I come up with amount to window dressing on a journal.

Yes, 100% is my expectation for both outcomes as well. Otherwise it wouldn't be a fork.

Other issue is that it is a hostage situation, and even in normal human hostage situations, whenever you should, or should not give the money to the hostage holder, depends solely to whenever you have higher probability that the hostages will be killed (or tortured) if money are given, than if money are not given.

Actually in real life, we also consider the future consequences of unspecified potential future hostage takers who may be motivated to take hostages if they see a hostage taker paid off. This is ostensibly why the USG will not (directly) pay of... (read more)

I'm sure this is true in some cases but not all of them. I've barely ever talked to anyone about my own fall from grace as a child and then again after a relapse in my teens, it was almost a completely introspective experience although what is interesting is that my relapse into Christianity was very much a social product. Still, atheism has never been an important part of my identity. In my mind the fact that I don't watch televised sporting contests sets me further apart from my peers than the fact that I'm an atheist.

I de-converted my wife just by being an atheist and never making a big deal about it one way or another; I think she just needed to see an example of someone getting along fine without the theism.

Comes off as transparent and condescending to me. I'm sure I can tell the difference between my dead grandmother signalling me with spoons and my own memories, thank you very much.

Yes but these effects can be very short-lived.

On the subject of 2.

People have speculated "could a government stop Bitcoin".

The answer is an unqualified "Yes", and the project will tell you the same thing. All it takes is having over 51% of the computing power of the world's mining operations.

A fork of Bitcoin called CoildCoin was killed by Luke-Jr. He explains his reasons for it a few pages into that thread, but basically he considered CoiledCoin to be fraudulent and/or a threat to Bitcoin. He claims he used only his own resources but its possible he used a large mining pool he o... (read more)

Yes but this trade benefits both parties. While the labor is "cheap" it pays better than if there weren't so many foreign companies building factories in that labor market. So in terms of aggregate quality of life I do not think this can be much of an objection in itself - the fact that all sorts of exploitation typically accompanies such trade not withstanding.

I understand what you are saying though: the total cost in person-hours to maintain a particular standard of living should maybe be taken into account - although I think this can be misle... (read more)

Maybe but its still easily 50 years away. People are "messy" but they are so cheap and you need so few of them - there is no capital tied up in them at all its just a month-to-month expense. Even if you lease equipment you are still paying for the cost of the capital tied up in it. The diminishing returns for automating such a small cost will ensure its continuity for quite some time I think.

Are you saying we should not buy things from poor people?

I think a lot of people make this mistake, to think that "very bad things" is equivalently bad to extinction - or even is extinction. It is unlikely that large scale nuclear war will extinguish the species, it is far beyond unlikely that global warning would extinguish humans. It is extremely unlikely large scale biological weapons usage by terrorists or states would extinguish humanity. But because we know for a certain fact that these things could happen and have even come close to happening or are beginning to happen, and because they are so ... (read more)

All these labor saving devices, even factories, are integrated by humans. While the productivity per worker skyrockets (fewer workers needed per X units of output), there is no factory that runs without people who do generally very easy tasks that are very difficult to automate.

The summer after high school I worked in a spray bottle factory. Yes, we made the spray nozzles like come on a bottle of windex. My job was to keep the bins full of the little parts that fed into the machine that assembled them. I also helped unload the boxes of the parts from the c... (read more)

I think that may the only job that could be safe for a given length of time. Eventually what you own will be superseded by something owned by someone else, and what you own will be worthless. If you are constantly investing in different products, markets and technologies you might stay ahead of it for a long time but that isn't what most people think of as a "safe job". I think what people are asking for in a "safe job" does not and will not exist.

The set of average european noblemen from 500 years ago does not include 8th century anyones. Yes, I am aware that different people hold different opinions. You asked a very speculative question about what an average member might think. So, thats all I have to say about it.

GPG seems to be gaining mindshare. It is an open-source set of libraries and command line tools that inherits a lot of the interface from PGP (which is proprietary).

I have used the Cryptophane interface on windows and it makes it pretty easy to generate keys and manage them in your local keystore as well as to sign, encrpyt and decrypt arbitrary text. This would get tedious if you did a lot of email though but based on what you described I think it would work well for you.

Here is a link to other front-end tools for GPG: http://www.gnupg.org/related_software/frontends.html

We are not discussing what I think are good things. We are discussing what an average European nobleman 500 years ago might think. I think they would be pleased to hear how much more straightforward it is to buy influence these days, and how unlikely it is that buying that from the wrong person is likely to end up with your head in a basket.

We are talking about a specific time and place. 500 years ago in Europe a lot of duels were still deadly.

Also, just because duels may have been necessary for gaining and maintaining status at that time doesn't mean that individuals would prefer that the most successful status seeking strategies were so dangerous. Today, you do not risk your life in the status games, and yes I think that would appeal to many average noblemen even 500 years ago.

The wealthy elite is sharing power?

With each other, yes.

I hate to admit it but sometimes I hope that is what I'm doing.

Yes but one of the reasons this is true is we tend to greatly discount all the suffering for ourselves that has been alleviated. Even if we are cynical, there is still less suffering.

They might approve of the elite not being driven by boredom to constantly murder each other in useless duels. They might approve of the wealthy elite sharing the power rather than consolidating it with a king or emperor. They'd probably approve of Cinemax After Dark.

What is the point of this?

I agree with deleting Q5 and Q6 because not only would I not expect useful responses but also because it may come off as "extremist" if any respondents are not already familiar with UFAI concepts (or if they are familiar and overtly dismissive of them).

Thanks for writing this, it is a very good analysis of what I sometimes find to be a pretty creepy trend. It helps me understand some of my reservations about this story link that was posted recently.

History is full of new things coming to pass, but they have never yet led to utopia.

This is not convincing because 10,000 years is a pretty small sample size.

This article isn't about intelligence, its about innovation. He's talking specifically about the "lightbulb moment" - the inspriation part of invention. I don't think there is anything at all original about the article except the tortured analogy to evolution.

Well, I don't know how other programmers do things, but what I do is I create models at various levels of abstractions, and play with those models until it occurs to me what ought to happen next. Like, I draw on the whiteboard with someone, and we generate all the known solutions we have and usually a known solution or pattern just needs to be adapted. So we're copying. Often, the adaptions aren't immediately obvious when you go down a couple levels and start actually coding it, and so I play around with a couple of different ideas, or maybe I'm guided by ... (read more)

It is very presumptuous of you to assume that I have an intiative like this. What I was really asking you is if there is any utilons offset that would change your mind - but I guess that really just amounts to asking if you are a utilitarian.

I suppose that is one thing. I've been trying to figure out exactly what it is that bothers me about it, and I think my problem is that it suggests that Transhumanists are looking for some authoritative feedback that they are on the right path. Not that anyone would confuse this story for such feedback - but if it fills a hole then I guess I'm not happy to find out that I or anyone else in the target audience has a hole there for it fill.

Yes I did, thanks!

Yeah I can just imagine the coyote thinking "oh weird I'm running away from this snake and yiping. I wonder what thats all about.".

I agree let's euphemise them.

I've heard it said that animal cruelty should be avoided for what it does to us as the perpetrator more than for what it is actually doing to the animal.

What if we sold African hunting licenses for enough money that for each victim, enough money would be raised for a charity that would save two African children's lives?

I think many intelligent people will start with a bias that they are smarter than the average of a market, but the idea of risking property maybe boosts our awareness of the uncertainties we have about our own knowledge.

Yes this is nice. I have some thoughts about why some people interested in Transhumanism will find it interesting and compelling. The reasons are not complimentary, though.

The price itself doesn't indicate hyper-deflation. That price could be the product of years of single digit deflation. Hyper-deflation I think can only happen if there is a run on most real goods - where people are literally in a panic to exchange their goods for rapidly decreasing numbers of bitcoins. Otherwise how would it feed on itself the way hyper-inflation does?

Under hyperinflation, people tend to run around with wheelbarrows of banknotes rather than reverting to barter. I'll have to think about it some more.

Hyperinflation only happens precisely because people have less and less interest in wheelbarrows full of bank notes. The reason it feeds on itself is that people desperately want to turn their notes into real goods or exchange for more stable currencies. That lowers the value of the notes even further since there are more notes chasing the same amount of desirable goods.

I'm not sure a hyper-deflation can r... (read more)

I'm curious, are you still mining? Also, are you living in a dorm with fixed electricity cost?

I do not think the transactions are free even now, it is just that they are spread out across the entire money supply rather than charged only to the participants in the transaction. The cost of the block are the 50 coins added to the money supply, which slightly decreases the value of every other coin.

Maybe this whole article is a stealthy way to assert that p-zombies are a meaningful idea.

Supply of labor decreases, driving up costs, driving inflation? Consumer spending decreases, lowering cost, reducing inflation? All things being equal changing a population should not change per-capita GDP (figured without the cryo-sleep people.) The sleeper's capital is dead money - not exerting any outside influence on resource allocation assuming the investment goals of their capital funds are sufficiently general to maintain a risk-adjusted rate of return.

I'm suspicious that this entire [Forbidden Topic] is a (fairly deep) marketing ploy.

Doesn't seem that relevant considering we're discussing the pro's and con's of "immortality". In any case my point was just that some people like children enough to want them at that rate.

If I can have one child every decade for eighty years, maybe I'd like to have eight children. As it is now, it would only be two.

If the desire for it became so widespread that it was a major social need in the general population

And if most people were even modestly rational...