Given so many shared premises, it's puzzling to me why Egan seems to bear so much antipathy towards "us"
This is a fairly well-documented phenomenon: the narcissism of small differences.
Also:
the OpenPhil people and the MIRI people and the Vassarites and ... &c. are all totally different and in fact hate each other's guts
is clearly an instance of the same phenomenon.
they prefer deepseek for erotic RPs? [T]hat seems kind of disturbing to me.
I've not been following these people, and only know Pliny for his jailbreaking prompts, so I don't have context for this remark. Why would this be disturbing? Is it worry about China overtaking the US, open models competing favorably with closed ones, or that LLMs are being used for such unsafe[1] activities at all?
Due to copyright infringement, terms-of-service violation, existential risk, nonconsensual/underage sexual activity, catastrophic harms, or some such bullshit.
Assuming I've understood your toy model correctly, if you add that due the solar competition during the day, the nuclear plant only sells half of what it used to during the day, it'd need to raise the night price to 195% to keep revenue fixed, and now the average price is up.
I think this would be missing the point. If it were "smart" like you describe, I definitely wouldn't buy it, and I wouldn't use it even if got it for free: I'd just get an app on my phone. What I want from such an object is infallibility, and the dumber it is, the closer it's likely to get to that ideal.
Are you describing a stopwatch?
If you can get it to run off of ambient light with some built-in solar panels (like a calculator), yes, I would buy such a thing for ~$20.
Yes, they do. People also amuse themselves from beyond the grave by arranging for their deaths to look like murders before killing themselves. Or are so overcome by remorse at fabricating lies about their beloved friends to the feds that they encase their feet in concrete and throw themselves into nearby lakes without thinking about how it'd look. Or forget their secret passwords to authenticate their suicide notes and decide it's too much trouble to retrieve it.
So sure, I agree there are reasons why a death that strongly looks like murder might still be suicide. But that doesn't address my position that if you can broadcast the message that you have no intention to kill yourself in the clear with perfect authentication, and still not be sufficiently convincing that your imminent death isn't suicide, elaborate schemes with passwords or cryptographic hashes don't do anything.
How is this better than stating explicitly that you're not going to commit suicide?
a good fully uncensored image generator that’s practical to run locally with only reasonable amounts of effort
Depending on what you consider reasonable (or what you consider "censored"), try ComfyUI with models (and LoRAs) of your choice from Civit AI. A word of warning: are you sure you want what you're asking for?
It's almost always only single-blind: the reviewers usually know who the authors are.