LESSWRONG
LW

All of det's Comments + Replies

What if a tech company forced you to move to NYC?
det1110

assuming you're talking about futures in which AI hasn't catastrophic outcomes, no one will be forcibly mandated to do anything

This isn't clear to me: does every option that involves someone being forcibly mandated to do something qualify as a catastrophe? Conceptually, there seems to be a lot of room between the two.

I understand the analogy in Katja's post as being: even in a great post-AGI world, everyone is forced to move to a post-AGI world. That world has higher GDP/capita, but it doesn't necessarily contain the specific things people value about thei... (read more)

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Big-endian is better than little-endian
det30

But Hebrew and Arabic speakers read numbers left to right (even though they read everything else right to left). So they treat the numbers as big-endian.

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2philh
Ah, thanks, I see now. You're saying that even if it's written with the small end before the big end according to the way the words flow, the direction of eye scanning and of mentally parsing and of giving a name to the number is still big end before small end? Similarly I might write a single word sdrawkcab in English text but the reader would still read it first-letter-to-last-letter. Curious, when handwriting, what order do you write in?
Big-endian is better than little-endian
det114

More evidence in favor of big-endian: In modern Hebrew and Arabic, numbers are written in the same direction as in English: e.g. 

.שטחה של המדינה הוא 22,072 קמ"ר 

As a native English speaker (and marginal Hebrew reader), I read each word in that Hebrew sentence right-to-left and then read the number left-to-right.

I never considered the possibility that native Hebrew speakers might read the number from right to left, in a little-endian way. But my guess is (contra lsusr) nobody does this: when my keyboard is in Hebrew-entry mode, it still writes num... (read more)

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2philh
Isn't this showing that Hebrew and Arabic write numbers little-endian? Surely big-versus-little-endian isn't about left-to-right or right-to-left, it's about how numbers flow relative to word reading order.
Epistemic Hell
det30

SMTM has a follow-up post that goes into how confusing citrus classifications are.

In particular:

  • The British called all citrus "lime" or "lemon" interchangeably (like you say).
  • Lemons can be green and limes can be yellow, so you can't clearly distinguish based on color.
  • We still use the word "lime" for a bunch of different kinds of citrus, so we're not that much better.
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AI Timelines
det*100

I was surprised by this number (I would have guessed total power consumption was a much lower fraction of total solar energy), so I just ran some quick numbers and it basically checks out.

  • This document claims that "Averaged over an entire year, approximately 342 watts of solar energy fall upon every square meter of Earth. This is a tremendous amount of energy—44 quadrillion (4.4 x 10^16) watts of power to be exact."
  • Our World in Data says total energy consumption in 2022 was 179,000 terawatt-hours

Plugging this in and doing some dimensional analysis, it look... (read more)

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