My favorite vegetable recipes:
I like the taste (yeah, this is the subjective part), and the extra calories come from things that seem healthy to me, so I don't mind.
If you cut a raw carrot to small pieces, it is a good thing to munch while watching TV.
(I also like to eat the Asian "meat and vegetables in a wok" meals, but I can't do them well at home.)
Maybe it's an acquired taste, but I think that raw vegetables are often good; cooked ones are mostly tasteless.
Seems to me that responsibility is linked to punishment... in the very wide sense of the word, including things like "someone is made to feel bad about something".
There is a desirable outcome (could be a small specific thing, or could be the entire coherently extrapolated volition of humanity), and you need to specify rules for punishment so that the outcome is satisfied or maximized.
For example, you can reduce murder by saying "the murderers will be executed". That means, the murderers will be held responsible for their crimes.
Or you could improve the profit of a company by saying "the managers will be responsible for their project being done on time and within the assigned budget".
Or you could do the heroic responsibility thing to yourself by saying "whenever a bad thing happens in the world, I will feel bad about it".
Now the choice of who "should" be responsible depends on what are your options for punishing people. Can you establish an actual law that other people will follow? Can you establish a rule in your company? Or are you limited to controlling yourself?
So the debate about responsibility is about two things: what is the best way to assign the punishments in order to maximize the desired outcome, and what punishments are actually available to you in this situation?
(This is not an exact answer, just an attempt to point approximately in the right direction.)
Probably not what you want, but another option is caching the results after computing them for the first time. If you have large enough memory, and you get the same questions asked repeatedly, only the first time will be expensive, and afterwards it will be O(1), which means that cost will converge to O(1) over time.
normal human being, just like you and me. Driven by ambition, hate, and circumstance.
Uhm, I am not driven by hate. Ambition, sometimes. Circumstances, probably all the time. Hate? I am not saying that the level is literally zero... sometimes I get angry at some people when I learn about some horrible things they are doing... but that usually doesn't last long and I switch to different thoughts; and even the moments when I am angry usually do not translate into specific actions.
We must acknowledge and confront the potential for evil in every single one of us, ourselves included.
This is widely accepted, but where is the proof? Sounds like yet another blank-slate belief. It is definitely good to reflect on your own actions, and each of us has their better and worse days, and we could have been much better or much worse under different circumstances... but that alone does not prove that the potential for evil is equally strong. Some people need to undergo lot of training, until they are capable of killing another person. Other people just do it for fun. Some people follow the commands. Other people work hard to get into the position where they could give horrible commands. Some people can do horrible things under extreme circumstances; other people are actively working on creating the circumstances when they would be allowed to do the horrible things.
the problem of governments that outsource everything to contractors and NGOs, which then fail to do the job and can't be held accountable or monitored because the government no longer has the staff or the expertise to oversee the project in detail.
I have seen this happen, both in government and in private companies. It's like people don't realize the full extent of the principal-agent problem. The solution seems easy "just outsource the task to someone else, and if you are not happy about the outcome, fire them and hire someone else". Here is what sometimes happens instead:
There are even contractors out there who create such situations on purpose; that is their actual business model. Like, they will provide you excellent customer service first, so you switch to their system, then they make sure that switching back would be too expensive for you, and then the customer service becomes crappy. (That's basically how SAP works. You pay for their system and e.g. 5 developers to help you. The first year, they will give your their best 5 developers, and the system does everything you want. So you switch your entire company to SAP. From then on, they will give you 5 junior developers - for the same price - and every little change you want now requires buying a new module and expensive customization.
With government, another problem is that the election cycle means no one is interested in making things work long-term. Switch to contractors can be done overnight (and someone can collect a bribe for that), growing your own team of experts from zero is difficult and takes years, so it almost never happens. And even if it happens by a miracle, again with a proper bribe the system can revert back overnight.
when you say you're "anti-woke", how can we tell whether that means you're against specific, recent types of administrative overreach or whether e.g. you actually want to drive gender-nonconforming people out of public life?
This feels like a false dilemma, are there no options in between? For example, I would be against specific administrative overreaches or whatever, but I am also against the general atmosphere of hate aimed at white men. I don't want to drive anyone out of anything, but I want the same courtesy to be extended to myself. What happened to the idea of fucking equality? I didn't choose my race or gender any more than any other person, so if you are going to hold that against me, expect some pushback.
It sucks that politics often becomes a battle of wide coalitions, where your choices are limited to choosing a group that includes those who hate X, or choosing a group that includes those who hate Y. Not sure what can be done about it.
In the eyes of my mentors, to whom I’d described this work, and even showed them the manuscript, I’d simply “wasted my time”, merely doing over again something that was “already known”. But I don't recall feeling any sense of disappointment.
A few days ago, I was thinking about matrices and determinants. I noticed that I know the formula for the determinant, but I still lack the feeling of what the determinant is. I played with that thought for some time, and then it occurred to me, that if you imagine the rows in the matrix as vectors in n-dimensional space, then the determinant of that matrix is the volume of the n-dimensional body whose edges are those vectors.
And suddenly it all made a fucking sense. The determinant is zero when the vectors are linearly dependent? Of course, that means that the n-dimensional body has been flattened into n-1 dimensions (or less), and therefore its volume is zero. The determinant doesn't change if you add a multiple of a row to some other row? Of course, that means moving the "top" of the n-dimensional body in a direction parallel to the "bottom", so that neither the bottom nor the height changes; of course the volume (defined as the area of the bottom multiplied by the height) stays the same. What about the determinant being negative? Oh, that just means whether the edges are "clockwise" or "counter-clockwise" in the n-dimensional space. It all makes perfect sense!
Then I checked Wikipedia... and yeah, it was already there. So much for my Nobel prize.
But it still felt fucking good. (And if I am not too lazy, one day I may write a blog article about it.)
Reinventing the wheel is not a waste of time. I will probably remember this forever, and the words "determinant of the matrix" will never feel the same. Who knows, maybe this will help me figure out something else later. And if I keep doing that, hypothetically speaking, some of those discoveries might even be original.
(The practical problem is that none of this can pay my bills.)
I get a feeling like you are trying to suggest that the AI is only dangerous because we are afraid of it. Like it's somehow our fear incarnated, and the more we fear it, the worse it will be. So the solution is to relax, and realize that this was all just a big cosmic joke. And then the AI will laugh together with us.
In other words, all you need to do for the abyss to disappear is to stop gazing in it.
I think this is not how AI works (and neither do abysses). The AI either is dangerous, or it is not; that is independent on what we think about it. It might be the case that we were fundamentally wrong about something, and actually everything will be okay. But whether that happens to be the case, doesn't depend on how relaxed we are. We could be scared shitless and ultimately nothing happens and everyone else will laugh at us. We could relax... and then drop dead at a random moment, not knowing what got us. Or any other combination.
The simultaneous attraction and rejection that a shadow-self causes is in my mind a good explanation for why so much of the rationalist community seems to converge upon the idea of "good AI to beat bad AI" (instead of, say, protesting AI companies, or lobbying to shut them down, or more direct paths to halting development).
But some people are protesting the AI companies. And I thought that the consensus of the rationalist community was that we don't know how to build the "good AI", and that we need more time to figure this out, and that everyone would benefit if we slowed down until we can reliably figure this out.
Out of the four companies you mention, three of them (Google, Meta, Microsoft/OpenAI) are big tech companies doing their business as usual: there is a new trend, they don't want to stay behind. Only Anthropic matches the pattern of "building good AI to stop bad AI".
My working definition of love is an extension of the markov blanket for the self-concept in your head to cover other conceptual objects. A thing that you love is something that you take into your self-identity. If it does well, you do well. If it is hurt, you are hurt. This explains, for example, how you can love your house or your possessions even if they are obviously non-sentient, and losing your favourite pen feels bad even if it makes no sense and the pen is clearly just a mass-produced plastic object.
Thanks for providing a specific proposal. Two problems. First, we have no idea how to make the AI love itself (in a human-like way). If the AI doesn't love itself, then it won't help much if it perceives us as parts of itself. Second, we don't actually love everything we perceive as parts of ourselves. People sometimes try to get rid of their bad habits, or trim their nails, or throw away cheap plastic objects when they outlived their purpose.
Yeah, when you remove the part about countries first agreeing to stop building data centers larger than X for the sake of survival of humankind, then it just sounds like senseless violence.
Any proposal "if X, then I would use violence against them" sounds bad if you only leave the second part.
Older software engineers often report that once they lose their current job, they can’t get new jobs and that this is because of rampant agism, others report this is not true, and it’s you in particular that sucks, or you’re seeing selection effects because most of the good ones get forced into management or start their own companies. It’s certainly not universal, but my sense is that many underestimate the downside risk of this outcome.
I am approaching 50. I can still find a job, but recently I notice that I am often the oldest developer at the workplace, and that makes me kinda nervous. People say that becoming a manager is the answer; I don't think it is a realistic option for a (self-diagnosed) aspie with ADHD, I am basically the opposite of the kind of person that I think is needed for that job. In find the workplace extremely distracting, these days open spaces are everywhere; in the past I learned new technologies at home during weekends, but now that I have small kids this is no longer an option. I don't have enough savings to retire, though I might be about halfway there (that depends on various assumptions).
I don't think that high compensation is the actual problem. I have tried working at companies that offered less, and it didn't make a difference; in my opinion the companies paid less because they were worse at selling their products, not because the work was less demanding. The correlation actually seems to be the other way round: stingy companies are trying to squeeze every bit of energy from their employees (who are often afraid to change jobs, because they believe that if they can barely do this, they wouldn't be able to handle a better paying work).
The advantage of hiring young people is that in a year, many of them become much better at their work, and half of them sucks at negotiation, so they won't notice that now they could get paid twice as much. Some of them won't even mind working unpaid overtime. If you hire an old person, what you get on day 1 is all there is.
There ‘aint no rule’ that PornHub videos need to be porn
My wife is a fan of opera, and she told me that she surprisingly often finds opera videos on porn sites. Not sure if this is because of better paying per view, or simply because the guardians of copyright focus their attention on YouTube and ignore the other parts of the internet.
Wrong.
The succession property is a part of a definition of what natural numbers are.
But the behavior under basic arithmetic operations can be defined recursively (using the succession), like:
a + 0 = a
a + s(b) = s(a + b)
a × 0 = 0
a × s(b) = (a × b) + a