GavinB

The relevance to hackers is that unlike most fantasy where spells are cast with hand motions, magic words, or spell ingredients, there's actually an explanation for why that works and makes sense.

https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Sorcerers-Intern-Humorous-Fantas...

This would indicate a few possibilities:

1. Expanding alien civilizations are relatively low impact and don't collect all of the energy of stars in ways that are visible to our current telescopes.

2. We are a very early civilization, civs are fairly rare, and we're relatively alone in the parts of the universe that we can see. Civs that are expanding in a grabby fashion started less recently in years than their distance in light years.

3. Aliens expand at close to the speed of light, so there are a lot out there but we won't see them until they're almost here.

4. Something that we have already noticed is actually evidence of grabby aliens, but it is happening in every direction so we assume that it is a natural phenomenon, because it is so uniform.

At the very least, it seems likely that we either we are alone in the galaxy, or expansion is very slow. The idea of "expanding in a bubble of influence close to the speed of light" seems implausible to me, just because of the vast amounts of energy required to accelerate and decelerate to relativistic speeds, not to mention protecting the cargo in transit--when you're flying at .9c, almost every other piece of matter in the universe is flying towards you at you at .9c. Accelerating tiny nanomachine von Neumann probes might be a solution, but how would they decelerate enough to not be destroyed on arrival?

It's all fascinating to think about, at least.

I do suspect that this pathological behavior could be trained out with additional fine tuning, but likely not without slightly diminishing the model's overall ability.

That said, I disagree with the assertions made in your post. ChatGPT is a great tool for saving time in doing simple research and calculations, as long as you double check it. It wasn't a year ago, but it is now.

I know, I'm scared by it, too!

Total Sky Area=4π×(2π360)^2×60^2 = 148,510,660 square arcminutes (you can also look this up easily)

NIRCam has 9.7 square arcminutes FOV (Yes, I double checked this)

NIRCam resolution is 2048 × 2048 x 2 modules for 2.4–5.0 µm (there are lots of different cameras and modules you could look at to make this estimate, but for a sense of magnitude this will work. If you looked at 0.6–2.3 µm that would be roughly 4x as many pixels for the 8 modules, I think? Again, napkin math for fun.)

Total FoVs Needed = 148,510,660.8 / 9.7 ≈ 15,310,377 FoVs

Total Pixels = (2048×2048×2)×15,310,377 ≈ 128,432,754,096,706 pixels

LLMs used to be quite awful at math. Now they're solving quite complicated problems with sophisticated plugins. This is a simple and straightforward calculation, just getting the FOV and its resolution and then projecting that onto a sphere. And, yes, I probably should have posted the full calculation, it's definitely more interesting to see it all written out.

Order of magnitude is 15 million images, 128 trillion pixels.

It would take 970 years of continuous operation to complete.

If your entire business is in the cloud, you can give an AI access to everything with a single sign or some passwords. If half is on the cloud and half is local, that's very annoying to have all in-context for your AI assistant. And there's no way we're getting everything locally stored again at this point!

But yes, another random thing GUI for generating marketing copy from GPT3 isn't a good long term play.

Even in this pandemic, we've (correctly, I would say) basically thrown out important principles like freedom of movement and freedom of association during lockdowns. I think that allowing volunteers to put themselves at a relatively low risk to speed up vaccine trials would have been a relatively small transgression, compared to the lockdowns and travel bans (which, again, I think were justified).

But I do take your point.

It's possible that I'm wrong! Maybe we invested everything possible and couldn't have done significantly more. But it's striking that this article doesn't even address that question.

Basically, I haven't seen any evidence that this take is wrong: https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2021/01/28/covid-bill-gates-and...

And then, yes, a lot of those factories would have ended up sold for scrap (or mothballed for future pandemics or mutations). But the few that worked then save trillions of dollars of value and hundreds of thousands of lives.

It's a simple matter of calculating expected values and investing accordingly. But thats not how our civilization works.

We did have it, we just didn't know which one it was. And we refused to risk any individual life in order to potentially save hundreds of thousands or more.

We also could have invested single digit billions early on to build capacity for all of these different potential vaccines, but we decided to play if "safe" and will now be spending over a trillion again to try to save the economy.

I don't blame the pharma companies for this. Our government and medical establishment was not intellectually prepared to make the hard decisions required to save us. And we need to be building momentum to learn how to do better.

"We tried to prove this hypothesis wrong and could not" is the main thing you want a study to do. Having everyone try to prove your hypothesis wrong, and failing, is the main way that science advances.

Hopefully either way the amount of news coverage will be enough that most people will get informed about it, in a way that they don't for most issues.

I do agree that calling most people "sheep" is uncharitable, and would add that calling aggressive conformists "stupid" is also not accurate or productive. They might be making stupid decisions, but they're not stupid people.

Even in a bi-polar conflict, the threat of mutually assured destruction helps to enforce official and unofficial rules of engagement. The Cold War demonstrated that quite effectively.

With the equivalent of a budget of several hundred thousand dollars and custom hardware, any commercially available equipment can probably be hacked.

I'd imagine that there are very few commercial technologies that couldn't be hacked if you can get research on a working copy and throw "several thousand total man hours" of highly qualified researchers at it, including building a custom device. And the hack has already been patched!

And then the end payout is that you can get into hotel rooms, which are regularly accessed by low-paid hotel employees and generally considered not a secure place to leave valuables—there's a reason for the safes in the closet of every hotel room.

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Also, it's unclear what court you're supposed to file in. I did some research and, at least in New York, you're supposed to file a claim where the defendant does business. I put my local county small claims court in (New York County Civil Court), but I'm not sure if that was right. Maybe because Equifax is such a big company doing business everywhere I can file in my local court? Otherwise it looks like I would need to file in Atlanta, where their headquarters is.

Add enough complicated if statements and you've got a rough definition of a human!

If your development is in any way exploratory or creative, my experience is that hourly billing frees everyone up to focus on making the best product. It also lets the developers and designers be creative and figure out the best way to build something, rather than having to build exactly what was drawn up by some idiot (usually me!) who isn't actually the one doing the work.

Yes, you have to trust that the hourly worker isn't wasting your time. Yes, they may have to raise their rates as they get more experienced and more busy.

The lesson: break the rules and grow so fast that by the time regulators catch up, you can put on a show of reforming and still keep most of the value that you created.

Admirable disruption or horrible cheating? I don't know how to feel about it.

It does seem like we should stop counting how many transistors fit in how much space. At this point, size isn't the limiting factor. Tracking either the cost of a unit of processing power or the total processing power of the planet would be more meaningful in benchmarking technological progress.

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