rad88

That hardly strikes me as more obvious, to say the least.

But then again perhaps no thing has ever struck me at all.

I'm saying that it's unscientific nonsense. Bolstrom has predicted that the number of people potentially in the future is between approximately 0 and 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. This isn't an estimate that can or should factor into any decision at all. 100B people are going to live in the 21st century. Worry about them.

Actual people are vastly outnumbered by entropy fluctuations in the long run, according to any number of valid cosmological models. Their total population is greater than 10^35 by far, and does not depend on whether superintelligence is possible or likely to destroy the actual human race. That question makes no difference to almost every human who will ever have a thought or feeling.

You could say, well, that's just a theory -- and it is a dubious one, indeed. But it's far more established by statistics and physical law than the numbers Bolstrom throws out.

It's a one sentence statement about nonspecific enormous risks, calling for something to be done about them. It's vague.

This seems obviously written and signed in the context of the emerging capabilities of large language models. Would you agree? Would you say that those are the problem? Or anything like them?

This is the kind of "concreteness" that is needed, because the statement as written is completely useless. And it requires explanation, because the company is saying that they're working on something like the atomic bomb. Really not a bad idea to demand to know what they mean by that, and you shouldn't assume that they're talking about the kind of notions popularized on the blogs of Eliezer et al. These are people who actually work in the field.

It doesn't seem that crazy. Working from a simpler analogy first -- if an alien can read 95% of written English, but completely mischaracterizes the remaining 5%, would a reasonable scientist conclude that they can't read at all and are just guessing randomly?

No, and it's indeed unscientific to proclaim from this something like, "there is no way that we could write differently so that the alien characterizes it better".

We know some more about LLMs than we do aliens. The LLM is a neural network whose parameters have been optimize to reduce the volume of errors it makes on inputs taken from a bunch of enormous datasets, and a smaller reward model.

We have to add to your analogy then, that it's somehow known the alien speaks English on their own planet remarkably well. It is still not perfectly correct, but when they have to describe something on their own planet, they can do it more correctly than they generally can given the same task on Earth.

And again, it would be totally unscientific to conclude that because of this, there is no way the alien can talk about earthly objects or ideas. The impulse of the mere engineer in this case, to just hack around and find out, is scientific.

Blowing up buildings, murdering jews, plotting assassinations etc. is substantially damaging. It is "extremist".

Why is it amazing that it left the pad?

Natural phenomena do tend to make sense when investigated scientifically. It seems rather that not all cosmologists and mathematicians have an obligation to develop scientific theories:

  - Blackhole Cosmology, Eternal Inflation: unscientific, dismiss reality
  - Mathematical Universe: unscientific, no reality

The actual sciences brought to bear on cosmology (thermo and statistical mechanics) can make enough sense of our observations, without the psychedelics, but do nothing for cosmology as the search for meaning which is what it really is.

Most of these concepts, in all their variety, share the same metaphysical premise that our observed universe was inevitable. To the extent that it appears very distinct, we simply cannot see the overall structure in which it was actually a certainty.

The Boltzmann Brain at least gets closer to facing the issue objectively. The basic reality that we experience today -- in which there's some amount of matter and charge, spacetime, in which eggs only scramble, etc. -- just happens to be so. From our point of view, something highly "improbable" happened in the distant past.

The really implausible thing about reversing a broken egg is not that it works itself back into the "original" state, but that it takes the same energy back from the environment (thrown off as heat in the forward direction) and converts it perfectly into the needed work. Which goes against physical law and also is something it's hard to even visualize. The environment shoves heat at the thing in some very specific way and then it jumps back into nothing more or less than a whole egg. Hopefully it won't start oscillating.

This can be expressed in the language of entropy but it is essentially a thermodynamic principle. Carlo Rovelli expressed it in a way that I like:

> In order to leave a trace, it is necessary for something to become arrested, to stop moving, and this can only happen in an irreversible process -- that is to say, by degrading energy into heat. In this way, computers heat up, the brain heats up, the meteors that fall into the moon heat it; even the quill of a medieval scribe in a Benedictine abbey heats a little the page on which he writes. In a world without heat, everything would rebound elastically, leaving no trace.

The figure at the center of all of this, when he was banned, literally just said whatever and started a competing social media site. Concerns about this topic have picked up over the last decade; "we'll carry anything" companies have formed in response. Not that those didn't exist before.

In any case, you can get online somewhere to say what you want. Use Cloudflare. The market surrounding the matter of publishing stuff online is healthy, and the nature of the internet/web is such that you can reach a global audience with relatively minor equipment.

On the consumer side, what is the argument? There is no lack of outlets, serving every niche, freely available on the same connection that delivers you Twitter. What's the problem? That people can't look away from Twitter?

There is no meaning of "housed" that implies "owns a house".

Might the lighter O2 naturally rise away from the organics layer? It may then be able to oxidize metals/meteors sprayed into the upper atmosphere, eventually falling back down with those compounds and fertilizing the substrate.

Long-term we could plant massive new floating plant species in the atmosphere to decarbonize it and form floating soil layers, which eventually would compactify and metamorphosize and spread out latitudinally to form a ring around the planet, thinning out towards the poles and making cliffs and beaches and islands with the atmosphere. The growing regions would not actually stay together but break apart and move technically on top of the atmosphere, with plate boundaries and subduction zones and volcanoes, driven by the pressure below, surface volcanism proper, and weather around the coastal areas.

It's not an epistemic problem. Twitter has to address their users' toxic behavior turning the whole place/world into a dump. Rather that the confrontation taking place in replies and quote tweets and spreading all over the network, it happens in birdwatch (in theory).

That is a very incisive analysis of "software engineering". I don't know how you did it.

$1B+ interest payments but no market for the debt. It is as of now a massive high-risk loan (though perhaps it wasn't in April).

The title is usually not up to a reporter's own personal choice and style, or even their integrity (unless it's bad enough to want their byline off the piece), so getting hung up on them over it is pointless.

In any case, it's the least interesting thing about the chip. Things aren't perfect. The title is not unambiguously perfect, that's all. The article provides the specs entirely adequately, so you have no warrant to declare its author/journalists generally clueless.

The most popular topic is so often the post title.

[Video clip of a Tesla EV, on fire from battery damage after Hurricane Ian. A fire crew is dousing it with water. Someone observes that they've put 1,500 gallons on it already.]

What are you talking about?

He starts with a "Webster's dictionary defines" kind of premise and most of the rest is rhetoric. Not one single "woke social justice warrior" values philosophy? That's not blunt, it's extremely lazy thinking expressed with name calling. I had no idea reading this that the author was nominally an intellectual and a philosopher.

The comparison is with blowing up hundreds of tons of fuel below and around a capsule filled with people, like half a dozen times. Give them a little flexibility on building codes. NASA rockets explode and catch fire due to weather and normal flight.

We already live in a tsunami of "passable" algorithmically generated content as it is. The problem is that as a people we are fully in the grips of media culture. We might as well brace for the continued existence of the television. It's easy to see how these new technologies could be used to spread misinformation, but fortunately/unfortunately not so obvious that they'll leave us any worse off. It has not been long enough since I saw my country go crazy, from TV/radio/book media alone, for me to worry about GPT-3.

I was (totally) wrong, but can't delete or edit the comment.

The reaction doesn't "require" 120C, that was simply the first experiment they described. They began by confirming that this reaction actually takes place and discovering which PFAs were neutralized by it. To that end they boiled a mixture of the stuff for 24 hours.

The reaction can occur at more moderate temperatures. There is more analysis (with experimental results) further down in the paper:

> Substantial defluorination still occurred when the isolated PFOA degradation product (perfluoro-1H-heptane 2) was subjected to degradation conditions but heated to only 40°C (table S3).

The first hot dog man provided nice white gloves for his customers to hold the wieners and toppings with. They were supposed to be returned after use, but evidently they were too fancy and many customers would hang onto them. His wife suggested serving the wieners in a bun instead.

I believe you. If you know it influenced you though, that means you didn't ignore it or not even realize you could change it, which is the idea I was replying to.

Again, it would be surprising if it didn't matter at all, but not unimaginable. What you're saying is that almost everybody in your company would have contributed a lesser amount if not for the default. It means you can all afford to give up $20k or whatever in income this year. There are other factors.

There is no truth to the matter of "whether defaults change behavior". This thread started about 401ks and then was taken into color preferences on the web. If someone has a gun to their head is asked if they want to die, I'm sure we'll agree that whatever the default is doesn't matter. Whether defaults do anything depends on what we're talking about. Nudges might work in web ux but not economics, why is that so incredulous?

The hacker news banner color doesn't matter and few have ever wanted to change it. But your financial position and needs, what % of your salary you can afford to money-hole until retirement, does matter and is pretty individual. It doesn't defy credulity to me that generally people would make a choice about this (when can I retire?), and that the default doesn't influence it.

I grant that it would be surprising if it had no influence at all, but I think the effect is more the social signal that you should want to save the max, that your neighbors probably do (it's the default after all), etc., rather than people completely ignoring/missing it.

Transhumanism still just seems like the mix of Cartesian logic with absolute fantasy. A purposeful argument for literally losing your mind and grip on reality, after which anything goes, so let's consult fiction...