smk_

Those who can't do, teach. Don't read. Do.

If I took 2 weeks off from work I could build this prototype quite easily. We're in an interesting period where the space of possibilities is so large it just takes a while for the "market" to exhaust it.

Nyfern (or should I call you EP) – I’m sure you’re aware EA donates upwards of $600 million each year, where about $400 million goes to global health and development and approximately $80 million to animal charity. To pick three examples amount to less than $1 million for a fiscal year is deeply uncharitable. I understand you’re angry but this attack on EA is increasingly looking like a modern day witch hunt.

Source: https://www.economist.com/media-assets/image/20221119_BBC769...

AbrahamParangi, you are deeply uninformed. Since the dawn of nuclear weapons, the risks of harmful technology to human civilization has been a discussion amongst the very brightest of our time.

John von Neumann, who contributed to the Manhattan project, published an essay called “Can we Survive Technology?” on the topic: https://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf in 1955.

It’s more likely he tried to cover up massive Alameda losses due to all the usual reasons people turn to illegal acts: shame, myopia, gambling addiction. One core EA principle is integrity. If he was actually “EA”, this wouldn’t have happened the way it did.

Philosophy is the constantly moving (and narrowing) circle of unanswered questions.

You are a psychopath.

I would imagine this fact is obvious to any Tesla engineers reviewing code. I would imagine they look at more factors than simply lines of code.

Longtermism in a moral context rewards thinking about the value of future beings that do not yet exist. Existential risk is important in this consideration, because it is an event that severely limits the amount of future beings that could exists. The strongest argument against longtermism is a flavour of a person-affecting moral view.

Smart people tend to be libertarian-leaning. It is a most natural predisposition. Most people living in the west are economically privileged.

Ajross, you don't seem to really believe what you are saying. Sci-fi arguments? Really? Since when is the risk from nuclear war, pandemics or artificial intelligence constrained to sci-fi? The Spanish flu, Black Death and the Plague. The Cold War. These events should all inform our way of thinking about risk.

Personally I'm looking forward to an Amazon home. Ring, Echo and Roomba – I will feel well taken care of and always safe.

Happiness always reverts back to a baseline level. You will never escape this baseline level.

Up until this point in your life, meaning has been a projection – a goal ahead of you. You have now reached this goal, realised the projection, and must find a new projection, a new project. You must find an I beyond the self, a goal that encompasses but is larger than yourself.

I recommend the book "What is Existentialism?" by Simone de Beauvoir as a starting point.

Read books. Build cool things. Cultivate your relationships. You need to aggressively protect your time. Ignore all else.

I’ll do the same as well. Kagi has literally improved my life a significant degree.

This is unlikely to work. Why? Whenever you impose a stringent system of categorization on top of information that eludes easy categorization, you will likely fail. “I’ll handle the edge cases” — that’s not an easy task. The edge cases add up, until all you are left with is edge handling. This reminds me of someone who lives in a theoretical, platonic plane without consideration for real world problems.

A system that has a higher success of working is developed organically, from the bottom up. I’d say Zettelkasten is one such example, though its primary beneficiaries are researchers in text-heavy fields (e.g. sociology).

While speaking from limited expertise, it is my general understanding these layoffs are a vital part in keeping a company lean and reducing bloat. Over time, in any company, some roles will be made redundant and is the reason for these occasional layoffs. If I was an investor, I would see this as a good sign of vision and a clear direction.

They say so themselves: > "To stay competitive, we need to remove duplication of work now that we are one Arm; stop work that is no longer critical to our future success; and think about how we get work done."

You would probably achieve the same effect by meditation and practicing attention control.

Example of good vertical integration: Apple M1/AirPods/iPhone/Apple Music. That's a very convenient ecosystem for users, and it allows Apple to reduce manufacturing cost. We both agree there should be strong competitors to Apple, for the lower manufacturing costs to propagate to consumers as well.

>Yes, that's exactly what I want to accomplish. These companies are too big & powerful.

Economic growth is a consequence of gains in productivity. Therefore, we should champion economic growth because it allows us to do more during a day.

>Huge companies use acquisitions to squash innovation.

Another idea: people set up really innovate companies because they hope to be acquired by a bigger company. In other words – big companies enable an incentive structure favouring innovation. In general, VC:s (which drive most innovation today) hope to exit via an IPO – but selling to a big tech-company is a safety cushion. If we remove the safety cushion – the VC market will be more risk averse and less willing to spend on innovative, but unproven, ideas.

I love this question. First and foremost, meditation. It definitely helps me be more present. Another skill that gives me joy is reading. I can concentratedly read for 2 hours, but after 2 hours I need to take a break. I can't think of any other activity that I can concentrate so long on. Ideally, I would become a scholar but I'm going into software engineering for now:)

I went from the Android to the Apple ecosystem, and would take the same decision if I had to decide from scratch. I believe reducing friction in brain-computer interfaces is a real comparative advantage, and that's much easier with Apple.

Vertical integration can be a win for consumers. Also, a law like that (and any law infringing a free market) disincentivizes growth and innovation.

Among the people I've talked to that has taken psilocybin, it seems common to believe in nonsense such as reincarnation. That's why I'll never take it, it seems as if you lose grip with reality.