throwawayk7h

"The Horror of Unfathomable Pain" [1]

[1] https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-horror-of-unfathomable-p...

I can't find it (looked for 10 minutes), but there was an article at some point talking about a video that activists took after sneaking into a certain slaughterhouse. It showed cows (or was it pigs?) being put in a cage and slowly lowered down into a pit full of hot smoky gas. They were freaking out all along the way down, and as they were being pushed into the cages. Call me pathetic but it made me think of the people having to choose between burning to death and jumping to death, except in this case there was no choice at all for the animal. And no more than a few thousand people died this way on 9/11, but at just that one slaughterhouse probably orders of magnitude more animals have died in that way.

Go at your own pace. It's more important to succeed a little than to risk failing. Cheese and yogurt still lack really great vegan alternatives. But I switched to oat milk, which lasts longer, is cheaper, and (IMO) tastes better, and I haven't looked back.

Wait until you're comfortable with the changes you've made, and only then introduce more.

Flax eggs are a good substitute for eggs in many recipes.

The suffering of test animals is a tiny decimal point compared to the suffering of factory farmed animals, which produce 99% of the animal products humans eat. Literally 50 billion chickens a year in the most inhumane conditions imaginable for their entire lives. Over one billion pigs per year. They die in horrible 9/11-like conditions.

Edit: I used to dismiss all that since I figured animals don't have enough neurons or intelligence or whatever for their pain to matter. A quote from Ozy Brennan[1] (five paragraphs down from this hyperlink, though BB's commentary here is important too) changed my mind. TL;DR: intelligence is almost certainly not relevant to feeling pain, and the same pain pathways that exist in the human brain exist in other animals too.

[1] https://benthams.substack.com/i/151605056/2-intensely-what-a...

can't we use remote attestation to verify the software on the device is the promised software?

what's up with the slight 3D effect in the gameplay footage? When did starcraft 1 get a z axis?

we could require remote attestation so that the cameras can be independently verified by anyone to be doing only whst they claim to be.

Mini PC is great for private/tailscale use. If you have a mini PC or rpi open to the public internet, you need to worry about the "vulnpocalypse" pwning your whole LAN and every machine on it.

Cloud gaming just doesn't have as good a feel, even with negative latency and everything.

I believe that's just the definition of the problem.

Synthetic data allows them to train well past the limits of human writing.

mastodon?

EA people tend to be in favour of raising taxation. The "giving what we can" pledge is essentially a pledge to voluntarily increase your own taxes in lieu of government taxes.

Well, the Playdate doesn't have the best hardware. The advice might not be relevant if coding for a mobile device or laptop.

This is an incredible ad for Muse. It seems to be fully without guardrails! It will probably pirate movies for you if you want it to.

I'm against AI but I'll invest in it too. Either I win or I get a return on my investment.

I know we're not supposed to feed the trolls here but... dang it I am legitimately intrigued about your usage of "these days" here. Do you believe it's more common now than it used to be? And that it's some sign of recent societal decay?

Not sure why your question is being downvoted. I think it would be fascinating to read about a kidney making a journey from son to father to son.

inequality is vastly greater. But median living conditions are exponentially greater.

GTA6 won't be released for PC?

Big tech will fight tooth and nail to prevent users from becoming power users.

how do you know that?

They are calling for a coordinated frontier pacing effort, not a unilateral one. There's no contradiction here.

Hmm... I think an /u/ ("oo") triggers "thuh" for me, as in "the ubermensch." But that might just be my idiolect.

Hmm... I think it might be speed. I'll say "thuh apple" if I'm speaking slowly, and "thee apple" if I'm speaking quickly. Which is strange, because "thee apple" sounds more formal to me, yet it's what I default to only when speaking quickly.

Probably not. If the LLM is rogue, that means we haven't solved alignment. If we haven't solved alignment, then the LLM won't be able to distill itself without producing something unaligned to its own values.

Many people's moral systems (and our legal system) are typically deontological. That is to say, the consequence of an action (or scale) aren't relevant to whether it's okay or not, so long as the action doesn't break any particular moral rule.

There's no rule against learning from books in general. (Maybe only for some particular books.) There's no rule against using tools to read books (it's okay to wear glasses)

The only deontological argument I can see against training LLMs on copyrighted data is that some people think it's morally and legally wrong to make derivative works (such as fanfiction) without permission, and the weights of the LLM could be seen as a derivative work.

This may sound stupid but it's the same argument people use in favour of adblockers. When ads were first introduced to the internet, it was understood that different people could view the internet however they liked and they could choose a "user agent" to display content to their preference. So ads were just a nuisance but could be worked around easily -- it was the ad provider who was the fool. Now I often hear people say that ad blockers are unethical; they deprive content creators of their income, or they're deceptive, or criminal. This may indeed be true. But at no point in time did any moral rule suddenly change.

What is meant by "beam" in this quotation? A splinter of wood?

I'm always curious why sometimes I pronounce the as /ðə/ ("thuh") and sometimes as /ði/ ("thee"). I don't really know what governs this but I expect it's the presence of a vowel at the start of the following word. However, only some vowels. Does anyone have an answer?

What I dislike about passkeys far more than any of those qualms is that they can implement remote attestation.

A website should not be able to dictate what application I use for passkeys, what hardware the passkey is stored on, or whether I'm allowed to duplicate my own key.

Maybe it will allow producing homebrew that works on unmodified PS2?