erostrate

8 ms·

1.
by erostrate 2y ago
How do I rule out the masses being attracted by electromagnetism?
2.
by erostrate 2y ago
How palatable an argument is determines its actual impact. It's not logical to spend effort making arguments that are so unpalatable that they will just make people ignore you.
3.
by erostrate 2y ago
Did the author factor in the impact of this kind of article on the external perception of the rationalist / utilitarian / EA community when weighing the utility of publishing this? Should you push arguments that seem ridiculously
4.
by erostrate 3y ago
The author leads infrastructure at Cresta. Cresta is a customer service automation company. His first point is about how happy he is to have picked AWS and their human-based customer service, versus Google's robot-based customer servic
5.
by erostrate 3y ago
> this is only for paid surface parking for non-residents. Residents price is not impacted (which is controversial). Underground parking is private and not affected. Free parking (outside of 8AM to 8PM Monday to Saturday) stays free for
6.
by erostrate 3y ago
This is the strategy famously identified as "commoditize your complement" by Joel Spolsky 22 years ago.
7.
by erostrate 3y ago
The following are all ~ 1 in a million chance of death, or 1 micromort: Travelling 6 miles (9.7 km) by motorcycle Travelling 17 miles (27 km) by walking Travelling 20 miles (32 km) by bicycle Travelling 230 miles (370 km) by car Travelling
8.
by erostrate 3y ago
Are you saying Schmidhuber should also get credit for smartphones?
9.
by erostrate 3y ago
Agreed, although I personally prefer when actual experts are communicating to the public. But that's not all he's doing, Tegmark also intends to influence global policy on AI research, random example: https://www.thegua
10.
by erostrate 3y ago
He talks a lot about the singularity but the biggest singularity I can see is in his ratio of "talks about AI" divided by "actual AI contributions".
11.
by erostrate 3y ago
Agreed, Ian Goodfellow wasn't the first to come up with the idea of jointly training a generator and discriminator. But he was the first to make it work for image generation with modern neural networks. For that Ian Goodfellow deserved
12.
by erostrate 3y ago
> credit belongs to the people who deserve credit for the work they've done that was useful to others Certainly agree. The point is that coming up with the idea, writing it as an equation, or an architecture diagram in a paper, is a
13.
by erostrate 3y ago
List of "famous" ML people not to waste time on: - Gary Marcus - Juergen Schmidhuber - Pedro Domingos - Max Tegmark - Eliezer Yudkowsky Some context for people unfamiliar with ML research: the author, Schmidhuber, is well known fo
14.
by erostrate 3y ago
The main problem with Alexa / Google Assistant / Siri is that the tech was not ready when they launched. We didn't have models that could understand non-trivial user requests, generate non-trivial actions or keep track of con
15.
by erostrate 3y ago
What does a salmon have in common with a man on a bicycle? They are both Pareto-efficient. Here's a chart of cost of transport (calories/gram/km) vs weight (kg) comparing a salmon vs a bicycle vs a jet fighter etc: https:&#x
16.
by erostrate 3y ago
Would you have an issue if that someone subsequently refused to part with 0.001% of their thankyou notes in order to save someone else's life? This is a terrible analogy because it captures the good reason why there are billionaires (w
17.
by erostrate 3y ago
One main idea of EA is that you should make a lot of money in order to give it away. The obvious problem is that this can serve as a convenient moral justification for greed. SBF explicitly endorsed EA, Will MacAskill vouched for him, and I
18.
by erostrate 3y ago
I used to be a utilitarian, but it made me morally repulsive, which pushed my friends away from utilitarianism. I had to stop since this had negative utility. More seriously, any moral theory that strives too much for abstract purity will b
19.
by erostrate 3y ago
You don't even need to go very deep to find financial interests at stake: Thorn sells a "comprehensive solution for platforms to identify, remove and report child sexual abuse material." [1] So the CEO of this Heat Initiative
20.
by erostrate 3y ago
Sarah Gardner, the author of the letter to Apple and CEO of the Heat Initiative, worked for 10 years and until earlier this year as a VP at Thorn [1]. Thorn sells a "comprehensive solution for platforms to identify, remove and report c
21.
by erostrate 3y ago
> These aren't mom-and-pop organizations buying penny stocks, they are some of the most sophisticated investors out there Agreed, but they're facing KKR and Apollo, who are even more sophisticated. PE is a small proportion of C
22.
by erostrate 3y ago
> Can't the institutional investors just pull their investment if they think it's a bad deal? Can't they read the fine print on the LBO deal? I can think of a few reasons why they don't. They need 'uncorrelated r
23.
by erostrate 3y ago
Fabrice Bellard did the converse, using a language model as a compressor: https://bellard.org/nncp/
24.
by erostrate 3y ago
I have a game, whenever I see a familiar brand or local franchise selling consumer products or services whose quality seems to have declined recently, first I try to guess if they've been PE funded, then I check by going to their websi
25.
by erostrate 3y ago
I suspect the author only counts raw material. So players who lose a pawn but gain compensation reduce the perceived impact of losing a pawn. Including many openings where you temporarily give up a pawn (queen's gambit, benko, etc).
26.
by erostrate 3y ago
The following are real examples of submissions that were rejected: A-numbers of sequences contributed by [your name] (however, this might be appropriate on your OEIS Wiki user page). Experience points required for a Pokemon in the "err
27.
by erostrate 4y ago
There is a likely innocent explanation: authors are required to stay anonymous while an academic paper is being peer reviewed.
28.
by erostrate 4y ago
My favourite ones are already linked: Sapolsky, Feynman, SICP. So here are some lesser known ones to signal boost: Introduction to Cryptography by Christof Paar, I wanted to understand Bitcoin's secp256k elliptic curve on finite fields
29.
by erostrate 4y ago
"For nerds, information sharing is the most highly valued form of communication possible." https://status451.com/2016/01/06/splain-it-to-me/
30.
by erostrate 4y ago
Can you think of a test or empirical observation that would convince you that a model does "actual reasoning"? Do bear in mind the tests that very smart people have proposed in the past (from playing chess to holding a conversatio

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