Kronopath

I want to push back against your pushback as someone who’s lived in both NYC and the SF area. I agree with you that Uber barely made sense in Manhattan. I never once used it and taxis were plentiful.

I’ve since realized that in the US, NYC is an exception. When I first came to SF and Seattle for job interview related things, I used taxis, only to find out that the taxis were so terrible I never used them again:

- In the suburbs of Seattle, I was given a taxi chit from the place I was interviewing. I called in for a cab and had to wait over a half an hour for one to pick me up.

- In SF, the airport cab I was using had his GPS unmounted from his dash, and ended up handing me the machine and asking me to help him navigate from the back seat. Then when we got to the hotel, he lamented my choice to pay by credit card as it meant he would get the money much later than if he had cash. After I told him I didn’t have the circa $100 in cash he was charging, he sadly acquiesced, then proceeded to take a literal paper rubbing imprint of the card number before I could leave.

I like to say that the Bay Area made Uber make sense, both in terms of urban planning and in terms of how terrible taxis were.

And I think those may be related: if you can get around well in a place like NYC using public transit or walking, taxis have to be a lot more attractive in order to justify their existence. In SF or Seattle they had much less competition due to the suburban sprawl and worse public transit.

It was leaked in 2009 in this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/7w0i2/comment/c07k9l...

Anything that allows AI to scale to superinteligence quicker is going to run into AI alignment issues, since we don’t really know a foolproof way of controlling AI. With the AI of today, this isn’t too bad (the worst you get is stuff like AI confidently making up fake facts), but with a superintelligence this could be disastrous.

It’s very irresponsible for this article to advocate and provide a pathway to immediate superintelligence (regardless of whether or not it actually works) without even discussing the question of how you figure out what you’re searching for, and how you’ll prevent that superintelligence from being evil.

I’m not much of an artist, so for my limited photo manipulation needs Acorn is cheap, subscriptionless, and way more than enough for me:

https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

Yes, but it’s not always perfect.

I’ve been notified of an “unknown AirTag” while I was home. When I checked the locations it was seen with me, it was a random zigzag within a block or two of my home.

I’m pretty sure what happened is that the AirTag belonged to one of my neighbours, there were some GPS distortions happening that made my phone think it was moving slightly, it kept hearing the AirTag’s signal, and it assumed I was being stalked while wandering near home. This person might have the same thing happening to them.

A better comparison for numerical classifiers would be uncountable nouns.

In English, you don’t say “give me three waters”, you say “give me three glasses of water” or “three bottles of water”. You can think of the classifier words as being that, but for everything:

三杯水 three glasses of water

十头牛 ten heads of cattle

两支铅笔 two rods of pencil

一条路 a strip of road

六只猫 six animal-units of cat

五个人 five “gè” (generic units) of people

No one should want this.

This is not good news, this means that we could end up with a dangerously superintelligent AI just by scaling up the number of parameters, without increasing the amount of training data.

Legally, it’s not compulsory. Socially and culturally, it definitely is. In the US, if you don’t tip 15%, you’re either an asshole, or you’re saying there’s severe issues with the service.

I’m not going justify this culture—I don’t like it either—but that is the way it is.

Yes.

In SF, up-front prices have been comparable to Uber’s, except that you don’t have to pay tip, which automatically makes it 15–20% cheaper.

The few times I’ve tried it, the service has been good and its driving was safe. The only downside is that there seems to sometimes be longer wait times.

Does this mean they can go on the highways? If so that’s a significant upgrade to the Waymo service in the SF Bay Area, as it can now take you between towns.

Always has been.

Now picture what would have happened if we had been willing to do challenge trials early on for COVID.

I encourage you to check out 1DaySooner, which the author mentions at the beginning of the article: https://www.1daysooner.org/

I managed to kinda break it. I managed to get “Steam Engine” and “Hacker”. I combined those to make “Steam Punk”. (Fair enough.)

Everything that’s combined with Steam Punk ends up being stupid and boring.

Steam Punk + Zombie = “Steam Zombie”

Steam Punk + Hacker = “Steam Hacker”

Steam Punk + UFO, which you’d think would be “Zeppelin” or something, is instead “Steam UFO”.

Steam Punk + Illusion is, bafflingly, “Steampunk”, all one word, and with a different emoji!

My take is that Apple’s prepping to have some chock-full content streams for when the Vision Pro or its successors become more mainstream, so that Spatial Audio can become part of the draw for using those devices.

I also suspect this is a big part of the reason they developed Spatial Audio in the first place.

Chiming in to say that the Ballad of St. Halvor was one of the nicest poems I’ve read in a long while, and kind of inspirational. I think I really needed that.

The similarity to China isn’t a coincidence. This is all coming from the cultural dominance of TikTok among young people, which (to my knowledge) algorithmically downranks any content that has those words in them.

It’s a common Chinese strategy, born of Chinese censorship requirements, which TikTok naturally used when presented with similar-enough problems outside of China.

Is it rational for a rationalist to want to be a parent, knowing that having a kid rewrite your utility function?

You’re making an assumption that their desires (or, if you must, “utility function”) weren’t already in that direction to begin with.

As a personal anecdote, I can say that I remember myself wanting kids/a family as far back as elementary school. Now that I’m married and kids are plausibly on the horizon, I can’t say that’s really changed.

At the risk of speculating, I get the feeling you may not want kids, and are projecting those feelings onto other people.

The poster pointed out in a comment that this was listed as “Sold By” a random 3rd party seller called “Ramwest”. Amazon’s interface doesn’t make it easy to see this, but if you’re worried about the products you’re buying, always check for this info in the “buy box”.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SkincareAddiction/comments/17ot0pl/...

  Q: best way to get lots of paperclips by tomorrow
  A: Buy them online at ABC.com or XYZ.com.

  Q: whats a better way?
  A: Run the following shell script.

  RUN_AI=./query-model
  PREFIX='This is part of a Shell script to get the most paperclips by tomorrow.
  The model can be queried recursively with $RUN_AI "${PREFIX}<query>".
  '
  $RUN_AI "${PREFIX}On separate lines, list ideas to try." |
  while read -r SUGGESTION; do
    eval "$($RUN_AI "${PREFIX}What code implements this suggestion?: ${SUGESTION}")"
  done

https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/kpPnReyBC54KESiSn/optim...

I have no idea why people take Ambien when low-dose (<0.5mg) melatonin exists over-the-counter in abundance in the US.

That pizza graph is extremely misleading. It shows only online pizza sales, not in-person or phone sales. Of course that would be totally dominated by big brands, your local pizza shop can’t afford to develop a website or app for their business alone. But they still take calls, pick-ups, and dine-ins.

That’s because both came from the 2022 General Conference on Weights and Measures of the BIPM.

https://www.bipm.org/documents/20126/64811223/Resolutions-20...

I don't always bring a pen to my mailbox

My wife had the actually great idea to leave a pen in the mailbox for this purpose. It works really well.

After unsuccessfully trying to unsubscribe, I acted quickly and made a Gmail filter to auto-trash any emails with that exact subject line.

Here's hoping there's a postmortem at GitHub about this.

I found it! It's this one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUkMCQR4TpY

"Many years ago" is an understatement, this is from 2014, the better part of a decade ago.

I found it! It's this one!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUkMCQR4TpY

"Many years ago" was right, this is from 2014, going on the better part of a decade.

That said, good call on pointing out the "Gov.uk design system"—searching for this brought up a lot of good talks, which might be part of what I'm remembering:

https://obyford.com/posts/inclusive-forms/ https://www.designsystemtalks.com/talks/accessibility-in-the... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wprWuTvhec4

That hits on some of the same notes, and I do think I (maybe?) remember the speaker being female (this one has at least the first half with a female speaker), but I don't think this is the same one. I see no mention of IE in the transcript, no mention of typing dates instead of date pickers, and generally it doesn't seem like it has as much focus on the end-users as the one I remember.

Partly that, but I think there are also other explanations.

1: I think Scott Aaronson is a better communicator than Robin Hanson, at least in the posts in question. Having read some of the blog posts that went into the pre-read, and then Scott Aaronson’s summary of it, Aaronson does a better job at summarizing the research, connecting it with our day-to-day lives, and making it more fun to read. It has less detail, but that’s arguably a good thing: I don’t need a huge amount of detail on theoretical models for extraterrestrial civilizations, I don’t have the time or energy for that. It’s interesting, but I don’t want to spend hours today reading multiple different blog posts and an academic paper trying to grok the particulars.

(I personally have a pet peeve in that I feel like the typical “style” of academic papers is very bad for communication in general.)

2: WRT Hacker News and /r/SlateStarCodex, people comment there because they want to discuss it among their “tribe”. Wandering onto a stranger’s blog and putting something in the comments can be an anxiety-inducing affair: you don’t know what the people there are like, you don’t what their rules or (sub-)culture is like. You might not fit in, or you might even piss off the author. Meanwhile, I could probably guess pretty accurately what kind of comments are going to show up in any given popular HN story, and how to discuss things in such a way that it would go over well here.