apatil

I have found myself legit using this instead of duolingo for the past couple of days, in spite of the speech to text issues. It feels like a better way to learn. The inline suggestions, in particular, seem like they will help me quickly move through bad habits and mistakes in order of severity.

The tutor review at the end of the lesson doesn't feel as useful currently; its content isn't particularly actionable. Maybe if it gave me a couple of exercises or something?

The auto submit slider doesn't work for me (on Android) but I can imagine what it would be like. I don't think the Portuguese speech to text is good enough for the app to be usable hands free even if the slider did work. For example, it just transcribed

"Eu quero ir a assistir ao filme." (which is almost correct)

as

"Eu quero ia AA chistian ao filme."

These errors have to be corrected by typing.

I've used chatgpt itself as a language tutor a bit but this is nicer. I like the inline suggestions that don't break the flow of conversation.

Portuguese speech to text is flaky. This may be partly attributable to my pronunciation, and chatgpt has the same issue.

I'd love to have a hands free mode that's suitable for use while doing chores or driving.

Penalizing a crime might make sense for the purpose of deterrence even if there is no conscious free will. The size of the deterrent effect is a scientific question, and how to weigh the benefits of deterrence to society vs. the harm the punishment inflicts on the criminal is a moral question (where by moral I mean "should we do this").

However, penalizing a crime for the purpose of retribution makes no sense if there is no conscious free will. The criminal's consciousness experiences the harm of the punishment, but didn't cause the actions that constituted the crime. This is patently unfair.

I don't think conscious free will exists. One of the reasons I care is that, if most people shared that belief, we would talk and think about crime so differently that our approach to crime would change in the direction of becoming more humane.

For example, given the news of SBF's conviction for fraud, no one would be happy about the fact that he will likely experience many years in prison. We might be happy that the harm his actions caused has been stopped, and we may feel a kind of dutiful satisfaction in the knowledge that the system is working to deter and prevent this kind of harm. However, these emotions would be tempered by regret that a young man is going to lose part of his life, and we would be questioning whether there's any way to achieve the same level of harm prevention without inflicting such serious harm on one person.

I find it plausible that it's often a good idea in medicine to be conservative before launching interventions that may have adverse side effects, but have difficulty swallowing the idea that this conservatism should be implemented by reducing visibility (eg by not applying tests too broadly if they have a nontrivial false positive rate and the condition is rare). It seems like the right thing to do would be to maximize visibility, but then to try to corroborate and not overreact to apparent positives.

I heard about this video from an astronomer friend a few months ago. It was mostly about how Loeb's social and professional behavior matches with that of past crackpots. He does seem to leave himself open to that.

There wasn't really a material argument against his controversial hypotheses about interstellar objects. I counted an ad hominem (45 minutes of analysis of his awkward public persona), an argument from ignorance ('Omuamua is out of view so it's not possible to collect evidence for the lightsail hypothesis) and an appeal to the authority of the broader astronomical community.

He is going out and looking for evidence about IM1, and is seeking cross-validation from other labs, in a very transparent way. He's making lots of possibly inappropriately optimistic public speculations in the meantime, but I haven't seen him make any actual claims that aren't justified, which seems like the defining feature of a crackpot.

In hindsight this comment was too short. Clarifying some points:

By "This makes sense", I meant that this kind of thing can happen; as more data are gathered, the Bayesian probability of a candidate value can increase and then suddenly decrease. Here's a Colab notebook demonstrating the general phenomenon: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1Eb1_humiGPdKb0c3qr_...

"Calibration" in this context means "statistical consistency between distributional forecasts and observations" in the words of https://sites.stat.washington.edu/raftery/Research/PDF/Gneit... . If the model's early forecasts predict impact with probability >3% for a class of objects that end up impacting with frequency much less than 3%, then the model is not well calibrated with respect to its early forecasts for those objects.

Based on the GP, it sounds like these early impact "probabilities" are no one's subjective (Bayesian) probability of impact because people who are closely familiar with this model know it is not well calibrated. The reported probabilities may still be useful to them as indicators or flags. However, those of us who are _not_ closely familiar with the model have found it confusing to see things that are not really probabilities reported as probabilities.

This makes sense, thanks. However, it doesn't mean that the 3% estimate of the chance of impact was wrong at the time of initial observation given data available, and that still makes it a huge deal at that time. At minimum, it would seem to justify using the best available instruments to characterize the asteroid more precisely as soon as possible.

If these large numbers happen so often that asteroids with initial impact probabilities of 3% are known to actually impact much less frequently than that, then the model is poorly calibrated, no? In other words, the reported probabilities aren't really probabilities and that is what has caused the confusion and anxiety in these comments.

Also, is it possible to quantify the risk of unseen companion asteroids, which someone else mentioned in the comments.

Two questions for people who live in rural areas in homes that were built in a more modern way.

- Do you have issues with pests? More precisely, how often do you have to use mousetraps or call an exterminator?

- What's your recurring home maintenance schedule like?

Two things that really bother me about American-style homes are the seemingly rapid deterioration and the failure to design out pests. It's easy for a stick-frame building to develop a defect sufficient to allow mouse ingress, and once inside, the hollow walls afford them many inaccessible places to nest. I really hate having to regularly kill, or at best relocate and traumatize, creatures that are just looking for a safe place to spend the winter. I have imagined that European-style concrete buildings, with tight-fitting prefab components, would be easier to own, but I have never actually asked anyone with a comparably located home.

Could anyone comment on how often Dafny finds proofs for useful theorems on its own in practice, without requiring the programmer to use expert knowledge of the proof search system to break it down into a sequence of gettable lemmas and/or refactor the code?

If the answer is "not that often", is there a possibility that LLM integration could help with proof search? This seems like an application where getting it 95% right is actually OK since proofs generated by the LLM can be automatically checked for correctness.

That's very interesting. In which variable is type inference EXPTIME complete?

Whichever variable it is, I suppose in practice humans can't create programs that are big enough in that way for type inference to become impractical. However, I wonder whether someone could comment on what this means about the utility of HM-like type systems in future AI generated software.

Sounds like an interesting story! I would love to see more sci-fi that really tackles AGI. I used to love sci-fi but most of it, even "hard" sci-fi, has become unwatchable or unreadable for me because the limited role of AGI is such an all-consuming plot hole.

I don't disagree, but I think the framing is overly pejorative and makes the likelihood of this outcome seem more tenuous than it really is. We do lots of things to help others because they make us feel nice. "Mothers and Others" by Sarah Hrdy argues that this tendency isn't just a fluke or a game-theoretic equilibrium of some kind between fundamentally self-interested agents, it's an ancient and deeply ingrained aspect of human nature.

The thought of living in a constructed world that exists by the grace of a single human owner of a super-powerful AGI is distasteful, of course, especially if the human owner uses their power to impose some of their own opinions about how people should think and behave. Becoming dependent on AGI is probably inevitable at some point, but I don't see that as so different from the status quo. We're already dependent on systems created by other humans that are so complex and sophisticated that no individual can grok them all.

I guess I would like to think that we will move past any initial impulse that the owner of the AGI feels to control other humans. We will presumably change so much that old ideas about how we should think and behave will seem irrelevant and quaint. And the AGI, which presumably will have the social engineering superpower, will hopefully point out inconsistencies between the owner's desire to control human thought and behavior and their desire for humans to live their best lives. Hopefully.

You may be right, of course.

Say you get access to a singularity-level AGI, meaning you have the power to render the entire human economy completely irrelevant. Given any task, no matter how big, small, novel, complex, simple or mundane, it's vastly more cost-effective to have your AGI to do it than to pay humans.

Do you really want to accumulate incomprehensible material wealth for yourself, whatever "wealth" means in this scenario where money is longer a token of spent human life energy, and let everyone else struggle and suffer? Or would you rather tell your AGI "please create a utopia in which all humans are fully actualized" and then go have a latte?

It's looking increasingly possible that, at some point in the not-too-far future machines will be so good at creating software that humans won't be competitive in any way, and won't be in the loop at all. I happen to think that once machines reach this point humans won't be competitive in the labor market at all for long. It doesn't seem plausible that automatic driving would still be decades off, or that the trades would be safe from automation indefinitely, when an AI could simply spawn teams of thousands of super-fast ML engineers who don't need to eat, sleep or schedule meetings.

But anyway, assuming that humans are completely out of the software loop at some point, I have been wondering what AI-generated code will look like. Will AI continue to build on top of the human-generated open source corpus, or leave it behind? If the latter, will abstraction and code reuse be useful at all for AI's or will it be simpler for them to just build every application completely from scratch? If there is abstraction and code reuse, what will the language look like? What will libraries and API's look like? Will there even be applications, or just a single mega-chatgpt that generates code as needed to serve our requests? Will we even make requests, or will it just read our minds and desires and respond?

We should start having a conversation about what the new social contract will look like and when and how it should be phased in.

As I understand your post, an explicit version of your argument would be something like "the level of suffering that nature intends for animals far exceeds the level of suffering experienced by animals farmed for meat, so farming animals for meat provides them with a better life than they deserve."

When assessing arguments like this I find it useful to substitute animals for a hypothetical population of hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals. If an island populated by such people were discovered, and they turned out to generally live nasty, brutish and short lives for some reason, would that justify farming them for meat?

The answer is clearly no. If you were to ever encounter a hominid of any cognitive ability who was being farmed for meat, you would be horrified and would report the situation to law enforcement. That individual's treatment by the operators of the farm would qualify as brutal regardless of how much people of the same background tend to suffer out in the world.

I don't think there is a valid reason to treat hypothetical hominids with cognitive abilities typical of nonhuman mammals differently from actual nonhuman mammals.

Given how quickly AI image generation, and creativity generally, has progressed, I think it's perfectly plausible that within ten years we will be able to tell an AI "create a work of art that is unique, highly meaningful and that would be very difficult or impossible for most humans to create with their hands," and will get a work of art that is, in blinded assessments, competitive with the work of any master.

If that happens, I agree that the top 100 human artists in the world will likely have jobs, but they won't be successful in the sense that their work is uniquely valued by society. We pay to see the very most talented humans perform tasks that have been successfully automated, such as chess and lifting heavy objects, not because we need the service they provide but because we get an emotional kick out of seeing other humans perform way outside the normal range of human abilities.

According to http://www.kastenmarine.com/metalboats.htm, mostly cost plus other drawbacks that sound like they would not be blockers if the cost were lower. That author thinks monel would be even better than stainless, but it's even more expensive.

It seems to me that, at some level, they must be subsidized by new buyers of filecoin. It's hard to imagine anyone providing storage so cheaply even if they didn't make any profit at all. Miner revenues have to come from somewhere.

What I want to know is whether a good equilibrium is available. Say some decentralized apps with significant storage requirements win big over the next five years, and the filecoin network starts seeing a more moderate level of usage. Assume also that sentiment normalizes so that the filecoin market starts viewing filecoin as a service token for storage and retrieval, not as a speculative investment. Is the network still competitive with centralized storage providers, and how does the filecoin supply inflate over time as the network operates?

Your broader point about OTA is certainly debatable, but off-peak charging can be incentivized (as opposed to mandated) very economically.

When I was 35, I could have written the OP's post almost verbatim. I'm 42 now and, despite having spent two years working intentionally on the problem, am still in a similar place on the whole.

Several solutions to the OP's predicament are being advanced with a fair amount of force, and I'm finding that I don't really believe any of them. I do believe that the advice is being offered honestly and in good faith. It's also clearly a good idea to cultivate healthy habits, stay active and meet people. However, I have tried many potential solutions myself and have encountered many false summits, and the tone of the most forceful advice here matches things I would have said to myself when I was camping on them. When I imagine myself taking the advice, I can easily see myself living through the familiar progression of triumph, doubt and disillusionment.

Maybe some of us are just wired for shame, loneliness and regret, and are searching for our safe harbor (to mix in another metaphor) where we won't have to struggle or prove ourselves anymore. That thought counterintuitively makes me feel a bit better. It gives me a reason to not feel ashamed and regretful _about_ feeling ashamed and regretful, and it reifies a system that, whether or not it's the work of humans, is clearly oppressive, which creates the opportunity to find meaning in resisting it.

Exploring your second point a bit more: if it were five billion lives rather than five lives being saved, most people's intuition would be that regrettably it's necessary to murder the one patient. Our intuition about this thought experiment transitions from deontology to consequentialism as the magnitude of the utility impact increases. There's something unarticulated about the murder that seems worse than five natural deaths, but not worse than five billion natural deaths.

Maybe it's the fact that the act would have a major negative effect on the surgeon, or that admitting a justification for murder other than self-defense could open the door to abuse causing widespread harm. Ie, maybe our intuition is basically utilitarian but is constrained by rights and rules to protect against risks that are hard to quantify.

I've done three of seven Mindbloom sessions so far. The first gave me a resolution to a deeply ingrained and painful pattern like the one you're describing, which I have worked on for years, in a matter of minutes. The second, which I did on a day when I felt rushed, was disappointingly mild. The third, during which I wasn't rushed but was pretty tired, was intense and pleasant, but didn't offer any epiphanies like the first session did. I'm planning to give mindset and setting very high priority on my remaining session days in hopes of having more significant experiences.

One miracle out of three attempts isn't bad, so I'm very happy I gave it a try. For an interesting overview of psychedelic therapy generally, check out "How To Change Your Mind" by Michael Pollan.

I think it's time to seriously think about putting the same amount of effort into non-pharmaceutical intervention (NPI) development as we put into the vaccines. As inspiration, note that parts of the US are have environments that can support malaria; malaria can spread very aggressively when conditions are favorable [1]; and that malaria used to be a major public health threat in the US. It is not anymore, despite the fact that there is no vaccine, because of NPI's. It was initially beaten back using NPI's and has been controlled using NPI's ever since [2].

What if we had an affordable, comfortable mask that worked so well that you have no practical chance of contracting an airborne virus while wearing it? I get that current N95 and surgical masks are not that, but I don't see why it would be impossible to create one within the physical laws of the universe, especially if you put power and air supplies on the table. Scuba gear and air-supplied biohazard suits seem to be existence proofs, the question is whether they can be made practical.

If everyone had such a mask, we would have a new strategy available for controlling delta and any other variant that emerges in the future: everyone could mask up full-time when outside the house _for a limited amount of time_ until transmission drops to a low level. From that point, local outbreaks could be controlled by local bouts of masking, plus aggressive testing and contact tracing.

I get that anti-masking would be an obstacle, but part of the difficulty has been messaging risk and uncertainty to people who start from a skeptical place. A mask that _positively_ protects the wearer, and that can remove the need for restrictions within a finite, predictable time, would be an easier sell, especially after the strategy is seen to work once or twice.

1: https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...

2: https://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/elimination_us.htm...

You should be able initiate an ACATS transfer out of your Robinhood account from another brokerage. https://www.interactivebrokers.com/en/index.php . https://robinhood.com/us/en/support/articles/transfer-stocks...

I don't mean to recommend IB as opposed to other brokerages in the current moment, I pasted their link because I transferred an account into IB in this way several months ago so I know it works.

I didn't have cases like your example in mind. If you couldn't know that the speed limit would decrease soon, eg you had no idea the speed limit was going to change until you were nearly level with the sign, then presumably the law should require you to slow down promptly but safely. The opt-out button shouldn't be required in that case.

The opt-out button would be for rare situations where you actually need to exceed the speed limit for reasons of health or safety.

I don't want information getting into the hands of powerful people without a very good reason, but I think the safety benefits of universal speed limit compliance with exceptions for health and safety would constitute a very good reason.

In terms of privacy, this idea seems more or less equivalent to traffic cameras that capture images of license plates when drivers fail to comply with traffic signals.

We could have speed governors with an opt-out button, where use of the opt-out button gets logged and has to be justified.