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.

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.

From the article:

In the next few months Dish Networks, a firm best known for its satellite-television service, is expected to launch America’s fourth big carrier.

Dish’s network is to be the first in America that would live almost entirely in a computing cloud. Except for antennas and cables, it is mostly a cluster of code that runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the e-commerce giant’s cloud-computing arm. As such, the roll-out is a test of the extent to which computing clouds will “eat” the telecoms industry.

Silicon Valley

Ironically reading and engaging in commentary on the article is a girardian desire

Selective breeding is one form of evolution.

This view seems to imply the double spend problem wasn’t really a problem after all, which seems to invalidate the reason why a peer to peer proof of work/stake system is implemented from the start.

I have this past year felt what you feel, and I know many others have too. First of all, as I’m sure you know, there are certain necessary conditions for fulfillment and motivation: regular social contact, a healthy microbiota, exercise, and a regular sleep schedule.

But that’s not always sufficient. As several others have pointed out: he/she who has a why can endure almost any how. Find your purpose & goal, and align your work with that purpose. The concept of ikigai is a good starting point.

Except that the algorithm is optimized for revenue and attention-grabbing content (the opposite of university material), and will gradually steer watching habits in that direction.

This seems to be related to the concept of flow: finding that sweet spot between being too relaxed and too-stressed out. We need a moderate dose of stress to perform at our best. What's so interesting is that experiencing flow is also correlated with long-term fullfillment.

I've recently theorized the single most important factor for happiness and performance is being able to control your stress levels and increase/decrease your stress levels at will. It is not novel, but it helps me if I see my primary task as identifying which mechanisms can help me lower or increase stress. So far, meditation seems to have the best effect.

Some interesting bits from the article:

"In less dramatic ways the same principle applies to all of us. A fundamental paradox of human psychology is that thinking can be bad for us. When we follow our own thoughts too closely, we can lose our bearings, as our inner chatter drowns out common sense."

"To make good decisions in a complex world, Gigerenzer says, you have to be skilled at ignoring information. He found that a portfolio of stocks picked by people he interviewed in the street did better than those chosen by experts. The pedestrians were using the “recognition heuristic”: they picked companies they’d heard of, which was a better guide to future success than any analysis of price-earning ratios."

"How do you learn to unthink? Dylan believes the creative impulse needs protecting from self-analysis: “As you get older, you get smarter, and that can hinder you…You’ve got to programme your brain not to think too much.” Flann O’Brien said we should be “calculatedly stupid” in order to write. The only reliable cure for overthinking seems to be enjoyment, something that both success and analysis can dull. Experienced athletes and artists often complain that they have lost touch with what made them love what they do in the first place. Thinking about it is a poor substitute."