warbaker

21 years ago today, Nick Bostrom published The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://nickbostrom.com/papers/the-fable-of-the-dragon-tyran...

This is one of the worst ideas I have ever heard.

The real with prediction markets problem is that people can make bets, then alter outcomes to match those bets. This is a well-known issue in sports betting (e.g. taking a fall), and I don't see how we're going to prevent it for things that matter a whole lot more than sports.

Non-paywalled version: https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-3326102/v1

One of the authors is a retired general, so he probably knows a bit more than us internet randos. Still, the last paragraph says: "The lesson of the Iran campaign is that the F-35 performed superbly in exactly the kind of fight it was built for." I feel like it's hard to gainsay the utility of the F-35 when it's useful in a real war we're actually in.

The author's main argument against the F-35 is that it can be easily destroyed on runways now, as drones and missile developments have outpaced missile defense, leaving the US and US allies vulnerable to a preemptive strike by China.

That might be true, but it's also strategically valuable to diminish the military capabilities of allies of China (e.g. the Iranian theocracy), which may make up for the tactical weaknesses of the F-35 against China in a direct confrontation. It's also possible that drone/missile defense will catch up (e.g. lasers), but that's hard to say at this point.

I am extremely pro-abortion. I think that "pro life" laws infringe on the basic human right to bodily autonomy, and threaten to criminalize miscarriage.

I am also aware that many people don't agree with me on this issue, but may agree with me on the importance of digital civil liberties.

When listing three example reasonable uses of social media, I feel EFF chose a needlessly divisive example, due the misguided notion that every good organization should support every good cause.

I want religious conservatives to support digital civil liberties, but if we insist on making it a "package deal" with stuff they don't support, we drive them away.

And downvoted to pieces. HN is such a cool place for dialogue!

I wish this announcement weren't infused with intersectionality.

"Your abortion fund uses TikTok to spread crucial information" is listed as one of three sample reasons you might use social media.

I support reproductive rights! But I don't want EFF to do that, and I don't want EFF to push conservatives out of the movement. I want EFF to appeal to everyone who cares about digital civil liberties, including people who disagree with me on other issues.

You can locate an aluminum plant pretty much anywhere you want, as the energy required to make aluminum is large compared to the cost of mining/shipping bauxite. This solves the main problem with geothermal, which is that it's in random locations around the world that don't necessarily have many people living there.

Any place with significant volcanic activity (e.g. Hawaii) could probably do geothermal power if they wanted to.

On aluminum, the author says:

“renewables” cannot provide the stable current and carbon atoms needed to make the process possible

This is untrue. Iceland has a huge aluminum industry, using mainly geothermal power: https://energytransition.org/2023/03/geothermal-iceland-this...

Iceland alone accounts for 1/10th of global aluminum production! https://www.riotinto.com/en/operations/iceland/isal

You do need constant, reliable power, as even a brief interruption makes a huge mess when the aluminum/slag freezes in the processor.

Unfortunate that JG is the fall guy for Siri. He was very successful at Google (e.g. BERT was published just after he left), but it looks like he wasn't able to save Apple from itself.

Is anyone willing to explain to me how Google is a monopolist in advertising? There are other online advertising platforms, and publishers can and do sell adds directly to advertisers.

See https://www.reddit.com/r/liberalgunowners/

...except that he is definitely wrong about the targeting aspect as well. Almost all of the people hit by the pager explosions were legit military targets. In the videos of the explosions, you can see people unharmed who were standing within meters of the targets. It was one of the most well-targeted anti-terrorist strikes in history.

I just want to say: thank you. It is hard to overstate how much Pytorch has accelerated ML/AI development, across the board.

Thanks for this - does this actually install CUDA, or just give a pytorch install for a particular CUDA version?

What do you do when a new CUDA version is released?

Have you figured out a good way to manage CUDA dependencies with uv?

Does uv handle CUDA versioning? This is the big reason I'm still on conda -- I can save a whole environment with `conda list --explicit`, including CUDA stuff, and I can set up a new machine with the same environment just from that file.

16 years later, I'm still disappointed about this decision. The justification for it is just awful: "6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want. But programming now isn’t so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don’t know who wrote."

This is just false. Engineering is still about taking small parts you understand entirely and using simple techniques to compose them into larger things you want. Sussman's justification is an abject surrender to shitty complexity. Engineers need to develop a taste for simplicity and elegance, especially at the beginning of their education.

Incidentally, an overlooked advantage of teaching in Scheme is that it levels the playing field, as pre-undergrad programming classes almost never use functional languages.

"without distinguishing between military officials and civilians"

Israel has air supremacy over Tehran. The facts don't support your narrative that Israel is flattening Tehran.

"Israel's defense minister warned Saturday that "Tehran will burn" if Iran continues firing missiles at Israel." https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-israel-retaliatory-strikes...

Don't get me wrong, Katz is a douchebag, but this was specifically a threat to retaliate in-kind of Iran continued to target arbitrary Israeli population centers.

I haven't seen any evidence of Israel targeting civilians (nuclear scientists aside), despite having complete air supremacy over Tehran. Air supremacy means Israel could carpet bomb the city if they wanted, but they don't want this. Not only would it be a horrible thing to do and of no military value, they simply don't blame the people of Iran for the IRGC's actions.

Israel wants nothing more than for Iran to be free of the IRGC.

Unlike Israel's Arab neighbors, Iran didn't attempt to destroy Israel (and kill all the Jews) in 1948. Before the IRGC took over, Iran and Israel had no problems.

The IRGC has made it clear that destroying Israel is one of their primary foreign policy objectives. They have said this, and it's why they funded Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis.

Google has responded to this "controversy" already:

https://x.com/JeffDean/status/1858540085794451906

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10053

The article you linked is not an example of this happening. Google open-sourced the chip design method, and uses it in production for TPU and other chips.

https://github.com/google-research/circuit_training

https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/how-alphachip-transfor...

Terrorist hijackings were a major reason for sky marshals being put on planes. The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine famously hijacked some planes and then blew them up on camera. This led directly to Nixon putting sky marshals on planes.

The whole saga only ended after the Palestinians failed to overthrow the King of Jordan in the Black September uprising, and then traded the final hostages for another terrorist whose hijacking attempt was foiled by the crew and passengers (pilot nose-dived the plane to give the crew and passengers a chance to capture the terrorists).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawson%27s_Field_hijackings

Alcohol is more addictive than opioids??

A solution to this is to book your flight first, then the hotel, as all airlines (that I'm aware of) allow for a full refund within 24 hrs.

and nobody beats them!

Forcing the sale of TikTok _is_ reciprocity. Facebook, Google, etc. are already banned in China. This is the CCP's policies backfiring.