Bucky

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Bucky Oct 9, 2025, 9:39 AM
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on: The Relationship Between Social Punishment and Shared Maps
One of my favourite LW post types is “something that I had a vague sense of being identified and fleshed out”
This is a great example of that.

Bucky Oct 9, 2025, 8:50 AM
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on: The Relationship Between Social Punishment and Shared Maps
In my experience, people thinking badly about me isn’t upstream of the social punishment of losing resources, people thinking badly of me IS the social punishment.
Evolutionarily speaking I would guess that worrying about what people think of me is important in order to allow me to get resources but my emotions are implemented on the social level, not the resource level.
(E.g. I don’t know any LWers IRL and will get very little resource from them but it would still feel bad if people had a bad opinion of me)

Bucky Aug 10, 2025, 8:46 PM
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in reply to: Ben’s comment on: If worker coops are so productive, why aren’t they everywhere?
The Co-Op’s purchase of Somerfield (£1.57b) would seem like an interesting case study—why did they decide to go ahead with this? Did it actually benefit staff in the long run?

Bucky Jul 27, 2025, 7:50 PM
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in reply to: Sodium’s comment on: The Purpose of a System is what it Rewards
Yeah, I think that clarifies my thoughts—IMO using the word purpose is not ok in these other perspectives unless you actually mean a person had that purpose. it brings in connotations that someone has this purpose for which we then assign moral blame when the real question may be competence. And then, when there is moral blame, separating that from a competence issue is harder.
Much better IMO to say “this system isn’t achieving its purpose” than to say “this system has this other purpose” unless that’s what you mean—you are claiming that some designer(s) have this other purpose.
I’m not familiar specifically with HSR but my guess is that there are multiple purposes from multiple people. Some designers have the purpose to improve transport links, some want a big project to make their name and some want a jobs program. Systems can have multiple purposes and trying to narrow it down to a single one oversimplifies things.

Bucky Jul 27, 2025, 6:33 PM
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on: The Purpose of a System is what it Rewards
I don’t think this works for general systems. For POSIWID the purpose of a car is to to get you for A to B. I don’t think POSIWIR returns a result—cars aren’t rewarded.
Having said that, I do think it’s much more interesting than POSIWID and, for human systems, more likely to yield sensible answers.
My take would be that purpose comes from conscious minds—the purpose of a system is what the designer intends. This is true even if the designer is rubbish at their job and their system doesn’t achieve the purpose they intend. When we don’t know what the designer intends we try to work it out by looking at what the system does or what it rewards.
This declares by fiat that non-engineered systems have no purpose but I think I’m ok with that. The purpose of a rabbit is not to make baby rabbits—rabbits just are. Saying rabbits have a purpose is to anthropomorphise evolution.

Bucky May 15, 2025, 11:24 AM
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on: Eliezer and I wrote a book: If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies
Quick note that I can’t open the webpage via my institution (same issue on multiple browsers). Their restrictions can be quite annoying and get triggered alot. I can view it myself easily enough on phone but if you want this to get out beware trivial inconveniences and all that...
Firefox message is below.
Secure Connection Failed
An error occurred during a connection to ifanyonebuildsit.com. Cannot communicate securely with peer: no common encryption algorithm(s).
Error code: SSL_ERROR_NO_CYPHER_OVERLAP
- The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because the authenticity of the received data could not be verified.
- Please contact the web site owners to inform them of this problem.

Bucky Aug 3, 2024, 9:55 AM
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on: Dragon Agnosticism
Do dragon unbelievers accept this stance? My impression is that dragon agnosticism would often be considered almost as bad as dragon belief.

Bucky Mar 17, 2024, 10:50 PM
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on: The Worst Form Of Government (Except For Everything Else We’ve Tried)
I’m confused as to how the fits in with UK politics. I don’t think the minority party has any kind of veto?

I guess we have the House of Lords but this doesn’t really have a veto (at least not long term) and the House of Commons and House of Lords aren’t always or even usually controlled by different factions.

Bucky Feb 9, 2024, 2:11 PM
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on: Running the Numbers on a Heat Pump
One extra thing to consider financially is if you have a smart meter then you can get all of your hot water and a chunk of your heating done at off peak rates. Our off peak electricity rates are about equal per kWh to gas rates.

Without this I think our system would be roughly the same cost per year as gas or slightly more, with it we save £200 per year or so I think. (This would be a very long payback time but there was a fully funded scheme we used).

If it helps anyone we are in Scotland and get average COP=2.9

Bucky Jan 11, 2024, 4:13 AM
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on: Introduce a Speed Maximum
In the UK there is a non-binding but generally observed rule that speed cameras allow you to drive 10% + 2mph above the speed limit(e.g. 35mph in a 30mph zone) before they activate.

This is a bit more of a fudge but better than nothing.

Bucky Nov 28, 2023, 2:28 PM
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on: why did OpenAI employees sign
1. Someone in your company gets fired by a boss you don’t know/particularly like without giving any reason
2. You are mad with the boss and want the decision overturned
3. You have a credible, attractive BATNA (the Microsoft offer)
These 3 items seem like they would be sufficient to cause something like the Open Letter to happen.
In most cases number 3 is not present which I think is why we don’t see things like this happen more often in more organisations.
None of this requires Sam to be hugely likeable or a particularly savvy political operator, just that people generally like him. People seem to suggest he was one or both so this just makes the letter more likely.
I’m sure this doesn’t explain it all in OpenAI’s case—some/many employees would also have been worried about AI safety which complicates the decision—but I suspect it is the underlying story.

Bucky Nov 23, 2023, 10:08 PM
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on: Why not electric trains and excavators?
I work in equipment manufacturing for construction so can comment on excavators. Other construction equipment (loaders, dumpers) have a similar story although excavators have more gently duty cycles and require smaller batteries so make sense to electrify first. Diesel-Hydraulic Excavators are also less efficient giving more potential advantage for electric equipment.
1. Agree that payback period is relatively low but possibly a bit longer than here—I’ve seen 3-5 years. The ruggedised batteries required for instance can be expensive.
Purchasers of new machines will generally keep them for 5-7 years which is enough to justify the payback but not to make it an obvious easy win.
1. If you have to use a diesel generator you immediately lose a lot of your cost saving. It is surprising how many construction sites lack mains electricity.
2. Many machines go to the rental market. In this case the equipment buyers do not get the benefit of the reduced operating costs. In that case the rental company has to sell the increased rental cost to their customers who are happy with what they are currently using.
3. Total cost of ownership just isn’t the main driver of buyer decisions. This is already a problem with diesel-hydraulic machines—there are many ways to make these more efficient which would have a decent payback period but don’t get implemented because efficiency isn’t a key purchasing driver.
What buyers really need is performance and reliability (plus low up front cost). The advantage of electric is more difficult to sell for reliability because of a lack of track record so going electric is a risk. Users are also rightly concerned that battery range will not be sufficient on high usage days—batteries in current machines often claim a full day but not necessarily with high usage.
1. Most likely route for electric in short term is for them to get used in environments where emissions are important (due to regulations or low ventilation such as mines) plus companies wanting to be/look green. This will allow a track record to build up which will give more confidence to buyers.
I suspect the most useful thing a government could do (assuming carbon tax is politically infeasible) would be to legislate for low emissions in cities which would build the track record faster.

Bucky Jun 29, 2023, 4:21 PM
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in reply to: lc’s comment on: When do “brains beat brawn” in Chess? An experiment
Something similar not involving AIs is where chess grandmasters do rating climbs with handicaps. one I know of was Aman Hambleton managing to reach 2100 Elo on chess.com when he deliberately sacrificed his Queen for a pawn on the third/fourth move of every game.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUjxDD7HNNTj4NpheA5hLAQLvEZYTkuz5

He had to complicate positions, defend strongly, refuse to trade and rely on time pressure to win.

The games weren’t quite the same as Queen odds as he got a pawn for the Queen and usually displaced the opponent’s king to f3/f6 and prevented castling but still gives an idea that probably most amateurs couldn’t beat a grandmaster at Queen odds even if they can beat stockfish. Longer time controls would also help the amateur so maybe in 15 minute games an 1800 could beat Aman up a Queen.

Bucky Jun 20, 2023, 8:18 PM
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in reply to: jefftk’s comment on: Public Transit is not Infinitely Safe
Think you need to update this line too?

This is a bit less than half the rate for the CTA.

Bucky Apr 1, 2023, 7:46 PM
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on: Proposal: Butt bumps as a default for physical greetings
Is there a default direction to twist for the butt bump? The pictures all show the greeters facing in the same direction so one must have turned left and the other right! How do I know which way I should twist?

I cannot sign the assurance contract until I understand this fundamental question

Bucky Apr 1, 2023, 1:12 PM
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in reply to: cousin_it’s comment on: Stop pushing the bus
Agreed, intended to distinguish between the weak claim “you should stop pushing the bus” and the stronger “there’s no game theoretic angle which encourages you to keep pushing”.

Bucky Mar 31, 2023, 6:00 PM
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on: Stop pushing the bus

So there’s no game theoretic angle, you can just make the decision alone, to stop pushing the frigging bus.

I don’t think this holds if you allow for p(doom) < 1. For a typical AI researcher with p(doom) ~ 0.1 and easy replacement, striking is plausibly an altruistic act and should be applauded as such.

Bucky Mar 4, 2023, 10:38 PM
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in reply to: Towards_Keeperhood’s comment on: Sydney can play chess and kind of keep track of the board state
I haven’t tested extensively but first impression is that this is indeed the case. Would be interesting to see if Sydney is similar but I think there’s a limit on number of messages per conversation or something?

Bucky Mar 4, 2023, 10:36 PM
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in reply to: Zachary Witten’s comment on: Sydney can play chess and kind of keep track of the board state
When you did this do you let ChatGPT play both sides or were you playing one side? I think it is much better if it gets to play both sides.

Bucky Mar 3, 2023, 9:46 PM
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on: Sydney can play chess and kind of keep track of the board state
I tried this with chatGPT to see just how big the difference was.

ChatGPT is pretty terrible at FEN in both games (Zack and Erik). In Erik’s game it insisted on giving me a position after 13 moves even though 25 moves had happened. When I pointed this out it told me that because there were no captures or pawn moves between moves 13 and 25 the FEN stayed the same…

However it is able to give sensible continuations of >20 ply to checkmate for both positions provided you instruct it not to give commentary and to only provide the moves. The second you allow it to comment on moves it spouts nonsense and starts making illegal moves. I also sometimes had to point out that it was black to play.

In Zack’s game ChatGPT has black set a trap for white (14… Ne5) and has white fall into it (15. Qxd4). After this 15… Nf3+ wins the Queen with a discovered attack from the bishop on g7.

Example continuation:

14… Ne5 15. Qxd4 Nf3+ 16. gxf3 Bxd4 17. Nxd4 Qxd4 18. Be3 Qxb2 19. Rec1 Bh3 20. Rab1 Qf6 21. Bd1 Rfc8 22. Rxc8+ Rxc8 23. Rxb7 Qa1 24. Bxa7 Qxd1#

One other continuation it gave got to checkmate on move 51 without any illegal moves or obvious blunders! (Other than whites initial blunder to fall into the trap)

In Erik’s game ChatGPT manages to play 29 ply of near perfect game for both players:

25… d5 26. g5 d4 27. cxd4 exd4 28. Qd2 Bb3+ 29. Ke1 Nd7 30. Nf5 Ne5 31. Be2 d3 32. Bd1 Bxd1 33. Kxd1 Nxf3 34. Qc3 f6 35. Qc4+ Kh8 36. Qe6 Qa5 37. Kc1 Qc3+ 38. Kb1 Rb8+ 39. Ka2 Qb2#

Stockfish prefers 26… dxc4+ and later on keeps wanting Bc5 for black plus black takes slightly to complete the checkmate than optimal but overall this is very accurate for both players.

Might be worth playing a game against chatGPT while telling it not to give any commentary?
What links here?

Bucky

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