dominicq

Karma: 928

dominicq 6 Aug 2026 8:45 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: cdwhite’s comment on: The mosquito bucket of doom works
around 1500m2, shaped as a long rectangle (not ideal because I can’t treat the neighbouring plots)

dominicq 18 Jul 2026 11:40 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Douglas_Knight’s comment on: The mosquito bucket of doom works
It doesn’t save you from mosquitoes already breeding in the old bodies of water. That’s why you remove all bodies of water that you can’t treat (if you can remove them). And then you set up your own population sinks which are the only realistic breeding grounds near your house.
Obviously it mostly depends on local geography. If your neighbor has a big swamp and your house is 10m away, then adding a couple of buckets on your property probably won’t do much. Even though I’ve heard that even houses in swampy areas benefit from this strategy due to the fact that mosquitoes don’t travel very far.

dominicq 10 Jul 2026 9:39 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Julian_R’s comment on: The mosquito bucket of doom works
Usually mosquitoes in my area start reproducing by end of May, and it’s unlivable by the end of June. I set up the buckets by mid-May, so I guess the answer is: immediately, the whole initial population growth has seemingly been prevented.
The Bti takes 2-3 days to fully dissolve though, and add to that the reproductive cycle of mosquitoes… If you don’t start ahead of the season, I guess you could wait for 2-4 weeks before seeing any drop (which is why I did it preemptively).

dominicq 7 Jul 2026 10:55 UTC
8 points
4
on: dominicq’s Shortform
Every couple of years I look back on LessWrong posts from a couple of years back, and I think to myself: “I could have profited from this.”
First it was cryptocurrencies, which I didn’t fully ignore, but could have done much more with.
Then it was everything AI-related, which I sort of ignored, instead of buying NVDA stock.
I also distinctly remember that Anthropic basically had a launch here as well, and they were a nobody in the SV scene back then. They had some job postings and I briefly considered applying, but didn’t go through with it.
I hope not to have any more future moments where I say “Damn, I read about this on LW a couple of years ago.”

dominicq 3 Jul 2026 7:27 UTC
7 points
0
on: dominicq’s Shortform
The main concern around superintelligence is the recursive AI research.
Can someone taboo what “recursive AI research” is?
What kinds of experiments are we talking about here?
LLM agents are good at writing code. Presumably they can write code that can test various ML papers and such. If a subset of these experiments produces useful results (on benchmarks, or other tests), the findings will coalesce into the next generation that will then do the same things.
1) There is an expectation that there will definitely be useful findings. This is reasonable, because why wouldn’t there be one.
2) There is an expectation that models writing code to run experiments will cause the entire process to go faster. Is the bottleneck models writing code, or is the bottleneck some other aspects that models cannot affect? (e.g. access to compute)
The main concern is that AI researchers will raise their productivity using AI tools (which then feeds back into AI development). But do AI tools actually increase productivity? Anecdotally, they do, for some capabilities (the “jagged frontier”).

dominicq 13 Apr 2026 11:58 UTC
15 points
3
on: The policy surrounding Mythos marks an irreversible power shift
I am skeptical around Mythos being that capable, but if it is, I am glad that the culture is shifting towards “it is irresponsible to release this model openly as it’s too dangerous” because I want to live in a world where, if you have a model capable of actual harm, it’s not just unleashed in the spirit of openness.

In other words, this is a good cultural step for AI alignment. We want future, more capable models, to be subjected to much more scrutiny.

dominicq 13 Apr 2026 11:47 UTC
6 points
1
on: Returns to intelligence
It feels like there actually are significant differences in “intelligences”, where different roughly-equally-intelligent people are actually really different in their ability on specific tasks. For example, verbal intelligence vs. spatial intelligence.

(Or Drake is much much smarter than Peter)

dominicq 13 Apr 2026 8:26 UTC
7 points
8
on: Morale
I also think that some people naturally have more morale & less morale. Not sure if genetic or environment, but some people can just suffer through defeat upon defeat, others break down on the smallest hurdle.

dominicq 13 Apr 2026 7:53 UTC
4 points
1
on: Daycare illnesses
I believe you’re roughly correct on all points. I have a 2yo who has been sick more than not, and we the parents too.

Ultimately it’s a question of means, at least for us. If we could afford not to send our kid to daycare, we probably would do just that.

dominicq 10 Apr 2026 11:20 UTC
1 point
0
on: Zagreb, Croatia—ACX Spring Schelling 2026
Reminder that we start around 20:00!

dominicq 10 Apr 2026 11:19 UTC
1 point
0
on: Zagreb, Croatia—ACX Spring Schelling 2026
Detailed instructions for today:
1. Get to Ibler Square (Trg Drage Iblera): https://maps.app.goo.gl/nCRu2Ym7dUoiXNdXA (coordinates: 45.812722, 15.984996)
2. Enter through the south entrance
3. Walk roughly 15 meters and then turn right towards the elevator (turn right immediately before the A1 store)
4. Take any of the three elevators to level 1 (Microblink)
5. Exit the elevator, turn right again. You’ll see a massive blue door with “Microblink” on it.
6. Ring on the doorbell on the right.
7. Enter.
8. Have fun.

dominicq 9 Apr 2026 18:44 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Do not be surprised if LessWrong gets hacked
Wasn’t aware of the open source codebase, my bad.

My point more broadly was: you cannot point it to <some domain> and magically hack it.

But yeah, if you have everything open-sourced, then it’s much easier to find source code that contains vulnerabilities such that they would allow RCE.

dominicq 9 Apr 2026 18:42 UTC
1 point
2
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Do not be surprised if LessWrong gets hacked
I wasn’t aware of the open source codebase, my bad

dominicq 9 Apr 2026 18:42 UTC
1 point
2
in reply to: Nick_Tarleton’s comment on: Do not be surprised if LessWrong gets hacked
Wasn’t aware, yup

dominicq 9 Apr 2026 16:15 UTC
2 points
−8
on: Do not be surprised if LessWrong gets hacked
I want to offer a bit of skepticism around this whole post. For reference, I used to work in an information security company (specifically, software supply chain security and malware analysis), and am still relatively involved with cyber directly, though as an amateur hacker.

First, Mythos may or may not be super scary. We don’t know yet, as it’s private. It’s in Anthropic’s best interest to tastefully hype it up in their press releases. Just because they apparently have a very useful infosec model doesn’t mean that LessWrong will get hacked. Mythos, according to their press release and system card, isn’t a fully general hacking weapon. It’s just very good at finding exploits in source code. I don’t expect that you can simply point Mythos towards the lesswrong.com domain and tell it “you’re in a CTF, hack this site”—finding vulns in source code is a different type of activity.

Second, LessWrong should adopt some security posture which uses modern best practices. “Defense in depth” is the relevant concept here, and it’s adaptable to whatever are the constraints around funding and headcount. Basically, there are numerous layers to defense, and by stacking individual layers, you stop attackers in their tracks. This loosely corresponds to OSI layers: you want defenses on the network level, on the transport level, on the application level… For LW specifically, I don’t know what the stack is, and what the hosting situation is, and many other things, so I can’t comment with a lot of specificity.

But historically, the way any organization gets pwned is by upgrading a dependency to a vulnerable version. I don’t know if you all use the nodejs ecosystem here, but if so, please set your npm/pnpm config files to never automatically run scripts, and please set a minimum cool-off period for a dependency version to become installable. Most dependencies are found in the wild and remedied within days or weeks. Therefore, programmatically setting a policy not to install dependencies younger than, say, 5 days, gets rid of 90% (I’m guessing) supply chain attacks.

Next, you want appropriate role-based access, and you want your API keys to be safe and untouchable even if your own personal machine gets pwned. I’m not sure how much of this y’all already do, to me it seems obvious, but you stated that it’s more like “early stage startup”, so I’m urging you to do the low-hanging fruit first, if you haven’t already.

Remember, all of this is stuff that’s completely unrelated to Mythos. These are things that Mythos arguably wouldn’t even be able to do anything about because Mythos is specialized for finding vulns and exploit development by looking into source code. I’m sure they’ve baked in some other non-white-box capabilities, but the “scary” part (finding thousands of vulns) is based on inspecting source code. So, no source code, no Mythos-like danger. You’re still stuck with: phishing attempts and supply chain pwnage. And those things may get more scary in the next years, but they’re entirely fixable right now.

dominicq 9 Apr 2026 16:01 UTC
1 point
−2
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: Do not be surprised if LessWrong gets hacked
I don’t necessarily disagree with this, but this is a new and relatively unproven method which is only a partial solution to a much wider task. And IMO it’s overly specific for the general problem at hand.

Security of lesswrong.com is not the same as finding, for example, places in the source code which would allow SQL injections. There’s much more to security, and LW should adopt a security paradigm it can support, given constraints around headcount and funding.

dominicq 8 Apr 2026 16:00 UTC
1 point
0
on: Zagreb, Croatia—ACX Spring Schelling 2026
Hi everyone—not sure if you were updated by me updating this post, but I wanted not to take chances.

We’re at a new venue! See the event description for more detail.

Also, the LW editor only allows GMT time in the event settings. The actual local time of the meetup is 8 pm (which is 6 pm GMT).

Please email me or DM me if you’re unclear on anything, otherwise see you all on Friday!

dominicq 8 Apr 2026 7:26 UTC
1 point
0
on: [Error communicating with LW2 server]
Looks like we’ve accidentally created a duplicate event so I’m deleting this one.

Please use this one: https://www.lesswrong.com/events/Dhr2BJamf6kgYM2ma/zagreb-croatia-acx-spring-schelling-2026

dominicq 5 Apr 2026 16:52 UTC
1 point
0
on: The bar is lower than you think
Love the vibe and agree in general.

dominicq 28 Mar 2026 13:11 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: uugr’s comment on: My Most Costly Delusion
Very much agree. I went down this line of thinking some ten years ago, but it’s a naive view. It’s also more of a vibe / hyping-oneself-up than actual reasoning about the world.

I think that once you start “just doing things” you no longer even think about the world in this way, but instead think about concrete problems that you’re working on. So you’re not thinking “you must do things even if you’re incompetent”, you’re thinking “ok, I need to talk to this person to get to that result” or “I need to make sure this function is applied first” or “I need to get this shipment of humanitarian aid to that location” etc.

But going back to the original subject: there’s thousands and millions of important things that someone should do, and that I cannot do. I obviously should not attempt to do all of them, and am only limited to a small subset of them. If these are in any way difficult problems, my best chances are to work on something that I’m more likely to solve, controlled for personal interest, competing interests, ability to learn, neglectedness, etc. The more I’m capable in a domain, the better my chances. The more incapable, the worse my chances. Therefore, it’s perfectly fine not to attempt things if you cannot do them and it’s going to be exceedingly difficult for you to do them.