niplav
Yes, it’s just that I haven’t tried it yet.
Software: fish shell
Need: interactive shell
Other programs I’ve tried: bash, sh, rcfish is pretty good as an interactive shell. It has a quite intuitive search and excellent tab completion (e.g. including tab completion previews). The language is much simpler than bash, but less prone to weird substitution errors. fish is configurable, but I suspect that its package environment is not as extensive as for zsh. fish recently had a breaking language change which screwed up a couple of scripts I had written. I wish someone would write an rlwrap equivalent with the user interface and feel of fish.
Software: rc
Need: scripting shell
Other programs I’ve tried: bash, sh, fishrc does a couple of things very right. It’s a new spin on the classic unix shell, its main advantage being the cleaned up syntax, e.g. for handling variable substitution around strings (it doesn’t do any substitution inside of strings), its handling of lists and basic control structures. It is best used conjunction with Plan 9/9front (e.g. the return value of a command being a string), but even on POSIX systems it fits my use cases nicely.
Advantages over bash/sh: Simpler syntax, variable substitution cleaner, nicer control structures. Disadvantages to bash/sh: Fewer packages/extensions/libraries (?), not available by default on any system
Disadvantages to fish: Interactive usage is less fluid, can’t be extended much further
Tongue orgasm
I’m intrigued – google gives only porn videos as search results.
Also, I assume you mean a P-spot orgasm when you say “female orgasm”?
A good thing I did today: reading this hilarious and horrifying project management star wars fanfiction.
I am insanely annoyed that something like this is happening.
I don’t know very much about the conflict, but concerning just the storage of preserved people, there should be ~0 disagreement on what the best course of action is (keep the people cooled until they can be revived).
What is the conflict about (in a very birds eye view)?
I think that this nonspecific discomfort could be fractal: You believe that it’s not always there, but there’s a version of it that’s always in the background, and you have learned to tune it out in everyday life (like e.g. a tinnitus that you tune out 99% of the time, but which you hear when lying in bed at night). Once you start investigating deeper and deeper, it becomes apparent in a wider range of states of mind.
I would also wager that especially strong nonspecific discomforts are the ones first identified once people start a little bit of meditation (those then are often resolved or at least made specific/their cause is identified) and the whole process is started on a more subtle & refined level.
I’m probably biased towards seeing meditation as a panacea, but if I was restricted to naming the three largest advantages of moderate practice, it would probably be “identifying nonspecific discomforts and showing their causal structure/source”.
I think I would phrase it differently, perhaps something like “Tell the typical LessWronger something that they will find valuable”, which might be kind of a cop-out.
That definition doesn’t exclude fiction or something like this, or Nate Soares Replacing Guilt series, which deals more with mental strategies than with truth.
I remember Valentine talking about wanting to have more poetry on LW – I think a post containing a poem, a mantra or litany, or a painting, or some music would also be valuable to LW, if it is relevant and some effort has been put into it.
A somewhat sad truth is that a post like this will likely only be upvoted if you are already known to the votership – you likely have to prove your worth beforehand.
Usually, when I downvote something, I try to weigh three factors against each other:
How much do I want others to see this?
How much time & effort would it take me to explain to the person why I think their comment is misguided?
How likely is it that I would influence the poster’s behavior productively?
I usually try to explain why I downvoted something, but I often have the impression that a simple “lurk moar”/”read the sequences and the codex”/”be more precise/formal/factual” would be the most accurate advice (most bad posts are meandering, imprecise and unstructured).
I wonder whether it’s nicer to comment and recommend someone to read the sequences and the codex than to strong-downvote them (I would guess that for most people, the psychological effect of the latter is much worse). For some reason, the former has kind of fallen out of fashion here.
Also, over time, I have learned that there are some topics that it’s pretty much hopeless to discuss about online: the E word, the C word, the G word, the other C word. At the least, for a conversation, there needs to be a shared understanding that you both know that you’re not just GPT-3ing the whole thing out.
AI systems find ways to completely manipulate some class of humans, e.g. by making them addicted. Arguably, this is already happening on a wider scale to a smaller amount – people becoming “addicted” to algorithmically generated feeds.
Maybe the question could be concretized to the amount of time people spend on their devices on average?
Yes, kind of (depends on how genocide exactly is defined).
I would speculate most of the impact is through insects not being born because their predecessors starving at a higher-than-normal rate because of the reduction of ecosystems, and not by being directly killed (e.g. crushed or killed by insecticides).
The posts above rest on the assumption of total hedonic utilitarianism, with no moral uncertainty being considered, and on several other empirical assumptions.
If we take wild animals (and possibly insects ) into account, humanity might be net positive.
I wish I had gotten that link before writing my 2,500 words. Still, thank you :-D
Brain-Computer Interfaces and AI Alignment
What fascinates you?
Which topics are not talked about enough, given how interesting/important they are?
Which question has been bugging you recently?
What would a society populated only by copies of you do that this one doesn’t?
Which recommendation-worthy piece of fiction is under-recommended/not recommended at all?
Which blog posts would you write if you had the time/energy to?
How do you structure a typical day/week/month/ year?
In which direction are you currently steering your life?
Nice, I wrote up some thoughts about the risk here. They possibly apply to you less due to high competence and therefore value as an emulation.
I’m in favour of keeping the and – it keeps the implication that a conversation can switch between meta and object level.
(I do not plan to sign up for cryogenics either. I predict distant self-interested agents are more likely to resurrect me as a slave than as a master. [Post-scarcity utopia is wishful thinking too. By medieval standards, we already live in a post-scarcity society. This world is not a utopia.])
Two small things: You want to refer to “cryonics”, not “cryogenics”, and the text you link is fiction (I also disagree with your assessment, but will have to take some time to type that up and make no promises of doing so :-)).
Is there a good case for the usefulness (or uselessness) of brain-computer interfaces in AI alignment (à la Neuralink etc.)? I’ve searched around a bit, but there seems to be no write-up for the path to making AI go well using BCIs.
Edit: Post about this is up.
The podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps stresses the importance of translations and transmissions of philosophical texts – e.g. Plato was a secondary or tertiary figure in the middle ages at best (with only parts of the Timaios being available), and rose to philosophical prominence in the 14th century only after translations from greek texts that had been preserved in Byzantium were brought to Italy. Similarly, we know that Chrysippus wrote hundreds of texts, ~none of which have survived until today (him being compared to Plato and Aristotle in terms on influence on hellenistic philosophy).
That got me thinking about the importance of translations and preservation of texts around LessWrong. There are translations of the sequences into some languages, but e.g. not Chinese with its 1 bio. speakers (I think there exists a chinese translation of Superintelligence, though).
There has been some effort to preserve existing writing, e.g. by gwern, of the Novum Organum and of the Felicifia forum.
Translation/preservation is probably undervalued because it is boring and it is hard to signal intelligence/creativity with it (which is probably why I don’t do it either).
Ideas for preservation: LiveJournal Scott Alexander posts (curated, there is a lot of personal information there), Facebook spit posts/discussions, probably some Discord servers (e.g. the Eleuther AI/Bayesian Conspiracy discord, curated as well).
See also Tomasik 2019.