RomanHauksson(Roman Hauksson-Neill)
I made an Anki deck for memorizing this jargon. You can download it or submit a pull request on GitHub.
During the past few months, I ran an undergraduate computer science research program at my university, and I chose to use Zulip to organize our communication (between 25 people). I wanted to use Zulip because it was open-source and, like you, I was a fan of the threads model. Unfortunately, the participants reported that the notifications were unreliable, the mobile app was janky, and the threads were confusing.
Keep in mind that these weren’t average software users but rather CS majors filtered through an application process – even for them, threads took a while to get used to. I concluded that Zulip would work well if every team member was on board with (and understood) the threads model, but a team that doesn’t care would prefer Discord or Slack.
[Question] What are your thoughts on the future of AI-assisted software development?
Is there any way to use cryptography to enable users to verify their humanity to a website, without revealing their identity? Maybe by “outsourcing” the verification to another entity – e.g. governments distribute private keys to each citizen, which the citizen uses to generate anonymous but verifiable codes to give to websites.
I thought I was the only one! It’s free cardio. My mile time is unusually fast, which I want to ascribe to this habit, but maybe the casuality goes the other way (“I like running everywhere because I was already good at running”).
Thank you! I recently began hosting dinners with friends and have ran into a similar issue. I would add that lentils and rice is a particularly hypoallergenic meal (vegan, gluten-free, nut-free, etc).
Would you mind listing other meal ideas you’ve had that follow the same structure?
Very well written, thank you! All of the writing about AI-generated art that I’ve stumbled across has been either one-sentence talking points (e.g. “it’s stealing art without artists’ permission” or “training an AI model is just like a human looking at past art”) or hedgy arguments from news articles (“some artists are concerned that...”).
It’s refreshing to see a serious, grounded look at the ethics of AI art. I was thinking about writing my own post along the same vein, but this covers most of what I would have touched on (and more).
I was not aware of this. Just edited Wirecutter out, thanks.
Edit: I’ve expanded this into a full post.
Three related concepts.
On redundancy: “two is one, one is none”. It’s best to have copies of critical things in case they break or go missing, e.g. an extra cell phone.
On authentication: “something you know, have, and are”. These are three categories of ways you can authenticate yourself.
Something you know: password, PIN
Something you have: key, phone with 2FA keys, YubiKey
Something you are: fingerprint, facial scan, retina scan
On backups: the “3-2-1” strategy.
Maintain 3 copies of your data:
2 on-site but on different media (e.g. on your laptop and on an external drive) and
1 off-site (e.g. in the cloud).
Inspired by these concepts, I propose the “2/3” model for authentication:
Maintain at least three ways you can access a system (something you have, know, and are). If you can authenticate yourself using at least 2 out of the 3 ways, you’re allowed to access the system.
This prevents both false positives (hackers need to breach at least two methods of authentication) and false negatives (you don’t have to prove yourself using all methods). It provides redundancy on both fronts.
- 30 Jan 2023 1:22 UTC; 1 point) 's comment on RomanHauksson’s Shortform by (
Three related concepts.
On redundancy: “two is one, one is none”. It’s best to have copies of critical things in case they break or go missing, e.g. an extra cell phone.
On authentication: “something you know, have, and are”. These are three categories of ways you can authenticate yourself.
Something you know: password, PIN
Something you have: key, phone with 2FA keys, YubiKey
Something you are: fingerprint, facial scan, retina scan
On backups: the “3-2-1” strategy.
Maintain 3 copies of your data:
2 on-site but on different media (e.g. on your laptop and on an external drive) and
1 off-site (e.g. in the cloud).
Inspired by these concepts, I propose the “2/3” model for authentication:
Maintain at least three ways you can access a system (something you have, know, and are). If you can authenticate yourself using at least 2 out of the 3 ways, you’re allowed to access the system.
This prevents both false positives (hackers need to breach at least two methods of authentication) and false negatives (you don’t have to prove yourself using all methods). It provides redundancy on both fronts.
Ideally, a competitive market would drive the price of goods close to the price of production, rather than the price that maximizes revenue. Unfortunately, some mechanisms prevent this.
One is the exploitation of the network effect, where a good is more valuable simply because more people use it. For example, a well-designed social media platform is useless if it has no users, and a terrible addictive platform can be useful if it has many users (Twitter).
This makes it difficult to break into a market and gives popular services the chance to charge what people will pay instead of the minimum amount required to keep the lights on. Some would say this is the price that things should be, but I disagree. Life should be less expensive for consumers, and diabetic people shouldn’t need to pay an arm and a leg for insulin.
Or maybe I’m just seething that I just willingly paid $40 for a month’s access to a dating app’s “premium” tier 🤢.
Yes, the increased chance that I find a good person to date in the next month is worth ≥$40 to me. It’s still the most efficient way to discover and filter through other single people near me. But I doubt it costs this much to maintain a dating app, even considering that the majority of people don’t pay for the premium tier.
The other thing that irks me about the network effect is that I don’t always like the thing that matches the puclic’s revealed preferences. I think this dating app is full of dark patterns – UI tricks that make it as addicting as possible. And it encourages shallow judgement of people. I would truly rather see people’s bio front and center, rather than their face, and I want them to have more space to talk about themselves. I wish I could just fill out a survey on what I’m looking for and be matched with the right person. Alas, OKCupid has fallen out of fashion, so instead I must dodge dark patterns and scroll past selfies because human connection has been commercialized.
I didn’t know about either of those concepts (network effects being classified as a natural monopoly and the average vs. marginal cost). Thanks!
While I am frustrated by the current dating landscape, I think dating apps are probably a net positive – before they were popular, it was impossible to discover as many people. And while arranged marriages probably have the same level of satisfaction as freely chosen marriages, I’m glad that I have to find my own partner. It adds to my life a sense of exploration and uncertainty, incentivizes me to work on becoming more confident/attractive, and helps me meet more cool people as friends.
Or maybe I’m just rationalizing.
I would love to read more about this.
The 2/3 rule for multi-factor authentication
an analogy between longtermism and lifespan extension
One proposition of longtermism is that the extinction of humanity would be especially tragic not just because of the number of people alive today who would die, but because this would eliminate the possibility for astronomical numbers of future people to exist. This implies that humanity should reprioritize resources away from solving near term problems and towards safeguarding itself from extinction.[1]
On a personal level, I have a chance of living to experience the longevity escape velocity, at which point anti-aging technology would be so advanced that I would only die due to accidents rather than natural factors. I may live for thousands of years, and these years would be much better than my current life because of improvements in general quality of life. Analogous to the potential of many future generations, this future would be so awesome for me that I should be willing to sacrifice a lot to increase the chance that it happens.
I could follow a version of Bryan Johnson’s “Blueprint” lifestyle for around $12,000 per year, which he designed to slow or reverse aging as much as possible. This might not be worth it. Suppose this protocol would extend my expected lifespan by 20%, but the extra $12,000 per year, if spent elsewhere, would increase my quality of life by 30%. This would mean I could gain more (quality of life × lifespan) by spending that money elsewhere.[2]
However, lifestyle interventions which, if I followed for the rest of my life, would increase my expected lifespan by 20%, would actually increase my expected lifespan by much more than 20% because our knowledge of how to extend lifespan increases as time passes. In other words, spending money on lifestyle interventions to promote longevity instead of quality of life increases the chance that I live to experience longevity escape velocity, so it may be worth it.
society spending resources on neartermist issues : me spending money on immediate quality of life :: society spending money on longtermist issues : me spending money on lifespan extension
altruism is part of my self-improvement feedback loop
One critique of utilitarianism is that if you seriously use it to guide your decisions, you would find that for any given decision, the choice that maximizes overall wellbeing is usually not the one that does any good for your personal wellbeing, so you would turn into a “happiness pump”: someone who only generates happiness for others at the detriment of themself. And, wouldn’t you know it, we see people like this pop up in the effective altruism movement (whose philosophy stems mostly from utilitarianism), particularly those who pursue earn-to-give. While most are happy to give away 10% of their income to effective charities, I’ve heard of some who have taken it to the extreme, to the point of calculating every purchase they make in terms of days of life they could have counterfactually saved via a donation.
However, since its beginnings, EA has shifted its focus away from earning to give and closer to encouraging people to pursue careers where they can work directly on the world’s most important problems. For someone with the privilege to consider this kind of career path, I believe this has changed the incentives and made the pursuit of self-fullfillment more closely aligned with maximizing expected utility.
the self-improvement feedback loop
Self-improvement is a feedback loop, or rather, a complicated web of feedback loops. For example,
The happier you are, the more productive you are, the more money you make, the happier you are.
The more often you exercise, the better your mental health, the better your executive function, the less often you skip your workouts, the more often you exercise.
The more often you exercise, the stronger you become, the more attractive you become, the more you benefit from the halo effect, the more likely you are to get a promotion, the more money you make.
It all feeds into itself. Maybe this is just another way of phrasing the effect of accumulated advantage.
let’s throw altruism into the loop
In my constant battle to nudge this loop in the right direction, I don’t see altruism as a nagging enemy, who would take away energy I could use to get ahead. Rather, I see it as part of the loop.
Learning about the privilege I have (not only in the US but also globally) and how I can meaningful leverage that privilege as an opportunity to help massive numbers of poorer-off people has given me an incredible amount of motivation to better myself. Before I discovered EA, my plan was to become a software developer and retire as early as possible. Great life plan, don’t get me wrong – but when I learned I could take a shot at solving the world’s most important problems, I realized it was a super lame and selfish waste of privilege in comparison.
Instead of thinking about “how do I make as much money as possible?”, I now think about
How do I form accurate beliefs about the world?
What does the world look like, where will it be in the future, and where can I fit in to make it better?
Which professional skills are the best fit for me and the most important for having a positive impact?
How do I become as productive and agentic as possible?
Notice how this differs from the happiness pump situation. It’s more focused on “improving the self to help others” than “sacrificing personal wellbeing to help others”. This paradigm shift in what it looks like to try to do as much good as possible brings altruism into the self-improvement feedback loop. It gives my life a sense of meaning, something to work towards. Altruism isn’t a diametrically opposed goal to personal fulfillment; it’s mostly aligned.
Tools for finding information on the internet
I’ll chime in with some strategies that work for me as well:
0.3 mg of Melatonin and 200 mg of L-theanine, ideally ~30 minutes before bed
Aggressive blue light filter on my devices plus turning all the lights down
I’ve been experimenting with turning all the lights off and carrying around a candle, but this is a bit too finnicky
No caffeine after ~14:00, and try to finish dinner before 17:00
Used to be a stomach sleeper, transformed into a back sleeper, feels more natural
Weighted blanket
ChiliPad at 63°F (like water-cooling/heating for my mattress)
Warm shower right before bed
Then some reading if I have time
If it takes me more than ~15 minutes to fall asleep, then I’ll also get up and read until I’m sleepy again
Eye mask that gives rooms for my eyelids
Headphones to block out some noise
Plus memory foam mattress and ergonomic pillow, but I don’t think these have helped that much
Body scan meditation and deep breathing, not sure how much this helps either
The definition for “Project Eggplant” is missing, and there is one fewer line break between “Resolve Cycles” and “Reductionism” than other definitions.