Said Achmiz

• Said Achmiz 19 Aug 2020 3:38 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: WordPress De­stroys Edit­ing Pro­cess, Seek­ing Alternatives

  Yep, a fair point. It only hap­pens with Naval Gaz­ing (not my per­sonal blog), for rea­sons I don’t think would ap­ply to Zvi’s blog, but un­til the bug that causes that is fixed, it’s a risk.

• Said Achmiz 18 Aug 2020 20:47 UTC

  4 points

  on: WordPress De­stroys Edit­ing Pro­cess, Seek­ing Alternatives

  Zvi, I host a cou­ple of blogs (such as my own blog and Naval Gaz­ing) on my cus­tom wiki plat­form. If you’re not able to find an­other al­ter­na­tive that suits you bet­ter, I’d be happy to host your blog as well.

  Pros:

  • I won’t ever add ‘fea­tures’ like “a new ed­i­tor that doesn’t work”

  • Per­sonal sup­port /​ assistance

  • A mas­sive ar­ray of fea­tures, from LaTeX to LessWrong com­ment thread tran­sclu­sion to em­bed­ded graphs /​ charts to Git in­te­gra­tion to … lots of stuff

  Cons:

  • No WYSIWIG editor

  • Less ‘pol­ished’ than Word­press in var­i­ous ways

  • Definitely not a drop-in re­place­ment and can­not seam­lessly trans­fer over old blog contents

• Said Achmiz 16 Aug 2020 16:36 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Slider’s comment on: At­tack­ing enlightenment

  The con­ver­sa­tion did not take place, so there are no logs to pro­duce.

• Said Achmiz 2 Aug 2020 22:25 UTC

  8 points

  on: Jam is obsolete

  Jam is tastier than frozen fruit. This, as far as I can see, ends the de­bate. (And if your jam is not tastier than frozen fruit, then you’re do­ing jam wrong.)

  (… you are mak­ing the jam your­self, of course—aren’t you? Cer­tainly there is lit­tle point in com­par­ing to store-bought jam.)

• Said Achmiz 15 Jul 2020 13:40 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Al­gorith­mic In­tent: A Han­so­nian Gen­er­al­ized Anti-Zom­bie Principle

  I don’t think that’s right. As I men­tion in an­other com­ment, Den­nett’s no­tion of the in­ten­tional stance is rele­vant here. More speci­fi­cally, it pro­vides us with a way to dis­t­in­guish be­tween cases that Zack in­tended to in­clude in his con­cept of “al­gorith­mic in­tent”, and such cases as the “catch more vi­tamin D” that you men­tion. To wit:

  The posit­ing of “al­gorith­mic in­tent” is ap­pro­pri­ate in pre­cisely those cases where tak­ing the in­ten­tional stance is ap­pro­pri­ate (i.e., where—for hu­mans—non-triv­ial gains in com­pres­sion of de­scrip­tion of a given agent’s be­hav­ior may be made by treat­ing the agent’s be­hav­ior as in­ten­tional [i.e., di­rected to­ward some posited goal]), re­gard­less of whether the agent’s con­scious mind (if any!) is in­volved in any rele­vant de­ci­sion loops.

  Con­versely, the posit­ing of “al­gorith­mic in­tent” is not ap­pro­pri­ate in those cases where the de­sign stance or the phys­i­cal stance suffice (i.e., where no mean­ingful gains in com­pres­sion of de­scrip­tion of a given agent’s be­hav­ior may be made by treat­ing the agent’s be­hav­ior as in­ten­tional [i.e., di­rected to­ward some posited goal]).

  Clearly, the “catch more vi­tamin D” case falls into the lat­ter cat­e­gory, and there­fore the term “al­gorith­mic in­tent” could not ap­ply to it.

• Said Achmiz 15 Jul 2020 13:32 UTC

  6 points

  on: Al­gorith­mic In­tent: A Han­so­nian Gen­er­al­ized Anti-Zom­bie Principle

  This dis­cus­sion would be in­com­plete with­out a men­tion of Daniel Den­nett’s no­tion of the in­ten­tional stance.

  What links here?

  • Said Achmiz's comment on Al­gorith­mic In­tent: A Han­so­nian Gen­er­al­ized Anti-Zom­bie Principle by Zack_M_Davis (15 Jul 2020 13:40 UTC; 23 points)

• Said Achmiz 13 Jul 2020 23:00 UTC

  3 points

  on: The Ghost of Joseph Weber

  If you would like to hear this post read aloud, try this video.

  Meta: the video didn’t make it through the cross-post­ing, it seems. (I am not sure if Less Wrong sup­ports video em­bed­ding; I think it may not. You might want to just link the video.)

• Said Achmiz 9 Jul 2020 18:15 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: abramdemski’s comment on: The New Front­page De­sign & Open­ing Tag Creation!

  For in­stance, Read­TheSe­quences.com has a slightly off-white back­ground for just this rea­son.

• Said Achmiz 29 Jun 2020 6:55 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The Illu­sion of Eth­i­cal Progress

  I mean that chairs and ap­ples are less uni­ver­sal than the Univer­sal Law of Grav­i­ta­tion.

  In what way?

  That the law of grav­i­ta­tion holds is a fact about the uni­verse. That chairs ex­ist is also a fact about the uni­verse.

  What does “less uni­ver­sal” mean? Does it mean some­thing like “is ap­pli­ca­ble or rele­vant in a smaller vol­ume of the ob­serv­able uni­verse”? If hu­man­ity spreads through­out the cos­mos, and if we bring chairs with us ev­ery­where we go, will chairs and grav­i­ta­tion thereby be­come equally “uni­ver­sal” (or, at least, more equal in “uni­ver­sal­ity” than they are now)?

  In any case this com­par­i­son is a red her­ring. The rele­vant com­par­i­son is not “chairs vs. grav­ity”, it’s “chairs vs. ethics”—or, more to the point, “guns vs. ethics”, “tanks vs. ethics”, “food vs. ethics”, “laws vs. ethics”, “gov­ern­ments vs. ethics”, “money vs. ethics”, “pres­tige vs. ethics”, etc. No vague al­lu­sion to “uni­ver­sal­ity” will help you in any of these cases, since all of the things I’ve just listed are (so far as we know, any­way) ap­prox­i­mately equally lo­cal­ized—namely, they are all facts about what ex­ists and hap­pens on the sur­face of one par­tic­u­lar planet.

• Said Achmiz 28 Jun 2020 22:25 UTC

  30 points

  on: The Illu­sion of Eth­i­cal Progress

  Per­haps this is not cen­tral to the post, but I have always found that bit from Pratch­ett to be un­be­liev­ably inane. Truly, it grinds my gears to see it quoted, in wise tones, as if it ex­presses some profound truth; and dou­bly so, to see it quoted on Less Wrong.

  Con­sider the fol­low­ing sub­sti­tu­tion:

  Take the uni­verse and grind it down to the finest pow­der and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of ap­ples, one molecule of chairs.

  Right? There aren’t any chair molecules, are there? You won’t find ap­ples on the Pe­ri­odic Table, will you? So what? Do chairs and ap­ples not ex­ist? Are they some­how not real, or less real than… well, than what…? Hy­dro­gen? Methane? Should we ad­just our at­ti­tude to­ward ap­ples, or chairs, or paint­ings, or tigers, on the ba­sis of this in­sight? What, ac­tu­ally, is to be con­cluded from this?

  Any­way, this is old news. The point, if you like, is that of course ‘physics’ ‘con­tains’ ethics, and im­prove­ments in ethics; these things are facts about peo­ple, and the go­ings-on in peo­ple’s brains—which are (du­al­is­tic views aside) very much “con­tained in physics”. Of course, you could ar­gue oth­er­wise^[1], but you must do it with­out re­course to any such “greedy-re­duc­tion­ist”, “grind down the uni­verse” ar­gu­ments…

  ---

  1. E.g., non-cog­ni­tivism, or er­ror the­ory. I am sym­pa­thetic to cer­tain ar­gu­ments in this broad class; but note that they have noth­ing much to do with the ques­tion of whether [fun­da­men­tal] ‘physics’ ‘con­tains’ ethics or not. ↩︎

• Said Achmiz 27 Jun 2020 23:42 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Why are all these do­mains called from Less Wrong?

  Which you can block un­prob­le­mat­i­cally; no site func­tion­al­ity de­pends on it. In fact, if you’ve got uBlock Ori­gin, GA will be blocked au­to­mat­i­cally.

• Said Achmiz 28 May 2020 18:18 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: lifelonglearner’s comment on: Ob­sidian: A Mind Map­ping Mark­down Editor

  The out­put is in SVG for­mat, but the cool thing about SVGs is that they (a) can have hy­per­links in them, and (b) can be dis­played in the browser. So the gen­er­ated SVG is dis­played in your browser, and each of the nodes are links to the wikipage the node rep­re­sents, so you can in­deed use it to nav­i­gate the wiki.

• Said Achmiz 28 May 2020 0:24 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lifelonglearner’s comment on: Ob­sidian: A Mind Map­ping Mark­down Editor

  I think the most promi­nent func­tion­al­ity is the mind-map­ping. Wikis, AFAICT, don’t have that.

  Oh, but they do.

• Said Achmiz 28 May 2020 0:22 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: lifelonglearner’s comment on: Ob­sidian: A Mind Map­ping Mark­down Editor

  I don’t know of any sim­ple self-hosted lo­cal wiki soft­ware off the top of my head though.

  PmWiki can do this, though whether it’s ‘sim­ple’ is a mat­ter of per­spec­tive. (It’s cer­tainly easy to use.)

• Said Achmiz 30 Apr 2020 22:11 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Why any­thing that can be for-profit, should be

  My re­ac­tion would be that a vac­cine should be made for profit; if there are peo­ple who can’t af­ford it there should be a char­ity to buy the vac­cine for them.

  Pay care­ful at­ten­tion to this for­mu­la­tion. Note the phrase:

  there should be

  What does that mean, pre­cisely?

  When we speak of whether a vac­cine should be made for profit or not, we are, im­plic­itly, speak­ing from the per­spec­tive of de­ci­sion-mak­ers who are in a po­si­tion to de­cide whether a vac­cine will be made on a for-profit or a non-profit ba­sis. This may be some level of gov­ern­ment (which may choose to con­tract to get a vac­cine made, then dis­tribute it to mem­bers of the pub­lic—or, may elect not to do so, and leave the mat­ter to the vac­cine man­u­fac­tur­ers to de­cide), or it may be a cor­po­ra­tion (which may man­u­fac­ture the vac­cine and then choose to make it available for free, in­stead of sel­l­ing it).

  Now, from the stand­point of those de­ci­sion-mak­ers, what does it mean to say that the vac­cine should be for-profit but that “there should be” a char­ity to buy the vac­cine for those who need it? It could only mean one of two things:

  1. We—i.e., by con­struc­tion, that de­ci­sion-mak­ing or­ga­ni­za­tion—hav­ing cho­sen to sell the vac­cine for a profit, will now also spin off a char­ity whose pur­pose will be to make the vac­cine available on a non-profit ba­sis.

  2. We will sell the vac­cine at a profit. Per­haps some­one else will found a char­ity which will pur­chase our vac­cine and make it available on a non-profit ba­sis. Or, per­haps not. Either way, we will merely sell it and make a profit.

  And note that op­tion #1 is no differ­ent from “make the vac­cine on a non-profit ba­sis” in the first place, whereas op­tion #2 is sim­ply a shrug—a re­fusal to ac­cept any re­spon­si­bil­ity for the prob­lem of peo­ple who can’t af­ford the vac­cine.

  Either way, you have not an­swered leggi’s ques­tion/​challenge, but evaded it.

• Said Achmiz 31 Mar 2020 20:20 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: sdmin’s comment on: Why I’ve started us­ing NoScript

  Well, for one thing, the prob­lem of “code de­liv­ered from a site you would nor­mally trust but that is now mal­i­cious” is the same as the prob­lem of “be­ing mis­taken about what sites to trust (and so ac­ci­den­tally trust­ing a site that was mal­i­cious all along)”.

  As I un­der­stand your ques­tion, and as I un­der­stand the web and its tech­nolo­gies, the prob­lem ba­si­cally is that “if you run code (JavaScript) in your browser—code that is pro­vided by ar­bi­trary peo­ple on the in­ter­net—this is fun­da­men­tally a vuln­er­a­bil­ity”. And that’s true. There’s no solu­tion to that ba­sic fact other than “don’t run JavaScript”.

  The mat­ter re­ally de­pends on how much you trust your browser ven­dor (Google, Ap­ple, or Mozilla) to se­cure the browser against ex­ploits that could harm/​steal/​pwn your com­puter or your data. If you trust them to a rea­son­able de­gree, then pre­cau­tions short of “dis­able JavaScript en­tirely” suffice. If you re­ally don’t trust them very much at all, then dis­able JavaScript (and pos­si­bly take even stric­ter mea­sures to limit your ex­po­sure, such as run­ning your browser in a VM, or some such thing; Richard Stal­l­man’s browse-by-email work­flow would be an ex­treme ex­am­ple of this).

• Said Achmiz 26 Mar 2020 2:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: 3 In­ter­view-like Al­gorithm Ques­tions for Programmers

  … then your an­swer is wrong. So… what gives?

• Said Achmiz 25 Mar 2020 20:53 UTC

  6 points

  on: 3 In­ter­view-like Al­gorithm Ques­tions for Programmers

  Re: #1:

  Which sort­ing al­gorithm shows O(n) time com­plex­ity given no as­sump­tions but that the val­ues are in­te­gers?

• Said Achmiz 21 Mar 2020 8:35 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MikkW’s comment on: Co­her­ent de­ci­sions im­ply con­sis­tent utilities

  Have you read the pa­pers I linked (or the more di­rectly rele­vant pa­pers cited by those)? What do you think about Au­mann’s com­men­tary on this ques­tion, for in­stance?

• Said Achmiz 18 Mar 2020 0:55 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Wel­come to LessWrong!

  Thanks to gw­ern for the men­tion of GW/​RTS!

  In the in­ter­ests of giv­ing equal screen time to the (friendly!) ‘com­pe­ti­tion’, here’s yet an­other viewer site for Less Wrong—one which takes an even more low-key and min­i­mal­ist ap­proach:

  https://​​lw2.is­sarice.com/​​