Hacker News Reader

314on Optimal AI agents tend to seek power

Without reading the paper it seems from the tweets that the results are overstated. Academics need to make their results sound more impressive and less trivial and so the choice of wording reflects that. The property that optimal agents seek is not "power", which is quite a general term - it looks more like "agency" i.e. a more specific form of power. But "Optimal agents seek agency" won't win any future grants.

314on What Is Hammock Driven Development?

More idle time when in a primed state.

314on Aphantasia

Yes, this is a good summary. I think the condition varies in presentation and severity - occasionally I will see a brief flash of an image before it disappears, but this ferls more like falling asleep for a split second than gaining the ability to visualize.

314on Aphantasia

I don't really understand your question - do you experience dreaming in a different way? I can remember what I saw in a dream, but I cannot visualize it. This is the same as waking memories - I can remember what I saw but I cannot see it again.

The only exception would be the hypnogogic state when I have visual imagery but I'm not entirely present to process it.

314on Aphantasia

All medicines are drugs, not all drugs are medicines. Depending on the purpose and use of a substance, pointing out that it is a drug is trivial and does not disqualify it from being a medicine.

314on Aphantasia

I have aphantasia (when I'm awake) and visual imagery in my dreams that is sharper and more detailed than real life. I'm also able to lucidly dream although I try not to as it messes with my long term memory.

I would say that we can dream about most things but there are a few obvious limits as there are types of thoughts that will make you wake up:

* Reading is difficult and typically books in dreams don't have words in them.

* "Pushing" (there is no good word for this) the direction of a dream in a particular way too hard will wake you up. It has to be done very gently.

* Abstract reasoning / logic is difficult in dreams, it causes you to concentrate too hard and then you wake up.

In general the limits are to do with the two dominant modes of thought: spontaneous unquestioning creation of ideas is very compatible with dreaming and you can float easily between multiple "perspectives" or versions without any problem. Analytical / questioning / critical thinking is incompatible with dreaming and causes you to wake up. Lucid dreaming is typically learning how to float in the sweet spot between the two modes.

314on How to Avoid the Time Wars

Responding to your edit: that is not what it says in the preprint. The last bit is used to decide the rounding mode for converting the rand in the interval 0-1 to an index of the shuffled array. They do not specify how the seed was picked at all.

314on Facebook Renames to Meta

If those are the only three futures on offer then we should all subsidize PornHub's expansion into the metaverse promptly.

314on World food prices hit 10-year peak – FAO

Does Econ101 dig into the differences between demand-side and supply-side inflation? Or what happens when you try to hide the deflationary effects of debt destruction through money printing?

I ask because I'm unfamiliar with the basic curriculum in economics, although in the sciences some of the early concepts that we are taught include:

* Correlation is not causation

* Confirmation bias should be overcome by posing relevant testable questions rather than relying on anecdotes.

314on Bitcoin is a Ponzi

Oh wow. This is unbelievably bad.

Bitcoin may be a scam on so e level, but it is not a Ponzi scheme. The linked article seems to miss the most important property of such a scheme:

Incoming capital is misrepresented as returns and passed back to investors. Bitcoin does not pay dividends. There are no returns in Bitcoin, only pure capital speculation. As there are no returns, there is no misrepresentation of capital inflow as returns and no Ponzi scheme.

Bitcoin is more like a tulip...

314on Signal is experiencing technical difficulties

How do you know it is not X is not a reasonable form of argument. How do you know it is not quantum fluctuations in the techno-babble framework they use?

314on Are there flaws in some ARM64 instructions?

This seems to be a flawed approach. Comparing the result to sub/div is not computing the error in the fused-mac. It is calculating the difference between one rounding operation and two.

To do this correctly requires:

* performing the calculation with a higher degree of accuracy (and precision).

* comparing the two approaches against the reference results.

To do this you should look into either writing a simulation of ieee with a larger mantissa or using an arbitrary precision library.

314on Human Rapamycin Longevity Clinical Trials Begin

As I go into my fifth decade most of the third is fuzzy so this seems believable.

314on Cryptoqueen: A woman scammed the world, then vanished (2019)

I didn't believe this theory at first but then I noticed that Elon Musk is actually an anagram of Pepe Silvia and it all started to click into place.

314on SolarBatteryBitcoin

Adding an elastic demand sink to a peaky supply in a way that is profitable is quite interesting. Joules that are not used at all are wasted. This converts that wasted generation into cash allowing expansion of the facilities and more Joules overall.

314on Just Be Rich

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Tale_of_Two_Cities

The intro paragraph is enough for you to get their point.

314on Ask HN: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?

Truly this fulfills the destiny of a Thought Leader.

314on Why in the world would you own bonds?

Ah, so you read what you want to hear into current events and seek confirmation bias. Your whole world-view comes off as a bit prepper / Great Replacement-crank.

314on Elon Musk’s $100M Gigaton Scale Carbon Removal Prize

Transactions take energy. Holding it would prevent more.

314on Robinhood Raises Another $2.4B from shareholders

This is not true. Party A has a contract that party B owes them a share - not the share that they originally loaned. The whole idea is for party B to buy a share later to balance the trade.

A better analogy to understand why short interest can rise above 100% is fractional reserve lending and the effect that it has on money supply.

314on We Are Preparing a Class Action Lawsuit Against Robinhood

> The only reason people are buying at those prices is to try to force a short squeeze, to effectively steal money from the hedge funds by forcing them to buy at irrational prices as they get margin called.

Go ahead and explain how that is stealing?

314on Machine Learning: The Great Stagnation

Winter is always coming, the important question is when it will arrive. Current ML research is still destroying new problems with ease so the current velocity is high. It will slow down first, before people start to question why the new crop of problems are too hard, and then the cycle will start again.

314on Robinhood was indeed too good to be true

Could you clarify what you mean by better - do you get a smaller spread?

314on The Erosion of Deep Literacy

Which implies that somebody responding to you in an argument would also need deep literacy to be able to dismiss such claims. But there is no argument that would progress better if one of the participants was less literate. Which does back up the original claim in the article...

314on Measuring "efficiency" in document prepration: Microsoft Word vs. LaTex

If you have never run into problems with macros expanding in the wrong sort of environment then you have probably not used it very extensively. If you have run into the problem of switching commands because of their fragile-ness then is it true that you never lost any time debugging?

314on Zero-click, wormable, cross-platform remote code execution in Microsoft Teams

So the people / companies who would be hacked and have their data / systems destroyed are what? Acceptable collateral damage?

314on The Erosion of Deep Literacy

Your ability to distill and refute the points in the article seem to be a result of deep literacy. Is this itself not the thrust of his main thesis?

314on What would happen if computers never got any faster?

Given the improvements in IPC over ten years it is not that far off. If your workload can spread over more cores then that level was exceeded long ago.

314on I Love Ed on CP/M

You should upgrade to vi :)

314on Increase in Bitcoin Addresses as More People Join the BTC Price Surge

> Gold expends energy to mine but is essentially free to store, bitcoin costs money to store proportional to its market price.

It's not really that simple. There is a different breakdown when you look at individual vs global costs. There is a cost to an individual for storing gold - e.g. building a vault, hiring a guard etc. This cost was the original incentive scheme behind the early banks - if we pool our gold storage then we can pool our security costs. Beyond that individual cost there is no additional global cost for storage.

Bitcoin is free to store for an individual. Once funds are stored at an address in the blockchain they will stay there. Although the global cost is huge it is invisible at the individual level - nobody needs to participate in mining the chain to hold bitcoin.

History suggests that individuals favor situations where the costs have been socialized and are not visible at the individual level.