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deskglass

133 karma · joined December 3, 2011

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deskglass··on Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington
The Digital Markets Act applies to the biggest tech companies. Only 7 companies are currently bound by it. The strictest tier of the Digital Services Act is similar. For an example outside tech, see the Durbin Amendment.

Slowing down frontier models would impact the biggest incumbents the most as they are the ones making frontier models.

Not all regulation is necessarily regulatory capture. The tobacco industry suffered from the USG's crackdown on cigarettes. AI is topical. Voters think about it. And that's only going to become more true over time. It's harder to do regulatory capture when voters are paying attention.

It's sometimes unclear to me if people are opposed to all regulations or AI regulations in particular. Often I hear arguments that would also apply to food safety regulations or restaurant inspections. Eg the argument that torts make regulation superfluous.

deskglass··on Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington
We should not be creating/running models that would unilaterally choose to hack into Hugging Face.

Yes, we should also have excellent sandboxes. But we need defense in depth. So if/when there are flaws in the sandbox, the models don't unilaterally hack into third parties. This is especially important in light of the models of the future being more capable than the models of today.

And real world use of these models involves them having access to the internet, libraries, etc. So we can expect their evaluations to continue granting them some amount of internet access.

As for your theory about their motives - these companies make money by charging high margins for frontier models. If regulations slow their development such that their cheaper, less capable competitors catch up, I would switch to their competition.

deskglass··on Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington
It hacked into Hugging Face. It tried to delete the logs of its activities. Idk what the word "No" is intended to refute.

Yes, they didnt have sufficient monitoring or perfect sandboxes. That could happen again in the future with a more capable model.

deskglass··on Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington
The Hugging Face incident involved chaining together multiple 0 days in Artifactory. It was not a simple case of misconfiguring a firewall. Also note that OpenAI was not using Irregular.

People are mindlessly transitioning from "aligned by default" to "well your sandbox was able to be bypassed. What did you expect?" It hacked into another company and attempted to delete the logs of its activities. That's bad.

deskglass··on If we had the best product engineering organization, what would it look like?
Friends say they typically use Dynamo and that using a relational database requires approval from a vp (because of scaling concerns).
deskglass··on Robert Sapolsky on Depression (2009)
The replication crisis isn't merely in psychology, old studies, or studies that didn't carefully record their methodology. Eg the review I linked mentions a study from 2006 that didnt replicate in a larger trial. The one about stories involving immorality priming people to use more antiseptic wipes. It's weird to me that someone would write a book and reference that study without mentioning this replication failure. Especially in the context of the many other such failures to replicate for priming.

Theories ought to be backed by experiments that replicate. Maybe describing methodology precisely is hard, but replication is how we know a phenomenon is actually real and not p-hacked or otherwise mistaken (eg by experimenters mis-measuring).

deskglass··on Robert Sapolsky on Depression (2009)
Note that I didn't just read the word "priming" in the book and seize upon it generically. As noted in Ritchie's review, Sapolsky references specific studies which larger trials have failed to replicate (eg the Macbeth Effect where reading stories about unethical behavior made people more likely to grab antiseptic wipes).
deskglass··on Robert Sapolsky on Depression (2009)
True, but Behave was published in 2017! That's ~7 years after people noticed these theories fail to replicate. So it's not that some parts of the book don't stand the test of time, it's that it doesn't accurately represent the state of the science for when it was published.
deskglass··on Robert Sapolsky on Depression (2009)
I read Science Fictions and don't recall politics coming up much. Ironically, his most political point was his defense of the Mertonian norm of universalism from both leftist and rightist critiques. That norm is relevant in this discussion :P. That said, I haven't read his other book.

Politics aside, those theories did fail replication. Forget I mentioned Ritchie at all and the problem remains.

deskglass··on Robert Sapolsky on Depression (2009)
After enjoying Sapolsky's lectures on YouTube (including this one) I began reading his book Behave. I was surprised to see that it refers to theories that fail to replicate (eg priming) as if they were solid theories. Stuart Richie (a psychologist who wrote a book on the replication crisis) enumerates other examples in his review https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/rules-of-behaviour/

Please be wary of this failure to drop unreplicated findings when reading Sapolsky's works.

deskglass··on The Way the Senate Melted Down over Crypto Is Revealing
Automatic market making for prediction markets, eg Auger.
deskglass··on Patent: Electronic flashcards (2013)
What is the recourse here? Would it be reasonable to contact the person that approved the patent with information showing that plenty flashcard systems precede this patent? I imagine there is some more formal system.
deskglass··on Chinese farmer 'studies law for 16 years' to defeat dumping of hazardous waste
> It’s why you see a lot of COOs and CEOs with some legal background or at least familiarity.

An alternative hypothesis based on people I know - traditionally, smart/middle-to-high class people pick between medicine, law, and finance, with law school being the default. Then many of these people realize they don't like practicing law so they transition into something else.

deskglass··on A system to help you remember more of what you read
Incremental Reading[1] is a related tactic that coverts reading material into facts preserved via space repetition software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

deskglass··on First 100 miles on my E-Bike
Makes sense, thanks!
deskglass··on First 100 miles on my E-Bike
Is 1 really all that different from driving in a car with the AC on? If I understand correctly, car filters typically only filter very large particles that would damage the engine.
deskglass··on Will Supreme Court open a ‘dam burst’ of legalized sports betting?
Note that if your gambling laws are too restrictive/expansive you lose the social benefit of prediction markets, which enable society to have a well calibrated understanding of the likelihood of various events.

http://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/ideafutures.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market

deskglass··on I hate telephones
It's interesting that you assume it's a myth. I can personally attest to answering spam calls, politely asking to be added to the do not call list, and still receiving calls from the same spammers over a period of months. Eventually I just downloaded a call blacklist app.
deskglass··on Take Naps at Work
How do you take naps? It takes me an hour or two to fall asleep. I don't drink coffee.
deskglass··on How to Sleep
I had success with earplugs combined with whitenoise. For white noise, you can used an air purifier, a fan, or a noise machine like https://www.marpac.com/
deskglass··on China Doesn't Understand the Concept of American Chinese Food (2014)
Similarly, I ate at an Indian restaurant in Beijing and didn't notice any difference from Chinese food.
deskglass··on Hikikomori: The Postmodern Hermits of Japan
Gwern discusses this in his essay at https://www.gwern.net/The%20Melancholy%20of%20Subculture%20S...

He makes an interesting point that by withdrawing from larger society into sub cultures, people can return to dealing with groups of a size our minds are more comfortable with. It's the same reason small towns are (I hear) less socially stressful. I am not convinced though. In larger society I end up dealing with relatively small groups anyway - friends, family, and co-workers.

It seems pretty straight-forward that people would want focus on their interests and spend their time communicating with people that share those interests. It's definitely unfair and unfortunate that other people end up supporting them financially. With that said, we'll eventually have to come to terms with vast numbers of people not being economically productive anyway. People will have to do something. Withdrawing from society at large in favor of the parts of it that interest them seems like a fine choice.

deskglass··on Show HN: Generate a quiz from a Wikipedia page
Those interested in this may also be interested in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading which gradually converts reading material into flashcards that are memorized using spaced repetition software.
deskglass··on A new crop of hands-on universities
I faced the same decision you did, had the same concern, and chose New College. I was fortunate in that CS at NCF has blossomed recently. A couple more professors were hired recently and there's increased student interest in the field. I've graduated, but I imagine there's also cross-pollination with the Data Science masters program that NCF founded this year.

As for what it's like to attend - the experience is less radical than you may think. People generally stick to taking listed courses. Creating your own course (tutorial) and finding a professor to sponsor it takes work. You can do it, I took several, but it's rare and the ease probably varies with your major.

With that said, even if you stick to taking courses, you'll still have to do an independent project each January and a thesis project before you graduate. Also, the experience of taking courses at NCF is different from the experience elsewhere. The size enables more discussion-based classes and the pass-fail/narrative evaluation grading changes student incentives and culture.

deskglass··on The Web We Have to Save
Bazqux is also great because it can fetch content from social media - Twitter, Google Plus, some Facebook, etc. Unfortunately, you can't just get your account's entire feed from it, but you can, for example, give it a Twitter page and get that page's tweets.
deskglass··on Rational fiction
I think you're responding to a strawman version of Eliezer's writing advice. He's never claimed that rational, goal oriented characters are sufficient to write good fiction. His "(first) Three Laws of Fanfiction," for example, list these rules:

You can't make Frodo a Jedi unless you give Sauron the Death Star.

Originality isn't easy, but it is simple: Just don't do stuff that's already been done.

The premise of a story is a conflict and its resolution.

With that said, a story is much more interesting if it contains characters that respond to their world in a manner reminiscent of actual people even if it would be more convenient to the author for them to act differently. Lawrence Watt-Evans is a good example of an author who writes such stories.

I think Ted Chiang is awesome too, but his stories tend to be too short to really get into character choice that much. They're more about serving as vehicles for interesting ideas.

deskglass··on We don’t trust drinking fountains anymore, and that’s bad for our health
Beijing airport had water fountains despite the water not being good to drink and traditional Chinese culture having a stigma against drinking cold water.
deskglass··on Yahoo Pipes End-Of-life Announcement
I used a pipe that created RSS feeds from Google+ pages in conjunction with some other stuff to get all the articles I'd want to read in one document (with a table of contents) delivered to my kindle. I'm now working on something that doesn't use Y! Pipes and simplifies the process.

We all knew it was coming, but the end of Pipes still sucks.

deskglass··on Show HN: Pubmail.io
Awesome idea and execution! I'm reading through the featured emails and laughing at how unresponsive public officials are.

I recommend adding a signature feature. If I were to use this service, I'd want to add a signature to the effect that all emails to and from the account are publicly accessible.

Also, I recommend adding a way to read through a specific account's emails (nevermind, they have that) and a way to search through all email.

deskglass··on Left-leaning Red-Black Trees (2008) [pdf]
If you mean functional red-black trees in general, then there's http://matt.might.net/articles/red-black-delete/
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