Alex

On a search for meaning in a world full of opportunities in little things.

[banteg @banteg]

>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful

>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg

>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality

>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking

>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets

>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future

>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"

>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now

>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner

>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value

>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god

>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully

>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved

>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical

>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical

>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic

>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign

>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important

>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples

>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me

>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting

>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous

>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field

>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels

>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends

>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment

>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back

>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc

>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere

>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review

>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed

>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly

>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better

>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"

>motte has entered the chat

>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren

>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy

>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored

>tell myself this is impartial altruism

>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"

>silence

>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval

>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"

>stare into cosmic light cone

>10^50 people staring back

>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions

>realize I have invented the perfect constituency

>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me

[Alex @Codepigeon]

AFAIK avionics software is held to standards that would be unthinkably high in other software fields. It’s obvious why it is like that and why it’s a good thing.

[Maximilian @MaximilianMoj]

As a software engineer I have to unfortunately inform you that if aviation was held to the standard of software engineering, no plane would ever land twice in a row.

[Alex @Codepigeon]

Linux ricers get on this UI right now!

[Jesse Palmer @RealJessePalmer]

This is the IMAX console we have here. Very old, but very reliable. You can see Odyssey is over 250k frames which includes the Dune 3 prologue. This works out to over 11 miles of film at around 630lbs.

[Alex @Codepigeon]

A fate worse than death

[The Institute for Type Safe Memetic Research @typememetics]

【✦ 新作マンガ発表 ✦】

彼はブロックチェーンに取り組むHaskell開発者だった。

ところが今や、2003年のJava開発者に転生してしまった——!?

「俺はHaskell開発者なのに、気づけば2003年のJava開発者に転生していた?!」

純粋関数、モナド、強力な型安全性を武器に、XML、Swing、そしてNullPointerExceptionが渦巻く世界を生き延びろ。

【出演：@effectfully】

✧ 詳細は近日公開 ✧

#Haskell #Java #マンガ #異世界 #プログラミング

------

【✦ NEW MANGA ANNOUNCEMENT ✦】

He was a Haskell developer, working on blockchains.

Now he has been reincarnated as a Java dev -- in 2003!?

“I Am a Haskell Developer, and I Just Got Reincarnated as a Java Dev in 2003?!”

Armed with pure functions, monads, and type safety, he must survive a world of XML, Swing, and NullPointerExceptions.

【Starring @effectfully】

✧ More details coming soon ✧

#Haskell #Java #Manga #Isekai #Programming

[Alex @Codepigeon]

@valigo We’ve been calling Dota players this for years as a russian/eastern european you should know lmao

[Boca Juniors - La12Tuittera @la12tuittera]

🔙26/6/2011

Feliz ani🅱️ersario, river.

❌Esa mancha NO se 🅱️orra NUNCA MÁS.

[Alex @Codepigeon]

One of my favorite things out of this is the ERA/NO ERA posts in /sp/ which remains in use to this day.

[Alex @Codepigeon]

Guys, guys, calm down: it’s a teaser for the Homer Extended Universe. Iliad coming next year confirmed.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

First look at the Trojan Horse popcorn bucket for ‘THE ODYSSEY’.

[Alex @Codepigeon]

That’s crazy! Is this true?

[Nauseam (in sf!) @ChadNauseam]

The answer is that MacOS blocks this program because it looks like ChillyHell, a virus that was deployed against officials in Ukraine. Any program that does TLS and contains "That's strange", "wonder", and "Welcome to Paradise" is blocked from running

[Alex @Codepigeon]

It was there before! I implemented it myself!

[Mario Zechner @badlogicgames]

if we see this, we know

[Alex @Codepigeon]

Seriously no one asking about those thick ass soles?

[Dev ♣️ @GymLeaderDev]

im cryin this therapy horse vigorously plays the piano to wake kids up from anesthesia 😭

[Alex @Codepigeon]

Absolutely not. It’s the exact same bs as always.

[Dr. Dad, PhD 🔄🔼◀️🔽▶️ @GarrettPetersen]

Hits different, doesn't it

[Alex @Codepigeon]

@woke8yearold I don’t remember where I heard the phrase “Garibaldi didn’t unify Italy, he divided Africa”

[Alex @Codepigeon]

My favorite, Master and Commander, also only has a woman speaking in the background for about 2 seconds in the whole run.

[World of Statistics @stats_feed]

In "The Shawshank Redemption" - there are only two female speaking roles, totaling about 10 seconds in a 2 hours and 22 minutes film

[Alex @Codepigeon]

Back in the day I remember using a program called Alien to convert rpms to deb and install them in Debian with various levels of success.

[🐝🇬🇷 @bee_fumo]

No you know what? He's absolutely right.
Both DEBs and RPMs are effectively archive formats(think zip files) that (mostly) just overlay files on your filesystem
Debian and Redhat could choose to switch to tar.zst files tomorrow (like arch) and fundamentally nothing would change.

The FHS is largely set in stone and similar for most distros last I checked unless you're doing something weird like Nix. The only real question is what do you do about scriptlets. Which some distros are already trying to get rid of.

[Alex @Codepigeon]

Goated album btw

[dylan @narrenhut]

Just figured out that you can “Pharrell remix” any song on Spotify by tapping it five times at the appropriate tempo

[Alex @Codepigeon]

“Walk without rhythm and it won’t attract the worm”

[Alex @Codepigeon]

“Even the doll… should it please you”

[Alex @Codepigeon]

D’onofrio colonial

[Holderiano @holderiano]

No voté por ellos pero el símbolo de Buen Gobierno es demasiado fino. Genio al que se le ocurrió referenciar a Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno de Guaman Poma de Ayala. A parte resaltan los colores frente a los otros partidos.