I read somewhere that Spotify initially seeded their db with pirated music! Now they go after anyone following their suit! It’s like a mafia’s boss that became mayor and is suddenly tough on crime, without acknowledging his past history!
It's exactly the same. "The secret ingredient is crime...", then once the coffers are full use the cash to legitimate their presence into a legal offering.
It's not as much of a hoodwink as you would think however, it's everywhere and has been the same throughout history.
East India Company, Facebook, and even more recently Uber. Uber is the most readily documented.
In Australia (and I'm almost certain else where, but I'll talk about Brisbane, Queensland explicitly), Uber were illegal for years and just paid the fines to the local authorities when pegged. And continued to do so until they became legal.
It's a confronting and candid example of "money fixes all problems". The truth of this continues to bother me, the older and maybe not wiser I become, the more twisted I am from feeling disenfranchised, jaded and cynical from this truth.
The world fundamentally operates very differently at the macro level where money is counted in 10 or more digits than the micro level where most of us here sit. Witnessing the average person struggle to home and feed them selves on a countries median wage. While organisations wash their sins with coffers and pivot into unicorns and technical behemoths.
If bun and node.js run I'm sure the agents will, you might have to fight tool calls since the system utils differ from GNU core utils a tiny bit here and there, but you could toss the agent and whatever tools into a jail and have a nice package, use zfs snapshots between prompts so you can disect it later.
I feel it my due diligence to advise you that LessWrong is closely associated with the rationalists and all that comes with them. It is worth doing a tad of research into the rationalist community and Eliezer Yudkowsky before going too deep down the LessWrong rabbit hole. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community
I found it pretty boring, to be honest. Felt like an excuse for the author to show off how smart they thought they were, without really any skill at characterization or meaningful plot.
And like, I'm not a writing snob. I read fanfic by amateur authors. But HPMOR just doesn't do much of anything interesting.
There's lots of valid critiques of HPMOR (I recently reread it and the early chapters are painfully obnoxious), but I think "no meaningful plot" and "doesn't do anything interesting" are objectively false. It has like a dozen interacting plotlines, and is massively different from any other HP fanfic and most media in general. It is popular for a reason. If you dropped it early, I'd encourage you to try again.
>Writing in Asterisk, a magazine related to effective altruism, Ozy Brennan criticized Gebru's and Torres's grouping of different philosophies as if they were a "monolithic" movement. Brennan argues Torres has misunderstood these different philosophies, and has taken philosophical thought experiments out of context.[21] Similarly, Oliver Habryka of LessWrong has criticized the concept, saying: "I've never in my life met a cosmist; apparently I'm great friends with them. Apparently, I'm like in cahoots [with them]."
The people that coined TESCREAL seem to not really be related to rationalists, and seem to have coined a term for "those vaguely related ideas from people that do some stuff we consider wrong and we consider bad". "Evil people from San Francisco" could work just as well I think.
And wait, shouldn't I beware arguments for utilitarianism rather than against? If that's what you meant yeah I agree, especially pushed to the extreme it leads you in very weird places.
I'm not sure what the parent meant by "beware arguments against utilitarianism" - there is nothing wrong with arguing for or against utilitarianism. It's a popular moral philosophy.
You should beware of bad utilitarian arguments though, which is where you often get the real "gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette" kind of arguments that justify all manners of atrocity in service of some narrow hypothetical future good.
Like when Marc Andreessen says we should consider anyone who would do something to slow down or regulate AI advancement murderers of future humans. Bad utilitarianism right there.
Proper utilitarians are concerned with the net difference between all positive and negative consequences of actions.
People often think they have mic-dropped utilitarianism by saying things like, "Oh, so if two people get a lot of joy by beating up a third person, that is ethical because it is overall net positive?"
A few things wrong with that. First is there is no net happiness formula which utilitarians are proposing. Peter Singer has said more than once that he weights suffering far, far higher than happiness.
Second is that every ethical system has screw cases which make the system look messed up. "Do unto others..." it terrible if you are talking about masochists.
I know nothing about the drama, but treating "utilitarianism" as if it is one thing or that a particular person or group's position is identical to utilitarianism seems ironic in the context. It is like claiming all pizza is bad because I went to dominoes and didn't like the experience.
I would change your "but" to "and"? But maybe my comment wasn't very clear. The dangers of phone typing.
I meant that one should acquaint oneself with the criticisms of utilitarianism, if one wants to understand what it is people react to in rationalism and related communities.
Like any group of humans, there are power structures and edge cases that can lead to horrific outcomes. Giving the person that posted the warning the benefit of the doubt, I think what they are saying is that "Rationalist does not necessarily mean positive for humanity, nor even no harm for humanity". This holds for all religions and religion-like movements, of which Rationalism, in this sense, is one.
I think this holds for basically all movements in which case, I don't really understand the need to flag that website over any website.
Edit: though I don't want to diminish that this specific group is a cult with classical cult techniques like sleep deprivation and with the disastrous consequences often associated with cults.
> They claim to practice unihemispheric sleep (UHS), a form of sleep deprivation intended to "jailbreak" the mind, which they believe can enhance their commitment to their cause.[
> I think this holds for basically all movements in which case, I don't really understand the need to flag that website over any website.
Because it uses the language and thinking patterns of the Rationalists, it serves as a strong indoctrination tool. The site itself isn't bad but, as someone who flirted with those communities as a result of the site, I think the warning is deserved.
If you feel like the warning is deserved, and have personal experience, yeah then fair enough. I personally live in the "periphery" (read: not in Berkley or SF or New York) so I think I may see way less of the good and the bad.
It's a particular variety of "everyone else is wrong (and maybe a bit stupid)".
Like, sure, sometimes you get popular nonsense like recovered memories or accidental fires can't be as hot as intentional fires or shaken-baby syndrome or bite-mark analysis. But a lot of times, everyone isn't wrong and you've just overlooked something critical or misdefined the problem.
> Like, sure, sometimes you get popular nonsense like recovered memories or accidental fires can't be as hot as intentional fires or shaken-baby syndrome or bite-mark analysis. But a lot of times, everyone isn't wrong and you've just overlooked something critical or misdefined the problem.
The older I get, the more I find that everyone is wrong. It's fucking astounding how much stuff either was never actually checked, or is true only under very select circumstances with those caveats being widely ignored. For example at work right now we have been using a test for 40 years that was developed around the idea that our product absorbed air - chemical variation would lead to extreme differences in results and you can't retest an item for at least 24 hours because it will still be affected. Turns out that none of that was true, all the error we were getting was from temperature change, the items can be retested after 45 seconds. 40 years and no one took 30 minutes to verify this claim which costs us millions of dollars per year. And this is just the example from this past week. I've probably seen several hundred such cases of completely unjustified claims being treated as gospel truth.
I can't speak for the countless things I've never tested, but if nearly everything I do test is wrong, across numerous fields full of very intelligent people, it doesn't give me much confidence about everything else. We live in a world that values simplicity and confidence, not nuance and rigorous verification. I've gotten to the point where I don't trust anything without verification, not even my own past work.
> It's a particular variety of "everyone else is wrong (and maybe a bit stupid)".
Gestures at the current state of the world
Not that adopting rationalist modes of thinking will fix the problem, of course. Teach rationalist principles to an idiot and you will have a slightly more rational idiot, who will reason himself into absurdity. Teach them to a manipulative, amoral psychopath and you will have a more skillful manipulator.
Rationalist principles and methods provide superior tools for thinking through some complex problems, but they say nothing about foundational ethics (other than pointing out possible sources for the many different systems of ethical beliefs). And they cannot be wielded effectively by people who lack the ability to decouple, to think abstractly, or to create extended “chains” of thoughts and keep them in working memory.
One should be suspicious of anyone who claims that rationalism is a panacea, or alternatively that it is somehow a problem per se. It’s a neutral set of tools, a community who wants to improve those tools, and a small group hanging off the edge who have unrealistic and/or harmful views of how those tools should be applied. Unfortunately this third minority is presented by anti-rationalists as the core of rationalism. In reality, they are easily avoided unless you hold the same core values.
(I say this as a long time observer who appreciates their work but does not consider myself a part of the “rationalist” community.)
One can take many good ideas from less wrong, yudkowsky et al without adopting a rationalist identity. Sure, it attracted wackos and they made a cult or two. But that could happen to anyone!
The global Shia’s population is even larger than Russia’s population, and more willing to fight the US/Israel. Russia is of course superior to Iran technologically but Iran has the larger support worldwide.
The article promotes the value of UI for the infrastructure by touching on ZFS. But in this age of Ai, what I’m really looking for is a good api or cli one can let LLM drives. I basically care more about using my infrastructure than how to create it. I know proxmox can do this, but I wish there was a nixos like system where all my VMs are in one file I can verify between LLM making the change and deployment
Kudos to you! I have one and it's been the hardest thing I've ever done and it has broken us entirely. We can never imagine having more than one given the difficulty, and are now finished at one 100%. Very huge admiration for parents of > 1. It's 10x the work and not just 2x the work
I love them and I spend a lot of time with them, but I have no idea what you're talking about.
My 11 year old has Level 2 Autism, ADHD, and crippling anxiety. The pediatric psychologist & psychiatrist team we've assembled between Johns Hopkins & Kennedy-Krieger have finally lowered his suicide risk status from high to low last week.
My 9 year old has such extreme ADHD that you would think he has Akathisia; compulsive running. He's constantly fighting with his younger sister because... why not? Dopamine is dopamine.
The best part is that we have the privilege of doing it all on our lonesome despite having retired parents and no siblings with children of their own. Perhaps babysitting costing us more than the date night itself is the satisfying part.
Oh, no, I've got it! The satisfying part is not having a real vacation in 11 years.
I wonder how satisfying it's going to be when we finally have to face the reality of never being able to have an empty nest.
If you have easy kids everyone wants to help. If you have difficult kids no one else is going to want to help you, especially if they fight because that's liability they don't need (CPS will blame the caregiver if one of the child is beat up by their own sibling). Also if you have difficult kids not only will no one help, they will damn you for having been a terrible parent for circumstances outside your control, crushing your self esteem even though you're trying harder than perhaps most others. This is part of what makes difficult children exponentially harder. Sucks but that's the reality.
I noticed as soon as our child became better tempered things were 100x easier because suddenly people that were previously out of the picture were willing to look after the child. For every 1% better the child behaves life is 10% easier for everyone.
I'm fairly sure even mentioning the name of the forum isn't allowed on HN. It should be trivial to find it yourself, though. I also replied to someone else with the CSV headers if you're only trying to find out what exactly was included in the leak: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46932380
Also, keep in mind that this is a partial leak. The data was scraped from some leaky endpoint which was patched out before every user could be scraped. Only users who were in the partial leak received emails (I have two accounts, only one received an email). If you're a Substack user but didn't receive an email, I'd assume you're not in the leak. Troy Hunt should load it into HIBP eventually, and those concerned can check there if they don't want to seek the leak out on their own.
This is actually a great analogy for why companies should take small data leaks seriously. A leak is a leak.
Also, to clarify, I don't mean to appear as though I'm discrediting this leak or downplaying its severity. I only mentioned that it was a partial leak to offer an explanation as to why some users received emails and others didn't, as witnessme's comment seemed confused about this.
How do you propose fixing that? Let the kids take both parents last names? In few generations you end with kids having their entire family tree as their last name! It might even make marrying within the tribe attractive again to keep last name single word!
First there’s absolutely no real reason for a spouse to change their name just because they got married.
You can do hyphenated last names for a kid and let the kids decide what names they want to carry forward for the next generation. Or they can make up their own. The point is it’s up to them and they can choose whatever they want and not be coerced to do something because of some tradition that is rooted in sexism.
erm, I think they're now called "sex workers" but self-employed or digital prostitutes is more correct now, given the inability to tell if you're dealing with a person or AI hologram!
why I specified, prostitute, as the restrictions with online sexiness, will push unrequited demand, back into real life, where nobody is concerned with bieng all nicy nice about the "titles" involved, it's kinks for sale, maddness, life on the edge, or cartoon's, so for those too chicken to buy a piece of tail, then they can buy a blow up doll, or something else in brown paper, or soon enough, personal AI...assistants, rather then the variety you can see getting lunch at noon, on the corner of young and bloor, which AI will never be able to simulate, ha!, anybody who can make it past a receptionist like those, still able to conduct serios negotiations, is made from stern and focused material indeed.
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