if my well-meaning children successfully implement my desire never to die, by being uploaded, and "turn me on" like this with sufficient data and power backups but lack of care; or if something else goes wrong with the technicians involved not bothering to check if the upload was successful in setting up a fully virtualized existence complete with at least emulated body sensations, or do not otherwise check from time to time to ensure this remains the case;

These don't seem like plausible scenarios to me. Why would someone go to the trouble of running an upload, but be this careless? Why would someone running an upload not try to communicate with it at all?

A shell in a Matrioshka brain (more generally, a Dyson sphere being used for computation) reradiates 100% of the energy it captures, just at a lower temperature.

The AI industry people aren't talking much about solar or wind, and they would be if they thought it was more cost effective.

I don't see them talking about natural gas either, but nuclear or even fusion, which seems like an indication that whatever's driving their choice of what to talk about, it isn't short-term cost-effectiveness.

I doubt it (or at least, doubt that power plants will be a bottleneck as soon as this analysis says). Power generation/use varies widely over the course of a day and of a year (seasons), so the 500 GW number is an average, and generating capacity is overbuilt; this graph on the same EIA page shows generation capacity > 1000 GW and non-stagnant (not counting renewables, it declined slightly from 2005 to 2022 but is still > 800 GW):

This seems to indicate that a lot of additional demand^[1] could be handled without building new generation, at least (and maybe not only) if it's willing to shut down at infrequent times of peak load. (Yes, operators will want to run as much as possible, but would accept some downtime if necessary to operate at all.)

This EIA discussion of cryptocurrency mining (estimated at 0.6% to 2.3% of US electricity consumption!) is highly relevant, and seems to align with the above. (E.g. it shows increased generation at existing power plants with attached crypto mining operations, mentions curtailment during peak demand, and doesn't mention new plant construction.)

1. ^{^}

   Probably not as much as implied by the capacity numbers, since some of that capacity is peaking plants and/or just old, meaning not only inefficient, but sometimes limited by regulations in how many hours it can operate per year. But still.

Confidentiality: Any information you provide will not be personally linked back to you. Any personally identifying information will be removed and not published. By participating in this study, you are agreeing to have your anonymized responses and data used for research purposes, as well as potentially used in writeups and/or publications.

Will the names (or other identifying information if it exists, I haven't taken the survey) of the groups evaluated potentially be published? I'm interested in this survey, but only willing to take it if there's a confidentiality assurance for that information, even independent of my PII. (E.g., I might want to take it about a group without potentially contributing to public association between that group and 'being a cult'.)

The hypothetical bunker people could easily perform the Cavendish experiment to test Newtonian gravity, there just (apparently) isn't any way they'd arrive at the hypothesis.

As a counterpoint, I use Firefox as my primary browser (I prefer a bunch of little things about its UI), and this is a complete list of glitches I've noticed:

• The Microsoft account login flow sometimes goes into a loop of asking me for my password
• Microsoft Teams refuses to work ('you must use Edge or Chrome')
• Google Meet didn't used to support background blurring, but does now
• A coworker reported that a certain server BMC web interface didn't work in Firefox, but did in Chrome (on Mac) — I found (on Linux, idk if that was the relevant difference) it broke the same way in both, which I could get around by deleting a modal overlay in the inspector

(I am not a lawyer)

The usual argument (e.g.) for warrant canaries being meaningful is that the (US) government has much less legal ability to compel speech (especially false speech) than to prohibit it. I don't think any similar argument holds for private contracts; AFAIK they can require speech, and I don't know whether anything is different if the required speech is known by both parties to be false. (The one relevant search result I found doesn't say there's anything preventing such a contract; Claude says there isn't, but it could be thrown out on grounds of public policy or unconscionability.)

I would think this 'canary' still works, because it's hard to imagine OpenAI suing, or getting anywhere with a suit, for someone not proactively lying (when silence could mean things besides 'I am subject to an NDA'). But, if a contract requiring false speech would be valid,

• insofar as this works it works for different reasons than a warrant canary
• it could stop working, if future NDAs are written with it in mind

(Quibbles aside, this is a good idea; thanks for making it!)

Upvoted, but weighing in the other direction: Average Joe also updates on things he shouldn't, like marketing. I expect the doctor to have moved forward some in resistance to BS (though in practice, not as much as he would if he were consistently applying his education).

And the correct reaction (and the study's own conclusion) is that the sample is too small to say much of anything.

(Also, the "something else" was "conventional treatment", not another antiviral.)