This is a special post for quick takes by Tao Lin. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
I've noticed that a lot of blogs in the rationalist diaspora lack favicons. This often makes it difficult to navigate tabs for different blogs, PDFs, ect. A favicon takes <15 minutes to make, saves your readers time, and improves your appearance. A win-win-win.
Maybe people think it's cool to have no favicon, or they want to stay on the down-low, or are ultra-minimalist, but, like, seriously?
More likely that this just doesn’t occur to people and/or they have no idea how to make and install favicons, and possibly don’t even have any concept of how favicons work and where they come from.
Don’t underestimate the technical cluelessness of people on the internet, even ‘rationalists’.
Working on anti spam/scam features at Google or banks could be a leveraged intervention on some worldviews. As AI advances it will be more difficult for most people to avoid getting scammed, and including really great protections into popular messaging platforms and banks could redistribute a lot of money from AIs to humans
Why not think the scams will be run by humans (using AIs) and thus the intervention would reduce the transfer to these groups?
In principle, groups could legally eat (some of) the free energy here by just red teaming everyone using a similar approach, but not actually taking their money.
Currently, I'm more interested in work demonstrating that AI scams could get really good.
i'd guess effort at google/banks to be more leveraged than demos if you're only considering harm from scams and not general ai slowdown and risk
I think I probably agree (though uncertain as demos could prompt this effort), but I wasn't just considering reducing harm from scams. I care more about general societal understanding of AI and risks and a demo has positive spill over effects.