https://malmesbury.substack.com
Could there be a signalling component? Nobody you see online would ever be in favour of conversion therapy, so there's no risk for you to be mistaken for one of them. The ideology where one excludes anyone who doesn't support gay rights become the baseline, the least sophisticated ideology, so it's tempting to be a meta-contrarian and argue against it, which signals intelligence and freedom of mind. But IRL, you see that there are pretty homophobic people around (could be some family members at the Christmas dinner), so being a meta-contrarian is no longer an option, as it would just signal intolerance.
I agree on the point that open source software doesn't have to be more secure. My understanding is that they are less likely to send user data to third parties as they're not trying to make ad money (or you could just remove that part from the source). For the exploits-finding AI, I can only hope that the white hats will outnumber the black hats.
I'm also a postdoc, and my institution more or less requires having a smartphone because you can't do anything without their proprietary 2-factors authentication. The other proprietary thing that seem mandatory is Zoom, have you found a way to escape from it?
This is just my humble opinion, but I found this post hilarious.
I see your point, and you're right. Data leaks from big companies or governments are not impossible though, they happen regularly!
Android is (partially) open source but it's not "free as in freedom", which is a technically narrower thing: https://itsfoss.com/what-is-foss/
I agree, though it depends on whether rational design of genomes is even possible, and can do at least as well as natural selection. Can we ever come up with something like an ATP synthase? (Tbh, just maximizing the traits we know about may be enough to stay in the game for a while)
Fixed, thank you.
Could an AI secretly make money on Onlyfans?
I was thinking about how a misaligned AI with write-access to the Internet could gain power without anyone noticing. It looks like porn would be a decent option. It's definitely easier than ordering peptides that turn into nanobots, and less noticeable than blackmail. All the AI has to do is generate realistic pictures of a hot girl and fish for horny subscribers. And then, when you've got money, you've got power.
If the pictures are convincing enough, it would be very hard for anyone to figure out it's fake, especially because it's normal for models not to give any identifying information.
Maybe we can actually try to do it. Just pretend we are an AI, and see how much money we can raise. If it works, it can be a compelling way to demonstrate that there are ways for AIs to silently gain power using only an Internet connection. If it doesn't work, well, it's good news: the world will not immediately end due to porn.
Unfortunately, I don't have any skills in AI-generated stuff, so I wouldn't be able to do it on my own. But if someone here knows an easy way to produce realistic pics of a fictitious model, maybe we can start something.
That's interesting, I usually don't think about this when writing. I will in the future.
On using words precisely: I find it more useful to think about how the reader will use the text to make an inference about what's going on in my head. Of course words have official labels that say what they are supposed to mean, but in pratice what matters is how you think I think, and how I think you think I think (you'll recognize a Schelling point). This may be correlated with the dictionary definitions, but it doesn't have to. For example, the word pratice doesn't exist, yet you can understand the meaning of this paragraph just as precisely as if I had written practice. Maybe it's just my experience, but thinking in this way makes writing feel less constrained.