it seems really rough to commit to attend something irl that will be scheduled at some random point in the future. even with 30 days of notice, the set of days that would make this feasible for me is still <50% of all days.
i broadly agree with this take for AGI, but I want to provide some perspective on why it might be counterintuitive: when labs do safety work on current AI systems like chatgpt, a large part of the work is writing up a giant spec that specifies how the model should behave in all sorts of situations -- when asked for a bioweapon, when asked for medical advice, when asked whether it is conscious, etc. as time goes on and models get more capable, this spec gets bigger and more complicated.
the obvious retort is that AGI will be different. but there are a lot of people who are skeptical of abstract arguments that things will be different in the future, and much more willing to accept arguments based on current empirical trends.
TIL that it's highly nontrivial to figure out which direction true north is given magnetic north and your location on earth.
I had always assumed that you could treat the earth as a big magnet with the magnetic north pole in a slightly different place than true geographical north. but apparently the magnetic field of the earth is a really weird fucked up shape.
do you know how long these proceedings will last / what the deadline is for requesting participation?
there are a lot of humans who don't take ideas seriously in that they are very socially conservative and therefore rarely get pwned, in the sense that they mostly live the life that they expect they will live, no matter what memes they are exposed to (which may be a very bad life from your perspective)
i think these are similar to conservatism in the sense that if you do them too much, you stop getting pwned but you also stop doing entire categories of things that you should do. for example, if you are too virtuous, you become overly self-sacrificial/martyr-like and stop taking many actions that are actually net-positive (many activists suffer from this); if you are too emotionally integrated, you become one of those people who meditated too much and no longer have any desires for anything at all.
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was being a nerd ever high status outside of the bay area?