Thank you very much for producing these. As someone who's rather time poor but trying to become more informed, they are very helpful.
Here is some alternative code for building an HN clone: https://github.com/jcs/lobsters (see https://lobste.rs/about for differences to HN).
It's also one night before full moon (which is at 4:50am on June 15), which should make the sky quite bright.
On a related note, consider what the moon looks like one night before it's full. Would you describe this as "over three-quarters full"? While that's technically correct, I wouldn't. I'd maybe describe a June 11-12 moon as "over three-quarters full" but I'd say a June 13-14 moon is "almost full". So we should up the probability that we're in a story/simulation/mirror.
Observation: If the purpose of this exercise is to run an AI box experiment, with EY as gatekeeper and the internet hivemind as the AI, then the ability to speak in parseltongue is problematic: It appears to make the game easier for the AI, thereby preventing the results from being generalized to a standard AI box experiment.
So why did Eliezer include the parseltongue constraint?
Maybe parseltongue is meant to introduce the concept of provability in a way that everyone can understand. To speak in parseltongue in real life, you just speak in logic statements and supply a proof with any statement you make. It seems reasonable (modulo computational complexity and provability concerns) for an AI to be able and/or required to supply proofs in an AI box experiment and parseltongue enables that in version of the game in the story.
I don't understand the constraint to speak only in parseltongue. Is that there to force us to focus on a solution set that is somehow of interest for friendly AI research?
Here's a flawed solution, but maybe someone can fix it.
Harry performs partial transfiguration on his brain, to transform it into a state where he thinks that he's booby-trapped the universe (for example, by transfiguring some strangelets along with a confinement field that will expire before the strangelets do). Then he just explains honestly to Voldemort why the universe will end if he dies.
The mirror and efficient simulation
Until the mirror appeared, the HPMOR universe could be simulated efficiently, at least as far as we knew. Time travel is limited to a six-hour cache; you can't transfigure arbitrary things, and Harry's attempts to use time travel to solve computational problems failed. This is likely to be deliberate.
So, how does the mirror exist? According to the inscription on the back, the mirror shows the actor's coherent extrapolated volition (CEV). Is this possible to compute efficiently from an actor's source code? I would guess not. (Is this right? Is there a hardness proof?)
Here are some possibilities to preserve efficient simulation:
This will be the last meetup at my apartment.
I sadly can't make this one.
We plan to discuss metaethics. It might be useful to narrow this down.
Reusable respirator guide