Gotta admit, Moltbook has me updating towards AI are conscious.
Well, those are my best arguments. I hope I’ve been helpful in some way.
So go back. Why is it unlikely that an ASI would reward those that help create it, rather than punish those that don’t? You dismissed angels, but this seems to me the far more-likely scenario. It’s basically the default, otherwise what’s the point of building them in the first place? Now that doesn’t mean the angel doesn’t kill us all too, but it doesn’t engage in all this torture causal trade nonsense.
I just don’t understand why this particular scenario seems likely. Especially since it’s unlikely to work, given how most people don’t give it much credence.
I’m just not about to change my life and become a supervillain henchman, but if some ASI... (read more)
“Moreover so much more than what could exist does”
Why would that be?
Pure combinatorics. You could potentially have children with everyone you encounter. Now some of those are exceedingly unlikely, but even if 1/100 of them had a significant probability, that’s likely at least on order of magnitude or more than the people that you do wind up having kids with. For every potential coparent, there are a lot more children that you could have, but won’t. There are just too many factors that determine the outcome of a pregnancy. Again, we’re talking orders of magnitude more potential children than actual children. when we talk about all of the possible states of the... (read more)
Nothing—that does not yet exist—wants to exist: it can’t. Only we that do exist, can want anything, including our own existence. If an entity doesn’t yet exist, then there is absolutely no qualia, so no desires. We can talk about them like they do, but that’s all it is.
Moreover so much more that what could exist does. It’s effectively infinite given the configuration space of the universe. Your expected value is the product of the value of whatever you’re considering and its likelihood. For every Basilisk, there could be as likely an angel. The value of being tortured is negative and large, but finite: there are things that are worth enduring torture.... (read more)
6/7 seems to me a continuation of a pattern that I think has gone on since the birth of humanity or before: kids like to annoy/confuse adults. Growing up, that’s where “dude” came from: it was taken from surf culture, and it annoyed our parents. Now I find it as a regular part of my speech. For my son’s friends, bruh, and bro got regular use because to Xers like me, it was associated with sounding dumb and insincere.
Now my nephew says 6/7. The fact that it confuses and annoys adults is just totally the point.
Nothing can make it go away faster than us using it. Once adults are in on the joke, it loses all meaning.
I’m not saying that there is no need to optimize for performance for REST-like servers, instead I am saying that it’s very dependent on the specific use case, which is difficult to predict. Often it can be more economical to scale up when there isn’t sufficient throughput, and to focus engineering optimization efforts on only those queries that are low-performing. Even then, there are typically optimizations to be made long before one reaches for assembly. Optimizing SQL queries, and efforts to increase parallelization are often sufficient.
For instance, the server that I work on is a GraphQL API written in Typescript. I have a few million users, and it runs without problems. When I have had slow queries, I typically need to optimize the SQL/Prisma queries, two times I needed to optimize parallelization. We’re not particularly computer-bound. So I haven’t yet even needed to offset processing to even a compiled language. NodeJS is simply fast enough.
You’re missing the reason why most code isn’t hand-optimized: it doesn’t matter. If you’re writing a server, most of the time waiting for a request, or waiting for a database query, or waiting on a file to read, or whatever. There is no point in optimizing these further. The only place where that matter is for high compute-bound processes. If you aren’t processing more than 10k records at a time, you’re unlikely to see much a difference. Even still, you can likely optimize your high-level code to get most of the gains you’d get from jumping down to asm.
Pre-mature optimization is a waste of time. That’s time that can better be spent working on a new problem. It’s better to use observability to know where your code is actually taking the most time in production, and then optimizing those places, if they need it at all.
I can’t tell you what you should do, but I can tell you about my experience. My son was born when I was 33. My (then) wife and I had been trying to convince for a few years, and we were about to seek fertility treatments. He was very much wanted. We talked about having more, but we felt pretty lucky to have the one. We divorced when he was about 8.
I had a great role model for a father: mostly in the positive sense, but also with a few negative features that I intended to improve upon. He told me I taught him a lot. I can say my son has... (read 691 more words →)
I am worried about some of the tonal shifts around the future of AI, as it may relate to more vulnerable members of the community. While I understand Mr. Eudowski’s stance of “Death with Dignity,” I worry that it’s creating a dangerous feeling of desperation for some.
People make bad decisions when they feel threatened and without options. Violence starts to look more appealing, because there is a point where violence is warranted, even if it isn’t something most of us would consider.
One of the big take-always from this community is “do something:” you can make a difference if you’re willing to put in the work. How many have we seem who have... (read more)
INTJ?