FWIW, this is generally true for design things. In web-design people tend to look for extremely simple surface-level rules (like "what is a good font?" and "what are good colors?") in ways that IMO tends to basically never work. Like, you can end up doing an OK job if you go with a design framework of not looking horrendous, but when you need to make adjustments, or establish a separate brand, there really are no rules at that level of abstraction. 

I often get very frustrated responses when people come to me for design feedback and I respond with things like "well, I think this website is communicating that you are a kind of 90s CS professor? Is that what you want?" and then they respond with "I mean... what? I asked you whether this website looks 'good', what does this have to do with 90s CS professors? I just want you to give me a straight answer".

And like, often I can make guesses about what their aims are with a website and try to translate things into a single "good" or "bad" scalar, but it usually just fails because I don't know what people are going for. IMO the same tends to be true for fashion. 

Almost any piece of clothing you can buy will be the right choice in some context, or given some aim! If you are SBF then in order to signal your contrarian genius you maybe want to wear mildly ill-fitting tees with your company logo to your formal dinners. Signaling is complicated and messy and it's very hard to give hard and fast rules.

In many cases the things people tend to ask here often feel to me about as confused as people saying "can you tell me how to say good things in conversations? Like, can someone just write down at a nuts-and-bolts level what makes for being good at talking to people?". Like, yes, of course there are skills related to conversations, but it centrally depends on what you are hoping to communicate in your conversations!

Aella is the partner of one of the authors! Of course she had advance access! I don't know about Grimes, seems plausible to me (though not super clear whether to count here as sympathetic or critical, I don't really know what she believes about this stuff, and also she has a lot of reach otherwise). 

I also don't think sympathetic people who aren't writing book reviews got copies in-advance, so my best guess is stuff is relatively symmetric. I don't really know how copies were distributed, but my sense is not that many advance copies were distributed in-total (my sense is largely downstream of publisher preference).

For me the answer is "roughly the beginning of the 20th century?"

Like, seems to me that around that time humanity had enough of the pieces figured out to make a more naturalistic worldview work pretty well. 

It's kind of hard to specify what it would have meant to press that button some centuries earlier, since like, I think a non-trivial chunk of religion was people genuinely trying to figure out what reality is made out of, and what the cosmology of the world is, etc. Depending on the details of this specification I would have done it earlier. 

Those companies are run by humans, so no, of course the world does not look like total human disempowerment to me? 

If practically all of the world's governments and corporations were run by AIs... well, then I expect we would be dead, but if for some reason we were not, it seems very likely that yes, that would constitute total human disempowerment.

Yeah, my model is if someone does this once they'll waive the charges. We already had autoscaling in our previous hosting context and both under the current setup and the previous setup people could DDos us if they want to take us down. Within a week or so we could likely switch things around to be robust against most forms of DDos (probably at some cost to user-experience and development experience).

If someone does this a lot, we can just turn on billing limits, and then go down instead of going bankrupt, which is roughly the same situation we were in before.

It's true! May history judge who was right in the end.

Thank you! Fixed.

Definitely! Requests are totally fine!

*** Comment Guideline: If you downvote this post, please also add a Reaction or a 30+ character comment prepended with "Downvote note:" on what to improve. ***

Sorry, to be clear, this is not a valid comment guideline on LessWrong. The current moderation system allows authors to moderate comments (assuming they have the necessary amount of karma). It does not allow authors to change how people vote. I can imagine at some point maybe doing something here, but it seems dicey, and is not part of how LessWrong currently works.