Another meme that arguably reached the Bay Area via the 1960s/1970s counterculture, but predates it, is “intentional community”. This influences startup culture and hacker culture (specifically hackerspaces), and to some (lesser?) extent seasteaders, the back-to-the-land movement, and rationalists as well.
LM7805
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My experience with modafinil has been that sleep is possible, but not necessary.
“Security Applications of Formal Language Theory” is a good overview. (If you don’t have IEEE access, there’s a tech report version.) Much of the work going on in this area has to do with characterizing classes of vulnerabilities in terms of unintended computational automata that arise from the composition of independent systems, often through novel vulnerability discovery motivated by considering the formal characteristics of a composed system and figuring out what can be wedged into the cracks. There’s also been some interesting defensive work (Haskell implementation, an approach I’m interested in generalizing). That’s probably a good start.
I have not actually learned Idris yet, and I think I could motivate myself better if I had a study partner; would you be interested in something like that?
I am interested in dependent type systems, total languages, and similar methods of proving certain program errors cannot occur, although I would have to do some background research to learn more of the state of the art in that field.
If you’re not already familiar with Idris, I highly recommend checking it out—it’s a dependently typed Haskell variant, a bit like Agda but with a much friendlier type syntax. The downside of Idris is that, as a newer language, it doesn’t have nearly as robust a standard library of proofs as, say, Coq. That said, the author, Edwin Brady, is keenly focused on making it a good language for expressing security properties in.
The field I work in has to do with proving that program errors related to maliciously crafted input cannot occur; if it’d be useful I’m happy to braindump/linkdump.
less wrong has a lot of opinions of the form “X is obvious and if you don’t believe X you are crazy”
This strikes me as a problem of presentation more than anything else. I’ve had computer science professors whose lecture style contained a lot of “X is obvious and if you don’t believe X you are crazy”—which was extremely jarring at first, as I came into a CS graduate program from a non-CS background, and didn’t have a lot of the formal/academic background that my classmates did. Once I brought myself up to speed, I had the methods I needed to evaluate the obviousness and validity of various Xs, but until then, I sure didn’t open my mouth in class a lot.
In the classes I TAed, I strove for a lecture style of “X is the case and if you don’t understand why then it’s my job to help you connect the dots.” That was for 101-level classes, which LW is, at least to my impression, not; if the Sequences are the curriculum for undergraduate rationality, LW is kind of like the grad student lounge. But not, like, a snooty exclusive one, anyone’s welcome to hang out and contribute. Still, the focus is on contribute, so that’s at least perceived social pressure to perform up to a certain standard—for me it’s experientially very similar to the grad school experience I described.
We’re talking about opinions here rather than theorems, and there’s a distinction I want to draw between opinions that are speculations about something and opinions that are … personal? … but I’m having trouble articulating it; I will try again later, but wanted to point out that this experience you describe generalizes beyond LW.
Foxit Reader supports javascript, and libpoppler (which powers evince and okular, among others) does as well.
Without something to measure, though, that’s really just a technical curiosity.
If the PDF is signed by a certificate the user has manually installed, it can embed what Adobe calls “high privilege” javascript, which includes the ability to launch any URL. That’s an extra step, which would discourage some users, but on the plus side it addresses the “who’s given informed consent?” problem.
Momentarily donning a slightly darker hat: it is also possible for a PDF to launch an arbitrary executable (see pp. 30-34 of Julia Wolf’s OMG WTF PDF, video). AIUI this requires no additional privileges.
D’oh. My “Elsevier == paywall” assumption kicked in too quickly. Thank you.
You can embed arbitrary javascript in PDFs, so what about including “phone-home” text-boxes for marginalia in rather the same way that online editions of Real World Haskell and other programming books have comment threads for each paragraph? I’d think other metrics like time-on-page could be measured as well. This would need to be disclosed, of course, and not every reader can be expected to comment, but the “how” seems tractable at first impression.
I don’t have any useful insights on what response to measure.
Santos, Santos, and Shimony, “Implicitly preserving semantics during incremental knowledge base acquisition under uncertainty”.
Santos, Wilkinson, and Santos, “Fusing multiple Bayesian knowledge sources”.
The first describes a formalism called the Bayesian knowledge base that is more compact than the usual conditional probability table approach to a Bayesian network, along with other advantages; the second presents an algorithm for aggregating representations in this formalism.
I ran across this in a book on adversarial reasoning, and haven’t found anything about it on LW (at least, not apparent from search results). Are paper summaries (e.g., explaining concepts like BKBs) suitable discussion posts?
The plural of anecdote is not data and neither is the singular, but: I am ten years older than my partner, and this is my partner’s first relationship. When we got together, we talked a lot about relationship failure modes and the hazards present in our situation (more than just the age difference), committed to voicing and understanding any concerns/fears/etc. that we experienced, and actually followed through on that commitment. We’re only about a year and a half in, but so far this has been amazingly successful. It’s hard to suss out how much is due to that commitment and how much is due to us apparently winning the compatibility lottery, but I do think there’s a lot to be said for being realistic about failure modes and their likelihood. Long-term relationships, and especially cohabitation, require effort, and the sunk cost fallacy applies to them as much as anything else.
I doubt Harry has read many RFCs, but IP over avian carrier had been around for just over two years at this point in the story.
There are some underlying differences between most charities and bone marrow donation, though. The registry gets no utility from prospective donors until they match donors with patients, so if they can’t reach a prospective donor, that database entry is worthless (except perhaps to artificially inflate the size of the database and attract financial donations). A charity that’s already gotten some of your money has already gotten some utility, and would like to have more, but faces less risk from losing contact with people on their list.
Also, can you even sign up for bone marrow donation anonymously? I suppose you could give them fake information but they’d still need to be able to reach you.
I can’t think of very many other charities that exist to match non-fungible donations with people who need them, though—pints of O+ are interchangeable, as are hours of unskilled labor—so I think you’ve found a really interesting outlier.
Hi. I’ve been a distant LW lurker for a while now; I first encountered the Sequences sometime around 2009, and have been an avid HP:MOR fan since mid-2011.
I work in computer security with a fair bit of software verification as flavoring, so the AI confinement problem is of interest to me, particularly in light of recent stunts like arbitrary computation in zero CPU instructions via creative abuse of the MMU trap handler. I’m also interested in applying instrumental rationality to improve the quality and utility of my research in general. I flirt with some other topics as well, including capability security, societal iterated game theory, trust (e.g., PKI), and machine learning; a meta-goal is to figure out how to organize my time so that I can do more applied work in these areas.
Apart from that, lately I’ve become disillusioned with my usual social media circles, in part due to a perceived* uptick in terrible epistemology and in part due to facing the fact that I use them as procrastination tools. I struggle with akrasia, and am experiencing less of it since quitting my previous haunts cold turkey, but things could still be better and I hope to improve them by seeking out positive influences here.
*I haven’t measured this. It’s entirely possible I’ve become more sensitive to bad epistemology, or some other influence is lowering my tolerance to bad epistemology.
My experiment in massively curtailing my use of Twitter and Facebook is going well. Objectively, I’m completing more items on my to-do list on a daily basis; subjectively, it appears that my ability to focus has improved, which I’m willing to chalk up to not feeling compelled to check new-message notifications and therefore just not having that distraction, though I would like to be able to measure this in some way.
I was expecting to feel rather cut off from the world, but fortunately this has not been the case. I’ve been more responsive to more personal methods of contact (email, IM, in-person interaction) that I had previously felt spread too thin to deal with, and this has been hedonically rewarding (e.g., answering email from person asking for some software design advice → nice thank-you email → warm fuzzies).
I also started the Tiny Habits course that I saw mentioned in the Useful Habits Repository.