Domain: VFX
Link: Vfx artists react to bad & great cgi
Person: Corridor Crew
Why: They’re skilled VFX artists reacting to good and bad VFX in movies. In doing so, they share tacit knowledge on compositing, lighting, 3D modelling, etc. They have lots of high profile guests from Seth Rogen to Adam Savage.
Yep, but of course the common opinion on Hacker News is that this is horrible.
I also find the wording of the saying unclear, and usually say, “eat your cake and still have it”.
I don’t usually comment on here, but I wanted to mention that my friend had his entire connected bank account drained by PayPal (by a third party, but PayPal did nothing about it), and that simply not holding a balance within PayPal is not enough. You have to close the PayPal account.
I can’t provide evidence of this, but you can see similar stories online.
I suspect a sufficiently intelligent, unaligned artificial intelligence would both kill us all immediately, and immediately start expanding its reach in all directions of space at near light speed. There is no reason for there to be an either-or.
A different measure than IQ might be useful at some point. An IQ of X effectively means you would need a population of Y humans or more to expect to find at least one human with an IQ of X. As IQs get larger, say over 300, the number of humans you would need in a population to expect to find at least one human with such an IQ becomes ridiculous. Since there are intelligence levels that will not be found in human populations of any size, the minimum population size needed to expect to find someone with IQ X tends to infinity as IQ approaches some fixed value (say, 1000). IQ above that point is undefined.
It would be nice to find a new measure of intelligence that could be used to measure differences between humans and other humans, and also differences between humans and AI. But can we design such a measure? I think raw computing power doesn’t work (how do you compare humans to other humans? Humans to an AI with great hardware but terrible software?)
Could you design a questionnaire that you know the correct answers to, that a very intelligent AI (500 IQ?) could not score perfectly on, but an extremely intelligent AI (1000+ IQ) could score perfectly on? If not, how could we design a measure of intelligence that goes beyond our own intelligence?
Maybe we could define an intelligence factor x to be something like: The average x value for humans is zero. If your x value is 1 greater than mine, then you will outwit me and get what you want 90% of the time, if our utility functions are in direct conflict, such that only one of us can get what we want, assuming we have equal capabilities, and the environment is sufficiently complex. With this scale, I suspect humans probably range in x-factors from −2 to 2, or −3 to 3 if we’re being generous. This scale could let us talk about superintelligences as having an x-factor of 5, or an x-factor of 10, or so on. For example, a superintelligence with an x-factor of 5 has some chance of winning against a superintelligence with an x-factor of 6, but is basically outmatched by a superintelligence with an x-factor of 8.
The reason the “sufficiently complex environment” clause exists, is that superintelligences with x-factors of 10 and 20 may both find the physically optimal strategy for success in the real world, and so who wins may simply be down to chance. We can say an environment where there ceases to be a difference in the strategies between intelligences with an x-factor of 5 and and x-factor of 6 has a complexity factor of 5. I would guess the real world has a complexity factor of around 8, but I have no idea.
I would be terrified of any AI with an x-factor of 4-ish, and Yudkowsky seems to be describing an AI with an x-factor of 5 or 6.
It’s funny, the text generated reminds me of babbling.
April Fools!
The dividend part made more sense—when people have more money, they can spend it on what’s most urgent. And they know that, better than anyone else.
Yes! I apologize that my writing was a bit unclear, I didn’t mean to advocate for specific legal rights such as a right to a decent home, but rather to advocate for a system under which everyone can afford a decent home, if they choose to buy one. That said, I’m not against some of these rights being enforced legally (Canadian here, and a huge fan of our healthcare system, excepting the fact that we don’t include dental or eye care. Are my eyes and teeth not a part of my body?)
It is possible that other solutions would work for solving the problems I outline. Taxing companies more could be a benefit, though taxing companies does lead to a drag on the economy. Also, companies can move overseas, but land cannot. Attaching minimum wage to some measure of inflation I don’t think would work, because landlords can eat the extra wages. I think rents are determined by what people can afford, AKA what landlords can get away with charging.
You’re probably right about the word ‘Manifesto’. I’ve changed this now.
(What is a spam list?)
A link would be nice, in case people reading this (the original post) haven’t read that.
Good idea!
Sure, but it’s a question of magnitudes. My claim is that what Joe Rogan is saying on his podcast has less impact on your life than the fact that the value of the land is being sucked up by landlords, rather than being shared by all. Of course, this isn’t the only important issue facing our society, I just think it’s one of the most important (aside from existential risks, probably), and that much less important issues only serve as a distraction from the more important ones.
Software: emacs
Need: Code editor (and personal information management system, and the only good git ui, and an email client, and...)
Other programs I’ve tried: Sublime Text, Atom, VsCode, vim
Why emacs is the best: Emacs can be whatever you want it to be. It can do everything and anything, all in one unified space where all your keybindings work, all your plugins work, etc. There is literally nothing you can’t change about it, and people have created many “modes” for it that do a lot of things. In particular, org-mode renders all of those todo apps pointless, because it’s way better, and really the only viable option for personal information management. If you would rather a ui for git than just use the command line, magit (an emacs mode) is also your only viable option.
Don’t bother with it though if you don’t have some time to invest in learning it (same goes for any powerful tool). I also use evil mode because more thought went into vim keybindings than emacs ones. Honestly, emacs feels kind of like an accident that’s evolved over time to become amazing (think JavaScript), and so there are some terrible defaults and so on, but the roughness around the edges can be changed, so I’d recommend using Doom emacs to start, because they’ve already done the job of creating a good set of defaults.
There is, in fact, a sedative level, and higher doses aren’t less effective, they just induce more side effects, from what I understand. I tried every dose under the sun, including tiny ones. The effect was always weak at best.
I’d wonder about the effect of atmospheric pollutants. Altitude would clearly also have an effect if obesity was being caused by pollutants in the air.
The effect size of melatonin use is usually pretty small. I think most studies say it shifts your cycle by 10-20 minutes. As I tended to go to bed an hour or two later every night, this was not enough.
As for light therapy, it’s not strange that it would have a different effect. Light stimulates a neural pathway going straight to your suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which is the core circadian clock in your brain. (Melatonin is not involved in this, though melatonin is affected downstream.) Melatonin, on the other hand, is released by the pineal gland and is used to regulate the SCN (among other things), but it’s not involved directly in the core timing mechanisms of the SCN.
I should note that my sleep issues are completely under control now, primarily due to the light therapy, as well as making sure I wake up at the same time every day, even on weekends. I now sleep like a normal, healthy person.
For a long time, especially when I was living in a dim basement, I had bouts of non-24 hour sleep-wake rhythm and I even had periods of irregular sleep-wake rhythm, which was a nightmare. So the light therapy etc. has taken me a long way. Fixing my sleep also played a large role in fixing my depression (and vice versa), since the comorbidity between depression and circadian rhythm disorders is very high (I think I remember >50%)
As for melatonin, I was never able to tell for sure if it was having an effect, but it definitely wasn’t solving my sleep issues as the other stuff did. Maybe there’s some biological variability in response to it or something. I did try different doses, up to the sedative level, and it never really helped. I’m glad some people find it helpful though.
Based on my experience with circadian rhythm issues (delayed sleep phase syndrome etc.):
- Turning off the blue light in your devices in the evening is probably less impactful than lowering the brightness of your devices in the first place. Do both, but don’t expect a blue light filter to work if the device is still blasting your eyeballs.
- Many indoor environments are underilluminated. Your bedroom is probably 100x times darker than the sun. That’s not an exaggeration—we just don’t notice because we perceive light on a curve. Get much brighter lights. Going as bright as direct sunlight is too expensive, but you can easily get 10% of the way there, and it will stabilize your sleep (as long as you put the lights on a timer so they match the actual sun!) Get lights with a 90+ CRI, otherwise they will feel harsh.
- It should be a few degrees colder in your bedroom when you want to go to sleep, than the rest of the building is during the day.
- I never had success with melatonin: your body adapts too quickly when it’s used as a sedative, and the effects of using it in smaller doses as a circadian-rhythm shifter (a few hours before bedtime) were mild to nonexistent for me.
Courage is not the absence of fear; courage is fear. To quote Alan Watts:
”To remain stable is to refrain from trying to separate yourself from a pain because you know that you cannot. Running away from fear is fear, fighting pain is pain, trying to be brave is being scared. If the mind is in pain, the mind is pain. The thinker has no other form than his thought. There is no escape.”
Exposure therapy techniques are useful if there’s something causing you more fear than it ought, but some level of fear is inevitable. Accepting the fear is the only way to conquer it, but trying to conquer it is just being afraid of the fear, and therefore not accepting it. So you must accept the fear, not because you want to be rid of it, but because you realise that resisting the fear is futile.
Domain: Math and Game Dev
Link: Shaders for Game Devs
Person: Freya Holmer
Why: She shares a lot of practical knowledge about math and shaders in her streams. She explains not just what, but why, answering people’s questions as she goes using her in-depth industry knowledge.