That’s fine for one offs, but if, like many, your job is essentially “use Excel” then the simplest solution is to just use windows, not mess around with emulators or VMs.
Yair Halberstadt
Karma: 2,916
A lot of people need to use software that’s only available on Windows. I don’t, and on the rare occasion I need to check Windows behaviour I use a cloud instance, so I use a Chromebook instead.
Although there’s at least a few Jewish born or half Jewish cardinals.
(it was a joke, yes 😀)
On the other hand, we know that Jews are very prominent whenever you’re selecting for competence, yet almost no Cardinals are Jewish, suggesting that maybe competence isn’t that important to be a cardinal 🤷?
The case for creating unaligned superintelligence
It is perfectly possible that they directly exchange stocks but denominate prices (and wages, contracts etc.) in a much more stable unit. The bank takes care of working out how much stock to transfer to make a given fiat denominated payment.
The quantity of lean code in the world is orders of magnitude smaller than the quantity of python code. I imagine that most people reporting good results are using very popular languages. My experience using Gemini 2.5 to write lean was poor.
Kolmogorov complexity? Your solution takes more bits to specify than the one in the solution (at least if you’ve already defined a standard library with concepts like primes)?
That seems like an example of C (obscure technology)
To the extent they don’t have epidemics or handle them better, and don’t elect Trump, it’s probably more stable.
I still can’t imagine what currency would be better than this, though, because I can’t think of a better way to say “I’m just as smart as the market” than to put my entire stake in the market.
Why are you assuming that the unit in which you denominate prices, and the way in which you store your savings are the same thing? Even on earth, most wealthy people only keep a small percentage of their net worth in cash.
These have two different purposes, so are done in two different ways.
Well GDP is about production, which should be relatively stable.
Stock prices are related to expectations about the future, which are far more variable. They essentially measure the interest adjusted value of future profit, and small changes in revenue/costs can lead to huge changes in profit since profit is a small percentage of revenue.
The main reason economists like inflation is because it allows companies to lower real wages of underperforming workers without having to actually give them a pay cut.
It also has other advantages—it allows a central bank to set a negative real interest rate, giving them more flexibility in the usage of interest rate as a tool.
Deflation meanwhile is considered very bad. Some of the reasons wouldn’t be relevant here, but the key one is that meeting agreed on contracts becomes much more expensive than expected. If the wages you pay to your farm workers are tied to the stock market, but the income you get from selling farm produce is not, you have a real problem.
Sorry if I misunderstood, thats how it came across to me. I didn’t know that was a self deprecating quote because there’s no link to its origin.
The relevant index is the FTSE global all cap. It doesn’t include privately traded companies, but then again neither would Dath Ilan be able to.
It has far lower growth than the S&P so is worse on that metric. Around 2021 it fell by over a quarter in the space of a year, and over the last week it’s gone down by 3%. Depending on how competitive the market is, these aren’t numbers that can just be rounded away.
The reason why stability is more important for prices than savings is they have different purposes. If my net worth goes down by 3% that has very little impact on my day to day choices. On the other hand if one shop is 3% more expensive than another shop, that will impact which shop I go to, and if one good gets 3% more expensive I will consider substitutes. This is much harder to do if goods fluctuate in price in correspondence to the stock market. You have an intuition for how much a coffee should cost. Eliezer’s proposal is to make that price even more stable to help your intuition out, your proposal makes it much less intuitive.
I also imagine that investment advice in Dath Ilan is to split your savings between Fiat, Bonds, ETFs and other investments depending on appetite for risk, just like on earth. They probably have fewer hedge funds.
My experience is that the biggest factor is how large is the codebase, and can I zoom into a specific spot where the change needs to be made and implement it divorced from all the other context.
Since the answer to both of those in may day job is “large” and “only sometimes” the maximum benefit of an LLM to me is highly limited. I basically use it as a better search engine for things I can’t remember off hand how to do.
Also, I care about the quality of the code I commit (this code is going to be continuously worked on), and I write better code than the LLM, so I tend to rewrite it all anyway, which again allows the LLM to save me some time, but severely limits the potential upside.
When I’m writing one off bash scripts, yeah it’s vibe coding all the way.
It is perfectly possible that in Dath Ilan all bank accounts are by default denominated in a global ETF, and you only exchange that for fiat currency at the point of use. It still makes sense to denominated prices of fiat currency.
Firstly a word of advice: this would come off better if it was less needlessly antagonistic. “Here’s a cool idea I had” is a lot less pleasant than “isn’t this guy stupid for not thinking of the cool idea I had”.
Also I don’t think this is obviously a good idea. The S&P 500 swings hugely in a small space of time. Prices meanwhile are meant to be stable, indeed this is the chief purpose of prices, as a stable means of comparing costs of different goods. If each unit of currency denotes a fixed percentage of all publicly traded firms, then each day prices will need to be reset according to investor confidence. This makes it much harder to know whether a shop is providing you a good price or not.
Even worse you can’t automatically adjust this because there’s no way to measure investor confidence—the value of all ETFs is approximately constant.
You are of course right that most Dath Ilanis would keep most of their savings in ETFs. But they will exchange it for fiat currency when they need to buy things, and with good reason.
Got it. So in a ways it’s more like a mathematical conjecture than a philosophical theory. We posit a statistical result, we have some toy examples which provide us with some intuition for it, but right now we’re not able to prove the general case. We hope to do so in the future, and people are actively working on doing so.
Also isn’t many worlds a straightforward interpretation of decoherence? Decoherence says that regions of large complex superpositions stop interfering with each other, and hence such regions will act classically, many worlds just says that the regions you’re not in presumably still exist? Or are there some extra hoops there?
Am I correct that decoherence isn’t really an interpretation of quantum mechanics, but an empirically verified statistical consequence of the standard model?
Accountants use features of excel that are not available in the cloud (e.g. VBA) all the time.
You are lucky that you don’t need these features (and that’s great for you), and assuming that therefore nobody has a legitimate reason to use Windows. This is just a really silly blind spot. Excel is just one of a huge amount of software, used day in and day out by a huge number of people (many of whom are self employed so not using an enterprise laptop) for which Windows is the only sensible option.