locallynonlinear

Question: if the only thing that matter is using AGI, what powers the AGI? Does the AGI produce net positive energy to power the continued expansion of AGI? Does AGI break the law of conservation because... if it didn't, it wouldn't be AGI?

I use nix to manage all my personal infrastructure. I enjoy it and it has many benefits.

But, I still have trouble recommending it openly or advocating its usage in any of my workplaces. There are so many gotchas that run against the grain, in practice. There are so many different patterns for using nix (like a big sore point is that nix flakes aren't the default way to manage dependencies, instead it's an experimental feature alternative to the default, which is fragmented tooling (pinned channels? fetchUrl? overlays? NIX_PATH? oh lord), (or even just the fact that minor version changes in nix completely deprecates certain core build utilities. See how nix docker images are still in major flux) that in practice a newbie who wants to go beyond playing with the simple compile a C project with make to... a nodejs development environment (shudder), is gonna have some struggles with unobvious decisions they make early on.

I totally understand that they have greatly improved documentation, examples, tutorials, and community. These are all high quality. But the offense remains the fact that you really should read the whole manual before you get started, because the --defaults-- of solving the small problems with nix, and the deep baggage of historical packages and tooling, means that you can dig yourself into a corner that one day will require rethinking how you organized your work. That to me isn't super great.

But yes, I do love nix and am happy to see them continue to work through these issues.

Maybe unpopular take here, but I love discord as an excellent fit for specific use cases. I think plenty of groups that should be web forums use discord wrong, but for several of my favorite communities:

1. They are better smaller, I don't necessarily want or need them to be discoverable aside from word of mouth.
2. They are better without search history, because the discussion is more ephemeral and personal instead of assuming that anyone is digging history in after hours
3. Ad hoc voice chat rooms is a useful boon because of exactly 1 and 2.
4. No ads. Yes I understand the privacy issues, but I would still prefer to have opt in subscriptions, no ads, and my chats are harvested than many alternatives for small communities that need to subsidize costs. (Again fediverse, if not ads, requires a buy in in terms of technical operational costs)
5. Trivial to build specialized addons in the case your community has a need.

Good examples for me are: Friend of Friend Groups for organizing dinners or parties Online gaming communities Book clubs Co-worker chat alternative to slack

That's the problem. What you, mere meatbags call systemic ethics problems is really a game theoritical global maximization driven by instrumental convergence on the universe's evolutionary selection for, penises.

Elon: "I created OpenAI! It only exists because of me!" Also Elon: "I created this new AI, which I copied from OpenAI, because it was... mine all along?"

As long as it's fine if I occasionally x-post interesting things I find in either?

Probably has something to do with the whole "We definitely know that race is a strong determinant of humanity, but we acknowledge that race isn't the only determinant if you also already have money or influence and could help us."

Is this an enemy of my enemy is my friend situation? Pinker's naive optimism bubble, is not exactly a perspective I 100% endorse either but hey 🤷

Oddly, r/buttcoin is still doing well enough that it's one of the few places I still stop by on reddit. Can't say the same for any community still on twitter, dough.

Exponential progress, I see.

"I'm LessWrong than you're implying!!!"

When, arguing with people like yudkowsky, you can never decisively 'win' or change his mind, because he and other doomers can quickly retreat to the classic hole: "You can't prove X is impossible!! Nature isn't already perfectly optimal!!!" Searching for some kind of "hard limit" on how nature or technology can evolve will always end up empty handed. Lots of really awful things are possible. (Lots of super fascinating things are also possible.) Searching for some singular hard reason why nature as it is, is totally safe from future threats or change will always end up empty handed.

Capability, is not interesting. Capability, is not the real test. Economics, is the real master of it. And specifically, the open system economics of the entire environment in which something is embedded. It's why the Voyager, a technology planned, built, and launched with 80 year old techniques and knowledge is SOTA for space exploration and contribution to science, and Starship is still just a huge dark hole for money and talent.

if I want to understand historical biology, I do not go looking for the alien intelligence and engineering capability that built it, I look for the environmental forces that contributed to, and eventually supported the homeostasis of, it.