brian_cloutier

12 ms·

61.
by brian_cloutier 4y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong, but (1) and (2) and (4) all seem to come from a place of believing that if a test is not 100% accurate then it is useless. Hopefully when I phrase it that way you can see why none of these objections "kill
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
They are controversial within popular culture but the idea that "Ability to solve these puzzles correlates with ability in a diverse range of cognitive abilities" is not controversial within the relevant scientific community. Here
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
Everybody agrees that the current paradigm has no chance of developing a soul and eating anybody.
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
> some kind of anti-SSC hater community There's one called sneerclub but there might be more. > something called "AGI" that can only exist in their imagination You're claiming it's impossible for non-humans to
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
> I would say that talking about a thermostat's goals is an even stronger example of anthropomorphism. Our disconnect might be a subtle difference in what we mean when we say "goals"? The thermostat is performing actions w
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
I don't think I understand your objection because it doesn't seem like a category error to talk about optimizers having goals. I think you would agree that thermostats have goals? They try to minimize the error between the desired
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
Do you have an example of someone in the community making this mistake? My understanding is that if we knew that all future AGIs would have human-like motivations, goals, opinions, and concepts of good and bad then that crowd would be much
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
I wonder if you've had an in-person conversation with someone who would identify as being a part of the AGI safety community. I've talked with several people and their arguments are a lot more sophisticated than an intuition that
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
Someday it might even become the canonical example, SMR is the only thing blockchain is! The Bitcoin blockchain is just a list of transactions, the hard part is getting everybody to agree on which transactions happened and which order they
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
I can see how you would think they are similar! Actors usually refers to a scheme with multiple coroutines which communicate via message passing. The emphasis is on the fact that there is no shared state: all communication happens via messa
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
Neither HackerRank nor Leetcode invented this style of interview. The questions you're complaining about predate both sites. The sites were created to help you study for those questions, they did not significantly popularize the questi
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
To everyone reading this comment please be aware of Poe's law. It's very hard to intuit intent online, this comment could be sincere, but it could also be satire. So, good chance the author has the same views you do, so there&
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by brian_cloutier 4y ago
I'm not the OP but Twitter has at various times suppressed information about covid and covid vaccines. They are well intentioned but they occasionally overreach. As a quick example, [1] lists some categories of tweets which they will d
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
This is a dumb question but... does housing have fundamentals? There's a demand curve of renters willing to rent housing at different price points and I can see how this would put a lower-bound on housing prices, but why should there b
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
Sure, of course, but that doesn't explain why price increases due to a "wheat shortage" are just while price increases due to a "shipping shortage" are panic.
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
This thread makes some claims which seem contradictory, or at least unusual. [0] claims that a rise in the price of wheat futures caused more wheat to be planted; fair enough. However, [1] claims that there is no wheat shortage, there is in
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
You seem to be claiming that the prices of many different assets are largely divorced from fundamentals. I'm willing to believe you, what you're saying is plausible, but I apparently haven't been looking at the same data you&
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
Interestingly, these attempts are about the same as what pops up when I try to remember the proof: - It's a proof by contradiction - The key step is in taking the finite list of primes, multiplying them together, and adding 1 I then tr
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
> What most people miss is that almost nobody pays full price for college. They have a high headline number for the wealthiest families, but virtually everyone else pays a fraction of this cost or some times nothing at all. You're u
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
It still could be impersonation but a couple different people have confirmed it's real: - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-02-26/ukraine-s... - https://twitter.com/VitalikBute
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
At a previous employer of mine we would have happily switched to c23. Postgres is written in c and if you want to write an extension for Postgres you're going to have the easiest time if your extension is also written in c. However, th
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
Total supply is not the only important factor. If there are a million units of some token and a thousand people hold it then each token will still be worth more than if there were just a thousand units, all held by one person. Network effec
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
When you make online transactions sitting in a cafe you feel safe in sending websites your credit card. This admittedly requires _some_ optimism but it would be surprising if someone in that cafe could break TLS. Systems like zcash and mon
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
> a Georgian judge could definitely order a change in ownership due to incorrect data entered into the ledger, so it's not immutable. There seems to be a misunderstanding. The ledger is immutable. That doesn't mean the state is
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
You've been kind enough to make a testable prediction here! Let me make it a little more concrete. Currently Bitcoin block 700000 has the hash 0000000000000000000590fc0f3eba193a278534220b2b37e9849e1a770ca959, I'm very confident th
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
I'll start by saying it doesn't matter whether you get it. The GP made a claim that there is no use for the technology which is not a scam. But people, today, are using filecoin to store files and are not being scammed. It doesn&#
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
Blockchains are not immutable because nothing made of matter is immutable. If you wanted something to be immutably published you probably want to get it into a major print newspaper; it would be extremely difficult to find and destroy every
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
Immutable ledgers are a godsend and are useful in many different contexts: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_Transparency - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lab_notebook - https:/&#x2
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
The first steam engine was invented in, well, it really depends on your definition of steam engine, but let's use Newcomen's engine and say 1712. That engine was HUGE, and the idea it would ever be made portable is comical. The fi
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by brian_cloutier 5y ago
Filecoin offers an S3-like service for a radically lower price: https://filecoin.io/blog/posts/filecoin-in-2021-looking-back... You have now seen a use for the technology which is not a scam.

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