derektank

3 ms·

1.
by derektank 5d ago
Surely, if we are decommodifying basic needs, our first priority should be food, not housing, right? How has nationalization of agriculture worked in the past?
2.
by derektank 5d ago
Not if those people are legislators or law enforcement
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by derektank 6d ago
If, during your upbringing, you were inculcated in pro-shrimp propaganda and earned substantial rewards for helping shrimp find food or defend themselves against predators, you’d probably be fairly inclined to help them out as an autonomous
4.
by derektank 6d ago
I would say that rationalists have some commitment to their religion being factually accurate (or at least grounded in empirical observation), which is more than can be said of most others
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by derektank 6d ago
>The only thing we actually disrupted was the economy, such that we now can't produce and disburse the things we need. Except for something like housing, the supply of which has been artificially constrained by policy since before t
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by derektank 6d ago
>Whose livelihood is destroying the engineer that design better protein folding software? Hasn’t homology modeling essentially been abandoned by researchers at this point? Maybe their livelihood wasn’t completely ruined but if you had sp
7.
by derektank 6d ago
For anyone doubting this, take a look at Zahi Hawass’s (former Minister of Tourism and Antiquities) response to the ScanPyramids project. From wikipedia, > On November 2, 2017, the Egyptologist Zahi Hawass told the New York Times: "
8.
by derektank 6d ago
A somewhat timely SMBC has the correct solution: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/waste-2
9.
by derektank 8d ago
Perhaps I misread the parent comment, but the emphasis on that clause seemed to be on the fresh produce, not the lower carbon emissions. I don’t know how swapping out for 100% electric improves people’s access to fresh produce is my point
10.
by derektank 8d ago
>I'm not comfortable with this at all, as giving work to an LLM that a human could do strikes me as wrong Where does this feeling come from? Is it just because the work is complex? We’re all (excepting maybe the amish) comfortable w
11.
by derektank 9d ago
I do not think granting someone an exclusive right to sell their new cultivar for 20 years is particularly dangerous, especially when existing variants don’t disappear. I like that someone was incentivized to grow Pink Lady and Cosmic Crisp
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by derektank 9d ago
>If there was a direct and maintained electric train route What do you mean by this? Most US freight trains are already diesel electric. German freight uses overhead electric wires on most of the shared passenger rail network, which is g
13.
by derektank 10d ago
>If you're a teenager convicted of hacking in the west, no corporation will want anything to do with you Kevin Mitnick? Marcus Hutchins? Robert Tappan Morris?
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by derektank 12d ago
Sure, but in an era where major unsolved mathematics problems start getting knocked out one by one, what if attacks for all of them are identified in the space of a couple of years? I don’t doubt that we could come up with new crypto algori
15.
by derektank 12d ago
So, does anyone have any intuition for how concerned we should be that one of leading foundation models will be able to successfully attack the gold standard symmetric and public key encryption algorithms (AES, ChaCha, ECDH, Kyber, etc.) in
16.
by derektank 12d ago
It does provide an explanation as to why Satoshi’s wallets have gone untouched (besides him being dead). $70B ain’t that much compared to a $5T market cap.
17.
by derektank 12d ago
Is it possible that the first message is more information dense/less likely to be ambiguous than the latter? It’s clearly being selected for for some reason, maybe it’s an artifact of the tokenizer or specific training data, but I don’
18.
by derektank 13d ago
It feels like you’re moving the goalposts here. If the question is, “Who should be liable for AI agents misbehaving,” I agree, it should be the end user that tasked the agent (in this case OpenAI). People are held liable for preventable acc
19.
by derektank 13d ago
No, OpenAI did not instruct their agents to hack Hugging Face. They instructed their agents to hack a piece of a software within exploit gym. Upon determining this task was impossible, they then attempted to cheat the scoring system. As an
20.
by derektank 13d ago
>I think the country with a strictly meritocratic elite selection system Not really relevant to the broader discussion, but this simply isn’t an accurate description of China. Starting with the gaokao, admission quotas are set by provinc
21.
by derektank 15d ago
If it’s truly separated (no interconnect agreement) or generation capacity is below 1 MW, it won’t show up in EIA data, yes. Rooftop solar is also not included in the data for that reason.
22.
by derektank 15d ago
Pulling recent data from the EIA, of the roughly 10,000 megawatts of new power capacity installed in Arizona between 2023 and 2025, 50% is batteries, 40% solar, 6.5% wind, and 3.5% gas. Now, most solar and wind plants rarely if ever hit the
23.
by derektank 15d ago
Alaska’s land is pretty rugged and hard to build on. It would be interesting to hear from someone who works in the industry why the Northern Interior states like Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota have fewer data center buildouts than Tex
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by derektank 16d ago
I mean, that is literally the scenario we find ourselves in, except the innate desire was the result of evolutionary pressures like kin selection rather than an alien race. And yeah, I have no particular desire to subvert those impulses jus
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by derektank 16d ago
The answer is probably yes, but in the example given, the running AI model would hopefully be hosted in a very secure data center, far from the self driving car itself. In that case, it would be far simpler for the machine to finish the tax
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by derektank 16d ago
In what way? There are many sources of inequality. Trying to play whack a mole with each one seems much more laborious than simply deciding how much inequality you want in society, and then setting it with the tax code
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by derektank 16d ago
Obviously not an LLM, but AI models + robotics are likely to automate many healthcare tasks in the long term and are already beginning to automate tasks like blood draws. The Aletta autonomously handles each step of the blood draw, whil
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by derektank 16d ago
Naturally, it varies by state. But yes, the Department of Licensing in WA state is also one of the least onerous bureaucracies I interact with
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by derektank 16d ago
Wouldn’t it be simpler for European countries to simply raise the VAT and redistribute the proceeds to poor people, rather than regulate the interchange fees if the concern is inequality
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by derektank 17d ago
Lots of large enterprises and organizations have security policies that make it very hard to self-install these tools and haven’t figured out they should add them to their approved software list yet. Federal government in particular is stil

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