estearum

12 ms·

301.
by estearum 2mo ago
Is it "clear" from a car accident fatality that seatbelts and airbags aren't doing shit?
302.
by estearum 2mo ago
Notice how neither example takes years to reverse course or mitigate? Let's just rattle a few more off, across the successfully-mitigated and not-yet-mitigated or failed-to-mitigate categories: - Hormuz oil shortage (likely to material
303.
by estearum 2mo ago
We don't disagree on the problem. We disagree on whether that means suddenly residents' needs will overcome business interests. They haven't for 100 years in the Southwest. Why would they now?
304.
by estearum 2mo ago
I wish I shared your optimism about the power of American democracy. Just as the residents' needs get more existential, so do the businesses'
305.
by estearum 2mo ago
So a broken ankle in the wilderness isn't an emergency? Having only 10 days of food when you expect to be 30 days away from resupply isn't an emergency? Would hate to be stuck in a tricky situation with you (which... it turns out
306.
by estearum 2mo ago
Water rights unfortunately don't really work like "residents > business."
307.
by estearum 2mo ago
What? The government has been quite openly going around pulling unrelated funding and launching investigations into educational institutions for similar reasons.
308.
by estearum 2mo ago
Wildberries is (or was, at least, prior to the initial attacks) openly selling equipment intended for and marketed for military uses
309.
by estearum 2mo ago
You a few comments ago: "Everyone is pulling these random P(doom) numbers out of their asses." You now: "I will make up fan fiction about my interlocutors to avoid having to substantiate any of my beliefs" lmao shameful
310.
by estearum 2mo ago
Ah, well color me shocked. Another AI utopianist who can't answer incredibly, incredibly basic questions about his/her beliefs like: "uhh... why would this be true for AI when it wasn't true of the last 20 technologies w
311.
by estearum 2mo ago
I can't even find a coherent argument here. You're claiming simultaneously: 1. People adopt beliefs in order to stand out (your article) 2. Everyone seems to believe in the doom narrative, but not you (you stand out!) 3. You'
312.
by estearum 2mo ago
And why would it be in their interest...?
313.
by estearum 2mo ago
It reminds me of (optimistically) the explosion of printing, the cotton mill, or the automobile. In each of those cases, many of the people yelling "DOOOOOM!" were actually correct in any sense that mattered to them. Lots of peo
314.
by estearum 2mo ago
Yes it's probably the people saying "hmm good outcomes aren't guaranteed" who live in la-la-land.
315.
by estearum 2mo ago
Yeah that characterizes most AI risk conversations I have. One person saying “this might be catastrophic” and then another saying “ahem, nay sir. It is only likely to be 99.99999% of a catastrophe.”
316.
by estearum 2mo ago
Naturally evolved viruses tend to have a tradeoff between contagiousness and lethality (just because both features have to evolve somewhat simultaneously). Synthetic viruses have no such difficulty.
317.
by estearum 2mo ago
Not sure how much Annie Jacobsen goes into the exact dynamics in Nuclear War, but it may be worth reading Ellsbergs' Doomsday Machine before you find comfort in the "chain of command."
318.
by estearum 2mo ago
Not guaranteed whatsoever. People keep mixing up the fact that it's very hard for a virus to naturally evolve that's both extremely lethal and extremely contagious with the totally distinct claim that it's hard or impossibl
319.
by estearum 2mo ago
If we could, it would be wise to prevent the sun from enveloping the earth at some point before that happened, yes. (obviously "we" won't be around or whatever, but the point remains: yes, you should solve as many existential
320.
by estearum 2mo ago
Your source of comfort is that we could restore the species with as few as 3,000 people?
321.
by estearum 2mo ago
Why don’t you just scroll up and answer with your timeline estimates so we can talk about something concrete instead of playing this goofy shell game? “No no some other step is hard. I won’t say what it is. No it’s not getting easier, mirac
322.
by estearum 2mo ago
Huh? Is "what's your proposal" your reaction to anyone who's alarmed by a problem? Pretty weird if so. Most problems are such that the people who should be alarmed by them is much, much larger than the set of people who
323.
by estearum 2mo ago
This may have flown past you, but we’re commenting on an article about trivially creating novel pathogens The shredding, mutating, reassembling is all it took to get the most well known pathogen in the world by the controls that you are
324.
by estearum 2mo ago
Define "reasonable precautions"? Here's a red team exercise where researchers successfully bought fragments of the best known pathogen in the world, never mind a novel one. What reasonable precautions failed to catch this but
325.
by estearum 2mo ago
The only difference between people who are quite concerned and you is that you are either 1) actually blind to or 2) choosing to ignore even the first derivative on those barriers. The people "got LLM-brain" are saying: "Wow
326.
by estearum 2mo ago
Uhhh right... but all the other hard parts are being solved too, correct? LLMs are clearly going to solve a part that, 10 years ago, one would've assumed would be one of the highest and last barriers to go down. Without LLMs, a reasona
327.
by estearum 2mo ago
Here let's just get specific. For each of the years below, what is YOUR estimate for how long would it take a person of 80th percentile intelligence with $10,000,000 (2026 money) to get from "I'd like to kill a lot of people&
328.
by estearum 2mo ago
If that's the understanding you came away with, it was clarified in my immediately following comment. Glad we agree that there are labs that will solve very hard parts of creating a novel virus, either by accident or by negligence.
329.
by estearum 2mo ago
Your example of how easy it is to control outputs behind specialized knowledge is a thing (recreational drugs) that exist in mass quantities every place on the planet at consumer-accessible prices?
330.
by estearum 2mo ago
https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custo... Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist. And yes, this service claims to have safegua

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