ShannonAlther

On his original blog the author once said that he was considering making the title of his new blog an anagram, and that the closest options were Slate Star Codex and Astral Codex Ten. We should be grateful he didn't go with Trans Latex Coeds

Just realized I didn't know this: how are you supposed to comply with GDPR if your clients are partially anonymous?

This article leans too much on the current state of the art to extrapolate towards possible futures, and it shouldn't. AI is dangerous, sure, but the examples we're getting here are a DOTA2 team that lost to humans in a modified version of the game, a blog post that doesn't adequately explain what the heck was accomplished, and Atari bots that buttonmashed their way into exploits that let them directly change registers in the game (all very cool but not super relevant).

It kind of buries the lede that we're one or two technical achievements away from the apocalypse (learning from unlabelled training sets, say) and instead starts with "AI sentencing guidelines are biased against black defendants", as if that exists in the same universe as Skynet IRL. IME the people who are even worried about AI risks at all are overwhelmingly in the "what if it disenfranchises minorities even more?" camp, and only a tiny fraction are concerned about having the atmosphere packed with graphite superconductors in the next fifteen years. Any article like this should probably start off with the assumption that the audience thinks AI is that cute thing in their iPhone that dials the local pizza joint instead of your mother when you try to speak to it. Whether or not AI will eventually let Donald Trump sustain himself eternally on a golden throne as the God Emperor of America is a red herring and needs to be deflected, like, immediately, or else people get on their own hobby horse about how AI represents a turning point in the bendy straws community. All the right notes are in here but they're at the end for some reason.

I bet the cat soon learns that sitting in front of the door magically summons a human to let it out.

How many companies would this work at? Seems like more than a few might take exception to a potential employee trying to circumvent their normal hiring pipeline.

Seconded.

You are right, but my point is that general relativity gives us enough of a causal model for gravity that throwing up our hands and saying "It's a mystery" is unacceptable.

Teixobactin, I assume? Their new method of parallel testing promising proto-antibiotics is really neat, but given the ratio of successes to failures, I wouldn't hold out much hope for a second golden age.

> The law of gravity is one example, since nobody knows where gravity actually comes from.

Please stop this. While I agree with your overall point, we know what causes gravity (the uneven curvature of space due to the distribution of mass). You can find this out by googling "what causes gravity". It's not a mystery anymore.

Yes, it does. More or less every class of antibiotic was invented between 1940 and 1960. Discoveries since that period have been mostly incremental.

I'm also in the "everything is kind of okay in my workflow" boat. One of the major problems I hear about and encounter frequently is that biotech is a painful industry. Creating and selling new drugs takes decades and costs millions of dollars. This isn't some immutable law of pharmacology, it's because drugs have to be approved by regulatory agencies like the FDA, and no amount of clever engineering is going to make clinical trials less onerous.

I think just about every industry that seems, from the outside, to have exploitable conditions like this has hidden barriers. The taxi industry looked exploitable, but in fact was tightly regulated. Uber has managed to capture some of the market by pretending to not be a taxi company, and wound up in a plethora of legal battles for their trouble.

I propose that how obvious or necessary a business idea appears at first glance is directly proportional to how difficult it would be to implement.

Amongst other things, the original publication of the memo by Gizmodo stripped it of all the charts, citations and references Damore included.