jaidhyani

Joined 4 years ago

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254

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Member since

Jan 26

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Comment · 6 months ago

I used to work for Meta. I quit largely because of intense frustrations with the company. Meta has made a lot of mistakes, overlooked a lot of harms, and made a lot of short-sighted, selfish choices. Many things about the world are worse than they could be because of choices Meta has made.

So that when I say that they really do have a zero tolerance policy for anyone using their internal systems to violate user privacy, it's not because I'm eager to defend them. It's just true (at least, it was when I was there). There are internal systems dedicated to making sure you have access to what you need to do your job, and absolutely nothing else. All content you interact with through internal tools is monitored and logged. If you get caught trying to use whatever access your job gives you for anything other than doing your job, security immediately escorts you out of the building. This is drilled into new hires early and often. For everything Meta gets wrong, they really do take this seriously.

Comment · 7 months ago

Said company is literally in court against said government at the moment, after said government attempted to designate it too dangerous to do business with.

Comment · 1 year ago

Approximately no one in the community thinks this. If you can go two days in a rationalist space without hearing about "Chesterton's Fence", I'll be impressed. No one thinks they're 100% rational nor that this is a reasonable aspiration. Traditions are generally regarded as sufficiently important that a not small amount of effort has gone into trying to build new ones. Not only is the case that no one thinks that anyone including themselves is 100% correct, but the community norm is to express credence in probabilities and convert those probabilities into bets when possible. People in the rationalist community constantly, loudly, and proudly disagree with each other, to the point that this can make it difficult to coordinate on anything. And everyone is obsessed with studying and learning, and constantly trying to come up with ways to do this more effectively.

Like, I'm sure there are people who approximately match the description you're giving here. But I've spent a lot of time around flesh-and-blood rationalists and EAs, and they violently diverge from the account you give here.

Comment · 2 years ago

Compare the trajectory of the US to other industrialized countries.

The best charts I could find on this are from an admittedly-biased think tank, but the sources it's pulling from are well-regarded and neutral:

https://www.americanprogress.org/article/7-reasons-the-u-s-e...

The US also recently passed a massive investment in building out renewable energy.

Comment · 2 years ago

https://ourworldindata.org/renewable-energy

Quick stats for the US:

In 2022, 11.3% of energy was generated by renewables (hydropower, solar, wind, geothermal, bioenergy, wave, and tidal). It's been growing at just under 0.5pp/year since 2007, when it was at 4.4%.

This is primarily driven by wind and solar. Wind power took off around 2000, and in the years since has grown from 5.6TWh to 434.3TWh in 2022. Solar power took off around 2011 and has since grown from 1.82TWh to 205.1TWh. Hydropower remains the #2 renewable in the US, with a noisy-but-nondirectional generation between 200TWh and 350TWh going back to the 60's, but solar appears poised to overtake it by 2024. All other renewables combined are holding steady or slightly dropping at ~75TWh (though anecdotally there may be some large geothermal capacity coming online in the medium-term future that would change this).

Narrowing the focus from all-energy-generation (e.g. including fuel) to specifically electricity, the US is currently generating 22.3% of its electricity from renewables, a number that has been steadily increasing at about 1pp/year since it was 8.4% in 2007.

Naïve extrapolation suggests we're about 75 years out from 100% renewables for electricity, but of course there are reasons to doubt that. For one, we've recently passed the tipping point where renewables are just straightforwardly cheaper than other sources of energy in many circumstances, and improvements in technology and infrastructure will just continue to make this true in more and more cases.

Comment · 3 years ago

> His actions made perfect sense from his utilitarian Effective Altruist worldview.

They don't. Everyone in EA (AFAICT) has been pretty clear about this. Lying and undermining trust and institutions does tremendous lasting harm.

I am also tired of "people are very concerned about X and think that it's important, so they're basically a cult".

Comment · 3 years ago

I will never cease to wonder at how so many people can blame so much on people trying to take a rigorous approach to world improvement, up to and including "a narcissistic con-man claimed to do trying to do X, and I can imagine a scenario where someone could justify doing the shitty things he did to justify X, so therefore everyone trying to do X must also suck and be complicit in fraud and assorted sins".

Comment · 3 years ago

I am begging people to stop confusing "I was unable to get LLM X to do Y using strategy Z" with "All LLMs are categorically unable to do Y".

Comment · 3 years ago

As the other commenter said, this is incorrect. The input was a sequence of legal moves (not even "real" moves - most of the training data was synthetically generated with "generate legal moves" as the only constraint).

Deducing board state from this is extremely non-trivial.

Comment · 3 years ago

Alternatively, the prior on "this is not possible" is very low because RLHF & Friends have targeted metrics that, inadvertently or not, discourage that outcome.

Comment · 3 years ago

Smallpox eradication

Comment · 3 years ago

Going to be extremely hard to quantify, ransomware peddlers aren't famous for their meticulous public record-keeping. You could try to sift through all the transactions on the public blockchain and try to classify the ransomware ones, but that's going to be challenging at best I imagine.

Overall I'm skeptical of the claim. It could be true, or partially true, but demonstrating that would probably require some work. Alternatively, someone could demonstrate that liquidity came from speculators or some other source, which seems potentially less doable but still not easy.