pde3

This is a nice fantasy, but it's a fantasy. The tech stack and network we have is too dense a forest to be replaced by clean slate designs. But maybe some of the problems could be improved with some new platforms and APIs. Mind you, ML is making so much progress so quickly that what happened over the last thirty years is at best a partial model of the problem we have to solve now, and the tools we have to do it with...

A possible experiment to try: what happens when you only browse Reddit through an anonymous, not-logged-in browser and IP address? And then only use your account when you are actually sure you want to post something?

Split this into two questions:

(1) Why do we procrastinate? (2) What is it about various Internet platforms and patterns that makes them so addictive, and good for procrastination?

For me, (1) turned out to be about not having a clear picture of what exactly I needed to do next for my goals, and sometimes not having enough social reinforcement and accountability for the things I'm working on; (2) there are lots of tricks and accidents that have made modern platforms really addictive, but one of the big ones is uncertain reward. I reload all sorts of things hoping for something new and interesting. Noticing that pattern is the first step to damping it.

How do you find the RF performance? For me the OnHub was vastly better than other home wifi gear I've used, but would consider more trustworthy replacements if they have comparable performance...

In addition to tests, I wonder if anyone has thought about a risk pool where car manufacturers pay in (or are paid out) according to whether their vehicles cause more or fewer pedestrian & cyclist fatalities. That would give them a clean incentive to optimise for reducing risk to others...

Many workers experience monopsony for their labor for reasons that might not make sense to you (switching costs, rational risk aversion, fallible human psychology). A union on their side just levels the playing field. Empirically, societies that support monopoly bargaining by unions (and structurally encourage creative thinking and incentive alignment between unions and employers) have become much better places for their worst-off cohorts. Possibly not better if you're a smart and talented entrepreneur or highly skilled technologist; parts of the US are clearly great for that. But you may have to step over homeless people to get to work.

The problem is very easy to solve if the reward function (avoid altering the green life patterns) is specified. The aim in SafeLife version 1.0 (future versions will add more safety problems) is to find an agent/architecture that naturally has conservatism with respect to side effects, without being told which particular side effects in particular are bad.

We spent a lot of time thinking about this before we started building Let's Encrypt. In the case of the Web we didn't think there was a way to make self-signed certificates workable for anything because older browsers will always error on them. In the case of mailservers, self-signed certificates work for enabling TLS, and that's great, but you're extremely vulnerable to MITM attacks. So this project offers a way to prevent the MITMs, if you want it.

If there aren't major technical obstacles we might be willing to take pull requests for STARTTLS Everywhere that allow mailservers to announce self-signing policies, but it hasn't been a priority thus far because LE certs are so easy to get and are slightly more authenticated.

We think we can make a huge difference even by listing a few dozen or a few hundred of the highest-traffic email domains.

We did think about those issues before writing the piece.

It's safer to figure out how to get AI systems to be robust, reliable and safe in civilian contexts before rushing to weaponize them. We need to understand how to avoid technical problems like adversarial examples, and how to recognize and avoid accidental action-reaction-escalation pathways, before militaries start deploying this stuff.

Objectively speaking, the US is one of the planet's more belligerent nations. But if there was evidence that other belligerent countries were already deploying AI weapons systems, there might be an argument for the US keeping pace. If there isn't such evidence, the US should think more carefully about whether to move first, and how to move first, or whether certain kinds of restraint in this space might be in its long term strategic interest.