romanows

Seems the religious people have a strong, sincerely held belief that they should follow a particular religious authority, and that seems to come outside of the religious authority itself. I guess I don't really buy this line of justification any more than just saying "because religion".

I can't vote anyone out alone, so groups/ideas like No Kings seek to collect people around some general organizing principle. Involved people are more likely to vote and it's possible that you highlight the issues for people who aren't aware or energized enough to vote.

Plus, protests can influence other people in government, outside of elections.

This may portend big things in the future, but this specific hack didn't do a lot of damage. These are both AI companies, and I'm sure part of Huggingface finds it a fascinating object of study. It's great that not every indiscretion is met with lawsuits and jail time.

75.6% die is right, it's just that the other 24.4% do too.

The probability calculator doesn't really help, since the core question for me is how one arrives at its "Probability that misalignment leads to an unrecoverable global catastrophe.".

I'd like to know how these people arrive at their estimates. Why 10% and not 1% or 50%?

I don't think it's particularly unusual for a company to spin off another company?

I wonder if the better approach would have been to lead engineering with a similar reliance on bending rules and "what you can get away with". This is where multiplying estimates by PI comes in, I think. And possibly some creative division of responsibilities to make it harder for a CEO to officially bully engineering. Totally different job than most engineers would (or could) want to perform- the guy probably wouldn't have taken the promotion in this case!

I find this anecdote fascinating because, while I identify completely with the new head of engineering, his requirement really only makes sense if you interpret it as a commitment to build at a certain level of quality, business be damned. Which is fine, but then he folds at the first test of this principle! Didn't even let the business sweat for a day!

This could be a lesson for us engineers to be a little less glib and a little more introspective, especially as you gain more power and influence in an org.

I agree in general, but this article claims that the unionized tech workers now have pay increases, cheaper health benefits, and layoff protections. There is also a discussion about the process. This article at least is not just "unions good" (waves hands).

"own" in the sense of "be responsible for the consequences". Not in the sense of "be able to grant reproduction rights".

Your link talks about how hard it is to define science fiction, so in some ways, I'm just putting my opinion out here on the internet as a data point. I'd say the Left Hand of Darkness is more science fiction than Little Women, but it's also more like the Hobbit than it is like Foundation, Ender's Game, Snow Crash, or even 1984.

Having something like another planet or alien biology is necessary but not sufficient to make something science fiction. There is some fuzzy amount of focus on science/technology, style, and tropes that are needed to make something more science fiction than fantasy or speculative fiction. The Left Hand of Darkness read more like fantasy to me, and I don't think it would have been any different at all if the setting was Middle Earth and the ambisexual species were Hobbits. I think I wouldn't have blinked if it had been described as "science fantasy" to me rather than "science fiction".

I'll bump up Chiang on my reading list, I have heard a lot of good things!

It's great that works for you but there is a reason we have these labels. I've definitely had the experience where I want to escape into some hard sci-fi, and so there's a reason I pick a book from that genre over Anna Karenina. And if someone told me that Anna Karenina was hard sci-fi, it'd color my experience with that book.

I've only read "The Left Hand of Darkness". It's a very well written book, but it didn't emphasize enough technology/science/engineering for me to consider it even soft science fiction. I guess she's doing the work of expanding the scope of what technology could be used in science fiction. I'm not sure that's super useful, since by her definition, almost every work of fiction will involve technology.

Now I want to write a science fiction story where the core technology is never written about explicitly and can only be inferred from its effect on the characters :P