Viewing profile — dspeyer

Eliezer does not curate any web forum. He says he is not planning to bomb any data centers, but he's also said that if he were planning to bomb data centers, he'd lie about it in p…

The author and most of his associates generally qualify as techno-utopians, and speak routinely of the "glorious transhumanist future". Smarter-than-human AGI really is different f…

Off the top of my head... * A plan exists * The plan itself predicts non-obvious results in smaller systems, and those tests have passed (prediction written *before* running test) …

I have yet to see a large static typed program that didn't -- somewhere -- run into the limits of static typing and contain a set of workarounds, using void* or linguistic equivale…

This isn't a question a non-engineer phone screener can ask. Coming up with first pass filters that don't require an engineer to interpret is harder.

I zoomed the image in and out a bunch -- no change. When I zoomed in enough, I could see the checkerboarding in A, but the overall color stayed the same as B.

I also had trouble calling either "more even". The first one has greater division at the darker end, and the second at the lighter, but they about balance out. The extreme for me w…

Last time I manually packed structures I was doing GPU programming. I forget the details, but the CPU and GPU had different alignment requirements so anything other than a manually…

Is there a good reason for making day 42 (out of 84) the primary endpoint? Did they at least decide to do that before looking at the data?

Because passwords are terrible. Lots of users pick guessable ones unless you have extensive password rules to stop them, and those rules are a huge pain to your users. Lots of user…

I suspect most people who don't use a password manager reuse passwords. A lot. If you get the password to one of my unimportant accounts, you get the password to most of them. They…

Not so easily. If you're trying to learn really difficult things, classes are a huge help.

Often they don't. Maybe by nominative tuition, but not by median.

They don't mention Researcher Allegiance Effect. Therefore I suspect they did nothing about it. Given the nature of the study, I feel comfortable ignoring the results on that alone…

Rename doesn't always do what we want. The one serious investigation I've seen [1] unhelpfully states that "[W]hen a file is appended, and then renamed ... many file systems recogn…

The timeline: 1934: This is predicted 1997: This is done http://www.nytimes.com/1997/09/16/science/scientists-use-light-to-create-particles.html 2014: We will "demonstrate the feat…

First thought: The usual pattern is that only one X chromosome gets transcribed in any given cell.[1] This keeps the dosage of all those proteins correct. Otherwise there would nee…

When those senior doctors are out of town, are risky-but-necessary procedures performed by less senior doctors or delayed until the senior ones return?

Actual descriptions of medical tests routinely give both rates. They often call them "sensitivity" and "specificity". Good luck remembering which is which. But if only one rate is …

The question is can disrupted comets or oorts block over 20% of the light from the star. A comet nucleus is a lot smaller than a star.

From the article: > I’m angry, and I’m a little upset with myself because I want to be useful. I'm thinking the same thing. What I'm wishing is that I held a position of influence …

The case in Boston a while back involved a white victim. Granted, that was TSA, not the school, but it seems like a pretty similar group of idiots. https://boingboing.net/2007/09/2…

As I understand it, eigenfaces require preprocessing to orient and align the images. That doesn't seem to have come up here. Maybe Amazon is really consistent about centering model…

That's there. Search for: > The misclassifications are interesting too One problem seems to be that it concluded she'd dislike anything the exact opposite color from her favorite s…

What do we know about Sundar? It sounds like he's really taking over Google. Is he likely to be up to it?