Viewing profile — erostrate

How do I rule out the masses being attracted by electromagnetism?

How palatable an argument is determines its actual impact. It's not logical to spend effort making arguments that are so unpalatable that they will just make people ignore you.

Did the author factor in the impact of this kind of article on the external perception of the rationalist / utilitarian / EA community when weighing the utility of publishing this?…

The author leads infrastructure at Cresta. Cresta is a customer service automation company. His first point is about how happy he is to have picked AWS and their human-based custom…

> this is only for paid surface parking for non-residents. Residents price is not impacted (which is controversial). Underground parking is private and not affected. Free parking (…

This is the strategy famously identified as "commoditize your complement" by Joel Spolsky 22 years ago.

The following are all ~ 1 in a million chance of death, or 1 micromort: Travelling 6 miles (9.7 km) by motorcycle Travelling 17 miles (27 km) by walking Travelling 20 miles (32 km)…

Are you saying Schmidhuber should also get credit for smartphones?

Agreed, although I personally prefer when actual experts are communicating to the public. But that's not all he's doing, Tegmark also intends to influence global policy on AI resea…

He talks a lot about the singularity but the biggest singularity I can see is in his ratio of "talks about AI" divided by "actual AI contributions".

Agreed, Ian Goodfellow wasn't the first to come up with the idea of jointly training a generator and discriminator. But he was the first to make it work for image generation with m…

> credit belongs to the people who deserve credit for the work they've done that was useful to others Certainly agree. The point is that coming up with the idea, writing it as an e…

List of "famous" ML people not to waste time on: - Gary Marcus - Juergen Schmidhuber - Pedro Domingos - Max Tegmark - Eliezer Yudkowsky Some context for people unfamiliar with ML r…

The main problem with Alexa / Google Assistant / Siri is that the tech was not ready when they launched. We didn't have models that could understand non-trivial user requests, gene…

What does a salmon have in common with a man on a bicycle? They are both Pareto-efficient. Here's a chart of cost of transport (calories/gram/km) vs weight (kg) comparing a salmon …

Would you have an issue if that someone subsequently refused to part with 0.001% of their thankyou notes in order to save someone else's life? This is a terrible analogy because it…

One main idea of EA is that you should make a lot of money in order to give it away. The obvious problem is that this can serve as a convenient moral justification for greed. SBF e…

I used to be a utilitarian, but it made me morally repulsive, which pushed my friends away from utilitarianism. I had to stop since this had negative utility. More seriously, any m…

You don't even need to go very deep to find financial interests at stake: Thorn sells a "comprehensive solution for platforms to identify, remove and report child sexual abuse mate…

Sarah Gardner, the author of the letter to Apple and CEO of the Heat Initiative, worked for 10 years and until earlier this year as a VP at Thorn [1]. Thorn sells a "comprehensive …

> These aren't mom-and-pop organizations buying penny stocks, they are some of the most sophisticated investors out there Agreed, but they're facing KKR and Apollo, who are even mo…

> Can't the institutional investors just pull their investment if they think it's a bad deal? Can't they read the fine print on the LBO deal? I can think of a few reasons why they …

Fabrice Bellard did the converse, using a language model as a compressor: https://bellard.org/nncp/

I have a game, whenever I see a familiar brand or local franchise selling consumer products or services whose quality seems to have declined recently, first I try to guess if they'…

I suspect the author only counts raw material. So players who lose a pawn but gain compensation reduce the perceived impact of losing a pawn. Including many openings where you temp…