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Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

andrewkelley.me

151–160 of 175 posts

Re: Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

#151
post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If true, then that's exactly what makes it good. We can save lives for the small cost of giving donors some recognition and a sense of community. Edit: To add the above, the median annual donation amount for someone earning $60k-$80k in 2010 was $107. Roughly 0.15% of their income. It feels weird to criticize people donating 10% for having not-pure-enough motives while letting the majority who donate almost nothing e…

Performative altruism, so hot right now. I used to have this old book by this guy Matthew something or other that talked about good deeds being done for the purposes of being seen. Might have to revisit that one again, personally.

I kind of wish you'd stop shaming people for donating to effective charities. What if these comments discourage someone from donating?

Re: Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm not American so this may be a dumb question, but why set your salary to $160k instead of what it actually is? Does it have to do with US tax law or non-profit org law?

I don't know if this applies to the States but at least in some European countries if you ever move to another country you are taxed for what you would have been expected to pay in taxes based on the profit the company made in the last years. Paying yourself a high salary (as long as it's reasonable, so as not to arouse suspicion of hidden profit distributions) allows the business entity to not make any profit on pap…

But you pay income tax on the income .

Re: Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I had in mind with my "tiny probability, infinite timescale" multiplier, and also why I said "waste of money". The comment I replied to had a more nuanced point about AI research, which I think merits a more nuanced approach. Having said that, I repeat what I said at some point: once they show that they can stop the dumbest DDOS, then and only then I'll listen to what they have to say about a super-intell…

I'm not sure if you're referring to a DDOS attack on one of their charities. I hadn't heard of that. Cloudflare prevents DDOS attacks. Why would effective altruists work on DDOS attacks?

No, what I mean is: some effective altruists invest their time and money in stopping a possible future AI from slaving humanity.

So, my challenge to them is: if you think that you can stop a super-intelligent AI from taking over, show me that you can stop the dumbest possible malicious intelligence that we know of, which right now would be a DDOS. And the incentives to develop either are pretty much the same, too.

If they can't, and my guess is that they can't, then I don't see why I should believe that they can stop anything bigger.

Re: Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you're referring to a DDOS attack on one of their charities. I hadn't heard of that. Cloudflare prevents DDOS attacks. Why would effective altruists work on DDOS attacks?

No, what I mean is: some effective altruists invest their time and money in stopping a possible future AI from slaving humanity. So, my challenge to them is: if you think that you can stop a super-intelligent AI from taking over, show me that you can stop the dumbest possible malicious intelligence that we know of, which right now would be a DDOS. And the incentives to develop either are pretty much the same, too. If…

People stop hundreds of DDOS attacks daily.

It's weird to demand AI safety researchers should stop working on AI safety and prove they can mitigate DDOS attacks. The two are nothing alike. A DDOS attack isn't an intelligence. DDOS protection services work largely by having more resources and infrastructure than the attackers. Anyone can do that with enough money.

They also aren't researching how to fight malicious AIs. They'd be researching how to program safe AIs. Largely the stuff discussed here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_control_problem

Re: Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

#155
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Zig foundation is super transparent about where their money goes, modulo a few months of delay. Technically he's drawing a salary of something like 12k/month but he donates most of it back to the foundation (initially 100% of it was being donated back, but he's scaled back gradually so it's more like 80% last I checked). I don't know if he has any other income but it seems like Zig is really a labor of love.

If you're in charge why would you pay yourself a salary only to donate some portion of it back?

Probably for insurance and tax purposes.

Re: Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the poster was probably asking why anyone would tell a future employer this information. Employers should pay what they value the position at, not what someone else was paying for it.

Would you refuse an employer that wanted a past W2 as a non-negotiable?

I feel like there’s a bit of trust involved in the whole hiring process. If they think I’m lying and can’t pay me what I want, then why do they believe anything I said during the interviews. I don’t want to work with people that think lying to them after a few conversations.

Re: Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, what I mean is: some effective altruists invest their time and money in stopping a possible future AI from slaving humanity. So, my challenge to them is: if you think that you can stop a super-intelligent AI from taking over, show me that you can stop the dumbest possible malicious intelligence that we know of, which right now would be a DDOS. And the incentives to develop either are pretty much the same, too. If…

People stop hundreds of DDOS attacks daily. It's weird to demand AI safety researchers should stop working on AI safety and prove they can mitigate DDOS attacks. The two are nothing alike. A DDOS attack isn't an intelligence. DDOS protection services work largely by having more resources and infrastructure than the attackers. Anyone can do that with enough money. They also aren't researching how to fight malicious AI…

First, I want to state that I appreciate your comment - I'm about to use some strong words in my reply and I wanted to say that I'm using them for conciseness, and not out of disrespect towards your (valid) points.

If someone were to argue "our strategy for survival is not to fight our enemies, but rather to convince them to use non-lethal weaponry", you would read their research in the rubble of their country after an enemy laid waste to them. I feel the same way towards that line of research: why would the US Army program their AI to be less aggressive when they could... not? How about the Russian army? China? Iran? You point out that anyone with money can make a DDOS attack, and I feel exactly the same way here: malicious AI could come up from anywhere.

If those researchers truly believe that a malicious AI is possible (and again, the website that started my comment chain puts it as a top-3 priority), they have to assume that it will be developed by someone with no interest in playing nice, just like that factory that started spewing ridiculous amounts of CFCs in 2019. Why would anyone use anti-bias correction in their NN embeddings when the biased ones exploiting harmful stereotypes gets them higher profits?

If those researchers cannot stop the most likely scenario, then I consider their research little more than wishful thinking. And we have seen how good "everyone will surely play nice" has worked - spam, pop-ups, phone scams, the list goes on. That's why I like DDOS as an application: it's the world's stupidest AI causing a lot of trouble. Can you outsmart that? Good, then now we can talk about outsmarting Skynet.

Re: Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

#159
post #67
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My ignorance is showing but, why Zig deserve to be funded?

Because a "better C" is long overdue. (And no, Rust is not it. It's a great language, but its design philosophy is very different.) Ironically, today, Zig is also one of the best C/C++ compilers around, chiefly because it "just works", even for advanced scenarios such as cross-compilers: https://andrewkelley.me/post/zig-cc-powerful-drop-in-replace... (Yes, of course, the actual compiler is Clang. But Zig wraps it in…

rust is it. the sooner everyone figures that out, the better.

Re: Why I'm donating $150/month (10% of my income) to the musl Libc project (2019)

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, thank you for sharing this. I was not aware of Every.org until today. I checked out the platform just now and am delighted. I love that it is a 501(c)(3) and that it is crystal clear with the promise to remain that way. We desperately needed something like this. I also love that you will mail checks to organizations even if they do not sign up for electronic disbursement. However I will sign up ZSF now of course…

Ok sounds like I can go ahead because you will accept from every.org and you do not plan to publish an address to accept donations directly? I'll match other HNers donations of as much as $100 to a total of an additional $1000. Not sure how to substantiate every.org donations but maybe I'll take HNers at their word. EDIT: scoreboard as of 22:20 UTC: $400 out of $1000 to be matched: easymuffin, slimsag, tav, _hl_. Bec…

Here's another $100: https://imgur.com/a/uoQdmqg
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