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Robin Hanson x.com
Do you think it is possible, if God exists, that he (or she or whatever) could clearly prove to you that he exists? So that you'd then assign >99.9% chance to his existing?
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19 September
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Their words
A lot of UI exists because software can’t understand what you want. Menus, settings screens, dashboards, filters: much of it is a human-accessible API to a dumb machine. Smart machines need much less UI.
17 September
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korrents.com
The story we tell about a life is not the life itself; life exists only in the present moment.Their words
The story of a life is not the life itself. Life is in the moment.
15 September
14 September
13 September
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A choice exists at the scale of a person thinking, weighing and deciding. Looking at the molecules underneath and finding no choice there doesn't prove that choice is an illusion.
11 September
10 September
7 September
6 September
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there exists a wisdom in the involuntary, and that our attempts to shape reality, however intentional, are themselves a form of unintentional expression.
#281: You, with a layer of paranoia shaved offhaleynahman.substack.com
3 September
1 September
30 August
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korrents.com
Trump has no concept of sovereignty, which is why he cannot predict the behaviour of leaders who do.Their words
He lacks any concept of sovereignty -- that a polity exists beyond the whims and the greed of the people in charge.
29 August
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korrents.com
Zone 2 training is a way of accumulating aerobic volume cheaply, not a physiological lever with magic of its own.Their words
Zone 2 isn’t a secret physiological lever, nor does it provide some sort of mitochondrial magic that only exists at this intensity.
28 August
25 August
22 August
20 August
17 August
15 August
14 August
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Their words
there's not a technical reason that they couldn't have plaid lunchboxes and shoelaces or be singing a song, but it would probably be more distracting and just take away from that instant recognition that you're aiming for.
12 August
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korrents.com
Software engineers behave as though the world exists in the repository, and it does not: the world is production.Their words
it's always weird to me just how much software engineers really seem to believe that the world exists in the repo. It doesn't. It's production, you know?
10 August
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when the machine says I'm sorry you're so sick today it's very different from how your friend says it to you because the machine said that because it has learned through pattern when someone tells it I'm sick you should say I'm sorry you're sick instead of I'm so glad you're sick because that data exists.
31 July
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korrents.com
Models can prove monumental theorems and still have never written an essay worth reading.Their words
I mean, it's very interesting, right? Because these can prove the Jacobian conjecture, you know, whatever. Uh and so clearly they're capable of these monumental feats. Um but somehow I still haven't read the LLM essay that I found super compelling.
30 July
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korrents.com
Batching exists only because moving data costs about a thousand times more energy than computing on it.Their words
Um because if you didn't have that thousandx difference then you know you wouldn't have to do batching but you have to do batching of you know many examples or maybe many tokens at once in order to amortize that data movement
29 July
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But I think it is more useful for most developers to have an exposure to like what math has in the various fields versus just going all in every single field when they see them, right? You've got to know what's available to know what's most useful for you. And most math will not be useful for you.
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I think we're at this like in amazing moment in the world where the bottleneck is not the progress of the AI models, the bottleneck is diffusing that through the rest of the world and and helping the world adapt to this amazing technology that already exists. Like I think if the models didn't improve at all from today, there would still be like decades and decades of like total upheaval and change in the economy and how the world operates and and everything around us
28 July
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We said all of this engineering that historically exists in spreadsheets really should exist in software. The spreadsheet engineering is like it's like baby software.
25 July
14 July
13 July
11 July
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Population-level studies will keep struggling to prove that short sleep shortens life, because they are structurally unable to separate cause from symptom—and the genetic tools meant to overcome this limitation inherit a different fatal flaw.
7 July
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it's more important to invest in trains that can get more riders than just the railfans; taking a line from 0% to 5% modal split is less important than taking it from 20% to 40%
Prioritizing Rail Expansion in New Englandpedestrianobservations.com
26 June
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we are trying to encourage people to not spend all their time just like going through all the mathematical open problems physics problems and um just seeing pushing the models to their limits to see what they can prove or disprove.
24 June
From one piece Tech interviews with NeetCode 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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I don't understand why anybody would learn the CAP theorem when that theorem exists because it's just more complete. It's not that much more complicated. I think it's more simple to understand.
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it's just right team, right project, cuz if you don't get the right project, there's no way you can prove yourself. You could be a 10x, 100x engineer, and if you're working on relatively easy stuff, you can't really say that you solved like a really hard problem.
21 June
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Lovedrcmnd.app
ZigTheir words
Zig is exceptional software: ambitious, practical, independent, and unusually serious about quality. Ghostty exists in large part because Zig made it possible for me to build the kind of software I wanted to build. This is why I support Zig.
16 June
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and you may now use the actual Inquisition record of you having gone through censorship as the document to prove that you and only you have the right to print the book and therefore you can sue people for plagiarizing it or printing an unauthorized edition. And so, the very first version of copyright is the Inquisition.
13 June
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korrents.com
The war in Ukraine will prove as historically significant in its outcome as the First World War was.Their words
The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the First World War, and there is every reason to think that its outcome will be of comparable historical significance.
9 June
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But the maritime world is about negative objectives. It's preventing things from bad things from happening. And um you can never prove that you prevented anything.
7 June
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Because an opinion-based thing on highly innovative, differentiated stuff, it doesn't have a model for that. There's not that stuff in there. You got to You still need the very version one to be done.
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korrents.com
A good idea often fails to spread not for lack of merit but because no convenient way exists to implement it.Their words
Sometimes, a good idea doesn't get traction because there isn't a convenient way to implement it.
3 June
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if you nominate people whose life history reflects a high degree of unreliability, they may prove unreliable once in office.
27 May
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There's always negative sentiment that exists for any business that's getting hyped. They have no incentive to correct it. Um so again it's complicated because I know the training costs are a big part of it. Uh the R&D department is is hugely expensive but long-term inference makes sense as a business and I think it it always will.
24 May
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korrents.com
The forward-deployed engineer is a real new job, and it exists because every agent needs a human.Their words
And the thing that is becoming really clear is the whole forward deployed engineer concept I think is for real. And it comes out of every agent needs a human.
13 May
From one piece TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Well, like I said, I mean the the overarching thing was this: power and productivity of C++ with the ease of use of Visual Basic in a sense, right?
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So that's unfortunate, and that's why some environments like Go, for example, has has Go routines and green threads, which are really language emulated lightweight threads that kind of do what I'm talking about, but but at a much lower cost. But you avoid the function coloring. So there is a bunch of different things, but but you know, but for an environment that already exists like JavaScript or like C# and and the Windows event loop and and whatever, this this was the right solution.
8 May
From one piece David Reich – Bronze Age shock, the Neanderthal puzzle, & the sudden spread of farming 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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It may still be the case, and I guess it is, that immune traits are the most selected category, but is not at all the case, and in fact, we can prove it's not the case that behavioral traits are not selected.
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So for complex traits, ones underpinned by many mutations, all the variation already exists to move the population to a different adaptive set point that's optimal in the environment which it's in.
24 April
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korrents.com
A confession stops the investigation that would have cleared the innocent person who gave it.Their words
A confession, though, will sometimes preclude police from doing the very sort of investigation that would prove the confessor’s innocence.
15 April
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Their words
Computing is not like that. There's a reason why the x86 still exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems, these ecosystems are hard to replace. It costs an enormous amount of time and energy and most people don't want to do it.
29 March
From one piece Chip Huyen: Building when it feels like there's nothing left to build - The Pragmatic Summit 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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So, I I think there's a lot of things we still try to imagine. What would be an AI-driven world look like, right? I think people are trying to like retrofit what already exists to fit what they think is a new workflow.
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And the question nowadays is less about like how to build because if you can describe the problem in the solution you want, usually AI can do it. Maybe not today, but maybe like two or three years from now on they can do a lot of those. The question is like what to build because we talk about like yes, if something exists, right? AI can replicate it.
20 March
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so so some people are concerned, you know, what if the Riemann hypothesis is proved with a completely incomprehensible proof? I I think once you have the artifact of a proof, we can do a lot of of of of of analysis on it.
19 March
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it turns out you can do this if you think really hard about okay, how do I have agents prove to me that the stuff they've written works?
11 March
From one piece Jeff Kaplan: World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Blizzard, and Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #493 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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And there’s no, like, textbook that exists for game design, at least none that has been introduced to me yet. But I think about, like, elements of fun.
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The right way to incubate a video game is you have the smallest group possible and you try to get the idea across with whatever technology you can get your hands on, using other engines, using art from whatever. You prove out that idea, and once you know what you’re doing, then you expand the team.
4 March
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Their words
When rare skills become more attainable, people feel pressure to move "up the stack" to prove their value.
17 February
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I cannot support any law that includes a “parental consent” exception—it defeats the central purpose of the law by dropping parents and children straight back into the same collective-action trap
1 January
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behavior and belief is like two-way street. You know, what you believe will influence the actions that you take, but the actions that you take can also influence what you believe about yourself. And you know, every time you show up and do it in some small way, you prove to yourself a little bit, hey, maybe I am that kind of person. And so, my encouragement, my suggestion is to let the behavior lead the way.
21 December 2025
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Their words
It had the best opening sentence of any nonfiction book I read this year: "In 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any prior year. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born—ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists." Such a simple and obvious fact but I had not known it before. I had to keep reading.
12 December 2025
9 December 2025
From one piece Is It a Bubble? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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There’s a consistent history of transformational technologies generating excessive enthusiasm and investment, resulting in more infrastructure than is needed and asset prices that prove to have been too high. The excesses accelerate the adoption of the technology in a way that wouldn’t occur in their absence.
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There can be no way to participate fully in the potential benefits from the new technology without being exposed to the losses that will arise if the enthusiasm and thus investors’ behavior prove to have been excessive.
3 December 2025
1 December 2025
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korrents.com
Spirituality is a real part of human nature and central to flourishing, whether or not God exists.Their words
I approach spirituality as a social scientist who believes that whether or not God exists, spirituality is a deep part of human nature, shaped by natural selection and cultural evolution, and central to human flourishing and self-transcendence.
25 November 2025
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I think for example our intuitive feeling of hunger is not succeeding in guiding us correctly in this world with an abundance of food.
31 October 2025
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I was like, “Well, what is sci-fi?” It’s science fiction, right? Science is a theory plus fiction. And so I’ve always thought the best sci-fi for me was when it wasn’t just kind of space opera, but there was a real obvious sort of hypothesis.
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korrents.com
Orion is too heavy for any rocket that exists to carry it to low lunar orbit and bring it home.Their words
Even for $5.2b per launch, Orion is so overweight that there does not exist a booster nor an upper stage that can launch it to Low Lunar Orbit and return it to Earth.
NASA’s Orion Space Capsule Is Flaming Garbagecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com
17 October 2025
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the reason that I think this is kind of tricky is quite subtle. And it's the fact that anytime you use an LLM to assign a reward, those LLMs are giant things with billions of parameters and they're gameable.
2 September 2025
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korrents.com
Studies showing a language model behaving badly prove nothing, because the model was asked to produce that behaviour.Their words
you write murder is good on a piece of paper and you put it in a photocopier and you press go and you say my god the machine says murder's good. Well, no, you told the machine to say that. And that's what these anthropic studies are. They're basically you tell the machine to say a thing and then it says it like well you haven't proved anything.
17 August 2025
14 June 2025
From one piece Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #472 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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I can tell you with complete certainty the twin prime conjecture is true. The random model gives overwhelming odds it is true, I just can't prove it.
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I'm much more comfortable with the fox paradigm. Yeah. So yeah, I like looking for analogies, narratives. I spend a lot of time… If there's a result, I see it in one field, and I like the result, it's a cool result, but I don't like the proof, it uses types of mathematics that I'm not super familiar with, I often try to re-prove it myself using the tools that I favor.
30 April 2025
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Their words
We'd constantly be improving the tools and just the iterative process and the speed at which that improves products is the critical element to success in games. The slower the iteration cycle, if you make a build every week and you prove, you go through one iteration every week, you're going to be way way way worse by the end of your project than a game company that makes new stuff every day.
17 December 2024
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Their words
you want to hire people for their unique strengths, not their lack of weaknesses. If they’re strong where you need them to be strong, it’s okay if they aren’t equally superpowered at everything — that’s why we build teams, to supplement and balance each other out.
28 November 2024
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Their words
Reward hacking exists because RL environments are often imperfect, and it is fundamentally challenging to accurately specify a reward function.
Reward Hacking in Reinforcement Learninglilianweng.github.io
30 September 2024
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korrents.com
Responsible scientists try to disprove their own theories, and archaeology keeps stepping out of that box.Their words
And as responsible scientists, we’re trying to disprove our theories. We are not supposed to be trying to prove our theories. That’s one more foot out of the science box that archeology often steps.
13 June 2024
From one piece Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #433 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
So my interpretation of reality is if you fold it up, all that bifurcation of many worlds, and you just fold it into the structure that is you, and you just said you are all of those many worlds and your history converged on you, but you’re actually an object exists that was selected to exist, and you’re self-consistent with the other structures. So the quantum mechanical reality is not the one that you live in. It’s this very deterministic, classical world, and you’re carving a path through that space. But I don’t think that you’re constantly branching into new spaces. I think you are that space.
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But mathematics too, and it’s interesting because people think that math has this Platonic reality that exists outside of our universe, and I think it’s a feature of our biosphere and it’s telling us something about the structure of ourselves.
4 June 2024
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Their words
But their latest study is for only 7.1 million miles. They need something like 40 times more data prove they are actually saving lives with statistical confidence (likely even more).
Waymo's Misleading Claim of Saving Livessafeautonomy.blogspot.com
8 April 2024
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and LifeTheir words
If I were teaching a course in decision-making and had to assign one book, it would be this one.
26 March 2024
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Their words
If you want to exchange or deliver information to a group of people, one of the worst ways to do it is with a live verbal presentation. If your goal is actually to deliver that scientific paper or that insight, then you should either write a book or write a memo and say, here, in an asynchronous way, this is what we know. If you're going to show up live, in person, in real time, synchronized, you are performing. And the goal is to not deliver the information, but to deliver emotion.
18 March 2024
2 February 2024
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Technological progress is not a mystical force that delivers the most important ones first.
10 technologies that won't exist in 5 yearsblog.jacobtrefethen.com
14 December 2023
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That will be a marker of success when you can have a really valuable space company started in a dorm room, then we know that we've built enough infrastructure so that ingenuity and imagination can really be unleashed.
6 December 2023
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Their words
Opportunity solution trees help product trios: Resolve the tension between business needs and customer needs
3 December 2023
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That was originally one of the hopes of Large Hadron Collider. I’d say at this point, it would be very unlikely given what they’ve already accomplished, but there are these underground detectors, xenon detectors that look for dark matter coming in, and they are going to try to achieve a much stronger bound than exists today.
28 November 2023
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Their words
These skewed priorities are the exact problem that effective altruism exists to solve - or the exact inefficiency that effective altruism exists to exploit, if you prefer that framing.
In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com
1 September 2023
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Their words
Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence, and it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.
19 August 2023
From one piece Seth Explains Consciousness 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Free will does not require violating the laws of physics, yet the subjective experience of it is real and meaningful.Their words
There is no "spooky free will" that violates the laws of physics in our common model of them, but the experience of free will certainly exists and is informative.
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korrents.com
Color as perceived is not an objective property of objects, but a construct generated by the perceiving brain.Their words
Redness is not "objective" in the sense of being "in the object", it only exists in the models generated by the sort of brains which are hooked up to eyes.
29 June 2023
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korrents.com
Whether time really exists does not matter; what matters is that time is a useful model for describing reality.Their words
I think time is a useful model, whether it exists or not. Right. Does quantum physics exist? Well, it doesn’t matter. It’s about whether it’s a useful model to describe reality.
27 June 2023
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korrents.com
A threat loses First Amendment protection only if the speaker was at least reckless about it being taken as a threat.Their words
Now, finally, the Court has resolved the question: the First Amendment requires that, at a minimum, the government prove that a speaker was reckless about whether their statement would be interpreted as threatening.
1 January 2023
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korrents.com
The International Space Station exists mainly to teach its builders how to build another space station.Their words
The ISS crew spend most of their time fixing the machinery that keeps them alive, and when they have a free moment for science, they tend to study the effect of space on themselves.
31 December 2022
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Their words
Easier said than done, but one of the best ways to prove you’re not a predictive language model is to demonstrate critical and sophisticated thinking.
7 September 2022
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Do we need to have some system which is capable of overriding a rational decision which cannot be made because there’s too much conflicting information by effectively an emotional judgmental decision that just says do this and see what happens? That’s what consciousness is really doing in my view.
10 June 2022
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Their words
Many alignment problems of superintelligence will not naturally appear at pre-dangerous, passively-safe levels of capability.
9 January 2021
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Their words
Adopting the traditional semiconductor manufacturing business model to compete head to head against the likes of Intel would guarantee automatic failure.
25 November 2020
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But nobody will ever get to the billions of representative miles necessary to say anything compelling about expected safety until after they actually deploy their fleet.
21 January 2019
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Formal verifiers have a dilemma: the more expressive the language, the harder it is to prove anything in it. But the less expressive the language, the harder it is to write anything in it.
22 August 2018
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I do not sign CLAs and I think they’re a harmful practice for this very reason. Asking a contributor to sign them is a slap in the face to the good will which led them to make a contribution in the first place.
16 April 2018
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
Hippocratic WritingsTheir words
So right there at the beginning, before there was even a profession such as medicine, there is some writing with a scientific appreciation of the body and how to make it better. There's no dogma here, because they're constantly asking, try this for yourself, prove me wrong! And there is also the beginning of a professional ethic about a group of people who should hold each other to high moral and clinical standards. A few of the writings complain about quacks, who rip people off, and don't pay attention to the high standards.
18 February 2015
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Their words
The size of what we’re making is unknown until we know what we’re putting there. So, it’s better to come up with an arrangement of elements and assign them to a size, rather than the other way around. We need to start drawing, then put the box around it.
29 July 2014
Nothing matches.
What is a korrent?
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