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technology philosophy

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26:55

“The economics of space tethers ” by harsimony

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/22

This is a link post.Some code for this post can be found here. Space tethers take the old, defunct space elevator concept and shorten it. Rockets can fly up to a dangling hook in the sky and then climb to a higher orbit. If the tether rotates, it can act like a catapult, providing a significant boost in a location where providing thrust is expensive. Kurzgesagt has a nice explainer and ToughSF has a great piece explaining the mechanics and some applications. Tethers make it cheaper to explore space,

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21:31

“Measuring Structure Development in Algorithmic...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/22

tl;dr: We compute the evolution of the local learning coefficient (LLC), a proxy for model complexity, for an algorithmic transformer. The LLC decreases as the model learns more structured solutions, such as head specialization. This post is structured in three main parts, (1) a summary, giving an overview of the main results, (2) the Fine Print, that delves into various cross-checks and details and (3) Discussion and Conclusions. Structure Formation in Algorithmic TransformersIn this work we study

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7:56

“Please do not use AI to write for you ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/22

I've recently seen several articles here that were clearly generated or heavily assisted by AI. They are all dreadful. They are verbose, they are full of "on the one hand" and "on the other", they never make any assertion without also making room for the opposite, and end with "conclusions" that say nothing. Please do not do this.————I wrote the above, unassisted, and it states my own views. To illustrate the point I then had GPT-4o rewrite it. Here was the prompt:I have recently seen a substantial

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10:35

“the Giga Press was a mistake ” by bhauth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/21

This is a link post. the giga pressTesla decided to use large aluminum castings ("gigacastings") for the frame of many of its vehicles, including the Model Y and Cybertruck. This approach and the "Giga Press" used for it have been praised by many articles and youtube videos, repeatedly called revolutionary and a key advantage. Most cars today are made by stamping steel sheets and spot welding them together with robotic arms. Here's video of a Honda factory. But that's outdated: gigacasting is the

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18:40

“AGI Safety and Alignment at Google DeepMind: A...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/20

Crossposted from the AI Alignment Forum. May contain more technical jargon than usual.We wanted to share a recap of our recent outputs with the AF community. Below, we fill in some details about what we have been working on, what motivated us to do it, and how we thought about its importance. We hope that this will help people build off things we have done and see how their work fits with ours. Who are we?We’re the main team at Google DeepMind working on technical approaches to existential risk from

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21:30

“Thiel on AI & Racing with China ” by Ben Pace

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/20

This post is a transcript of part of a podcast with Peter Thiel, touching on topics of AI, China, extinction, Effective Altruists, and apocalyptic narratives.If you're interested in reading the quotes, just skip straight to them, the introduction is not required reading. IntroductionPeter Thiel is probably known by most readers, but briefly: he is an venture capitalist, the first outside investor in Facebook, cofounder of Paypal and Palantir, and wrote Zero to One (a book I have found very helpful

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42:07

“Limitations on Formal Verification for AI Safety ”...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/20

In the past two years there has been increased interest in formal verification-based approaches to AI safety. Formal verification is a sub-field of computer science that studies how guarantees may be derived by deduction on fully-specified rule-sets and symbol systems. By contrast, the real world is a messy place that can rarely be straightforwardly represented in a reductionist way. In particular, physics, chemistry and biology are all complex sciences which do not have anything like complete

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15:09

“LLM Applications I Want To See ” by sarahconstantin

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/20

Midjourney, “artificial intelligence large language model neural network”I’m convinced that people who are interested in large language models (LLMs) are overwhelmingly focused on general-purpose “performance” at the expense of exploring useful (or fun) applications.As I’m working on a personal project, I’ve been learning my way around HuggingFace, which is a hosting platform, set of libraries, and almost-social-network for the open-source AI community. It's fascinating, and worth exploring even if

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24:11

“A primer on why computational predictive toxicology...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/19

This is a link post. IntroductionThere are now (claimed) foundation models for protein sequences, DNA sequences, RNA sequences, molecules, scRNA-seq, chromatin accessibility, pathology slides, medical images, electronic health records, and clinical free-text. It's a dizzying rate of progress.But there's a few problems in biology that, interestingly enough, have evaded a similar level of ML progress, despite there seemingly being all the necessary conditions to achieve it.Toxicology is one of those

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13:50

“Interdictor Ship ” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/19

The standard operating procedure against a primitive forest-dwelling enemy is to retreat to orbit and then bombard the planet until there isn't a forest anymore. However, the only reason the Galactic Empire was in the Alpha Centauri A system in the first place was because of the fragile mineral resources underneath that forest. Dropping tungsten rods at hypersonic speeds would risk destroying the only thing of value on Pandora. Alien aborigines armed with bows and arrows damaged Imperial legitimacy

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5:06

“Decision Theory in Space ” by lsusr

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/19

"Since you are reluctant to provide us with the rebel base," said Grand Moff Tarkin, "I have chosen to test this station's destructive power on your home planet of Alderaan." "No. Alderaan is peaceful. We have no weapons there. It is a loyal planet under Imperial control. Striking Alderaan would destroy your own resources and foment rebellion. Destroying it is irrational," said Princess Leia, perfectly calm. "Nonsense," said Tarkin, "That is a naïve understanding of decision theory. I am a causal

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14:55

“Quick look: applications of chaos theory ” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/19

Introduction Recently we (Elizabeth Van Nostrand and Alex Altair) started a project investigating chaos theory as an example of field formation.[1] The number one question you get when you tell people you are studying the history of chaos theory is “does that matter in any way?”[2]. Books and articles will list applications, but the same few seem to come up a lot, and when you dig in, application often means “wrote some papers about it” rather than “achieved commercial success”. In this post

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9:46

“Why you should be using a retinoid ” by GeneSmith

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/19

If you want the 60 second version of this post that just tells you what to do, click here to skip to the summary.Every now and then I stumble down a YouTube rabbit hole and end up learning way more than I ever intended about a particular topic. A few months ago I noticed that I was starting to get permanent smile lines etched around my mouth and started wondering whether there was something I could do to fix them.An ex of mine was a skincare addict and had perhaps the nicest skin of anyone I have

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8:04

“Liability regimes for AI ” by Ege Erdil

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/19

For many products, we face a choice of who to hold liable for harms that would not have occurred if not for the existence of the product. For instance, if a person uses a gun in a school shooting that kills a dozen people, there are many legal persons who in principle could be held liable for the harm: The shooter themselves, for obvious reasons. The shop that sold the shooter the weapon. The company that designs and manufactures the weapon. Which one of these is the best? I'll offer a brief and

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2:26

“What is ‘True Love’? ” by johnswentworth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/18

Meta: I recently entered the dating market, so naturally I have lots of random thoughts on the subject which you all get to suffer through for a while. Your usual diet of dry math and agency theory will resume shortly.Obviously the phrase “true love” has been so thoroughly overdone in so much fiction as to lose all substantive meaning. That's what happens when we leave important conceptual work to would-be poets. We’re here to reclaim the term, because there's a useful concept which is very

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4:20

“I didn’t have to avoid you; I was just insecure ” by...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/18

This is a link post.I don't usually post stories on LessWrong so I'm curious to see how this is received.The first time we spoke, you asked me some questions that felt really invasive. I didn’t want that to happen again, so I avoided you the entire following year.So when you said “Hi” at a party and suggested catching up, I hesitated. But curiosity won out.You still asked probing questions like “Why did you quit your job?” and “What did you think of your manager? I hear they don't have a great

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13:36

“Release: Optimal Weave (P1): A Prototype Cohabitive...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/17

I recently argued for Cohabitive Games, games that are designed for practicing negotiation, or for developing intuitions for applied cooperative bargaining, which is one of the names of preference aggregation.I offered the assets for P1, my prototype, to whoever was interested. About 20 people asked for them. I told most of them that I wanted to polish the assets up a little bit first, and said that it would be done in about a month. But a little bit of polish turned into a lot, and other things got

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6:45

“Rewilding the Gut VS the Autoimmune Epidemic ” by GGD

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/17

Did you know that an autoimmune disease now affects one in five Americans? Of these, 80% are women; autoimmune disease is the fifth leading cause of death in women under 65. Most autoimmune diseases are being diagnosed in increasing numbers, but it is still unclear if all this variance is due to higher awareness, medical literacy, or better diagnosis techniques.The effects of autoimmune diseases can be devastating. As a person's immune system attacks their body instead of microbes or cancerous

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8:14

“Rationalists are missing a core piece for agent-like...

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/17

The agent-like structure problem is a question about how agents in the world are structured. I think rationalists generally have an intuition that the answer looks something like the following: We assume the world follows some evolution law, e.g. maybe deterministically like<span>_x_{n+1} = f(x_n)_</span>, or maybe something stochastic. The intuition being that these are fairly general models of the world, so they should be able to capture whatever there is to

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10:48

“Please support this blog (with money) ” by Elizabeth

LessWrong (30+ Karma) ·

2024/08/17

Short version It has always felt like a gift that people read things I write, and I enjoyed reciprocating that by sharing my writing for free. Until recently I had enough income to pull that off and still cover material needs. That is no longer true, and while it is not an urgent problem, I would like to solve it while that is still true. However it's important to me to keep this blog free. To square this, I’m asking for your support. If you value this blog and can comfortably do so, please

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