birb_cromble
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User ID: 3236
birb_cromble
5hr ago
Sorry - I was wrong on my title. I was working from memory while on mobile. I'm back at my desk now.
The actual paper is "When should an effective altruist donate", from 2019, by William MacAskill, published by the global priorities institute. He establishes a proposed mathematical framework that determines whether to donate now or later (page 14 of the PDF). Reading through his own definitions above, he sets it up so that it's almost always beneficial to give later. Take the "Values" section. He explicitly state that values are unlikely to change over time. I find that just as unlikely as he finds it likely.
On a deeper note, this goes back to a problem I have with utilitarianism in general and effective Altruism in particular. I used to hang out with some effective Altruists. I also volunteer at an animal shelter, doing unglamorous work that most volunteers don't particularly want to do. My EA acquaintances mocked me for that choice, and earnestly argued that I would be better off quitting my job, moving to a HCoL area, getting paid "what I (was) really worth", then donating back to the animal shelter in question to hire somebody else to "do that kind of work".
I don't talk to them much anymore. I'm still disinfecting ringworm and mending fences at the animal shelter, and they're donating to groups like METR, because that will allegedly do more good than anything I'm doing.
birb_cromble
6hr ago
My brother in Christ, we are in a thread about Sam Bankman Fried, Caroline Ellison, and the fallout of FTX and you are asking for a source?
How about William McAskill, in his paper Investing to Give?
There's also Sam Harris and Sam Bankman Fried in Sam Harris' podcast.
Ellison herself brought it up during her trial.
Even Scott's arguments against it are lukewarm at best, and he accepts it as a valid practice. The giving pledge is Earning to Give in drag. It's the same mechanics - defer giving for an extended period of time under the nebulous promise that it will do more good in the long run. The giving pledge it simply says that your kids don't get to keep up the grift forever. That doesn't matter much. In the long run, we're all dead.
You can argue that I may have been imprecision in my terminology, but "perpetuity" vs an "entire human lifespan" feels like a distinction without a difference.
birb_cromble
8hr ago
Decoupling is not a concept with infinite elasticity.
birb_cromble
22hr ago
That's qhat I get for posting while doing guerilla carpentry. I qill respect your qishes.
birb_cromble
22hr ago
Over the course of this Qeek, I've been learning about the concept of fiscal dominance.
Fiscal dominance is a macroeconomic condition in which government fiscal pressures (high public debt and deficits) effectively dictate or constrain a country’s monetary policy. In a fiscally dominant regime, the central bank’s usual objective of controlling inflation becomes secondary to the Treasury’s budget financing needs, often leading the central bank to accommodate government borrowing by keeping interest rates low or buying government debt. This situation tends to create inflationary pressure
Do you think that we are starting to see that phenomenon in the United States? It seems like the symptoms of said event line up with what we're seeing: stubborn inflation, ripping equities, increasingly schizophrenic Treasury behavior. On the other hand, I'm always suspicious of something that fits a little too well.
If it is happening, what should private American citizens expect, other than high inflation? How would an Argentinian prepare for their fiscal dominance scenario if a time traveler warned them ahead of time?
birb_cromble
1d ago
I hadn't considered that comparison before. It's funnier than it should be.
birb_cromble
1d ago
An awful lot of ea people argue that not giving money now is better if they can leverage it into obscene wealth and donate more in the future. The thing is, you can continue justifying not giving using that equation unto perpetuity.
It's a cool trick.
birb_cromble
1d ago
Anyway, the optics are bad but if you ignore them Ellison is probably a decent employee.
But other than that, Ms. Lincoln, how was the play?
birb_cromble
1d ago
Heaven's gAIte?
birb_cromble
2d ago
Kiss is unironically one of the best disco bands in history.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I'm actually being earnest in the post. The evolution of music composition is something I find fascinating.
I'm also never going to pass up a tasteless joke, though.
birb_cromble
2d ago
Interestingly it hasn’t happened yet, although you never know.
What is your take on the (conspiracy) theory that Aum Shinrikyo tested a nuke in the Australian outback?
An acquaintance is temporarily losing his band's bassist and has asked me to fill for several shows over the next two months. I said yes as a personal favor to him, and now I'm ass-deep in an entirely new repertoire which mostly consists of 1970s - 1980s rock and pop.
It's really interesting to see how musical composition has developed over the last 50 years.
Take Warren Zevon's "Splendid Isolation": it has a lot going on. The track contains harmonica, multi-voice vocals, guitar, bass, piano all in the same piece. Despite that, it feels noticeably more "open" than a lot of modern music. Rather than anchoring the song on guitar riffs, Zevon anchors it on a simple backbeat and a repetitive bass riff on the bottom end. Once he establishes the groove, he uses the harmonica and piano sparingly on the high end, but leaves a space in the sonic environment for vocals that's big enough to drive a truck through.
It's not a style you really see anymore. Like a a few other things, Phil Spector killed it.
birb_cromble
2d ago
I hired a human artist for a similar project once. It might be worth looking into, depending on the art style that you want and the size of the project. For simple projects, it can be cheaper, faster, and easier than you might think.
birb_cromble
4d ago
Reading that, it makes sense. He puts as much effort into running as I do into lifting.
birb_cromble
4d ago
a pretty bad 5k (16:49)
A sub 6:00 mile for the full 5k is bad?
The best mile I ever ran in my life was 5:58 and I literally spent the rest of the day coughing blood. How do you do it?
birb_cromble
4d ago
Spending is $2,267.27 lower than the same day last year.
birb_cromble
5d ago
Given that this is the culture war thread, I think it's in the interest of this forum to also mention the controversy over the topic.
A mathematician is alleging impropriety on the part of OpenAI. Please forgive the formatting. I'm pulling it straight from the pdf.
I asked whether the model had been trained on, or had access to, our sessions in Codex, into which we had been putting all our drafts for the whole of this project. I was told the model did not look up user data. I asked again, about training, and I did not get an answer.
Two proposals were offered to me. The first was that we post our Euler result, and that OpenAI post its Navier-Stokes result the next day. The second was that, after posting Euler, I alone write a paper presenting the Navier-Stokes result, acknowledging that an internal OpenAI model had resolved it. Sebastien twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship, and said it would all be simple if only it were not the case that, and it was so annoying that, Levent works at Anthropic. It was also said that if OpenAI posted after us, they would say that we deserved the Clay Prize, and that we were the “closest humans to the problem”. I declined both offers.
I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”
I'm not going to comment on the veracity of the claims, nor am I going to comment on the math itself.
I will say, however, that I will be meeting with a few other developers and a representative from our corporate risk team today to discuss contingencies if these allegations prove true.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I can't rule it out. By the time a company calls me, they're generally fucked to the point where they'll call me.
birb_cromble
6d ago
Thank you. I am glad that I'm now immortalized as "that guy who makes metaphors about testicles and office furniture" in the AAQC archive. I feel like that's how I want to be known around here.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I'm optimistic that over time the industry will develop better norms and understand how LLM tooling should and should not be used
Overall, I am less optimistic than you. It seems like the incentives are too broken for us to reach a new equilibrium any time soon. If we do get there, it'll be on the other side of a graveyard of companies that got too greedy.
birb_cromble
6d ago
I've seen it repeat at every scale, from legally-a-small-business to a fairly memorable consult at a Fortune 100 company.
I won't argue as to whether your group has some secret sauce or unusual competency, but I will say that what you have described is absolutely not the norm at the kinds of places that will contract me.
birb_cromble
6d ago
but as a whole I would agree that software engineering productivity has been meaningfully enhanced via AI.
I'm not sure if I would even go that far. I work at a software company, and I do some consulting on the side. I've been able to watch a lot of AI-coding initiatives from the sidelines due to that consulting, and I see the same pattern a lot.
First, management picks something they can measure. Lines of code, commits, and PRs merged are the most common ones. This causes a certain kind of climber who doesn't actually want to be a programmer to ruthlessly optimize for whatever the metric is. Management lauds that person as a "10x/100x/1000x developer" and they receive glowing performance reviews while spending their days giving presentations to their coworkers about how to avoid being Left Behind In the Permanent Underclass.
At the same time, the rest of the team ends up drowning in this person's "work". Their PRs are 30,000 line, codebase-spanning fever dreams that come with "helpful" documentation that doesn't make any sense. The "spec" is under-defined and the code fails to adhere to it. The tests are made up nonsense. Management softly forces to team to rubber stamp the Rockstar's work. Nobody knows what the hell is going on, defects rise, baffling production down events occur, and nobody can figure out why.
The net productivity for the organization doesn't actually change much. What the technology does do is shift perceived productivity into a small group of people who have offloaded all the work to everybody else.
The con man who job hops has been a rampant problem in this industry for decades. LLMs have just systematized and automated it.
birb_cromble
7d ago
It's heavily dependent on where you live and the local terrain.
If your property is:
- Flat
- Well-exposed to the sun
- Up to code with modern wiring
You might be a good candidate.
If possible, try to line the work up with additional major work around the roof or your wiring to save on scheduling headaches and labor.
At my house, for example, I have trees on two sides of my property and I live on a slope that obscures the sun even further. This is compounded by being a very overcast region in terms of weather. The cost of the installation would exceed any reasonable ROI until either the cost of the install dips by ~40% or I have to get rid of the trees for other reasons.
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