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suy  2yr ago (astralcodexten.substack.com)   Edited 2yr ago   4226 thread views

Scott Alexander on Sam Bankman-Fried, FTX and Effective Altruism

astralcodexten.substack.com

I made this a top level post because I think people here might want to discuss it but you can remove it if it doesn't meet your standards.

Edit: removed my opinion of Scott from the body

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Why would I even want to run some code on a supercomputer?

From time to time I'm doing a work project that needs a lot of compute to properly converge. Now this isn't that common an occurrence, to the point that 95% of the time I'm not using one, but for the other 5% of the time it's absolutely necessary, unless I want to wait six months running the code on my office desktop, by which time the signal I'm investigating may well have disappeared. Hence we rent out compute time on a supercomputer from Amazon and this works well for the firm even though owning a supercomputer is not practical as 1) We're not in that line of business and 2) The majority of the time It'd be lying idle doing nothing.

You have a specific job but I don't. Although you could say that by posting here and on reddit I am probably using code that runs on some Amazon cloud services or whatever but that is too indirect.

I just wanted to see if I could be a part of bitcoin network without any extra expense by using my own laptop. It wasn't really possible.

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