Mindless Algorithm

Many people think they know what will happen after the singularity.

Many people engage in "Vice Signalling", where they will intentionally do actions which are considered to be bad according to some social norm or morality system.

Many people look at the breakneck pace of AI progress on software engineering tasks and expect that: Software engineering tasks will shortly be ~fully automated White collar work will be automated ~shortly after software engineering tasks.

When people think about aliens, they make a number of assumptions which I think are wrong.

An overview of why I find the tools worrying and would not personally use an LLM based tool which can use my computer "as me" (for now).

Inspired by the many, many others of these (e.g.

(And other questions about Pluribus, spoilers throughout, up to date as of episode 8) In the hit Apple TV show "Pluribus", SETI picks up a signal containing a DNA sequence for a virus, which when released by stupid scientists merges all but 13 people into…

Bay Area Quality of life seems good overall, nice climate, nice food and things to do.

Epistemic status: Speculation, I am not confident in my views here and I skim over a lot of issues.

TL;DR Software developers are well paid and have relatively easy lives.

This is likely of interest only to myself and a few others.

A bunch of people seem to think that a recent rash of UFO sightings admitted to by the US Navy are important, and possibly indicative of alien visitors, or some as yet unknown natural phenomenon.

TL;DR I'm giving away £35k this year. £3.5k to SCI and the remainder to the Long Term Future Fund.

Note 1: This is an old post I wrote in 2019, I have moved it here because I find the need to send it to people.