~ after a month of prodding, the Effective Accelerationists can’t ~ A later age may look upon this moment with grim humor: Tech Billionaires have branded themselves with a new Icon — ‘Effective Accelerationism’. I, having worked in tech and engineering for a couple decades, hoped to talk to some…

~ instead of political pork dictating infrastructure, let businesses pool and plan what they need, themselves ~ We do need government to protect from abusive practices, and uphold law, contract, & defense, and provide services to children and those on hard times. Yet! We also gave the Federal government the…

~ evaporation is orders of magnitude better than desalination ~ If I buy the snazziest, most efficient (and expensive) desalination facility, I can clean 1 ton of water for 2kWh — that’s 7,200,000 Joules. Solar panels in the desert, where 24hr-averaged insolation is 320 Watts per square meter, can collect…

~ an answer that ‘makes sense’ is entirely different from what works ~ We often begin with some axiom, an assumption of Truth, and hope that we can derive from that a complete set of all Truths. Kurt Gödel killed that hope; your induction will never attain proof, for an…

~ while entropy increases, so does order ~ The popular conception of entropy is ‘disorder’ — chaotic, dispersed, useless. Entropy is only the absence of useable Work, however; it says nothing about the amount of Order in the system. In fact, MOST entropy CREATES order. Watch: Dust piles up. Fuzz…

~ just post it in the comments! ~ in response to the essay “AGI soon, but Narrow Works Better” Please note! The argument that “RETRO and other models use memory, which could be used for following a multi-step plan” is erroneous; for RETRO or other memory-equipped networks to utilize their memory on the *task* of “remember which step of the Destroy-All-Humans-Plan that you’re on, now” they would have needed to *re-assign* the *meaning* of those memory locations, which would require plasticity of the weights. Yet, the original constraint was that weights be frozen; hence, no memory’s *meaning* can be re-assigned to “keep track of which step they’re on”… nor could frozen weights generate a new macro-task such as “Destroy all humans” unless that macro-level task was included in its training data.

~ a community of Bayes-enthusiasts fumble statistical inference ~ TL;DR — Industry uses Dirichlet Process and SAS, NOT Bayes. Bayes is persistently *wrong* and lacks a great deal of important information. Supposed ‘rationalists’ cling to Bayes as the Ultimate Truth, without knowing enough Mathematics to know they’re wrong. “Oh, well…

~ a list for myself: some of the times ‘I told you so’… ~ 1998, California — During the froth of the dot-com boom, when the USA was the only country with an internet, and that internet was the New Economy, the Singularity… I was looking at ‘Capital Saturation Curves.’…

~ a sketch of a radio-active world and its life-forms… somewhere ~ Pergamma should be dead. No sun envelopes her rocky surface in warmth; the frost descends in cyclonic fury, deafening with terrible lightning flashes, ceaselessly. …