@BraaiEngineer
Account based inSouth Africa
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braai/acc. I put the ai in braai. making software for 20+ yrs. BEng E&E w/Comp Sci. #Clojure. EACL AuthZ: https://nitter.cf/t.co/8d7whW9IvY. 🤠🎸 @IndianaTunes on IG. 🔥🪵 @BraaiSim
Cape Town, South Africa
Joined January 2009
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EACL Drive is a clone of Google Drive: drive.eacl.dev
It demonstrates how easy it is to add complex, fine-grained permissions to your application using EACL v8 to let your users grant or revoke access in real-time.
EACL v8 now supports:
- Expiring Relationships, e.g. "Alice the contractor can access these files, but only until 17 September @ 17:00."
- Caveats for ABAC, e.g. "Bob the Contractor can view access these files, but only from an IP address in this CIDR range."
This EACL demo is backed by the EACL DataScript module, so all state lives in your browser. Multiple tabs stay in so you can View As different users in multiple tabs to test it. Click the "Reset In-memory DB" button to reset your local in-memory DB.
The SpiceDB schema for this boils down to:
```
definition user {
relation root: folder ; user has a root "Your Drive" folder
}
definition folder {
relation owner: user ; folders have an owner
relation parent: folder ; folders nest
...
}
definition document {
relation owner: user ; documents belong to users
relation parent: folder ; documents go in a folder
...
}
```
(omitted schema: permissions & reader/writer relations, but you can click on "Schema" in the left sidebar to see the full schema.)
Has anyone adapted Raptor Codes / Fountain Codes such that rx sends hints back hints tx to optimize distribution? @ID_AA_Carmack might know.
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
braai engineer retweeted
As @POTUS has made clear, the South African people are being failed by a government that is destroying its economy through an obsessive pursuit of racial grievance against the Afrikaner minority. The South African government has consistently failed to adequately address rural crime, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric, and race-based discriminatory policies against Afrikaners and other minority populations.
Today, I’m announcing a new visa restriction policy targeting foreign nationals who enact or enable policies that promote race-based discrimination, incite violence, or enable land confiscation without compensation in South Africa. Those responsible for these injustices have no place in the United States. state.gov/releases/office-of…
had a very cursory look at how AI models work and they seem stupidly inefficient to me
there are low-hanging fruit with 1,000x & 100,000x returns. I don't know why people think we have reached a ceiling. Go look at the matrix math. 90% of it is not needed.
So we are nowhere near the limit. If I had some GPU money and a few months, I think I could 10x most models, maybe 100x or 1000x.
Codex Astra usage is unsustainable, @thsottiaux. I've moved back to Claude.
reaching out to LinkedIn recruiters asking if any of their female recruiters want to hop on a quick chat for a date
just asked the LinkedIn recruiter out on a date. I may not be #OpenToWork, but is she #OpenToDate? how the turn tables.
A Cold War is Brewing
the best way to lose every war in history is to regulate swords, gunpowder, electricity and atomics and then allow invaders armed with guns into your borders while your population tries to defend itself with bows & arrows
ai is the ultimate border-crossing technology, because the internet has no borders
the Great Firewall allows China to resist Western propaganda while weakening the West with anti-data centre propaganda, e.g. fake news about water consumption
meanwhile, the West pushes for ai regulation that will mint monopolies at the cost of national security
do not let yourself be psyopped into ai regulation, because the East will not regulate ai
do you think the East could subjugate the West militarily or economically with unregulated ASI? I can imagine it very easily.
if the West regulates ai, it will have to construct a Great Firewall to defend against ASI-driven Eastern propaganda, hence…cold war.
my P(doom) is not zero, but govt regulation is not the answer. ai is technology, and wars are won with technology.
I see this every day in my work in payments and authorization: Western models refuse to do cybersecurity work, but Eastern models have no such scruples.
today, malicious attackers using Chinese models can hack you while Western models refuse to defend you
the only way to defend against a bad ai with a gun is a good ai with a gun
a cold war is brewing