codekilla

Which field, and which paper? Genuinely curious.

What you're describing was outlined pretty clearly in The New Ruthless Economy[1] in 2005. A very interesting read, given when it was publshed.

[1] https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-new-ruthless-eco...

Not sure how much detail you are looking for, but I think essentially it is a term rewriting system.

What would a low capital biological research institute look like? Like nothing?....because it can't exist? (This is the answer in my experience). I ask only to see if anyone has any ideas. The consensus seems to be that you will always need 100s of millions of dollars to do something like this.

Bravo!

Yes, but the point is the approach to proof (proving this for all cases) that represented a paradigm shift in mathematics, largely attributed to Thales.

Thank you both for the comments. I believe I remember early on there were some comparisons to kdb+/q. I think there is some pretty great potential with an offering like this (an in-memory database integrated with the language, coupled with solid static storage) from the Julia community going forward. I can envision some use cases in genomics/transcriptomics.

Wanted to ask if JuliaDB is something that might get more development attention? Or will that remain a community project? (I see it’s been in need of a release for awhile.)

This is fantastic work. I had picked up The Body Electric over a decade ago, and maintain a strong interest in these ideas, though I currently work in a different field (synthetic biology). I hope to contribute in the future.

I was at Casa by The Sea in Ensenada Mexico from 2000-2002 [0]. These were run by WWASP (I wish I was making that up). What a trip to learn today that Paris Hilton was at one of the US based programs. As bad as these were in the US, the foreign ones could be very brutal (Casa was raided and shut down by the Federales).

Happy to answer any questions.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_by_the_Sea

thanks for the ref

thanks for the ref

Resources/book/paper recommendations for understanding concatenative programming?

I also have tried starting a research institute (eonias.org), and am a member of ronininstitute.org. I’d be happy to have conversations with anyone interested in setting up an institute: grant@eonias.org (my name).

Do you happen to have any reference you could share about this re [0]?

I think it's worth bearing in mind that Hayek lived before the information age, and that there are real limits to the validity of the idea that design isn't useful (and especially in economics/finance).

UBI may not be a good idea, but the reason being that it's likely not the best design (I would say Minsky had it largely correct [0]).

[0] http://www.levyinstitute.org/publications/ending-poverty-job...

This seems fair.

> the US absolutely does not have a functioning legislative branch

I'm more concerned by this than anything else. In effect this results in calcified government, which can neither regulate tech companies (or anything) effectively, or serve as a check on executive power. People need to start moving to Wyoming and Alaska, yeah the weather sucks.....but we need to redefine 'civic duty'.

Government intervention in our markets is the rule, not the exception. Whether we call it ‘socialism’ or ‘stabilization’ is simply a matter of who is making the sales pitch.

Isn't this the sort of meta-hack that should(or is?) be illegal? I thought selling your services at a loss to specifically drive competitors out of markets was illegal? If it's not, should it be? Once capital has accumulated, there is really no effective way to compete if these practices are allowed.

Maude is a really cool Language based on rewriting logic.

http://maude.lcc.uma.es/maude31-manual-html/maude-manual.htm...

> Just to be clear; do you mean completely wiping out humanity or a reset to some small population that might have another chance at it?

Either might occur, given deployment of nuclear or bio technology.

> Getting nations to truly cooperate probably means giving up a lot of identity based on tradition, origin, and history. I have no clue how best to convince people that what really matters about them and their neighbors is how individually happy, fulfilled, and free to explore they are regardless of their differences. Getting rid of false beliefs in zero sum economics and the futility of status signalling might be a start, but humans are sort of innately programmed for a lot of counterproductive beliefs about status, pride, fairness, worth, etc.

Yes, and I think one needs to realize that this is a 100 year project. Technologies like nuclear fusion, and quantum computing I put into this '100 year' category, that is those that would catalyze profound transformations of humanity (synthetic biology being another, Abstract General Intelligence another [I do not like the term 'artificial']) given about 100 years and sufficient resources.

So rebuilding and rethinking completely the way humans govern themselves I think is one of these 100 year projects. Things like nomadic citizens (humans without borders), economics with externalities an explicit factor, zero secrecy non zero sum international relations. All stuff that is easy enough to write down, but with no real chance of swift movement towards. Future economic systems are hopefully cooperative, perhaps further enabled by greater gains in digitizing the economy (though risks towards greater inequality that is further destabilizing seem just as likely) .

> reason under uncertainty without probabilities.

I got started in math and computation working on quant stuff during the first financial crash. It was a front row seat to how probability goes wrong (your copulas aren't worth the pixels you graphed them on). The idea is that you have to recognize some things just aren't accurately quantifiable. If you don't recognize that, you just place yourself in a situation where you have a false sense of certainty about uncertainty. You just simply can't assign a probability accurately to anything you so choose. It's not that probability isn't worthwhile, it most certainly is, the point is to be able to accept when you are dealing with a situation where it is non-informational (and likely even counter-informational).

That’s not how it was presented in [0], which is one book I had read, among others. And that’s fine if that particular argument is incorrect, the logic of the point I’m making still stands. I can envision a feasible chance of a technological improvement to explosives that would make them ‘completely’ dangerous (kill every last human) if that’s what we’re going for.

[0] https://anniejacobsen.com/pentagons-brain/

Here's the fundamental problem as I see it: probabilities are meaningless. We can talk about conditionals...potentials...likelihoods....whatever until we are blue in the face. All they do is provide a thin veneer over what I see is the truth: we simply have no real idea regarding most existential risks. Probability is a false god that justifies our wasting resources on problems we can't hope to solve, as we don't even understand them. AGI is the canonical problem of this type--absolutely no real understanding of the parameter space. What can it do...can it do this or that...what will it do...how to bound/align what it will do...???; well--just tell me what it is first. Aliens could show up tomorrow and smoke us (in theory), so what dollar amount should we spend on that (it's the same problem really...what capabilities will the aliens have so as to focus our efforts on their not smoking us).

> What do you propose we spend money on that actually moves the conditional probabilities away from global nuclear war?

First, let me say that I appreciate the frank discussion, and that I also appreciate the original author's willingness to author posts on this topic, these are in fact important issues. To answer your question, if it were my decision (I actually just responded to a couple RFPs with a sketch of a system for viral bioinformatics [which were declined]), I would say our largest current existential threat is our systems of government that have not made significant progress in the last couple hundred years. Regardless of how we score existential threats (I eschew probabilities personally), it's clear that we will need effective governance to respond to them as they arise (let's call covid a fire drill that we failed miserably at). We need research into questioning the fundamental assumptions by which we govern (secrecy, militancy, the paradigm of competition). How do we set goals as a world, not as nations? How do we engineer trusted environments, not zero trust environments? This is where my money would be.

> AGI is another path to a post-existential-threat future for humanity but probably has the greatest risks because it accelerates virtually all of the existing risky technology and climate trends

No, it is not. The reason is this: it is science fiction. This makes it no less, or no more, dangerous than anything else I can make up with a quasi realistic chance of existing in the near term future.

When thermonuclear bombs were detonated, they thought there was a possibility that the reaction would get away from them, and incinerate the atmosphere. The first test, they were scared this actually happened as the explosion carried on longer than they expected.

The point? They actually assigned a probability (non zero) to this event, and then carried on with the test anyway. So I could say that a hydrogen bomb, using some iteration of technology just beyond our grasp is likely to kill every human on earth in the near future. Am I right? Who knows..but in conjecturing this I am no more or 'less wrong' than anyone saying AGI is the greatest threat.

> extremely bad and worth avoiding

Shrugs???? What exactly do you mean? Quantify this, how bad...with respect to AGI?

> discourages anyone from preparing for potential nuclear wars

Interesting, what would be your suggestions for preparing? Mine would be: AT ALL COST AVOID. (I mean it...ALL COST).

Anything else, and I would classify it as a species wide failure to adapt to technology (In this case EXISTENTIALLY dangerous tech). Further, there is no way to grasp or accurately predict confounding factors of post total nuclear war that would put humankind at further risk.

> In my view, the greatest risk to humanity’s potential in the next hundred years comes from unaligned artificial intelligence, which I put at 1 in 10. One might be surprised to see such a high number for such a speculative risk, so it warrants some explanation.

The above is from the article you link. Where.....oh where....are you getting the 1 in 10 number? This is pure, and I mean pure...uncut conjecture. This is why these types of 'intellectual' offerings are so irritating to me. There is absolutely no sound, or 'rational', way to back that number up.

What is the point of writing a post like this? I feel like there is an impetus in the 'rational' tech press to want to downplay threats like nuclear war, and emphasize dubious threats like AGI.

I really don't care if nuclear war doesn't kill every single human instantly. So what? Full scale nuclear war means instant civilization collapse....full stop. Should we forget about disarmament?....guess not every single person theoretically dies....as in the AGI apocalypse fantasy land scenario....so let's not worry too much.

Complete BS. The US has unilaterally kneecapped the U.N. and every other international organization capable of facilitating a fair world order. We don’t need the US to build a fair world order, contrary to the neocon ‘Pax Americana’ crap. Honestly I was surprised to see that phrase in a hacker news comment.

Are there any ideas out there addressing how research cooperatives might work? Ideally looking for ways to collectively manage large datasets (i.e. biotech research?).

This looks great. How would you compare to seastar?