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doitLPon Forget the plague, this is the disease that will kill us all

That’s what need. Lots of machines cleaning up the landscape. That’s nature at work!

doitLPon Do dentists know what they're doing?

What better choices? They all gave conflicting diagnoses

doitLPon Do dentists know what they're doing?

Unfortunately we still haven’t beat that disease. despite all the focus on it sadly up to half the population still suffers from viewing the world with MG.

doitLPon Do dentists know what they're doing?

But she wasn’t hired. Clearly she is the dentist that owns the practice. Clearly she is selling herself as a poster child of what her patients could look like if they pay for her services. Also, you’re assuming he’s assuming. Sounds like he’s just stating a fact. If you dont get that then obviously you’re not a golfer.

doitLPon Do dentists know what they're doing?

same question on substack, and he responded https://mapwriting.substack.com/p/dentists/comment/361445411

doitLPon Archaeologists Are Reconstructing the 'Invisible' Technologies of the Stone Age

The kalahari bushman had a trick to stay cool on a hot day: dig a sand pit in the shade, put in the fibrous bits of inedible plant material, pee on them, lay down in the pit and cover up with sand and wait until the evening cooled things down.

doitLPon Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines

And the story this was inspired by in particular is called “Cookies”:

Toad makes very good cookies and he and frog can’t stop eating them. “We need willpower!” they say.

So they put the cookies in a box. But they realize they can just open it, so they tie it with string and put it on a high shelf. But they realize they can get it down so Frog goes outside and scatters the cookie and birds eat them all.

There says Frog “now we have lots and lots of willpower!”

Toad is upset. “You can keep your willpower Frog. I am going home to bake a cake!”

doitLPon AI safety is mostly a sex cult in Berkeley

But are they wrong though?

doitLPon Bushmen

Sahlin and Lee are quoted in the article. Looks like there were murders but many came from two blood feuds that got out of hand and also overlapped with resettlement and pressure and enslavement by the white and bantus, so its hard to say. Regular violence was rare and denigrated but those poison arrows...

doitLPon Watch AI materials-science and bioscience abilities closely

Grifters don’t usually spend their entire lives devoted to preparing for something that doesn’t yet exist, giving up whatever else they like doing to work on that problem, and spending years trying to plan out how to make things go well for everyone when that thing materializes.

Grifters are opportunistic short-termists. Whatever you can say about these rationalists, they aren’t that.

doitLPon Pivot to AI safety, I beg you

What is it you’re doing?

doitLPon Pivot to AI safety, I beg you

> AI capability is limited by AI safety in the way the power of a rifle is limited by how safe it is to use

But merely making it safe to use still prevents unnecessary death. And advocacy against rifles in general, or general gun safety is a viable path to limiting the negative outcomes.

Rifles are banned in many places on Earth and they also backfire and misfire less than they used to.

Even so, you can do the simple "call your representative" and "hand out fliers" and "talk to people about how AI is net negative" with no cost to yourself and it absolutely aligns with your fundamental beliefs, right?

doitLPon Amazonian civilization had estimated 3M people in 3% of forest area

Not a trope if you go back another 12’000 years or so!

doitLPon Holocloth

Tap the spider icon in the corner to hide the menu

doitLPon Pseudpocalypse

Already happening.

https://mapwriting.substack.com/p/living-subscription-free-i...

doitLPon Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new

And this was itself written by an LLM…we read so much of this stuff now that I’m worried about is we’re all just going to start writing like this whether we use LLMs or not.

https://mapwriting.substack.com/p/living-subscription-free-i...

doitLPon Regression to the Mean: on LLMs and the quiet death of the new

And obviously written by an AI

doitLPon We Are the Last People Who Know How It Works

> At a macro level brain rot is real, but it cuts across all generations and it started long before LLMs.

The thing is, if there’s a way to do something easier people will generally just do that. All the nostalgia of the olden days has as a component that there were no alternatives as the example in the article highlights.

We can try to preserve the hard way to things that gets improved, but the hard way will only ever be niche if it doesn’t become extinct entirely. There is no going back.

doitLPon Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads

And all of that was accomplished without AI! Not all advances are equivalently beneficial as of course you know, and all come with tradeoffs. Not everyone is willing to accept those tradeoffs, especially without being asked.

Parent is concerned about the reduction of independence heralded by centralizing control, wealth inequality, destruction of digital commons and other real downsides!

doitLPon Larry Ellison: "Citizens will be on their best behavior because we’re recording"

Sounds pretty bad, but what’s the context? We should be skeptical of a quote out of context with some dogpile parallels without any other context. When did he say it? Where did he say it?

doitLPon What Is Happening to Publishing?

> God could come down in a chariot made of golden carrots

With imagery like this, I’d love to read your other work! Link?

doitLPon We've made the world too complicated

Thank you for this article. I know no truly effective weapon against the Kingsnorthian Machine, except to name it and remind people that they are still creatures and not machines. That it doesn’t have to be this way. That for 99% of our history it wasn’t this way.

The spirit of the machine is born of our desire to never die. And so we continue to discover new things, continue striving, continue servicing desires that will never be satisfied. And destroying anything human and natural along the way.

But keep writing about it. Be an example of anti-machine values. Touch grass. Find the stillness and work to preserve it, in whatever way you can.

doitLPon I work in Hollywood. Everyone who used to make TV is now training AI

Not just writers…there’s unions for every piece of the pie and they all have members and pensions and have to justify their existence.

There’s the ever-increasing restrictions and cost of shooting in California and the huge incentives other localities offer to film and even commercial (advert) projects. My friend just flew the whole production to Louisiana to shoot a 30 second commercial because of the incentives.

There’s the fact that even if a new show or movie is good, it is competing not only with other new stuff but also with the entire back catalogue of everything ever made that is instantly available for viewers.

There’s streaming rights, that never paid as much as traditional TV even though it had broader reach.

There’s competition with phone / social platforms that continue to optimize their content and algorithms with shorter feedback loops and more additive content, against trad production which takes a ton of money and time and upfront cost.

doitLPon Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable

This really isn’t Reddit. Please try to preserve the last vestige of something resembling good dialogue on the internet.

doitLPon AWS North Virginia data center outage – resolved

Yes it tends to have the most things running in it, including backbone and internal services that only exist in that region.

doitLPon The bottleneck was never the code

“Something went wrong with the editor” when loading page

doitLPon Today I've made the difficult decision to reduce the size of Coinbase by ~14%

Good example but it still sounds more like a “tech lead”: this guy is still focused on tactical line level with other players than on handling the overall strategy, PR, plans, hiring, etc that a coach does

doitLPon Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

Not really. I’m asking why he’s a genius. When I was told that WW2 wouldnt have gone the same without George C Marshall or how amazing Teddy Roosevelt was at getting stuff done, I went and read their bios and now I understand. Cook does things different than other CEOs apparently so what are those? Other have recommended Apple In China so I’ll start there!

doitLPon Tim Cook's Impeccable Timing

I’m not underestimating what he does, I’m asking what does he actually do to make it happen beyond setting priorities and holding subordinates accountable? I’m not questioning that he does many things well and right and even genius, I just want to know what those are!

I’m sure Isaacson will cover it well in his bio!