Type-checked examples are becoming more popular in the Scala community, e.g. using the tut tool. This is one of the few ways in which the Scala community appears to be ahead of the Haskell community, in terms of technology.
I think it's because people commonly forget what it's like to be a beginner and which things that are obvious to them are not obvious to a beginner. This is probably more true in Haskell where there is just so much that it's possible to learn that the most advanced Haskell programmers are very, very far ahead of the beginners.
Yes, it's a mistake to believe that the type class instances of a type are always going to be advanced details that can be skipped until later. They might be, or they might not.
I'm not sure I agree. Functional Reactive Programming is a declarative way of doing user interaction, but it's still a computer science research topic (Elm used to claim to be FRP, but has now decided to move away from its old allegedly FRP-like style). I need to play around with the latest FRP research libraries some time!
In addition there is also machines/pipes/conduits, which all mix imperative I/O with declarative style code in an interesting and new way.
Additionally, in languages with good, convenient support for functional programming like Haskell and Scala, I find that I tend to write lots of short functions, often making use of higher-order functions to decompose code into really simple, and potentially reusable, pieces. And like you say, this really helps to show intent. The same sort of thing, in fact, that object-oriented programmers try to do with design patterns such as the Strategy pattern - but with fewer lines of code.
It depends. I wouldn't hire Yarvin, because his record of alleged racist writing and speech suggest he would be a lawsuit waiting to happen. But Lambdaconf appear to have decided that explicitly muzzling his alleged racist and political views for the duration of the conference is likely to work, or at least it makes sense to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I agree on that. Also, similarly, my standards on who I would wish to work with are stricter than who would deter me from attending a technical conference. Calling supporters of Nelson Mandela mother f*ers is not a good culture fit.
Point 5 is moot and offensive because slavery is wrong. Even Moldbug now claims he does not support chattel slavery. However he is very keen on tyranny, which he correctly identifies as akin to slavery.
>If that's to apply, then the people who are using it first need to have convinced society at large.
Just FYI, the controversial speaker at issue here quotes Carlyle - a man who advocated slavery, and using lethal force to put down a rebellion of disenfranchised former slaves in Jamaica - approvingly.
AFAIK decentralised Bitcoin transactions are already illegal in the US if none of the parties to the transaction have a money transmitter license - correct me if I'm wrong.
You need a code of conduct to prevent that if you are not to pre-vet all slides, which is excessively bureaucratic and creates an implicit code of conduct anyway.
Discriminating against homophobic people is going to discriminate against a lot of Muslims, Russians etc. Discriminating against racists is going to discriminate against a lot of people from all over the world. Are you OK with that?
There's this weird thing where libertarians go so far right they become neoreactionaries, and vice versa. It's sort of the horseshoe theory for the authoritarian-libertarian spectrum I guess. I don't really understand it.
This is Scientific American, a general-interest publication, not AGI Risks Weekly. In other words, most of the people reading this article will have never come across these ideas, let alone considering the questions "obvious". I'd be overjoyed if scientific american was discussing transhumanism, the singularity and AGI risks on a regular basis, and I'd be happy to be proven wrong - but I don't think that's the case.
Feudalism is a word that has been applied to such a wide variety of historical situations that it almost has no meaning, like the word "liberal". Please explain what is bad with having to pay rent to the government, given that we already pay taxes, and land value tax would reduce the need to levy other taxes, other than socially-advantageous sin taxes such as carbon taxes.
Worth noting that the community has spread out into a kind of "diaspora": some have gone into effective altruism (many retaining their AI risk beliefs, especially the ones in California); some have been hired to work on existential risks full-time; Scott Alexander now has his own (impressive) blog and some LWers still follow him there and go to meetups that he attends... Of course, it's also probably true that some have since graduated, got jobs and simply have less time to read and post stuff on the internet any more.
I don't think it is the case that "AI-fearing folks" like myself don't appreciate what the alleged difficulties of building AGI might be. Rather, the burden of proof is on you, the doubters, to show that we need to spend no money at all on such risks, despite the magnitude of the harm that would be caused if we're right and nothing is done about the risks.
> So suggesting that by (say) 2066 software will not only stop sucking but will be able to meta-improve itself with bug-free perfection to the point where it can eat the world seems curiously ungrounded.
That's a straw man. Software doesn't need to be bug-free to take over the world, literally or figuratively. Cars replaced horses but weren't fault-free. PCs replaced typewriters but weren't bug-free. All software needs to do to take over the world is be sufficiently competent and superior to its competitors - products or (in the case he's concerned about) humans.
Also, it's true that one AI might blow itself up, or make a fatal mistake, while trying to take over the world, but it only needs one idiot misconfiguring his AI in his basement to give us a potential world-destroying calamity - the classic "paperclip-maximiser" problem. That's a very hard problem, and it's bigger than solving the AI control problem - it's no good knowing the secret to keeping AIs under control with probability 0.9999999999999999... if someone else unleashes a dangerous AI without knowing that secret, or deliberately ignores it due to insanity or some death-wish on humanity.
And while he doesn't focus on this, there are plenty of AI risks that we still might conceivably face even if we defeat the outright existential risks, the threats to our very existence as a species. For example, consider what would happen if a paedophile or a rapist got hold of a very powerful AI and was able to command it...