schoen

It's kind of striking how that joke post about ed (from 1991) presented Emacs as extremely resource-wasteful

https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.html

but I guess trends elsewhere were so keen on adding abstractions that now Emacs is an efficient, parsimonious choice by comparison.

I often thought that a cat could be named /bin/cat. After all, many cats seem to enjoy being in boxes or bins!

Can I assume you were taking the new electrified Caltrain? It feels a lot nicer than the old diesel Caltrain, including, I think, the comfort of the seats.

Looking forward to it! I just started my first-ever NetHack 5.0 game to practice a bit.

I've been working on a theory that a huge fraction of human culture and values could be interpreted as coping mechanisms in the same sense (as making peace with, or finding a way to manage or compromise with, limitations, suffering, or unsatisfactoriness of aspects of life, and concluding that the things thus successfully managed or the means used to cope with them are themselves good). I've been keeping occasional notes for an article on this concept for many years. I particularly don't think that there is only one community, subculture, or ideology that exhibits this psychological tendency.

Maybe someday I can get clearer on this and organize it and write it up!

(Yes, I know about the transhumanist criticism of acceptance of mortality that this LLM's view is more specifically evoking.)

The "fraud" claim is kind of bizarre to me, but it's clear (and not hidden) that Taler intentionally provided less privacy for payees than other designs and systems because of a conscious decision that payees should have less privacy.

I find this objectionable, but not at all deceptive or manipulative.

Introducing natural language uncertainties into a scripting language reminds me of AppleScript, which used almost entirely English words (mainly in sentences or at least verb phrases), but was nonetheless notably definitely not English. It was quite possible to forget at times which English verbs were language keywords and which weren't.

If I remember correctly, AppleScript was inspired by HyperTalk, which also mainly used English keywords in English-inspired syntax, but most HyperTalk wasn't valid AppleScript, and vice versa.

"Technical error" sounds frustratingly vague and contentless, but it's odd to think about the lack of cultural consensus about whether the ability for others to depict someone with generative AI is more a benefit to him or her, or more a risk. I could imagine someone hearing this and sincerely thinking that Meta was protecting Lula from deepfake attacks (making it slightly harder for people to falsely depict him doing saying embarrassing or offensive things). Uses of AI to mock or attack people often get more attention than uses of AI to praise them.

In the U.S., if someone had programmed a generative AI to be unwilling to depict Obama, I imagine many people would assume that decision was meant to help Obama, not harm him.

I've heard this theory sincerely expressed from the right about the left and from the left about the right, and I understand that it looks this way to many people, but I suspect it's mainly the out-group homogeneity bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity

This reminds me of How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers by R. W. Wood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_W._Wood

The concern is more that Claude is a moral patient rather than a moral agent:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_patienthood

I've worked with Let's Encrypt (I mean inside the organization, not just as an end user) a bunch and I feel like I often know or can guess rationales for things, but while I know "why short-lived certs", I surely don't know "why 64".

Is it because it's a round number in binary?

It leads to the intuition that an economy where 100 people consume 10000 (let's say of energy because it should be inflation-independent) per week and 1 person consumes 100000 is worse than an economy where 100 people consume 9000 per week and 1 person consumes 10000. That is, you can strongly reject or disapprove of changes that strictly increase everyone's wealth or consumption.

I think this is not only mistaken but would wrongly lead people to often oppose economic growth, which is likely to increase inequality at least somewhat in many circumstances, while increasing almost every other measure of welfare. They often point in opposite directions.

The case where inequality is most important is when there are things whose supply is fixed or very inelastic (famously land, maybe housing), in which case you are in more of a long-term competition or bidding war with other people for some of those things. That might be a reason that total consumption is an imperfect metric too, because maybe your consumption of one thing with elastic supply (food?) went way up as the economy grew but your consumption of something with inelastic supply (housing?) went down at the same time.

Years of seeing ":help uganda" every single day have left me kind of instinctively curious about how to help Uganda, although I have yet to donate to Bram's charity ICCF.

One thing I've wondered about in this respect is what happens if NSA learns 5000 new units of math while the general public learns 4000 new units of math.

This sort of happened at various times in the past, because they hired and/or funded so many mathematicians, and especially before the late 1970s they had many of them working in areas where academic mathematicians weren't working at all, so they were learning more math, or more math that they especially cared about, than the public was. (I was going to write a note here just a few days ago about how NSA has had a "Classified Mathematics Library" for many years.)

For vulnerability scanning, I think the new-capabilities trajectory is good (in the sense of "it will help defenders win") even if governments find ways to get more of it, because there are finitely many bugs and classes of bugs, so at some point more capable models' or longer runs' advantage over less capable models and shorter runs should stop helping them outcompete the less-well-funded defenders, because the defenders will still have learned most of the information that's relevant to achieving successful defenses.

So if NSA gets 5000 units of vulnerability scanning and the public only gets 4000 units, we might still just wipe out all of the pure software vulnerabilities and then go back to worrying about physical supply chain security or side channels or something.

For math, I'm not quite sure! For one thing, there may be things that have no feasibly deployable defense at all even when you understand the underlying mathematics (I'm especially worried about traffic analysis here, because understanding in detail how traffic analysis is done, or how powerful particular techniques are, does not necessarily always or usually make defending against it more convenient or less costly). In a more science fiction scenario, there might also not be any efficient secure cryptographic primitives of some kind, like if it turns out P=NP with reasonably small exponents and reasonably small constant factors.

Oh, I remember hearing about "computer scientists" or something that would attempt to determine physical laws on the basis of empirical evidence, possibly also in that timeframe. That might be another thing to look for. I'm sure that's something people were writing about.

Edit: with the noun-noun compounding being different from the usual interpretation here, like "scientists who are computers" rather than "scientists who study computation"! Maybe "computerized scientists" or something.

Some candidates suggested to me by an AI:

Gina Kolata allegedly in the New York Times in 1996 on the Robbins conjecture (noting that computers had started to contribute to math research in some sense), and a longer piece in Math Horizons by her the following year ("Computer Math Proof Shows Reasoning Power"). I didn't immediately find the NYT article, so I don't know if it might be a hallucination.

John Horgan in Scientific American in 1993 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-death-of-proo...). There's also a retrospective on the topic by the same author in Scientific American in 2022 (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/should-machines-r...).

Natalie Wolchover in Quanta (but reprinted in Wired) in 2013 (https://wired.com/2013/03/computers-and-math).

I was involved in some distributed computing stuff in the late 1990s and early 2000s and I don't really remember people in that community talking about proofs but there may have been a "if we had a mechanical proof-checker, could we do distributed searches for valid proofs that it would accept?" conversation somewhere at some point. There were definitely volunteer distributed computing projects working on pure math; I remember the Optimal Golomb Ruler search (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_ruler). So, that could possibly have shaded over into "can we find proofs this way too?". At the time it probably would have been based on brute force searches through proof space rather than clever optimization, though.

The idea that you can lexicographically list all proofs in some formalism and then mechanically determine if any is valid is quite clear from Gödel's construction of the function Bew in "On Formally Undecidable Propositions", but he points out that you don't know where to stop because you don't know how long a valid proof would potentially have to be (so "is this a valid proof of this claim?" can be decided mechanically in a limited time, while "is there any valid proof of this claim?" can't be! maybe the shortest valid proof is 49 steps long but you eventually stopped checking after looking at all 7-step proofs, or something).

After working on several court cases about surveillance activities, I'm definitely aware that whether I call something spying or not has little relationship to whether courts will think it's legal.

I would call it spying in this sense at a minimum if individual people don't know whether their conversations were stored or disclosed in a way they don't want. For example, suppose someone said "we will monitor the activities of 10% of people". You don't know if you're in that 10% or not, but I would still want to call that spying.

A less central case would be when you clearly do know about the activity but you can't quite see the details, like with behavioral ad targeting or something. It feels pretty normal to me to call that spying even if it's disclosed to everyone and certainly happens to everyone, but it's also a less central example of the concept.

Right, the difficulty is partly that they can get a negative headline from any choice of behavior.

"Anthropic failed to report murderer's threats to authorities"

(or "Chatbot knew man was planning murder, yet company did nothing")

"Anthropic reported private chats to authorities"

(or "Arrested for chatbot fantasy")

To be fair to the journalists in these cases, there's also no society-wide agreed Schelling point about the correct outcome or correct rules. I have strong beliefs and intuitions about what should happen, but other people also have strong beliefs and intuitions, and many of those are probably opposite of mine. Even if my intuitions are the best and most justified, a journalist is unlikely to think "I'm just not going to mention that some people are mad at this company over this outcome, because a hypothetically better norm or principle would support the company's actions here". Hopefully the journalism can at least contextualize the lack of legal or social consensus and the difficult incentive problems, rather than jumping to "obviously companies are sociopaths staffed by supervillains".

You might say his prose is very lean.

(Sorry (?))

Also described as a traditional Yiddish folktale (a rabbi suggests responding to stress by moving a series of animals into the home, and then at the end they're removed and everything seems great by comparison!).

That would work if you were only demonstrating encryption or creating challenges related to encryption, but some challenges don't map very easily to a cipher (though you might be able to get them to map to a cipher key).

In Simplicity (and in a sense in Bitcoin Script) there's a broader concept of "if you show you know information X, you're entitled to this money", but it has this specific issue that if the information or the entitlement to receive money for knowing it isn't unique to a specific recipient, there will automatically be a witness swiping or front-running risk for architectural reasons.

Hence the time machine!

I'm pretty sure this was achieved with prompting rather than with weights, but there is a chatbot available that tries to maximize the motivated refusals:

https://www.goody2.ai/chat

Except for the prize money for the RSA challenge contest! Although they'll also need to have Claude invent a time machine.

I would very strongly recommend the Gökyay Chess Museum in Ankara, Turkey, if anyone is ever there.

https://www.gokyaysatrancvakfi.org.tr/en/chess-museum/

Somewhat unexpectedly, I thought it was one of the best museums I've ever visited in my life. It's the world's largest collection of chess sets, and is basically a museum of the chess set as an artistic genre, not of chess as a game. As you can see a bit from this site too, the artistic genre is quite broad and deep.

In the Gökyay Museum there were lots of questions raised by this genre:

* What historical events do people feel comfortable treating as distant history, versus something that you have to show respect or deference about?

* How would you make a chess set for blind players?

* Do chessboards have to be physically flat, not just topologically two-dimensional? Do they have to be horizontal rather than vertical?

* What events or activities can be metaphorically represented as a "battle"?

* How would different sculpture and painting traditions from around the world translate into a highly stylized chess set? How about different availability of materials?

* How do commercial marketing and pop culture leak into the comparatively culturally elite or refined realm of chess?

Anyway, it's just awesome and you should definitely go if you can.

I was pretty shocked at the rate of change in Crawl. I played it for a couple of years and during that time entire major game mechanics changed, like moving from many kinds of food, to only one kind of food, to completely eliminating food and hunger (while adding a completely new form of clock to kill players who didn't keep moving).

Not sure! It sounded more imminent back in 2000 when I heard Eric Hughes perform the song.

I've recently been working on this exact problem due to my desire to create puzzle challenges for Simplicity, the smart contract programming environment that I work on for my job.

Since Simplicity runs on Bitcoin-like blockchains, someone can swipe the witness data from the legitimate winner's proposed transaction, and create a new transaction (perhaps with a higher fee) using the same claim data and sending the prize to a different address.

Anyway, I ended up implementing a two-phase commit mechanism in which you pay a deposit to temporarily lock the prize so that it can only be paid out to your address. If you then make a valid claim, the prize can be paid to you; if you don't, you forfeit your deposit.

https://community.simplicity-lang.org/t/running-prize-contes...

(I think this was suggested by Russell O'Connor, the inventor of Simplicity, but it may have been a widespread idea in the smart contracts world. I don't know whether there's a straightforward way to implement it with Bitcoin Script, which is what this older prize would have needed.)