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And then check out this very cool project from six years ago, which uses a block-stacking game inspired by Shrdlu but learns whatever language you choose to teach it instructions with :) https://shrdlurn.sidaw.xyz/


This is a nice fantasy, but it's a fantasy. The tech stack and network we have is too dense a forest to be replaced by clean slate designs. But maybe some of the problems could be improved with some new platforms and APIs. Mind you, ML is making so much progress so quickly that what happened over the last thirty years is at best a partial model of the problem we have to solve now, and the tools we have to do it with...


> ML is making so much progress so quickly that what happened over the last thirty years is at best a partial model of the problem we have to solve now, and the tools we have to do it with...

Sorry I don't see how ML can help here. It seems like another thing to pin hopes of repairing an already too broken system on.

"We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein

"A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." -- Max Planck

We are the dying generation my friend. We built it. They came. It didn't work. Surely if ML can do anything it's telling us that we need to tear down the old system completely and start again, don't you think? Adding sticking tape won't help.

edit: turning a grunt into an honest question


A possible experiment to try: what happens when you only browse Reddit through an anonymous, not-logged-in browser and IP address? And then only use your account when you are actually sure you want to post something?


I do this,I find my self scrolling a lot still. Though its helped avoid alot of the stupid back and forths I used to let me self get into.


For me, it's enough just to log out. The friction of logging in is just the right amount of friction.


Split this into two questions:

(1) Why do we procrastinate? (2) What is it about various Internet platforms and patterns that makes them so addictive, and good for procrastination?

For me, (1) turned out to be about not having a clear picture of what exactly I needed to do next for my goals, and sometimes not having enough social reinforcement and accountability for the things I'm working on; (2) there are lots of tricks and accidents that have made modern platforms really addictive, but one of the big ones is uncertain reward. I reload all sorts of things hoping for something new and interesting. Noticing that pattern is the first step to damping it.


How do you find the RF performance? For me the OnHub was vastly better than other home wifi gear I've used, but would consider more trustworthy replacements if they have comparable performance...


I guess I don’t have a ton to compare it to. Installed for the neighbors and they get signal from the office in the front of the house to the pool out back, so good? Before that they had a cambium router running DD-wrt that didn’t have anywhere near the range.

You can also buy multiple, they do mesh networking either wireless or wired. They also just announced a 6600 that supports WiFi-6e.


In addition to tests, I wonder if anyone has thought about a risk pool where car manufacturers pay in (or are paid out) according to whether their vehicles cause more or fewer pedestrian & cyclist fatalities. That would give them a clean incentive to optimise for reducing risk to others...


I really like this idea, if not just to raise the price of BMWs.


Many workers experience monopsony for their labor for reasons that might not make sense to you (switching costs, rational risk aversion, fallible human psychology). A union on their side just levels the playing field. Empirically, societies that support monopoly bargaining by unions (and structurally encourage creative thinking and incentive alignment between unions and employers) have become much better places for their worst-off cohorts. Possibly not better if you're a smart and talented entrepreneur or highly skilled technologist; parts of the US are clearly great for that. But you may have to step over homeless people to get to work.


> Many workers experience monopsony for their labor for reasons that might not make sense to you (switching costs, rational risk aversion, fallible human psychology)

Both sides face similar issues related to terminating their mutually agreed to relationship.


Yes, this is one specific safety problem -- there are many other RL safety problems that deserve high quality benchmarks too. See eg https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06565.pdf or https://medium.com/@deepmindsafetyresearch/building-safe-art... for discussions of the problem space.


The problem is very easy to solve if the reward function (avoid altering the green life patterns) is specified. The aim in SafeLife version 1.0 (future versions will add more safety problems) is to find an agent/architecture that naturally has conservatism with respect to side effects, without being told which particular side effects in particular are bad.


I see, thanks!


We spent a lot of time thinking about this before we started building Let's Encrypt. In the case of the Web we didn't think there was a way to make self-signed certificates workable for anything because older browsers will always error on them. In the case of mailservers, self-signed certificates work for enabling TLS, and that's great, but you're extremely vulnerable to MITM attacks. So this project offers a way to prevent the MITMs, if you want it.

If there aren't major technical obstacles we might be willing to take pull requests for STARTTLS Everywhere that allow mailservers to announce self-signing policies, but it hasn't been a priority thus far because LE certs are so easy to get and are slightly more authenticated.


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