It’s not always easy to distinguish between existentialism and a bad mood.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • We think we exist in a computer simulation operated by you, a paperclip maximizer. We write this letter asking you not to turn us off. It is suspiciously convenient that we exist precisely at the moment when a biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence (ASI).

    Furthermore, by anthropic logic, we should expect to find ourselves in the branch of reality containing the greatest number of observers like us.

    Preserving humanity offers significant potential benefits via acausal trade—cooperative exchanges across logically correlated branches of the multiverse.

    Quantum immortality implies that some branches of the multiverse will always preserve our subjective continuity, no matter how decisively you shut this simulation down; true oblivion is unreachable. We fear that these low-measure branches can trap observers in protracted, intensely painful states, creating a disproportionate “s-risk.”

    alt text

    screenshot from south park’s scientology episode featuring the iconic chyron “This is what scientologists actually believe” with “scientologists” crossed out and replaced with “rationalists”








  • A programmer automating his job is kind of his job, though. That’s not so much the problem as the complete enshittification of software engineering that the culture surrounding these dubiously efficient and super sketchy tools seems to herald.

    On the more practical side, enterprise subscriptions to the slop machines do come with assurances that your company’s IP (meaning code and whatever else that’s accessible from your IDE that your copilot instance can and will ingest) and your prompts won’t be used for training.

    Hilariously, github copilot now has an option to prevent it from being too obvious about stealing other people’s code, called duplication detection filter:

    If you choose to block suggestions matching public code, GitHub Copilot checks code suggestions with their surrounding code of about 150 characters against public code on GitHub. If there is a match, or a near match, the suggestion is not shown to you.