And i believe that so much that I don't even consider graceful shutdown in design. Components should be able to safely (and even frequently) hard-crash and so long as a critical percentage of the system is WAI then it shouldn't meaningfully impact the overall system.
The only way to make sure a system can handle components hard crashing, is if hard crashing is a normal thing that happens all the time.
Honestly is is just like Insurance. You understand the value of things you are protecting (and simple compliance has a value to you in penalties and liabilities avoided) and make sure it costs more than that to break into your system.
At a corporate level, it is contractually almost identical to insurance, with the product being sold liability for that security, not the security itself.
Right. I sometimes call it meta-level insurance, because it's structurally what it is. Funnily, actual insurance is a critical part of it - it's the ultimate liability sink, discharging whatever liability that didn't get diluted and diffused among all relevant parties.
And, I guess it's fine - it's the general way of dealing with impact that can be fully converted into dollars (i.e. that doesn't cause loss of life or health).
It’s really not fine. Expensive and useless security theater isn’t just inefficient and corrupt, it’s way more actively harmful than that because there’s a huge opportunity cost associated with all the wasted time and money AND the incentivized deliberate refusal to make obviously good/easy/cheap improvements. Even in matters pertaining purely to dollars.. Spreading out liability can’t erase injury completely. it just pushes it onto the tax payer because someone is paying the judge to sit in the chair and listen to the insurance people and the lawyers.
Hey, make an artificial intelligent entity significantly more capable than any individual human, then be surprised you have a goal misalignment with your superagent.
We gave AI legal personhood in the 1800s and we were doomed from there
Yeah :) Though I can think of two reasons why: it's not typable for most people on a keyboard, and most programs are not designed to deal with it, or render it properly in an aligned way, like tab characters.
You could put it anywhere you like; our ability to forecast the future has been rubbish for thousands of years. Some of my favorites: 2019, 2000, 1992, 1969, 1928, 1900, mid 1700s, ~400 BCE, ~5000 BP, ~11000 BPE.
This is why I tend to phrase it as an "event horizon" rather than a "singularity" (well, this and to avoid the baggage).
There's always been some stuff we can't forecast, and some other stuff we can forecast kinda OK-ish. If you'd asked people from 11000 BPE if the sun would still be rising and crops would still be grown today, I suspect the biggest difficulty would be finding someone who really understood the meaning of the number used to express the number of years between then and now — even a "big city" back then would have been order of 1k-2k people.
But I say "sun" and "crops" because of what I expect to be the limits of their imagination. We see such limits even today — even on Hacker News, look at threads about AI taking over the world, and you will see people discussing AI as if it can only be in the form of existing current LLMs.
So, the question to ask is: how far into the future would you have to take someone from each of those years, before they're shocked by what they encounter? That's my "event horizon", because it's the horizon beyond which you cannot see, even if that horizon is one of inability to predict what specific thing will be invented rather than the general trend-lines going infinite.
The time-gap to a shocking new invention decreases as the rate of progress increases.
Obviously how much some person will be able to forecast and hence not be surprised by, will depend on how much attention they pay to technological developments — and I've seen software developers surprised by Google Translate having an AR mode a decade after the tech was first demonstrated — but there is an upper limit even for people who obsessively consume all public information about a topic: if you're reading about it when you go to sleep, will you be surprised when you wake up by all the overnight developments?
Personally, I've tried making my own forecasts about the future, I'm fairly consistent for the last decade that my models stop making sense around 2032. But even with that consistency, I could only see ChatGPT coming when InstructGPT was shown off in a Two Minute Papers video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=PmxhCyhevMY&t=4m...) and the rate of change of Transformer and Diffusion models has continued to surprise me.
(I also didn't predict how severely YouTube would be stuffed with adverts, but that's more of a cultural shift — everyone gets all "kids these days" as they get older, why would I be any different?)
Sure because the incentive is always quick and easy money.
Apple nearly went bankrupt in the late 90s early 00s by avoiding the race to the bottom of the PC industry till they pivoted to music players. Look at the auto makers today.
Unless you can convince customers why they should pay a premium for your commodity products, you will be wiped out by your competitors who do not refuse the race to the bottom.
As an immunocompromised person who lost measles resistance, this is terrifying.
Vaccines don't only protect you.
I went on an immunosuppressant during covid, i was suposed to re-up MMR beforehand, but we had a major nationwide vaccine shortage at the time (all plants re-tasked to produce covid vaccines) so i couldn't. This doesn't seem a fun way to die. I guess I just mask up and hope.
If you are trying to pin a currency to a standard, gold isn't great. Its value is almost entirely speculative and it lacks meaninful intrinsic value at this point. If you demand to leave fiat currency, an aluminum or steel standard might make more sense. Rare earth metals, or even just petroleum would be my proposal. Maybe someday we will have a duterium pinned currency.
I think this shows the problem of non fiscal pegs - the value of rare earths or duterium is going to be impacted by technical change. For example let's say that a new processing technique means that a rare earth can be extracted at 20% of the current cost, or a new deposit is discovered. The whole economy is now flexed around this change... which has nothing to do with the economy.
I don't think that there is a fixed asset that could be suitable as a proper peg.
Helium? Finite supply that is only going down until we get off planet.
It seems like the actual value of gold is that it is useless, and thus not used up, and all the easy gold is extracted. We could just use numbers instead.
In fact there is no figurative gold standard for value or money. A pokemon card or let's say a banana duck-taped to a canvas can have a lot of value. All there is, is reputation and trust.
I think we need to move away from thinking of money as a store of wealth, but a indication of value. (wealth is a side effect, it will of course always be a store of wealth.)
Pegging currency to gold or silver gives it the illusion of being of a fixed value, that can't be gamed or changed. However history says otherwise. Its continuously mined, and there are industrial uses so Gold and silver's actual value will still fluctuate.
plus whilst tradeable gold is normally stored in vaults, there is still a boat load of "free" gold that can move around and cause monetary problems. Its a side plot of one of the James Bond books.
You also have to remember that even if there is a physical backed standard, banks still need to lend, which means that in practice it'll still be a fiat currency, just not centrally controlled.
"Intrinsic value" has not been considered part of the definition of money since The Wealth of Nations. Gold is good money, not because it has some sort of innate value or use, but because it has all of the properties that constitute what makes good money.
rare Earths have a pretty big downside of having huge swings in the supply when there happens to be a discovery. you want a pretty stable supply for a reserve currency / backing commodity.
oil is fairly difficult / expensive to transport and store, certainly at volume.
With the current communication capacity, "transport" isn't horribly relevant. Free exchange of any currency backing substance would be as bad as bitcoin for fraud. So why bother moving it? Oil changes owners all the time without going anywhere.
If it turns out the universe is holographic, then you have the same bound. This might just be enforment of the holographic principle...