I am the journeyer from the valley of the dead Sega consoles. With the blessings of Sega Saturn, the gaming system of destruction, I am the Scout of Silence… Sailor Saturn.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 29th, 2023

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  • I agree. I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to understand Yudkowsky’s posts about newcomb boxes back in the day so my two cents:

    The digital clones bit also means it’s not an argument based on altruism, but one based on fear. After all if a future evil AI uses sci-fi powers to run the universe backwards to the point where I’m writing this comment and copy pastes me into a bazillion torture dimensions then, subjectively, it’s like I roll a dice and:

    1. live a long and happy life with probability very close to zero (yay I am the original)
    2. Instantly get teleported to the torture planet with probability very close to one (oh no I got copy pasted)

    Like a twisted version of the Sleeping Beauty Problem.

    Edit: despite submitting the comment I was not teleported to the torture dimension. Updating my priors.









  • I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

    My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

    Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

    Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!






  • At this point cryptocurrency has a bad enough reputation that they have to try and ease readers into it.

    (insert clown getting dressed meme image here)

    1. It’s new digg!
    2. AI is bad (but also sexy and all powerful)
    3. so captchas are hard :(
    4. let’s make a real fancy captcha!
    5. With… Zero-Knowledge Proofs :D :D :D :D :D (all non cryptocurrency people flee at this point)
    6. Also like NFTs for products you buy so when you shill them people know you’re at least a real person doing so (maybe, kinda, sorta)
    7. So anyway I was thinking if only there was something else as dystopian cool as Sam Altman ę§˜ā€™s orb thing and we smeared it across the entire internet




  • To be fair their calculation also involves multiplying by the carefully chosen factors of 4 and 0.25. It’s a macroeconomics thing you probably wouldn’t understand. https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

    The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

    This ā€œCavalloā€ reference isn’t actually listed in their citations (gee I wonder why) but appears to be Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy (link).

    Meanwhile Cavallo et al 2021:

    Chinese exporters did not lower their dollar prices by much, despite the recent appreciation of the dollar. By contrast, US exporters significantly lowered prices affected by foreign retaliatory tariffs. In US stores, the price impact is more limited, suggesting that retail margins have fallen. […] Our results imply that, so far, the tariffs’ incidence has fallen in large part on US firms.

    Amazing. The government’s official position is that tariffs are OK because both US exporters and importers get less money.