/technology/

Towards a supercoordination protocol
Inspired by >>2513 and >>2589 I have been thinking about what a software implementation of a supercoordination protocol might look like. Specifically, this is based on the signal/impact model presented in >>2570. I would be interested to hear what other an... posted 2d ago with 2 replies technology informatics

Towards a supercoord

That is true. But an advantage I see in the system described is that 'garbage in' doesn't really have an impact on the network if nobody chooses to interact with said garbage. For example, if Mallory wants to spam their own log with garbage signals, they h... 13h ago

That is true. But an

Designing a word frequency auto-tagger for sofiechan
Let's talk about the upcoming auto-tagger architecture. All it has to do is produce affinity scores between threads and tags, and our now existent smart tag selector will select a high-affinity set of tags that also make a good index. To do this, it's goin... posted 6d ago with 3 replies technology meta informatics

Designing a word fre

It works! But slow as all hell. Right now we fully rebuild the "taste machine", which now includes this word frequency tagger, about once a minute. That used to do 50 iterations of the expectation-maximization algorithm we use to refine everyone's tastes, ... 3d ago

It works! But slow a

Intelligent Use of LLMs
I would like to start a thread to share the methods we employ to use LLMs in a way that enhances our abilities, rather than just lazily outsources tasks to them. The heuristic for the techniques I am looking for would be if after employing the technique, a... posted 2mo ago with 8 replies technology intelligence learning

Intelligent Use of L

just text:... 1w ago

just text:...

The Hellenic View of Existential Risk
When I was a teen, I read much of the Less Wrong and the rationalist work of the day. This provided the basis for a vague worry surrounding "existential risk." The feeling was pervasive, and I would read works about the dangers of AI or other technology to... posted 3mo ago with 10 replies technology rationality philosophy

The Hellenic View of

I think in this discussion, as well as the places where I generally see this particular kind of critique of EA and x-risk come up, there's a conflation of two intertwined but separable core issues. The first is the factual risk of irreparable damage to the... 1w ago

I think in this disc

Intelligence vs Production
"Optimize for intelligence" says Anglo accelerationist praxis. "Seize the means of production" says the Chinese. Who's right? It is widely assumed in Western discourse that intelligence, the ability to comprehend all the signals and digest them into a plan... posted 2mo ago with 9 replies technology accelerationism economics

Intelligence vs Prod

Look no comment on the current regime and its lack of tact. I support their priorities but there's obviously a lot of dumb stuff going on. In any case I consider it orthogonal to what we should be doing in theory and i wish not to be constrained by their r... 2w ago

Look no comment on t

A Primer on E-Graphs (A technique to control combinatorial blowup in term rewriting systems)
About 10 years ago I was very interested in term rewriting as a basis for exotic programming languages and even AI. One of the big problems in term rewriting is that without a canonical deterministic ordering, you rapidly end up with an uncontrollable numb... (www.cole-k.com) posted 3w ago with no replies technology intelligence informatics

A Primer on E-Graphs

Patchwork city states ?
With State capacity decline and movement of decentralization how probable is it that we see something like sov corp city states emerging ? First through corporations providing private security (I think this is already the case in Brazil to some extent) eve... posted 1mo ago with 6 replies technology accelerationism sovereignty

Patchwork city state

We see it already with today's tech companies, to an extent: the US government shuts down nuclear power plants while GOOGL and MSFT plan on building their own nuclear power plants, facilitating their respective AGI plans.... 4w ago

We see it already wi

"Forum software blew a 4000x lead with poor UX" - Simon Sarris
I really liked forums. I liked imageboards. I dislike many of the patterns on twitter and group chats etc. But it's undeniable that those apps offer a richer more engaging user experience somehow. It's just more immediate with something you want to respond... (x.com) posted 1mo ago with 7 replies technology meta

"Forum software blew

not a ton of new ideas here, mostly agreeing with what others have said already.... 1mo ago

not a ton of new ide

How to build better anonymous social media: curation and tags
Back in 2014, moot banned gamergate discussion from 4chan. This led to an exodus of the most adventurous and curious channers to 8chan, which had a strict free speech policy. For a few months at least, 8chan was a haven of smart free discussion on all sort... posted 2mo ago with 13 replies technology meta coordination

How to build better

Very cool, guys. Let a thousand alt social media flowers bloom. I look forward to seeing your respective attempts. I hope you’ll still want to come visit us here. 2mo ago

Very cool, guys. Let

Dissolving vs. Surviving
Recent xenohumanist discussion has the doomer assumption built in that we as humans will be dissolving when higher man arrives on the scene. I don't think that's set in stone and want to offer a clarification.... posted 3mo ago with 5 replies technology accelerationism gnon

Dissolving vs. Survi

Some people won't believe in the inherent goodness of existence until it's been autistically proven to them with English philosophizing a hundred times over. That's fine. For the rest of us, we don't need to be persuaded of the inherent goodness of existen... 2mo ago

Some people won't be

Super-Coordination Technical Exercise Problems
Another anon and I have been thinking about how to do supercoordination. We've got many ideas but we're still looking for the right problem to dive into together seriously.... posted 3mo ago with 4 replies technology rationality coordination

Super-Coordination T

How about aggregating the collective will of a bunch of individuals wills? By will, I mean a freeform expression/document consisting of issues one values/cares about/wants change in. 3mo ago

How about aggregatin

Lessons from Palantir Alums About Building a Tech Company
https://www.partly.work/p/lessons-from-palantir-alums-about posted 7mo ago with 3 replies technology

Lessons from Palanti

That makes sense. The forward deployed engineers are the engineers the customer should have but don't. 7mo ago

That makes sense. Th

"Bull fighting" from the future: Drone Slaying
For a few months I've been thinking about the history of warfare and sports. My grandfather grew up bullfighting - Most of my memories of him are watching the "corridas" every Saturday.... posted 12mo ago with 11 replies technology

"Bull fighting" from

America retains distinct advantages in premier industrial domains, such as computer chip design (note, separate from manufacture), rockets, turbine jet engines, and various advanced materials science. As a strictly military example, no one makes night visi... 9mo ago

America retains dist

Soft Ware for Hard Power
I learned Photoshop as an autistic youth who wanted to make logos and background graphics for friends' gaming YouTube channels. Thousands of hours of skill development there transferred to every graphic design software I've come across since (Illustrator, ... posted 1y ago with 16 replies technology sovereignty

Soft Ware for Hard P

One of my old friends from Berkeley wanted to design a new power supply for an amp. He designed it from scratch, used open source PCB design software and had it printed for him by a company specializing in such things.... 10mo ago

One of my old friend

The Drone Question. Is America screwed by lack of industrial capacity?
The war in Ukraine is teaching us that explosive hunter-seeker drones, FPV piloted or autonomous, are shockingly overpowered. Flying panzerfausts are wrecking armor for fractional cents on the dollar, and flying grenades are blowing the legs off of boys wh... posted 12mo ago with 40 replies technology economics

The Drone Question.

consumer demand is a complete red herring here. Consumers should not be buying drone swarms or even thinking about it. The question is whether hackers are building novel stuff and then getting into manufacturing, and then whether the manufacturing ecosyste... 12mo ago

consumer demand is a

Towards an Illegible Computational Medium of Exchange
You cannot be sovereign if you do not control your medium of exchange, if your enemies can insert themselves into every transaction and tax it or block it at will.... posted 12mo ago with 12 replies technology sovereignty

Towards an Illegible

There had been a thread on high software profit margins, which has since disappeared off sofiechan. The OP on hackernews might still be relevant (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35904339):... 12mo ago

There had been a thr

Silicon Valley's Military Fever Dream
Thank goodness I can just Ctrl-A Ctrl-P before the paywall shows up. That was a close one. It does appear that Silicon Valley wants to appear more chad, so to speak. Perhaps nerds have too much of a reputation for being hunchbacked and quiet, as the articl... (www.forbes.com) posted 1y ago with 24 replies politics technology

Silicon Valley's Mil

I looked to President Eisenhower in his inaugural address for guidance... 12mo ago

I looked to Presiden

How to Control an Online Forum
This thread is for the linked post about disinformation and forum control.... (edith.reisen) posted 1y ago with 5 replies technology coordination

How to Control an On

Currently, sliding is not a huge problem because the front page has everything (scroll down!). Though of course discussion seems to be concentrated in the top few threads. In the long run, we're going to deal with scale and prioritization with tags. There ... 14mo ago

Currently, sliding i

Who’s Behind All the ‘Pussy in Bio’ on Twitter? A little something on what we're up against.
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/who-is-behind-all-the-pussy-in-bio-porn-spam-on-x.html posted 1y ago with 6 replies politics technology

Who’s Behind All the

1. Urbit is not designed to be uncensorable, nor is it particularly useful for our purposes.... 14mo ago

1. Urbit is not desi

Updates on sofiechan's curation system: Cybernetic Direct Democracy
I (admin) just pushed a bunch of changes. You'll see it most obviously in the percent signs next to the save and hide buttons, and as colored emojis indicating which posts are well regarded, and which are about to be deleted. Broadly, this is part of how s... posted 1y ago with 12 replies technology meta

Updates on sofiechan

I notice a large number of threads converge on approximately 60% up, 1% down. This is two things: not enough people, so when the usual number of us vote and engage in a usual thread, it ends up with about the usual amount of evidence. But then they should ... 1y ago

I notice a large num