March 2021 newsletter

Published: 2021-04-30
Word count: ~747

Table of contents:

timtimestim

There's some important news about timtimestim.com to share, as well. I'm going to be updating a lot less often. There will still be the newsletter, but the blog and other things are probably going to slow down considerably.

The reason for this change is because I want to study Artificial Intelligence from the ground up, understanding the math as well as the theory behind it so that I might be able to contribute to the field some time in the future.

I've long considered AI to be the most important problem facing humanity, but for the longest time I've always made excuses about why I couldn't work on it. So I've chosen to study the subject for at least a year to see if I have the ability to learn fast enough to contribute anything before we all die from some moron doing it wrong. This is an experiment to test my potential long-term skill at a hard task; when next April rolls around I will have a much better idea of if I actually have a chance to help.

And when I say "study AI" I don't mean going to school for it. I mean reading relevant research papers and other writings and working backwards from those until I can understand them. I also don't mean "study machine learning" so much as I mean "study AI alignment"; machine learning is important, obviously, but I'm much more concerned about making sure future AIs are aligned to human values. Weather or not AGI is made from machine learning or not is relevant, yes, but I want to make sure that whatever comes about just so happens to not want to turn my atoms into paperclips.

So... Yeah. This is going to take up a large portion of my free time. Expect slower updates. Sorry to the 1 person who reads this and somehow actually cares about the things I make. I could keep trying to justify this decision, but fuck you I do what I want :D.

Dumping ground

Read later

Wealth, shown to scale

Just in case you didn't feel inferior enough, check out "Wealth, shown to scale". I can't believe I'm saying this, but this page is best read on mobile phones, so that you can really feel the physical annoyance of scrolling through it with your thumb.

I don't have anything else to add here. The wealth gap is real. Reality sucks. Lolololo

Reason #3266 to hate software

I used to use the "Signal" messenger app to talk to my friend. Of course, now I don't. First they forced stupid stickers and other bullshit onto us, and then one upped themselves with a baller move of literally forcing a crypocurrency payment scheme into their messenger app.

Yay! Don't use centralized shit to talk to your friends, because the experience can be ruined without a second thought to feed someone's stupid greedy cryptocurrency scheme. We're using a matrix client now, but that sucks too for entirely different reasons.

Please release me from this nightmare. I just want reliable software. Please. Why do you do this to me.

AIXI

Flash round! AIXI is an AI that can't be made in real life that does things perfectly according to solomonoff induction and some other black magic.

This is the part where I tell you all the cool things about this, but I can't bring myself to care right now. I want to read some stuff and I'm just trying to type this newsletter out as fast I can. Whoops.