I made a new UI for the microblog.
My analysis professor doesn’t think the universe is a C* algebra but I think she might be wrong
TIL my wife and son have Canadian citizenship under their Bill C-3! Cool!
Watching the Anthropic livestreams today. I would like to register medium-high aesthetic aversion to Ami Vora.
Cautiously optimistic about SimpleX as the future of private decentralized messaging. Direly need better UI tho! (And possibly a better name.)
Bernie speaking clearly about AI makes me feel emotional in a way I rarely am about this sort of thing.
A sketch of a nice model of human values I think I first heard from John Wentworth at Iliad II in August 2025:
We don’t have an explicit utility function, but we have a set of reward signals and pretend that there is some true hidden utility function which we try to model with uncertainty. Then we use our reward signals to update our map of a (fictional) utility function.
This lets us protect against value drift and wireheading by resisting things which would cause our reward signals to give us worse information about our imagined true utility function.
I’ve been happier than usual the past few days in a strange way; strange because I can’t explain what’s different.
I continue to fail to understand why otherwise very smart people are so attached to prerational intuitions about consciousness which don’t seem to come along with independent logical arguments
Specifically the intuition that qualia are irreducible is a priori reasonable but leads to all sorts of paradoxes
And since we have no principled reason to believe it it should be quite cheap to discard
This does not mean there aren’t lots of things about consciousness which I am confused about and find mysterious
Anyway if you think you can explain something I am missing contact me