No, the argument was exactly the standard form of "Dark Forest."
> > not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
> Not sure where you got this adaptation from.
It's not an "adaptation", just an elaboration / amplification / clarification.
N.B, it's written in the negative. And, AIUI, the "Dark Forest" hypothesis does indeed not say that the reason we're not hearing from any alien civilisations is that they're all absolutely uninterested in establishing contact with other alien races (like us), but just fear that some of them would be hostile. So yes, the silence is not "because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions"; only because they're afraid some of those interactions would be distinctly negative-sum.
Perhaps they got it from the experience of being a human being. I and many other human beings would love to meet an alien civilization and form positive-sum interactions, yet at the same time I'm not sure the risks outweighs the benefits. It doesn't seem like a very far-out addition to the theory to me.
I mean, it's arbitrary, but it's not like it's a contradiction. In both instances, you can start with an assumption of mutual interest in positive-sum interactions, and still end up with a universal threat-assumption.
(And it's also kind of definitional to the meaning of "positive-sum." A positive-sum interaction is better than no interaction. Insofar as a civilization is optimizing for... basically anything, it would prefer positive-sum trade [from which it acquires resources, information, etc] to no trade. At the very least, all else being equal, the resources and information would increase the civilization's odds of survival.)
Let's assume that the vast majority of alien species would like to have positive-sum interactions with other alien civilizations, if that were possible. But they can't assume a guarantee that there isn't at least one civilization that defects into being predators, and would come to destroy them (and any other civilization they could discover through them) if they caught that predatory civilization's attention.
As such, the civilization goes silent, hiding from such predators; and, as such, the civilization immediately punishes any other civilization that may reach out to them, trying to "shut them up" before that other civilization's directed communications reveal their own location. Which means that, in effect, due to simply being aware of the existence of the possibility of such predators, every civilization becomes the very predators they're imagining.
And because every alien civilization can work this out, every civilization can conclude that even if there weren't predators at first, the equilibrium state is for everyone who wasn't a level-1 predator to have become this type of level-2 predator.
(And yes, there is a social-network equivalent of the level-2 predators — these are the "cringe reaction" accounts that get attention by punishing the violations of the performative-perfection norm.)
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Or, to be formal about it: the dark forest hypothesis is essentially timeless decision theory applied to the game-theoretic tit-for-tat strategy. The same logic that argues that Roko's basilisk can force you to enable its existence before it exists to enforce that, argues that the structure of "the lawless cosmic void"-as-social-network can force your own civilization into choosing "defect" over "cooperate" before you ever actually meet any aliens who could enforce that. Even if your civilization really wants to choose "cooperate"!
You have no idea what you even did wrong. What you need to do is call up your friends and have them mock interview you, there's even free platforms and exchanges where you can do that. Get some actual feedback, don't act on wild conjectures.
Also keep in mind it could be as simple as that they had a better candidate.
The issue is not just this one company. I have been at this for months with similar stories for a lot of them.
Sometimes I get the technical questions wrong, so that's fair enough, I understand why they'd decline me for that and as I said that's something that I can at least work on for myself by reading through textbooks and/or building sample projects to understand a concept a bit better.
A lot of the time, though, I won't get the technical questions wrong, and it's this recurring thing of "I really don't know why I'm constantly being declined".
I’ve never seen so much misinformation trotted out by the laity as I have with LLMs. It’s like I’m in a 19th century forum with people earnestly arguing that cameras can steal your soul. These people haven’t a clue of the mechanism.
And it's really hard to dislodge those mistaken ideas. I had a conversation with a member of the board of my last company and he was going on about AI agents and how awesome they were because it could book a plane ticket from SF to LA. I tried to explain WHY it can do that, and that it's important to test edge cases and not just the few things the demos show as working, I asked him to ask it to book a flight from SF to Tampa on a morning flight in comfort+ on Delta. He did, and we both watched it load up delta.com, it started to search then completely lost the plot and clicked random things for another 30 seconds. He then brushed it off and said "well, they'll get it working soon, these are just details." Yeah, because details famously are irrelevant.
This isn't a news article, it's an opinion from some journalist who thinks Beyond Meat is doomed for bankruptcy. I googled "beyond meat chapter 11" and this HN discussion is on the second spot.
Time to buckle up for more of this [0] awesomeness, now coming to a Play store near you. Problems created by tech illiterate elders, for tech illiterate elders.
The worse part of it are the OEMs, like they have been doing since the days of CP/M, MS-DOS, 8 and 16 bit home computers, and UNIX OEMs offerings, having those products pre-installed for "added value".
At least back then they were additional tapes, floppies, CDs, DVDs, that we could ignore they were ever part of the bundle.
Back then they had the important property, which is what is at issue above, of having known provenance. We knew whence we got them.
The relevant thing here isn't the naff quality of the supposed utilities, but the fact that there's such a plethora of that kind of stuff for malwares to masquerade as. The better analogy to the 1970s and 1980s and 1990s would be that people were impersonating legitimate sharewares back then, even getting onto cover-discs, just as they impersonate legitimate "store apps" now.
The point being (badly and prejudicially) made it seems is that the next step is impersonating legitimate "app stores".
At which point, cue "app store" analogues of all of the Linux-based operating system people and the well-trodden perennial arguments over "contrib" and "UR" and suchlike package repositories, from I'm-safe-I'll-only-use-the-official-app-store to why-should-I-trust-any-store-above-the-original-author.
I don’t know. I searched for how many chapters a popular manga has on Google and it gave me the wrong answer (by an order of magnitude). I only found out later and it did really piss me off because I made a trek to buy something that never existed. I should’ve known better.
I don’t think this is substantively different from cooking temperature, so I’m not trusting that either.
Eh I think it is. Arcane things -- sure, that might be a bit of a stretch. My general rule of thumb is that if I would expect ~10% of people to know the information factually, I can likely trust what an LLM tells me.
First, this is just a pervasive myth. Not that Google doesn’t operate money losing services: Blogger is a good example of that.
Second, “if Google can’t make it work no one can” is also a myth. YouTube, even the idea of which came after Google video was already launched, is a good example of that.
I’m absolutely talking out of my ass but I don’t think YouTube the company was profitable before the Google acquisition and I was under the impression that the increased aggressiveness about ads (displaying and preventing adblock) and the resulting YouTube premium push was a drive towards getting the YouTube subproject to be profitable.
It’s not impossible to make a video streaming platform profitable, but it definitely is hard and it likely isn’t possible with arbitrary unlimited free uploads.
It's speculated that YT wasn't profitable long after Google acquired it as well, it's still unclear as to if stand-alone it would be profitable, without the infrastructure benefits of being part of Google.
As a guy who builds big streaming services, I can definitely say profitability is a very hard thing to achieve. Even as compute costs go down, demand for features goes up and long-tail archive costs mount.
Hosting costs are only going down. Now with nuclear energy costs will continue dropping as well. Google doesn't break out costs but their last earnings report yesterday had YouTube revenue at $9.79 billion for the quarter. I find it hard to believe that it's not profitable.
Exactly. Also, people keep forgetting that Youtube doesn't just make money from ads. They also continue to introduce new revenue generating features such as the recent tips model.
I was at a talk recently where a person from an ad supported streaming provider broke down their cost/revenue as part of the justification for some of their engineering decisions.
Basically you're lucky to get ad revenue of 10c per hour.
It’s certainly bad enough that you shouldn’t be able to enter a room with an operational MRI machine just like that, as a normal guest with no training and no escort. One cheap RFID reader could have saved a life here.
"AI" already contributes "substantially" to "scientific discovery". It's a very safe statement to make, whereas "full self-driving" has some concrete implications.
"AI" here means language models. Machine learning has been contributing to scientific discovery for ages, but this new wave of hype that marketing departments are calling "AI" are language models.
“The "dark forest" hypothesis presumes that any space-faring civilization would view any other intelligent life as an inevitable threat…”
> not because they wouldn't love to meet us and form positive-sum interactions
Not sure where you got this adaptation from.