The ability to create limited-liability corporations at will encourages certain kinds of unethical behaviour, where you grab unethical nickels until you're hit by the steamroller of the law but still come out ahead. We should indeed be looking to get the law changed so companies like that can't exist; part of that should be reserving limited liability for entities that create a corresponding public interest benefit rather than handing it out like candy.
> relicensing IP is not "using" the IP to me - you either use it, or lose it. Unless of course, you're the original author (and by author, I mean the humans, not businesses that paid them)
If I come up with a brilliant new compression algorithm, but don't have the software development skills to make a robust production implementation, what difference does it make whether I hire someone to write that production implementation, license my algorithm to someone who writes that production implementation, or sell my patent rights to someone who writes that production implementation (or licenses my algorithm to someone else who does that)? Heck, given that software is fluffy abstract stuff rather than physical goods, would you consider selling a program to count, or is it only someone who makes a hardware device that uses the algorithm who gets to count?
1) You patent something, but don't do anything with it except enforce the patent.
2) You patent something, but the only thing you do with it is license others to use it, potentially hiring someone else to manage the licenses but you retain ownership.
3) You patent something, you sell the patent to someone else to do 2)
Cases 1 and 3 have significant negative effects on both technology and society that the law should prevent. Case 2 covers your brilliant new invention but don't bring it to market yourself and is fine.
The key notion here is that you cannot sell intellectual property. It's ephemeral. You can license it and create all sorts of creative license terms, but once you're dead or the timeline of exclusive rights runs out, or you personally stop "using" it (or all companies stop using it), the patent effectively expires because you can't claim damages if you or your license holders have not seen any negative impacts.
In a perfect world, "defensive" patent strategies and rent-seeking by middlemen would be prevented by construction. This maximizes the incentive to innovate and share ideas, instead of bottling them up. If you want true, exclusive rights to something, don't share it in a patent.
> Cases 1 and 3 have significant negative effects on both technology and society that the law should prevent. Case 2 covers your brilliant new invention but don't bring it to market yourself and is fine.
How are 2 and 3 meaningfully different as far as anyone outside is concerned though? If I own a field and I'm not a farmer, no-one cares much whether I rent it out to someone else to farm on or sell it to (either for some proportion of their income or for a straight up flat fee). Economically it's all the same - you can rent something or you can buy it funded with a loan, and your cash flows will be more or less identical.
If the city bureaucracy doesn't exist primarily to provide continued employment to people of a certain class who can't or won't do something more productive, it's doing a pretty good impression of it. The purpose of a system is what it does and all that.
> Instead of each node storing the next- and previous-pointers separately, store a single pointer which is the XOR of the two. Which is obviously an invalid pointer. But when iterating, XOR the previous node's pointer with the combined pointer to get the next node's pointer, and so on. You can iterate this way in both directions. Feels illegal. :)
Meh, it's not a pointer, it's not really any different from storing the difference between the two pointers, which obviously would let you iterate in both directions.
Yes, but as mentioned in TFA, storing the difference would require an extra bit. The difference between two 32 bit numbers is in the range [-2^32 -1, 2^32-1], needing 33 bits to store. The XOR is the same size as the original pointer, simplifying data flow.
But even so, storing a doubly linked list with only pointer differences and no absolute pointers (other than head and tail) feels illegal too
> storing the difference [of prev and next pointers] would require an extra [sign] bit [relative to XOR]
No it wouldn’t. Just let wraparound happen normally and things will work out.
Effectively what you need are functions
pair : ptr × ptr → uintptr
left : uintptr × ptr → ptr
right : ptr × uintptr → ptr
left(pair(x, y), y) ≡ x
right(x, pair(x, y)) ≡ y
Setting all three to XOR is one possibility. But
pair(x, y) = (x + y) mod 2^(width of ptr)
left(p, y) = (p - y) mod 2^(width of ptr)
right(x, p) = (p - x) mod 2^(width of ptr)
is an equally valid one, because addition and subtraction modulo any fixed value are related in exactly the same way as normal addition and subtraction.
Uh, no. Assuming 32-bit pointers, you'd add or subtract them using normal unsigned arithmetic which is modulo 2^32. Essentially the same trick definitely works because all these operations (adding/subtracting/xoring a number) are invertible.
The neat thing about xoring with a number is simply that that operation is its own inverse.
One difference between XOR and difference is that because of the symmetry of XOR, you could use the same code for walking the list forwards and backwards.
I'm not sure you understood the article. You can have a very low load but each task on your queue takes a while to process, in which case you want fair distribution of work.
The distribution is fair - everything is round-robin, so in the long run each worker receives the same rate of tasks. It's just "lumpy" - sometimes you can get a big batch sent to one worker, then a big batch sent to another worker - but it will all average out.
> If Id had paid Microsoft to do the port, it would automatically be work-for-hire and the copyrights would belong to Id, unless the contract said otherwise.
Nope, not true. Work by non employees is only work-for-hire if it falls into one of the qualifying categories and the contract explicitly says that it is work-for-hire.
Pick your favourite cult checklist and see how much applies. Rationalists certainly have some cult-like characteristics, but e.g. practically any environmentalist group has all the ones you list and more (especially the targeting the young part). In particular the Rationalists I know don't discourage questioning and dissent (quite the opposite), don't focus much on bringing in money or members, don't give their leaders any exalted status or obey them unquestioningly (quite the opposite), don't encourage people to break the law or disobey the proper authorities, and don't try to isolate people from their outside friends or family.
I suggest you read the section starting "The Zizians, believe it or not, are not the only cult-like groupuscule to have emerged from the heady stew of the Rationalist community" from [1]
Some quotes:
> (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a ‘demon’ which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging tools
> there were also psychotic breaks involving demonic subprocess narratives,” and where people in positions of power would “debug” underlings. “I experienced myself and others being distanced from old family and friends, who didn't understand how high-impact the work we were doing was,”
> Scott Alexander, maybe the most prominent Rationalist besides Yudkowsky, suggested that the problem was not really M.I.R.I. or C.F.A.R. so much as that Taylor was in a cult-like group centered around a former M.I.R.I. head
> I don’t know that I have the patience or energy to really get to the bottom of it all except to say: It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me! And I haven’t even gotten into the Burning Man camp Black Lotus or the Monastic Academy for the Preservation of Life on Earth
> The Zizians, believe it or not, are not the only cult-like groupuscule to have emerged from the heady stew of the Rationalist community
Many communities have cultlike offshoots. What frequency, what proportion are we talking about? And surely the fact that mainstream Rationalists have been loudly denouncing and warning people about the Zizians for the past 5 years counts for something.
> (Alignment Group) would attempt to articulate a ‘demon’ which had infiltrated our psyches from one of the rival groups, its nature and effects, and get it out of our systems using debugging tools
> there were also psychotic breaks involving demonic subprocess narratives,” and where people in positions of power would “debug” underlings.
Yeah, that's crazy. I don't think any of the people I know would get involved in anything like that. Again, is that "normal Rationalists" or is that what a snake-handler sect is to Christians?
> I don’t know that I have the patience or energy to really get to the bottom of it all except to say: It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me!
This is the kind of thing you'd say if you wanted to smear a group but knew the dirt was actually pretty limited.
Just noting I was just quoting it, but it seems accurate.
My personal view is that Rationalism is more like a religion, and there are spin-offs that are cults.
> And surely the fact that mainstream Rationalists have been loudly denouncing and warning people about the Zizians for the past 5 years counts for something.
Religions usually are very vocal to denounce breakaways as apostates.
The OP said:
> If at the apex of an organization you have a person who has organized his life in such a way as to have sex with several other people, and if many people involved in the movement pay a tithe to the organization or charities it designates, and if many of the members of this organization go crazy thinking about the impending hell (of AGI), how is this different from a cult?
It seems your main objection is to the "many" word in "if many of the members of this organization go crazy".
>> It all kinda sounds pretty culty to me!
> This is the kind of thing you'd say if you wanted to smear a group but knew the dirt was actually pretty limited.
> (The way the page is written, I get the impression that the word "infohazardous" markets the content of the glossary as "extra powerful and intriguing occult material", as I noted is common in my recent post about infohazards.)
> Given that I thought I may had started World War 3 and was continuing to harm and control people with my mental powers, I seriously considered suicide.
> There is a very disturbing possibility (with some evidence for it) here, that people may be picked off one by one (by partially-subconscious and partially-memetic influences, sometimes in ways they cooperate with, e.g. through suicide), with most everyone being too scared to investigate the circumstances.
etc etc
Decide for yourself if "pretty culty" is a reasonable label.
There's a lot of things that I'd qualify as "religious" that I probably wouldn't as a kid, even in my very Catholic upbringing. Most of the companies I've worked for command loyalty and have rituals that border on religious ceremonies. They use legal avenues rather than social avenues for control, but who's to say the modern corporate ethos isn't a cult? I feel semi-confident in saying that broadly of Fortune 500 companies and especially technology industry companies (and their leaders.)
That isn't to say rationalists on the whole are one thing or another, but rather my hypothesis is as society gets more desperate and divided this kind of order is a natural consequence.
> If you're jumping to conclusions by looking at people's photos - you're probably not really coming to a considered conclusion based on the breadth of evidence.
There's a reason "me or your lying eyes" is a joke. At some point you have to be willing to look at something rather than thinking yourself into a position when you can't see what's in front of you.
I invite you to elaborate, because because while I see how it's true you should draw conclusions from what you see in general, abstract terms, I don't understand what you mean to imply in the context of the comment I made (eg "don't judge a book by it's cover" or "if you're judging a book by it's cover, don't be surprised or claim victimhood if you get the feedback you've come to errant conclusions").
What I'm saying is that looking at a photo is a reality-check and a valuable one. Yes, sometimes something isn't what it looks like. But often things are exactly what they look like. If your elaborate theory leads you to one conclusion, and looking at the photo leads you to another, you should at least consider the possibility that it's the elaborate theory that's wrong.
You've not really elaborated on how your views apply to this discussion and the original comment. If your commentary is generic rather than related to this particular discussion, then it was already priced into the discussion, and didn't need stating. Generic tangents should be avoided.
