franksvalli's comments

Post by Thomas Feeney on LinkedIn:

I recently completed an entry on Leibniz's Theodicy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Leibniz predates AI, but I could not help making the connections while I wrote.

Leibniz published in 1710 to answer a hard problem: God created intelligent, agential beings in His own image, and these creatures caused enormous harm. Who is responsible, and could God have done better?

Now, we're building systems modeled on our own intelligence, granting them agency, and then asking: who is responsible when they cause harm? Their creators and designers? The systems themselves? The conditions that made failure inevitable?

Three ideas from Leibniz map directly to AI governance:

1. The author-of-sin problem → the accountability gap. Leibniz asked: if God creates "all the opportunities for sin" and even "provokes the will of the agent," how is God not responsible? We ask the same of companies deploying AI. If you design the system, train it, and release it, how much distance can you claim from its failures?

2. The best-possible-world defense → the tradeoff argument. Leibniz argued that some evils are inseparable from the goods they enable. "A dissonance in the right place gives relief to harmony." And we have recently heard, from AI companies, that some harms may be the price of a system that, on balance, does enormous good.

3. Deficient causation → emergent failure. Leibniz argued, with subtlety, that sin arises not from what God puts into creatures, but from their inherent finitude. Our connatural limitations become "deficient causes" of harm. And for AI: there can never be enough data, compute, and training to guarantee virtue.

Leibniz himself refused easy answers. The creator's good intentions are not enough. Human freedom does not excuse the author of our nature and circumstances. And evil itself is real enough to demand an explanation: you can't take credit for two bowings of the violin without taking responsibility for the dissonance. Most importantly, Leibniz insisted that philosophical answers provide real comfort to the afflicted.

Three centuries later and the engineers have theological problems now.

Link to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/leibniz-evil/

A few years back I noticed something similar and had to find an alternative, which I found in Commento, which is now unfortunately abandoned: https://www.davidbcalhoun.com/2020/ditching-disqus-migrating...

I'm not sure it's worth the upkeep to have comments. Seems that mostly spammers comment, and rarely real people. I just wanted a low-maintenance commenting system and Commento seemed to work decently at the time. I'm now noticing it's showing some CORS error, so I guess comments have been broken on my site for some time, doh...

Had the chance to see him speak at Google ten years back. I took a bunch of photos and added them to Wikimedia Commons for anyone interested in publishing articles: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:John_Searle

(this isn't a promotion, these are free to use photos)

Not to mention the name of his company!

I agree the smaller the better - maybe a controversial opinion but I don't really think a few megabytes is a big concern. There's a much bigger elephant in the room in the form of phone apps - Facebook, TikTok, etc are over 300 megabytes. Instagram is over 250 megabytes. iOS even implemented background updates to update apps unobtrusively in the background.

It's comforting to me that this has been a challenge for many generations, the only difference is now the distractions are digital.

From Zhuangzi, Warring States period in China (born around 369 BC):

    But to wear out your brain trying to make things into one without realizing that they are all the same - this is called "three in the morning".  What do I mean by "three in the morning"?  When the monkey trainer was handing out acorns, he said, "You get three in the morning and four at night".  This made all the monkeys furious.  "Well, then", he said, "you get four in the morning and three at night".  The monkeys all were delighted.  There was no change in the reality behind the words, and yet the monkeys responded with joy and anger.  Let them, if they want to.  So the sage harmonizes with both right and wrong and rests in Heaven the Equalizer.  This is called walking two roads.

(note: Burton Watson translation)

I interpret this to mean first that what the monkeys care about is petty and trivial (like the petty distractions we all encounter daily), and more importantly at the end of the day there's no real change in the situation one way or another (the sum either way is seven acorns). The monkeys, caring about these trivial things, are happy they won the argument and got their way, even though it amounts to no significant difference at the end of the day.

So let it be.

Trying Not To Try by Slingerland is a great accessible introduction to the different modes of Chinese philosophy, and the two approaches to Daoism by Laozi and Zhuangzi are discussed.

For more depth I highly recommend Van Norden's Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy. I took a course that used this book as its text and it was really life changing and made me hopeful that there are some more practical philosophies out there for us.

I think pjmorris is talking about the Raleigh Alamo which is great! They definitely are responsive to email feedback. They do have a 35mm projector but it seems rarely used, though I think they are trying to use it more recently.

I don’t know of any other places showing film in the area, but I do know the Carolina Theatre in Durham shows loads of classics.

+1 to Alamo Drafthouse, they have really good visuals, good sound, a strict no talking and no cell phone policy, and they show a lot of old films. They also serve beer and great milkshakes. Food is OK, could be better. But all around the best theatre experiences I've had.

MethaneSAT | Multiple Positions | Full-Time | Remote-First | US ONLY

* Senior Site Reliability Engineer, DevOps ($130k - 142k, benefits): https://www.edf.org/jobs/sr-site-reliability-engineer-devops...

* Senior Cloud Engineer ($130k - 141k, benefits): https://www.edf.org/jobs/senior-cloud-engineer-methanesat-ll...

Company mission: Reducing methane emissions is the single fastest way to slow the rate of global warming today. In order to reduce emissions we first have to know where they're being emitted and who is responsible. The most effective way to do this on a global scale is from space, which is why we're launching a satellite to find when, where, and how much methane is being emitted. We are building tools to put in the hands of folks who will best be able to make the data actionable.

MethaneSAT is part of EDF, the Environmental Defense Fund.

Cool, hope some of it's useful!

Doh, sorry about that! Looks like it's working again if you want to give it another try: https://www.edf.org/jobs/sr-site-reliability-engineer-devops...

These have been helpful for me:

https://www.reddit.com/r/hiking

https://www.reddit.com/r/AppalachianTrail

https://www.reddit.com/r/PacificCrestTrail

MethaneSAT | Sr. SRE | $130k - 142k, benefits | Full-Time | Remote-First | US ONLY

Senior Site Reliability Engineer, DevOps https://www.edf.org/jobs/sr-site-reliability-engineer-devops...

This position will help design and develop cloud infrastructure (GCP, Terraform, Kubernetes) for the satellite's mission systems, image processing pipeline, and more.

Company mission: Reducing methane emissions is the single fastest way to slow the rate of global warming today. In order to reduce emissions we first have to know where they're being emitted and who is responsible. The most effective way to do this on a global scale is from space, which is why we're launching a satellite to find when, where, and how much methane is being emitted. We are building tools to put in the hands of folks who will best be able to make the data actionable.

MethaneSAT is part of EDF, the Environmental Defense Fund.

Angular 2 is a good example of something that didn't turn out so well. Many developers gave pause and ended up just migrating to a competing framework instead. I just skimmed through this but it looks like a decent summary: https://medium.com/@chriscordle/why-angular-2-4-is-too-littl...

NPM trends tells an interesting story as well: https://npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue

It's definitely no joke! When I hiked half the Appalachian Trail and eventually made it to Maine, a shuttle driver that came out to pick us up from a nearby hostel talked about how he'd lost several friends to car accidents due to moose collisions. He was intensely interested in arriving back at the hostel before dark.

He also had some sort of decoration made out of moose scat decoration hanging from the rearview mirror and was also trying to convince us passengers of the many uses of moose scats - skin remedies, even ingestion. But that's another story!

Woot, thanks for the plug! I work at MethaneSAT with a bunch of smart folks trying to make this happen (have to also say we're hiring ;)).

MethaneSAT | US Remote (remote-first) | Full-time | https://www.methanesat.org/

* Senior Front-End Engineer: https://www.edf.org/jobs/senior-front-end-engineer-methanesa...

* Back-End Software Engineer: https://www.edf.org/jobs/back-end-software-engineer-methanes...

* Infrastructure Software Engineer: https://www.edf.org/jobs/infrastructure-software-engineer-me...

Reducing methane emissions is the single fastest way to slow the rate of global warming today. In order to reduce emissions we first have to know where they're being emitted and who is responsible. The most effective way to do this on a global scale is from space, which is why we're launching a satellite to measure and attribute methane emissions. We are building tools to put in the hands of folks who will best be able to make the data actionable.

MethaneSAT is part of EDF, the Environmental Defense Fund.

MethaneSAT | US Remote (remote-first) | Full-time | https://www.methanesat.org/

* Senior Front-End Engineer: https://www.edf.org/jobs/senior-front-end-engineer-methanesa...

* Back-End Software Engineer: https://www.edf.org/jobs/back-end-software-engineer-methanes...

* Infrastructure Software Engineer: https://www.edf.org/jobs/infrastructure-software-engineer-me...

Reducing methane emissions is the single fastest way to slow the rate of global warming today. In order to reduce emissions we first have to know where they're being emitted and who is responsible. The most effective way to do this on a global scale is from space, which is why we're launching a satellite to measure and attribute methane emissions. We are building tools to put in the hands of folks who will best be able to make the data actionable.

MethaneSAT is part of EDF, the Environmental Defense Fund.

I'm not a lawyer. In my brief time there years back in the US, there was a training course that somewhat touched on this. Essentially the takeaway was that what you developed on your own time and equipment was a bit of a grey area, but likely problematic if what you were building was something that would compete with Google in some way. Since Google owns so much tech in so many spaces, the general argument was that whatever software you were writing on your own time was likely something that could be seen as competing with Google, therefore you'd be better to just avoid it altogether.

I'm not sure if the same argument can be made for non-code manuscripts.