Kind of. I live with my mother so the house expenses are shared - sometimes I’m short on money and she covers it for me, sometimes it’s the opposite.

Sometimes either of us cover my sister’s financial arse too, even if she doesn’t live with us.

This screams FAITH (Filthy Assumptions Instead of THinking) from a distance, on multiple levels:

1. Assuming that the current machine learning development will lead to artificial general intelligence. Will it?
2. Assuming that said AGI would appear in time to reduce power consumption. Will it?
3. Assuming that lowering the future power consumption will be enough to address issues caused by the current power consumption. Will it?
4. Assuming that addressing issues from a distant future means that the whole process won’t cause harm for people in a nearer future. Will it?

Furthermore, Gates in the quote is being disingenuous:

“Let’s not go overboard on this,” he said. “Datacenters are, in the most extreme case, a 6 percent addition [to the energy load] but probably only 2 to 2.5 percent. The question is, will AI accelerate a more than 6 percent reduction? And the answer is: certainly,” Gates said.

The answer addresses something far, far more specific than the main issue.

If I may, here’s my alternative solution for the problem, in the same style as Gates’:

Kill everyone between the North Pole and the Equator.

What do you mean, it would kill 85% people in the world? Well, you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, right? Nobody that I know personally lives there, so Not My Problem®. (Just keep Japan, I need my anime to watch.)

…I’m being clearly sarcastic to deliver a point here - it’s trivially easy to underestimate issues affecting humankind, and problems associated with their solutions, if you are not directly affected by either. Gates is some billionaire bubbled around rich people; this sort of problem will affect the poor first, as the rich can simply throw enough money into their problems to make them go away.

More like the straw that broke the camel’s back. And a sign that Microsoft’s behaviour is still the same as it was in IE times.

I know that this expression desensitises people to something serious, but it describes Microsoft - the “it”/corporation - perfectly: rapist mentality. It shows how eager Microsoft is to disregard consent, users saying “no, I don’t want it”, and to force itself over the users as long as it gets some benefit out of it.

Including new obnoxious advertisement slots into an already released product - one that you paid for - is only a result of that mentality.

If I were to watch Dragon Ball Z now, I’d probably drop the series. I still remember it fondly, but it’s too slow.

The first two seasons of the Pokémon anime aged well for me. Individual games, too. But the series as a whole felt from an “I know all 386!” to “…it’s a Tentaquil”.

Chrono Trigger went from “it’s okay, it’s fun” to “…I spent my whole life underrating it, didn’t I?” So did Final Fantasy VI.

Same deal with Dostoyevsky. I guess you need some maturity to understand things.

Baudelaire, though? Hard pass.

I still love 1984 and Animal Farm, but I want to drown 90% of the muppets talking about them.

I can’t stand Legião Urbana any more. Pink Floyd on the other hand aged well, so did Nenhum de Nós.

To be honest I was never too much into movies. There’s one or another thing that I like (Modern Times, 8 1/2, The Shining), but it’s mostly unchanged.

Those mistakes would be easily solved by something that doesn’t even need to think. Just add a filter of acceptable orders, or hire a low wage human who does not give a shit about the customers special orders.

That wouldn’t address the bulk of the issue, only the most egregious examples of it.

For every funny output like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving me 200 burgers”, there’s likely tens, hundreds, thousands of outputs like “I asked for 1 ice cream, it’s giving 1 burger”, that sound sensible but are still the same problem.

It’s simply the wrong tool for the job. Using LLMs here is like hammering screws, or screwdriving nails. LLMs are a decent tool for things that you can supervision (not the case here), or where a large amount of false positives+negatives is not a big deal (not the case here either).

could you say that town is homelessnessless?

Has. The word is legit, but it would be an adjective because of the last -less there, so:

• That town has homelessnessless.
• That homelessnessless town is nice.

You could convert it back into a noun, through zero derivation; for example “homeless” is an adjective too, but people can say “the homeless are hungry”, as if it was a noun. But it sounds weird in this situation, I don’t know why.

Because English is half a dozen languages wrapped in a trenchcoat?

A language is not its vocabulary; that’s like pretending that the critter is just its fur.

English vocabulary is from multiple sources, but that is not exactly unique or special.

All languages are the result of the collective brainfarts of lazy people. English is not special in this regard.

What you’re noticing is two different sources of new words: making at home and borrowing it from elsewhere.

For a Germanic language like English, “making at home” often involves two things:

• compounding - pick old word, add a new root, the meaning is combined. Like “firetruck” - a “truck” to deal with “fire”. You can do it recursively, and talk for example about the “firetruck tire” (the space is simply an orthographic convention). Or even the “firetruck tire rubber quality”.
• affixation - you get some old word and add another non-root morpheme. Like “home” → “homeless” (no home) → “homelessness” (the state of not having a home).

The other source of vocabulary would be borrowings. Those words aren’t analysable as the above because they’re typically borrowed as a single chunk (there are some exceptions though).

Now, answering your question on “why”: Norman conquest gave English a tendency to borrow words for “posh” concepts from Norman, then French. And in Europe in general there’s also a tendency to borrow posh words from Latin and Greek.

My orc did get hungry a few times, but on a lighter side the range of available food is larger than the other races. Kobolds? Poison resist! Tripe? Nom nom nom. That dead pet? Waste not, want not. Goblin? What’s up with cannibalism, meat is meat!

Probably ascending in Nethack. With a wizard orc! (Not a good combo, but I’m stubborn.) I even #chatted with Famine for shits and giggles.

Ah, got it.

The relevant root is Proto-Germanic *walhaz. If I got it right it was used by PG speakers first to refer to a specific Celtic tribe, then other non-Germanic Europeans. (Proto-Slavic borrowed the word but changed the meaning - from “any speaker of a foreign language” to “Latin/Romance speaker”.)

Latin never borrowed that root because they simply called any non-Roman “barbarus”.

He’s talking about the name Wallace, or rather its etymology.

They’re mostly safe. Don’t taunt them, don’t get too close to them (specially not to veals and bulls), and eventually they’ll see you as “safe to ignore”.

Yup.

The post and the comments make me glad that I never bothered with Less Wrong. It makes HN and Reddit look smart in comparison.

By “the ‘w’ foreigner word” do you mean Wallace, or words with W in general?

If Wallace: I could’ve rendered his name by sound; in Classical pronunciation Valis [wɐɫɪs] would be really close. But then I’d need to do the same with Brett (Bres?) and Jules (Diules? Ziuls?) and it would be a pain.

If you mean words with W in general: yup. Long story short ⟨W⟩ wasn’t used in Latin itself; it started out as a digraph, ⟨VV⟩, for Germanic [w] in the Early Middle Ages. Because by then Latin already shifted its own native [w] into [β]→[v], so if you wrote ⟨V⟩ down people would read it wrong.

Here’s a link to the original formulation of Roko’s Basilisk. The text that it refers to (Altruist’s Burden) is this one.

You know, I’ve seen plenty variations of Pascal’s Wager. But this is probably the first one that makes me say “it’s even dumber than the original”.

I’ve seen worse stuff. I’ve caused worse stuff.

In my Chemistry uni times, I already prepared limoncello at home (vodka infused with lemon peels). Nothing weird, right. I even brought some to the uni parties, people loved that stuff.

And in the Organics lab one of the practical tasks was to synthesise isoamyl acetate, also known as banana oil. It’s completely safe as food/drink flavouring, but it has a clearly artificial banana flavour.

Then there’s that muppet connecting both things. He took inspiration of my limoncello, but he wanted to do things “like a chemist”. So he prepared a batch of isoamyl acetate, and used it to flavour vodka. He also used a buttload of sugar and yellow food dye. And he brought that to a uni party.

He called it “bananacello”. Everyone else, including me, called it “banana de plástico” (plastic banana). We still drunk it to the end, because “a good chemist likes alcohol” was our motto back then.

• [Iulius] Num lupam similat?
• [Brito] Quid?
• [Iulius] LVPAMNE ILLE TIBI SIMILAT???
• [Brito] Nullo modo!
• [Iulius] Quare sicut lupam illum igitur futuere uis, Brito?
• [Brito] Nolo!
• [Iulius] Per hercle Brito, futuisti! Sic! Tu Marcellum futuere conatus es!
• [Brito] Non, non…
• [Iulius] Sed Marcellus Alienis fututum esse non amat. Nisi a Domina Alienis.

Next on the news: “Hitler ate bread.”

I’m being cheeky, but I don’t genuinely think that “Nazi are using a tool that is being used by other people” is newsworthy.

Regarding the blue octopus, mentioned in the end of the text: when I criticise the concept of dogwhistle, it’s this sort of shit that I’m talking about. I don’t even like Thunberg; but, unless there is context justifying the association of that octopus plushy with antisemitism, it’s simply a bloody toy dammit.