Jeff Kaufman

It sounds like you're talking about relative numbers, and I have no disagreement there, but I'm talking about absolute numbers. There just weren't that many people online in 1995, so even a large fraction then can easily be less than a very small fraction now. I know lots of people with websites (ex: my own, https://jefftk.com) and a lot of this is it's so much easier and cheaper now. You don't have to be a sysadmin or be friends with one, domains cost 10x less than they used to, many more people have internet access, etc. > When was the last time you saw real, true, honest content, without an agenda, without cat videos, without selfies, on a modern content silo? I think it depends a lot who your friends are, what subcultures you're in, and how you choose who to follow. My Facebook feed is mostly my friends talking about interesting things and I like it a lot.

Definitely they're smart, but most of them just started writing and built up a following that way, and that became its own kind of credential. Jeff Kaufman started writing in his freshman year of college (https://www.jefftk.com/p/webpage-up), Matt Y also started as a college student (https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/01/11/matt-yglesias-slow… Dan Luu's linkedin tagline is just '???'.

Here is a use case that almost any office worker encounters, and measurements to show that a wired connection is better : https://www.jefftk.com/p/ethernet-is-worth-it-for-video-calls Got any measurements to the contrary?

Anyone could implement this. The User-Agent of the feed request should include a subscriber count for each service that is downloading your feed to provide to its users. Examples: https://www.jefftk.com/p/looking-at-rss-user-agents

If you use a static site generator, there is a nice cli for doing that called openring. It's what is used by people like https://www.jefftk.com/ and https://drewdevault.com/. Drew wrote the OG version: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/openring I also made a little rust version here: https://github.com/lukehsiao/openring-rs

On this topic, what happened with https://www.jefftk.com/nextbus/ ? Seems to be a 404 now. Was there a breaking change or disruption in the nextbus API? I loved its bare-bones UI. It was definitely one of the most usable webapps. I assume its a11y was nearly perfect as well. If anyone would like to see it, here's an archived snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20170622033104/https://www.jefftk.com/next… I also admire https://diskprices.com/ for the same reasons.

This is good skills: https://www.jefftk.com/donations The author seems to have fallen into the classic trap of conflating media/medium and content. Content can be free (or not) but getting it to eyeballs requires additional effort that is rarely free/gratis (your ISP charges you).

If you haven't read much about earning to give, I recommend jefftk's blog.[0] That was where I first heard about the concept. I found it interesting to see how much he and his wife had earned for charities by working lucrative jobs and donating a large percentage of their earnings. [0] https://www.jefftk.com/donations

Some folks find that switching from WiFi to Ethernet for your home office can help: https://www.jefftk.com/p/ethernet-is-worth-it-for-video-calls

> There was structure, expectations, and responsibilities. jefftk makes this point in a reflection on raising his own child--that there is great value in providing an environment which is predictable: https://www.jefftk.com/p/how-to-parent-more-predictably

Yes. But quite possibly "greater efficiency" according to a fitness function that's not accurately mapped onto "keeping humans alive"... I wonder if this'll end up in an equivalent state to the "tank detection neural net" which learned with 100% accuracy that the researchers/trainers had always taken pictures of tanks on cloudy days and pictures without tanks on sunny days? ( https://www.jefftk.com/p/detecting-tanks ) Who'd bet against the doctor/insurer neural net training ending up approving all procedures where, say, the doctor ends up with a kickback from a drug company - instead of optimising for maximum human health benefit?

The research suggests SAT test prep has an effect of about one seventh of a standard deviation – about 50 points out of 2400[1]. That's significant but not huge. Most of the perception of large gains comes from the fact that people do better as they get older with or without coaching. (None of the research is great, but better than nothing.) [1]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/sat-coaching-what-effect-size

Exactly. One of my favorite blog post titles: "Make buses dangerous" https://www.jefftk.com/p/make-buses-dangerous

> The characters of this article are so carefully constructed to evade this question that I have to assume malice. Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman are real people who are, so far as I know, pretty much as the article describes: http://www.givinggladly.com/ http://www.jefftk.com/

Have you seen this on HN yet?: http://www.jefftk.com/p/how-to-get-a-massive-discount-on-college Get married to a platonic roommate with a prenup. Risky some what, but with prenups and no fault divorce the risk is greatly diminished. The access to finding another human to join incomes and assets for tax planning purposes has doubled.

This approach would make sense if most charities were similar in how much better they could make the world with your dollar. But instead there are huge differences! For example, if we look just at developing world health we see a power law distribution, where a few interventions are much better than the rest. [1] Instead of signing up to give small amounts to lots of different organizations, it's much better to find one working on one of these best approaches (givewell.org is helpful here) and fund that more. [1] http://www.jefftk.com/daly-per-1000-usd.png

I'm one of the people in the article. I'm really interested to learn that you were thinking along the same lines (assuming this was a while ago, if $36k was a lot?) I had heard of one reference to the idea from 1996, but otherwise I had only heard of it in the 2010s: http://www.jefftk.com/news/2012-09-18 I'd love to talk to you about how you and your friends got interested in this idea and what successes and failures you saw. I imagine there's a lot we can learn from your experience. juliawise07 at gmail

Related essay https://www.jefftk.com/p/yudkowsky-and-miri >In talking to ML researchers, many were unaware that there was any sort of effort to reduce risks from superintelligence. Others had heard of it before, and primarily associated it with Nick Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and MIRI. One of them had very strong negative opinions of Eliezer, extending to everything they saw as associated with him, including effective altruism. >They brought up the example of So you want to be a seed AI programmer, saying that it was clearly written by a crank. And, honestly, I initially thought it was someone trying to parody him. Here are some bits that kind of give the flavor: >>First, there are tasks that can be easily modularized away from deep AI issues; any decent True Hacker should be able to understand what is needed and do it. Depending on how many such tasks there are, there may be a limited number of slots for nongeniuses. Expect the competition for these slots to be very tight. ... [T]he primary prerequisite will be programming ability, experience, and sustained reliable output. We will probably, but not definitely, end up working in Java. [1] Advance knowledge of some of the basics of cognitive science, as described below, may also prove very helpful. Mostly, we'll just be looking for the best True Hackers we can find. >Or: >>I am tempted to say that a doctorate in AI would be negatively useful, but I am not one to hold someone's reckless youth against them - just because…

E.g., the majority of the posts on https://jefftk.com

I love it when anything Caenorhabditis elegans (C. Elegans) related pops up because this little biological organism sits at this beautiful intersection between technology and biology and philosophy. The successful emulation of C. Elegans would represent a concrete step towards whole brain emulation and all the transhuman and ethical and moral quandaries that would bring. The general idea is that the human brain has billions of neurons, Elegans has hundreds (and we've had them mapped since 1986). If one can successfully "upload" Elegans, then humans are just a matter of scale. However, it should be noted that the field, and specifically this line of research, hasn't produced much in the way of results in 10+ years. University of Oregon planned (though I can't tell if they ever developed) NemaSys[0] ~1997. OpenWorm has been exploring this since 2011. Project Nemaload explored it a bit from 2011-2013.[1] But each project ran into three problems: - Knowing the connections isn't enough. We also need to know the weights and thresholds. We don't know how to read them from a living worm.[2] - C. elegans is able to learn by changing the weights. We don't know how weights and thresholds are changed in a living worm.[2] - Funding [3] The best we can do is modeling a generic worm - pretraining and running the neural network with fixed weights. Thus, no worm is "uploaded" because we can't read the weights, and these simulations are far from realistic because they are not capable of…

Do you track yourself? Do you check, what you are reading, and verify your own progress? Some time ago I started thinking about my problems with Google search, and was inspired by other project to write a program for myself. Throughout my life I have found many resources worthy of my time, but which I have lost, or forgotten about. I wanted to change that. I wanted to be able to look back. I have started my project in Sept of 2023. The core functionality is: to store, browse, and search for links. Additionally I added RSS sources as sources, so every hour I ping sources to check if there is anything new, and I expand my database. Does that replace Google search? Nope. On the other hand it expanded my horizons. I found most of RSS aggregators lacking: - some provides ability to bookmark entries, but some do not allow to insert links manually - some do not provide ability to tag links - some are on-line, and I strongly prefer local NAS web apps - most do not provide clean ability to search link database (as it may involve heavy operations) I found Google search lacking: - 10 pages each with 10 links for a searched keywords is not enough. If I write 'covid' into google search I would be expecting millions of links in results, from variety of sources. Even Fox news, even daily mail - I have results curated by big tech, I prefer to curate output myself What I have found about archive.org: - it is slow and unreliable - does not store RSS sources often enough - author…

When one of my upstairs toilets started leaking in my house in the US, it finally got so bad that I noticed a stain on the garage ceiling. The insurance inspector said that insurance would not cover a "slow leak". I was very nice and polite and pointed out how soaked the subfloor was and that there was no way to know when the leak started (which was true). She wrote her recommendation that it be covered, which the company apparently accepted since they wrote me a check. Definitely not $50k (more like $2.5k), but it's still disturbing that the line between insurance covering it and not covering it was so thin. I wonder if a more thorough inspection would have caught it. Surely houses built around that time are routinely inspected for asbestos, lead-based paint, etc before purchase anyway. (Actually, going back and reading the comments, he actually addresses this point: http://www.jefftk.com/p/mercury-spill#fb-752340840802_752343036402. Perhaps he could have made it a condition of purchase, that the seller pay for a mercury vapor inspection? Perhaps it's not such a common problem that such a requirement would be reasonable. Hindsight, etc.)

This is optimistic, I see "The cryonics people make a mistake in freezing you (how do we know they don't make lots of mistakes?)"[0] and "The current cryonics process is insufficient to preserve everything"[0] resulting of a product 10% already, seemingly matching the questionnaire as well as possible. They say "under ideal conditions" in the survey, so maybe that rules out cracking of brain tissue or ice growth, but that's not the number practitioners want to know about. [0]: https://www.jefftk.com/p/breaking-down-cryonics-probabilities “Principles of Cryopreservation by Vitrification” https://gwern.net/doc/biology/2015-fahy.pdf

Trial of Glycol, Far UVC, and CFM Measurement at BIDA https://www.jefftk.com/p/glycol-far-uvc-and-cfm-measurement-at-bida

I use git icdiff (a plugin) in my terminal. I use Zed and VSCode GUI editors, but I don’t care to use their git tools. Command line git is fine. https://www.jefftk.com/icdiff

Well, I base my opinion about EA on specific people I happen to know, such as https://www.jefftk.com/news/ea , but of course that shouldn't stop anyone from making up edgy interpretations and posting them as a fact. Because what is the point of discussing actual effective altruists when imaginary villains are a much more interesting topic.

OT: what's your blog based on? I looked for a colophon / about site page with no joy. Source suggests it's simply hand-coded HTML? Hrm... Apparently, plus some webscripts? <https://www.jefftk.com/p/designing-low-upkeep-software> <https://github.com/jeffkaufman/webscripts/blob/master/makerss.py>

This can be done but ergonomics become a consideration if you plan to spend some time there: https://mgsloan.com/posts/supine-computing/ https://www.piratekingdom.com/blog/my-productivity-couch-setup https://www.jefftk.com/p/folding-couch-monitor

Have you seen jefftk's ceiling air purifier? Post: https://www.jefftk.com/p/ceiling-air-purifier HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31590773

One tip for your .bashrc I only recently found out and can't do without anymore is one I picked up here (log all shell commands directly to a file): https://www.jefftk.com/p/you-should-be-logging-shell-history