had this realization seeing this reddit post where the husbando redditor had happily (and laborously) set up a local household llm for him and his wife, and the wife refused to use it despite all his begging - most ppl would rather give their data to openai than to some small group of ppl. bc at least you have privacy through obscurity with openai, but if it's your fam then it's going to be obvious who is who if any data leaks (plus the dev might see your data). smallness/localness isn’t automatically higher trust - if anything, bigger companies like google, openai, aws etc get more trust than smaller players bc we assume they have more resources for security. it’s the same way sometimes smaller towns feel higher trust and other times bigger cities feel higher trust bc they have the sense of anonymity. “do I trust xyz with my data” - trust is a very load-bearing word here because it can mean “trust not to do bad things with” (husband wins) or “trust not to look at and realize is me” (big company wins) or “trust not to accidentally leak” (big company wins)

humor is encryption for covert signaling

prediction: culture will be invaluable to alignment because it gives us theory of mind

counterintuitive but in SF, I think it is harder to find solitude than social noise. NYC had much more visible social life, but also much more solitude. maybe that's just because it is easier to get lost in a big city than a small town?

consider the feeling you get when you're downstairs in your room and hearing ppl upstairs laughing and talking. you feel like you SHOULD be upstairs joining in the laughter but the introvert part of you is desperate to stay in. now imagine if you didn't have any roommates and just lived alone, you would never enter this dilemma in the first place. so you're quite happy in your room, not knowing that somewhere in the world, they are having fun without you. optionality is agony. choice is agony. but it's better to have that optionality and to suffer, than to never have that choice at all

econ is interesting bc it is about decision making under constraint. and all of life is about making decisions under constraint. see gary becker

competition is a discovery procedure (hayek). we don't know everything, we do know a way to discover it

i like AI pets bc i realize they are the only form of AI media that isn't dystopian. most AI-related stories are AI girlfriend or AI robot-slave. But actually Pokemon and Digimon are AI stories. they're non-human creatures of uncertain providence that you nevertheless care for and recognize the moral weight of, and they choose to team up with you to go on quests together! actually most childhood stories are like this (think Big Hero 6, Transformers) where robots are our friends, but it feels like we abandon that 'naivete' when we grow up.

sometimes you need short term to get to long term thinking

if cringe is a layer 2 feeling, irony is a layer 3 feeling. what are some other layer 3 feelings?