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Adding dormers to our house
Over the last year we added three dormers to our house. This added two bedrooms to our third floor, bringing it to four bedrooms. We changed: To: CostsConstruction The biggest cost was the...
View ArticleBlocking
Blocking on Facebook is very thorough. If A has blocked B then neither can see the other's posts, comments, or any other comments in threads the other starts, among other things. In many cases this is...
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Loft Idea
Currently when we have a guest spend the night we have a fold-out couch available in the living room. It's a good one so it's reasonably comfortable, but it's kind of in the middle of things. This...
View ArticleHow to make housing cheaper
Big coastal American cities have a problem: too many people want to live there. Overall this is much better than the reverse, but lots of people wanting to move in drives up housing costs, and people...
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Frozen Lunch Pucks
Now that I'm no longer at Google I'm making my own lunches. One thing I've been doing that I'm pretty happy with is making single serving "pucks" that I can freeze: I'll pick something that I think...
View ArticleReplace Infrastructure Wholesale?
Things used to be a lot cheaper to build than they are now. There are a lot of contributing factors, but a big one is that we already have a lot of things, and new things have to work around the...
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Python Navigation in Emacs
I'm now working full time in python in a medium-sized existing codebase, and I've started using jedi-mode for code navigation. What I really like about this package is that I can press C-c . to jump...
View ArticlehaMephorash
The last installment of Unsong comes out today. I transcribed the words of the main song from the chapter headings: haMephorash - Leonard Cohen - Scott Alexander (Tune is Hallelujah by non-fictional...
View ArticlePound Confusion
The Pound Sterling (GBP) is a peculiar currency union. There are English, Scottish, Northern Irish, Manx, Jersey, and Guernsey Pounds. And not only that, but the Scottish and Northern Irish pounds are...
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Text-to-Speech Speed
Interacting with phones by talking to them has gotten enormously better over the past few years, to where for many tasks it's now the most efficient way to interact with them. For example, saying "set...
View ArticleThree String Guitar Chords
The high three strings of a guitar are G-B-E, which is an interval of a third and then a fourth. The other strings of my guitar are broken right now, so I've been playing around with what chords work...
View ArticleWhat's Next?
I was laid off from Wave yesterday: they've decided that having engineers build a mobile money system in East Africa while living in the US has a lot of drawbacks, and I (and my family) aren't up for...
View ArticleShould I run for office?
On yesterday's post, one of the suggestions was running for office. I initially thought this wasn't a good fit, but now I'm less sure. Somerville local elections are coming up this fall [1] and I...
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June 2017 Time Tracking
Every so often Julia and I like to track how we spend our time, trying to keep things fair. (2015, 2011) Here's the most recent round, which corresponds to the week from 2017-06-14 to 2017-06-20:...
View ArticleLooking into AI Risk
In considering what to work on, I wrote that recently many people I respect have started to think that AI risk is the most valuable place to focus EA efforts. For example, 80000 Hours ranks it first...
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Triple Play Recorder
If you want to play recorder but have fewer than eight fingers the current options are all very expensive. This is a problem in elementary schools that use the recorder as a very cheap instrument that...
View ArticleSuperintelligence Risk Project
I've decided to make a larger project out of looking into AI risk. I don't think we really know why there's such a disconnect between people who think we should strongly prioritize it and the...
View ArticleConversation with Dario Amodei
Earlier this week I talked to Dario Amodei, a research scientist at OpenAI and one of the authors of Concrete Problems in AI Safety ( pdf). I wanted to talk to him as part of my superintelligence risk...
View ArticleSuperintelligence Risk Project Update
I've now been working on my project of assessing risk from superintelligence for a little over a week, though I was traveling for the end of last week. To keep me motivated, and let other people...
View ArticleConversation with Michael Littman
A few days ago I talked to Michael Littman, a CS professor at Brown working in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, as part of my project of assessing superintelligence risk. Michael doesn't...
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