Doing things on a computer - Building @memetok_app
EVM
Joined April 2013
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- Followers149
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To all the people running 10+ agents, pushing 100+ commits a day.
What exactly are you building?
I love the setups and the terminals and the UIs and the orchestration layers.
But where are they taking you?
I am genuinely curious.
Carlos Simko retweeted
>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
Launchpads are the dexes of this cycle
A lot will be created.
One will win the general market
Others will win the specialization game: (chain, market, intent)
Builders will build on top of them
KYC, personal information forms, etc...
You're basically handing out your privacy to someone else for what often leads to nothing.
-EV all the way
Woke up to all my data leaked by @Revolut.
Sharp reminder that KYC hasn’t produced meaningful upside and has put many in harm’s way.
Recently answered this question:
"What motivates you the most: research rigor, impact, ownership, speed of execution or financial upside? Why?"
---
For me it's a mix of a few: Impact, ownership and speed of execution.
I consider myself an engineer, so research rigor usually comes before or is adjacent to me. I like to execute.
On the other side of things, if I control and focus on the three that motivate me the most, financial upside is the by product of them. Any sort of force I could exert in order to achieve it can only be done (ethically) by pushing one of those three previously mentioned.
Impact is the most important, because regardless of what/how/where/when/why, it is the truest measure of success independent of the solution.
Ownership gives the me power and responsibility to execute at my highest standard.
And speed of execution is the guiding principle that both promotes innovation and improves my abilities.
Is it me or does every builder eventually hit a phase where they start wondering if something is spiritually blocking them ...
Carlos Simko retweeted
Devconnect Interview
Today we get to meet @MetaTradingCo from @Khugaverse
An energetic guy with a broken heart that likes to play chess 💔
@EFDevcon
@Simkocarlos
This is mostly how we tackle development over @memetok_app
Backend/deployments/contracts are the strictest of all.
Often manually review line-by-line
App sits somewhere in the middle
Internal tools are the closest to a black box for us (if it works and no one else is going to see it, ship it)
Hey ████,
I think there is room for both.
1. Prototypes and other throw-away code can be treated as totally black box. If you’re going to throw it away anyway, and if the blast radius of it breaking is low, it doesn’t need to be perfect.
2. Production code written by Claude should have a higher bar than if it was written by a human. At Anthropic, we have many guardrails in place to make sure this is happening: lots of lint rules, lots of tests, Claude-driven end to end tests, Claude-powered fuzzers running daily, automated code reviews and security reviews, automated code refactoring, and so on. Without these, you can end up with a mess that is hard to maintain down the line. Luckily, the model makes it increasingly easy to do these well — run a few daily routines, use Claude Code Review, etc.
Your job is to hold the bar on code quality. If Claude’s code doesn’t meet the bar, try:
- Using the latest frontier model (Opus 5 or Fable 5.1)
- Increase effort to high or xhigh
- Invest in your CLAUDE.md and skills to succinctly teach Claude how to work in your codebase
If all else fails, steer Claude more when you work with it, or have Claude fix accumulated debt and rewrite your codebase to make it easier to work with. Or, wait for the next model.
Best,
Boris
🔥
this wild defcon talk is finally out
researchers created a fake defi startup, hired lazarus it workers, put them into a sandbox and recorded their tooling, workflows, and faces from inside the operation
starts at 5:46:09
youtube.com/live/_uYQr8hfpbI…
