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99.99% Friendly AI isn’t good enough
One of the first articles from The AI Security and Safety Book is Max Tegmark’s Friendly Artificial Intelligence paper from 2014. The paper is wonderful, but its purpose is hard to understand. After reading it multiple times, I came to a core quote that made sense to me: To program a friendly AI, we need…
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Musk on AI safety before xAI in 2019
MUSK: I think there is a lot—a tremendous amount of investment—going on in AI. Where there’s a lack of investment is in AI safety. And there should be, in my view, a government agency that oversees anything related to AI to confirm that it does not represent a public safety risk. Just as there is…
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The dance, between vulnerability and trust
I got angry at a team mate a couple of days ago, a team mate who I highly admire who is guiding us into a challenging year. He then very reasonably suggested we discus the underlying causes of it, between the three of us working at the time. One of his suggestions was 1-on-1 talks,…
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Why functional programming?
This is a post to discuss the benefits of functional programming (FP) for those who don’t use functional programming and I guess most relevant for full stack developers – you love your JavaScript and your SQL children equally. tl;dr: FP combines well with SQL, is easy to learn like Excel, is declarative, makes you think…
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Composable
What does it mean to say that something is composable in JavaScript? These are some notes after watching the funfunfunction Promises video. Callbacks are not composable, but Promises are. My simple understanding of composing two functions is just calling one function inside another: The example compares callbacks: vs Promises: Or in individual terms, we can…
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VSCode Neovim setup
I recently switched over to using the vscode-neovim extension for VSCode. What wasn’t obvious though was how to get a plugin manager and plugins / vim customisations working. I’ll add here quickly my plugins setup as I’m using vim-surround, and a bunch of Tim Pope plugins: I’m on Linux / Ubuntu 22.04, with nvim installed…
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Javascript REPL
I really like the simple ‘console’ REPL that you have in a browser debug tools. I wanted to recreate this in VS Code. tl;dr Debug console It turns out after lots of experimenting this can be also done with the ‘Debug Console’ when you start a debug session – see VSCode debugging. This is exactly…
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VSCode debugging
What I don’t think a lot of VSCode users are used to is constantly living with the debugger turned on. Most web devs grew up in a world without Visual Studio, so console.log is the norm. However anyone who used Visual Studio for Visual Basic or C# development will know the power of constantly using…
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A Happy Illustrated Guide to a PhD
Originally posted on Toeholds: Diego posted a link to Matt Might’s article “The Illustrated Guide to a PhD“, which was funny, sad, and many would think is accurate. Since I feel optimistic today, I would like to extend on that with an encouraging note. While we’re all familiar with “perfect” objects, like a circle, triangle,…
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‘Science is not for scientists, but for the world’
This is an article from a Belgian magazine, Knack – all copyright is theirs. I’m just posting it here, because Hannah Arendt (“The banality of evil“) is a fascinating person and I think this article is important enough to be shared in English. https://www.knack.be/nieuws/belgie/wetenschap-is-er-niet-voor-wetenschappers-maar-voor-de-wereld/article-opinion-1807221.html ‘In times of rapidly increasing polarization, it is especially important not…
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Ian Channing 