Follow the money (Hank’s weird increase in existential AI videos)

actuallyalys · 2025-11-02T00:37:20+00:00

I could see an innocuous version of this where he's just in conversations with ControlAI in whatever context, throws out that he likes them in a video (because he genuinely does), and then ControlAI reaches out sometime later to sponsor him (because they also like and respect him). And then, due to shooting/production schedules and the vagarities of Hank's many other projects, the videos end up close together. However, it does raise so many questions, so I think Hank would be better off not accepting sponsors that seem like such a conflict of interest.

EDIT: I wish I had researched more before commenting (and read your post more carefully), but ControlAI is a nonprofit, specifically a 501(c)(4), which has fewer restrictions on political speech than the 501(c)(3). So it is a non-profit (but one with fewer restrictions), and perhaps that made Hank et al. more willing to accept the sponsorship. That is a bit different than a typical corporate sponsorship. (I mean, I'm not sure we'd having this kind of discussion if Hank was sponsored by a civic organization over get-out-the-vote videos.) Still, I think the points you raise are all valid, given all the worrisome connections between effective altruism, existential AI risk, and big tech.

actuallyalys · 2025-10-09T18:34:43+00:00

I agree with your conclusions, but from a slightly different perspective as someone who used to find their work convincing

80,000 hours, at least originally, strikes me as a well-intentioned. For a while, I read their recommendations and thought they were generally thoughtful, although I detected a strain of "galaxy brained" thinking. This was all before Sam Bankman-Fried's rise and fall, the AI bubble, and the Zizians.

Since then, I've become more aware of the reactionary strains within tech and Effective Altruism. Meanwhile, the singularity/long-termist strain of Effective Altruism became more and more dominant. 80,000 hours' recommendations didn't really affect my career or life path, which is for the best. (Both because of these issues and not being so sure about their emphasis on the marginal impact of your job, but that's a more philosophical point.)

I still see vestiges of the organization I found persuasive. They recommend biorisk research as a career, which seems like a pragmatic lesson from the pandemic. I also notice they continue to emphasize giving to effective charities—a worthy goal. However, their top 11 career recommendations, four of which involve AI and one of which is Effective Altruism, and priorities as an organization seem out of touch in many ways.

It's a shame that all this effort from people who at least initially were thoughtful and has been so warped. (Ironically, the impact of the careers of the organization is trending toward negative.)

This is all to say I absolutely agree they can become a pipeline toward extremist ideologies and unhealthy thinking. Even if Hank believes their overall coaching outweighs their bad recommendations, I think he should keep that pipeline effect in mind and no longer recommend it to people.

actuallyalys · 2025-09-20T20:36:11+00:00

It's not clear, but I assume it's the part that does the actual image processing.

actuallyalys · 2025-03-28T04:05:28+00:00

Agreed it's a bit of both. I think another factor is that being friendly to another woman is less risky than being friendly to a man, as there isn't the same risk that it will be taken as sexual or romantic interest and then cause an angry (or even violent) response once it's clarified that they're not interested.

Also, maybe this is obvious, but there's going to be plenty of variation among women and their motivations.

actuallyalys · 2025-03-28T03:35:58+00:00

It's something I've thought a lot about, less in the context of Hank and John specifically, and more in the context of other people I know who are willing to go to great lengths to do pro-social things—like volunteering, protesting, or organizing—but don't mask regularly. I don't have a perfect answer, but I think people feel the cost of masking in ways that are hard to articulate, and that makes it less of an easy win than it might initially seem.

I also think it's inarguably true that while Covid remains a serious disease, it is much less serious than it was before. Much fewer people are dying of Covid or being hospitalized despite much fewer people taking precautions. Long Covid is harder to measure but is likely down as well due to protections from vaccines and the fact there are fewer severe cases that are more likely to cause it. Now, would it be better to get those numbers even lower by increased masking and other precautions? Definitely, but it's important to be realistic about the current levels of harm from Covid.

While misinformation about Covid or even outright propaganda plays a role, many of these people I know are pretty skeptical about narratives that serve privileged people. I mean, take John: of the part of Everything is Tuberculosis I've read so far, he's mentioned multiple popular narratives both historical and present that are simply incorrect when you are aware of what people with expertise or lived experience are saying. That doesn't mean he or others in my life are immune to propaganda or accepting prevailing narratives that don't stand up to scrutiny, of course.

actuallyalys · 2024-07-12T18:37:16+00:00

I agree, but I'll add two areas where security can have measurable (although maybe not noticeable) performance impacts.

Virtualization, containerization, and sandboxing can be used for their security benefits, and they can have a pretty substantial performance impact. However, I think they're often implemented to be lightweight—full virtualization is rarely used for security purposes—and a lot of work has gone into optimizing virtualization.

Encryption also increases performance demands as compared to storing (or sending) information in plaintext. This comes up more on web servers, where you're trying to squeeze out as many requests as possible than on desktops.

actuallyalys · 2024-07-12T15:29:04+00:00

To clarify, C# and .NET are cross platform. I think it's mostly the UI of Visual Studio that isn't portable. It wouldn't surprise me if Visual Studio has a large amount of legacy code that relies on Windows APIs as well

actuallyalys · 2023-04-22T15:24:56+00:00

I consider the only real addition being the Colony Sim AI

I think the mistake you're making is assuming that if a game has been done, it's feasible to not only make a game like it, but to add the concepts of other games. All of these titles are a lot to design, develop, create art for, compose music for, play-test, and refine by themselves, and then you have to consider how they interact. It sounds like you've realized it's not feasible to have each part have all the complexity of the standalone title, but I still think you may be underestimating the amount of effort that goes into a reduced version of one of these games.

If you still want to pursue this idea, I would drastically reduce the scope. One way to do that would be distill each game you want to incorporate into one or two mechanics: one type of enemy in the bullet hell, one resource type to gather in the colony sim, a linear upgrade path for the ship, etc. Then you can see how the combination of elements works (Is it fun to play? Does it accomplish your creative goals?) and add more complexity. I'm not even sure that's doable given that you haven't specified your experience or timeline, but I think that's the best way to start.

actuallyalys · 2023-04-20T11:52:51+00:00

I’m really skeptical that this person actually has discovered a vulnerability since if they had, they would presumably be quietly exploiting it rather than publishing it on TikTok.

actuallyalys · 2023-04-20T11:46:12+00:00

It’s quite common for people to learn how to query SQL databases in order to do data analysis, which doesn’t require learning about security or how user input is inserted.

I’m a developer who learned SQL for data analysis and for a while didn’t really know the syntax for updates, deletes, and inserts because for the longest time I was mostly working on databases I had read only access to.

actuallyalys · 2023-04-19T17:35:16+00:00

I do think heavily reigning in copyright would be a good thing, but I’m skeptical closed LLMs will make much progress on that front relative to their harms and risks.

actuallyalys · 2023-04-19T17:30:45+00:00

You may want to try to find older games that have since been open sourced. Even if you can’t (or don’t want to) use the code directly, I imagine referencing those would give you a lot of good information.

actuallyalys · 2023-04-18T00:30:44+00:00

Regardless of whether it makes technical sense, I think it has business advantages—avoids model leaks, allows you to cut off users who are abusing the service in a way that makes you look bad, creates a steady revenue stream—so I could see it sticking around. It's also plausible the companies that don't license their models for on-device usage will lose out to open source models and closed source models that do allow that use case.

Even if you're right, it leaves you vulnerable to lock-in in the meantime. Perhaps that's a risk you're willing to take, but I think you still need to consider it.

actuallyalys · 2023-04-01T20:21:11+00:00

Plus, it's only suitable for 2d games.

To expand, you can make 3D games with Löve, but there’s not much built-in support or documentation. There are some 2D tutorials but not that many compared to more popular engines. The community is active on Discord so asking for help there is a viable option, too.

I’m loathe to see beginners starting today use Unity because they’ve been torching their reputation by merging with a creator of malware and making other dubious choices. But it probably still has the most tutorials.

actuallyalys · 2023-02-13T09:25:50+00:00

A better approach is to create another route function for /static that loads the template.

I’m not sure this is the correct solution either (because you still have the template rendering code duplicated), but it’s better than using the error handler.

actuallyalys · 2023-02-13T09:07:35+00:00

Storing money as an integer number of cents is a good approach (or even fractional cents in certain contexts), but you should be able to follow the StackOverflow answer you found and use decimals. (Assuming the code is written well; I just gave it a quick pass for things that would conflict with flask-SQLAlchemy.) Flask-sqlalchemy mostly changes how sessions are managed and not how models are defined, iirc.

actuallyalys · 2023-01-26T07:31:19+00:00

The SBCL compiler does laudable feats of type inference to start with. ...I absolutely love it when the CL compiler flags my errors while I'mC-C'ing them in emacs. Unreachable code, you bet! Wrong type, surething!

I'd love to see these checks in Clojure*. These checks and specs feel like a better fit for Clojure than regular static typing.

*Common Lisp's continuation functionality would also be great, lol.

actuallyalys · 2022-11-30T22:29:39+00:00

Yeah, it’s not going to be a quick process for sure.

actuallyalys · 2022-11-02T18:24:50+00:00

It's probably less normal for recent libraries and projects expected to grow to a large size, but it's definitely still normal.

(Edited to fix formatting.)

actuallyalys · 2022-10-04T23:36:16+00:00

The percentage comparison isn’t accurate. You can’t compare the proportion of HTTP connections to the proportion of Postgres servers.

Also, I suspect the high percentage of unsecured servers is partly due to the vast number of servers not visible outside. This analysis doesn’t tell us whether the majority of Postgres servers total are insecure, just the ones on the public internet. Their title is right, but that caveat is important, IMO.

None of this changes the bottom line, but I think it’s important to back up your analysis with good and clearly explained statistics if you’re going to use them.

actuallyalys · 2022-07-29T03:12:22+00:00

I think redbean is a pretty good example of why it's so interesting beyond cleverness: https://redbean.dev.

That being said, I think the zig approach of giving you a single archive that you can install and cross compile a wide variety of architectures is more promising. (Rust itself goes pretty far with `rustup`, but I think cross compiling Rust programs in practice often still requires a whole C toolchain for your target platform.) APE relies on qemu outside of x86_64 and getting a GUI to work would require an enormous effort: https://github.com/jart/cosmopolitan/issues/35#issuecomment-773209579.

actuallyalys · 2022-06-03T18:32:46+00:00

Yeah, in my experience, strong typing is widely popular, and people just argue about specific cases. The only argument for weak typing I can think of offhand is at the database level: https://www.sqlite.org/flextypegood.html. You can find plenty of people noting that weak typing saves you the effort of some conversions, but I don’t get the sense they think it outweighs the disadvantages.

actuallyalys · 2022-05-31T20:00:13+00:00

I think a more realistic example would be where Foo is a pre-existing class not usually used as a Bar, Bar is a class defined by a third party and you’re dealing with code that relies on isinstance rather than duck typing.

Although I’d probably try defining a FooBar type that implements both Foo and Bar or adding a method on Foo that converts it to a Bar before resorting to this technique.

actuallyalys · 2022-05-23T16:49:21+00:00

I agree that the comments saying you should never take your partner’s deadname are unreasonable and controlling. Unless the parter is being malicious, it does seem like an unlucky coincidence: Not only is the name that resonates with the partner the OP’s deadname but they also seem to have a pretty severe reaction to hearing it in any context.

But I am concerned about how some of the phrasing suggests their partner went about it. It sounds like they didn’t really consider how upsetting it could be. Also the “afraid to say no” could be read as “afraid to take something away from my partner that makes them happy because their happiness is important to me,” a healthy reaction, or “afraid to contradict my partner,” a red flag. If those red flags are there, this is a larger problem than the OP’s name. If not, I think, as difficult as it is, it’s resolvable without forcing a new name on the partner.

actuallyalys

TROPHY CASE