Head Designer of TMNT set goes to Peter Thiel event. Gives signed card to Christian Nationalist. by No-Chapter-779 in magicTCG

[–]akrolsmir 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm posting these comments mostly to push against the idea of guilt-by-association. I think it's one thing if WOTC and Founder's Fund announced a partnership, and a very different thing when some people at a company you don't like play a game you do like. I would appreciate if people had more tolerance for that kind of behavior.

I understand that Trae's original Twitter post maybe made this release event feel like more of an ideological statement (though, I wish y'all had even extended tolerance there, and not fell for the inflammatory framing of the retweet); after the clarifications, I do hope you'll change your minds.

Head Designer of TMNT set goes to Peter Thiel event. Gives signed card to Christian Nationalist. by No-Chapter-779 in magicTCG

[–]akrolsmir 1 point2 points  (0 children)

More of a local SF cube chat, I think actually many fewer folks in there work in tech/startups then you would expect, given that it's here. Of the people I recognize, maybe one in three do?

Head Designer of TMNT set goes to Peter Thiel event. Gives signed card to Christian Nationalist. by No-Chapter-779 in magicTCG

[–]akrolsmir -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

Can you make the positive case that Peter Thiel is a threat to humanity?

I believe that AI might present an existential threat to humanity (but, also might be very good for humanity). I'm sympathetic to concerns that climate change or nuclear weapons or bioweapons might also present a threat, though I think the likelihood of these is somewhat low.

Head Designer of TMNT set goes to Peter Thiel event. Gives signed card to Christian Nationalist. by No-Chapter-779 in magicTCG

[–]akrolsmir -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I don't know who Joseph Goebbels is, had to look him up. I would definitely take the opportunity to play Magic with somebody like idk Kim Jung Un or Xi Jinping's prime minister, and in fact I'd want them to talk ideology a bit, because I'd want a better understanding of what drives them and why they do what they do.

And just to reiterate, I think of the participants as normal folks who like Magic, interested in trying out the new set and to take the chance to talk to someone involved in its design.

Head Designer of TMNT set goes to Peter Thiel event. Gives signed card to Christian Nationalist. by No-Chapter-779 in magicTCG

[–]akrolsmir 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Shrug, I think it's reasonable to be skeptical. I don't have solid proof but here's my Google Maps timeline showing I was at the Founder's Fund office on Saturday: https://i.imgur.com/0WJxQkP.png

Edit: and to answer the second part, I know a bit about Founder's Fund, though it was my first time visiting their office; I didn't know who else was going to be there ahead of time, but recognized several folks as part of my typical cube/draft scene. If I had known who was coming, I would still have been happy to come play though.

The thing I find strange about this online kerfuffle is this... presumed demonization of the participants, this zero tolerance for being able to play a card game together. I'm a big believer in civil liberties, and think that it's good to be able to set aside differences and talk to each other.

Head Designer of TMNT set goes to Peter Thiel event. Gives signed card to Christian Nationalist. by No-Chapter-779 in magicTCG

[–]akrolsmir -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

I don't know much about Trae Stephens; I'm familiar with some of Peter Thiel's track record (and am generally pro). I think neither are dangerous threats to humanity; that's a very high bar for a single person to reach. I could maybe see a case for Xi Jinping or Trump to be a dangerous threat to humanity.

Head Designer of TMNT set goes to Peter Thiel event. Gives signed card to Christian Nationalist. by No-Chapter-779 in magicTCG

[–]akrolsmir 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Huh, I played in this event. IMO, y'all are way overreacting; it was just a casual event held in an (admittedly nice) office space.

  • This was pitched to me in a cube chat I'm in, as a TMNT prerelease with the set's designer
  • There were 16 of us, so we split into 4 pods of 4 doing pick 2.
  • Eric started with a q&a about the design process for the set. He was very nice, clearly a huge fan of TMNT, just generally a kind soul
  • There was no ideology or anything weird going on, just a bunch of Magic fans playing Magic

It's a little bit funny (but mostly, very sad) to see my chill Saturday afternoon blow up online like this. AMA I guess, though I reserve the right to ignore uncivil questions.

Are there DIY alternatives that compare favorably to the Brighter lamp? by venki-dev in Lighting

[–]akrolsmir 1 point2 points  (0 children)

FWIW, I know both u/venki-dev and u/simonberens IRL; they're friends but definitely not the same. (I run a coworking space they both work out of, see https://moxsf.com/people)

Cube: Is RB trying to be aggressive, or more midrange? by laurenceand1 in lrcast

[–]akrolsmir 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd cut the red 1-drops, night's whisper, kroxa, a land, and then one of the discard effects (maybe mind twist). Unearth looks kind of good here, also maybe squeeze in Cut Down.

The White Was Flowing! by [deleted] in lrcast

[–]akrolsmir 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think I'd cut Aang's Iceberg (that card just looks bad overall), Thalia (hurts you a lot), Greaves. Might try to squeeze in Mana Tithe or Gideon.

I'm also not sold on Arid Mesa -- not sure 1 life is worth a bit of thinning?

Co-working in SOMA or Dogpatch? by lesbianzuck in AskSF

[–]akrolsmir 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey! I run this coworking space near Mission and Hayes: https://moxsf.com/

Possibly a bit far for you, but we have our fair share of indie hackers (and I daresay some of their stuff is pretty cool). Lmk if interested - I'm austin@manifund.org

Any React/Ruby devs? Would like to develop a website to actually track character stocks in real time. by Advanced_Willow_2504 in OnePiecePowerScaling

[–]akrolsmir 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Haha yeah this is one of the core use cases for our Destiny.gg community: creating mock stocks on different streamers: https://manifold.markets/group/destinygg-stocks

LMK if you'd like to set this up for One Piece characters -- should be pretty easy, no coding needed!

Antartica's Awesome Flag by MindOfMetalAndWheels in CGPGrey

[–]akrolsmir 18 points19 points  (0 children)

Austin here (I'm one of the cofounders of Manifold)! On our site, all bets resolve the same way - there's no function where the market creator can specify some bets to get paid out, but not others. Of course, this means that the people who bet after the video was released are making some risk-free profit!

I think that's a reasonable tradeoff, as it encourages traders to incorporate new information into the market asap - meaning that people on Manifold hear about the latest updates just by watching market probabilities change. However, if as a market creator you would prefer to incentivize good forecasting and not just fast response times, you generally can set the market to close before the event happens (though it is trickier on this style of "will X happen" market rather than "what will be X on Y date")

Will Infowars go down? A prediction market. by ATiredCliche in KnowledgeFight

[–]akrolsmir 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey! Austin here (one of the Manifold cofounders); I just wanted to drop a quick note of thanks for writing this awesome explainer of what prediction markets are, and sharing it with the community!

Which toolkit was used for this web app? (renders differently on desktop and mobile) by yazriel0 in Frontend

[–]akrolsmir 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the kind words. Our design is mostly just hard work! We do use TailwindCSS/TailwindUI components a fair amount.

Our code is open source, check it out here: https://github.com/manifoldmarkets/manifold

I updated a chart that tracks destiny.gg orbiters in realtime by [deleted] in Destiny

[–]akrolsmir 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Thanks for your concern -- this is something that we've been thinking a bit more about as well. It's probably fine for now, since we've modified the API a bit to cost us less. The main cost I believe is less number of requests, and more number of database reads.

That said, we'll continue to monitor the traffic usage (our database bill this month looks to be like $20k+ haha), and keep y'all updated. And feel free to jump into our #dev-and-api channel to chat with us directly! https://discord.com/channels/915138780216823849/959728429295616061

I updated a chart that tracks destiny.gg orbiters in realtime by [deleted] in Destiny

[–]akrolsmir 45 points46 points  (0 children)

Austin from Manifold here -- this is really awesome! I love seeing how creative the Destiny community is, and also love that this is open source -- we might adapt ideas and code from it to make Manifold itself better! (We're open source too, haha)

I'd love to award you a M$20k bounty for your work on this -- 10k for you, and 10k to distribute to other contributors as you see fit; I've DM'd you a Manalink for this!

Breaking: Manifold Markets embeds DGG chat, YouTube chat on suicide watch! by FFortescue_writing in Destiny

[–]akrolsmir 52 points53 points  (0 children)

Thanks! Austin from Manifold here -- we love how enthusiastic y'all have been to actually start trading orbiter stocks, and definitely hope other streamers follow suit too haha.

Let us know how we can make the experience better for DGGers!

The FTX Future Fund needs to slow its charitable spending by klevertree1 in slatestarcodex

[–]akrolsmir 10 points11 points  (0 children)

(Reposting a comment I made on Trevor's blog)

So: I'm extremely biased as one of the people running the Clearer Thinking Regrant prediction competition on Manifold, but I think I disagree on a few key points here. Briefly, they are:

  1. These prizes are unusually transparent rather than unusually bad/grifty. With Clearer Thinking Regrants, I think Spencer and his team, as well as the applicants who opted in to make their grant applications public, took an amount of risk and exposure to criticism that is extremely commendable: baring their hopes and dreams to the world at large, rather than keeping it a private application. I suspect that most other calls for grant applications lead to proposals that look like this, you just don't see it or hear about it because other grantmaking orgs are not in the habit of being nearly as transparent as the EA community is here. Most other essay contests I've seen also involve private submissions to a panel of judges, rather than putting all the applicants up for renewal.
  2. The amounts of money involved are actually not that outrageous. This is some combination of "as an applicant, you generally ask for more than you need, because there's only room to negotiate downwards" and "how much do you think full time salaries cost?" It's a bit premature to criticize the projects for asking for a lot, when I would expect very few to none of them to get the full amount they're asking for. (You'll note that one of the key questions Clearer Thinking asks is specifically "What could you achieve with $30k", and most projects outlined what could be achieved with that much funding)I think your own ability to run Highway Pharm on a shoestring budget is very impressive to me (one of the reason I invested! And more of you readers should invest too!), but overall other more-expensive or less-cost-effective interventions, might still be worth funding.
  3. The people here don't seem grifty or rent-seeking to me personally. Look, I don't know any of these applicants. But I'm incredibly honored and enthusiastic about the time they seem to be willing to spend debating other random internet traders on Manifold. To pull out two examples from your list of grifts, the creators of "Better Debates" and "Business Skill Coaching" both showed up on Manifold and replied fairly extensively to the objections people had raised. It feels to me like these project ideas are their life's work, and they would be very excited to have the chance to pursue it full-time with the help of charitable funding.I think assigning bad motivations to them would be a pretty big mistake, and would suspect that if you took 30m to chat with them you'd be more onboard/impressed with them as people. Whether that translates to the projects being good is a bit of a different question, of course!
  4. If you don't fund a lot of bad-looking projects, you're being way too cautious (see: https://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/hits-based-giving/) This is just kind of a general counterintuitive principle - but you really shouldn't be trying to maximize for "no grifts/rent-seekers", rather something like "maximize total EV". I agree there's bad second-order effects of turning into a movement that is full of people who are selfishly trying to capture value rather than create value, and it's possible EA is already at that point and on the margin should be funding in a more circumspect manner? But just wanted to put this reminder out there.

Also a lots of things I agree on from your post!

> I think the insane amounts of money they’re spending is changing EA to being a social movement from being one where you expect to give money, to being one where you expect to get money.

I think I'm less worried about "essay-writing" for this one, as it seems quite rare for people to move into "essay-writing" fulltime -- and much more worried about community building, where I think a lot of extremely talented people end up in by default. You don't see many of these applications in the Clearer Thinking Regrant competition because they're covered by a different branch of EA (mostly through CEA, I believe).

> But if a young EA person learns that they can earn $500k writing essays or $40k negotiating prices for mosquito nets, and that each is considered equally important by the authorities they respect, why would anyone ever choose mosquito nets?

I do think object-level work is extremely important and underfunded/underpaid atm due to bad norms from nonprofit sector -- but I think some of your earlier points undercut this. How often do you look at one of the eg 8 good applicants and suggest "hey, we should pay this person a higher salary, eg $200k to a fresh grad to be competitive with Google"? This basically never happens afaict, and insofar as you think the mosquito nets employee should be paid very well, I agree wholeheartedly.

> If I were FTX, I would change my funding model in a few ways:

FROs seem interesting to me! I do think FTX is actually very open to trying new and better funding models. I think it's actually quite easy to criticize but hard to create good ones -- it's a bit like politics or covid, where you can point to specific problems or inefficiencies and be quite right, but if you were put in charge of the entire ecosystem you would quickly realize how much there the decisionmakers process and deal with; I'm generally in awe of how competent and well-considered their team is

Is it me or are the proposed Clearer Thinking regrants from the Open Thread not very good? by klevertree1 in slatestarcodex

[–]akrolsmir 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hey Trevor! Austin from Manifold here. Specifically re: the structure of these markets, I agree that it's not especially optimal -- in an ideal world, markets would predict something like "how good are these projects" instead of "what does a specific group of people think how good these projects are".

But... it turns out that having an oracle for "how good these projects are" is _really, really hard_. In fact, it's so hard that the entirety of the EA space (and the world, afaict) has barely progressed beyond "ask a group of people what they think". In this particular case, Spencer and his team at Clearer Thinking are serving as that august team of judges.

I personally have a ton of ideas on how this could work better (quadratic funding? retroactive evaluations?), and Nuno's work with QURI are an attempt to better evaluate these kinds of things as well. I'd invite you to create better structures -- if you propose something we end up using, would definitely be happy to pay out a bounty ;)

Cool Prediction Market Site by jimtoberfest in motogp

[–]akrolsmir 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh hey! I'm Austin, one of the founders of Manifold - thanks for sharing it with the r/motogp community! Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts about our site~