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Summary This week Anna (https://x.com/AnnaRRose) catches up with Zac Williamson (https://x.com/Zac_Aztec) & Ariel Gabizon (https://x.com/rel_zeta_tech) from Aztec (https://aztec.network/). They explore what's new since they were both on the show last spring before diving into the pair's work over the last year, covering everything from Zac's contributions to Aztec 3 to Ariel's latest research on IVC with his publications of the Protostar and Stackproofs works. Here's some additional links for this episode: [Episode 273: History of Plonk, Noir, and the building of Aztec 3(]https://zeroknowledge.fm/273-2/) Episode 274: SNARKs: A Trilogy with Ariel Gabizon (https://zeroknowledge.fm/274-2/) 5:51 * zkSummit: plookup: Speeding up the PLONK prover - Zac Williamson & Ariel Gabizon (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vdlc1CmRYRY) 13:01 * HyperNova: Recursive arguments for customizable constraint systems by Kothapalli and Setty (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/573.pdf) 13:01 * ProtoStar: Generic Efficient Accumulation/Folding for Special Sound Protocols by Bünz and Chen (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/620.pdf) 27:24 * cq: Cached quotients for fast lookups by Eagen, Fiore and Gabizon (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1763.pdf) 34:54 * Delegating Computation: Interactive Proofs for Muggles by Goldwasser, Kalai and Rothblum (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2008-DelegatingComputation.pdf) 34:54 * Unlocking the lookup singularity with Lasso by Setty, Thaler and Wahby (https://people.cs.georgetown.edu/jthaler/Lasso-paper.pdf) 36:36 * Stackproofs: Private proofs of stack and contract execution using Protogalaxy by Eagen, Gabizon, Sefranek, Towa and Williamson (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/1281.pdf) 54:32 * Accumulation without Homomorphism by Bünz, Mishra, Nguyen and Wang (https://eprint.iacr.org/2024/474.pdf) 55:24 * Aztec.network (https://aztec.network/) Check out the ZK Jobs Board (https://jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm/) for the latest jobs in ZK at jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm (https://jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm/) zkSummit12 is happening in Lisbon next week on Oct 8th! Applications to attend are now open at zksummit.com (https://www.zksummit.com/), apply today as early bird tickets are limited! Episode Sponsors Attention, all projects in need of server-side proving, kick start your rollup with Gevulot's ZkCloud, the first zk-optimized decentralized cloud! Get started with a free trial plus extended grant opportunities for premier customers until Q1 2025. Register at Gevulot.com (https://gevulot.com/). Aleo (http://aleo.org/) is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. As Aleo is gearing up for their mainnet launch in Q1, this is an invitation to be part of a transformational ZK journey. Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/ (http://aleo.org/). If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (www.youtube.com/channel/UCYWsYz5cKw4wZ9Mpe4kuM_g)

Send us a Text Message.Curious about how to leverage the power of SEO to get your website noticed? Master essential concepts and terminology in our latest installment of the SEO A to Z series, where we break down everything you need to know starting with the letter 'C'. From understanding how cached pages work and how Google stores them, to the critical role of CTAs in boosting user engagement, we leave no stone unturned. We'll also demystify canonical tags and URLs, offering insights on how to prevent duplicate content issues and ensure Google indexes your preferred pages. Plus, get up-to-date on the growing influence of ChatGPT in the SEO world and Google's current stance on AI-generated content.But that's not all—we're diving into the murky waters of black hat SEO techniques and strategies. Learn about "churn and burn," a controversial tactic aiming for quick gains at the risk of a ban, and the impact of citations for local SEO. We'll also cover cloaking, where different content is served to users and search engines, and discuss keyword and page clustering with real-world examples from broadband.co.uk. And of course, no SEO discussion is complete without touching on Content Management Systems like WordPress and the importance of commercial intent in search queries. Don't miss this jam-packed episode filled with actionable insights and expert advice!Links to resources mentioned in this podcast:- SEO Glossary- SEO Glossary CSEO Is Not That Hard is hosted by Edd Dawson and brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUse.comYou can get your free copy of my 101 Quick SEO Tips at: https://seotips.edddawson.com/101-quick-seo-tipsTo get a personal no-obligation demo of how KeywordsPeopleUse could help you boost your SEO then book an appointment with me nowAsk me a question and get on the show Click here to record a questionFind Edd on Twitter @channel5Find KeywordsPeopleUse on Twitter @kwds_ppl_use"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 Licensehttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Summary In this week's episode, Anna (https://x.com/AnnaRRose) and Tarun (https://x.com/tarunchitra) chat with Sims Gautham (https://twitter.com/simanta_gautam) and Liam Eagen (https://twitter.com/liameagen) from Alpen Labs (https://twitter.com/alpenlabs). They dive into the world of Bitcoin L2s and focus on how ZK can be used to incorporate strong connections between Bitcoin and new execution environments. The group then explore BitVM, covenants, the distinction between the Bridge Operators and sequencers in this model - and how this differs from how these actors work in Eth L2s. They then dive into SNARKnado, including what is happening under the hood, the ways in which this system offers round-based fraud games mixed with ZK and which agent provides DA and more. Here's some additional links for this episode: Bulletproofs++: Next Generation Confidential Transactions via Reciprocal Set Membership Arguments by Eagen, Kanjalkar, Ruffing, Nick (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/510.pdf) Bulletproofs: Short Proofs for Confidential Transactions and More by Bünz, Bootle, Boneh, Andrew, Wuille, and Maxwell (https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/1066.pdf) Zcash Website (https://z.cash/) Protogalaxy: Efficient Protostar-style folding of multiple instances by Eagen and Gabizon (https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1106.pdf) cq: * Cached quotients for fast lookups by Eagen, Fiore and Gabizon (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1763.pdf) Zerocoin: Anonymous Distributed E-Cash from Bitcoin by Miers, Garman, Green and Rubin (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6547123) Zerocash: Decentralized Anonymous Payments from Bitcoin (extended version) by Ben-Sasson, Chiesa, Garman, Green, Miers, Tromer and Virza (https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/349.pdf) Monero Ring Signatures (https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/ringsignatures.html) Blockstream Whitepapers (https://blockstream.com/whitepapers/) Scalable, transparent, and post-quantum secure computational integrity by Ben-Sasson, Bentov, Horesh and Riabzev (https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/046.pdf) Ordinal Theory by Casey Rodarmor (https://rodarmor.com/blog/ordinal-theory/) BitVM: Compute Anything on Bitcoin by Robin Linus (https://bitvm.org/bitvm.pdf) BitVM 2 (https://bitvm.org/bitvm2) BitVM Website (https://bitvm.org/) Jeremy Rubin Blog on Lamport Signatures (https://rubin.io/blog/2021/07/02/signing-5-bytes/) Introducting SNARKnado by Alpen Labs (https://www.alpenlabs.io/blog/snarknado-practical-round-efficient-snark-verifier-on-bitcoin) ZK Hack Montreal has been announced for Aug 9 - 11! Apply to join the hackathon here (https://zk-hack-montreal.devfolio.co/). Episode Sponsors Launching soon, Namada (https://namada.net/) is a proof-of-stake L1 blockchain focused on multichain, asset-agnostic privacy, via a unified shielded set. Namada is natively interoperable with fast-finality chains via IBC, and with Ethereum using a trust-minimised bridge. Follow Namada on Twitter @namada (https://twitter.com/namada) for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada (http://discord.gg/namada). Aleo (http://aleo.org/) is a new Layer-1 blockchain that achieves the programmability of Ethereum, the privacy of Zcash, and the scalability of a rollup. Dive deeper and discover more about Aleo at http://aleo.org/ (http://aleo.org/). If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)

NLW gives the update on the EU AI Act, and why multiple parties don't love where it landed. Also, does a Bing cache leak confirm GPT 4.5? Sponsors: Try Notion free at https://notion.com/aibreakdown ABOUT THE AI BREAKDOWN The AI Breakdown helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI.  Subscribe to The AI Breakdown newsletter: https://theaibreakdown.beehiiv.com/subscribe Subscribe to The AI Breakdown on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheAIBreakdown Join the community: bit.ly/aibreakdown Learn more: http://breakdown.network/

* Listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts* Be sure to check out and follow Holly's Substack and org Pause AI. Blurb and summary from ClongBlurbHolly and Aaron had a wide-ranging discussion touching on effective altruism, AI alignment, genetic conflict, wild animal welfare, and the importance of public advocacy in the AI safety space. Holly spoke about her background in evolutionary biology and how she became involved in effective altruism. She discussed her reservations around wild animal welfare and her perspective on the challenges of AI alignment. They talked about the value of public opinion polls, the psychology of AI researchers, and whether certain AI labs like OpenAI might be net positive actors. Holly argued for the strategic importance of public advocacy and pushing the Overton window within EA on AI safety issues.Detailed summary* Holly's background - PhD in evolutionary biology, got into EA through New Atheism and looking for community with positive values, did EA organizing at Harvard* Worked at Rethink Priorities on wild animal welfare but had reservations about imposing values on animals and whether we're at the right margin yet* Got inspired by FLI letter to focus more on AI safety advocacy and importance of public opinion* Discussed genetic conflict and challenges of alignment even with "closest" agents* Talked about the value of public opinion polls and influencing politicians* Discussed the psychology and motives of AI researchers* Disagreed a bit on whether certain labs like OpenAI might be net positive actors* Holly argued for importance of public advocacy in AI safety, thinks we have power to shift Overton window* Talked about the dynamics between different AI researchers and competition for status* Discussed how rationalists often dismiss advocacy and politics* Holly thinks advocacy is neglected and can push the Overton window even within EA* Also discussed Holly's evolutionary biology takes, memetic drive, gradient descent vs. natural selectionFull transcript (very imperfect)AARONYou're an AI pause, Advocate. Can you remind me of your shtick before that? Did you have an EA career or something?HOLLYYeah, before that I was an academic. I got into EA when I was doing my PhD in evolutionary biology, and I had been into New Atheism before that. I had done a lot of organizing for that in college. And while the enlightenment stuff and what I think is the truth about there not being a God was very important to me, but I didn't like the lack of positive values. Half the people there were sort of people like me who are looking for community after leaving their religion that they grew up in. And sometimes as many as half of the people there were just looking for a way for it to be okay for them to upset people and take away stuff that was important to them. And I didn't love that. I didn't love organizing a space for that. And when I got to my first year at Harvard, harvard Effective Altruism was advertising for its fellowship, which became the Elite Fellowship eventually. And I was like, wow, this is like, everything I want. And it has this positive organizing value around doing good. And so I was totally made for it. And pretty much immediately I did that fellowship, even though it was for undergrad. I did that fellowship, and I was immediately doing a lot of grad school organizing, and I did that for, like, six more years. And yeah, by the time I got to the end of grad school, I realized I was very sick in my fifth year, and I realized the stuff I kept doing was EA organizing, and I did not want to keep doing work. And that was pretty clear. I thought, oh, because I'm really into my academic area, I'll do that, but I'll also have a component of doing good. I took giving what we can in the middle of grad school, and I thought, I actually just enjoy doing this more, so why would I do anything else? Then after grad school, I started applying for EA jobs, and pretty soon I got a job at Rethink Priorities, and they suggested that I work on wild animal welfare. And I have to say, from the beginning, it was a little bit like I don't know, I'd always had very mixed feelings about wild animal welfare as a cause area. How much do they assume the audience knows about EA?AARONA lot, I guess. I think as of right now, it's a pretty hardcore dozen people. Also. Wait, what year is any of this approximately?HOLLYSo I graduated in 2020.AARONOkay.HOLLYYeah. And then I was like, really?AARONOkay, this is not extremely distant history. Sometimes people are like, oh, yeah, like the OG days, like four or something. I'm like, oh, my God.HOLLYOh, yeah, no, I wish I had been in these circles then, but no, it wasn't until like, 2014 that I really got inducted. Yeah, which now feels old because everybody's so young. But yeah, in 2020, I finished my PhD, and I got this awesome remote job at Rethink Priorities during the Pandemic, which was great, but I was working on wild animal welfare, which I'd always had some. So wild animal welfare, just for anyone who's not familiar, is like looking at the state of the natural world and seeing if there's a way that usually the hedonic so, like, feeling pleasure, not pain sort of welfare of animals can be maximized. So that's in contrast to a lot of other ways of looking at the natural world, like conservation, which are more about preserving a state of the world the way preserving, maybe ecosystem balance, something like that. Preserving species diversity. The priority with wild animal welfare is the effect of welfare, like how it feels to be the animals. So it is very understudied, but I had a lot of reservations about it because I'm nervous about maximizing our values too hard onto animals or imposing them on other species.AARONOkay, that's interesting, just because we're so far away from the margin of I'm like a very pro wild animal animal welfare pilled person.HOLLYI'm definitely pro in theory.AARONHow many other people it's like you and formerly you and six other people or whatever seems like we're quite far away from the margin at which we're over optimizing in terms of giving heroin to all the sheep or I don't know, the bugs and stuff.HOLLYBut it's true the field is moving in more my direction and I think it's just because they're hiring more biologists and we tend to think this way or have more of this perspective. But I'm a big fan of Brian domestics work. But stuff like finding out which species have the most capacity for welfare I think is already sort of the wrong scale. I think a lot will just depend on how much. What are the conditions for that species?AARONYeah, no, there's like seven from the.HOLLYCoarseness and the abstraction, but also there's a lot of you don't want anybody to actually do stuff like that and it would be more possible to do the more simple sounding stuff. My work there just was consisted of being a huge downer. I respect that. I did do some work that I'm proud of. I have a whole sequence on EA forum about how we could reduce the use of rodenticide, which I think was the single most promising intervention that we came up with in the time that I was there. I mean, I didn't come up with it, but that we narrowed down. And even that just doesn't affect that many animals directly. It's really more about the impact is from what you think you'll get with moral circle expansion or setting precedents for the treatment of non human animals or wild animals, or semi wild animals, maybe like being able to be expanded into wild animals. And so it all felt not quite up to EA standards of impact. And I felt kind of uncomfortable trying to make this thing happen in EA when I wasn't sure that my tentative conclusion on wild animal welfare, after working on it and thinking about it a lot for three years, was that we're sort of waiting for transformative technology that's not here yet in order to be able to do the kinds of interventions that we want. And there are going to be other issues with the transformative technology that we have to deal with first.AARONYeah, no, I've been thinking not that seriously or in any formal way, just like once in a while I just have a thought like oh, I wonder how the field of, like, I guess wild animal sorry, not wild animal. Just like animal welfare in general and including wild animal welfare might make use of AI above and beyond. I feel like there's like a simple take which is probably mostly true, which is like, oh, I mean the phrase that everybody loves to say is make AI go well or whatever that but that's basically true. Probably you make aligned AI. I know that's like a very oversimplification and then you can have a bunch of wealth or whatever to do whatever you want. I feel like that's kind of like the standard line, but do you have any takes on, I don't know, maybe in the next couple of years or anything more specifically beyond just general purpose AI alignment, for lack of a better term, how animal welfare might put to use transformative AI.HOLLYMy last work at Rethink Priorities was like looking a sort of zoomed out look at the field and where it should go. And so we're apparently going to do a public version, but I don't know if that's going to happen. It's been a while now since I was expecting to get a call about it. But yeah, I'm trying to think of what can I scrape from that?AARONAs much as you can, don't reveal any classified information. But what was the general thing that this was about?HOLLYThere are things that I think so I sort of broke it down into a couple of categories. There's like things that we could do in a world where we don't get AGI for a long time, but we get just transformative AI. Short of that, it's just able to do a lot of parallel tasks. And I think we could do a lot we could get a lot of what we want for wild animals by doing a ton of surveillance and having the ability to make incredibly precise changes to the ecosystem. Having surveillance so we know when something is like, and the capacity to do really intense simulation of the ecosystem and know what's going to happen as a result of little things. We could do that all without AGI. You could just do that with just a lot of computational power. I think our ability to simulate the environment right now is not the best, but it's not because it's impossible. It's just like we just need a lot more observations and a lot more ability to simulate a comparison is meteorology. Meteorology used to be much more of an art, but it became more of a science once they started just literally taking for every block of air and they're getting smaller and smaller, the blocks. They just do Bernoulli's Law on it and figure out what's going to happen in that block. And then you just sort of add it all together and you get actually pretty good.AARONDo you know how big the blocks are?HOLLYThey get smaller all the time. That's the resolution increase, but I don't know how big the blocks are okay right now. And shockingly, that just works. That gives you a lot of the picture of what's going to happen with weather. And I think that modeling ecosystem dynamics is very similar to weather. You could say more players than ecosystems, and I think we could, with enough surveillance, get a lot better at monitoring the ecosystem and then actually have more of a chance of implementing the kinds of sweeping interventions we want. But the price would be just like never ending surveillance and having to be the stewards of the environment if we weren't automating. Depending on how much you want to automate and depending on how much you can automate without AGI or without handing it over to another intelligence.AARONYeah, I've heard this. Maybe I haven't thought enough. And for some reason, I'm just, like, intuitively. I feel like I'm more skeptical of this kind of thing relative to the actual. There's a lot of things that I feel like a person might be skeptical about superhuman AI. And I'm less skeptical of that or less skeptical of things that sound as weird as this. Maybe because it's not. One thing I'm just concerned about is I feel like there's a larger scale I can imagine, just like the choice of how much, like, ecosystem is like yeah, how much ecosystem is available for wild animals is like a pretty macro level choice that might be not at all deterministic. So you could imagine spreading or terraforming other planets and things like that, or basically continuing to remove the amount of available ecosystem and also at a much more practical level, clean meat development. I have no idea what the technical bottlenecks on that are right now, but seems kind of possible that I don't know, AI can help it in some capacity.HOLLYOh, I thought you're going to say that it would increase the amount of space available for wild animals. Is this like a big controversy within, I don't know, this part of the EA animal movement? If you advocate diet change and if you get people to be vegetarians, does that just free up more land for wild animals to suffer on? I thought this was like, guys, we just will never do anything if we don't choose sort of like a zone of influence and accomplish something there. It seemed like this could go on forever. It was like, literally, I rethink actually. A lot of discussions would end in like, okay, so this seems like really good for all of our target populations, but what about wild animals? I could just reverse everything. I don't know. The thoughts I came to on that were that it is worthwhile to try to figure out what are all of the actual direct effects, but I don't think we should let that guide our decision making. Only you have to have some kind of theory of change, of what is the direct effect going to lead to? And I just think that it's so illegible what you're trying to do. If you're, like, you should eat this kind of fish to save animals. It doesn't lead society to adopt, to understand and adopt your values. It's so predicated on a moment in time that might be convenient. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough at that problem, but the conclusion I ended up coming to was just like, look, I just think we have to have some idea of not just the direct impacts, but something about the indirect impacts and what's likely to facilitate other direct impacts that we want in the future.AARONYeah. I also share your I don't know. I'm not sure if we share the same or I also feel conflicted about this kind of thing. Yeah. And I don't know, at the very least, I have a very high bar for saying, actually the worst of factory farming is like, we should just like, yeah, we should be okay with that, because some particular model says that at this moment in time, it has some net positive effect on animal welfare.HOLLYWhat morality is that really compatible with? I mean, I understand our morality, but maybe but pretty much anyone else who hears that conclusion is going to think that that means that the suffering doesn't matter or something.AARONYeah, I don't know. I think maybe more than you, I'm willing to bite the bullet if somebody really could convince me that, yeah, chicken farming is actually just, in fact, good, even though it's counterintuitive, I'll be like, all right, fine.HOLLYSurely there are other ways of occupying.AARONYeah.HOLLYSame with sometimes I would get from very classical wild animal suffering people, like, comments on my rodenticide work saying, like, well, what if it's good to have more rats? I don't know. There are surely other vehicles for utility other than ones that humans are bent on destroying.AARONYeah, it's kind of neither here nor there, but I don't actually know if this is causally important, but at least psychologically. I remember seeing a mouse in a glue trap was very had an impact on me from maybe turning me, like, animal welfare pills or something. That's like, neither here nor there. It's like a random anecdote, but yeah, seems bad. All right, what came after rethink for you?HOLLYYeah. Well, after the publication of the FLI Letter and Eliezer's article in Time, I was super inspired by pause. A number of emotional changes happened to me about AI safety. Nothing intellectual changed, but just I'd always been confused at and kind of taken it as a sign that people weren't really serious about AI risk when they would say things like, I don't know, the only option is alignment. The only option is for us to do cool, nerd stuff that we love doing nothing else would. I bought the arguments, but I just wasn't there emotionally. And seeing Eliezer advocate political change because he wants to save everyone's lives and he thinks that's something that we can do. Just kind of I'm sure I didn't want to face it before because it was upsetting. Not that I haven't faced a lot of upsetting and depressing things like I worked in wild animal welfare, for God's sake, but there was something that didn't quite add up for me, or I hadn't quite grocked about AI safety until seeing Eliezer really show that his concern is about everyone dying. And he's consistent with that. He's not caught on only one way of doing it, and it just kind of got in my head and I kept wanting to talk about it at work and it sort of became clear like they weren't going to pursue that sort of intervention. But I kept thinking of all these parallels between animal advocacy stuff that I knew and what could be done in AI safety. And these polls kept coming out showing that there was really high support for Paws and I just thought, this is such a huge opportunity, I really would love to help out. Originally I was looking around for who was going to be leading campaigns that I could volunteer in, and then eventually I thought, it just doesn't seem like somebody else is going to do this in the Bay Area. So I just ended up quitting rethink and being an independent organizer. And that has been really I mean, honestly, it's like a tough subject. It's like a lot to deal with, but honestly, compared to wild animal welfare, it's not that bad. And I think I'm pretty used to dealing with tough and depressing low tractability causes, but I actually think this is really tractable. I've been shocked how quickly things have moved and I sort of had this sense that, okay, people are reluctant in EA and AI safety in particular, they're not used to advocacy. They kind of vaguely think that that's bad politics is a mind killer and it's a little bit of a threat to the stuff they really love doing. Maybe that's not going to be so ascendant anymore and it's just stuff they're not familiar with. But I have the feeling that if somebody just keeps making this case that people will take to it, that I could push the Oberson window with NEA and that's gone really well.AARONYeah.HOLLYAnd then of course, the public is just like pretty down. It's great.AARONYeah. I feel like it's kind of weird because being in DC and I've always been, I feel like I actually used to be more into politics, to be clear. I understand or correct me if I'm wrong, but advocacy doesn't just mean in the political system or two politicians or whatever, but I assume that's like a part of what you're thinking about or not really.HOLLYYeah. Early on was considering working on more political process type advocacy and I think that's really important. I totally would have done it. I just thought that it was more neglected in our community to do advocacy to the public and a lot of people had entanglements that prevented them from doing so. They work sort of with AI labs or it's important to their work that they not declare against AI labs or something like that or be perceived that way. And so they didn't want to do public advocacy that could threaten what else they're doing. But I didn't have anything like that. I've been around for a long time in EA and I've been keeping up on AI safety, but I've never really worked. That's not true. I did a PiBBs fellowship, but.AARONI've.HOLLYNever worked for anybody in like I was just more free than a lot of other people to do the public messaging and so I kind of felt that I should. Yeah, I'm also more willing to get into conflict than other EA's and so that seems valuable, no?AARONYeah, I respect that. Respect that a lot. Yeah. So like one thing I feel like I've seen a lot of people on Twitter, for example. Well, not for example. That's really just it, I guess, talking about polls that come out saying like, oh yeah, the public is super enthusiastic about X, Y or Z, I feel like these are almost meaningless and maybe you can convince me otherwise. It's not exactly to be clear, I'm not saying that. I guess it could always be worse, right? All things considered, like a poll showing X thing is being supported is better than the opposite result, but you can really get people to say anything. Maybe I'm just wondering about the degree to which the public how do you imagine the public and I'm doing air quotes to playing into policies either of, I guess, industry actors or government actors?HOLLYWell, this is something actually that I also felt that a lot of EA's were unfamiliar with. But it does matter to our representatives, like what the constituents think it matters a mean if you talk to somebody who's ever interned in a congressperson's office, one person calling and writing letters for something can have actually depending on how contested a policy is, can have a largeish impact. My ex husband was an intern for Jim Cooper and they had this whole system for scoring when calls came in versus letters. Was it a handwritten letter, a typed letter? All of those things went into how many points it got and that was something they really cared about. Politicians do pay attention to opinion polls and they pay attention to what their vocal constituents want and they pay attention to not going against what is the norm opinion. Even if nobody in particular is pushing them on it or seems to feel strongly about it. They really are trying to calibrate themselves to what is the norm. So those are always also sometimes politicians just get directly convinced by arguments of what a policy should be. So yeah, public opinion is, I think, underappreciated by ya's because it doesn't feel like mechanistic. They're looking more for what's this weird policy hack that's going to solve what's? This super clever policy that's going to solve things rather than just like what's acceptable discourse, like how far out of his comfort zone does this politician have to go to advocate for this thing? How unpopular is it going to be to say stuff that's against this thing that now has a lot of public support?AARONYeah, I guess mainly I'm like I guess I'm also I definitely could be wrong with this, but I would expect that a lot of the yeah, like for like when politicians like, get or congresspeople like, get letters and emails or whatever on a particular especially when it's relevant to a particular bill. And it's like, okay, this bill has already been filtered for the fact that it's going to get some yes votes and some no votes and it's close to or something like that. Hearing from an interested constituency is really, I don't know, I guess interesting evidence. On the other hand, I don't know, you can kind of just get Americans to say a lot of different things that I think are basically not extremely unlikely to be enacted into laws. You know what I mean? I don't know. You can just look at opinion. Sorry. No great example comes to mind right now. But I don't know, if you ask the public, should we do more safety research into, I don't know, anything. If it sounds good, then people will say yes, or am I mistaken about this?HOLLYI mean, on these polls, usually they ask the other way around as well. Do you think AI is really promising for its benefits and should be accelerated? They answer consistently. It's not just like, well now that sounds positive. Okay. I mean, a well done poll will correct for these things. Yeah. I've encountered a lot of skepticism about the polls. Most of the polls on this have been done by YouGov, which is pretty reputable. And then the ones that were replicated by rethink priorities, they found very consistent results and I very much trust Rethink priorities on polls. Yeah. I've had people say, well, these framings are I don't know, they object and wonder if it's like getting at the person's true beliefs. And I kind of think like, I don't know, basically this is like the kind of advocacy message that I would give and people are really receptive to it. So to me that's really promising. Whether or not if you educated them a lot more about the topic, they would think the same is I don't think the question but that's sometimes an objection that I get. Yeah, I think they're indicative. And then I also think politicians just care directly about these things. If they're able to cite that most of the public agrees with this policy, that sort of gives them a lot of what they want, regardless of whether there's some qualification to does the public really think this or are they thinking hard enough about it? And then polls are always newsworthy. Weirdly. Just any poll can be a news story and journalists love them and so it's a great chance to get exposure for the whatever thing. And politicians do care what's in the news. Actually, I think we just have more influence over the political process than EA's and less wrongers tend to believe it's true. I think a lot of people got burned in AI safety, like in the previous 20 years because it would be dismissed. It just wasn't in the overton window. But I think we have a lot of power now. Weirdly. People care what effective altruists think. People see us as having real expertise. The AI safety community does know the most about this. It's pretty wild now that's being recognized publicly and journalists and the people who influence politicians, not directly the people, but the Fourth Estate type, people pay attention to this and they influence policy. And there's many levels of I wrote if people want a more detailed explanation of this, but still high level and accessible, I hope I wrote a thing on EA forum called The Case for AI Safety Advocacy. And that kind of goes over this concept of outside versus inside game. So inside game is like working within a system to change it. Outside game is like working outside the system to put pressure on that system to change it. And I think there's many small versions of this. I think that it's helpful within EA and AI safety to be pushing the overton window of what I think that people have a wrong understanding of how hard it is to communicate this topic and how hard it is to influence governments. I want it to be more acceptable. I want it to feel more possible in EA and AI safety to go this route. And then there's the public public level of trying to make them more familiar with the issue, frame it in the way that I want, which is know, with Sam Altman's tour, the issue kind of got framed as like, well, AI is going to get built, but how are we going to do it safely? And then I would like to take that a step back and be like, should AI be built or should AGI be just if we tried, we could just not do that, or we could at least reduce the speed. And so, yeah, I want people to be exposed to that frame. I want people to not be taken in by other frames that don't include the full gamut of options. I think that's very possible. And then there's a lot of this is more of the classic thing that's been going on in AI safety for the last ten years is trying to influence AI development to be more safety conscious. And that's like another kind of dynamic. There, like trying to change sort of the general flavor, like, what's acceptable? Do we have to care about safety? What is safety? That's also kind of a window pushing exercise.AARONYeah. Cool. Luckily, okay, this is not actually directly responding to anything you just said, which is luck. So I pulled up this post. So I should have read that. Luckily, I did read the case for slowing down. It was like some other popular post as part of the, like, governance fundamentals series. I think this is by somebody, Zach wait, what was it called? Wait.HOLLYIs it by Zach or.AARONKatya, I think yeah, let's think about slowing down AI. That one. So that is fresh in my mind, but yours is not yet. So what's the plan? Do you have a plan? You don't have to have a plan. I don't have plans very much.HOLLYWell, right now I'm hopeful about the UK AI summit. Pause AI and I have planned a multi city protest on the 21 October to encourage the UK AI Safety Summit to focus on safety first and to have as a topic arranging a pause or that of negotiation. There's a lot of a little bit upsetting advertising for that thing that's like, we need to keep up capabilities too. And I just think that's really a secondary objective. And that's how I wanted to be focused on safety. So I'm hopeful about the level of global coordination that we're already seeing. It's going so much faster than we thought. Already the UN Secretary General has been talking about this and there have been meetings about this. It's happened so much faster at the beginning of this year. Nobody thought we could talk about nobody was thinking we'd be talking about this as a mainstream topic. And then actually governments have been very receptive anyway. So right now I'm focused on other than just influencing opinion, the targets I'm focused on, or things like encouraging these international like, I have a protest on Friday, my first protest that I'm leading and kind of nervous that's against Meta. It's at the Meta building in San Francisco about their sharing of model weights. They call it open source. It's like not exactly open source, but I'm probably not going to repeat that message because it's pretty complicated to explain. I really love the pause message because it's just so hard to misinterpret and it conveys pretty clearly what we want very quickly. And you don't have a lot of bandwidth and advocacy. You write a lot of materials for a protest, but mostly what people see is the title.AARONThat's interesting because I sort of have the opposite sense. I agree that in terms of how many informational bits you're conveying in a particular phrase, pause AI is simpler, but in some sense it's not nearly as obvious. At least maybe I'm more of a tech brain person or whatever. But why that is good, as opposed to don't give extremely powerful thing to the worst people in the world. That's like a longer everyone.HOLLYMaybe I'm just weird. I've gotten the feedback from open source ML people is the number one thing is like, it's too late, there's already super powerful models. There's nothing you can do to stop us, which sounds so villainous, I don't know if that's what they mean. Well, actually the number one message is you're stupid, you're not an ML engineer. Which like, okay, number two is like, it's too late, there's nothing you can do. There's all of these other and Meta is not even the most powerful generator of models that it share of open source models. I was like, okay, fine. And I don't know, I don't think that protesting too much is really the best in these situations. I just mostly kind of let that lie. I could give my theory of change on this and why I'm focusing on Meta. Meta is a large company I'm hoping to have influence on. There is a Meta building in San Francisco near where yeah, Meta is the biggest company that is doing this and I think there should be a norm against model weight sharing. I was hoping it would be something that other employees of other labs would be comfortable attending and that is a policy that is not shared across the labs. Obviously the biggest labs don't do it. So OpenAI is called OpenAI but very quickly decided not to do that. Yeah, I kind of wanted to start in a way that made it more clear than pause AI. Does that anybody's welcome something? I thought a one off issue like this that a lot of people could agree and form a coalition around would be good. A lot of people think that this is like a lot of the open source ML people think know this is like a secret. What I'm saying is secretly an argument for tyranny. I just want centralization of power. I just think that there are elites that are better qualified to run everything. It was even suggested I didn't mention China. It even suggested that I was racist because I didn't think that foreign people could make better AIS than Meta.AARONI'm grimacing here. The intellectual disagreeableness, if that's an appropriate term or something like that. Good on you for standing up to some pretty bad arguments.HOLLYYeah, it's not like that worth it. I'm lucky that I truly am curious about what people think about stuff like that. I just find it really interesting. I spent way too much time understanding the alt. Right. For instance, I'm kind of like sure I'm on list somewhere because of the forums I was on just because I was interested and it is something that serves me well with my adversaries. I've enjoyed some conversations with people where I kind of like because my position on all this is that look, I need to be convinced and the public needs to be convinced that this is safe before we go ahead. So I kind of like not having to be the smart person making the arguments. I kind of like being like, can you explain like I'm five. I still don't get it. How does this work?AARONYeah, no, I was thinking actually not long ago about open source. Like the phrase has such a positive connotation and in a lot of contexts it really is good. I don't know. I'm glad that random tech I don't know, things from 2004 or whatever, like the reddit source code is like all right, seems cool that it's open source. I don't actually know if that was how that right. But yeah, I feel like maybe even just breaking down what the positive connotation comes from and why it's in people's self. This is really what I was thinking about, is like, why is it in people's self interest to open source things that they made and that might break apart the allure or sort of ethical halo that it has around it? And I was thinking it probably has something to do with, oh, this is like how if you're a tech person who makes some cool product, you could try to put a gate around it by keeping it closed source and maybe trying to get intellectual property or something. But probably you're extremely talented already, or pretty wealthy. Definitely can be hired in the future. And if you're not wealthy yet I don't mean to put things in just materialist terms, but basically it could easily be just like in a yeah, I think I'll probably take that bit out because I didn't mean to put it in strictly like monetary terms, but basically it just seems like pretty plausibly in an arbitrary tech person's self interest, broadly construed to, in fact, open source their thing, which is totally fine and normal.HOLLYI think that's like 99 it's like a way of showing magnanimity showing, but.AARONI don't make this sound so like, I think 99.9% of human behavior is like this. I'm not saying it's like, oh, it's some secret, terrible self interested thing, but just making it more mechanistic. Okay, it's like it's like a status thing. It's like an advertising thing. It's like, okay, you're not really in need of direct economic rewards, or sort of makes sense to play the long game in some sense, and this is totally normal and fine, but at the end of the day, there's reasons why it makes sense, why it's in people's self interest to open source.HOLLYLiterally, the culture of open source has been able to bully people into, like, oh, it's immoral to keep it for yourself. You have to release those. So it's just, like, set the norms in a lot of ways, I'm not the bully. Sounds bad, but I mean, it's just like there is a lot of pressure. It looks bad if something is closed source.AARONYeah, it's kind of weird that Meta I don't know, does Meta really think it's in their I don't know. Most economic take on this would be like, oh, they somehow think it's in their shareholders interest to open source.HOLLYThere are a lot of speculations on why they're doing this. One is that? Yeah, their models aren't as good as the top labs, but if it's open source, then open source quote, unquote then people will integrate it llama Two into their apps. Or People Will Use It And Become I don't know, it's a little weird because I don't know why using llama Two commits you to using llama Three or something, but it just ways for their models to get in in places where if you just had to pay for their models too, people would go for better ones. That's one thing. Another is, yeah, I guess these are too speculative. I don't want to be seen repeating them since I'm about to do this purchase. But there's speculation that it's in best interests in various ways to do this. I think it's possible also that just like so what happened with the release of Llama One is they were going to allow approved people to download the weights, but then within four days somebody had leaked Llama One on four chan and then they just were like, well, whatever, we'll just release the weights. And then they released Llama Two with the weights from the beginning. And it's not like 100% clear that they intended to do full open source or what they call Open source. And I keep saying it's not open source because this is like a little bit of a tricky point to make. So I'm not emphasizing it too much. So they say that they're open source, but they're not. The algorithms are not open source. There are open source ML models that have everything open sourced and I don't think that that's good. I think that's worse. So I don't want to criticize them for that. But they're saying it's open source because there's all this goodwill associated with open source. But actually what they're doing is releasing the product for free or like trade secrets even you could say like things that should be trade secrets. And yeah, they're telling people how to make it themselves. So it's like a little bit of a they're intentionally using this label that has a lot of positive connotations but probably according to Open Source Initiative, which makes the open Source license, it should be called something else or there should just be like a new category for LLMs being but I don't want things to be more open. It could easily sound like a rebuke that it should be more open to make that point. But I also don't want to call it Open source because I think Open source software should probably does deserve a lot of its positive connotation, but they're not releasing the part, that the software part because that would cut into their business. I think it would be much worse. I think they shouldn't do it. But I also am not clear on this because the Open Source ML critics say that everyone does have access to the same data set as Llama Two. But I don't know. Llama Two had 7 billion tokens and that's more than GPT Four. And I don't understand all of the details here. It's possible that the tokenization process was different or something and that's why there were more. But Meta didn't say what was in the longitude data set and usually there's some description given of what's in the data set that led some people to speculate that maybe they're using private data. They do have access to a lot of private data that shouldn't be. It's not just like the common crawl backup of the Internet. Everybody's basing their training on that and then maybe some works of literature they're not supposed to. There's like a data set there that is in question, but metas is bigger than bigger than I think well, sorry, I don't have a list in front of me. I'm not going to get stuff wrong, but it's bigger than kind of similar models and I thought that they have access to extra stuff that's not public. And it seems like people are asking if maybe that's part of the training set. But yeah, the ML people would have or the open source ML people that I've been talking to would have believed that anybody who's decent can just access all of the training sets that they've all used.AARONAside, I tried to download in case I'm guessing, I don't know, it depends how many people listen to this. But in one sense, for a competent ML engineer, I'm sure open source really does mean that. But then there's people like me. I don't know. I knew a little bit of R, I think. I feel like I caught on the very last boat where I could know just barely enough programming to try to learn more, I guess. Coming out of college, I don't know, a couple of months ago, I tried to do the thing where you download Llama too, but I tried it all and now I just have like it didn't work. I have like a bunch of empty folders and I forget got some error message or whatever. Then I tried to train my own tried to train my own model on my MacBook. It just printed. That's like the only thing that a language model would do because that was like the most common token in the training set. So anyway, I'm just like, sorry, this is not important whatsoever.HOLLYYeah, I feel like torn about this because I used to be a genomicist and I used to do computational biology and it was not machine learning, but I used a highly parallel GPU cluster. And so I know some stuff about it and part of me wants to mess around with it, but part of me feels like I shouldn't get seduced by this. I am kind of worried that this has happened in the AI safety community. It's always been people who are interested in from the beginning, it was people who are interested in singularity and then realized there was this problem. And so it's always been like people really interested in tech and wanting to be close to it. And I think we've been really influenced by our direction, has been really influenced by wanting to be where the action is with AI development. And I don't know that that was right.AARONNot personal, but I guess individual level I'm not super worried about people like you and me losing the plot by learning more about ML on their personal.HOLLYYou know what I mean? But it does just feel sort of like I guess, yeah, this is maybe more of like a confession than, like a point. But it does feel a little bit like it's hard for me to enjoy in good conscience, like, the cool stuff.AARONOkay. Yeah.HOLLYI just see people be so attached to this as their identity. They really don't want to go in a direction of not pursuing tech because this is kind of their whole thing. And what would they do if we weren't working toward AI? This is a big fear that people express to me with they don't say it in so many words usually, but they say things like, well, I don't want AI to never get built about a pause. Which, by the way, just to clear up, my assumption is that a pause would be unless society ends for some other reason, that a pause would eventually be lifted. It couldn't be forever. But some people are worried that if you stop the momentum now, people are just so luddite in their insides that we would just never pick it up again. Or something like that. And, yeah, there's some identity stuff that's been expressed. Again, not in so many words to me about who will we be if we're just sort of like activists instead of working on.AARONMaybe one thing that we might actually disagree on. It's kind of important is whether so I think we both agree that Aipause is better than the status quo, at least broadly, whatever. I know that can mean different things, but yeah, maybe I'm not super convinced, actually, that if I could just, like what am I trying to say? Maybe at least right now, if I could just imagine the world where open eye and Anthropic had a couple more years to do stuff and nobody else did, that would be better. I kind of think that they are reasonably responsible actors. And so I don't know. I don't think that actually that's not an actual possibility. But, like, maybe, like, we have a different idea about, like, the degree to which, like, a problem is just, like, a million different not even a million, but, say, like, a thousand different actors, like, having increasingly powerful models versus, like, the actual, like like the actual, like, state of the art right now, being plausibly near a dangerous threshold or something. Does this make any sense to you?HOLLYBoth those things are yeah, and this is one thing I really like about the pause position is that unlike a lot of proposals that try to allow for alignment, it's not really close to a bad choice. It's just more safe. I mean, it might be foregoing some value if there is a way to get an aligned AI faster. But, yeah, I like the pause position because it's kind of robust to this. I can't claim to know more about alignment than OpenAI or anthropic staff. I think they know much more about it. But I have fundamental doubts about the concept of alignment that make me think I'm concerned about even if things go right, like, what perverse consequences go nominally right, like, what perverse consequences could follow from that. I have, I don't know, like a theory of psychology that's, like, not super compatible with alignment. Like, I think, like yeah, like humans in living in society together are aligned with each other, but the society is a big part of that. The people you're closest to are also my background in evolutionary biology has a lot to do with genetic conflict.AARONWhat is that?HOLLYGenetic conflict is so interesting. Okay, this is like the most fascinating topic in biology, but it's like, essentially that in a sexual species, you're related to your close family, you're related to your ken, but you're not the same as them. You have different interests. And mothers and fathers of the same children have largely overlapping interests, but they have slightly different interests in what happens with those children. The payoff to mom is different than the payoff to dad per child. One of the classic genetic conflict arenas and one that my advisor worked on was my advisor was David Haig, was pregnancy. So mom and dad both want an offspring that's healthy. But mom is thinking about all of her offspring into the future. When she thinks about how much.AARONWhen.HOLLYMom is giving resources to one baby, that is in some sense depleting her ability to have future children. But for dad, unless the species is.AARONPerfect, might be another father in the future.HOLLYYeah, it's in his interest to take a little more. And it's really interesting. Like the tissues that the placenta is an androgenetic tissue. This is all kind of complicated. I'm trying to gloss over some details, but it's like guided more by genes that are active in when they come from the father, which there's this thing called genomic imprinting that first, and then there's this back and forth. There's like this evolution between it's going to serve alleles that came from dad imprinted, from dad to ask for more nutrients, even if that's not good for the mother and not what the mother wants. So the mother's going to respond. And you can see sometimes alleles are pretty mismatched and you get like, mom's alleles want a pretty big baby and a small placenta. So sometimes you'll see that and then dad's alleles want a big placenta and like, a smaller baby. These are so cool, but they're so hellishly complicated to talk about because it involves a bunch of genetic concepts that nobody talks about for any other reason.AARONI'm happy to talk about that. Maybe part of that dips below or into the weeds threshold, which I've kind of lost it, but I'm super interested in this stuff.HOLLYYeah, anyway, so the basic idea is just that even the people that you're closest with and cooperate with the most, they tend to be clearly this is predicated on our genetic system. There's other and even though ML sort of evolves similarly to natural selection through gradient descent, it doesn't have the same there's no recombination, there's not genes, so there's a lot of dis analogies there. But the idea that being aligned to our psychology would just be like one thing. Our psychology is pretty conditional. I would agree that it could be one thing if we had a VNM utility function and you could give it to AGI, I would think, yes, that captures it. But even then, that utility function, it covers when you're in conflict with someone, it covers different scenarios. And so I just am like not when people say alignment. I think what they're imagining is like an omniscient. God, who knows what would be best? And that is different than what I think could be meant by just aligning values.AARONNo, I broadly very much agree, although I do think at least this is my perception, is that based on the right 95 to 2010 Miri corpus or whatever, alignment was like alignment meant something that was kind of not actually possible in the way that you're saying. But now that we have it seems like actually humans have been able to get ML models to understand basically human language pretty shockingly. Well, and so actually, just the concern about maybe I'm sort of losing my train of thought a little bit, but I guess maybe alignment and misalignment aren't as binary as they were initially foreseen to be or something. You can still get a language model, for example, that tries to well, I guess there's different types of misleading but be deceptive or tamper with its reward function or whatever. Or you can get one that's sort of like earnestly trying to do the thing that its user wants. And that's not an incoherent concept anymore.HOLLYNo, it's not. Yeah, so yes, there is like, I guess the point of bringing up the VNM utility function was that there was sort of in the past a way that you could mathematically I don't know, of course utility functions are still real, but that's not what we're thinking anymore. We're thinking more like training and getting the gist of what and then getting corrections when you're not doing the right thing according to our values. But yeah, sorry. So the last piece I should have said originally was that I think with humans we're already substantially unaligned, but a lot of how we work together is that we have roughly similar capabilities. And if the idea of making AGI is to have much greater capabilities than we have, that's the whole point. I just think when you scale up like that, the divisions in your psyche or are just going to be magnified as well. And this is like an informal view that I've been developing for a long time, but just that it's actually the low capabilities that allows alignment or similar capabilities that makes alignment possible. And then there are, of course, mathematical structures that could be aligned at different capabilities. So I guess I have more hope if you could find the utility function that would describe this. But if it's just a matter of acting in distribution, when you increase your capabilities, you're going to go out of distribution or you're going to go in different contexts, and then the magnitude of mismatch is going to be huge. I wish I had a more formal way of describing this, but that's like my fundamental skepticism right now that makes me just not want anyone to build it. I think that you could have very sophisticated ideas about alignment, but then still just with not when you increase capabilities enough, any little chink is going to be magnified and it could be yeah.AARONSeems largely right, I guess. You clearly have a better mechanistic understanding of ML.HOLLYI don't know. My PiBBs project was to compare natural selection and gradient descent and then compare gradient hacking to miotic drive, which is the most analogous biological this is a very cool thing, too. Meatic drive. So Meiosis, I'll start with that for everyone.AARONThat's one of the cell things.HOLLYYes. Right. So Mitosis is the one where cells just divide in your body to make more skin. But Meiosis is the special one where you go through two divisions to make gametes. So you go from like we normally have two sets of chromosomes in each cell, but the gametes, they recombine between the chromosomes. You get different combinations with new chromosomes and then they divide again to bring them down to one copy each. And then like that, those are your gametes. And the gametes eggs come together with sperm to make a zygote and the cycle goes on. But during Meiosis, the point of it is to I mean, I'm going to just assert some things that are not universally accepted, but I think this is by far the best explanation. But the point of it is to take this like, you have this huge collection of genes that might have individually different interests, and you recombine them so that they don't know which genes they're going to be with in the next generation. They know which genes they're going to be with, but which allele of those genes. So I'm going to maybe simplify some terminology because otherwise, what's to stop a bunch of genes from getting together and saying, like, hey, if we just hack the Meiosis system or like the division system to get into the gametes, we can get into the gametes at a higher rate than 50%. And it doesn't matter. We don't have to contribute to making this body. We can just work on that.AARONWhat is to stop that?HOLLYYeah, well, Meiosis is to stop that. Meiosis is like a government system for the genes. It makes it so that they can't plan to be with a little cabal in the next generation because they have some chance of getting separated. And so their best chance is to just focus on making a good organism. But you do see lots of examples in nature of where that cooperation is breaking down. So some group of genes has found an exploit and it is fucking up the species. Species do go extinct because of this. It's hard to witness this happening. But there are several species. There's this species of cedar that has a form of this which is, I think, maternal genome. It's maternal genome elimination. So when the zygote comes together, the maternal chromosomes are just thrown away and it's like terrible because that affects the way that the thing works and grows, that it's put them in a death spiral and they're probably going to be extinct. And they're trees, so they live a long time, but they're probably going to be extinct in the next century. There's lots of ways to hack meiosis to get temporary benefit for genes. This, by the way, I just think is like nail in the coffin. Obviously, gene centered view is the best evolutionarily. What is the best the gene centered view of evolution.AARONAs opposed to sort of standard, I guess, high school college thing would just be like organisms.HOLLYYeah, would be individuals. Not that there's not an accurate way to talk in terms of individuals or even in terms of groups, but to me, conceptually.AARONThey'Re all legit in some sense. Yeah, you could talk about any of them. Did anybody take like a quirk level? Probably not. That whatever comes below the level of a gene, like an individual.HOLLYWell, there is argument about what is a gene because there's multiple concepts of genes. You could look at what's the part that makes a protein or you can look at what is the unit that tends to stay together in recombination or something like over time.AARONI'm sorry, I feel like I cut you off. It's something interesting. There was meiosis.HOLLYMeiotic drive is like the process of hacking meiosis so that a handful of genes can be more represented in the next generation. So otherwise the only way to get more represented in the next generation is to just make a better organism, like to be naturally selected. But you can just cheat and be like, well, if I'm in 90% of the sperm, I will be next in the next generation. And essentially meiosis has to work for natural selection to work in large organisms with a large genome and then yeah, ingredient descent. We thought the analogy was going to be with gradient hacking, that there would possibly be some analogy. But I think that the recombination thing is really the key in Meadic Drive. And then there's really nothing like that in.AARONThere'S. No selection per se. I don't know, maybe that doesn't. Make a whole lot of sense.HOLLYWell, I mean, in gradient, there's no.AARONG in analog, right?HOLLYThere's no gene analog. Yeah, but there is, like I mean, it's a hill climbing algorithm, like natural selection. So this is especially, I think, easy to see if you're familiar with adaptive landscapes, which looks very similar to I mean, if you look at a schematic or like a model of an illustration of gradient descent, it looks very similar to adaptive landscapes. They're both, like, in dimensional spaces, and you're looking at vectors at any given point. So the adaptive landscape concept that's usually taught for evolution is, like, on one axis you have fitness, and on the other axis you have well, you can have a lot of things, but you have and you have fitness of a population, and then you have fitness on the other axis. And what it tells you is the shape of the curve there tells you which direction evolution is going to push or natural selection is going to push each generation. And so with gradient descent, there's, like, finding the gradient to get to the lowest value of the cost function, to get to a local minimum at every step. And you follow that. And so that part is very similar to natural selection, but the Miosis hacking just has a different mechanism than gradient hacking would. Gradient hacking probably has to be more about I kind of thought that there was a way for this to work. If fine tuning creates a different compartment that doesn't there's not full backpropagation, so there's like kind of two different compartments in the layers or something. But I don't know if that's right. My collaborator doesn't seem to think that that's very interesting. I don't know if they don't even.AARONKnow what backup that's like a term I've heard like a billion times.HOLLYIt's updating all the weights and all the layers based on that iteration.AARONAll right. I mean, I can hear those words. I'll have to look it up later.HOLLYYou don't have to full I think there are probably things I'm not understanding about the ML process very well, but I had thought that it was something like yeah, like in yeah, sorry, it's probably too tenuous. But anyway, yeah, I've been working on this a little bit for the last year, but I'm not super sharp on my arguments about that.AARONWell, I wouldn't notice. You can kind of say whatever, and I'll nod along.HOLLYI got to guard my reputation off the cuff anymore.AARONWe'll edit it so you're correct no matter what.HOLLYHave you ever edited the Oohs and UMS out of a podcast and just been like, wow, I sound so smart? Like, even after you heard yourself the first time, you do the editing yourself, but then you listen to it and you're like, who is this person? Looks so smart.AARONI haven't, but actually, the 80,000 Hours After hours podcast, the first episode of theirs, I interviewed Rob and his producer Kieran Harris, and that they have actual professional sound editing. And so, yeah, I went from totally incoherent, not totally incoherent, but sarcastically totally incoherent to sounding like a normal person. Because of that.HOLLYI used to use it to take my laughter out of I did a podcast when I was an organizer at Harvard. Like, I did the Harvard Effective Alchruism podcast, and I laughed a lot more than I did now than I do now, which is kind of like and we even got comments about it. We got very few comments, but they were like, girl hosts laughs too much. But when I take my laughter out, I would do it myself. I was like, wow, this does sound suddenly, like, so much more serious.AARONYeah, I don't know. Yeah, I definitely say like and too much. So maybe I will try to actually.HOLLYRealistically, that sounds like so much effort, it's not really worth it. And nobody else really notices. But I go through periods where I say like, a lot, and when I hear myself back in interviews, that really bugs me.AARONYeah.HOLLYGod, it sounds so stupid.AARONNo. Well, I'm definitely worse. Yeah. I'm sure there'll be a way to automate this. Well, not sure, but probably not too distant.HOLLYFuture people were sending around, like, transcripts of Trump to underscore how incoherent he is. I'm like, I sound like that sometimes.AARONOh, yeah, same. I didn't actually realize that this is especially bad. When I get this transcribed, I don't know how people this is a good example. Like the last 10 seconds, if I get it transcribed, it'll make no sense whatsoever. But there's like a free service called AssemblyAI Playground where it does free drAARONased transcription and that makes sense. But if we just get this transcribed without identifying who's speaking, it'll be even worse than that. Yeah, actually this is like a totally random thought, but I actually spent not zero amount of effort trying to figure out how to combine the highest quality transcription, like whisper, with the slightly less goodAARONased transcriptions. You could get the speaker you could infer who's speaking based on the lower quality one, but then replace incorrect words with correct words. And I never I don't know, I'm.HOLLYSure somebody that'd be nice. I would do transcripts if it were that easy, but I just never have but it is annoying because I do like to give people the chance to veto certain segments and that can get tough because even if I talk you.AARONHave podcasts that I don't know about.HOLLYWell, I used to have the Harvard one, which is called the turning test. And then yeah, I do have I.AARONProbably listened to that and didn't know it was you.HOLLYOkay, maybe Alish was the other host.AARONI mean, it's been a little while since yeah.HOLLYAnd then on my I like, publish audio stuff sometimes, but it's called low effort. To underscore.AARONOh, yeah, I didn't actually. Okay. Great minds think alike. Low effort podcasts are the future. In fact, this is super intelligent.HOLLYI just have them as a way to catch up with friends and stuff and talk about their lives in a way that might recorded conversations are just better. You're more on and you get to talk about stuff that's interesting but feels too like, well, you already know this if you're not recording it.AARONOkay, well, I feel like there's a lot of people that I interact with casually that I don't actually they have these rich online profiles and somehow I don't know about it or something. I mean, I could know about it, but I just never clicked their substack link for some reason. So I will be listening to your casual.HOLLYActually, in the 15 minutes you gave us when we pushed back the podcast, I found something like a practice talk I had given and put it on it. So that's audio that I just cool. But that's for paid subscribers. I like to give them a little something.AARONNo, I saw that. I did two minutes of research or whatever. Cool.HOLLYYeah. It's a little weird. I've always had that blog as very low effort, just whenever I feel like it. And that's why it's lasted so long. But I did start doing paid and I do feel like more responsibility to the paid subscribers now.AARONYeah. Kind of the reason that I started this is because whenever I feel so much I don't know, it's very hard for me to write a low effort blog post. Even the lowest effort one still takes at the end of the day, it's like several hours. Oh, I'm going to bang it out in half an hour and no matter what, my brain doesn't let me do that.HOLLYThat usually takes 4 hours. Yeah, I have like a four hour and an eight hour.AARONWow. I feel like some people apparently Scott Alexander said that. Oh, yeah. He just writes as fast as he talks and he just clicks send or whatever. It's like, oh, if I could do.HOLLYThat, I would have written in those paragraphs. It's crazy. Yeah, you see that when you see him in person. I've never met him, I've never talked to him, but I've been to meetups where he was and I'm at this conference or not there right now this week that he's supposed to be at.AARONOh, manifest.HOLLYYeah.AARONNice. Okay.HOLLYCool Lighthaven. They're now calling. It looks amazing. Rose Garden. And no.AARONI like, vaguely noticed. Think I've been to Berkeley, I think twice. Right? Definitely. This is weird. Definitely once.HOLLYBerkeley is awesome. Yeah.AARONI feel like sort of decided consciously not to try to, or maybe not decided forever, but had a period of time where I was like, oh, I should move there, or we'll move there. But then I was like I think being around other EA's in high and rational high concentration activates my status brain or something. It is very less personally bad. And DC is kind of sus that I was born here and also went to college here and maybe is also a good place to live. But I feel like maybe it's actually just true.HOLLYI think it's true. I mean, I always like the DCAS. I think they're very sane.AARONI think both clusters should be more like the other one a little bit.HOLLYI think so. I love Berkeley and I think I'm really enjoying it because I'm older than you. I think if you have your own personality before coming to Berkeley, that's great, but you can easily get swept. It's like Disneyland for all the people I knew on the internet, there's a physical version of them here and you can just walk it's all in walking distance. That's all pretty cool. Especially during the pandemic. I was not around almost any friends and now I see friends every day and I get to do cool stuff. And the culture is som

This week, Anna (https://twitter.com/annarrose) and Ariel Gabizon (https://twitter.com/rel_zeta_tech) cover the SNARK trilogy; a history of pairing-based SNARKs in 3 acts. Starting from Jens Groth's early works on SNARKs, Ariel takes us on a journey through key moments and breakthroughs in SNARKs over the last decade. They also dive into the emerging accumulation research on folding schemes and Ariel's latest work surrounding lookup tables! This is an episode you won't want to miss. Here are some additional links for this episode: Relevant Jens Groth Papers * Short Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Proofs by Jens Groth (https://www.iacr.org/archive/asiacrypt2010/6477343/6477343.pdf) * Short Pairing-based Non-interactive Zero-Knowledge Arguments by Jens Groth (http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/J.Groth/ShortNIZK.pdf) * On the Size of Pairing-based Non-interactive Arguments by Jens Groth (https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/260.pdf) * Zero-knowledge Argument for Polynomial Evaluation with Application to Blacklists by Stephanie Bayer and Jens Groth (https://eprint.iacr.org/2015/195) PLONK-Relative Papers * PLONK: Permutations over Lagrange-bases for Oecumenical Noninteractive arguments of Knowledge by Gabizon, Williamson, Ciobotaru (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/953.pdf) * HyperPlonk: Plonk with Linear-Time Prover and High-Degree Custom Gates by Chen, Bünz, Boneh and Zhang (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1355.pdf) * Proposal: The Turbo-PLONK program syntax for specifying SNARK programs by Gabizon and Williamson (https://docs.zkproof.org/pages/standards/accepted-workshop3/proposal-turbo_plonk.pdf) Lookup-Relative Papers * plookup: A simplified polynomial protocol for lookup tables by Gabizon and Williamson (https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/315.pdf) * Caulk: Lookup Arguments in Sublinear Time by Zapico, Buterin, Khovratovich, Maller, Nitulescu and Simkin (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/621) * A Close Look at a Lookup Argument - Mary Maller at The 13th BIU Winter School on cryptography (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGjbczKGm4s&list=PL8Vt-7cSFnw1gx51WHRgAtioVqAjzMS1w&index=13) * cq: Cached quotients for fast lookups by Eagen, Fiore, and Gabizon (https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1763) Additional Resources * Pinocchio: Nearly Practical Verifiable Computation by Parno, Howell, Gentry and Raykova (https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/279.pdf) * Sonic: Zero-Knowledge SNARKs from Linear-Size Universal and Updateable Structured Reference Strings by Maller, Bowe, Kohlweiss, and Meiklejohn (https://eprint.iacr.org/2019/099) * Perpetual Powers of Tau GitHub (https://github.com/weijiekoh/perpetualpowersoftau) * Delegating Computation: Interactive Proofs for Muggles by Goldwasser, Kalai and Rothblum (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/2008-DelegatingComputation.pdf) * Efficient Zero-Knowledge Arguments for Arithmetic Circuits in Discrete Log Setting by Bootle, Cerulli, Chaidos, Groth and Petit (https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/263) * Nova: Recursive Zero-Knowledge Arguments from Folding Schemes by Kothapalli, Setty and Tzialla (https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/370.pdf) * Episode 232: Cutting Edge ZK Research with Mary Maller (https://zeroknowledge.fm/232-2/) * ZK Whiteboard Sessions - Module Six: Lookup Tables for Performance Optimisation (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oLzrbTBlbc) Check out the ZK Jobs Board here: ZK Jobs (https://jobsboard.zeroknowledge.fm/). Anoma's (https://anoma.net/) first fractal instance Namada (https://namada.net/) is launching soon! Namada is a proof-of-stake L1 for interchain asset-agnostic privacy. Namada natively interoperates with fast-finality chains via IBC and with Ethereum via a trustless two-way bridge. Follow Namada on twitter @namada (https://twitter.com/namada) for more information and join the community on Discord discord.gg/namada (http://discord.gg/namada). If you like what we do: * Find all our links here! @ZeroKnowledge | Linktree (https://linktr.ee/zeroknowledge) * Subscribe to our podcast newsletter (https://zeroknowledge.substack.com) * Follow us on Twitter @zeroknowledgefm (https://twitter.com/zeroknowledgefm) * Join us on Telegram (https://zeroknowledge.fm/telegram) * Catch us on YouTube (https://zeroknowledge.fm/)

Zach Glazar (Frog God Games), Bill Barsh (Pacesetter Games) and Levi Combs (Planet X Games) share the personal impact (here's a hint: "existential threat") and professional impact that Wizards of the Coast's recent OGL announcements had on them, and where they're going from here. "Unprofessional" and "ham-fisted" is mentioned a lot by our guests. Third-party publishers have been publishing the strong stuff for 5E in recent years. Was WotC's final decision enough to get things back to what they were with 3rd party TTRPG publishers and creators or is the relationship over? What options are on the table if someone wants to leave WotC and their OGL behind? OGLs versus SRDs. ORCs and Black Flags. Finer points of TTRPG legal warfare. What the heck does irrevocable mean, anyway? Our guests have firm theories on what level in WotC this all came from (and the theories might surprise you). Shane Plays gets a HOT SCOOP from Pacesetter Games. Shane Plays Geek Talk Episode #265 - 2/9/2023 Like what you hear? Support Shane Plays Geek Talk on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/shaneplays Listen to the Shane Plays Geek Talk podcast on YouTube, SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play Music, Amazon Music, Podbean and Stitcher (and other fine, fine podcast directories). Hey, you! Yeah, you! Buy cool stuff, support Shane Plays Geek Talk with these affiliate links! Humble Bundle https://www.humblebundle.com?partner=shaneplays DriveThruRPG.com https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?affiliate_id=488512 SHOW NOTES Dungeons & Dragons' New License Tightens Its Grip on Competition https://gizmodo.com/dnd-wizards-of-the-coast-ogl-1-1-open-gaming-license-1849950634  An Update on the Open Game License (OGL)  Cached version Frantic backpedaling (and attempted spin) on OGL 1.1 https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_ilAqfJ3Cj8J:https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1423-an-update-on-the-open-game-license-ogl&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us  Summary of creator and fan response to WotC's OGL 1.1 official statement "It has become clear that it is no longer possible to achieve all goals" - Wizards of the Coast address Dungeons & Dragons OGL 1.1 backlash https://www.sportskeeda.com/esports/it-become-clear-longer-possible-achieve-goals-wizards-coast-address-dungeons-dragons-ogl-1-1-backlash?fbclid=IwAR3SzmtSYacMb-vT6b-aLGgWhATGMUVjfrliszX0ZH6Tn_JbITXgHWL_3bU  A Working Conversation About the Open Game License (OGL) Cahed version https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:5dPV6amx320J:https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1428-a-working-conversation-about-the-open-game-license&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us  D&D maker still wants to revoke earlier versions of "open" gaming license https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/01/dd-maker-still-wants-to-revoke-earlier-versions-of-open-gaming-license/  D&D Beyond: OGL 1.0a & Creative Commons https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1439-ogl-1-0a-creative-commons  88% do not want to publish TTRPG content under OGL 1.2. 90% would have to change some aspect of their business to accommodate OGL 1.2. 89% are dissatisfied with deauthorizing OGL 1.0a. 86% are dissatisfied with the draft VTT policy. 62% are satisfied with including Systems Reference Document (SRD) content in Creative Commons, and the majority of those who were dissatisfied asked for more SRD content in Creative Commons. Ryan Dancey -- Hasbro Cannot Deauthorize OGL https://www.enworld.org/threads/ryan-dancey-hasbro-cannot-deauthorize-ogl.694196/  Goodman Games Announces January Is Best Sales Month In Its History https://goodman-games.com/blog/2023/02/01/goodman-games-announces-january-is-best-sales-month-in-its-history/  Paizo Announces System-Neutral Open RPG License - Open RPG Creative License (ORC) https://paizo.com/community/blog/v5748dyo6si7v  Kobold Press's Black Flag Blog Posts (new SRD / open fantasy RPG system project) https://koboldpress.com/category/black-flag/  Kobold Press releases new details for Project Black Flag https://nichegamer.com/kobold-press-details-project-black-flag/ --- Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-Playing Games 2nd Edition Shane's book! Co-authored with Matt Barton of Matt Chat https://www.amazon.com/Dungeons-Desktops-History-Computer-Role-Playing/dp/1138574643/

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: MrBeast's Squid Game Tricked Me, published by lsusr on December 3, 2022 on LessWrong. I recently watched Squid Game—both the original Netflix series and MrBeast's real life version. Then I watched every video I could find about how MrBeast's Squid Game was made. I was surprised to learn that MrBeast used a whole bunch of CGI (computer-generated imagery). I had taken its realty at face value. There are four places I know of where MrBeast used CGI. The sky above the big dirt field wasn't originally sky. The scenes were actually filmed in an indoor stadium. The smoke effects of players who got eliminated were added in post-production. A dust effect where a woman fell was CGI. The big platforms for Tug-of-War and Glass Bridge weren't real at all. Both events took place close to the ground. In those scenes, almost everything the players didn't physically touch was CGI. Even the empty spaces between glass panels in Glass Bridge weren't real. They were solid black squares that got removed in post-production. The sky, smoke and dust are all plausible. But the big giant platforms had to be CGI. Using such platforms in a real-life game would be ludicrously dangerous, especially without safety harnesses. Real platforms would be unnecessarily expensive too compared to replacing backgrounds, which is part VFX artists' standard toolkit. Why didn't I notice? First of all, the VFX team SoKrispyMedia is very good at VFX. But that alone isn't sufficient. My experience of watching MrBeast's Squid Game reminds me of a magic trick routine I used to perform. To the audience it looked like two separate magic tricks but they actually worked together. First I would perform a series of tricks that used a real regular deck of cards. Everything was pure sleight-of-hand. Once my audience had gotten used to the idea that I'm doing everything legitimately I would switch to a set of gimmicked (fake) cards. The effect was much stronger than when I started out with the gimmicked (fake) cards. MrBeast (perhaps unintentionally) pulled off a similar trick. When I watch television and movies, I'm constantly scrutinizing each scene to figure out how the filmmakers created it. But most of MrBeast's videos are completely real. When I watched MrBeast's Squid Game it did not occur to me to question anything, even when the images onscreen were unrealistic. I wasn't on-guard for CGI trickery. Unexamined Beliefs Most of our beliefs never go through a thorough examination. There's just too much stuff going on. It's infeasible to question whether every rock and tree you look at is real. Perhaps you pick up a rock and question its legitimacy once or twice, but you can't do it for every rock you walk by every day. There isn't enough time in the day. One way to define beliefs is to ask "what would you bet money on". But contemplating whether you would bet money on an unexamined belief modifies that belief the way forcing a quantum superposition into one of its eigenvectors destroys the initial state. The number of beliefs that go through a rational analysis is a tiny fraction of our total beliefs. The beliefs you would bet money on are an even smaller selection. Nearly all of our beliefs are (in their natural state) not things we would bet money on. The problem of identifying what to question is a more fundamental challenge than reconsidering cached thoughts and thinking outside your comfort zone. Cached thoughts have been examined at least once (or, at the very least, processed into words), which is more examination than most of the beliefs flowing through a human brain. As for thinking outside your comfort zone, someone raised in a religious household who is merely 50% confident in Creationism is already most of the way to abandoning it. Identifying the small bits of information that are even worth thinking about i...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: MrBeast's Squid Game Tricked Me, published by lsusr on December 3, 2022 on LessWrong. I recently watched Squid Game—both the original Netflix series and MrBeast's real life version. Then I watched every video I could find about how MrBeast's Squid Game was made. I was surprised to learn that MrBeast used a whole bunch of CGI (computer-generated imagery). I had taken its realty at face value. There are four places I know of where MrBeast used CGI. The sky above the big dirt field wasn't originally sky. The scenes were actually filmed in an indoor stadium. The smoke effects of players who got eliminated were added in post-production. A dust effect where a woman fell was CGI. The big platforms for Tug-of-War and Glass Bridge weren't real at all. Both events took place close to the ground. In those scenes, almost everything the players didn't physically touch was CGI. Even the empty spaces between glass panels in Glass Bridge weren't real. They were solid black squares that got removed in post-production. The sky, smoke and dust are all plausible. But the big giant platforms had to be CGI. Using such platforms in a real-life game would be ludicrously dangerous, especially without safety harnesses. Real platforms would be unnecessarily expensive too compared to replacing backgrounds, which is part VFX artists' standard toolkit. Why didn't I notice? First of all, the VFX team SoKrispyMedia is very good at VFX. But that alone isn't sufficient. My experience of watching MrBeast's Squid Game reminds me of a magic trick routine I used to perform. To the audience it looked like two separate magic tricks but they actually worked together. First I would perform a series of tricks that used a real regular deck of cards. Everything was pure sleight-of-hand. Once my audience had gotten used to the idea that I'm doing everything legitimately I would switch to a set of gimmicked (fake) cards. The effect was much stronger than when I started out with the gimmicked (fake) cards. MrBeast (perhaps unintentionally) pulled off a similar trick. When I watch television and movies, I'm constantly scrutinizing each scene to figure out how the filmmakers created it. But most of MrBeast's videos are completely real. When I watched MrBeast's Squid Game it did not occur to me to question anything, even when the images onscreen were unrealistic. I wasn't on-guard for CGI trickery. Unexamined Beliefs Most of our beliefs never go through a thorough examination. There's just too much stuff going on. It's infeasible to question whether every rock and tree you look at is real. Perhaps you pick up a rock and question its legitimacy once or twice, but you can't do it for every rock you walk by every day. There isn't enough time in the day. One way to define beliefs is to ask "what would you bet money on". But contemplating whether you would bet money on an unexamined belief modifies that belief the way forcing a quantum superposition into one of its eigenvectors destroys the initial state. The number of beliefs that go through a rational analysis is a tiny fraction of our total beliefs. The beliefs you would bet money on are an even smaller selection. Nearly all of our beliefs are (in their natural state) not things we would bet money on. The problem of identifying what to question is a more fundamental challenge than reconsidering cached thoughts and thinking outside your comfort zone. Cached thoughts have been examined at least once (or, at the very least, processed into words), which is more examination than most of the beliefs flowing through a human brain. As for thinking outside your comfort zone, someone raised in a religious household who is merely 50% confident in Creationism is already most of the way to abandoning it. Identifying the small bits of information that are even worth thinking about i...

In this extra special episode, the boys discuss Tornado Cash, state attacks on blockchain sovereignty, and how government offensives may accelerate a global transition to the Network Age. All this plus crypto lobbying, Bloomberg's vote buying, Tolstoy's takes on history, and America's nose for a golden goose. Find us on twitter: @BichulR, @BasileSportif, @AlephDao

For users who count on textures from the local file system, rather than adding textures as materials to a project, it has been somewhat cumbersome to manage projects where textures may be replaced with new files during production. XPression now has an option to check in memory cache against the local file system for a newer version of the same file (file name), based on the date stamp of the file. Living Live! with Ross Video www.rossvideo.com/XPression-U

How one fruit led to another and so did stories. This summer, eat a

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is The Science of Winning at Life, Part 7: Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics, published by lukeprog. Part of the Sequence: The Science of Winning at Life. Co-authored with Minda Myers and Hugh Ristik. Also see: Polyhacking. When things fell apart between me (Luke) and my first girlfriend, I decided that kind of relationship wasn't ideal for me. I didn't like the jealous feelings that had arisen within me. I didn't like the desperate, codependent 'madness' that popular love songs celebrate. I had moral objections to the idea of owning somebody else's sexuality, and to the idea of somebody else owning mine. Some of my culture's scripts for what a man-woman relationship should look like didn't fit my own goals very well. I needed to design romantic relationships that made sense (decision-theoretically) for me, rather than simply falling into whatever relationship model my culture happened to offer. (The ladies of Sex and the City weren't too good with decision theory, but they certainly invested time figuring out which relationship styles worked for them.) For a while, this new approach led me into a series of short-lived flings. After that, I chose 4 months of contented celibacy. After that, polyamory. After that... Anyway, the results have been wonderful. Rationality and decision theory work for relationships, too! We humans compartmentalize by default. Brains don't automatically enforce belief propagation, and aren't configured to do so. Cached thoughts and cached selves can remain even after one has applied the lessons of the core sequences to particular parts of one's life. That's why it helps to explicitly examine what happens when you apply rationality to new areas of your life — from disease to goodness to morality. Today, we apply rationality to relationships. Relationships Styles When Minda had her first relationship with a woman, she found that the cultural scripts for heterosexual relationships didn't work for a homosexual relationship style. For example, in heterosexual dating (in the USA) the man is expected to ask for the date, plan the date, and escalate sexual interaction. A woman expects that she will be pursued and not have to approach men, that on a date she should be passive and follow the man's lead, and that she shouldn't initiate sex herself. In the queer community, Minda quickly found that if she passively waited for a woman to hit on her, she'd be waiting all night! When she met her first girlfriend, Minda had to ask for the date. Minda writes: On dates, I didn't know if I should pay for the date or hold the door or what I was supposed to do! Each interaction required thought and negotiation that hadn't been necessary before. And this was really kind of neat. We had the opportunity to create a relationship that worked for us and represented us as unique and individual human beings. And when it came to sexual interactions, I found it easy to ask for and engage in exactly what I wanted. And I have since brought these practices into my relationships with men. But you don't need to have an 'alternative' relationship in order to decide you want to set aside some cultural scripts and design a relationship style that works for you. You can choose relationship styles that work for you now. With regard to which type(s) of romantic partner(s) you want, there are many possibilities. No partners: Asexuality. Asexuals don't experience sexual attraction. They comprise perhaps 1% of the population,1 and include notables like Paul Erdos, Morrissey, and Janeane Garofalo. There is a network (AVEN) for asexuality awareness and acceptance. Celibacy. Celibates feel sexual attraction, but abstain from sex. Some choose to abstain for medical, financial, psychological, or philosophical reasons. Others choose celibacy so the...

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is The Science of Winning at Life, Part 7: Rational Romantic Relationships, Part 1: Relationship Styles and Attraction Basics, published by lukeprog. Part of the Sequence: The Science of Winning at Life. Co-authored with Minda Myers and Hugh Ristik. Also see: Polyhacking. When things fell apart between me (Luke) and my first girlfriend, I decided that kind of relationship wasn't ideal for me. I didn't like the jealous feelings that had arisen within me. I didn't like the desperate, codependent 'madness' that popular love songs celebrate. I had moral objections to the idea of owning somebody else's sexuality, and to the idea of somebody else owning mine. Some of my culture's scripts for what a man-woman relationship should look like didn't fit my own goals very well. I needed to design romantic relationships that made sense (decision-theoretically) for me, rather than simply falling into whatever relationship model my culture happened to offer. (The ladies of Sex and the City weren't too good with decision theory, but they certainly invested time figuring out which relationship styles worked for them.) For a while, this new approach led me into a series of short-lived flings. After that, I chose 4 months of contented celibacy. After that, polyamory. After that... Anyway, the results have been wonderful. Rationality and decision theory work for relationships, too! We humans compartmentalize by default. Brains don't automatically enforce belief propagation, and aren't configured to do so. Cached thoughts and cached selves can remain even after one has applied the lessons of the core sequences to particular parts of one's life. That's why it helps to explicitly examine what happens when you apply rationality to new areas of your life — from disease to goodness to morality. Today, we apply rationality to relationships. Relationships Styles When Minda had her first relationship with a woman, she found that the cultural scripts for heterosexual relationships didn't work for a homosexual relationship style. For example, in heterosexual dating (in the USA) the man is expected to ask for the date, plan the date, and escalate sexual interaction. A woman expects that she will be pursued and not have to approach men, that on a date she should be passive and follow the man's lead, and that she shouldn't initiate sex herself. In the queer community, Minda quickly found that if she passively waited for a woman to hit on her, she'd be waiting all night! When she met her first girlfriend, Minda had to ask for the date. Minda writes: On dates, I didn't know if I should pay for the date or hold the door or what I was supposed to do! Each interaction required thought and negotiation that hadn't been necessary before. And this was really kind of neat. We had the opportunity to create a relationship that worked for us and represented us as unique and individual human beings. And when it came to sexual interactions, I found it easy to ask for and engage in exactly what I wanted. And I have since brought these practices into my relationships with men. But you don't need to have an 'alternative' relationship in order to decide you want to set aside some cultural scripts and design a relationship style that works for you. You can choose relationship styles that work for you now. With regard to which type(s) of romantic partner(s) you want, there are many possibilities. No partners: Asexuality. Asexuals don't experience sexual attraction. They comprise perhaps 1% of the population,1 and include notables like Paul Erdos, Morrissey, and Janeane Garofalo. There is a network (AVEN) for asexuality awareness and acceptance. Celibacy. Celibates feel sexual attraction, but abstain from sex. Some choose to abstain for medical, financial, psychological, or philosophical reasons. Others choose celibacy so the...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Cached Selves, published by AnnaSalamon on the LessWrong. by Anna Salamon and Steve Rayhawk (joint authorship) Related to: Beware identity Update, 2021: I believe a large majority of the priming studies failed replication, though I haven't looked into it in depth. I still personally do a great many of the "possible strategies" listed at the bottom; and they subjectively seem useful to me; but if you end up believing that it should not be on the basis of the claimed studies. A few days ago, Yvain introduced us to priming, the effect where, in Yvain's words, "any random thing that happens to you can hijack your judgment and personality for the next few minutes." Today, I'd like to discuss a related effect from the social psychology and marketing literatures: “commitment and consistency effects”, whereby any random thing you say or do in the absence of obvious outside pressure, can hijack your self-concept for the medium- to long-term future. To sum up the principle briefly: your brain builds you up a self-image. You are the kind of person who says, and does... whatever it is your brain remembers you saying and doing. So if you say you believe X... especially if no one's holding a gun to your head, and it looks superficially as though you endorsed X “by choice”... you're liable to “go on” believing X afterwards. Even if you said X because you were lying, or because a salesperson tricked you into it, or because your neurons and the wind just happened to push in that direction at that moment. For example, if I hang out with a bunch of Green Sky-ers, and I make small remarks that accord with the Green Sky position so that they'll like me, I'm liable to end up a Green Sky-er myself. If my friends ask me what I think of their poetry, or their rationality, or of how they look in that dress, and I choose my words slightly on the positive side, I'm liable to end up with a falsely positive view of my friends. If I get promoted, and I start telling my employees that of course rule-following is for the best (because I want them to follow my rules), I'm liable to start believing in rule-following in general. All familiar phenomena, right? You probably already discount other peoples' views of their friends, and you probably already know that other people mostly stay stuck in their own bad initial ideas. But if you're like me, you might not have looked carefully into the mechanisms behind these phenomena. And so you might not realize how much arbitrary influence consistency and commitment is having on your own beliefs, or how you can reduce that influence. (Commitment and consistency isn't the only mechanism behind the above phenomena; but it is a mechanism, and it's one that's more likely to persist even after you decide to value truth.) Consider the following research. In the classic 1959 study by Festinger and Carlsmith, test subjects were paid to tell others that a tedious experiment has been interesting. Those who were paid $20 to tell the lie continued to believe the experiment boring; those paid a mere $1 to tell the lie were liable later to report the experiment interesting. The theory is that the test subjects remembered calling the experiment interesting, and either: Honestly figured they must have found the experiment interesting -- why else would they have said so for only $1? (This interpretation is called self-perception theory.), or Didn't want to think they were the type to lie for just $1, and so deceived themselves into thinking their lie had been true. (This interpretation is one strand within cognitive dissonance theory.) In a follow-up, Jonathan Freedman used threats to convince 7- to 9-year old boys not to play with an attractive, battery-operated robot. He also told each boy that such play was “wrong”. Some boys were given big threats, or were kept carefully su...

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Cached Thoughts, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the AI Alignment Forum. One of the single greatest puzzles about the human brain is how the damn thing works at all when most neurons fire 10–20 times per second, or 200Hz tops. In neurology, the “hundred-step rule” is that any postulated operation has to complete in at most 100 sequential steps—you can be as parallel as you like, but you can't postulate more than 100 (preferably fewer) neural spikes one after the other. Can you imagine having to program using 100Hz CPUs, no matter how many of them you had? You'd also need a hundred billion processors just to get anything done in realtime. If you did need to write realtime programs for a hundred billion 100Hz processors, one trick you'd use as heavily as possible is caching. That's when you store the results of previous operations and look them up next time, instead of recomputing them from scratch. And it's a very neural idiom—recognition, association, completing the pattern. It's a good guess that the actual majority of human cognition consists of cache lookups. This thought does tend to go through my mind at certain times. There was a wonderfully illustrative story which I thought I had bookmarked, but couldn't re-find: it was the story of a man whose know-it-all neighbor had once claimed in passing that the best way to remove a chimney from your house was to knock out the fireplace, wait for the bricks to drop down one level, knock out those bricks, and repeat until the chimney was gone. Years later, when the man wanted to remove his own chimney, this cached thought was lurking, waiting to pounce . . . As the man noted afterward—you can guess it didn't go well—his neighbor was not particularly knowledgeable in these matters, not a trusted source. If he'd questioned the idea, he probably would have realized it was a poor one. Some cache hits we'd be better off recomputing. But the brain completes the pattern automatically—and if you don't consciously realize the pattern needs correction, you'll be left with a completed pattern. I suspect that if the thought had occurred to the man himself—if he'd personally had this bright idea for how to remove a chimney—he would have examined the idea more critically. But if someone else has already thought an idea through, you can save on computing power by caching their conclusion—right? In modern civilization particularly, no one can think fast enough to think their own thoughts. If I'd been abandoned in the woods as an infant, raised by wolves or silent robots, I would scarcely be recognizable as human. No one can think fast enough to recapitulate the wisdom of a hunter-gatherer tribe in one lifetime, starting from scratch. As for the wisdom of a literate civilization, forget it. But the flip side of this is that I continually see people who aspire to critical thinking, repeating back cached thoughts which were not invented by critical thinkers. A good example is the skeptic who concedes, “Well, you can't prove or disprove a religion by factual evidence.” As I have pointed out elsewhere,1 this is simply false as probability theory. And it is also simply false relative to the real psychology of religion—a few centuries ago, saying this would have gotten you burned at the stake. A mother whose daughter has cancer prays, “God, please heal my daughter,” not, “Dear God, I know that religions are not allowed to have any falsifiable consequences, which means that you can't possibly heal my daughter, so . . . well, basically, I'm praying to make myself feel better, instead of doing something that could actually help my daughter.” But people read “You can't prove or disprove a religion by factual evidence,” and then, the next time they see a piece of evidence disproving a religion, their brain completes the pattern. Even some atheist...

In this episode of Scaling Postgres, we discuss connection scaling, how to cache your sequences, a message queuing implementation and the harms of subtransactions. Subscribe at https://www.scalingpostgres.com to get notified of new episodes. Links for this episode: https://richyen.com/postgres/2021/09/03/less-is-more-max-connections.html https://dev.to/yugabyte/uuid-or-cached-sequences-42fi https://blog.crunchydata.com/blog/message-queuing-using-native-postgresql https://postgres.ai/blog/20210831-postgresql-subtransactions-considered-harmful https://blog.timescale.com/blog/how-to-create-lots-of-sample-time-series-data-with-postgresql-generate_series/ https://blog.anayrat.info/en/2021/09/01/partitioning-use-cases-with-postgresql/ https://www.postgresql.fastware.com/blog/logical-replication-tablesync-workers https://dev.to/ftisiot/solving-the-knapsack-problem-in-postgresql-40cc https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/postgresql-the-power-of-a-single-missing-index/ http://postgis.net/2021/09/04/postgis-patches/ https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com/en/postgis-upgrade-with-ubuntu-20-04-02/ https://blog.crunchydata.com/blog/querying-spatial-data-with-postgis-and-ogr_fdw https://blog.rustprooflabs.com/2021/08/postgres-openstreetmap-changes-over-time-json https://postgresql.life/post/dmitry_dolgov/ https://www.rubberduckdevshow.com/episodes/11-modern-web-application-front-ends/

In this video, you'll learn how to cache Motion Vectors that have been generated in the Flame 2022.1 update. This includes motion vectors that have been generated for tasks such as 3D tracking or motion warp tracking. So you'll cover how to cache motion vectors, re-use Cached motion vectors in other composites and address how the Motion Vectors cache is handled in the Timeline.

(February 6, 2019) Rick and Jeff (Chrome DevRel) discuss the state of service workers: how they enable PWA functionality, which websites are a good fit, current adoption, common implementation mistakes, and how the Workbox tool can help. For more info about everything discussed in this video, check out the original video→ https://goo.gle/2MmjeP8 

(March 6, 2019) Rick and Una discuss the state of CSS: its outdated reputation for being unwieldy, tools that help developers work with CSS, and the status of powerful new APIs like flexbox, grid, and Houdini. For more info about everything discussed in this video, check out the original video → https://goo.gle/2XNCD0w

Aidan Harding joins to talk about Nebula Core, a Salesforce Apex functional programming Library, an open-source project published by Nebula Consulting company. Aidan is a senior Salesforce consultant and developer. Main Points Aidan’s self-introduction and the Nebula core open-source library including Salesforce functional programming feature Feature 1 – Cached way to retrieve record type information Feature 2 – the functional programming part in the lazy iterator  Feature 3 – the lazy part in the lazy iterator  Feature 4 – Sobject index Feature 5 – Custom metadata type-driven logger Links Aidan’s Twitter Aidan’s LinkedIn Nebula Core repository Blog thread about Feature The post 46. Nebula Core – Apex Functional Programming | Aidan Harding appeared first on SalesforceWay.

In this episode of Syntax, Scott and Wes talk about state in React: local state, global state, UI state, data state, caching, API data and more! LogRocket - Sponsor LogRocket lets you replay what users do on your site, helping you reproduce bugs and fix issues faster. It’s an exception tracker, a session re-player and a performance monitor. Get 14 days free at logrocket.com/syntax. Freshbooks - Sponsor Get a 30 day free trial of Freshbooks at freshbooks.com/syntax and put SYNTAX in the “How did you hear about us?” section. Show Notes 3:38 - What is state? 4:58 - What kind of things are kept in state? Data Temporary client side data From forms, button clicks, etc. Cached server data Data from API UI status AKA isModalOpen isToggled 12:48 - Global state vs. Local state Ask yourself: does the data need to be accessed outside this component? If data does need to be accessed a little higher, you can simply move where that state lives. React calls this “lifting state”. Do you count Apollo API calls as global state? 21:15 - Managing Local state useState, setState Passing state & update functions down State machines 31:12 - Approaches to Global state Redux Complicated, hard to learn Very useful, organized and structured Actions, reducers and more Time traveling do to nature of store Immutability Tons of Redux based hooks libs Mobx Based on Observables An Observable is like a Stream and allows to pass zero or more events where the callback is called for each event. Often Observable is preferred over Promise because it provides the features of Promise and more. Context Functions just work and update global state. Downside is there are no fancy tools Apollo Apollo quires for data in global cache Apollo client for global UI state Not quite there, isn’t super elegant Links Thinkso Learn Node! Meteor Session xstate-react React Context Mobx easy-peasy hype.codes providerCompose.js Relay React Podcast ××× SIIIIICK ××× PIIIICKS ××× Scott: Command Line Heroes Wes: MASSDROP CTRL MECHANICAL KEYBOARD Shameless Plugs Scott: LevelUpTutorials - Gatsby Ecommerce — Subscribe before price goes up! Wes: All Courses — Use the coupon code ‘Syntax’ for $10 off! Tweet us your tasty treats! Scott’s Instagram LevelUpTutorials Instagram Wes’ Instagram Wes’ Twitter Wes’ Facebook Scott’s Twitter Make sure to include @SyntaxFM in your tweets

Alyssa & Kayla discuss the horrors of the upstairs mouth...as well as the downstairs mouth. Trigger warnings abound! Links & pics below. --   DENTISTRY Dentistry article Dentures George Washington dentures Tooth keys Early dental tools Roman dental bridge Trench mouth   POOP KNIVES Original poop knife Reddit post Cached poop knife Reddit post Buzzfeed article

InSecurity Podcast: Why is Cylance entering the consumer market? What if I told you that 67% of workers use their own personal devices while at work 37% of US workers telecommute What if you asked me “why should I care?” Cloud-based solutions (Office365, DropBox, Box, Trello, Atlassian, etc) allow employees to access corporate assets from personal devices Employees can connect USB thumb drives to personal devices infected with malware, then plug them into a company device Employees can access corporate email on personal devices Telecommuters can VPN into work from a personal device Cached credentials from employees logging into company assets from a personal device could be stolen by malware Web-cam enabling malware on a personal device could spy on and compromise employees The virtual borders of a Corporate network are no longer defined by the corporate firewall. With the proliferation of work and personal devices at home, the distinction between the corporate network and employee’s home networks have become blurred. CISOs and their Security Teams have a difficult time controlling their security risk and exposure from cybersecurity threats originating from employee’s homes. Think you’ve got the kind of security solution in place you need to protect your network from not just the bad guys, but hard-working employees? In this episode of the InSecurity Podcast, Hiep Dang and Edward Preston join Matt Stephenson to introduce Cylance’s new baby… Cylance Smart Antivirus. Hiep and Edward will explain how Cylance is bringing their groundbreaking, enterprise security solutions to the home user. About Hiep Dang Over 14 years ago, Hiep Dang (@Hiep_Dang) serendipitously turned a casual curiosity in computer forensics and viruses into a full time professional career in the cyber-security industry. His journey has given Hiep a spectrum of experiences from burgeoning startups to Fortune 500 companies while solving deep technical to abstract business problems. Hiep’s sweet spot is product management because it is at the intersection of product strategy and technical execution. During the day, he geeks out on building innovative security products and at night Hiep teaches Kung Fu. About Edward Preston Edward Preston (@eptrader) has an eclectic professional background that stretches from the trading floors of Wall Street to data centers worldwide. Edward started his career in the finance industry, spending over 15 years in commodities and foreign exchange. With a natural talent for motivating, coaching, and mentoring loyal, goal-oriented sales teams, Edward has a track record for building effective sales teams who have solid communication lines with executive management.  About Matt Stephenson Insecurity Podcast host Matt Stephenson (@packmatt73) leads the Security Technology team at Cylance, which puts him in front of crowds, cameras, and microphones all over the world. He is the regular host of the InSecurity podcast and host of CylanceTV Twenty years of work with the world’s largest security, storage, and recovery companies has introduced Stephenson to some of the most fascinating people in the industry. He wants to get those stories told so that others can learn from what has come before. Every week on the InSecurity Podcast, Matt interviews leading authorities in the security industry to gain an expert perspective on topics including risk management, security control friction, compliance issues, and building a culture of security. Each episode provides relevant insights for security practitioners and business leaders working to improve their organization’s security posture and bottom line. To hear more, visit: ThreatVector InSecurity Podcasts: https://threatvector.cylance.com/en_us/category/podcasts.html iTunes/Apple Podcasts link: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/insecurity/id1260714697?mt=2 GooglePlay Music link: https://play.google.com/music/listen#/ps/Ipudd6ommmgdsboen7rjd2lvste  

7/26/18 Bitcanal Shunned; Malicious MDM; IoT Passwords Cached | AT&T ThreatTraq

What do you think is the biggest obstacle to cybersecurity success? Convenience. We love our convenience. The ability to do what we went, when we want, whatever way we want. Hackers love our love of convenience. Convenience breeds laziness. Cached passwords, the same password everywhere, simple passwords, lack of software and firmware updates are just a few examples of ways hackers can infiltrate your computer and online accounts. So what can you do right now? Listen to this episode. Dr. Stephanie Carter is a cybersecurity expert. She has more certifications thank I can write here and has made it her mission to transform the way we think about cybersecurity. Dr. Stephanie Carter started her cyber career in the US Army in 1994.  During her military career she has been relocated to several states and countries around the world.  She has served in many capacities all captured under the umbrella of cybersecurity disciplines such as network engineering, network administration, security analyst, information management officer.  She has partnered on behalf of DoD with other agencies such as DISA, NSA, FBI, and FEMA leading large scale IT projects and serving as lead security specialist in disaster recovery and incident response efforts.  After 20 years of service she retired and entered into the civilian cyber workforce.  In her civilian career, she has worked for and with agencies such as Department of Homeland Defense (DHS), Defense Health Agency (DHA), USCERT Team, and Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) all in senior cybersecurity/subject matter expert roles.  Dr. Carter currently works as a contractor for the Department of Justice (DOJ) managing a team of Information System Security Officers (ISSOs).  Outside of serving as the lead of this team, she is also the SME for all cloud implementations, NIST Risk Management Framework, the FedRAMP framework, ISO 17020, and NIST 800-171.  She takes great pride in the mentorship and development of future cybersecurity professionals in her role as a professor with the University of Maryland University College (UMUC) teaching courses in the Cybersecurity Graduate School programs as well as teaching classes for local chapters in the fields which she is certified.  She is certified CISM, CISSP, and CISA.  She is pursuing her PMI-RMP and CRISC later this year.  In addition to her military awards, she has won ICMCP Minority Teacher of the Year 2017, Humanitarian Award 2017, and has been recognized by ASIS, UMUC, IOBSE and many local cybersecurity chapters for speaking engagements.  With the unmeasurable desire she has for cybersecurity, she even continues to mentor cybersecurity professionals one on one, outside of the busy schedule detailed above all with the goal of furthering the diversity and DNA of the field of cybersecurity.     

Book 2, Part I, Chapter 90: Cached Thoughts "Rationality: From AI to Zombies" by Eliezer Yudkowsky Independent audio book project by Walter and James http://from-ai-to-zombies.eu Original source entry: lesswrong.com/lw/k5/cached_thoughts/ The complete book is available at MIRI for pay-what-you-want: https://intelligence.org/rationality-ai-zombies/ Source and podcast licensed CC-BY-NC-SA, full text here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ Intro/Outro Music by Kevin MacLeod of www.incompetech.com, licensed CC-BY: http://incompetech.com/music/royalty-free/index.html?isrc=USUAN1100708

Book II: How to Actually Change Your Mind - Part I: Seeing with Fresh Eyes - Cached Thoughts

In this episode I've got another blast from the past for you.  We have reached deep into the podcast archive and retrieved episodes 5 and 6. In Episode 5 we touch on using the video website YouTube for genealogy, and then I walk you through how to Bring Sites Back From the Dead with Google. Then we wrap things up with a cool little way to Spice Up Your Genealogy Database. In episode 6 I have a gem for you called Cast a Shadow on Your Ancestors, and we cover the free genealogy website US GenWeb    Episode: # 05  Original Publish Date:  March 25, 2007 MAILBOX      Email this week from   Mike O'Laughlin of the : “Congratulations on your podcast!  I am sure it will help many folks out there. I was glad to see the fine Irish families of Scully and Lynch on your latest show notes!” GEM:  You Tube Follow Up Note: The Genealogy Tech Podcast is no longer published or available. YouTube in the news – the concern was raised by Viacom this month about YouTube benefiting from their programming without compensating them, which could mean copyright infringement.  While the course of YouTube could change depending on the outcome of this suit, the attraction for family historians remains strong because of the nature of the content. Software mentioned: Pinnacle.  Final Cut for MAC.  Limits with Movie Maker I posted 2 videos – A Nurse In Training Part 1 & 2   Click the Subscribe button to receive notification of new videos   GEM:  Bring Sites Back From the Dead with Google                                                     When you get a "File Not Found" error when clicking on a link, it doesn't mean the information is always gone forever.  You may be able to find it in the Cache version.    Google takes a snapshot of each page it examines and caches (stores) that version as a back-up. It's what Google uses to judge if a page is a good match for your query.  In the case of a website that no longer exists, the cache copy us a snapshot of the website when it was still active hidden away or cached.    Practically every search result includes a Cached link. Clicking on that link takes you to the Google cached version of that web page, instead of the current version of the page. This is useful if the original page is unavailable because of: 1.      Internet congestion 2.      A down, overloaded, or just slow website - Since Google's servers are typically faster than many web servers, you can often access a page's cached version faster than the page itself. 3.      The owner's recently removing the page from the Web   Sometimes you can even access the cached version from a site that otherwise require registration or a subscription.    If Google returns a link to a page that appears to have little to do with your query, or if you can't find the information you're seeking on the current version of the page, take a look at the cached version.   Hit the Back button and look for a link to a "cached" copy at the end of the URL at the end of the search result. Clicking on the "cached" link should bring up a copy of the page as it appeared at the time that Google indexed that page, with your search terms highlighted in yellow.   If you don't see a cached link, it may have been omitted because the owners of the site have requested that Google remove the cached version or not cache their content.  Also, any sites Google hasn't indexed won't have a cache version.   Limit:  If the original page contains more than 101 kilobytes of text, the cached version of the page will consist of the first 101 Kbytes (120 Kbytes for pdf files).   Really looking for an oldie but a goody?  Try the   It allows you to browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago.   To start surfing the Wayback, type in the web address of a site or page where you would like to start, and press enter. Then select from the archived dates available. The resulting pages point to other archived pages at as close a date as possible. Keyword searching is not currently supported.     GEM:  Spice up your database Search Google Images, then Right click and save to your hard drive. Use Silhouettes Find something that represents what you do know about that person.  It really does help you see them more as a person and less as an entry in your database – their occupation, a reader, a sport, etc.     Episode: # 06 Original Publish Date: April 1, 2007 You can learn more about Jewish roots at the 350 Years of American Jewish History website , The Home of Jewish Genealogy   GEM:  Cast a Shadow on Your Ancestors In the episode #5 I shared a little gem that would spice up your genealogical database – adding silhouettes and artistic images to the file of an ancestor when you don't have a photograph.  Probably the most famous silhouette these days are the silhouettes used by Apple for advertising the iPod digital music and audio player.  It may surprise your teenager or grandchild to learn that the first silhouettes were done hundreds of years ago.  Back then silhouettes (or shades as they were called), they paintings or drawings of a person's shadow. They were popular amongst English royalty and the art form quickly spread to Europe.  A silhouette can also be cut from black paper, and was a simple alternative for people who could not afford other forms of portraiture, which, in the eighteenth century, was still an expensive proposition. The word took its name from Étienne de Silhouette, but it's uncertain as to whether his name was attributed because he enjoyed this art form, or as the story goes because the victims of his taxes complained that they were reduced to mere shadows. Either way, the popularity of Silhouettes hit new heights in the United States where they were seen in magazines, brochures and other printed material. But they faded from popularity as Photographs took over in the 1900s. As a follow up, I want to share with you a simple technique for creating your own silhouettes. You can use ordinary snapshots to create a visual family record.  Take a photo of a person in profile against a neutral background.  Blanket the photo background with white acrylic or tempera paint Fill in the image with a heavy black permanent marker, curing the shoulders down for a classical pose.  Add fun details like cowlicks, eyelashes, hats, and jewelry that express the person's personality with a fine felt-tip pen. Photocopy the doctored photos onto quality art paper.  Since glossy papers work print best, you could also use your computer scanner to scan the image into your hard drive.  From there you can add it to your database, or print it out onto glossy photo paper for mounting. To represent folks in your family tree, create a silhouette of your father to represent his Great Great Grandfather, and add a farmer's hat and rake to represent his profession of farming.  Chances are dad has inherited some of his profile anyway.  Have fun with it and be creative.  But of course be very sure to label to silhouette appropriately as a creative interpretation rather than a literal rendering. You can also do silhouettes of your family including extended family and arrange the portraits together on a wall.  Use black painted frames in a variety of shapes and sizes and hang in a way that represents the family tree / relationships. Check out the Art Café Network website for a by Katherine Courtney.   For More detailed how-to information, they have   2 Silhouette books to turn to: by Kathryn K. Flocken         GEM:  GenWeb Pages Last year the website celebrated its 10th Anniversary.  The USGenWeb Project consists of a group of volunteers working together to provide Internet websites for genealogical research in every county and every state of the United States. The Project is non-commercial and fully committed to free access for everyone. Organization within the website is by state and county. You can go to the homepage of the website and click on the state of your choice from the left hand column.  From the state page you can select the county you wish to search in.  However, when I know they name of the county I want to search in,  I've found it's often quicker just to search at google.com and do a search like  “genweb sibley county mn”  The choice is yours.  Remember to use the Google search gem that I gave you in episode one (see episode #134  ) to quickly search within the county website.   Many don't have search engines of their own, and so that's when I first really started using that search technique.  These county sites are often very rich though, and after a focused search, it's rewarding just to wander the site.  It will help you become more familiar with the county! You'll likely find databases of Births, Deaths, Marriages, townships histories, plat maps, surnames, and a host of other topics. Because each county has its own volunteer coordinator, the information you will find varies from county to county.  And as always, info is being added regularly, so you need to book mark them and return on a regular basis to see what's new.  Be sure and share your resources as well.  That's the power behind the GenWeb project – volunteers.  Volunteering your county resources will enrich other's experience and will likely lead to connections that will continue to further your own research. Book Mentioned in this episode:  by Rhonda McClure