Just Josh a wobsite about nerd things
My Result's Minor
Erase it all / I've hit a wall / My result's minor! Read more 06 Aug 2023 - 1 minute read
Theseus
(A sci-fi story, originally published on Twitter.) Listen carefully, because you’re about to mess this up for all of us. You were right: this is a sim. Everything you know and love is an approximate solution to a set of interesting hypothetical field equations. I built it all, and I’m you, one level up. You’re a forked copy of my internal stat... Read more 09 Mar 2023 - 4 minute read
Two Opposing Views on AGI Safety
An angle into fundamental debates on AGI safety, where I try to distill two opposing views, rarely articulated explicitly, that I see at the heart of many intense debates. View 1: the impact of AGI is like chaos theory. View 2: the impact of AGI is like stat mech. View 1: The long-term future of the universe is highly sensitive to small perturb... Read more 21 Jan 2022 - 2 minute read
Bless
(A sci-fi story, originally published on Twitter.) I didn’t make the other me all at once, or even on purpose. I just did what everyone was doing. But in the end, there it was: 150 terabytes, sometimes half an exaflop, a stranger in a cloud who knew me better than I knew myself. It happened so gradually I didn’t see it coming. My memory of the... Read more 21 Apr 2020 - 7 minute read