All recent entries from simonsafar.com
Making AI Part of Us 2026/08/02 Much has been talked about how to get the AIs to do what we actually want. Some of this is in the context of "if we're going to build superintelligent machines, how do we ensure they don't turn us into paperclips"... but there is another, somewhat more prosaic meaning to this as well. Namely... even with the current level of AIs... if your prompt is three sentences…
Claude and Taxes 2026/03/28 Last year, I filed my tax return in October. Technically, you're supposed to send them out by April 15th; procrastinating on doing them is definitely easier though, and that was the second deadline you can catch. Admittedly, some might consider the way I'm doing taxes to be... somewhat unnatural? See also: Shell Scripts, Emacs and Taxes ; it's text files, processed by…
Evolution vs. Alignment 2026/03/15 Is it possible to align an AI that is smarter than us? so that it does whatever we'd want it to do? or will ones that don't care about alignment always outrun / out-evolve the ones that do? Note that "alignment" would involve predicting at least some things about the AI's behavior. It is a complex system. It is impossible to predict everything that it would do.…
So I Wrote A Book 2025/12/22 Some readers might have noticed a... pause in blogpost activity. I guess if I suddenly produce an entire book's worth of stuff, it'd be a pretty good excuse, right? Well, I... indeed wrote a book; there are some issues with "sudden" though. In fact, it was ready to go as of... sometime in late 2004. Have you ever heard the piece of advice about how you should be…
Double Pretend It's Real 2025/09/18 Life is... mostly uninteresting. I mean... yes you're living in a sci-fi movie , etc, but... come on. Your daily commute is, sci-fi or not, Boring. It's the same every day. You got used to it. Wouldn't it be cooler, if, say, you went to, um, Japan? and took the train and could be like the protagonist in your favorite anime series? (... isn't there something…
Living More Like Humans 2025/09/11 (actually published 09/20, mostly written 08/21, 09/11 is when it was slightly fixed up) As mentioned before , we're living in an age of unprecedented prosperity. If we're not quite yet happy, it's a consequence of not having reached the Glorious Transhumanist Future yet, where everyone lives forever, has huge amounts of freedom, resources, and no illness or pain…
Logarithmic Hedonism 2025/08/09 Going after nice things often has diminishing returns. Eating a slice of cake is great; getting a second one is definitely not as satisfying as the first one, and... well, with cakes, the 10th one likely has negative utility... but even considering things that scale a lot better (e.g. money): getting a thousand dollars is extremely good news if you're broke, but…
How to Build the Evil Superintelligence out of the Book 2025/07/05 It's 2025. We are living in the Future. We have language models that you can talk to , and better yet, that seem to roughly understand human values. None of this was supposed to be possible. After all, human values are complicated... and all we have is computers. If we were to build a superintelligence (... so the argument went in…
Spaces for Humans 2025/06/01 It was a hard life, a couple hundred years ago. For most people, food, clothing and warmth were scarce resources; you needed to work for them, a lot, taking up a significant fraction of your available time. You... sometimes found the time to socialize, to go to church, meet up with friends, have a good time... but this wasn't really a priority in the grand scheme of…
You Can Run a DNS Server 2025/05/03 In fact, it's not especially even hard to run a DNS server. In case you were wondering whether this would mean... writing zone files with some arcane syntax that BIND 9 is apparently famous of, I hereby present the main point of this post a recommendation for which DNS server to choose. As it happens, PowerDNS does support querying a database for DNS records.…