Show LW: Get a phone call if prediction markets predict nuclear war

post by Lorenzo (lorenzo-buonanno) · 2023-09-17T22:25:21.206Z · LW · GW · 8 comments

This is a link post for https://recursing.github.io/nukes/

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hasrussialaunchednukes.com used to be a website "to help [the author] and a few of [their] friends get notified when Russia launches any nukes towards Ukraine, which would be a sign for many of us to leave the big cities we live in, and chill in the countryside for a few weeks." It used prediction markets for 2022, so it stopped working in 2023.

Some people asked me to make a version for 2023, so here it is at https://recursing.github.io/nukes.^[1]

I manually curate the list of phone numbers, a bunch of which were sent to me by one of the people requesting this, you can ask for your number to be added using any of the links at the bottom of the website.

You can look at the incredibly hacky script I use to make phone calls here: it runs every 10 minutes on a Hetzner VPS I use for a bunch of things^[2]

I don't think this is extremely reliable, I give an ~80% chance that it will work, and I'll do my best to prevent false alarms, but some people found it useful, and I was asked to share this here.

I would be curious to hear if you have any thoughts!

1. ^{^}

   Why do it in mid-september, given that the year is almost over? I actually implemented this in February, but procrastinated until today to write this post. But it will be trivial to update it for 2024, once the year is over.

2. ^{^}

   I use vonage instead of twilio to handle phone calls because someone else was implementing a similar thing with twilio, and we wanted to have redundancy 

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