That is a classic question of population ethics (LW). The author is writing from a totalist perspective (which I think is by far the most common view on LW) while you seem to find a person-affecting perspective clearly correct.

I would expect that to work fine as an adult on my own, but if I'm the one who gets to the street first it would be confusing to my kids.

We are eating food cooked at home, which is a lot cheaper then frozen meals and much cheaper than restaurant food. We have a dinner rotation with housemates (and a neighbor) where we take turns cooking dinner, so Julia and I each usually cook once a week.

What I cooked last night:

• 3lb sausages, bought on sale @ $2/lb
  • I often buy meat on sale and keep it in our chest freezer
• 2lb pasta @ $1.20/lb
• 2lb tomatoes @ $2/lb
• 2lb onions @ $2/lb
• 2 bell peppers @ $2/each

Usually there'd also be a vegan or vegetarian option, but we didn't happen to have anyone who needed that any last night. If we did I probably would have baked some tofu, 1lb @ $3.50/lb.

Overall cost, assuming I'd included the tofu, is ~$25 when you count the small amount of amortized spices, cooking oil, etc. This would be dinner for about 10 people, and several lunches. About $2/meal. $732 is ~$5/person/day, and lunch and breakfast are generally much lighter and cheaper than dinner.

My lunch is also provided by my work, and once a week we have dinner with my extended family at my dad's house. I'm also not counting the electricity used to run the stove, but I think that's probably too small to matter?

A much larger missing expense is the opportunity cost of each adult's time cooking, but I can combine cooking with watching the kids to some extent and it's also something we enjoy.

I only use this setup when I'm away from my desk. If I'm in a convenient location I can just plug into an external monitor at the right height.

(somehow) make bread that was likely to last longer

You could decrease the water content and not leaven it, making it into hardtack. This will last for years if kept dry. But it's very unpleasant to eat, and I don't think people would buy it or bakers would make it unless required to.

Whoops; fixed!

I think it's most likely contamination within the lab doing the nucleic acid extraction, since talking to them they do work with lentiviral vectors.

Setting aside economics or technology, would it in principle be possible to detect a variant of concern in flight and quarantine the passengers until further testing could be done?

There are two pretty different scenarios:

1. Initial detection: if you don't already know whether there's something out there, you'll need to do metagenomic sequencing or something similar to identify the pathogen. This is the part of the problem that the NAO is trying to solve. While I haven't looked into the absolute-minimum-sequencing-time portion of the space deeply, my understanding is if you want a reasonable cost-per read you need to use a sequencing method that (counting both the preparation and the sequencing machine running) takes multiple days. So not a good fit for per-flight testing.

2. Containment: we've learned about a pathogen somehow (ex: someone with unusual symptoms, metagenomic sequencing) and we're trying to keep it from spreading. Now we can use a targeted method, such as qPCR, where there are stand-alone speed-optimized options here that take under an hour (ex: KrakenSense). In this case, the question is, how do you get the samples to test? Ideally you'd get everyone to give a sample before boarding, which you could do a pooled test on while the plane was in flight, but that requires infrastructure and cooperation with the originating country.

you're saying that your prelim results show that 0.2% of the sampled population would need to have at some point in the past been infected for the variant of concern to be detectable?

That's correct. While detection is fundamentally based on the people who are currently shedding copies of the virus, but our modeling counts "time" in terms of the progress of the infection through the population.

suggesting this would be deployed in airports rather than municipalities. So the plan has changed?

We're also exploring arport monitoring, but airplane blackwater tanks not terminals. Preliminary data from pooled tank samples (you collect between the truck that sucks it out of the planes and the dumping point) looks very good.

infected travelers/day in an airport setting to get .2% of the wastewater being from them

Sorry to keep harping in this, but 0.2% of wastewater from people who've ever been infected (cumulative incidence) not currently infected (prevalence). While shedding is primarily about prevalence (though varying over the course of the infection) for evaluating a system we generally think cumulative incidence is more informative because it tells you much more and how far along the pandemic is.

Technically it's 0.2% cumulative incidence not 0.2% prevalence, but depending on the assumptions you make about how long infections last and how quickly they spread they're usually in the same ballpark.

Many SeaTac travelers do not defecate, so your effective sample size is smaller. Possibly too small for this to work well. This modeling is generally assuming larger sewersheds, like municipalities.

if someone modified a virus that NAO wasn't explicitly monitoring for modifications, then that would go undetected?

That's correct. But it's extremely cheap to monitor an additional virus, so there's not much downside to casting a large net.

Pretty sure at the end of A1 you meant robins roll larks away R to L (So you're rolling away your partner rather than shadow)

It should have read: "(4) On the way back, Larks roll Robins away (left to right)" instead of "(4) On the way back, Robins roll Larks away (left to right)". Fixed now!

I didn't write it down, so don't trust this much, but something like 2-3.5?

The important part is probably the behind-the-head straps.

That's my guess too.

that seal comes from your face deforming to fit a rigid mask

Are you sure? It seems to me that even the most "rigid" masks I've tried are still not very hard, and with sufficiently tight straps while my skin deforms slightly the masks deform much more?

Here is a typical disposable P100 mask.

Note that this is a valved mask, so it probably wouldn't have done well in a source control comparison.

FWIW, I read 700e6 the same as 700M or 7e8. If someone was trying to communicate significant figures I'd expect 7.00e8.

If I was running a website I'd simply not use analytics.

My bet is if you were running a website like this you'd see how useful analytics are for making complex websites better.

In our case I'm not worried about when they wake up in the morning, but about going to sleep, especially at naptime. A crib is boring and conducive to sleep, but there are a lot of interesting things to play with around the room.

The reason I want to stick with a crib over a bed or floor mattress (and I assume the reason most people use cribs) is that it keeps them in their bed during the time they're supposed to be sleeping.

Climbing out of the crib is mildly dangerous, since it's farther down on the outside than the inside. So it's good practice to switch a way from a crib (or adjust the crib to be taller) once they get to where they'll be able to do that soon.

Even if they can do it safely, though, a crib they can get in and out of on their own defeats the purpose of a crib -- at that point you should just move to something optimized for being easy to get in and out of, like a bed.

I do think it's possible to have low crosstalk with low damping. The problem is that my current design uses the same rubber (sorbothane) pad for both purposes. Possibly this could be two layers, first sorbothane (for isolation) and then something springing (for minimal damping). Or an actual spring?

I do think that would be possible, but then I think you'll also get more false triggers. The strong damping is what makes it so I can sensitively detect a pluck on one tine without a strong pluck on one tine also triggering detection of a weak pluck on neighbor tines.

I was thinking that finger muting wouldn't be possible, because the sensors are physically damped and there's no vibration left for your fingers to stop. Except now that you mention it, it might still be possible! It could be that gently placing your finger on one of them has a sufficiently recognizable signal that if it's currently "vibrating" and you do that I could treat that as a mute signal.

I don't think they are pinchy, since they are tight in their resting position?

Whoops! You're right! Will do.

Turns out I forgot to solder the ground and power pins! So they worked, but very poorly.

Combined with switching to shielded cable and swapping the piezo input from +1.65v to ground, it's working well now!

I'm seeing 68ms in current Chrome Canary. If I use current stable the test page doesn't work because of this bug. Filed a bug!

I did decide to redo it for the Teensy 4.1, and I hooked up all 18 inputs:

I also added mounting holes, and a bit of writing.

When you get deeper in you will hit the issue that almost every modern part is smd with no through hole equivalent.

I'm not currently planning to get deeper into this, but we'll see!

Audio science review forums will have domain experts who are much more knowledgeable than I am about this, it's very hard to make "perfect" analog acoustic circuits where any design compromises are no longer audible. But it can be done.

One nice thing about this project is that I'm not trying to capture high-quality audio: I only need it to be good enough to work as a sensor.

Testing with a breadboard the 3.3v digital seems to be good enough, and the noise I'm getting seems to be RF on the piezo lines which is hard to avoid.

Note that if you have a hot air soldering iron and paste it's not difficult to use smd parts of you order the big ones or have a microscope.

I don't, and haven't used one. I suspect it's not worth getting into it for this project?

I silkscreened the actual values not "r1...rn" and the same for capacitance. This makes hand building easier.

My current draft (as pictured here) does both, which is the KiCad default.

The post isn't trying to cover all cases of harmful careers, just ones where the career seems to be clearly net positive when approached from a costs-and-benefits framework, but still involves some harms. Trying to think about your class of objections, all the ones I can think of are covered by "that's actually net negative" and not "that's clearly positive, but you shouldn't do it anyway"?

For example, say someone cares a lot about animals and thought their best altruistic option might be working in their family's ranch. They'd (a) they'd earn a bunch of money (hypothetical!) that they'd donate to ACE recommendations, (b) they'd have some influence in the direction of better treatment of animals, but (c) they'd be complicit in raising animals for food. [1] It seems to me that the question here is whether (a) and (b) outweigh (c)? Or do you want to give additional weight to farms like this being incompatible with the stricter moral standard you think is correct?

[1] If the movement were working to outlaw ranches like this I see how working at one could undermine that, and so be another harm in addition to (c).

That's right: if it were free to include then sure, even if only 5% of attendees can read it. But it's actually quite a lot of work.

I can't tell if you're joking? But at the risk of missing the joke, where do you see this in EA philosophy?

Twilio has extended this by two years: https://www.twilio.com/en-us/changelog/Extension-of-Twilio-Programmable-Video-End-of-Life-to-December-5-2026

Speak up if you want me to keep this running until the new EOL date?

It could be fun to see how much of this is automatable: I have a camera roll that goes back to early 2012 combined with my selections for each year. That's a decent amount of annotated data!

For an example of #1 at a solstice, I think The Next Right Thing at the 2023 Boston one went pretty well. You can hear as the audience figures it out and starts singing along. The original version is much more complicated, and this version I simplified intentionally for the event.

For #2, here's Song of Artesian Water where you can hear people joining in progressively over the course of the song.

For #3, here's Chasing Patterns, which is also a good bit of #1.

I don't think there are other community venues that could host the solstice celebration for free

Instead of having one big gathering for the whole Bay Area you could have several gatherings small enough to fit in the houses of community members who have large spaces. Since the main bottleneck is organizers splitting like this wouldn't make sense for the Bay, but hosting them at houses is pretty common in cities with smaller gatherings (ex: Boston, which I help organize).

On sheet music: I think this isn't part of the tradition because most versions of Solstice have segments where the lighting is dimmed too far to read from paper, and also because printing a lot of pages per attendee is cumbersome.

I think a bigger factor is that not very many people can sing unknown songs from sheet music, so it wouldn't help very much to include it on the slides.

There are two ways to get large numbers of people to sing together: you can teach everyone at least rudimentary music literacy & show them the sheet music, or you can sing songs that everyone is already familiar with.

Other ways, all of which I've seen at solstices:

1. Limit to songs with a melody and structure that are really easy to pick up.  A lot of praise music does this.
2. Songs are long enough that even though they're not super easy to pick up most people will have it after a few verses and there are a lot of verses. Some people are going to find the first few verses not so fun.
3. Leader sings something, everyone sings it back (call and response).

Yes! But not just time, you should also compare them on accuracy.

A common experience in parenting is that a little kid will strongly prefer to play with toys that other kids are playing with, even when there are lots of others sitting around totally available. Conditional on another kid having chosen this toy out of all the options it's probably a better toy!

My guess is it's just that the fan is really big?

Since writing this I've learned more about how the air flows around ceiling fans, and I expect that (a) using slightly taller filters that extend below the blades and (b) adding a cowl would help a lot.

But your accounts would be up so much that you'd only need a tiny fraction of them to fund your immediate consumption

Maybe you want to use the money altruistically? To spend on labor, compute, etc?

I think a lot of this depends on your distribution of potential futures:

• What sort of returns (or inflation) do you expect, in worlds where you need the money at various ages?

• What future legal changes do you expect?

• How likely are you to have a 5y warning before you'll want to spend the money you've put in a traditional 401k?

• What are your current and future tax brackets?

• How likely are you to be in a situation where means testing means you lose a large portion of non-protected money?

• How likely are you to lose a lawsuit for more than your (unprotected) net worth or otherwise go bankrupt?

The first version of this post (which I didn't finish) tried to include a modeling component, but it gets very complex and people have a range of assumptions so I left it as qualitative.

The third example I give is exactly that, where Andrew produced our CD, so a lot of overlap!

Helping you be a better live band in the moment, though, seems like it's usually not going to come out of working with a record producer?

This is subtle and I may be missing something, but it seems to me that using a pretax 401k helps some but not that much, and the Roth scenario is only slightly worse than the regular investment account. Compare the three, chosen to be maximally favorable to your scenario:

1. You contribute to your pre-tax 401k, it grows (and inflates) 2x. You roll it over into a Roth IRA, paying taxes on the conversion. Over the next five years it grows 1.3x. You withdraw the contribution and leave the gains.

2. You contribute to your post-tax Roth 401k, it grows (and inflates) 2x, and then another 1.3x. You withdraw the same amount as in scenario #1.

3. You put it in a regular investment account.

Let's assume your marginal tax rates are 24% for regular income and 15% for capital gains.

In #1 if you start with $100k then it's $200k at the time you convert, and you pay $48k (24%) in taxes leaving you with $152k in your Roth 401k. It grows to $198k, you withdraw $152k and you have $46k of gains in your Roth 401k.

In #2 your $100k is taxed and $76k (less the 24%) starts in the Roth. When it's time to withdraw it's grown to $198k. Of that, your $76k of contributions are tax and penalty free, leaving you with $122k of gains. To end up with $152k in your bank account you withdraw $115k, paying $28k (24%) in taxes and $12k (10%) in penalties. You have $7k of gains still in your Roth.

In #3 your $100k is taxed to $76k when you earn it, and then grows to $198k. You sell $179k, paying 15% LTCG, and end up with $152k after taxes and $19k still invested (but subject to 15% tax when you eventually sell, so perhaps consider it as $16k).

So you're better off in #1 than #3 than #2, but the difference between #3 and #2 is relatively small, and this is a scenario relatively unfavorable to Roths.

My claim isn't "Roth 401(k)s are strictly better than putting the money in investment accounts" or "Roth 401(k)s are strictly better than pre-tax 401(k)s" but instead "when you consider the range of possible futures, for most people Roth 401(k)s are better than non-protected accounts and other protected accounts may be even better".

The original version of this post had results from a simulation where the key results were off by a factor of 100. See the update at the top of the post for more.

Many cooperative board games run into a problem where if there are people of differing skill levels on the same team than the strongest player ends up doing most of the playing. Hanabi is the only multiplayer game I've tried that successfully avoids this, where every player needs to be engaged and trying their best.

Often, but not always: your plan might not allow in-service withdrawals, so taking the money out right away might require leaving your company.

In your 50% of worlds where we get AGI in the next 3y, do you have important uses for the money?

How does your remaining 50% smear across "soon but >3y" through "AI fizzle"?

Saving, but avoiding protected "retirement" plans so you can invest in traditional taxed assets. This is very hard to justify, for the reasons you give. I'd classify as mostly dumb.

This is the only one I'm trying to argue against in the post, fwiw.