Yonatan Cale

• Yonatan Cale 24 Oct 2024 13:36 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: How do you fol­low AI (safety) news?

  Every time Zvi posts something, it covers everything (or almost everything) important I’ve seen until then

  https://​​thezvi.substack.com/​​

  Also in audio:

  https://​​open.spotify.com/​​show/​​4lG9lA11ycJqMWCD6QrRO9?si=a2a321e254b64ee9

  I don’t know your own bar for how much time/​focus you want to spend on this, but Zvi covers some bar

  The main thing I’m missing is a way to learn what the good AI coding tools are. For example, I enjoyed this post:

  https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​CYYBW8QCMK722GDpz/​​how-much-i-m-paying-for-ai-productivity-software-and-the

• Yonatan Cale 12 Oct 2024 11:24 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: How To Be­come A Pro­fes­sional Soft­ware Developer

  Backend recommendations:

  I’m much less confident about this.

  1. If you want a working backend with minimal effort, because actually the React part was the fun thing

     1. Firebase (Firestore) :

        1. This gives you, sort of, an autogenerated backend, if only you describe the structure of your database. I’d mainly recommend this if you’re not interested in writing a backend but you still want things to work as if you built an amazing backend.

        2. The main disadvantage is it will be different from what many databases look like.

           1. You could skip the “subscribe for changes” feature and only use the “read” feature and it will be a bit more realistic, but I don’t actually recommend that.

  2. If you want to write backend in a way that will push you towards best practices, using a technology that is very popular (and specifically documented well for beginners)

     1. Django

     2. A big disadvantage is you’d need to learn some pyhton, and you might be reading this because you already built a fun React project and you want to get it done without learning lots of new tech

     3. DB:

        1. Postgres is the default normal DB for most use cases. SQLite might be easier for local development (on your laptop), and is missing some features that you’ll almost surely not notice, so please don’t care about them until a concrete problem comes up.

  Things that automatically override this advice:

  1. If you’re picking technologies for your startup or something then remember this wasn’t written for you.

  2. If you have a senior developer who will mentor you if you work on some different technology that they know well, then probably go with them.

• Yonatan Cale 12 Oct 2024 10:49 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How To Be­come A Pro­fes­sional Soft­ware Developer

  Tech stack recommendations:

  Many people who want to build a side project want to build a website that does something, or an “app” that does something (and could just be a website that can be opened on a smartphone).

  So I want to add recommendations to save some searching:

  1. React. You can learn react from their official tutorial, or from an online course. Don’t forget to also learn any prerequisites they mention (but you don’t need to invent your own prerequisites)

     1. If you want a React competitor, like Vue, that’s also ok (assuming you’re more excited about it).

        1. Choices I don’t think are legit: JQuery, vanilla javascript.

           1. I can elaborate.

           2. (If someone sent you to “learn the basics” then I probably disagree with them. Yes it has value, but it’s not the most effective path to a first job with mentorship nor to getting far in 5 years. There are other times to learn these things which are not “before your first job”)

  2. For graphics (making your website nice)

     1. If you don’t care about graphics, you can skip all that (including css)

     2. If you don’t want to put effort into graphics but you want your website to look nice anyway, you can use Material UI or Bootstrap. They have ready components like a pretty button or a pretty checkbox, you just import them and only do minimal customization like “hey checkbox, you’re disabled by default”.

     3. If you think making a pretty website is really cool and is obviously the exciting thing to do: you can learn css, and perhaps Tailwind. This isn’t a path I took myself and I don’t know it well. Just remember—it’s a higher priority to get a first project done even if bad and ugly. But as part of “looking for things that excite you to learn more”, graphics might be one of them

  3. Deploying (having a url that you can send to your friends, or put on your CV)

     1. Firebase Hosting

        1. There are many fun ways to deploy websites, including React, I’m specifically recommending Firebase because you might want to use it to solve other problems too (which I might write about).

  4. Backend

     1. If you mainly wanted to make a website-that-does-something, I’d start with that before getting into backend. Once you reach this point on a real project, check if you actually want to continue here. The main important thing is that you work on something that excites you, so you have my official permission to leave your project “not perfect”, without a backend (even if it needs one), if you think that part will be less fun.

     2. Main things a backend will give you (written here so you can check if this seems exciting or meh)

        1. User login

        2. Communication between users (for example if it’s anything like a chat)

        3. Saving information that will still exist if you open the website in a new browser (for example, if you have a TODO list, you probably want to see the list both in your phone and in your computer)

     3. ((I might continue in a sub-comment))

• Yonatan Cale 31 Aug 2024 15:28 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 3

  in reply to: Neel Nanda’s comment on: Should you work at a fron­tier AI com­pany?

  My frank opinion is that the solution to not advancing capabilities is keeping the results private, and especially not sharing them with frontier labs.

  ((

  making sure I’m not missing our crux completely: Do you agree:

  1. AI has a non negligable chance of being an existential problem

  2. Labs advancing capabilities are the main thing causing that

  ))

• Yonatan Cale 31 Aug 2024 13:03 UTC

  2 points

  5 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Should you work at a fron­tier AI com­pany?

  I also think that a lot of work that is branded as safety (for example, that is developed in a team called the safety-team or alignment-team) could reasonably be considered to be advancing “capabilities” (as the topic is often divided).

  My main point is that I recommend checking the specific project you’d work on, and not only what it’s branded as, if you think advancing AI capabilities could be dangerous (which I do think).

• Yonatan Cale 31 Aug 2024 12:56 UTC

  25 points

  3 ∶ 1

  on: Should you work at a fron­tier AI com­pany?

  Zvi on the 80k podcast:

  Zvi Mowshowitz: This is a place I feel very, very strongly that the 80,000 Hours guidelines are very wrong. So my advice, if you want to improve the situation on the chance that we all die for existential risk concerns, is that you absolutely can go to a lab that you have evaluated as doing legitimate safety work, that will not effectively end up as capabilities work, in a role of doing that work. That is a very reasonable thing to be doing.

  I think that “I am going to take a job at specifically OpenAI or DeepMind for the purposes of building career capital or having a positive influence on their safety outlook, while directly building the exact thing that we very much do not want to be built, or we want to be built as slowly as possible because it is the thing causing the existential risk” is very clearly the thing to not do. There are all of the things in the world you could be doing. There is a very, very narrow — hundreds of people, maybe low thousands of people — who are directly working to advance the frontiers of AI capabilities in the ways that are actively dangerous. Do not be one of those people. Those people are doing a bad thing. I do not like that they are doing this thing.

  And it doesn’t mean they’re bad people. They have different models of the world, presumably, and they have a reason to think this is a good thing. But if you share anything like my model of the importance of existential risk and the dangers that AI poses as an existential risk, and how bad it would be if this was developed relatively quickly, I think this position is just indefensible and insane, and that it reflects a systematic error that we need to snap out of. If you need to get experience working with AI, there are indeed plenty of places where you can work with AI in ways that are not pushing this frontier forward.

  The transcript is from the 80k website. The episode is also linked to in the post. It also continues to Rob replying that the 80k view is “it’s complicated” and Zvi replying to that.

• Yonatan Cale 28 Jul 2024 13:45 UTC

  10 points

  3 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Guy Raveh’s comment on: Case-con­trol sur­vey of EAGx at­ten­dees finds no be­havi­oural or at­ti­tu­di­nal changes af­ter six months

  Something like “noticing we are surprised”. Also I think it would be nice to have prediction markets for studies in general and EA seem like early adopters (?)

  I don’t know why this was so downvoted/​Xed

  :/​

• Yonatan Cale 27 Jul 2024 17:34 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: jacquesthibs’s comment on: jacquesthibs’s Shortform

  Hey :)

  Looking at some of the engineering projects (which is closest to my field) :

  • API Development: Create a RESTful API using Flask or FastAPI to serve the summarization models.

  • Caching: Implement a caching mechanism to store and quickly retrieve summaries for previously seen papers.

  • Asynchronous Processing: Use message queues (e.g., Celery) for handling long-running summarization tasks.

  • Containerization: Dockerize the application for easy deployment and scaling.

  • Monitoring and Logging: Implement proper logging and monitoring to track system performance and errors.

  I’m guessing Claude 3.5 Sonnet could do these things, probably using 1 prompt for each (or perhaps even all at once).

  Consider trying, if you didn’t yet. You might not need any humans for this. Or if you already did then oops and never mind!

  Thanks for saving the world!

• Yonatan Cale 27 Jul 2024 16:51 UTC

  21 points

  10 ∶ 7

  on: Case-con­trol sur­vey of EAGx at­ten­dees finds no be­havi­oural or at­ti­tu­di­nal changes af­ter six months

  If you ever run another of these, I recommend opening a prediction market first for what your results are going to be :)

  cc @Nathan Young

• Yonatan Cale 14 Jul 2024 15:12 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Thoughts on these $1M and $500k AI safety grants?

  Any idea if these capabilities were made public or, for example, only used for private METR evals?

• Yonatan Cale 12 Jul 2024 20:00 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: sndr_brst’s comment on: How To Be­come A Pro­fes­sional Soft­ware Developer

  I’m not sure how to answer this so I’ll give it a shot and tell me if I’m off:

  Because usually they take more time, and are usually less effective at getting someone hired, than:

  1. Do an online course

  2. Write 2-3 good side projects

  For example, in Israel pre-covid, having a CS degree (which wasn’t outstanding) was mostly not enough to get interviews, but 2-3 good side projects were, and the standard advice for people who finished degrees was to go do 2-3 good side projects. (based on an org that did a lot of this and hopefully I’m representing correctly).

  
  There is more that I can say about this, but I’m not sure I’m even answering the question.

  Also note that the main point of this post is to recommend people do side projects, as opposed to recommending they don’t get a CS degree. Maybe another point is “don’t try to learn all the topics you heard about before you apply to any job”, which is also important.

• Yonatan Cale 6 Jul 2024 9:23 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Rebecca’s comment on: 80,000 hours should re­move OpenAI from the Job Board (and similar EA orgs should do similarly)

  1. If Conor thinks these roles are impactful then I’m happy we agree on listing impactful roles. (The discussion on whether alignment roles are impactful is separate from what I was trying to say in my comment)

  2. If the career development tag is used (and is clear to typical people using the job board) then—again—seems good to me.

• Yonatan Cale 4 Jul 2024 6:39 UTC

  10 points

  3 ∶ 2

  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: 80,000 hours should re­move OpenAI from the Job Board (and similar EA orgs should do similarly)

  My own intuition on what to do with this situation—is to stop trying to change your reputation using disclaimers.

  There’s a lot of value in having a job board with high impact job recommendations. One of the challenging parts is getting a critical mass of people looking at your job board, and you already have that.

• Yonatan Cale 4 Jul 2024 6:36 UTC

  10 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Conor Barnes’s comment on: 80,000 hours should re­move OpenAI from the Job Board (and similar EA orgs should do similarly)

  Hey Conor!

  Regarding

  we don’t conceptualize the board as endorsing organisations.

  And

  contribute to solving our top problems or build career capital to do so

  It seems like EAs expect the 80k job board to suggest high impact roles, and this has been a misunderstanding for a long time (consider looking at that post if you haven’t). The disclaimers were always there, but EAs (including myself) still regularly looked at the 80k job board as a concrete path to impact.

  I don’t have time for a long comment, just wanted to say I think this matters.

• Yonatan Cale 26 Apr 2024 16:56 UTC

  7 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: $1.25/​day—What does that mean?

  So when a person gather sticks from the forest for their own use — that counts as ‘consumption’

  How could one measure consumption that includes things like this? And how would you pick a dollar value for how much the stick gathering was worth?

• Yonatan Cale 26 Apr 2024 15:44 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How To Be­come A Pro­fes­sional Soft­ware Developer

  Paul Graham agrees that building something you’re excited about is a top way to get good at technology:

  https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​mtBwjfygyAudDakyC/​​yonatan-cale-s-shortform?commentId=KBeNwzkiAKFp5Lw9T

• Yonatan Cale 26 Apr 2024 15:43 UTC

  4 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Yonatan Cale’s Shortform

  Paul Graham about getting good at technology (bold is mine):

  How do you get good at technology? And how do you choose which technology to get good at? Both of those questions turn out to have the same answer: work on your own projects. Don’t try to guess whether gene editing or LLMs or rockets will turn out to be the most valuable technology to know about. No one can predict that. Just work on whatever interests you the most. You’ll work much harder on something you’re interested in than something you’re doing because you think you’re supposed to.
  
  If you’re not sure what technology to get good at, get good at programming. That has been the source of the median startup for the last 30 years, and this is probably not going to change in the next 10.

  From “HOW TO START GOOGLE”, March 2024. It’s a talk for ~15 year olds, and it has more about “how to get good at technology” in it.

  What links here?

  • Yonatan Cale's comment on How To Be­come A Pro­fes­sional Soft­ware Developer by Yonatan Cale (26 Apr 2024 15:44 UTC; 4 points)

• Yonatan Cale 19 Apr 2024 16:05 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Per­sonal re­flec­tions on FTX

  Linking to Zvi’s review of the podcast:

  https://​​thezvi.wordpress.com/​​2024/​​04/​​15/​​monthly-roundup-17-april-2024/​​

  Search for:

  Will MaCaskill went on the Sam Harris podcast

  It’s a negative review, but opinions are Zvi’s, I didn’t hear the podcast myself.

• Yonatan Cale 19 Apr 2024 10:47 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Adam Binksmith’s comment on: Job Post Template

  do you have a rough guess at what % this is a deal breaker for?

  It’s less of “%” and more of “who will this intimidate”.

  Many of your top candidates will (1) currently be working somewhere, and (2) will look at many EA aligned jobs, and if many of them require a work trial then that could be a problem.

  (I just hired someone who was working full time, and I assume if we required a work trial then he just wouldn’t be able to do it without quitting)

  Easy ways to make this better:

  1. If you have flexibility (for example, whether the work trial is local or remote, or when it is, or something else), then say that in the job post.

     1. It was common for me to hear that candidates didn’t even apply because of something like that which is written as a strict requirement, and then for me to hear from an employer that they didn’t really care about it.

  2. If your candidates will feel comfortable talking to you and telling you about things like this, and then you can find a solution together—I imagine that would be great.

  Also, some candidates will WANT a work trial to see how the job actually is. I asked for a work trial in my current job.

  Also, CEA does work trials. You could ask them how it goes. (But they won’t hear about people who didn’t even apply, I guess)

• Yonatan Cale 11 Mar 2024 7:53 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 2

  on: OpenAI an­nounces new mem­bers to board of directors

  I recommend adding “Sam Altman” to the title, it can act as a TLDR. The current phrasing has a bit of a “click here to know more” vibe for me (like an ad) (probably unintentionally)