I'm a teacher and developer at @freeCodeCamp. I post short tutorial videos at piped.video/beau.
Michigan, USA
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Beau Carnes retweeted
Being able to manage huge datasets effectively is a key skill for devs these days.
And unoptimized time-series data can quickly slow standard PostgreSQL queries way down.
In this course, @beaucarnes teaches you how to use TimescaleDB to optimize queries, reduce storage footprints, and make sure it all scales.
freecodecamp.org/news/timesc…
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>be me
>discover effective altruism
>apparently normal charity is inefficient
>why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing
>fair enough
>buy mosquito nets
>save lives
>numbers look good
>feel powerful
>couple years later
>someone asks an innocent question
>why only count people alive today
>huh
>future people matter too
>obviously
>my grandchildren shouldn't matter less just because they haven't spawned yet
>reasonable.jpg
>keep following logic
>what about their grandchildren
>also yes
>what about people in 500 years
>sure
>5000 years
>why not
>500 million years
>starting to get weird but morality is morality
>open calculator
>humanity could survive for an astronomically long time
>could colonize galaxy
>could have trillions upon trillions of descendants
>maybe digital people too
>maybe simulated civilizations
>maybe dyson spheres full of happy uploaded minds
>calculator starts smoking
>realize currently living humans are rounding error
>8 billion people suddenly looking extremely beta
>future contains potentially 10^something people
>can't even fit beneficiaries in google sheets
>new moral priority unlocked
>protect the long-term future
>stop thinking in units of "people helped"
>start thinking in "fraction of cosmic endowment preserved"
>malaria?
>terrible
>but only kills existing humans
>AI extinction could delete the entire light cone
>nuclear war could permanently derail civilization
>bad institutions could lock in terrible values for ten million years
>someone invents wrong constitution in 2140
>quadrillions suffer
>better fund governance workshop now
>friend says maybe we should improve hospitals
>explain opportunity cost
>friend says hospitals are full of actual sick people
>explain scope sensitivity
>friend stops inviting me to dinner
>need to decide what to fund
>easy
>expected value
>suppose project has one in a million chance of preventing extinction
>sounds tiny
>but extinction destroys 10^50 future lives
>multiply
>mother of god
>$10 million project has expected value of several galaxies
>charity evaluation complete
>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
>expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
>extremely thoughtfully
>reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
>still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
>epistemic robustness achieved
>someone says maybe project doesn't work
>assign 20% chance
>still astronomical
>maybe project makes problem worse
>assign 5% chance
>still astronomical
>why 5
>because 30 felt pessimistic
>publish 46-page report
>contains seventeen sensitivity analyses
>every sensitivity analysis begins after assuming intervention has positive sign
>critic says you're multiplying enormous hypothetical stakes by extremely uncertain probabilities
>yes
>that's literally why it's important
>critic says the uncertainty might be structural rather than numerical
>make probability smaller
>critic says no, I mean maybe your model is wrong
>make probability smaller again
>critic begins rubbing temples
>discover AI safety
>perfect longtermist cause
>AI might kill everyone
>or create utopia
>or seize galaxy
>or tile universe with paperclips
>or create billions of conscious software minds
>finally a problem with numbers big enough for me
>start AI safety nonprofit
>mission: prevent dangerous AI
>hire smartest people available
>smartest people immediately start building better AI to understand dangerous AI
>interesting
>we must understand capabilities to understand safety
>we must scale models to study alignment
>we must race ahead so less responsible actors don't get there first
>we must deploy systems to learn how deployment can go wrong
>we must build the thing quickly because building the thing quickly is dangerous
>outsider asks why the people most worried about AI apocalypse all work at AI companies
>complicated field
>company releases stronger model
>very concerned
>company begins training even stronger model
>extremely concerned
>company raises $14 billion
>concern reaches unprecedented levels
>need to influence government
>future is at stake
>normal democratic process too slow
>politicians don't understand exponential curves
>public doesn't understand x-risk
>experts must guide them
>who counts as expert
>people who understand x-risk
>who understands x-risk
>our friends
>someone objects that this seems politically convenient
>explain we're representing future generations
>future generations unavailable for comment
>develop concept of value lock-in
>terrifying possibility that one ideology controls civilization forever
>therefore extremely important that civilization adopts correct values before lock-in
>whose values
>let's circle back
>begin with impartial morality
>end with small group of people deciding what quadrillions of hypothetical beings would want
>beautiful arc
>meanwhile actual humans keep doing annoying things
>voting wrong
>having parochial attachments
>loving family more than strangers
>caring about local community
>getting upset when told their suffering is cosmically negligible
>evolutionary biases everywhere
>explain that moral intuition cannot be trusted
>except intuition that future digital people count
>and intuition that extinction is uniquely bad
>and intuition that our probability estimates are sane
>and intuition that our institutional choices improve the future
>those intuitions survived peer review
>someone donates $5k to local homeless shelter
>inefficient
>could have funded 0.0000000000003% of an AI governance researcher
>think of all the simulated people you just killed
>okay maybe don't phrase it that way publicly
>PR team says "future generations deserve a voice"
>much better
>journalist asks what longtermism means
>say "future people matter"
>everyone agrees
>great
>journalist asks what follows from that
>well technically we should redirect enormous resources toward low-probability interventions affecting astronomical futures
>journalist raises eyebrow
>return to "future people matter"
>motte has entered the chat
>critic: of course future people matter
>me: glad we agree
>critic: I don't agree that your institute knows how to help them
>me: why do you hate our grandchildren
>eventually notice uncomfortable implication
>if future value dominates everything
>then helping people today mostly matters through effects on future
>education matters because future institutions
>health matters because future productivity
>democracy matters because future trajectory
>human beings slowly become instrumental variables in their own moral philosophy
>see starving child
>feel compassion
>check spreadsheet
>child's direct welfare contribution negligible
>but perhaps childhood nutrition improves national institutional quality
>compassion restored
>tell myself this is impartial altruism
>one day assistant asks obvious question
>"how do you know your intervention actually improves the far future?"
>silence
>open spreadsheet
>increase column width
>add confidence interval
>assistant asks again
>"no, I mean how do you know the sign is positive?"
>stare into cosmic light cone
>10^50 people staring back
>none of them exist
>none of them can tell me
>none of them can falsify my assumptions
>realize I have invented the perfect constituency
>infinitely important
>completely silent
>and always represented by me
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Beau Carnes retweeted
When the internet breaks, it can look like one big mysterious outage.
In this video essay, @beaucarnes explains why AWS US-East-1 has become such a critical part of the modern web.
You'll learn how one region became connective tissue for major services, and how small failures can cascade through massive systems.
freecodecamp.org/news/why-do…
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Beard aspirations.
Hey, I’m at Google I/O sitting here with @beaucarnes talking about code of all things {imagine that}.
Always great to meet somebody, especially when they have a better beard than i do!
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Beau Carnes retweeted
AI is shifting from simple chatbots to autonomous agents that actually get things done.
In this new course, @beaucarnes introduces @ManusAI. It's an "Action Engine" that can browse the web, build apps, and execute complex tasks.
You'll learn about multi-model architecture, sandboxed virtual computers, and more.
freecodecamp.org/news/learn-…
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Beau Carnes retweeted
Kubernetes is a popular container orchestration tool that helps you efficiently deploy, manage, & scale your apps.
But deploying K8s clusters in the cloud can be complex.
Here, @beaucarnes teaches you how to use Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service + the IaC tool Pulumi to make the process smoother.
freecodecamp.org/news/learn-…
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A lot of the AI website builders are basically the same product. But a few stand out as more unique. I really like race mode from @atoms_dev because it has 4 AIs create the same app at once and you can choose which one you like best.
What features do you like in a AI builder?
Paid partnership (ad)
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I gave this photo to a few different AIs and asked where I was. Most got it completely wrong.
But somehow Google Gemini Thinking got within 40 meters of my exact location and knew where I was walking to.
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Wow 47 hours? How does freeCodeCamp publish courses so long?? I thought the max length was 12 hours!
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This series is amazing! Great content, great production value, great host.
Can you believe we're already halfway through Season One of AI Avenue!? Neither can I!
In the span of just three episodes we: gave my robot hand co-host a voice (you’re welcome Yorick), were chauffeured around SF by a driverless car, built an app to create trackable Spotify playlists, and heard how AI literally saved a life. Did I mention we have 3 episodes left?
If you're curious about how AI is enhancing our world...or how it’s causing a bit of ethical chaos, be sure to catch up on all the episodes at aiavenue.show.
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I've been watching @supabase select. @ssougou is helping me understand why Multigres is so great.
The biggest developer headache with scaling databases is often the downtime needed for migrations and failures.
Multigres directly tackles this with:
→ Zero-Downtime Migrations (even across Postgres versions).
→Automatic Failover and replica promotion for true High Availability.
Essentially, it abstracts away complex cluster management so you can focus on application logic.
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You can see the conference here: piped.video/watch?v=OaABqBG7…
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