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gwillen — LessWrong

I think a lot of people got baited hard by paech et al's "the entire state is obliterated each token" claims, even though this was obviously untrue even at a glance

can you link this, I can't immediately find it by googling.

Replying toEliezer's Unteachable Methods of Sanity

gwillen2mo

Eliezer's Unteachable Methods of Sanity

Someone mentioned "mass hysteria" above. I think there are cases where, surrounded by a certain culture or context, people feel positive-tribal-emotions about going insane. If that's true, it seems perhaps quite helpful -- to some particular people, in some particular context -- for a Big Tribal Leader (or a friend!) to say, "I strongly recommend not going insane! To the extent that this seems interpretable as a choice, I strongly recommend choosing the other thing!"

Replying toThe skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1

gwillen3mo

The skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1

Yeah, that's what I went to -- I didn't realize that was a standard term for it. Mine was arranged through the BMWCCA, for some reason; few of the people attending had BMWs. (Although they mostly had much sportier cars than my 2012 Honda Civic; I think I might have been the only attendee with front-wheel drive.) They "required membership", perhaps for liability reasons, but were selling it as a package deal with the class. Unfortunately, that specific outfit seems to run them very rarely these days, and their online scheduling interface is crap, or I would recommend an upcoming one.

Replying toThe skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1

gwillen3mo

The skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1

You can take classes, which are done in large open flat areas where skidding or spinning your car won't harm anything. I have taken the very beginning level myself, just to improve my driving skills, with no intention of ever racing. They had you do it in your own car, no specific prerequisites (other than being a legal driver, and an adult or appropriately supervised by one), maximum 25 mph (which turns out to be more than enough to start getting a feel for traction.) The next class, which I didn't take, involved more safety equipment and higher speeds.

You totally start to get a feel for when your car is losing traction, after very little practice. (This helpfully taught me that, in a scary prior incident on a mountain road, my car had been starting to lose traction, and something about how and why. This kind of knowledge is why I took the class.)

Replying toThe skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1

gwillen3mo

The skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1

Although, for safety's sake, I (who am not the article author, and not a race driver, but have a lot of opinions anyway...) actually go out of my way NOT to fly straight through a fresh green at full speed. In fact, my approximate goal is to avoid going through a very fresh green any faster than someone starting from a dead stop. Because that's the amount of time that an aggressive red-light runner in the crossing direction believes they have to "safely" get through. (And they're in the wrong, and I absolutely have the right of way, and I don't want "he absolutely had the right of way" on my tombstone.)

Replying toOut-paternalizing the government (getting oxygen for my baby)

gwillen3mo

Out-paternalizing the government (getting oxygen for my baby)

You can see in the description that this is an oxygen concentrator -- it pulls oxygen from the room air. It's the same type of device Ruby discusses in the post. I assume they call it a "generator" in the headline because people don't know what a "concentrator" is.

There is such a thing as a "chemical oxygen generator", like they typically use for the emergency oxygen masks on airplanes. Those are quite hazardous, because in addition to oxygen, they produce immense amounts of heat, easily enough to start fires. (They also "generate" the oxygen from a solid "fuel" material, which makes them one-time-use emergency devices only.)

Replying toStatus Is The Game Of The Losers' Bracket

gwillen3mo

Status Is The Game Of The Losers' Bracket

When I was at Google, I conducted a technical interview of an engineering candidate who wore a suit exactly once in my time there. I found it confusing and sus, but actually he was very good, and he did get the job. I guess he just didn't get the memo. (And he was clearly a person who enjoyed dressing up, atypically for an engineer; he wasn't just doing it for the sake of interviewing.)

Replying toPeople Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals

gwillen3mo

People Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals

What persentage of people around you, do you think are trying to signal anything with their outfit?

This seems... close to unanswerable? I think it depends enormously on what you mean by "trying to signal anything". I think there are reasonable definitions for which the answer is very high. (I was going to say "close to 100%", but then considered that this is untrue of e.g. small children, who may be both incapable of desiring to socially signal things yet, and also not choosing their own clothing. Although in that case, their parents may be trying to signal something instead.) Anybody who is aware that clothing signals things, and is choosing between multiple items of clothing, is very likely (although not certain!) to be putting some consideration, however little, into what their clothes are saying.

Replying toShallow Water is Dangerous Too

gwillen6mo

Shallow Water is Dangerous Too

After she recovered she told me she was trying to push her legs down and stand up, but they wouldn't go down.

I see an electrical cord going into that fountain (I assume for the pump), and I would like to point out a hidden danger which might or might not have played a role here. Faulty electrical wiring in water (such as a pool or a fountain) can cause current to flow through the body of a person in the water, leading to muscle contraction / paralysis. If the leakage current is large enough, it can directly kill; but even if it's fairly small, the resulting paralysis can cause drowning, due to... (read more)

Replying toDebugging for Mid Coders

gwillen6mo

Debugging for Mid Coders

I would describe myself as an expert-level debugger (which you sound like also), and all of this is describing experiences I have also had.

Nested layers of "options"

Here I use "option" in the sense of C++ std::optional<> / Rust Option / Haskell Maybe.

It feels to me like "real-world data" often ends up nested in thick layers of "optionality", with the number of layers limited mostly by how precisely we want to represent the state of our "un-knowledge" about it. When we get data from some source, which potentially got the data in turn from another source, and so on, there is some kind of fuzziness or uncertainty added at each step, which we may or may not need to represent.

I'm thinking about this because I'm feeding data from Home Assistant into Prometheus/Grafana to log and graph... (read 359 more words →)

Importance vs Seriousness of projects

(Note: I'm not sure "serious" is the right word for what I mean here. As I was writing this, I overheard a random passerby say to someone, "that's unprofessional!" Perhaps "professional" is a better word for it.)

While working on some code for my MIT Mystery Hunt team, I started thinking about sorting projects by importance (i.e how bad the consequences would be if they broke.)

The code I'm working on is kind of important, since if it breaks it will impair the team's ability to work on puzzles. But it won't totally prevent progress (just make it harder to track it), and it's not like puzzles are a life-or-death... (read 467 more words →)

Why [not] ask why?

When someone asks for help, e.g. in a place like Stack Overflow, they are often met with the response "why do you want to do that?"

People like to talk about the "XY Problem": when someone's real problem is X, but their question is about how to do Y, which is a bad way to solve X. In response, some other, snarkier people sometimes talk about the "XY Problem Problem": when someone's problem is Y, and they ask about Y, but people refuse to help them with it because they're too busy trying to figure out the (nonexistent) value of X.

The other day, I thought about a taxonomy of good... (read 850 more words →)

3D Printer foibles

I got a 3d printer last year, and I've been using it on and off. I want to document some of the stuff I've learned in the process. I'll start with just an outline for now, and see if people are interested (or I feel inspired) for more specifics.

The specific printer is a Monoprice Voxel, which is a rebadged / whitelabel Flashforge Adventurer 3.

Had I known it was a whitelabel I would have instead bought the original version. I don't know if that one has the same firmware bugs, but there's at least one missing feature in the Monoprice firmware (nozzle temperature calibration when replacing the nozzle.) It's possible to

... (read 617 more words →)

What's up with all the foo-vectors?

This is an attempt to succinctly (hah) answer a question I keep having to refresh my memory about: What's up with (vectors, bivectors, axial vectors / pseudovectors, multivectors, the cross product, etc.?) How do they relate to each other?

Multivectors

Multivectors or k-vectors are a generalization of vectors. Vectors have a length and a direction, and can be thought of as one-dimensional; k-vectors generalize vectors to arbitrary dimension k. In this framework, a scalar -- a quantity without direction -- can be thought of as a 0-vector. A 1-vector is just a regular vector. A 2-vector (or "bivector") is a quantity associated with a two-dimensional "direction", which is an... (read 645 more words →)

gwillen's Shortform

gwillen

This is a special post for quick takes (aka "shortform"). Only the owner can create top-level comments.

Upvote/downvote amounts

gwillen

In light of the variable voting powers that the new karma system has, I keep finding myself wanting to be able to vote less than my "full power" on a comment.

But in particular, the thing I think I always want in practice is to be able to downvote less than that. Downvoting a comment by 4 feels like a huge slap in the face, especially if the comment already has 4 or fewer points. I think the default downvote weight should probably be 1, or n/2, or something less than the default upvote weight. Upvoting is a positive community interaction, and downvoting, while necessary, is sort of a necessary evil at best.

I'm not sure whether I'd argue in favor of going further to actually enable choosing the amount for up/down votes, or just down-weighting downvoting.

Principals, agents, negotiation, and precommitments

gwillen

13y

I'm sure this observation has been made plenty of times before: a principal can gain negotiating power by delegating negotiations to an agent, and restricting that agent's ability to negotiate.

For example: If I'm at a family-owned pizza joint, and I want a slice of pepperoni but all they've got is meat-lover's, I can negotiate for the latter at the price of the former. This is a good deal with well-aligned incentives, and is likely to be accepted. But at a chain restaurant, the employees are not empowered to negotiate: It's the menu prices or nothing. Since I'm aware of their lack of power, and my demand for pizza is not very elastic,... (read more)