All of 4hodmt's Comments + Replies

4hodmt-10

I thought Worm had a very bad ending. Vg cebzvaragyl srngherf Pbagrffn, jub vf gur jbefg punenpgre naq unezf gur fgbel fvzcyl ol rkvfgvat. Gnlybe ybfrf ure cbjref. Gur Fvzhetu fgnegf fbzr cyna naq gura gur cybg guernq vf nonaqbarq.

But despite this I still consider it one of my favorite stories.

4hodmt00

Assuming he only had one shoulder operated on, where was the control shoulder?

0ChristianKl
His doctor was dumbfounded over the result and the doctor has seen control shoulders.
4hodmt00

I stopped biting my nails (coating them in a bitter substance to remind myself not to bite them if I tried) and I did not make any replacement habit. I don't have a "habit of not biting my nails" any more than I have a habit of breathing. It happens automatically without conscious effort, so calling "not biting nails" a habit is misusing the word.

0Brillyant
This is why I mentioned the definition of "habit" in my comment. From Wikipedia:
4hodmt00

Probably because rich people have most to lose if they're expected to be charitable, and rich people controlled what got published in the Bible. If giving is supposed to be secret then who can prove they're giving nothing?

4hodmt00

Flavoring is optional, but the vast majority of e-cigarette users use strong smelling flavored liquids. Some of them smell worse than tobacco IMO.

4hodmt-10

That study is testing the effect of tobacco use, not pure nicotine.

EDIT -- why is this downvoted? The linked study does not test your claim. Tobacco smoking is a CYP1A2 inducer so it will increase caffeine metabolism, but I am not aware of any studies demonstrating that the nicotine is responsible for this. Tobacco smoke contains PAHs and PAHs are known CYP1A2 inducers: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25911656

4hodmt00

This rule is incomplete. Most two-syllable adjectives ending in "y" can be converted to comparative form with "er". Some of these may be uncommon, but not all, and my spell checker agrees they are real words, in both British and American English.

Eg. Angrier, heavier, cleverer, friendlier, happier, lazier, tidier, etc. And even three syllable words can take "er": bubblier, foolhardier, jitterier, slipperier, many words starting with "un".

4hodmt10

Dessert is tasty even when you're already full, so if you're going to eat some eat it first to avoid obesity. This might not work if you have a strong habit of clearing your plate even if you don't need more food.

-3polymathwannabe
The law of marginal utility satisfaction says no. But it's still true that you need to watch how much you eat.
2[anonymous]
Related life advice: Get smaller plates, you'll eat less.
4hodmt00

Less than £2 on eBay. I bought mine for 99p including postage, but I can't find any for that price now.

4hodmt00

Butter is meant to be kept at room temperature only if you're going to use it as a spread. If you mostly use it as an ingredient, or for flavoring vegetables, it's better to keep it refridgerated.

4hodmt150

I do not know if emigration can be attributed to climate change or not, but I do that that Israel produces very large quanties of fresh water by desalination:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination#Israel

Neighboring countries may not be able to afford this.

1knb
The wholesale cost of desalinated water in Israel is quite cheap, about 50 cents for a cubic meter, which is significantly more than the average household uses.
4hodmt70

Cooking by weight is common in the UK, and it's superior for two reasons: One, it's more accurate, because it's unaffected by packing density. Two, it's quicker, because you can pour all the ingredients directly into one container, zeroing the scales between each one. Cooking by weight is standard for professional baking even in the US.

4hodmt50

Additional assumptions you are making:

  1. The only cost of suicide is physical pain
  2. Humans mature into rational adults immediately after birth
-6Username
4hodmt00

It's true that most projects don't need or use the advanced features of git, but this isn't a good reason to use svn, because git can also be used in a simple manner: http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html You're at no disadvantage compared to if you used svn.

But when you want to contribute to one of the big projects that does require the full power of git, you are at an advantage, because you don't have to learn a complete new version control system, only the extra git features you hadn't learned yet.

3btrettel
In my view, svn has a number of benefits over git. Let me offer a quick runthrough of why I prefer svn for small projects. The main reason to use svn in my view is simplicity. git can't do many things svn does with as little friction as svn requires. Centralized version control is definitely simpler than distributed. Distributed can be useful if you want to develop a feature offline (and find the svn ways of doing that to be a pain, as I do), want to work on something independently for a while, want to work on an experimental branch, etc.. But there's a good reason to prefer centralized in some cases. Distributed version control is too confusing for many people you might want to collaborate with. My research group has enough trouble getting my PhD advisor to use svn. Do you think this will be easier with git? The documentation for git is pretty bad. In contrast to svn, I can't rely on the documentation for git making sense and basically have to Google for many things, even some things which are straightforward in svn (like svn keywords). The Pro Git website is pretty good, however. One thing I like is having a incrementing number that refers to a unique version. You actually can get that in git, but it's a complicated command that I've never seen used in real life. This is just how svn works. Let's say you are using git just want to print the hash and date of last modification in your code or document. svn has a keyword functionality to do this automatically when you update. git makes this at least moderately complicated (for silly reasons). There are several ways to do this, but editing the file directly with a script is unsatisfactory because the file will show up modified, unless there's some git way around this. In svn the files show up as unmodified. You also could pass in the hash at compile time, which is just extra work over svn. I have heard conflicting things about partial checkouts in git. My impression is that they work but are more complicated tha
4hodmt20

My 5 second judgement, which is about as much attention as a totally unknown channel can expect to get, is that these videos are stand-up comedy by somebody without the confidence to perform live in front of an audience. This immediately signals that it's not worth my time.

0VocalComedy
Which video did you watch? And do you know how could that impression be averted, at least from a personal perspective? Thank you for the feedback.
4hodmt-10

Pushing the fat man is the wrong choice because it forces fat men everywhere to constantly be on the lookout for consequentialists, and causes moral hazard by encouraging lax safety around railroads. Consequentialism is only indisputably the correct morality when everybody is perfectly rational and everybody has the same goals. In reality people have differing terminal goals and perfect rationality is impossible because of limited computational ability. Deontology is superior because it is far more predictable. Nobody has to waste brain cycles on avoiding being a convenient victim for some dubious "greater good".

4hodmt20

Further evidence for this: people often become good friends with sparring partners in combat sports.

4hodmt10

The chance of an AI torturing humans as a means to some other goal does seem low, but what about the AI torturing humans as a end in itself? I think CEV could result in this with non-negligible probability (>0.000001). I wouldn't be surprised if the typical LessWrong poster has very different morality than the majority of the population, so our intuition of the results of CEV could be very wrong.

0hairyfigment
Note that it does not suffice for us to have different conscious morality or different verbal statements of values. That only matters if the difference remains under extrapolation, eg, of what others would want if they knew there weren't any deities.
4hodmt50

I went to school. That's a clear example of "repeated stressful challenges", and it did not produce any satisfaction or happiness.

4hodmt20

You can program to solve your own problems. It's very likely that other people have similar or identical problems, so your code can benefit them even if you didn't plan for that.

4hodmt00

For me it produced a feeling I can best describe as a tactile analog of the sound of fingernails scraping on a blackboard. It's not exactly pain but something similar and unpleasant. When it wore off I would feel noticeably happier for several hours. I didn't repeat the experience many times, partly because of the unpleasant feeling, and partly because I didn't find a good delivery method other than smoking. I used a concentrated extract strong enough that I could get the full effects from two inhalations, but once I'd done it enough to gain a basic unders... (read more)

4hodmt00

In my experience Salvia divinorum works very much like this.

0Ritalin
Could you elaborate on any specifics? Apparently the plant is legal in most of the world and only prohibited in very few countries.
4hodmt10

Isn't individuality of dietary needs reason not to consult a physician? In most cases it's going to be impractical for a physician to study any individual patient's requirements. They may also be legally or professionally prohibited from the kind of experimentation needed to find those requirements.

4hodmt60

As a cheaper alternative to 100% dark chocolate, I drink unsweetened* cocoa made as follows:

  1. Fill kettle, start boiling water
  2. Add 2 teaspoons cocoa powder to mug, stir in a small trickle of cold water to make a paste
  3. Stir in boiling water, filling mug about 2/3rd full
  4. Top up with cold milk (*milk contains sugars so this isn't technically zero sugar. You could skip the milk if you think it matters, at the cost of worse taste).

Best tasting cocoa powder I've found in the UK is Cadbury Bournville. Some supposedly premium brands (eg. Green & Blacks) tast... (read more)

0Emily
Isn't this exactly how cocoa is normally made? Either like that or with hot milk instead of boiling water. What would anyone do differently with that sort of cocoa?
2palladias
I like drinking cocoa made as follows: 1. 1 mug milk (heated in microwave 2. ~1.75 spoons of unsweetened cocoa powder 3. 1-2 dashes of cinnamon 4. (sometimes) cayenne powder
4hodmt10

I've never heard of anybody successfully training themselves to genuinely dislike the taste of sugar, as opposed to the idea of eating it. I've been succesfully avoiding sugar for years and on the rare occasions when I do eat some I thoroughly enjoy it. It might be easier to train yourself to enjoy bitter tastes. This is releatively easy, because drugs are often bitter. Strong unsweetened black coffee on an empty stomach might be a good place to start. You'll associate the bitterness with the caffeine high and eventually enjoy bitterness even without the c... (read more)

4hodmt20

Videoconferencing uses fairly consistent processing/memory over time. The load on the garbage collector has low variance so it can be run at regular inteverals while maintaining very high probability that the software will meet the next frame time. Games have more variable GC load, so it's more difficult to guarantee no missed frames without reserving an unacceptably high time for garbage collection.

4hodmt00

Obviously visible strobing only indicates low refresh rate in CRTs and the rare few monitors with black frame insertion or scanning backlights. In most cases strobing is caused by PWM brightness control, which has the visual disadvantage of strobing without the sample-and-hold-blur reducing advantage of frame-syncronized strobing. PWM brightness control is purely a cost saving measure. At high frequencies it might not bother you but it's rare for PWM frequency to be listed in the specifications.

My phone uses PWM brightness control at about 200Hz so I run it at full brightness (100% duty cycle) if I'm using it for a long time which negates the strobing.

4hodmt40

I find refresh rate extremely important. I stuck with CRTs at 100Hz+ for a very long time after LCDs became popular because only 60Hz LCDs were available. I now use a 120Hz LCD and it's much more enjoyable than 60Hz. Everything feels smoother and more responsive. The improved mouse control is very obvious (this might require increasing the mouse sample rate, I use usbhid mousepoll=2 on Linux). Motion appears much sharper, because the higher refresh rate allows for higher frame rate which reduces sample-and-hold blur (see http://www.blurbusters.com for deta... (read more)

4hodmt70

As somebody who's also done a lot of mushrooms, the first trip provides comparatively little insight. You're so busy observing all the novelty that you don't have much time to think about it. When you're more familiar with the common effects there's time for introspection without missing anything interesting.

4hodmt00

20 beats per second is for two-handed drumming over one minute, so that's only 10bits/s/muscle theoretical maximum. There doesn't seem to be any organized competition for one-handed drumming, but Takahashi Meijin was famous for button mashing at 16 presses per second with only one hand, although for much shorter times.

4hodmt20

I cycle as my main form of transportation. I chose cycling partly to save money and partly for exercise. I ride a flat bar touring bike with internal hub gears. I ride in a vehicular style, following the recommendations of "Cyclecraft" by John Franklin. This helps acheive the exercise goal, because vehicular cycling is impossible without a good level of fitness.

I'll use high quality infrastructure when it's available, but here in the UK most cycle infrastructure is worse than useless. We have "advisary cycle lines" in which cars can fre... (read more)

0btrettel
Infrastructure quality is a major issue. I don't mind infrastructure at all as long as it is done well. Most of the infrastructure I have seen is not done well. The infrastructure we have here in the US tends to be terrible, though perhaps for different reasons than in the UK. As an example, consider the recent cycletrack in where I live, Austin, TX. This cycletrack is a disaster as far as I'm concerned. Local bike advocates say that it's Dutch style infrastructure, but it really isn't. In the Netherlands, the intersections are separated with a bikes-only part of the light cycle. The current setup has no such separation, and encourages conflicts with motorists as far as I can tell. This is particularly bad where the cycletrack ends, as the road markings make cars and bikes cross, and drivers basically never yield or even look as they are required to. I just ride in the normal lane unless I'm stopping off somewhere on the cycletrack.
4hodmt10

I find it's well worth spending money on reliability and low maintenance for things you use regularly. I cycle as my main form of transport, and I spent extra money on a good set of internal hub gears. The only maintenance required is a yearly oil change. The time needed to clean and adjust derailuer gears probably isn't much, but the subjective feeling of reliability is valuable for me. Likewise, I use tires with strong puncture protection. I'm confident that I can set out to cycle at short notice and arrive at my destination at a predictable time.

The sam... (read more)

4hodmt160

Strongly seconding the SSD recomendation. I can't think of anything else that's given so much enjoyment for the money. A SSD dramatically increases perceived performance of a computer beyond what you'd expect from benchmarks. Adding extra ram can hide the latency of a mechanical HD by caching, but it does nothing for worst case performance, and worst case performance is highly salient. I'd much rather use a low spec PC with a SSD than a high spec PC with a mechanical HD. Predictably mediocre performance feels faster than high average performance with high variance.

5Lumifer
That really depends on what you are running. In the general case, if you get a LOT of performance increase from an SSD, this generally means your disk cache is way too small and you should start by buying more RAM.
4hodmt60

Playing mirror Go is often considered dishonorable. In practice it's not a major problem because it's a suboptimal strategy.

4hodmt-10

The most popular anti-anxiety drug (alcohol) is legal in most places.

If you don't like alcohol, there's another legal drug which doesn't have the same anti-anxiety effects, but in many places comes with a ready made social network. That drug is tobacco, in places where indoor smoking is banned. The ban helps strengthen the feeling of community. Many tobacco users claim this group membership is the main reason they smoke.

The risks of smoking tobacco probably exceed the social benefits. Nicotine itself, vaporized in an e-cigarette, is much safer. Long runnin... (read more)

Ishaan140

The most popular anti-anxiety drug (alcohol) is legal in most places.

Caution - mild scientific evidence for anxiety increasing effects in the long run, moderate scientific evidence that the anxious are more susceptible to dependency for this substance, not to mention that alcohol + neuroticism has an anecdotal reputation as a failure mode.

It feels like the boring / obvious thing to say, but I think it's worth mentioning.

3ialdabaoth
Failure mode: my mother smoked excessively when I was a child, which contributed to either a built-up sensitivity to nicotine, or a psychosomatic perception of the same. Either way, nicotine is non-viable. Also, alcohol actually makes me MORE neurotic, not less, because I'm constantly reminding myself that I'm drunk, and therefore likely to do something dumb.
4hodmt50

Contact is about as anti-rationalist as a movie can get. The main character was right in that she really did violate the known laws of physics, but her reasoning was completely wrong. The government's public arguments were correct because they correctly valued the prior probability that the known laws of physics are correct. The fact that the main character's conclusion turned out to be correct anyway is then used to promote religious faith. I very much dislike this movie.

4hodmt70

My first thought was detective/courtroom drama type movies, but these are typically Sherlock Holmes style pseudo-rationality, with lessons you can't apply to reality.

In general I don't think movies are good for promoting rationality. The best I can think of are some of the more realistic war movies, eg. Das Boot, Platoon, The Great Escape, which illustrate the "nature doesn't care" idea, where the characters can do everything perfectly and fail anyway because they were in an impossible situation from the start.

6ChristianKl
A lot of detective movies overmatch evidence too much. Detective get away with seeing patterns where there are no real pattern.
4hodmt110

I didn't see a list of "good" gurus, so I checked all the individual reviews looking for them. I saw only three:

  • Milton Cudney
  • Nancy Dunnan
  • James Gilbaugh
4hodmt50

Continuing with your current deck should be strictly superior to starting from scratch, because you will remember a substantial portion of your cards despite being late. Anki even takes this into account in its scheduling, adjusting the difficulty of cards you remembered in that way. If motivation is a problem, Anki 2.x series includes a daily card limit beyond which it will hide your late reviews. Set this to something reasonable and pretend you don't have any late cards. Your learning effectiveness will be reduced but still better than abandoning the deck.

I've previously let Anki build up a backlog of many thousand unanswered cards. I cleared it gradually over several months, using Beeminder for motivation.

0Emile
True, I forgot about that option - I actually discovered it after I had cleared my backlog, and thought "hm, that could've been useful too..."
4hodmt20

If this works, it seems like a good use for those LCD picture frames. Turn them on when you want to work, turn them off to relax.

4hodmt100

Making web browsing slightly more annoying can be effective in reducing use.

0Luke_A_Somers
Yes. Even as wrong as downloading 15 chapters of fanfic in one command line and binging them for an afternoon would be while seeming to use the connection for around 3 seconds... that isn't what would normally happen.
4hodmt180

Beeminder without the deadlines is Beeminder with the weekly rate set to zero.

4A1987dM
Or even just a text file and a gnuplot script, for that matter.
4hodmt90

"Happiness" as a concept sounds simple in the same way "a witch did it" sounds simple as an explanation. Most people consider wireheading to be a failure state, and defining "happiness" so as to avoid wireheading is not simple.

0blacktrance
Happiness as a feeling is simple, though it may be caused by complex things. If wireheading would make me happy - that is, give me the best possible enjoyable feeling in the world - I'd wirehead. I don't consider that a failure state.
4hodmt00

Any good set of headphones can reproduce the whole 20Hz to 20kHz human frequency range, and any audio editor software can generate tone sweeps. The frequency response won't be perfectly flat but it will give a rough idea without paying for properly calibrated testing. Each ear can be checked separately.

As for tinnitus, I don't know what influences permanence, so the safest assumption would be to avoid any sound exposure that causes it.

4hodmt90

I've had the exact same experience with AMF.

4hodmt40

Thanks, I didn't notice the '*'s.

4hodmt00

My apologies then. It would be useful if LessWrong marked edited posts as edited.

7Douglas_Knight
It does mark edited comments, by an * after the date. It does not mark edits to top-level posts or edits by admins (even self-edits by admins, which is clearly a bug).
4hodmt20

Editing the quote to remove the "considerably" changes the meaning. The original is not a tautology because the "considerably" suggests a visible step in the curve.

8wedrifid
I didn't remove a word. The original was edited to change the meaning.
0ChristianKl
If there a visible step in the curve that would be interesting. If anyone has any sources that makes such a claim, please provide it.
1Mestroyer
private_messaging's post is edited. I bet wedrifid quoted it as it originally was, and private_messaging edited it later to change the meaning. Edit2: (To change my posts's meaning, heh) or to clarify the original intended meaning. Edit: fixed formatting error caused by not escaping the underscore private_messaging's name.
4hodmt160

Not taking risks of audio noise exposure seriously. Hearing loss is gradual, and tinnitus often starts as a temporary thing, so it's very easy to accumulate major damage before you realize it's a problem.

0lukeprog
I'm probably risking this. Do you know how I can test for hearing loss, or how I can avoid tinnitus? I should do my own research, but I figured I'd check if you have tips.
1solipsist
I carry around earplugs everywhere I go. It looks a bit weird, but I'm very glad for it.
4hodmt10

Whole fruit/vegetables act as a sustained release delivery system for their micronutrients, so even supplementing all the relevant micronutrients may not perfectly replicate fruit/vegetables if they're delivered as bare molecules.

1passive_fist
Perhaps we could engineer 'sustained release delivery systems' with properties far better than any fruit.
Load More