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Brendan Long
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Benefits of Psyllium Dietary Fiber in Particular
Brendan Long6d20

Thanks for sharing this! It seems worth trying to get a low-lead psyllium powder (right now Consumer Reports recommends Organic India).

I read around a little, and it sounds like this shouldn't be too concerning though. Since psyllium forms a gel and and doesn't actually get digested, I'd guess that very little of this lead is actually absorbed, and there are actually studies recommending psyllium as a way to remove lead from your body.

I'd lean on the side of caution and not feed psyllium husk to children though.

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Don't Eat Honey
Brendan Long6d20

That's a good point, that farming also causes large numbers of insects to die whether we bring bees in or not. The post seems to argue that bees in particular are smarter/more important than other insects though. I'd also expect in a most cases that bees are being brought to farms, not wild fields, so the (alleged) suffering of bees is on top of the suffering of other insects on the farm, not an alternative to it. Although, maybe once you've done the work of preparing a field, having bees produce honey from it is less bad than preparing additional fields.

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Don't Eat Honey
Brendan Long7d*171

This company claims theirs is https://www.elevenmadisonhome.com/story/mellody-honey

It's for sale here ($28/9oz) https://www.elevenmadisonhome.com/product/mellody-plant-based-honey

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Don't Eat Honey
Brendan Long7d80

Is your placement of free-range eggs because it's a watered-down term, or because you think even actual-free-range/pastured chickens are suffering immensely?

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Don't Eat Honey
Brendan Long7d104

In almost all cases, animals are fed farmed alfalfa and grain several times the caloric value of the meat they produce, so even if you're worried about wild animal suffering to grow crops, we'd grow less crops producing food for people to eat directly rather than food for animals to inefficiently convert to meat.

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Try o3-pro in ChatGPT for $1 (is AI a bubble?)
Brendan Long14d*63

Meanwhile hundreds of OpenAI's current and ex-employees sold their stock.

To be fair, this is pretty much always the right strategy when stock vests, for diversification reasons. Current employees likely have significantly more stock that will vest in the future.

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Escaping the Jungles of Norwood: A Rationalist’s Guide to Male Pattern Baldness
Brendan Long17d40

I read the whole thing and disagree. I think the disconnect might be what you want this article to be (a guide to baldness) vs what it is (the author's journey and thoughts around baldness mixed with gallows humor regarding his potential fate).

The Norword/forest comparison gets used consistently throughout (including the title) and is the only metaphor used this way. Whether you like this comparison or not, it's not a case of AI injecting constant flowery language.

That said, setting audience expectations is also an important part of writing, and I think "A Rationalist's Guide to Male Pattern Baldness" is probably setting the wrong expectation.

I upvoted since I thought it was interesting and I learned a little bit.

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Notes on Meetup Ideas
Brendan Long21d20

Anecdote: The Seattle meetup has a game night 1 week & a rationality meetup the next week, & enjoys this pattern.

Is this a thing that still happens? I'm in Seattle but I'm only aware of the reading group.

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Do multimodal LLMs (like 4o) use OCR under the hood to read dense text in images?
Answer by Brendan LongJun 15, 202550

Multimodal LLMs convert patches of image inputs into embeddings, similar to how they handle text input. The pieces that do that conversion can be pre-trained image classifiers or can be trained as part of the system. https://sebastianraschka.com/blog/2024/understanding-multimodal-llms.html

So, no, LLMs don't have an internal OCR system that converts images to text, but yes LLMs have an internal OCR system that processes images into embeddings (similar to how they have a system that processes tokens into embeddings). The difference is that you might process an image patch into an embedding which doesn't match the embedding for any text token.

Whether that piece is trained as part of the system or dropped in is a design choice.

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How concerned are you about a fast takeoff due to a leap in hardware usage?
Brendan Long24d42

Isn't Sam Altman basically trying to do this with Stargate?

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6Brendan Long's Shortform
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7Make Data Pipelines Debuggable by Storing All Source References
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23LessWrong merch?
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16How much should I worry about the Atlanta Fed's GDP estimates?
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15Lazy Hasselback Pommes Anna
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15Benefits of Psyllium Dietary Fiber in Particular
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20Increase the tax value of donations with high-variance investments?
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