All of janshi's Comments + Replies

I just asked Gemini 2.5 Pro to explain how to tie shoelaces to someone who has never done that before, a task probably works in its favor because it is so common, plenty of descriptions exist and most people can perform it with little cognitive effort within few seconds every day. It took about 1.5 letter-sized pages of text and still missed a little bit of detail but I think a humanoid robot could follow it and get to the right result. I imagine many tasks of machinists and craftsmen are more complex but simply don’t exist in writing, so I agree that lack... (read more)

1Nate Sharpe
I can see this being automated given the visual capabilities in the latest models along with a healthy dose of input from existing practitioners. Do detailed teardowns of different products across many different industries, with images of each component and subassembly along with detailed descriptions of those images (what the parts are, what they're made of, how they were made, what purpose they serve as a whole and what purpose various features are serving). This could then start to create the textual training data to then allow the models to generate such information themselves in the opposite direction. And in fact this closely resembles how mechanical engineers often build up experience (along with making things, building them, and seeing why they don't work like they thought they would).
2Mo Putera
Out of curiosity, can you share a link to Gemini 2.5 Pro's response?

However, there are a ton of diverse manufacturing processes, many of which don’t have good simulation solutions.

I’m interested to know which processes these are, what general categories they fall into and why we don’t have simulations for them? Is the bottleneck physics, computation, economics…?

6Brian Smith
The bottlenecks would be physics in this case! Engineering is approximations of physics, and many physical systems break down into intractable math quickly. This is most true in places that care about dynamic (time-sensitive) systems, such as Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) or Kinematics. Modeling is done by doing discrete time steps and using  previous time steps as approximations of derivatives for the differential equations that determine the system, which always loses some detail as you can never discretely calculate an infinitely small time step. A simple example would be a double pendulum, where the fundamental equations are straightforward, but behaves chaotically. Most physical systems have this chaotic behavior at some level, just due to the complexity of the world.

They expand their contract with OpenBrain to set up an “Oversight Committee,” a joint management committee of company and government representatives, with several government employees included alongside company leadership. The White House considers replacing the CEO with someone they trust, but backs off after intense employee protests.

This seemed relatively less likely to me in 2027 compared to 2023 given that a few paragraphs earlier it is described that

But Agent-4 now exercises significant control over OpenBrain’s day-to-day operation.

How many hu... (read more)

Hey Alexey, any update on the status of the newsletter?

Psychologically, I would be angry because, apparently, everyone else was littering but it was just me who was picked for the punished. It would be unjust. Also, there were no trash bins so I couldn't had behave even if I wanted to. That doubles the injustice. Moreover, I was carrying the cup for hours, you do-gooder moron!

Historically people had to develop a thick skin if they wanted to be pro-social because of exactly this. I think from there you get the "turn the other cheek" phrase (personified in Jesus being crucified) or the idea of an invisible being... (read more)

The "Moment of Maximum Tiredness"

To me, this sounds unreliable because I've experienced that tiredness can be triggered very reliably within minutes via breathing techniques such as NSDR (1, 2) therefore shifting my sleep window forward 1-2 hrs.

Hint: Macs and iOS devices come with build-in “accessibility” tools that read out loud everything on screen. The voices can be improved even more by downloading the “Siri enhanced” voice in the settings.

Here is a little detail I learned in behavioral finance class: you don’t need behavioral finance/econ to discover loss aversion. All you need is a rational utility maximizing agent in a standard neoclassical framework who has a concave utility function (such as LOG which is commonly assumed to model diminishing marginal utility). From this you see that the rational agent has more to loose from a one unit negative change than a one unit positive change i.e. loss aversion.

I did actually unfollow ~95% of my friends once but then found myself in that situation where suddenly Facebook became interesting again I was checking it more often. I recommend the opposite and follow as many friends from high school and work as possible (assuming you don’t work at a cool place).

2Ben Pace
Either way I’ll still only check it in a 2 hour window on Saturdays, so I feel safe trying it out.

Try practicing doing nothing I.e. meditation and see how that goes. When I have nothing particular to do my mind needs some time to make the switch from that mode where it tries to distract itself by coming up with new things it wants to do until finally it reaches a state where it is calm and steady. I consider that state the optimal one to be in since only then my thoughts are directed deliberately at neglected and important issues rather than exercising learned thought patterns.

5Ben Pace
I think you’re missing me with this. I’m not very distractable and I don’t need to learn to be okay with leisure time. I’m trying to actually have hobbies, and realising that is going to take work. I could take up meditation as a hobby, but at the minute I want things that are more social and physical.

I suspect doing long-term (or any) studies on people diagnosed with depression and weightlifting would be difficult, since the motivation required to do regular heavy exercise is either preventing people from following a strict routine or it would disqualify them from the clinical diagnosis of depression. I have tried exercise as part of my life-long battle against depression and in a recent conversation with a therapist was told that I am in fact not depressed, because a depressed person "is not be motivated to invest effort into doing something about their depression".

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