why wouldn't you want regexes?

links 12/16/2024: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-16-2024

https://people.mpi-sws.org/~dg/teaching/lis2014/modules/ifc-1-volpano96.pdf the Volpano-Smith-Irvine security type system assigns security levels to variables (like "high" and "low" security). You can either use type checking or information theory inequalities to verify properties like "information can't flow from low to high security."

• https://romyholland.substack.com/p/what-nobody-told-me-about-abortion a personal essay about the experience of abortion
  • tbh I was pretty alienated by this. this was mostly an essay about grief. I feel bad for her, of course, but I was kind of curious about the details of the physical/procedural experience and we don't get much of that.
  • some people feel grief about abortion, some don't. I've never had an abortion or miscarriage, but I've had children, and I can tell you, I didn't feel a seismic unprecedented maternal love
• https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/fifth-season-makeready-1236069133/  apparently there's a new script deal for an AI-based movie called Alignment
• https://mtlynch.io/human-code-reviews-1/  advice on being polite in code reviews

• https://www.rosemarykirstein.com/ Rosemary Kirstein's blog, author of the Steerswoman series. I love the books; the blog is mostly travel/event updates but she seems like a lovely person and has many SFF book recommendations.

   

plausible...but surely walking isn't "consummatory"? And turning on the DBS doesn't cause "automatic/involuntary" walking movements.

links 12/13/2024:

 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2407.00695 Minimo, an RL agent for jointly learning both conjectures and proofs in Peano from "intrinsic motivation"

• what is "intrinsic motivation" in RL?
  • https://arxiv.org/pdf/2203.02298 intrinsic motivation mechanisms include:
    • reward shaping, i.e. comparing the expected value of two possible states, so that the agent gets an incremental "reward" when it moves to a state with higher expected value
    • rewards based on novelty rather than expected success, such as assigning more reward to visiting novel states, or assigning more reward to states with high prediction error relative to the agent's model of the world
    •  
• https://github.com/p-doom/gc-minimo gc-Minimo, the "goal-conditional" version that involves subgoals
• https://pdoom.org/ AI organization, research aimed at AGI; young, educated European team, they seem smart (to my unsophisticated eye) and idealistic (they want to share/open-source as much as possible, in contrast to secretive for-profit AI labs)
• https://news.mit.edu/2024/noninvasive-imaging-method-can-penetrate-deeper-living-tissue-1211  new non-invasive laser imaging technique; label free; 700 nm deep.
  • aka, not useful for subcutaneous imaging in living mammals, but possibly quite useful for non-destructive imaging of organoids (mentioned in the article) or maybe invertebrates, embryoids, other small living things;
  • maybe also nondestructive imaging of surface cells in live mammals:
    • skin
    • eyes
    • surgically exposed tissues
      • when you're operating on a tumor, it's important to make sure you have clean margins; would tumor cells look different under this sort of "metabolic" imaging?
• https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/2024/12/11/fermats-last-theorem-how-its-going/ ongoing project to translate a proof of Fermat's Last Theorem into Lean.
  • https://xenaproject.wordpress.com/what-is-the-xena-project/ the Xena Project is a project to get undergraduate math majors to formalize things in Lean.
    • "One could imagine things like formally verified course notes, which would later turn into some searchable database, and then to a tool which attempts example sheet questions by applying theorems from the course".
    • "No available system currently has all of an undergraduate pure mathematics degree, so undergraduates can even contribute to research projects. Over ten Imperial maths undergraduates have contributed to Lean’s maths library, and there are plenty of students at other universities in the UK and beyond who have also got involved."
• https://reactormag.com/the-vampire-p-h-lee/ eerie, touching short story: what if, in early-2010's Tumblr, there were active vampire and werewolf communities?
• https://www.za-zu.com/blog/playbook how to cold-email at scale. apparently if you just send a bajillion emails from one account it can get marked as spam; there are methods to circumvent this.
• https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kray_twins celebrity-esque 1960's British gangsters.
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03306-x
  • today in What Can't The Hypothalamus Do: stimulate the lateral hypothalamus and you get improved walking in recovery from spinal cord injury in mice, rats, and 2 humans.
    • appears to be specific to Vglut2 neurons (as shown by optogenetics)
    • got the patients to be able to climb stairs and walk 50 m, when they couldn't before, after 3 months of rehab (they had both had their spinal injury for many years prior without being able to walk/climb).
    • you can see from the emg data that both patients have way more leg muscle activation when trying to walk or raise their knees from a lying position when the DBS is on vs off
  • how crazy is this? the standard lists of things the lateral hypothalamus does don't include motor function. mostly it's autonomic stuff, arousal, hunger, and motivation/mood.
    • otoh it does directly innervate the motor cortex, spinal cord, cerebellum, etc
    • https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnins.2021.639313/full and there's some evidence that stimulating orexin neurons in the lateral hypothalamus induces movement (in mice) and hypothalamic orexin neurons are necessary for motor adaptation to sensory feedback https://www.jneurosci.org/content/42/32/6243
• https://www.cognition.ai/blog/devin-generally-available  this worries me from a mundane security point of view, though maybe I'm excessively paranoid; do you really want an AI agent autonomously mucking about in your code repo and pushing changes? I've heard the argument that this doesn't really introduce more risk than a new junior developer (who might likewise be error-prone or even a crook) but my mind is not at ease.
• https://ideaharbor.xyz/ a cute site where people can post project ideas. some of them are not, y'know, possible. "Batteries that can store the internet in them for when your connection goes down."

"Schizo" as an approving term, referring to strange, creative, nonconformist (and maybe but not necessarily clinically schizophrenic) is a much wider meme online. it's even a semi-mainstream scientific theory that schizophrenia persists in the human population because mild/subclinical versions of the trait are adaptive, possibly because they make people more creative. And, of course, there's a psychoanalytic/continental-philosophy tradition of calling lots of things psychosis very loosely, including good things. This isn't one guy's invention!

if you are literally worried about the risk of inducing hallucinations, i would be more cautious about things like overusing recreational drugs or not getting enough sleep, and less paranoid (lol) about talking to people or engaging with ideas. 

links 12/10/24: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/12-10-2024

• https://hedy.org/hedy Hedy, an educational Python variant that works in multiple languages and has tutorials starting from zero
• https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunking/ Patrick McKenzie on "debanking"
  • tl;dr: yes, lots of legal businesses get debanked; no, he disagrees with some of the crypto advocates' characterization of the situation
  • in more detail:
    • you can lose bank account access, despite doing nothing unethical, for mundane business/credit-risk related reasons like "you are using your checking account as a small business bank account and transferring a lot of money in and out" or "you are a serial victim of identity theft".
      • this is encouraged by banking regulators but fundamentally banks would do something like this regardless.
    • FINCEN, the US treasury's anti-money-laundering arm, shuts down a lot of innocent businesses that do some kind of financial activity (like buying and selling gift cards) without proper KYC/AML controls. A lot of bodegas get shut down.
      • this is 100% a gov't-created issue and it's kind of tragic.
    • FDIC, which guarantees bank deposits in the event of a bank run, is also tasked with making rules against banks doing things that might lead to bank runs.
      • You know what might cause a run on a bank? A bunch of crypto-holders suddenly finding out their assets are worthless or gone, and wanting to cash out. To some extent, FDIC's statutory mandate does entitle it to tell banks not to serve the crypto sector too heavily, because crypto is risky.
      • Another thing the FDIC is entitled to do is regulate banking products to ensure that consumers are not misled into thinking their money is in an FDIC-insured institution when it isn't. Under that mandate, a lot of crypto-based consumer banking/trading products have gotten shut down.
      • This does amount to "FDIC doesn't like crypto", but it is in fact FDIC's job to regulate banking in ways related to preventing consumers from losing their savings. Patrick McKenzie is fine with this; given the picture he presents, if you are not fine with this, it basically means you're not fine with the existence of the FDIC. (Which is not an unheard-of position; it belongs in the same category as objecting to other New Deal innovations like going off the gold standard and creating the welfare state.)
    • Separately, In the Obama administration, Operation Chokepoint happened. the FDIC claimed that a wide variety of politically disfavored businesses (guns, pornography, fireworks, etc) were risky...because of the regulatory risk of FDIC disapproving of them.
      • unlike the crypto regulation, this is totally unrelated to things like bank run risk that are in FDIC's official mandate. It is simply using FDIC to punish businesses that someone in the government doesn't like. Patrick McKenzie considers it a "lawless" abuse of power.
    • The Fed & Treasury's refusal to allow Facebook to issue the Libra cryptocurrency was similarly politically motivated. Senators blamed Facebook (and the Cambridge Analytica scandal) for Trump's election and warned the CEOs of Visa, MasterCard, and Stripe not to engage with Libra. Patrick McKenzie also views this as the "naked exercise of power."
    • Politically motivated debanking of individuals is clearly possible -- it happened in Canada with the truckers' convoy. However, Patrick McKenzie does not think it is routine in the US today. It is a risk rather than a common reality.
    • However, he wants to insist that the "crypto agenda" of "crypto should be treated on an equal playing field with USD by the banking sector" is not going to protect ordinary people from getting debanked for being, say, bodega owners or gun enthusiasts or conservatives or pornographers. He views it as a crypto-specific lobbying agenda, pretty much separate from the civil-rights/authoritarianism issue of political debanking.
• https://austinvernon.site/blog/datacenterpv.html Austin Vernon's outline of how off-grid, solar-powered datacenters could work and be cost-effective
•  

it's an introspection/lived-experience/anecdotes from other people kind of thing, i don't have data, but yes i do believe this is true.

"Most people succumb to peer pressure", https://roamresearch.com/#/app/srcpublic/page/u3919iPfj

• Most people will do very bad things, including mob violence, if they are peer-pressured enough.
• It's not literally everyone, but there is no neurotype or culture that is immune to peer pressure.
  • Immunity to peer pressure is a rare accomplishment.
  • You wouldn't assume that everyone in some category would be able to run a 4-minute mile or win a math olympiad. It takes a "perfect storm" of talent, training, and motivation.
  • I'm not sure anybody "just" innately lacks the machinery to be peer-pressured. That's a common claim about autistics and loners, but I really don't think it fits observation. Lots of people "don't fit in" in one way, but are very driven to conform in other social contexts or about other topics.
  • Evidence that any culture (or subculture), present or past, didn't have peer pressure seems really weak.
    • there are environments where being independent-minded or high-integrity is valorized, but most of them still have covert peer-pressure dynamics.
  • Possibly all robust resistance to peer pressure is intentionally cultivated?
    • In other words, maybe it's not enough for a person to just not happen to feel a pull towards conformity. That just means they haven't yet encountered the triggers that would make them inclined to conform.
    • If someone really can't be peer-pressured, maybe they have to actually believe that peer pressure is bad and make an active effort to resist it. Even that doesn't always succeed, but it's a necessary condition.
• upshot #1: It may be appropriate to be suspicious of claims like "I just hang out with those people, I'm not influenced by them." Most people, in the long run, do get influenced by their peer group.
  • otoh I also don't think cutting off contact with anyone "impure", or refusing to read stuff you disapprove of, is either practical or necessary. we can engage with people and things without being mechanically "nudged" by them.
  • maybe the distinction between engaging in any way and viewing someone as your ingroup is important?
  • or maybe we just have to Get Good at resisting peer pressure (even though that's super hard and rare.) Otherwise the next time some terrible thing happens to be popular, we'll go along with it.
    • like...basic realism here. most things don't last forever, it is an extraordinary claim to say that your virtue would survive any change in your culture.
• upshot #2: "would probably have been a collaborator in Nazi Germany" is not actually that serious an accusation. it just means "like the majority of the population, not at all heroic." in good circumstances, non-heroes make perfectly fine friends and neighbors. in bad circumstances, they might murder you. that's what makes the circumstances bad!
  • and don't be too quick to assume that someone who's never been in bad circumstances would be a hero. it's just hard to tell ahead of time.

I agree, and I am a bit disturbed that it needs to be said.

At normal, non-EA organizations -- and not only particularly villainous ones, either! -- it is understood that you need to avoid sharing any information that reflects poorly on the organization, unless it's required by law or contract or something. The purpose of public-facing communications is to burnish the org's reputation. This is so obvious that they do not actually spell it out to employees.

Of COURSE any organization that has recently taken down unflattering information is doing it to maintain its reputation. 

I'm sorry, but this is how "our people" get taken for a ride. Be more cynical, including about people you like.

I'm still on Roam and using it every day. For me, it's not "a lot of work", it's what's necessary to keep track of my thoughts to the point that I feel like my mental workspace is clean. I've journaled a lot since I was a kid. I think better in writing. 

This is my permanent diary. I will probably have it for the rest of my life, if they keep supporting it. Twenty years from now, I'll want to know what I was doing today!

I also log literally all links of "general interest" in my browsing history in my public Roam. does anyone care? Probably not, but it matters to me.

Roam doesn't make me smarter. To be honest, in my current life I don't especially need to be smarter. But I do think it makes me more consistent and coherent. It helps me realize when I've had a thought before, and what thoughts I keep coming back to. It helps me "listen to my own voice", which is an antidote to peer pressure. And it helps me see change over time -- what things I've said in the past that seem foolish now, how long it takes me to emotionally process things (sometimes years!), etc.