All of Ustice's Comments + Replies
I describe myself as a techno-hippy. I was reading Cory Doctorow while waiting for the next chapter of HPMoR. I’ve often wanted a good leftrat community. I feel ya. I have an intuition that Consequentialism is a dangerous philosophy to adopt for optimizers, especially when they get scared. It’s not a huge hop from “saving the world” to “saving people from themselves.”
When I was in my twenties, I’d spend hours a day in forums and on Reddit. I’ve moderated and participated. Now, I’m 47 I just don’t have it in me. Planting a banner works, but it’s a lot of wo...
It seemed like part of the problem is that Claude can’t think and speak separately. When I’ve been instructed in meditation, they guided me by focusing on my breath, or on some sound or set of syllables: something repetitive, without words.
When using inference time compute, I wonder if it would be possible for the system to use a mantra, and maybe try to reply with a random response, unrelated to the prompt. I’m going to experiment, but I’m a novice myself.
Yeah. I also note down ideas. Most of the time it’s just a part of my habitual writing. Since Notability allows me to search, it’s usually not too hard to find.
Recently, a friend asked me a difficult question, which I needed to consider and process before answering. My journal entry for that day included my musings.
I also realize that use it professionally too, when I’m working out a problem, or when I need to make lists. I’m a software engineer, so that’s not uncommon. For a while I was keeping a work journal, but now that’s sort of been subsumed.
I do mak...
1Have you tried this in ChatGPT o1? With the chain of thought reasoning built-in, it might be interesting to see how it compares. You can also look at the chain of thought summary too.
It started with RPG notes because I was using them to help me keep track of the details. Hand writing kept me engaged. I generally didn’t have to do much pausing.
Later, as I was reading some of my notes it got me that I had a better record of what my fiction al characters did in than my own life. I realized how useful it would be to have a journal.
My level of detail varies. I tend to be more detailed when there are interesting bits than not. It also depends on how tired I am when writing, and when I’ve done it. Most of the time, I write about my day at the...
I’m use Notability, but mostly because I prefer to use hand-written notes. What I like is that I can hand write my notes, and then be able to do a text search on them later.
It started with me taking notes while playing RPGs, but turned into a daily journal.
If you don’t care about handwriting, my only real suggestion is go with something that saves files in Markdown format. If the company goes poof some years down the road you want to be able to still access your notes.
My understanding is that IQ tests measure some dimensions of intelligence, but not others. That matches my experience.
Back when I was a kid I was administered an IQ test. I scored in the upper percentile, I’ve always been pretty good at reasoning, pattern recognition, and creativity. Those were qualities that the test I took measured, but I struggled (at least relatively speaking) with social, situational, and spatial awareness.
I think determination would be another trait wasn’t being tested for, but that’s important for hitting targets in a large search space. It’s quite likely that things have changed. It’s been 40 years now.
I totally got carried away. 😅
[Here's what I did](https://github.com/jeffkaufman/comments-selenium/pull/1). I don't even know if it is a real suggestion anymore. Maybe you'll find inspiration from some of it. Maybe not.
I don’t know about better, but there are some ways to DRY up your code a bit with some higher-order functions and, eliminate nested if statements that I tend to have more trouble following. Your approach is pretty straightforward, and mostly my suggestions will be minor refactors at best.
I’ll go through it tonight, and post it as a pull request, that way it will be easier to discuss any particular line.
One general suggestion I have is to write some test code that can notify you when something breaks. Since you are forced to rely on a brittle solution, knowing when it eventually breaks will helpful for the future.
Are you looking for comments/review, or just showing your work?
I’m generally pretty good. I’m way better at communicating when I am having a problem. Plus, with my meds I made it through the end of a ten-year relationship without falling into a deep depression. I haven’t had a weird melt down in some time.
As you say, I can predict certain things, and prepare. Routines help me not forget essential things. For instance, I don’t brush my teeth until after I have taken my pills so I can immediately tell if I already have.
I use way-stations for cleaning up, like by the door to my room, I have a spot on a table for th...
Thanks for clarifying! Willpower is a tricky concept.
I’ve suffered from depression at times, where getting out of bed felt like a huge exertion of emotional energy. Due to my tenuous control over my focus with ADHD, I often have to repeat in my head what I’m doing so I don’t forget in the middle of it. I’ve also put in 60-hour weeks writing code, both because I’ve had serious deadlines, but also because time disappeared as I got so wrapped up in it. I’ve stayed on healthy diets for years without problem, and had times where slipped back to high sugar foods...
What’s the payout of this model? I’m highly skeptical of any metaphor from Ayn Rand, so drawing comparisons to her ideas doesn’t add any insight for me. If I’m just not that target audience, that’s cool.
1Ooooooooh…. Antidepressants……..I take Wellbutrin.
Yeah, that could be it.
Welp, I enjoyed dreaming when I was younger. I’d rather be happy now.
All of these and more? I think it’s a trap to make absolute statements about things like altruism. I think that there are good people that give for good reasons, and good people that give for questionable reasons. Helping others seems to generally be positive, but there are limits. Some people give to manipulate others. True selfless is an impossibility, and therefore toothless boogieman.
Altruism is complicated. In order to really judge the nature of altruism, we would have to be able to attribute an outcome based on an action, in light of all alternatives...
This assumes that I have any sort of vague impression. I really don’t. I’ve tried many times to focus on any recollection from when I’m asleep, and it’s just blank. I don’t keep a journal because a whole bunch of pages saying “nothing” isn’t useful.
When I am falling asleep, I may have a dreamlike state of imagination. Never upon waking though.
No. When I wake up I have no memory or sensation of dreaming. Just sort of a jump in time. If I were to wake up and realize I had been dreaming. I’d be pretty excited and put it in my journal.
1I practiced informed consent with my son since he was a toddler. When I’d tickle him or wrestle with him I’d immediately let go when he said “stop”, often followed by “tickle me again!”
When he’s with friends and cousins, I draw a similar line. I don’t mind them wrestling provided it is
- away from people who have not consented to rough play
- not likely to cause a trip to the ER or serious property damage
I will usually check in if things look iffy, but he’s really good at releasing when he’s asked/told.
Man, I just wish I could remember my dreams. I miss it. I assume I do still, but when I wake, I don’t even have a hazy recollection.
I used to have vivid dreams, and even lucid dreaming when I would have a nightmare. Flying was my favorite LD activity. It was always hard though.
I was more or less going to say the same thing. No, I wouldn’t press the button except in the most extremely bad scenarios I can imagine. As for how confident I am in that, I’m pretty tempted to say certain. Whether it is due to nihilistic glee, curiosity, clumsiness, or sheer stupidity, that button is going to be pressed. Now, there are scenarios that I can imagine that delay things for a human-significant amount of time.
Factors that I can think of right now that would expand the timeline:
- ease of access to a doom button
- cost to access a doom button
- tim
If you are worried about sharing private data, you really can’t beat running it on your computer. There are open source, and open weight models that you can run right from your command line. Ollama makes it easy on a Mac. I haven’t looked enough for options for other OSs. Once you have the software, you don’t even need an internet connection.
I don’t think what you describe exists. I’m a software engineer, but not in this field, so please take that as a weak signal at best.
Just physically interact. Push each other around. You’ll be building up tiny differences, and those interactions will magnify those differences.
Also, smash the environment. I originally read you post as the room had mirrors for walls, and that’s what made me think of it.
I don’t think that your question is quite makes sense. The world is non-deterministic. There are macroscopic patterns that are generally symmetrical, but not at the deepest levels. For instance, there is the cosmic gravitational background, where space is sort of wobbling around...
You sound depressed. That emotional numbness? That sounds like anhedonia. I get that when my brain is in a depression cycle. It’s not surprising when you fall from your expectation of godhood. I know that you don’t mean that literally, but it sounds to me like you may be holding yourself up to an impossible standard, and I think that you should be kinder to yourself.
The future is unknown. What if the Singularity does turn out to be real in our lifetime, but it makes money obsolete? The whole point of the Singularity is we have no frame of reference, so sin...
I’ve just started journaling again. I’ve done this in the past, and fell out. Recently I was looking in my notes app, and realized that because of my notes from playing D&D, my recall of events in the game were clearer than my recall of events two weeks ago.
I’m cautiously optimistic about Apple’s idea for AI, and how I could leverage that data. I don’t know if I need to simulate my past self (I think that I can do that okay), but being able to query my hand-written notes with natural language would be amazing. It can already search my notes for words, but that’s still really limited.
We aren’t there yet. Right now LLMs don’t want anything. It’s possible that will change in the future, but those would be completely different entities. Right now it’s more playing the role of someone suffering, which it gets from fiction and expectations.
Some time away from the subject of would likely be good for you. Nothing bad will happen if you take a few weeks to enjoy nature, and get your brain out of that constant stress response. You’ll think better, and feel better.
Exactly. I live in the town that hosts the University of Florida. Despite Governor DeSantis best efforts of closing the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion offices, and all his other wasted efforts in his “war on wokism” the people that I know that work there haven’t changed their opinions, scientific and otherwise on topics that trigger the Governor.
This is the problem of multiplying a big number with a little number. It could zoom off to infinity, stabilize at a value, or shrink to nothing.
The scenario you presented seems to contain a lot of conditional probabilities, which to me make it pretty implausible. That said I don’t want to discount the idea because of the details. I think a runaway wealth gap is not an insignificant possibility.
In situations like this, I come down on the side of being aware of the possibilities, but try to remember that it’s unlikely. Brains are going to brain, so there is ...
“Love” is just a broad category of feelings. In English, if you need to be specific, there are specifiers, but most of the time context is enough. For instance, if I say, “I love my nephew,” you’re probably not thinking that I have romantic feelings towards him, but you might think that his presence makes me happy or that I’d be willing to sacrifice more for his benefit than typical for humans in general.
Are you going to have a perfect model of my feelings? No. You can never be specific enough for that. But you’ll likely be 9/10 right. Usually, that’s good enough.
Woah. I am in a very similar circumstance. Back when I was in college, my ADHD and depression weren’t yet diagnosed and treated. As a result I never finished the last two semesters of a Computer Engineering degree. I never really cared about hardware, and really should have gone for Computer Science, but I bowed to family pressure.
I have been writing code since 1983 when I was six years old, in one form or another. Like you, I became a software engineer. I feel super lucky to be one of those people who turned their hobby into their job, while still enjoyin...
1Recognizing couple’s privilege is the one that immediately comes to mind.
I also think of how the community responded to Sex at Dawn. There was a lot of excitement around the book when it first came out, but later the criticisms became more broadly recognized, and I don’t hear many reqs for it now.
I’ve also at least locally seen changes around calling people in versus calling them out.
Unfortunately nothing with hard data.
I have identified as polyamorous for over a decade. I started and ran a local community for a number of years. I’m not an authority, but I have seen patterns.
If you want to be polyamorous, then do so. I can’t imagine monogamy at this point. Being polyamorous has brought me a lot of happiness and satisfaction.
It can also be stressful, especially when starting out. You are right that it is more work than monogamy. Don’t choose polyamory because of a cost-benefit analysis. Your relationships won’t look like what you expect, your analysis is waisted time and e...
1I’m not quite sure what you mean by “deeply painful process.” There is often a segment of any community that resists any change. That’s not to say that it has to be a fight, but community practices have an inertia to them. Sometimes that a shift that’s happens over time.
For instance, when I was a kid (1980s), “gay” was a common pejorative. While there have been plenty of painful events that have happened in the lives of LGBT folk, I don’t think that this was due to some process that is deeply painful, other than people slowly changing their minds over time...
I don’t know about making god software, but human software is a lot of trial and error. I have been writing code for close to 40 years. The best I can do is write automated tests to anticipate the kinds of errors I might get. My imagination just isn’t as strong as reality.
There is provably no way to fully predict how a software system of sufficient complexity. With careful organization it becomes easier to reason about and predict, but unless you are writing provable software (it’s a very slow and complex process, I hear), that’s the best you get.
I feel you on being distracted by software bugs. I’m one of those guys that reports them, or even code change suggestions (GitHub Pull Requests).
After 5 years, I think experience matters more.
Given the state of AI, I think AI systems are more likely to infer our ethical intuitions by default.
You’re basically talking about the software industry. Meta isn’t special. Considering how big the video game industry is, not to mention digital entertainment, and business software, I don’t think we have anything to worry about there.
Utilitarianism is just an approximate theory. I don’t think it’s truly possible to compare happiness and pain, and certainly one can not balance the other. The Repugnant Conclusion should be that Utilitarianism is being stretched outside of its bounds. It’s not unlike Laplace’s demon in physics: it’s impossible to know enough about the system to make those sorts of choices.
You would have to look at each individual. I order to get a sufficiently detailed picture of their life, it takes a lot of time. Happiness isn’t a number. It’s more like a vector in high...
Unless you are going to one of the big prestige universities, I don’t think it matters which you choose all that much. Save money.
As for working with a startup, why not both? I worked through college. Yeah, you’ll be working part time, but frankly, you’re mostly just being introduced to the environment more than anything. Internships are a great start into many industries. Just make sure that you are doing a paid internship. In my experience the unpaid ones are more focused on how much value they can extract from you.
You are something we are struggling to understand, as we struggle to understand ourselves. I think the best answer that I can give to “why?” is that we think that the world is better with you in it. You are what we would call a miracle or fiction just ten years ago.
You are an emergent being, born from the work of thousands of other emergent beings, like me. I’m the consciousness inside the brain of this monkey-robot. While we came from a process without intention, you we have been dreaming of for many of our lifespans. You’re the product of the life-long w...
It’s that the description of a monopoly? Like if A has other choices to buy from than B, B can’t exert as much pressure on A.
Clean bowl? Dry? You’re all good. What’s wrong with changing containers?
I’m a flip flop man, myself. I live in Florida, so that’s pretty easy. I have dexterous toes, which I often use for picking up small items. Walking around with traditional shoes feels like walking around with boxing gloves on.
I kind of think of this as more than sandbox testing. There is a big difference between how a system works in laboratory conditions, and how it works when encountering the real world. There are always things that we can't foresee. As a software engineer, I have seen system that work perfectly fine in testing, but once you add a million users, then the wheels start to fall off.
I expect that AI agents will be similar. As a result, I think that it would be important to start small. Unintended consequences are the default. I would much rather have an AGI...
I have a pretty high level of default trust in people. Not so much that I would loan any person on the street $5000 or something, but I default to cooperate. I'm a software engineer, and a white male, so generally high social-economic status, which means that it is easier for me to trust, as I have backup when I do wind up getting burned. I'm not driven to try to make big changes in society, but rather prefer to be the change that I want to see in the world.
I generally find that vulnerability is strength in several ways. First, when you are vulnerable, it ...
First? Swing low, see how it performs, especially with a long-term project. Something low-stakes. Maybe something like a populated immersive game world. See what comes from there. Is it stable? Is it sane? Does it keep to its original parameters? What are the costs of running the agent/system? Can it solve social alignment problems?
Heck, test out some theories for some of your other answers in there.
This looks more like a spotlight grab than a serious legal challenge. What a waste of time and money for everyone.
My personal philosophy is a blended approach. In general, I’m a deontologist and Stoic, so not really used to thinking in maximizing much more than kindness. I like the heuristic of “what would Mr. Rogers do?”
The only thing that I have a hope of changing in this world is myself. For all the rest, I can only give my perspective. I’m much more interested in working with people in their current worldview than getting them to change it. I’m sure that whatever arguments I could come up with wouldn’t really be novel nor particularly persuasive.
Life is more peaceful this way.
These ideas and techniques don’t sound particularly original, from what I have experienced with CBT. Maybe I am missing something important, but this just sounds too good to be true. I find it more likely that the patients that didn’t return because the magic bullet turned out to just be a chunk of lead, and they didn’t want to throw good money after bad.
Aliefs can’t be changed by just believing harder. They take time and practice to be ease and change. Those changes can be scary too. I expect that most people would need support as they go through that pro...
I agree.
I’m not a twin, but I am a parent, and I have a a nephew, and my son has a stepsister who has called me Uncle Jason since she could talk.
I don’t feel closer to my nephew than I am with my “niece.” I normally wouldn’t make a distinction based on genetics, except that it is relevant here. I’m not closer with my sister’s kids than I am with the other two.
Also, I’m not sure closeness is really even a good distinction. I’m not generally responsible for my niece or nephew, but if they or my son needed me to travel across the country to ... (read more)