Technology Connections viewers already know this somewhat related bit: Consider switching to loose powder instead of tabs, or having both. The dishwasher runs three cleaning cycles (pre-wash, main, rinse), and the tab only goes in for the second phase. The first phase tries to get all the food and grease off using just water… which isn't ideal. Adding like 1/2 a teaspoon of the loose powder directly onto the door / into the tub at the bottom will greatly support the pre-wash phase and should deal with most things.
Since I started doing that, I don't bother ...
The way I approach situations like that is to write code in Lua and only push stuff that really has to be fast down to C. (Even C+liblua / using a Lua state just as a calling convention is IMHO often nicer than "plain" C. I can't claim the same for Python...) End result is that most of the code is readable, and usually (i.e. unless I stopped keeping them in sync) the "fast" functions still have a Lua version that permits differential testing.
Fundamentally agree with the C not C++/Rust/... theme though, C is great for this because it doesn't have tons of ch...
Sabine Hossenfelder's assessment (quickly) summarized (and possibly somewhat distorted by that):
This seems to be another case of "reverse advice" for me. I seem to be too formal instead of too lax with these spatial metaphors. I immediately read the birds example as talking about the relative positions and distances along branches of the Phylogenetic tree, your orthogonality description as referring to actual logical independence / verifiable orthogonality, and it's my job to notice hidden interaction and stuff like weird machines and so I'm usually also very aware of that, just by habits kicking in.
Your post made me realize that instead of people's ...
Main constraint you're not modeling is how increasing margin size increases total pages and thus cost.
That's why I'm saying it probably won't need that for the footers. There's ~10mm between running footer and text block, if that's reduced to ~8 or 9mm and those 1-2mm go below the footer instead, that's still plenty of space to clearly separate the two, while greatly reducing the "falling off the page" feeling. (And the colored bars that mark chapters are fine, no need to touch those.)
Design feedback: Alignment is hard, even when it's just printing. Consider bumping up the running footer by 1-2mm next time, it ended up uncomfortably close to the bottom edge at times. (Also the chapter end note / references pages were a mess.) More details:
variance: For reference, in the books that I have, the width of the colored bars along the page edge at each chapter (they're easy to measure) varies between ~4.25mm and ~0.75mm, and sometimes there's a ~2mm width difference between top and bottom. (No complaints here. The thin / rotated ones look a bi...
Sounds great so far, some questions:
And (different category)
Re solanine poisoning, just based on what's written in Wikipedia:
...Solanine Poisoning / Symptoms
[...] One study suggests that doses of 2 to 5 mg/kg of body weight can cause toxic symptoms, and doses of 3 to 6 mg/kg of body weight can be fatal.[5][...]
Safety / Suggested limits on consumption of solanine
The average consumption of potatoes in the U.S. is estimated to be about 167 g of potatoes per day per person.[11] There is variation in glycoalkaloid levels in different types of potatoes, but potato farmers aim to keep solanine levels below 0.2 mg/g.[18] Sign
My gut feeling (no pun intended) says the mythical "super-donor" is a very good excuse to keep looking / trying without having to present better results, and may never be found. Doing the search directly in the "microbiome composition space" instead of doing it on people (thereby indirectly sampling the space) feels way more efficient, assuming it is tractable at all.
If some people are already looking into synthesis, is there anything happening in the direction of "extrapolating" towards better samples? (I.e. take several good-but-not-great donors that fal...
I have something in the pipeline, but it'll take a while... if it's trying to be "actually" alien, it's kinda important that it's internally consistent. "Add some arbitrary bytes to [...represent] metadata" is exactly what you don't want to do. Because if you do, sure, it'll be hard, it'll (probably) be eventually solvable, but it'll be... somewhat dissatisfying. Same for using stuff like NTSC, it's just... why would they come up with exactly that? It just doesn't make any sense!
So, in case anyone else wants to also make a good challenge in this style, her...
I can't recall specific names / specific treatments of this, but I'm also relatively sure that it's kinda familiar, so I suspect that something exists there. Problem is that, in some sense, it falls right between areas.
On the practical side, people don't really care where the problem originates, they just want to fix it. (And people are swimming in abstraction layers and navigate them intuitively, so a "this is one layer up" doesn't really stand out, as it's still the bottom layer of some other abstraction.) So from the perspective of computer security, it...
Some very quick notes, don't have time for more:
It looks to me as if you fail to separate formal models from concrete implementations. Most exploitability results from mismatches between the two. As a concrete example, the PDF spec says (said?) that a PDF starts with a "this is a PDF" comment, e.g. %PDF-1.4
. (Right at the start, with nothing before it.) In practice, most readers are happy if that signature sits anywhere in the first 4KiB or something like that. End result are benign things like polyglot files on the one end – look for Ange Albertini and
On the topic of grayscale: Love it, strongly recommend trying to everyone too.
What I'd really like to see is a way to selectively grayscale applications, or exclude some from the grayscale filter. (So e.g. if I'm running Gimp/PS/..., keep just that one non-grayscale while still desaturating everything else.) If anyone knows anything, all pointers are strongly appreciated!
(I think it ought to be possible with the X server permissions model on Linux, but I'm not sure if a program could even have the permissions to do this on Windows.)
I've done both – asparagus and lettuce – and it works. (Especially for the more bitter kinds of leafy greens, it somewhat reduces bitterness. It can also soften the stems / bottom bits and make them more usable. So e.g. finely chopping the stem and sauteing with some onion and mushrooms can be a good way to use what you'd otherwise discard.)
There's even salad-based soups (both with something like e.g. romaine added just before the end, and also with e. g. iceberg shredded, cooked, and blended), and while it may seem strange initially and mess with your exp...
They're actually quite different from how our computers work (just on the surface already, the program is unmodifiable and separate from the code, and the whole walking around is also a very important difference[1]), but I agree that they feel "electronics-y" / like a big ball of wires.
Don't forget that most of the complexity theoretic definitions are based on Turing machines, because that happened to become the dominant model for the study of these kinds of things. Similar-but-slightly-different constructions would perhaps be more "natural" on lambda calc...
I'll focus on the gears-level elaboration of why all those computational mechanisms are equivalent. In short: If you want to actually get anything done, Turing machines suck! They're painful to use, and that makes it hard to get insight by experimenting with them. Lambda calculus / combinator calculi are way better for actually seeing why this general equivalence is probably true, and then afterwards you can link that back to TMs. (But, if at all possible, don't start with them!)
Sure, in some sense Turing machines are "natural" or "obvious": If you start f...
Update: Amazon Germany now also has the books listed, for €36 (which is fine.) Since I haven't received the "Notify me when the UK books are available" mail yet, I assume this is further downstream propagation from the Amazon US listing.
If that is accurate, then there should be no need at all to manually ship books to other regions?! I guess that's very good news for future books!
Defaults matter: Opt-in may be better than opt-out.
For opt-out, you only know that people who disabled it care enough about not wanting it to explicitly disable it. If it's enabled, that could be either because they're interested or because they don't care at all.
For opt-in, you know that they explicitly expended a tiny bit of effort to manually enable it. And those who don't care sit in the group with those who don't want it. That means it's much more likely that your feedback is actually appreciated and not wasted. Additionally, comments with extended vo...
As a one-off, sure. Long term, it may be. I'm currently restructuring my todo list(s) to tag stuff by brain state. (Most of it requires considerable brain capacity, so if I'm exhausted/tired, I tend to scroll Discord or watch Twitch because "I can't do anything in this state anyway", which is neither productive nor particularly relaxing.)
Lots of things like watering plants, cleaning the bathroom walls, throwing some cleaner into the sinks / tub / ..., taking out the trash, properly archiving last quarter's stack of records, making backups, etc. are all ~ze...
I largely agree with this. Multi-axis voting is probably more annoying than useful for the regulars who have a good model of what is considered "good style" in this place. However, I think it'd be great for newbies. It's rare that your comment is so bad (or good) that someone bothers to reply, so mostly you get no votes at all or occasional down votes, plus the rare comment that gets lots of upvotes. Learning from so little feedback is hard, and this system has the potential to get you much more information.
So I'd suggest yet another mode of use for this: ...
Berlin's numbers show about 20% Omicron for last week and about 3% for all of Germany. So at least in Berlin, it's already there (and numbers should be >50% omicron with new year's eve.)
I just noticed (again) that link previews on (only?) old posts are sometimes broken, e. g. when I open this in a new window/tab. At first I suspected it's something about the old link formats but more testing made me more and more confused, and now it seems more and more again like maybe that is relevant?
/s/.../p/...
in a new window/tab (i.e. not in an existing LW context) always(? - ~10 tests done) breaks the previews on links in the text, and they don't get the ° decoration. (Tags, pingbacks etc. still work.) The same seems tIt says the UK Amazon doesn't ship to Germany [at least for the auto-generated listing], and from the US it'd be ~$45 incl. shipping + taxes... =/
And since it's above the magic number of 1kg (around 1.2kg), even a bulk order with local distribution would have to add about €5 for the last leg of shipping, which (adding packaging etc.) makes that just not worth it.
Since Amazon UK is happy to ship other books, I subscribed to the UK availability notification -- maybe it'll work once it's "really" there. I'll update this once the notification comes and I have ...
Update: Amazon Germany now also has the books listed, for €36 (which is fine.) Since I haven't received the "Notify me when the UK books are available" mail yet, I assume this is further downstream propagation from the Amazon US listing.
If that is accurate, then there should be no need at all to manually ship books to other regions?! I guess that's very good news for future books!
A related observation that might help some: I'm fairly nocturnal because I can work better at night. (Less noise, less light, no interruptions from others, etc.) My default strategy to achieve that was to stay up very late and sleep until the early afternoon.
But at some point I noticed that getting up really early (like 1-3am) also gets you the time at night to work, except now you're going to bed around 6pm instead of staying up until 6am. Both work, with different tradeoffs. (And different friend groups being accessible at different times.)
I know now that I'm not forced to stick to the "staying up late" schedule to get the effect that I want.
Well if we've fallen to the level of influencing other people's votes by directly stating what the votes ought to say (ugh =/), then let me argue the opposite: This post – at least in its current state – should not have a positive rating.
I agree that the topic is interesting and important, but – as written – this could well be an example of what an AI with a twisted/incomplete understanding of suffering, entropy, and a bunch of other things has come up with. The text conjures several hells, both explicitly (Billions of years of suffering are the right choi...
Your writing feels comically-disturbingly wrong to me, I think the most likely cause is that your model of "suffering" is very different from mine. It's possible that you "went off to infinity" in some direction that I can't follow, and over there the landscape really does look like that, but from where I am it just looks like you have very little experience with serious suffering and ignore a whole lot of what looks to me to be essential complexity.
When you say that all types of suffering can be eliminated / reversed, this feels wrong because people chang...
Isn't this false nowadays that everyone has multi-core GPUs?
Nope, still applies. Even if you have more cores than running threads (remember programs are multi-threaded nowadays) and your OS could just hand one or more cores over indefinitely, it'll generally still do a regular context switch to the OS and back several times per second.
And another thing that's not worth its own comment but puts some numbers on the fuzzy "rapidly" from the article:
It's just that [the process switching] happens rapidly.
For Windows, that's traditionally 100 Hz, i. e. ...
I'd adjust the "breadth over depth" maxim in one particular way: Pick one (maybe two or three, but few) small-ish sub-fields / topics to go through in depth, taking them to an extreme. Past a certain point, something funny tends to happen, where what's normally perceived as boundaries starts to warp and the whole space suddenly looks completely different.
When doing this, the goal is to observe that "funny shift" and the "shape" of that change as good as you can, to identify the signs of it and get as good a feeling for it as you can. I believe that being a...
Other failure modes could be to fail to have properties of probabilty distributions. Negative numbers, imaginary amounts? Not an unknown probability distribuiton because its not a probabilty distribution[...]
Not every probability distribution has to result in real numbers. A distribution that gets me complex numbers or letters from the set { A, B, C } is still a distribution. And while some things may be vastly easier to describe when using quasiprobability distributions (involving "negative probabilities"), that is a choice of the specific approach to ...
If I really wanted to, I could probably force myself to eat a pack of dates for about 2-3 days before having enough of them.
Actually, I tried that too now. 8 was more than enough, don't really want to eat more. (Wolfram estimates a single dried date to weigh about 16 g and contain roughly 10 g sugar.) So if that's right, this was about 80g of sugar. That's less than half of what I estimated. (Even adding the (tea)spoon of sugar from before as 1-2 extra dates doesn't make much of a difference.)
Approximate amount: 50-60g maybe? I like to add juuust a little to tea and other drinks, about 1-2g / 100ml. Completely unsweetened (and I count nut milks as sweetener too) irritates my stomach for some reason. (And plain unflavored water causes nausea, so teas it is.) There's also often a teaspoon or two in some meals to balance acidity or bring out spices. Rarely some chocolate (80-99% cocoa) or a slice of home-baked cake. (I tend to halve the amount of sugar in recipes.) Fruits (fresh or dried) also contain non-negligible amounts.
How I feel about sugar:...
I plan to stick to Hy, but I'll make the versioning clearer in the future.
If there's two weeks, that should leave enough time for making & checking alternate implementations, as well as clarifying any unclear parts. (I never fully understood the details of the selection algorithm (and it seems there were bugs in it until quite late), but given a week for focusing just on that, I hope that should work out alright.)
I'm optimizing for features, not speed.
No complaints here, that's the only sane approach for research and other software like this.
...H
Feedback on the game so far:
Genome Format: Even though I'm a long time programmer, I vastly preferred this year's version where no one (except you) had to write any code. This was awesome!
Implementation/Spec: I would have preferred a clear spec accompanied by a reference implementation. Hy may be fun to use, but it's incredibly slow. (Also the version differences causing various problems was no fun at all.)
The only big thing to watch out for is to not use the built-in RNG of whatever language you'll end up using, but instead a relatively simple to impleme...
In the Markdown editor, surround your text with
:::spoiler
at the beginning, and:::
at the end.
This (or at least my interpretation of it) seems to not work.
I read it as anywhere inline (i.e. surrounded by other text) putting :::spoiler
(without the backticks), followed by your text to be spoilered, followed by :::
(no space required and again without backticks.)
That ended up producing the unspoilered text surrounded by the :::spoiler ... :::
construction and making me slightly sad. Here is a :::spoiler not really ::: spoilered example of the failure.
It...
I didn't trusty myself to reimplement the simulator - any subtle change would likely have invalidated all results. So simulations were real slow... I still somehow went through about 0.1% of the search space (25K of about 27M possible different species), and I hope it was the better part of the space / largely excluding "obviously" bad ideas. (Carefully tweaking random generation to bias it towards preferring saner choices, while never making weird things too unlikely.) Of course, the pairings matter a lot so I'm not at all certain that I didn't accidental...
I've got it mostly working now... problem is that the default plot size is unusable, the legend overlaps, etc. etc. -- when run interactively, you can just resize the window and it'll redraw, and then you save it once you're happy. So now I'm also setting plot size, font size, legend position, and then it's "just" a (plt.savefig "plot.png")
added before the (plt.show)
.
I might also add a more easily parseable log output, but for now tee
and a small Lua script mangling it into CSV is enough.
I'll probably clean up all of that in a couple of hours and send ano...
Another question: where does the script save the data / graphs when running it? Or does it do that at all?
It looks like it might try to open a plot window, but I'm running it on a headless server... so nothing will happen. Is the (hard-to-parse) text scrolling by all that I'll get at the end of a run?
That just gets me an even longer error message:
Python 3.7.3 (default, Jan 22 2021, 20:04:44)
[GCC 8.3.0] on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import hy
>>> import main
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/hy/macros.py", line 238, in reader_macroexpand
reader_macro = _hy_reader[None][char]
KeyError: '*'
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module&
... Do you have a more exact version spec? Because I don't even have pip3
and I don't use Python, so I just installed the hy
that comes with my distro... and then I get
File "./main.hy", line 63, column 1
(defn initial-population [biome]
"Creates a list of initial organisms"
(+ [] #*
(lfor species +species-list+
(if (= (. species ["spawning-zone"])
biome)
(do
(setv organisms [])
(setv energy +seed-population-energy+)
(while (> energy 0)
... Once things have stabilized and things like inline annotations are there, I'd love to see the following: (1) An easy way to add and remove yourself from a pool of available feedback providers. (Checkbox in settings?) And (2) a way for anyone (or nearly anyone - e.g. non-negative karma) to request brief / "basic feedback" on their posts, by automatically matching people from the pool to posts based on e.g. post tags and front page tag weights.
On (1): I have proofread a couple thousand pages by now, and while I'm usually pretty busy, in a slow week I'd be ha...
Could you imagine the feeling of lying on a carpet without a shirt on (ie the feeling of a carpet on your torso) ?
Somewhat... it's too diffuse. I can imagine the effect at single spots, the whole thing at once doesn't really work. (I get "glitchy partials", brief impressions flickering and jumping around, but it's not forming anything consistent / stable.)
What about a spider crawling across your hand ?
Back of the hand is manageable (it's "only" tracking of 9 points - 8 legs plus occasional abdomen contact) and it can even become "independent" and su...
Also one of my friends struggles with verbal thinking and thinks mostly implicitly, using concepts, if I understood that correctly, and they have a strong preference for non-verbal signs of affection (physical contact, actions, quality time etc.).
Same here. Not thinking in words at all, very strong preference for touch or very simple expressions. Over the years with my SO, we basically formed a language of taps, hugs, noises, licks, sniffs, ... (E. g. shlip tongue noise - Greetings! / I like you. / ... (there are even tonal variations - rising / higher ...
Some more details on each of the categories in order:
Visual - I don't really see things, I just get some weird topological-ish representation. E.g. if I try to imagine a cube, it's more like the grid of a cube / wireframe instead of a real object, and it's really stretchy-bendy and can sometimes wobble around or deform on its own. And attributes like red / a letter printed on a side etc. are not necessarily part of the face but often just floating "labels" connected by a (different kind of) line that goes "sideways" out of 3-space? o.O Even real objects li...
I suspect the water content of honey/treacle (estimating 15-20%) will lead to more gluten formation, which risks causing a chewy instead of crumbly texture. (If you're not adding any water at all, you're not getting gluten strands.) Butter also has some water (around 15%), so you generally don't knead these kinds of dough for long. (Same goes for shortbread, scones, ...)
Hence, I guess any flour should do if you know how to handle it / are careful not to overwork the dough.
Unfortunately that requires Facebook =/ and most of my friends avoid / don't have Facebook for privacy reasons.
Alternatives: