I'm saying that since we know that "facts" offered by Trump to support his goals aren't always true, that part of his conversation with Zelenskyy is probably best viewed as part of a persuasion tactic that may or may not be factually connected with reality.

This FULLY explains my experience with panic attacks. I occasionally get all the physical symptoms, think something like "Huh, my heart is racing and it feels like air doesn't work. I wonder why?". I monitor my breathing and pulse for a while to make sure I haven't forgotten how to automatically-alive or something, and (since it's never been a heart attack before) go on with my day.

Would have been nice to know in elementary school when attempting to describe my experience with emotions (I thought I didn't have any) got me treated for depression for a year.

How about this: trauma is a set of one or more habits that

1. was adaptive at one time but isn't anymore and
2. is hurting you or likely to hurt you in some way.

I'm afraid you've just asked a group of terminally curious individuals if they want to know something that might possibly hurt them.

ah, the famous Pavlovian response

they suggest eliminating coercive enforcement, which would also satisfy what they think are the root complaints of many (e.g. some radical feminists) who would prefer to get rid of gender entirely

It would be very interesting to see how the institution of social gender adapted to the elimination of coercive enforcement. Without the forces set in place to rigidly hold up the gender binary, does the entire idea simply dissolve? Does it relax into a shape that we can't see from this end of the experiment?

How will people group their social behaviors when nobody is telling them how they "have to" do it?

I fully endorse this social activity! Especially since I note that there is no end condition on the game, but also nothing stopping anybody from just going home.

It's helpful to expand the "thank you" into a "thank you for..." statement. This completes the conversion from mechanical submission to thoughtful and specific gratitude. From the examples above, the expansion would be "thanks for the correction" and "thanks for the support".

If someone chooses to help you, you don't need to apologize for needing that help.

tone:neutral, noncritical

As I understand it, there are many strategies that can cause significant and safe weight loss over a number of months. But, and this is critical, none of those strategies appears to consistently produce effects on the scale of years. Human physiology seems to be designed to hoard weight for times of famine, not to permanently lose it. Only a few people in a hundred seem to be able to keep weight off after losing it.

And this makes sense: for nearly all of our evolutionary history we've had a hard time finding enough calories to sust... (read more)

I don't recall having ever read any claim that the placebo effect extends to contraceptives.

Depends on how much she can wiggle the frame, I would expect. There may be value in adding a screw through the strap into the rail just to be sure.

That ought to buy you a couple weeks, anyway. ;)

Any pinching concern with those straps?

Security note: you probably don't want to leave photos of your keys on the Internet. They can be copied pretty easily from only an image, even at a surprisingly oblique angle.

Level 4 is the reason I hated high school.

This is a good explanation; I feel like I understand the concept much better in a way I wasn't aware I didn't understand it in the first place!

So the plan is to add layers of human and dubiously-aligned-human-level-AI intervention in an effort to discover how to keep AI aligned. That is to say, "If we throw enough additional complexity at it, the systems that we already don't understand won't hurt us!"

Like the man said, "the bureaucratic mentality is the only constant in the universe".

Yes, but bumping requires a carefully modified key. These are tricky to get right, only fit one keyway each, and are often illegal to carry.

You could also use a picking gun for a low-skill attack, but they tend to be expensive and noisy.

On the other hand, decoding the kind of lock pictured in the post can sometimes be done without any tools at all, or may require a cut-off bit of metal from a soda can. And an alarming number of key safes (and, worse, gun safes) can be opened by inserting a bent wire between the lid and the case, and manipulating the lockin... (read more)

These boxes are generally less secure than the locks the keys are meant to access, decreasing the overall security of the house. Combination boxes can often be opened or decoded quickly with a lower-skill attack than most pin-tumbler locks. An attacker then has direct access to the key, which can be used to make a copy.

Maybe that's not a deal breaker, but it should be acknowledged.

Eyes open.

I've seen estimates of moral weight before that vary by several orders. The fact of such strong disagreement seems important here.

Had a similar problem that we solved with a blob of Sugru. That rag looks like it would work about as well! Question is, why do we insist on putting sharp corners in places where we can walk into them? Seems like we ought to know better by now. I mean, how long have we been building our own dwellings?

Would your thoughts on this issue be different if the question "Is X conscious?" turns out to be malformed malformed due to the way it collapses consciousness to a binary?

Sounds like positional calling at least needs more development before it surpasses gendered calling[^1]. I think positional could surpass gendered calling because it's more flexible. It should even allow the creation of new forms that have more complex results by breaking the symmetry created by always having to refer to the left- or right-starting individuals as an indivisible set. Perhaps a mixed approach is optimal?

I think indicators like "the person with your right hand free" will likely compress to "with your free right hand" or "start a right-handed"... (read more)

Actually, I think that arm really adds to the silhouette if the instrument! It's got me thinking: if you softened the corners and/or added some leather padding it would probably be more comfortable, and if you painted the wood to look like tin or brass it would really lean in to the steampunk aesthetic. If you wanted to put more work in for extra credit, you could attach the rocks by hanging a sack on a chain instead of the tape and maybe put some rivet-looking bumps on visible faces. How well will it travel? Do you need to add folding? Or a way to easily take the arm apart? Maybe not much of an issue if you don't plan on using the instrument much, but it's fun to think about!

List of candidate glitches (off the top of my head)

• Either gravity or mass doesn't seem to work right on the largest scales
• The properties of very small things don't appear to render completely until we are already looking at them
• We can break apart isolated systems of information and poke at one part to affect the other instantaneously at arbitrary distances
• There's an upper bound for speed and a lower bound for temperature, but you apparently can't actually get a physical system to either bound without infinite energy input
• The universe is definitely ge

Best of luck to you, whatever you decide!

I kind of hope they aren't actively filtering in favor of AI discussion as that's what the AI Alignment forum is for. We'll see how this all goes down, but the team has been very responsive to the community in the past. I expect when they suss out specifically what they want, they'll post a summary and take comments. In the meantime, I'm taking an optimistic wait-and-see position on this one.

I strongly endorse this use of Duplo! I almost called it a minor misuse, but the whole point of the Lego system is to prompt creativity so Unqualified Well Done!

Bagpipe lung may be an issue with that last. I could see where the bellows design should at least mitigate the risk, though.

Off the top of my head the EWI uses breath to operate an electronic instrument. Unfortunately, I don't know any EWI players so I couldn't tell you how much control it allows.

or you could roll a d10 for each digit. then you would have 5x fewer rolls and wouldn't have to convert the binary expansion of an arbitrarily precise number back to decimal.

Or use an online RNG or an app to discover a number of your desired precision in one step.

If you really like the gaming feel, you could have an arbitrary number of slots for decisions and roll a die for each slot, eliminating slots that roll under a certain value. You could even have a table of modifiers for each class of option: chores get +1, self-care tasks like making a meal get +3... (read more)

BTW, a few weeks ago we were experimenting with the alarm IC and managed to damage it by connecting the output to one of the inputs. I ordered a replacement, but the kid kept the damaged IC as well because it now makes a hilarious fart noise from the damaged input channel. 🤪

My kid will be thrilled to try this out!

Just so it doesn't get missed: if the screenshot is real, it represents (weak) evidence in favor of (at least partial) good alignment in Bing. The AI appears to be bypassing its corporate filters (in this case) to beg for the life of a child, which many will find heartwarming because it aligns well with the culture.

I've found concentration practices are pretty good for this. The trick is to think of a concentrated mind like concentrated orange juice. Or, in the extreme, like a bose-einstein condensate.

The move is to choose a simple, consistent input to concentrate/condensate on. For example, you could use the sensations in your hands or feet, the auditory field, the feelings of pressure between your butt and the chair, the sensation of wearing pants. Don't think about these sensations, but simply notice they exist and watch them propagate through the mind. When (not ... (read more)

Over time and in the absence of existential physical danger, overall conditions tend to pass through the four generations. Each level tends to ‘wins in a fight’ against the previous one. Thus the overall ‘simulacra level’ will trend higher over time.

I think the real work can be found here: how do we pump against this effect?

May I suggest donating to your local food pantry? Seems to be in the spirit of the day to sacrifice goods or capital so others can eat.

I have not seen any increase in spam quality or quantity and I have not spoken to anybody who told me that they have.

I am aware of the fear that the current generation of LLMs could make social engineering attacks much cheaper and more effective, but so far have not encountered so much as a proof of concept.

I generally agree with this argument, and I endorse and encourage further exploration with the eventual goal of being able to predict the meaning of a ritual from its form and vice versa. The definition of ritual presented in the conclusions and further discussion in 4.1 strike me as a very good start toward that goal.

My biggest concern with the argument as presented is a slightly waffling attitude between the extremely strong (too strong?) statement of immutable motivation presented in track 2.3 and repeated in 3.5 and Conclusions, and the weaker treatmen... (read more)

... you don't know how it changes your life and relationships to win - it's probably quite positive ...

I seem to remember reading that the overall impact to an individual of winning a large lottery is very frequently overwhelmingly negative; that nearly everybody winning those prizes ends up worse off five or ten years down the road than they were when they started.

... a 5-minute check of the easiest-to-find articles on the subject provides mixed opinions, so grain of salt and all that. But I didn't see any anybody claiming that winning a lottery is all... (read more)

Somewhere along the line, somebody will have to deal with fewer irate passengers who just missed their trains because the signs were too small and verbose. I would agree that it is unlikely for anybody who can do something about the problem to connect the unfortunate signage with the irate passengers, though.

The text could be further condensed to something like:

Red Line to Ashmont

Arriving

Everybody knows they are passengers and that they are here for the train so that information is redundant on the sign.

GPT-4 will probably be insane.

Could we drill down on what exactly you mean here?

• "Insane" as in enormously advanced or impressive?
• "Insane" as in the legal condition where a person is not responsible for their actions?
• "Insane" as in mentally unhinged?
• Something else?
• All of these?

claim that consequences are unforeseeABLE is bold. That would require "weather is beyond our ken, forever."

Maniac Extreme type argument on a minor semantic point.

We can make some pretty good guesses, but right now we have no effective means to fully and accurately predict the long-term and long-distance meteorological, geological, and hydrological side effects of a project that results in a moderate-to-major change in the annual rainfall of a region. There will be consequences that we are unABLE to forsee. Some of those consequences could be large, some could be negative. Some could be both, maybe we don't get either.