"was not associated" tells us more about the sample size than the effect, as far as I can tell, though, doesn't it? The 0.82-2.42 CI does not seem very reassuring. Especially given this is just observational - it could well be that people who brush immediately after intake of something that's bad for your teeth are generally conscientious about their dental health, so if they still end up with worse outcomes in this study (albeit not reaching statistical significance), then brushing quickly after acid intake could potentially be even worse than this CI (weakly) suggests.

That said, the measured odds ratios for fruit/acids between meals were so much larger that it might indeed make more sense to focus on these than on the exact timing of brushing.

silentbob5dQuick Take

After using Claude Code for a while, I can't help but conclude that today's frontier LLMs mostly meet the bar for what I'd consider AGI - with the exception of two things, that, I think, explain most of their shortcomings:

lack of real multimodality
context window limitations

Most frontier models are marketed as multimodal, but this is often limited to text + some way to encode images. And while LLM vision is OK for many practical purposes, it's far from perfect, and even if they had perfect sight, being limited to singular images is still a huge limitation^[1].

Imagine you, with your human general intelligence, were sitting in a dark room, and were conversing with someone... (read more)

Replying toEmpiricist and Narrator

silentbob10d

Empiricist and Narrator

It seems to me that narratives are skewed and highly simplified abstractions of (empirical) reality that then are subject to selection pressure, such that the most viral ones (within any subculture) dominate, where virality is often negatively correlated with accuracy. Yet, when hearing narratives from people we like and trust, we humans seem to have deeply ingrained urges to quickly believe them. This gets most apparent when you hear the narratives other subcultures are spreading that affect you or your beliefs negatively. Like, hearing the narratives of AI skeptics & ethicists (say about AI water usage, about AI not being "actually intelligent", or about all AI doomers secretly trying to inflate stock... (read more)

Replying toThe limiting factor in AI programming is the synchronization overhead between two minds

silentbob11d

The limiting factor in AI programming is the synchronization overhead between two minds

I read your title and thought "exactly!". I then read your post and it was pretty much exactly what I expected after reading the title. So, ironically, it seems like you perfectly compressed the state of your mind into a few words. :) But to be fair, that's probably mostly because we've made very similar experiences and doesn't translate to human<->LLM communication.

When vibe-coding, many things work really fast, but I often end up in these cases where the thing I want changed is very nuanced and I can see that just blurting it out would cause the LLM to do something different from what I have in mind. So I sometimes have... (read more)

Replying toTo be well-calibrated is to be punctual

silentbob18d

To be well-calibrated is to be punctual

Even with a car, there are cases where traffic and/or finding a parking spot can cause huge variance. It really depends on the type of meeting / circumstances of the other people whether it's worth completely minimizing the risk of being late at the expense of potentially wasting a lot of your own time.

E.g., when I visit somebody at their home, then it will likely be bearable for them to welcome me 10 minutes later. Whereas if we meet at some public space, it may be very annoying for the person to stand around on their own (particularly if the person has social anxiety and gets serious disutility from the experience).

That all being said, probably the majority of minutes that people are late to things are self-inflicted, and I agree with OP it makes sense in general to reduce that part (and more generally striving to be a reliable person).

Replying toReinventing the wheel

silentbob19d

Reinventing the wheel

I can relate to a lot of this. But I think in my case the motivation for reinventing the wheel also comes down to fundamentally not enjoying activities like "reading documentation" or generally "understanding what another person has done". But implementing my own library is usually fun. And I can often justify it to myself (and sometimes others) because it will then match the given use case perfectly and will be exactly as big/complex as needed, rather than being some huge highly general universal solution full of bells and whistles we won't even need. Which can be a real advantage - but it's also just one side of a trade-off, and I... (read more)

silentbob24d

I'm not sure what you're hinting at, but in 99.9% of cases when I'm out of the house, I do carry a smartphone around. If you mean that it's annoying when the display gets confused by water, then I agree that's a real disadvantage (but I doubt people's attitude towards being exposed to rain changed that much between 2006 and today, so there certainly is some severe general dislike of rain independent from smartphones). If this is not what you mean, then please elaborate. :)

silentbob24d

Agreed, that's one of the exceptions I was thinking of - if you're getting soaked and have no way to get into dry clothes anytime soon, there's little way around finding that rather unpleasant. But I'd say 95% of my rain encounters are way less severe than that, and in these cases, my (previous) attitude towards the rain really was the main issue about the whole situation.

Replying toComparing yourself to other people

silentbob1mo

Comparing yourself to other people

People compare things that are close together in some way. You compare yourself to your neighbors or family, or to your colleagues at work, or to people that do similar work as you do in other companies.

Isn't one pervasive problem today that many people compare themselves to those they see on social media, often including influencers with a very different lifestyle? So it seems to me that comparisons that are not so local are in fact often made, it primarily depends on what you're exposed to - which to some degree is indeed the people around you, but nowadays more and more also includes the skewed images people on the internet, who... (read more)

silentbob1mo

Relatedly, at some point as a teenager I realized that being exposed to rain is actually usually not that terrible, and I had just kind of been accidentally conditioned to dislike it because it's a normal thing to dislike and I never met anyone who appeared to enjoy the experience. But turns out, once you stop actively maintaining that resistance and welcome the rain, it can be pretty nice to walk around in rain while everyone around you tries to escape it. (Some exceptions apply, of course)

Egoism has a bad reputation, but I think that doesn't do it justice. Some degree of egoism is likely very helpful, as it's a form of ensuring available local knowledge is taken into account. If people were not at least mildly egoistic, a great deal of local knowledge would be ignored, leading to everyone supposedly helping others in not-actually-helpful ways.

What I think is much more harmful overall is the distinction between valuing public goods^[1] at least somewhat vs not valuing them at all in their decision-making. This is something I've in particular seen in some B2C companies I've been involved with: when things are going well for them, they're proud of the value... (read 431 more words →)

Don't Trust Your Brain

silentbob

2mo

…if it's anything like mine^[1]. If it isn't, then maybe treat this as an opportunity to fight the typical mind fallacy by getting a glimpse at what's going on in other minds.

I've made many predictions and have gone through a lot of calibration training over the years, and have generally become pretty well calibrated in several domains. Yet I noticed that in some areas, I seem surprisingly immune to calibration. Where my brain just doesn't want to learn that it's systematically and repeatedly wrong about something. This post is about the ~~three~~ four such areas.

(1) Future Ability to Remember Things

Sometimes, I feel incredibly confident that some piece of information will be easy for... (read 1093 more words →)

Reality itself doesn't know whether AI is a bubble. Or, to be more precise: whether a "burst-like event"^[1] will happen or not is - in all likelihood, as far as I'm concerned - not entirely determined at this point in time. If we were to "re-run reality" a million times starting today, we'd probably find something that looks like a bursting bubble in some percentage of these and nothing that looks like a bursting bubble in some other percentage - and the rest would be cases where people disagree even in hindsight whether a bubble did burst or not.^[2]

When people discuss whether AI is a bubble, they often frame this (whether deliberately or... (read more)

Visual Exploration of Gradient Descent (many images)

silentbob

5mo

If you (understandably) think "this post is too long, ain't nobody got time for that!" I suggest scrolling to ~the middle of the post and at least check out the Mandelbrot Training Animation(s). I think they're pretty neat.

After going through ~half of the ARENA curriculum, I couldn't stop myself from taking a few days off and just exploring what happens in a small neural network during gradient descent. I'm summarizing that little adventure in this not-so-little post. Hard to say how far my findings and newly won intuitions generalize beyond this particular case, but at the very least it led to some nice-looking pictures.

What I Did

I trained a small neural network (<100 neuron... (read 5991 more words →)

Some quick thoughts on vibe coding:

it turns you from a developer into more of a product manager role
- but the developers you manage are a) occasionally stupid/unwise and b) extremely fast and never tired
this makes it relatively addictive, because feedback cycles are much shorter than for a "real" product manager, who often has to wait for weeks to see their wishes turn into software, and you have a strong element of randomness in your rewards, with things sometimes turning out surprisingly well one-shot, but sometimes not at all
It can also lead to laziness, as it's very tempting to getting used to "just letting the AI do it" even in not primarily vibe-coded projects,

... (read more)

Using coding agents gave me a new appreciation for the Jevons paradox, a concept that received a lot of attention earlier this year when DeepSeek R1's release in January coincided with a sudden drop in Nvidia's stock price, possibly as the supposed efficiency gains of the model made many traders assume this would lead to a decrease in hardware demand. The stock eventually bounced back though, with Jevons paradox being cited as one of the reasons, as it predicted that efficiency gains would lead to an increase in hardware demand rather than a decrease.

I recently realized that Github Copilot's agent mode with GPT5 is way more capable than I would have imagined,... (read more)

Futility Illusions

silentbob

6mo

…or the it doesn’t make a difference anyway fallacy.

A picture of an indecisive cow that is attached to a tiny tree with a thin rope. The cow should be easily able to escape the tree, but appears to not believe in its ability to do so.

Improving Productivity is Futile

I once had a coaching call on some generic productivity topic along the lines of “I’m not getting done as much as I’d like to”. My hope was that we might identify ways for me to become more productive and get more done. The coach, however, very quickly narrowed in on figuring out what I typically work on in order to eliminate the least valuable things – also a good idea for sure, but this approach seemed a bit disappointing to me. I had the impression I already had a good selection of high-value things, and really only wanted to do more of... (read 1215 more words →)

One super useful feature of Claude that some may not know about:

Claude is pretty good at creating web apps via artifacts
You can run and use these web apps directly in the Claude UI
You can publish and share these artifacts directly with others

As far as I can tell, the above is even available for non-paying users.

Relatedly: browser bookmarklets can be pretty useful little tools to reduce friction for recurring tasks you do in your browser. It may take <5 minutes to let Claude generate such bookmarklets for you.

You can also combine these two things, such as here: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/9c58fb4a-5fae-48ce-aed3-60355bfd033e

This is a web app built and hosted by Claude which creates a customized browser bookmarklet... (read more)

Procrastination Drill

silentbob

7mo

Have you ever been endlessly procrastinating on some task, but then once you eventually, finally do it, you realize that it is not half as bad as you thought?

Somehow, many of us keep overestimating how unpleasant it will be to engage with certain types of work to a degree where we put them off for months, building up guilt and resentment, when ultimately all we needed to have done was to grapple with some minor inconvenience.

On the other side, many of us know the feeling of having some drive to continue a thing once we've started it, even though it's supposedly unpleasant. I can dread doing my taxes for months, yet once... (read 595 more words →)

Melatonin Self-Experiment Results

silentbob

8mo

Throughout the first half of 2025 I did a blinded experiment to see how low to moderate melatonin intake affects me. In this post I summarize my findings.

Tl;dr: In my blinded self-experiment on melatonin, conducted over n = 60 days and analyzed with hypothesize.io, I found significantly positive effects for time to fall asleep (averaging ~25 instead of ~35 minutes, p ~= 0.001) and feeling awake the following morning (5.74/10 instead of 4.95/10, p = 0.006; but: this effect only persisted for the lower of two dosages, and did not persist throughout the rest of the day; could well be a false positive, as I didn’t correct for multiple hypothesis testing) for a... (read 2400 more words →)

After first learning about transformers, I couldn't help but wonder why on Earth this works. How can this totally made-up, complicated structure somehow end up learning how to write meaningful text and having a mostly sound model of our world?

(tl;dr: no novel insights here, just me writing down some thoughts I've had after/while learning more about neural nets and transformers.)

When I once asked someone more experienced, they essentially told me "nobody really knows, but the closest thing we have to an answer is 'the blessing of dimensionality' - with so many dimensions in your loss landscape, you basically don't run into local minima but the thing keeps improving if you just throw... (read 756 more words →)

One thing that confused me about transformers is the question of when (as in, after how many layers) each embedding "flips" from representing the original token to finally representing the prediction of the next token.

By now, I think the answer is simply this: each embedding represents both at the same time (and more). For instance, in GPT3 there are 12,288 embedding dimensions. At first I thought that all of them initially encode the original token, and after going through all the layers they eventually all encode the next token, and somewhere in the layers between this shift must happen. But what, upon some reflection, makes much more sense would be something very... (read more)

For a long time, I used to wonder what causes people to consistently mispronounce certain words even when they are exposed to many people pronouncing them correctly. (which mostly applies to people speaking in a non-native language, e.g. people from continental Europe speaking English)

Some examples that I’ve heard from different people around me over the years:

Saying “rectangel” instead of “rectangle”
Saying “pre-purr” (like prefer, but with a p) instead of “prepare”
Saying something like, uhh, “devil-oupaw” instead of “developer”
Saying “leech” instead of “league”
Saying “immu-table” instead of “immutable”
Saying "cyurrently" instead of "currently"

I did, of course, understand that if you only read a word, particularly in English where pronunciations are all over the place and often... (read 359 more words →)

Four Types of Disagreement

silentbob

10mo

Epistemic status: a model I find helpful to make sense of disagreements and, sometimes, resolve them.

Update: I should mention that this model is loosely based on things I've read elsewhere. There are many sources dividing "types of claims" into facts, values and policy. I'm not sure where I originally read this though. Adding "labels" seemed useful, as this explains many unproductive debates that don't map well to the other 3 categories.

I like to categorize disagreements using four buckets:

They don’t represent a perfect partitioning of “disagreement space”, meaning there is some overlap between them and they may not capture all possible disagreements, but they tend to get me pretty far... (read 1260 more words →)

Any-Benefit Mindset and Any-Reason Reasoning

silentbob

11mo

One concept from Cal Newport's Deep Work that has stuck with me is that of the any-benefit mindset:

To be clear, I’m not trying to denigrate the benefits [of social media]—there’s nothing illusory or misguided about them. What I’m emphasizing, however, is that these benefits are minor and somewhat random. [...] To this observation, you might reply that value is value: If you can find some extra benefit in using a service like Facebook—even if it’s small—then why not use it? I call this way of thinking the any-benefit mind-set, as it identifies any possible benefit as sufficient justification for using a network tool.

Many people use social platforms like Facebook because it allows them to stay connected... (read 1758 more words →)

Seeing Through the Eyes of the Algorithm

silentbob

There’s a type of perspective shift that can bring a lot of clarity to the behavior and limitations of algorithms and AIs. This perspective may be called seeing through the eyes of the algorithm (or AI, or LLM). While some may consider it obvious and intuitive, I occasionally encounter people – such as inexperienced programmers struggling with why some algorithm doesn’t work as expected, or generally many people complaining about the limitations of LLMs – who seem to be unfamiliar with it. For those who do find it obvious, it may still prove beneficial to explore a variety of examples to make this perspective shift more intuitive. It also sheds some light... (read 2733 more words →)

On Responsibility

silentbob

My view on the concept of responsibility has shifted a lot over the years. I’ve had three insights that brought me from my initial, very superficial and implicit understanding of responsibility, to the one I have today, which I consider more accurate, more practical, and more healthy.

Responsibility is Made Up

The first insight came while I was part of a dinner debate with a local philosopher and a few friends. We were discussing AI, of course, and the philosopher eventually brought up the question of responsibility: if a self-driving car malfunctions and ends up killing a pedestrian, who’s responsible? The human in the car? The car manufacturer? The programmers? The car itself? Can an... (read 1673 more words →)

Reality is Fractal-Shaped

silentbob

Tl;dr: Much of common sense and personal insights are just first order approximations, broadly generalizing complex situations to a single supposed truth. But often the truth value of a claim depends on many hidden factors. In this post I argue that it’s important to maintain a general awareness of the imprecise nature of seemingly binary statements, and to recognize when it’s appropriate to dig deeper and figure out these hidden variables and how they interact. Often we should replace “Is X true?”-type questions with “When is X true?”, which has a better shot at leading to more interesting and accurate insights.

Many human disagreements come down to something like the following:

Alan: Did you... (read 2188 more words →)

For people who like guided meditations: there's a small YouTube channel providing a bunch of secular AI-generated guided meditations of various lengths and topics. More are to come, and the creator (whom I know) is happy about suggestions. Three examples:

They are also available in podcast form here.

I wouldn't say these meditations are necessarily better or worse than any others, but they're free and provide some variety. Personally, I avoid apps like Waking Up and Headspace due to both their imho outrageous pricing model and their surprising degree of monotony. Insight Timer is a good alternative, but the quality varies a lot and I keep running into overly... (read more)

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

silentbob

Failures in Kindness

Micro Habits that Improve One’s Day

Procrastination Drill

Beware of Fake Alternatives

silentbob

silentbob

Don't Trust Your Brain

Visual Exploration of Gradient Descent (many images)

Futility Illusions

Procrastination Drill

Melatonin Self-Experiment Results

Four Types of Disagreement

Any-Benefit Mindset and Any-Reason Reasoning

silentbob

Failures in Kindness

Micro Habits that Improve One’s Day

Procrastination Drill

Beware of Fake Alternatives

silentbob

silentbob

Don't Trust Your Brain

Visual Exploration of Gradient Descent (many images)

Futility Illusions

Procrastination Drill

Melatonin Self-Experiment Results

Four Types of Disagreement

Any-Benefit Mindset and Any-Reason Reasoning

(1) Future Ability to Remember Things

What I Did

Improving Productivity is Futile

Responsibility is Made Up