All of Space L Clottey's Comments + Replies

9quetzal_rainbow
For me, "enjoying life" means "enjoying good things that happen in life", while everything in-between is neutral at best. Many people seem to put positive value on "in-between" space. If I try to point out, some people enjoy just the fact of being embodied.

Thanks so much for writing this, this is a major problem I experience and it's nice to have a set of really gentle tools to address it.

I tried doing this. It was okay. Here was the prompt I used. 

 

I also wrote code to use the GPT-4 API, feel free to DM me if you want it. 

 

It was also very expensive in the end. 

I spent a lot of time on it and it wasn't that good, I think I'll wait for the next GPT to try it again. 

"""
# Better, and now it talks about increases instead of just effects

I'm an Economics student and I want to create flashcards that comprehensively cover the knowledge and the reasons why for each of those pieces of knowledge
------
Make flashcards that... (read more)

2Diogo Cruz
Cool, I haven't been able to play with the API yet. Yeah, it has its challenges. Personally, my template prompt gets the card format right almost all of the time with GPT-4 (only sometimes with GPT-3.5). I asked it to return the cards using "Front:" and "Back:" because it would often default to that format (or "Q:" and "A:"), and it's easy to clean it up with a script afterward. As you've seen yourself, it's very difficult to force it be concise. It does tend to ignore more specific commands, as you tried. I suggest you try to put the examples at the end of the prompt, instead of the middle. I've noticed that the later cards tend to inherit the formatting of the first ones, so the examples at the end might play that role. Personally, I'm quite happy with how the Rationality deck turned out, but I'm hesitant about using it for more complicated topics (in my case, mostly math-heavy stuff). In any case, I would likely not have spent the time writing the cards by hand, so this is always better than nothing.

In trying to understand people's feelings, I tend to ask a lot of questions about the situation so I can understand, but I worry a lot about it turning into an interview and maybe people don't like explaining themselves a lot when they're upset? But I don't really know what to do. Advice?

1David Zeller
[My comments are less refined than the main post, so take ‘em with a little extra skepticism. All the same, I think this might help.] Sometimes people don’t want to talk, and that’s ok. But if the conversation turns into an interview when they do want to talk, a few different things could be happening. - Some people rely too much on using closed questions. Using open questions instead can open up the conversation. - Some people rely too much on asking questions in general. There are other types of things that we can say as the listener which may be worth using more of. Reflection of feelings (“It sounds like you’re feeling overwhelmed”) and reflection of meaning (“I’m hearing that this job really mattered to you”) can be surprisingly good, for instance. - In general, the more attuned we are to the core meaning of what the other person is saying, beyond the surface facts, the less likely that the conversation will feel surface-level or like an interview. 

Interesting, I wrote that comment a year ago and autohotkey is still embedded into the genes of how I use my computer. My capslock is remapped to control, I can write a small four letter string to pull up a notepad file with my daily journal, another string for my sleep long, another four my collection of fictional quotes I like, and fun ones like typing 'nowk' to expand to the current date without having to check it (2022-12-05) or typing -0 to auto expand to — em dash are things that my computer feels very empty without now 

2MondSemmel
Maybe my expectations for usability are just too high, or the tool is easy enough for professional programmers? (Which I am not, though I have some minor programming experience.) Or maybe you're used to the tool, flaws and all, so now you benefit from the upside without suffering from the learning curve? Or maybe I would've fared better if I'd consulted that specific quick start tutorial rather than searching in the docs when I had questions? Anyway, a few days ago, I finally took the plunge, again. It took me ~80 min to write this almost trivial key recording script to help an author of video game guides who up to this point had typed their huge walkthroughs by hand (example, one of those solutions is >700 characters long). The majority of that scripting time was spent raging at the documentation and syntax and lack of error messages, for a script I expected to be very simple. The resulting script worked and the recipient was very happy about it, so spending the time was worth it, but I found the scripting experience itself just unpleasant. On the other hand, maybe now the worst is behind me, and writing further scripts would be smooth sailing?
4LawrenceC
AI research engineers in the Bay Area. More generally, in the Bay Area tech scene traditional credentials matter less than which companies/teams/projects you've been on.
3the gears to ascension
in my case, software engineering.

This was really interesting. Mapping the bits I understood (which was minimal) to the bits I didn't was fun, but also the style of writing for even the bits I didn't understand was entertaining

Really engaging! Was especially gripped at the bluffing section, and laughed out loud in shock at the reveal. Really enjoyed it :)

I love Thrill of the Fight. Gets me super exhausted with my muscles sore. 

Change is Bad? or Choices are bad? Choices are really bad?

Actually, I want to walk back on this a bit. I was on a plane since this comment and the ten hours of no wifi was really nice and really unique and really focused, and I had absolutely no reason to check my phone because there was absolutely zero chance of their being a notification... I realised that I appreciated digital minimalism at the time because I had just come out of having no wifi forced apon me for a week and finding it really nice and really wanting to maintain it. I think I've just forgotten how nice it actually is

I really really enjoyed digital minimalism when I read it, but think it was somewhat harmful to my relationships, given how hard it says that only text-relationships are basically worthless. It took like a year but I happened to meet someone really cool who strongly didn't like calling and since the only way I could talk to them was texting, I sucked it up and actually found out that it's not so bad.

I think it did help me firm up the things I dislike about texting, and with some agreed about norms I think they can be mitigated. Wrote about it here: Why cal... (read more)

4TurnTrout
I don't remember at this point what digital minimalism advocates, but I advocate doing cost-benefit analyses, which are naturally sensitive to the specifics of your situation. The question may become: How can I draw most of the benefits of texting, without checking my phone 40 times a day?  And I think this question has meaningful answers, from batching responses eg thrice daily, to dedicated synchronous texting periods (like text-based phone calls!).

Actually, I want to walk back on this a bit. I was on a plane since this comment and the ten hours of no wifi was really nice and really unique and really focused, and I had absolutely no reason to check my phone because there was absolutely zero chance of their being a notification... I realised that I appreciated digital minimalism at the time because I had just come out of having no wifi forced apon me for a week and finding it really nice and really wanting to maintain it. I think I've just forgotten how nice it actually is

7Tom Lieberum
I want to second your first point. Texting frequently with significant others lets me feel be part of their life and vice versa which a weekly call does not accomplish, partly because it is weekly and partly because I am pretty averse to calls.  In one relationship I had, this led to significant misery on my part because my partner was pretty strict on their phone usage, batching messages for the mornings and evenings. For my current primary relationship, I'm convinced that the frequent texting is what kept it alive while being long-distance.  To reconcile the two viewpoints, I think it is still true that superficial relationships via social media likes or retweets are not worth that much if they are all there is to the relationship. But direct text messages are a significant improvement on that.  Re your blog post: Maybe that's me being introverted but there are probably significant differences in whether people feel comfortable/like texting or calling. For me, the instantaneousness of calling makes it much more stressful, and I do have a problem with people generalizing either way that one way to interact over distances is superior in general. I do cede the point that calling is of course much higher bandwidth, but it also requires more time commitment and coordination. 

Holy crap, that was the best fanfiction I've ever read. That was insanely entertaining.

Liron Shapira's bloatedmvp.com may also count? Which involves the same content as The Lean Startup

2Gunnar_Zarncke
@paulg would agree: https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1336695936383397891  https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1228063091444920321  For startups, the product must be as minimal and as quickly iterating as possible. For grown companies, the requirements might be different. Minimum Lovable Product or something like that.
2Gunnar_Zarncke
The link is broken (points back the OP, should be bloatedmvp.com ).

Thank you for the recommendations!

 

For something like Keysmith (automating series of tasks) for windows, I use AutoHotkey. It's free and super easy and powerful and has a very good Tutorial Page

2MondSemmel
Counterpoint: I've bounced off of AutoHotkey multiple times so far and would therefore not describe its docs as good. Or rather, I always install it to solve a moderately difficult problem, then get stumped because the tool has way too many functionalities with weird edge cases. AutoHotkey might work fine if one first installs it and gets used to it, and only then encounters that moderately difficult problem; but my experience with it has always been disappointing.

Ah, totally, thank you for the tip and how to generate it myself. 

Thank you very much for making this. It didn't work for me on google play books before converting to mobi and back to epub using calibre. This is that version:

 https://drive.google.com/file/d/1h5OeJPZFaUPeYFIn05Z50eOzdJvksGd_/view?usp=sharing

Blot.im also seems really cool, as it auto uploads whatever you put into a dropbox folder. It's $4 a month. 

1[comment deleted]

I used Anki for 3ish years and SuperMemo for the last year, and have to say I've liked SuperMemo exponentially more because of it's incremental reading feature, where you put hundreds of sources to learn from (like lesswrong posts) into it, and go over them over time and can rank them by priority. Is far less of a pain to learn from things then making cards one by one.

2Morpheus
There is an Anki add-on that basically provides the same functionality with a pretty impressive feature set. Personally I found it a bit clunky to use and stopped, so I might look into SuperMemo.
1Space L Clottey
Blot.im also seems really cool, as it auto uploads whatever you put into a dropbox folder. It's $4 a month. 

Oh yes of course, perfect, thank you.

I think what I'm getting at is a desire for better self-awareness in people giving advice. I think it's fine to give the alternative, brute force  methodology version (step-by-step philosophy to happiness / probability theory) as a way to artifically make up for it in the absence of the original way of acquiring the skill (of happiness / future vision). So I think what Saphire's doing is fine, except if it's under the pretense that that's how you actual acquired the skill in the first place, which I think reflects lack of self awareness. 

Loved this, a lot of it made me laugh. Came here from searching 'Naval' to see if other people on LessWrong knew about him. He's a gem of wisdom.

I think you'd get a lot of value out of using incremental reading, it improves the learning to memorisation workflow tremendously. Currently SuperMemo is the best at IR. (Post I wrote about this: https://gingerjumble.wordpress.com/2020/08/28/the-main-reason-you-should-switch-from-anki-to-supermemo/)

The truth will triumph - when? They never achieve anything. A cheap hope, better than despair? I disagree. Hope can induce passivity as easily as despair, two ways of changing your perception of the situation without changing the situation.

Thanks, I agree. I do not want to encourage passivity. Leaving it as purely dystopian, which it is, would likely have been better for that purpose. Thank you. I wonder if it's too late to edit out the final bit?

 

As for concrete steps, talking about the thing is one of the steps, so that people can stop rationalising... (read more)

4Vanilla_cabs
Well I think as a general matter that a case against status quo is incomplete without the case for an alternative, because everybody can picture the status quo, but few will guess what your alternative looks like. There's been a plethora of essays denouncing the school system already, and I haven't seen any major change except more restrictions on alternatives to public schools. A difficulty IMO is that good teaching is hard to scale. To keep motivated, young people need models to look up to, and the most relatable are the ones they can interact with IRL. An alternative would be teaching parents to be those role models, but your mileage would vary. Have you heard of the monitorial system - bleh, this sounds carceral in English - ? When public education appeared, a lot of leeway was left to teachers. To manage large numbers of students, the school didn't batch students by age. Students who had learned a topic would teach it in return. This seems like a clever way to form role models, personalize learning, teach responsibility and reinforce the learnings, all with minimum investment. My current best plan would be to get rich, fund multiple private schools based on alternatives, rate them, keep the best, open more. I'm far from milestone 1.

At age 5 I am told that every single morning as we drove to school I said to my mother that it was a waste of time. Shockingly, she listened, and after a year of this she had found out about home education and made arrangements for me to be released.

That's amazing, what a victory. I'm really glad that happened, freedom is great.

If you're exhausted at the point when your alarm rings, then forcing yourself to wake up at the alarm clock can be pretty terrible for your health since you obviously need more sleep. Unfortunately alarm clocks are a necessity for a large amount of the population, but it is possible to pull back your sleep phase with things like morning sunlight and exercise so that you get closer to waking up at the time you need to naturally. I'm working on pulling back my sleep phase now.

1Duff
I agree, the responding to the alarm thing should not be at the expense of sleep. I get 8.5 hours so I think I'm good. If I don't do the alarm, I scroll my phone endlessly in bed though, so this has been helpful for me.

Thank you for the recommendations! +1 on Replacing Guilt. It is shockingly powerful. As for Atomic Habits, I've heard some very strong insistence that Tiny Habits is superior with less fluff.

After I shower, it’s 11:40pm and my hair has to try afterward

typo?

2Mark Xu
yep, thanks

Ditto on Autohotkey. It's amazingly easy to learn and very useful. (eg. for making Yoda Timer windows anywhere with even the most basic of programming experience). I've taught it to quite a few people and would be happy to teach anyone if they want to schedule a call: 
calendly.com/meetsquid

2Matt Goldenberg
Booked!

Ditto, this post in particular is very well explained.