abstractapplic

Karma: 2,642

abstractapplic 1 Jan 2025 17:51 UTC
6 points
0
on: abstractapplic’s Shortform
Enemy HP: ⁷²⁄₁₀₄
Fractionalist cast Reduce-4!
It succeeded!
Enemy HP: ¹⁸⁄₂₆

abstractapplic 1 Jan 2025 3:44 UTC
31 points
13
on: (The) Lightcone is nothing without its people: LW + Lighthaven’s big fundraiser
I’ve procrastinated and prevaricated for the entire funding period, because, well . . . on the one hand . . .
- Lightcone runs LW, runs Lighthaven, and does miscellaneous Community Things. I’ve never visited Lighthaven, don’t plan to, and (afaik) have never directly benefited from its existence; I have similar sentiments regarding the Community Things. Which means that, from my point of view, ~$2M/yr is being raised to run a web forum. This strikes me as unsustainable, unscaleable, and unreasonable.
- The graphs here say the number of monthly users is ~4000. If you disqualify the ~half of those who are students, lurkers, drive-by posters, third-worlders, or people who just forgot their wallet . . . that implies ~$1000, per person, per year, to run a web forum. (Contrast the Something Awful forums, which famously sustain themselves with a one-time entry fee of $10-$25 per person (plus some ads shown to the people who only paid $10).)
- I suspect Rationality is one of those things you get less of as you add more money; relatedly, frugality is one of the more reliable defenses against Chapman-style capital-S Sociopaths, and Zvi-style capital-M Mazes.
But on the other hand . . .
- It’s a really good web forum; very plausibly the best that exists. This walled garden is impeccably managed and curated, and has an outsized impact on the rest of the world.
- If just a handful of the mundane UI innovations prototyped here caught on in the wider internet, that could justify every penny being asked for and then some (I’m thinking particularly of multidimensional voting and the associated ability to distinguish “this comment is Good” from “this comment is Right”).
- LW has had a non-negligible and almost-certainly-net-positive impact on my personal and professional lives, and I think that should be rewarded.
I’ve decided to square this circle by giving $200 but being super tsundere about it. Hopefully the fact that this is about a fifth of what’s implicitly being asked for, while being about five times what I’d consider sensible for any other site, serves to underline everything I’ve said above.

abstractapplic 29 Dec 2024 13:57 UTC
3 points
1
on: Does Claude Prioritize Some Prompt Input Channels Over Others?
Typo in title: prioritize, not priorities.
Here’s Claude’s take on a diagram to make this less confusing.
The diagram did not make things less confusing, and in fact did the opposite. A table would be more practical imo.
10 chat sessions
As in, for each possible config, and each possible channel, run ten times from scratch? For a total of 360 actual sessions? This isn’t clear to me.
Regardless: a small useful falsifiable practical result, with no egregious errors in the parts of the methodology I understand. Upvoted.

abstractapplic 28 Dec 2024 3:12 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
Oh, and as for
the Bonus Objective
if I’m continuing with my current paradigm I’d guess it has something to do with
an apparent interaction between Orcs and Hags which makes a path containing both less dangerous than might otherwise be expected
possibly such that
I could remove the Goblin in Room 7 without making the easiest path any easier
but
I have low confidence in this answer
and
I have no idea how I could get away with purging the second Goblin

abstractapplic 27 Dec 2024 23:58 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
Built a treebased model; trialled a few solutions; got radically different answers which I’m choosing to trust.
The machines seem to think that the best solution I can offer is
BOG/OWH/GCD
and I’ve
found a row which confirms the adventurers-scout-one-room-ahead paradigm is, at the very least, not both eternal and absolute
so I’m making that my answer for now.

abstractapplic 27 Dec 2024 21:58 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
Did some more tinkering with this scenario. It is remarkably difficult to be 100% confident when determining the basic mechanics of this scenario, i.e.
whether adventuring parties can see more than one room ahead.
And I’m beginning to suspect that
some adventuring parties always take the optimal path, while some others are greedy algorithms just picking the easiest next encounter.

abstractapplic 27 Dec 2024 12:06 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: What are the most interesting / challenging evals (for humans) available?
( . . . and IQ tests, and exam papers, and probably some other things that are too obvious for me to call to mind . . . )

abstractapplic 27 Dec 2024 4:02 UTC
10 points
0
on: What are the most interesting / challenging evals (for humans) available?
You might want to look into tests given to job applicants. (Human intelligence evaluation is an entire industry already!)

abstractapplic 27 Dec 2024 4:02 UTC
7 points
0
on: What are the most interesting / challenging evals (for humans) available?
D&D.Sci, for Data Science and related skills (including, to an extent, inference-in-general).

abstractapplic 20 Dec 2024 1:05 UTC
5 points
0
on: abstractapplic’s Shortform
“What important truth do you believe, which most people don’t?”
“I don’t think I possess any rare important truths.”

abstractapplic 15 Dec 2024 12:31 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
On reflection, I think
my initial guess happened to be close to optimal
because
Adventurers will successfully deduce that a mid-dungeon Trap is less dangerous than a mid-dungeon Orc
and
Hag-then-Dragon seems to make best use of the weird endgame interaction I still don’t understand
however
I’m scared Adventurers might choose Orcs-plus-optionality over Boulders
so my new plan is
CBW/OOH/XXD
(and I also suspect
COW/OBH/XXD
might be better because of
the tendency of Adventuring parties to pick Eastern routes over Southern ones when all else is equal
but I don’t have the confidence to make that my answer.)

abstractapplic 15 Dec 2024 2:21 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
Oh and just for Posterity’s sake, marking that I noticed both
the way some Tournaments will have 3 judges and others will have 4
and
the change in distribution somewhere between Tournaments 3000 and 4000
but I have no clue how to make use of these phenomena.

abstractapplic 15 Dec 2024 2:18 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
On further inspection it turns out I’m completely wrong about
how traps work.
and it looks like
Dungeoneers can always tell what kinds of fight they’ll be getting into: min(feature effect) between 2 and 4 is what decides how they collectively impact Score.
It also looks like
The rankings of effectiveness are different between the Entry Square, the Exit Square, and Everywhere Else; Steel Golems are far and away the best choice for guarding the entrance but ‘only’ on par with Dragons elsewhere.
Lastly
It looks like there’s a weak but solid benefit to dungeoneers having no choice even between similarly strong creatures: a choice of two dragons and a choice of two hags are both a bit scarier than hag-or-dragon. (Though that might just be because multiple of the same strong creature is evidence you’re in a well-stocked dungeon? Feature effects are hard to detangle.)
Also
It seems like there’s a weirdly strong interaction between the penultimate obstacle and the ultimate obstacle?

abstractapplic 14 Dec 2024 21:45 UTC
5 points
0
on: D&D.Sci Dungeonbuilding: the Dungeon Tournament
I still have a bunch of checking to confirm whether this actually works, but I’m getting my preliminary decision down ASAP:
CWB/OOH/XXD (where the Xes are Nothing or Goblins depending on whether I’m Hard-mode-ing)
On the basis that:
Adventurers should prioritize the ‘empty’ trapped rooms over the ones with Orcs, then end up funelled into the traps and towards the Hag; Clay Golem and Dragon are our aces, so they’re placed in the two locations Adventurers can’t complete the course without touching.

abstractapplic 11 Dec 2024 0:17 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
But you know you can just go onto Ligben and type in the name yourself, right?
I didn’t, actually; I’ve never used libgen before and assumed there’d be more to it. Thanks for taking the time to show me otherwise.

abstractapplic 8 Dec 2024 22:57 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Ninety-Three’s comment on: Parable of the vanilla ice cream curse (and how it would prevent a car from starting!)
as documented in Curses! Broiled Again!, a collection of urban legends available on Libgen
Link?

abstractapplic 8 Dec 2024 0:15 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: kave’s comment on: Algebraic Linguistics
You’re right. I’ll delete that aside.

abstractapplic 7 Dec 2024 21:56 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Algebraic Linguistics
I can’t believe I forgot that one; edited; ty!

Algebraic Linguistics

abstractapplic7 Dec 2024 19:18 UTC

32 points

27 comments5 min readLW link

abstractapplic 5 Dec 2024 2:56 UTC
13 points
3
on: I Finally Worked Through Bayes’ Theorem (Personal Achievement)
Congrats on applying Bayes; unfortunately, you applied it to the wrong numbers.
The key point is that “Question 3: Bayes” is describing a new village, with demographics slightly different to the village in the first half of your post. You grandfathered in the 0.2 from there, when the equivalent number in Village Two is 0.16 (P(Cat) = P(Witch with Cat) + P(Muggle with Cat) = 0.1*0.7 + 0.9*0.1 = 0.07 + 0.09 = 0.16), for a final answer of 43.75%.
(The meta-lesson here is not to trust LLMs to give you info you can’t personally verify, and especially not to trust them to check anything.)
ETA: Also, good on you for posting this. I think LW needs more numbery posts, more 101-level posts, and more falsifiable posts; a numbery 101-level falsifiable post gets a gold star (even if it ends up falsified).

abstractapplic

Alge­braic Linguistics

Algebraic Linguistics