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Karma: 3,010

Error 10 May 2024 22:17 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: LessOnline (May 31—June 2, Berkeley, CA)
Thanks. I thought of two more questions after posting:
1. Any laundry facilities? (i.e. if I stay a week, will I need clothes for a week?)
2. Any refunds if I book a bed/ticket and can’t make it? (I’ll understand if not, of course; but I have another, much busier event (Momocon) the weekend before, so there’s an elevated chance I’ll catch con plague at the least convenient possible time)
3. [edit]: Possible bug report: I notice one of the shared-dorm rooms has different (higher) pricing than all the others, despite identical descriptions.

Error 9 May 2024 23:41 UTC
4 points
0
on: LessOnline (May 31—June 2, Berkeley, CA)
I see no general-inquiries address on less.online, so I hope it’s okay if I post them here. Longtime rationalsphere lurker, much rarer poster, considering going. I’m based in Atlanta and pricing the trip:
1. It’s not clear from the page what the ‘summer camp’ part of the schedule is. To me that phrase connotes ‘for kids’, but I’m not sure, so I’m not sure if it’s worth it to me to stay extra days. [EDIT: Never mind, I see this was answered below.]
2. What’s the nearest major airport, and is Lighthaven accessible from there by train and/or uber? (i.e. will I need a rental car)
3. What’s the washroom situation like for the shared dorms vs. private rooms? (I take long showers and worry about blocking others.)
4. Most of the shared dorms don’t list a building, just “shared dorms”. Where are they relative to the rest of the facility?
5. What’s local connectivity like? (I can stay longer if I can plausibly respond to work emergencies).
[EDIT: And, I just realized this announcement was over a month ago, I’m not sure how I missed it at the time or why I just noticed it now. Dunno if you or anyone else will see this. I’ll wait a day in case someone does, then try a PM or something.]

Error 4 May 2022 21:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) ’s comment on: What DALL-E 2 can and cannot do
Ah, that put me on the right track. I’ve been asking google the wrong questions; I was looking for a downloadable program that I could run, but it looks like some (all?) of the interesting things in this space are server-side-only. Which I guess makes sense; presumably gargantuan hardware is required.

Error 4 May 2022 17:47 UTC
2 points
on: What DALL-E 2 can and cannot do
The Bill Watterson one requires me to request black bears attacking a black forest campground at midnight.

Optionally: ”...as pixel art”.

I have to ask, how does one get hold of any of the programs in this vein? I’ve seen Gwern’s TWDNE, and now your experiments with DALL-E, and I’d love to mess with them myself but have no idea where to go. A bit of googling suggests one can buy GPT3 time from OpenAI, but I gather that’s for text generation, which I can do just fine already.

Error 30 Dec 2021 1:44 UTC
11 points
4
on: What would you like from Microcovid.org? How valuable would it be to you?
The main thing I’ve gotten out of microcovid is reduced search costs. Having ballpark figures for the relative effects of situations and interventions, gathered in one place, by a source I consider reasonably trustworthy, makes it much cheaper to estimate which risks are worth taking and which interventions are worth bothering with.

“Trustworthy” in this context means “someone systematically looking for the correct numbers, as opposed to targeting a bottom line chosen for reasons other than correctness.” As with most politicized information, the problem isn’t that the information is unavailable, but that most sources are acting in bad faith. Noise drowns out the signal until search costs become prohibitive. Your whitepaper in particular is excellent in this respect. Showing your work goes a long way towards demonstrating good faith; sharing your sources is better; sharing how and why you’re using them is best of all.

Even just having the available options collected together helped. I didn’t know P100s were a thing until I read your whitepaper. I use one to attend otherwise-riskier-than-I’d-like events in relative safety and comfort.

It’s a shame that Microcovid’s numbers haven’t been updated for omicron—that would be the first item on my wishlist, along with the booster and test numbers mentioned in other comments—but that doesn’t diminish the work you’ve already done. Your team provided an identifiable signal in the noise, and I love it for that.

[edit: since you ask for dollar values, I’d be willing to contribute say $1k towards getting the numbers updated for omicron, tests, and boosters—provided that it was done to similar standards and preferably by the same team. That’s less because I’d derive that much value out of it personally (at this point I know what I need to) and more that I think this sort of work is an underfunded public good.]

Error 30 Dec 2021 0:49 UTC
7 points
on: What are the pros and cons of seeking a formal diagnosis of autism?

Many people seem to find a formal diagnosis helpful for understanding themselves

Anecdote: I was in this camp, for sufficiently low values of “formal.” I went to a psychologist to get checked out for autism (among other things) five or ten years ago. After testing, he said that he wouldn’t personally diagnose me, but that I was close enough to the line that if I shopped around I could probably find someone who would. I said that was fine—it told me what I wanted to know.

(hilariously, I also scored rather high on schizophrenia. His reaction went something like “Okay, obviously you’re not schizophrenic. Analytical personalities of the sort that take ideas and moral systems seriously just read that way on the tests. You’re not schizo, you’re just weird.”)

Error 15 Dec 2021 16:54 UTC
13 points
on: Zvi’s Thoughts on the Survival and Flourishing Fund (SFF)

The only concierge service I know about, which I somehow got access to, is completely useless to me because it assumes I’m super rich, and I’m not, and also the people who work there can’t follow basic directions or handle anything at all non-standard.

This is my experience, too, with almost any form of assistance. Actual thinking about the task is absent.

It’s annoying, because an obnoxiously large proportion of life goes towards 1. doing all the fiddly stupid bits, 2. procrastinating about doing all the fiddly stupid bits, and 3. worrying about procrastinating too much about doing all the fiddly stupid bits. I would love to not have to deal with that. I’ve automated or outsourced everything I can, but it’s never enough.

I suspect the degree of life-competence needed to be good at “personal assistant tasks” is scarce enough that anyone capable of doing it well is also capable of getting a job that pays better. General personal assistance requires non-cached thought, and most people can’t do that on demand, if ever. Task-specific assistance can often be had at a reasonable price, because trainable habits can make up for thought. Sadly, in most cases that just replaces the original task with a more-difficult acquire-task-appropriate-services task, so it’s only worth it for long-term maintenance, like cleaning.

...having written that, I wonder if there’s a task-specific assistant service for “finding good task-specific services and arranging their help.” Probably not. Knowing who’s good at X often requires being good at X to begin with.

(unimportant, but related and maybe interesting: I get my groceries curbside or delivered. I’d rather pay for delivery, most of the time, but the curbside service is significantly more accurate and less interaction-required. I think it’s because curbside groceries are collected by store employees who can proxy-shop the store by habit, while deliveries are third-party and less familiar with the specific store)

Error 25 Sep 2021 15:00 UTC
2 points
in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
Thanks, and you’re welcome.

Hrm. So testing organisms takes a while. Oh well. I might try to parallelize it, but I don’t actually know hy, I’m just blindly translating python idioms, and concurrency is hard.

I notice that the hy version in the ubuntu repos will not run the program, apparently due to an upstream bug. The version from pip will. I mention this in case anyone else runs into the same hiccup.

Error 25 Sep 2021 2:20 UTC
4 points
on: The 2021 Less Wrong Darwin Game
I want to test my organisms before submitting them and noticed there wasn’t a way to tell the program to use my species files instead of the one in the repo. Also, the shabang line breaks on systems that aren’t yours.

I sent you an MR covering both, but I don’t know if you’re watching them so I figured I’d mention it here.

Is it normal for it to take a couple seconds per generation to run?

Error 13 Feb 2021 16:04 UTC
13 points
in reply to: thisheavenlyconjugation’s comment on: Your Cheerful Price
“Buying expertise” seems like a good candidate. A friend might prefer to pay me to fix their computer, instead of taking it to a shop, because they know I won’t tell them they need an expensive frobnitz unless they actually do. My cheerful price might be higher than the shop’s, but it could easily be worth it. A similar situation probably applies to car mechanics.

Error 27 Jan 2021 15:33 UTC
2 points
in reply to: jbash’s comment on: New Empty Units
Not at all a serious suggestion, but it popped into my head: You could solve this problem by making other forms of money laundering more convenient than real estate.

(or making real estate laundering less convenient/riskier, but that’s not as funny a thought)

The use of real estate as a store of value/unit of exchange makes me think of an old Diablo II issue. Officially, the medium of exchange in D2 was gold. In practice, it was a relatively rare item called the Stone of Jordan.

How did this happen? For a time, a serious bug allowed players to dupe items easily. Many of them chose to dupe the Stone. After the bug was fixed, players were left with a relatively fixed supply of a high-value item that used little inventory space. It worked very well as both a store and a medium, modulo developer attempts to clean up dupes. Thereafter, I understand that most high-level transactions were done with what amounted to counterfeit currency.

I don’t know if that’s still the case. I do know at one point the developer created a quest that could only be triggered by destroying Stones, presumably in an attempt to get rid of the counterfeits.

Error 7 Jan 2021 4:10 UTC
4 points
on: A dozen habits that work for me
“Mental constipation” is an awesome phrase for a phenomenon I really hate having.

Error 1 Sep 2020 0:54 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: “On Bullshit” and “On Truth,” by Harry Frankfurt

suffer enough of it and you’ll become a connoisseur of it, able to enjoy it, but having also fallen into an attractor that keeps you from enjoying the greater joy of what simply is

A pattern of bullshit becomes a stable orbit in the space of lies.

Error 18 Mar 2020 21:58 UTC
4 points
on: Ubiquitous Far-Ultraviolet Light Could Control the Spread of Covid-19 and Other Pandemics
It doesn’t sound like this would require much in the way of coordination. That makes me a bit more hopeful about it than most options. Less room for a tragedy of the commons. Once demonstrated safe and effective, individuals and businesses could deploy UV lighting and derive benefit from it, without worrying about whether their investment will be wasted by the inaction of others.

Error 26 Sep 2019 18:20 UTC
12 points
on: Honoring Petrov Day on LessWrong, in 2019
How did you implement the button? I run a small site, love the idea, and would like to do something similar.

Error 29 Aug 2019 2:46 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Zvi’s comment on: Dual Wielding
Datum: I have a Pixel 3 (known for a relatively small battery) and the only time battery becomes an issue is when I forget to put it on the charger overnight.

But I don’t watch video (too small a screen), play games (ditto), send email (fuck phone keyboards), or do much of anything but SMS, rare phone calls, and internet lookups when I’m away from a keyboard. I think a lot of worrywarting over phone battery capacity stems from trying to use them for things that are better done on a real computer.

That said, I got an external battery after reading this post. I have one use case: at conventions, when I use it constantly to read the schedule. Buying something for a single use case seemed out of line at first, but eventually I thought of it this way: if I’m willing to spend $30 for slightly more convenient parking, I should be willing to spend $30 to stop worrying about phone charge forever.

Error 17 Apr 2019 14:24 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Agency and Sphexishness: A Second Glance

To change something, you must first describe it. To describe something, you must first see it. Hold still in one place for as long as it takes to see something

-- Diane Duane

Error 17 Apr 2019 14:18 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Agency and Sphexishness: A Second Glance

Also, meta decisions take time to bring fruit at the object level, so when you make plans, you should spend the following days executing the plans instead of adjusting them; otherwise you decide without feedback.

Execution is Actual Work, though! Noooooooooooooooo!

(I’m adding that to my fortune file. I could use the reminder from time to time.)

Error 16 Apr 2019 17:21 UTC
5 points
on: Agency and Sphexishness: A Second Glance
I wonder what distinguishes sphexishness from a simple habit. They’re both unreflective, automatic, default behaviors, and “bad habits” are just habits that fail to achieve goals. But they feel different to me. The best I can come up with is something like: habits are in theory changeable, whereas an actual sphex wasp will never change its behavior based on experience. Habits are acting sphexish.

But we need habits. I’m reminded of this:

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

-- Alfred North Whitehead

So I think I agree with you about noticing and agency. Agency isn’t the opposite of sphexishness. But it does seem to require choosing when to act so, and that requires noticing when you’re doing it.

(somewhere in my unposted-blog-notes folder is something about noticing that horrible mental loop where I click random links all over the web, no matter how much I’m not-enjoying-myself, because I can’t seem to context-switch. I titled it “Noticing Boredom.”)

Error 16 Apr 2019 16:55 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Literature Review: Distributed Teams
Suggestion: Attach or link these, rather than putting them inline in a comment. I like that they’re available, but I had to scroll down many screens to find the actual comments.