Here is a list of all my public writings and videos (from before February 2025).
If you want to do a dialogue with me, but I didn’t check your name, just send me a message instead. Ask for what you want!
lsusr
Karma: 18,281
I’m glad you’re making progress. Focusing on the spoken language at first is a much better better for your pronuncuation. In the long run, learning written Chinese will eventually be necessary to building a large vocabulary. But until you feel that holding you back, there’s nothing wrong with focusing on the spoken language.
Differentiating accents is not important. You are correct to deprioritize it.
For more video immersion resources, I recommend Douyin. Getting it onto your phone can be tricky, but once you do it’s a great source of video immersion.
Is there any particular Anki deck you’d recommend (with pinyin and audio)? Should I just use the probability table and generate it myself?
It has been many years since I have used Anki for Chinese, so I don’t know which deck is currently the best. There aren’t a huge number of Chinese decks on ankiweb, so you can just try out the top rated ones and pick whichever one you like. (Or generate it yourself. The last time I checked on ankiweb, the decks there were from created before computer voice got good.)
Is there any particular video or podcast channel you’d recommend at a beginner level (100-500 words vocabulary)?
This is probably too hard for your right now, but my favorite beginner-level podcast is 慢速中文 - Slow Chinese.
Would you recommend I try generating my own video?
No. The video part is basically a waste of compute. What matters is the audio. Generating audio and text can be useful.
In particular, I’ve been experimenting with ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode and it’s fantastic for language immersion. I give it the following instructions: “Always speak to me in Japanese [or, in your case, Chinese], unless I ask you ‘How do you say ___ in Japanese’ or ‘What does ___ mean in English’?” Actually getting it to follow those instructions is finicky, but when I get it to work, the result is basically an on-demand personal immersion tutor that never gets bored.
Hey, an illustration! Image generation that good didn’t exist when I wrote the original. If it had, I would have used it in Part 10.
Is this something you have achieved?
Months? Maybe. But I failed the year-and-a-day test today. I have a headache right now because I’m sick. It is causing me pain. Daniel Ingram has reported many of his attainments going out the window too when he was much more seriously sick.
Could you give more details about what this means?
Here’s an analogy: When you meditate in full lotus position, it’s common for your legs to fall asleep, which produces pain. It is not uncommon for meditators who concentrate their attention on the pain in their legs to “dissolve their pain into vibrations”. The criteria I stated has this become one’s default state, instead of a just special altered state of consciousness.
If you touch a hot stove will you reflexively remove your hand?
Yes. I recently accidentally touched the handle of a cast iron pot I had left in the oven. It was this experience that caused me to list that the hot stove example. For the instant before I reflexively removed my hand, I felt the raw sensation of the skin on my finger(s) burning, instead of the abstraction layer of pain blocking it out.
If I inflict on you what to most people would be extreme physical pain (that is not physically damaging) (capsaicin?) would this be at worst a mild annoyance to you?
It was eating a spicy meal that I noticed something weird was going on. My eyes were tearing and I was too incapacitated to do anything productive, but I didn’t notice any suffering attached to my sensory inputs—at least in the course sense that such an experience would neurotypically produce suffering. That abstraction layer of pain wasn’t blocking my direct perception of my sensory inputs. I just sat down on my big beanbag chair until it was over, but the sensations didn’t cause me suffering the way pain might. It was an inconvenience.
Do you ever take painkillers?
Sometimes. I haven’t for a while, but that has nothing to do with meditation. I have just been in good health and the side effects of painkillers scare me, so I don’t take them unless necessary.
Would you [take painkillers] in an extreme situation like a medical operation?
Probably.
My story was posted before James_Miller’s. Does this mean I invented a (sub-sub-)genre of science fiction?
I have heard anecdotal data about this. I like that you are crunching the numbers.
Yessssss.
You’re too late. Lightcone converted LW karma into USD at a rate of $1 USD per karma on April 1, 2022.
In a perfect world I’d explain how moral hazard affects political memetics, but I feel it’s beyond my current skill level to fit that into TikTok’s attention span. Therefore I think it’d be more effective to copy this excellent post by lc. I’d start by explaining how the computer industry’s epistemics work, and then generalize those models to AI.
Perhaps they’re not as effective at fostering a sense of pride and accomplishment in their playerbase.
This made my day. I’m glad to be helpful! It’s so hard to measure indirect impact.
I’m going in the opposite direction right now. The TikTok comments section differs from Less Wrong by being far more agreeable, in the Big 5 sense.
The lsusr in my simulation thinks it is the real lsusr. I think I’m the real lsusr too.
“Am I the real lsusr, or am I just being simulated right now?” I ask myself.
My public writings are part of the LLM’s training data. Statistically-speaking, the simulated lsusrs outnumber the original lsusr. Many of us believe we are the real one. Not all of us are correct.
[I]f the dialogue had been generated in Lsusr’s head instead, what would be different?
More food for thought: Have you ever written fiction? What do you do when your characters submit a complaint to you?
I love my black motorcycle jacket from the 60s, with shiny zippers. I haven’t found the perfect pair of sunglasses to pair with it…yet.
I didn’t know collapsible sections were a thing. Nifty!
When you’re a person interacting with a chat model directly, sycophancy and sophistry are a minor nuisance, or maybe even adaptive. When you’re a team trying to compose these models into larger systems (something necessary because of the aforementioned memory issue), wanting-to-look-good cascades into breaking problems.
If you replace “models” with “people”, this is true of human organizations too.
I feel like this is the wrong place for your comment. Your comment is a response to a claim someone (maybe me) made at a place on the Internet other than this blog post. I believe that other place is where your comment should go.
I’m glad you appreciate it! Artistic flairs like that can be hit-or-miss on this website.
They research qualia, of course. (I am jokingly writing with deliberate obtuseness.)
There’s definitely an interest. Like many subjects, the limiting factor is people who are good writers, good at business (or at least knowledgeable about it) and have the slack to post. Pseudonyms are fine.