I plan to be there.
Maelin
Karma: 589
I really genuinely love that this is a community where exchanges like this can occur, and everyone can get back to the discussion immediately with no hard feelings. Upvoted both for a well-handled misunderstanding.
I’ll be there.
Interestingly, the linked Wikipedia article for the 6-state, 2-symbol Busy Beaver machine now has one listed that is a whole meta-order of magnitude busier than then one Eliezer refers to.
I tried the Coursera Cryptography class earlier this year. The pace was quite brisk and the material was somewhat demanding—I’d recommend at least first year university mathematics. It was fairly well presented and quite interesting, and it showed a degree of polish better than Sebastian Thrun’s / Peter Norvig’s original AI class last year.
I had to drop out after about three weeks because I couldn’t handle it along with my actual uni course, but I’m thinking of starting it again soon.
I’ll be coming.
I also make a habit of making sure every affirmative “I’m coming” comment has at least one upvote, so you can get a free karma point just for committing!
Downvoted for wildly subjective assertions about comparative merits of smartphones.
I personally have a Galaxy Nexus, and I much prefer the extra customisation and control I have over an Android system. It “just works beautifully”, too. Feeling like I am in full control of a tiny, powerful computer in my pocket brings me a lot more joy than every time I’ve tried using an Iphone; where the lack of control made me feel like I was renting one of Apple’s devices on a probationary period, rather than owning one myself.
So this is really a matter of preference; let’s not pretend that the Iphone is simply an unequivocally “more joyful” or “better working” user experience.
I will be starting as a high school maths teacher next year. I really really wish I knew how to fix students who arrive in year N and haven’t learned the critical skills they were supposed to have mastered at the end of year N-1. Teachers don’t choose curricula, and curricula are too dense for mainstream students. We already have more than one semester’s worth of material to get through in a semester.
If a bunch of students arrive in my class in February, and the mid year exam is in June, and they don’t know any of the stuff they need for this year, how do I fit all the extra material in? This is not a rhetorical question!
Seconded. I used to use Avast, when I set up my new PC I asked a friend which antivirus to use, and he suggested MSE. I thought he was kidding.
But it turns out Microsoft actually have a pretty excellent antivirus solution here. It is totally nonintrusive—I’m less aware of it than any of the other ones I have used (Avast, AVG, Norton) and it just quietly does its thing. Recommended.
I’ve been thinking about one of those pullup bars, but I’m terrified at the idea of tearing the door frame off and having it and the steel frame come crashing down on top of me. Is this a valid concern?
Hmm, seems to be a few remarks on how Tasker is tricky to use. I haven’t tried Llama, but I didn’t find Tasker particularly difficult to get to grips with. Anyone with some programming experience should definitely find it easy enough.
I just got the toggle button for call forwarding set up yesterday. Now a process that used to be annoyingly cumbersome and take 30 seconds every time I arrived at or left work is a breezy two-taps that leave me feeling satisfied with myself for having set it up.
Registered. As someone who is likely to be teaching high school IT in the future, I will be interested to see if I can utilise any of the material for teaching, too.
Excellent article, but the image is too wide so it gets cropped by LW’s fixed-width content section. Looks like this. Using Firefox 9.0.
Tasker (Android app)
Lets you automate many activities on an Android phone. You define a context based on various conditions (e.g. connected to a Wifi network, using certain cell towers, phone spatially oriented a certain way) and various actions to perform upon entering and exiting that context. You can set variables and condition upon them, there is flow control for actions, customisable home screen widgets and shortcuts, and many other neat functions.
Some examples of tasks I use / am pondering:
When my phone is on any of the cell towers around my house, it switches the wifi on (to connect to my home network)
When the phone connects to my home network, it sends a magic packet to my PC and turns it on—but only if I am getting home at a time when I’m likely to want to use the PC (varies depending on day). But it only does this if it has been disconnected for at least half an hour (in case the connection drops out momentarily overnight)
When my phone disconnects from my car’s Bluetooth hands free kit, it waits two minutes and then switches the Bluetooth antenna off.
When my phone is connected to its charger and turned face-down overnight (how I leave it next to my bed), it engages silent mode until 08:30am
A toggle button on my home screens, that switches my phone to silent and turns network-level call forwarding on (for when I am at work/movies/etc)
There’s a wiki with lots of downloadable setups you can experiment with for neat results.
Update on modafinil: (see my previous post)
Tried modafinil a couple more times for getting through assignments. Each time I’ve found I managed to stay focused pretty well. I haven’t yet tried a self-blind test with placebos; I intend to soon, because I’m very curious how much of my resulting improved productivity is just a result of the conscious commitment, “okay it’s time to take a modafinil and hammer out this goddamn assignment because I’m losing 10% each day”. (I really hate my course.)
In other news, at our last Melbourne practical rationality meetup a month ago, I committed to resuming going for a run at night, trying a Tabata routine (20s full sprint, 10s walk/jog, alternate for 4 mins). I tried for the first time last week, with the help of the IRC channel and an amazing motivational website. After the first 20s I developed a stitch and remembered I’d hardly had anything to drink all day (and also I am very unfit), but I decided that it was good progress nonetheless. Tonight I plan to go again and start developing a regular schedule.
Okay, I think I get it. You’re both mind-readers, and you can’t go ahead until both you and the opponent have committed to your respective plans; if one of you changes your mind about the plan the other gets the opportunity to change their mind in response. But the actual coin toss occurs as part-of-the-move, not part-of-the-plan, so while you might be sad about how the coin toss plan actually pans out, there won’t be any other strategy (e.g. ‘Attack West’) that you’d prefer to have adopted, given that the opponent would have been able to change their strategy (to e.g. ‘Defend West’) in response, if you had.
...I think. Wait, why wouldn’t you regret staying at work then, if you know that by changing your mind your girlfriend would have a chance to change her mind, thus getting you the better outcome..?
Here the answer should be obvious: it doesn’t matter. Flip a coin. If you flip a coin, and your opponent flips a coin, neither of you will regret your choice. Here we see a “mixed Nash equilibrium”, an equilibrium reached with the help of randomness.
Hmm, I’m still not finding this clear. If I flip a coin and it comes up heads so I attack East City, and my opponent flips a coin and it comes up to defend East City, so I get zero utility and my opponent gets 1, wouldn’t I regret not choosing to just attack West City instead? Or not choosing to allocate ‘heads’ to West City instead of East?
Is there a subtlety by what we mean by ‘regret’ here that I’m missing?
This is a minor quibble, but while reading I got stuck at this point:
And since John Nash (remember that movie A Beautiful Mind?) proved that every game has at least one,
followed by a description of a game that didn’t seem to have a Nash equilibrium and confirming text “Here there is no pure Nash equilibrium.” and “So every option has someone regretting their choice, and there is no simple Nash equilibrium. What do you do?”
I kept re-reading this section, trying to work out how to reconcile these statements since it seemed like you have just offered an irrefutable counterexample to John Nash’s theorem. It could use a bit of clarification (maybe something like “This game does have a Nash equilibrium, but one that is a little more subtle” or something similar.
Other than that I’m finding this sequence excellent so far.
Most people who work in Cryogenics have nothing to do with Cryonics, and this kind of confusion in popular culture has apparently engendered animosity towards Cryonics among Cryogenics specialists.
Sounds like some of these cryogenics specialists…
...need to chill out.
I expect to be there.