Mqrius

Karma: 173

Mqrius 5 Dec 2016 8:05 UTC
0 points
in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: On the importance of Less Wrong, or another single conversational locus
Does that take into account, for example, Arbital seeming less promising to people / getting less engagement, because all the users have just sunk energy into trying to get by on a revived LW?

There’s an intuition pump I could make that I haven’t fully fleshed out yet, that goes something like, If both Arbital and Lesswrong get worked on, then whichever seems more promising or better to use will gain more traction and end out on top in a very natural way, without having to go through an explicit failure of the other one.

There’s caveats/responses to that as well of course — it just doesn’t seem 100% clear cut to me.

Mqrius 5 Dec 2016 5:46 UTC
0 points
in reply to: AnnaSalamon’s comment on: CFAR’s new focus, and AI Safety
Brainstormy words in that corner of concept-space:
- Raising the sanity waterline
- Downstream effects
- Giving someone a footstool so that they can see for themselves, instead of you telling them what’s on the other side of the wall
- ~~Critical mas~~s ~~hivemin~~d Compounding thinktank intelligence
- Doing thinks better
[switches framing]
Signal boosting means sending more signal so that you it arrives better on the other side. There’s more ways of doing so though;
- Noise reduction
- (The entire big field of) error correction methods
- Specifying the signal’s constraints clearly so that the other side can run a fit to it
- Stop sending the signal and instead build the generator on the other side

Mqrius 3 Mar 2014 12:52 UTC
2 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity
The maximum total energy from PUFA has been a discussion point with DIY Soylent makers as well. The final consensus was that it should definitely be below 10%, and possibly below 4%. The 4% figure comes from The perfect health diet, which uses this as a source:

Angela Liou Y, Innis SM. Dietary linoleic acid has no effect on arachidonic acid, but increases n-6 eicosadienoic acid, and lowers dihomo-gamma-linolenic and eicosapentaenoic acid in plasma of adult men. Prostaglandins, Leukotrienes and Essential Fatty Acids 2009 Apr;80(4):201–6, http://pmid.us/19356914.

I’ve also got a copy hosted at http://forecast.student.utwente.nl/Lesswrong/ but only download that if your university or company legally gives you access to Elsevier content.

For the discussion and links to other relevant papers, see http://discourse.soylent.me/t/optimal-micronutrient-ratios/5049/52 and further posts

For my Soylent, I ended up getting most fats from macadamia oil (mostly Omega-9 aka MUFA) and MCT oil (Medium-chain saturated fat), since they don’t have any negative effects associated with them. Correct me if I’m wrong.

Mqrius 3 Mar 2014 12:35 UTC
2 points
in reply to: RomeoStevens’s comment on: Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity
My university has access to the paper. I’ve got it hosted on my server, but you’re only allowed to download it if you have legal access through your university as well. If you have legal access, feel free to click this link:

http://forecast.student.utwente.nl/Lesswrong/The%20importance%20of%20the%20ratio%20of%20omega-6%20omega-3%20essential%20fatty%20acids.pdf

Mqrius 12 Dec 2013 18:09 UTC
2 points
in reply to: skizo’s comment on: Meetup : Utrecht
Haha, bluf! (Or in English: I dare you!)

Mqrius 8 Dec 2013 11:55 UTC
4 points
on: Meetup : Utrecht
Dang, another one that doesn’t sit well with my planning. I’ll attend at some point, really!

Mqrius 6 Nov 2013 9:54 UTC
2 points
on: Meetup : First Meetup in Cologne (Köln)
Now that the scheduling issues are out of the way;

Coming Sunday, we’ll have wallowinmaya, EGI and girlfriend, SimonF, Falstofe, and my girlfriend and me, if I’m not mistaken. That would be a nice turnout!

Mqrius 15 Oct 2013 11:46 UTC
2 points
on: Meetup : First Meetup in Cologne (Köln)
Me and my girlfriend will most likely be there! We’ve been thinking of starting something ourselves :)

Mqrius 31 Aug 2013 16:30 UTC
0 points
in reply to: robertzk’s comment on: Effective Altruist Job Board?
My current effective altruism strategy is:
- Make a lot of money
- Give it away
Pretty straightforward, but it means I don’t need to have a job specifically related to effective altruism.

The question might be if you’re more useful by making money and giving that away, or by working directly with the cause or meta-cause you support. I think for me it’s the former.

Mqrius 21 Jul 2013 10:50 UTC
0 points
in reply to: Error’s comment on: Open thread, July 16-22, 2013
To get a permanent URL, the workaround was that you could schedule a hangout very far in the future. Are you saying that you can’t run a specified application on that?

Mqrius 3 Jul 2013 14:55 UTC
0 points
on: The benefits of madness: A positive account of arationality
Besides being very interesting in the topics covered, this post has shifted my inclination to try drugs (to the trying drugs side).

Up to now, I didn’t feel like trying anything serious. I saw no clear benefit, and I was afraid that it would mess with my core reasoning. I depend on my “reasoning core” to operate in stressful, inebriated, or otherwise compromised situations. Messing with that seemed like a Bad Idea.

Thinking about it now, though, I recognize that my core reasoning is not an isolated crystal anyway, being influenced by emotions and subconscious thoughts, resulting in things like procrastination. I think pushing this a little further and learning to deal with it might potentially actually help dealing with normal situations.

I’m still wary of messing something up, and I’ll still be careful. But at least I’ve started considering it now.

I hope you manage to write the proposed sequence(s) at some point!

Mqrius 25 May 2013 19:42 UTC
1 point
in reply to: AdeleneDawner’s comment on: Let There Be Light
Do you still hold these ideas? Have you managed to work them out in detail in the meantime?

Mqrius 17 Mar 2013 22:04 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: Programming the LW Study Hall
For the record: A number of programmers have applied and, as far as I know, will be discussing with Shannon and beeminder people to discuss actually programming the required parts.

I, meanwhile, am just hobbying a bit to see if OpenMeetings can be turned into something useful. But indeed, I’m often in the room when I do that :)

Mqrius 16 Mar 2013 21:37 UTC
6 points
in reply to: Mqrius’s comment on: Programming the LW Study Hall
Login form: Gutted
Video resolution: Capped
Chat area height: Increased

Webcam selection: Eh. The devs changed it, it’s a bit better, but not quite there yet. Maybe they’ll work on it more after the weekend. Edit: It’s fixed! :)
Chat notifications: Haven’t looked into it yet. Edit: Have looked into it, but haven’t figured it out yet.

I’ll have it running most of the time. Feel free to look around!

For the programmers, patches are available here: ftp://lesswrong:openmeetings@forecast.student.utwente.nl

Mqrius 15 Mar 2013 21:54 UTC
9 points
in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: Programming the LW Study Hall
Since I fixed this, it seems OpenMeetings is stable. It has been running for at least 10 hours, with at some point 8 people in there, all streaming video. There have been a few notes in the chat which I’ll address publically:

I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to redirect people here if tinychat is still better until this gets done correctly

Agreed. The redirection today was only for stresstesting it. If it’s not stable, putting further effort in it is useless. It turns out it’s stable though, so I’ll hack some more at it, and see what I can make of it.

is there a way to make the chat part larger?
&
bah, this chat window should be nr1 priority to fix

I’ll have to edit the source code for it. I haven’t been in the source code so far. Difficulty: Easy

I signed up with a username. Why is it not displayed?

It uses the First & Last name as display names. I intend to gut the entire registration form to just ask for username & password, and use the username as a display name. Difficulty: Easy

hm I dont think I can make public rooms

Indeed, only the admin can. However, you can make personal rooms, and then give someone else an invitation link. I can make a few more public rooms, if there’s demand for that?

I don’t like that the no [chat] notifications part, though

Agreed. I don’t know if it’s supported. If it’s not, I, or the devs, will need to add it. Don’t know how difficult that will be.

it is making my computer work a lot harder [compared to tinychat] though

I don’t know if that’s because there was an unusually large amount of people there, or because the video quality is higher than tinychat. I can put a limit on the video resolution you can select, if people want that. Difficulty: Easy

Confusing webcam selection screen

I mentioned that to the devs 2 days ago, they fixed it the same day, and put out a new release candidate. However, running it, it doesn’t work for me. I’ve just notified them, I expect this to be fixed soon.

Right now, the user experience delta to tinychat is: Login form. Manual resizing of every single video required. Loads of buttons and options to get lost in.
&
The barrier to entry is much higher than tinychat.

Login form will be gutted, I’ll cap video resolution, and the webcam selection will be simpler. That should get the barrier to entry on a similar level as tinychat, while retaining the potential of multiple public rooms and such.

Mqrius 15 Mar 2013 13:45 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Mqrius’s comment on: Programming the LW Study Hall
It’s working quite well. It’s been going all morning without any issues.

Mqrius 15 Mar 2013 10:15 UTC
2 points
in reply to: BerryPick6’s comment on: Programming the LW Study Hall
We tried out mqrius’ server and encountered a few difficulties, but I have no idea what was causing them, so it could just be that OM is a bit shaky.

I poked around a bit more.
Basically, I got “java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: PermGen space”, so I figured it was a lack of allocated memory and increased the allocated heap space (Xmx and Xms). However, I did some further googling, and apparently the PermGen space is separate from the heap space. If it goes out of memory, it might be caused by either a normal process, or by a memory leak. It might be solved by having java unload its classes. I’m running it with the following flags at the moment:
```
-Xmx1024m -Xms128m -Xmn512m -Xss512k -XX:+CMSClassUnloadingEnabled -XX:+UseConcMarkSweepGC -XX:MaxPermSize=128m
```
Since I now applied a fix that might be specific to the problem, it warrants giving it another test.

But honestly, ideally, I should not be the one to test OpenMeetings: I don’t have enough knowledge to judge if I’m doing things wrong or if OpenMeetings is. The “fixes” I try are just suggested by random googling, not by careful consideration.
What links here?
- Mqrius's comment on Programming the LW Study Hall by ShannonFriedman (15 Mar 2013 21:54 UTC; 9 points)
- Mqrius's comment on Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia by ShannonFriedman (15 Mar 2013 21:47 UTC; 0 points)

Mqrius 14 Mar 2013 11:29 UTC
8 points
on: Programming the LW Study Hall
Maybe a common room where people can initially talk about what they intend to work on. (Eliezer says: This needs either strong group norms or built-in limits on talk time to avoid becoming a social chat timesink.)

I discussed this a bit with tsakinis, and I think that we can indeed create group norms that do the following:
- Suggest people that are having a (long) discussion to do so in a private room
- Welcome new people, find out what they’re working on, and then go off together to do a pomodoro in one of the study rooms
This will mean that someone who joins “just to have a look” will be positively welcomed, and get his first taste of the social work encouragement. The alternative, no lobby room, means that a new person will have to choose between arbitrary study rooms, then “drop in” on people that are working. For someone who’s unsure about the entire thing, this doesn’t help at all.

Mqrius 14 Mar 2013 11:23 UTC
3 points
on: Programming the LW Study Hall
For programmers who are curious about OpenMeeting, I’ve set up a mockup server on my PC. It’s is not entirely stock install, I’ve changed a few configurations to make it more like what we want. No source code changing yet though. You can have a look at it here:
http://forecast.student.utwente.nl:5080/openmeetings/
Go there, wait for a few seconds for it to load, make an account (no verification or anything required), and then you can join the public room. You’ll get a popup for video settings: it shows a black screen initially, even though your cam does work when you hit “Start recording test”. I’ve notified the devs that this is very non-intuitive, and they’ll be changing it.
Instead of joining the public room, you also have the option to make personal rooms, and invite people in with a link.

My impression about OpenMeetings:
Pros:
- Open source
- Very customizable, because it’s open source
- Doesn’t require a google account
- It’s in active development, with an active mailing list on which people reply quickly
- Easy to limit rooms, get a room overview, and create new rooms
Cons:
- I find the documentation not very intuitive
- It needs a server to run on
- Screensharing is a bit clunky: You can’t really use it instead of your webcam, as in google hangout. Should be fine for 1-on-1 video chats though.
Compared to Google hangouts:
Pros:
- Easy to set up
- Doesn’t need a server
- Supports screensharing
- Somewhat customizable: It supports widgets, but I’m not sure to what degree the layout is editable.
Cons:
- Needs a google account
- Permanent rooms are a bit of a hack (by creating an event far in the future)
Neither is a clear winner. I’ll personally be looking at if it’s easy to change the layout on OpenMeetings. If that’s doable, then it’s already at or beyond the “baseline” level we have with Tinychat.

Mqrius 12 Mar 2013 23:10 UTC
2 points
in reply to: Tenoke’s comment on: Co-Working Collaboration to Combat Akrasia
Screensharing is indeed very effective in a 1-on-1 session, but I think the webcam view is quite valuable for different reasons: It provides the sense of actual people whom you’re working with on the other side. Part of the reason why the study room works is because of the community feeling you get. When the community starts a pomodoro, you join.

Of course, google hangouts support switching between screensharing and webcam on the fly, so this isn’t an argument against hangouts: I just wanted to mention the value of the webcams.

--

I’m trying to imagine screen sharing in a study room now, with for example 6 people. I think it’s possible that a shared screen can be distracting to some—much more so than having a webcam. This, too, was mentioned in the relevant post:

I had to set a timer (for between 5 and 11 minutes depending on circumstances) to remind me to check Vladimir’s screen (resetting the timer manually after every check). If I did not, I either spent too much time looking at his screen or let him go too long without monitoring.