mruwnik

Karma: 455

mruwnik Apr 10, 2025, 9:41 AM
5 points
0
in reply to: Judd Rosenblatt’s comment on: Why Have Sentence Lengths Decreased?
Having studied Latin, or other such classical training, seems to be but one method of imbuing oneself with the the style of writing longer, more complicated sentences. Personally I acquired the taste for such eccentricities perusing sundry works from earlier times. Romances, novels and other such frivolities from, or set in, the 18-th century being the main culprits.
I suppose this sort of proves your point, in that those authors learnt to create complicated sentences from learning Latin, and the later writers copied the style, thinking either that it’s fun, correct, or wanting to seem more authentic.

mruwnik Mar 13, 2025, 7:47 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Aprillion’s comment on: How Much Are LLMs Actually Boosting Real-World Programmer Productivity?
I can do more projects in parallel than I could have before. Which means that I have even more work now… The support and maintenance costs of the code itself are the same, as long as you maintain constant vigilance to make sure nothing bad gets merged. So the costs are moved from development to review. It’s a lot easier to produce thousands of lines of slop which then have to be reviewed and loads of suggestions made. It’s easy for bad taste to be amplified, which is a real cost that might not be noticed that much.
There are some evals which work on large codebases (e.g. “fix this bug in django”), but those are the minority, granted. They can help with the scaffolding, though—those tend to be large projects in which a Claude can help find things.
But yeah, large files are ok if you just want to find something, but somewhere under 500 loc seems to be the limit of what will work well. Though you can get round it somewhat by copying the parts to be changed to a different file then copying them back, or other hacks like that...

mruwnik Mar 9, 2025, 11:32 PM
7 points
3
on: How Much Are LLMs Actually Boosting Real-World Programmer Productivity?
Writing tests (in Python). Writing comprehensive tests for my code used to take a significant portion of my time. Probably at least 2x more than writing the actual code, and subjectively a lot more. Now it’s a matter of “please write tests for this function”, “now this one” etc., with an extra “no, that’s ugly, make it nicer” every now and then.
Working with simple code is also a lot faster, as long as it doesn’t have to process too much. So most of what I do now is make sure the file it’s processing isn’t more than ~500 lines of code. This has the nice side effect of forcing me to make sure the code is in small, logical chunks. Cursor can often handle most of what I want, after which I tidy up and make things decent. I’d estimate this make me at least 40% faster at basic coding, probably a lot more. Cursor can in general handle quite large projects if you manage it properly. E.g. last week it took me around 3 days to make a medium sized project with ~14k lines of Python code. This included Docker setup stuff (not hard, but fiddly), a server + UI (the frontend is rubbish, but that’s fine), and some quite complicated calculations. Without LLMs this would have taken at least a week, and probably a month.
Debugging data dumps is now a lot easier. I ask Claude to make me throwaway html pages to display various stuff. Ditto for finding anomalies. It won’t find everything, but can find a lot. All of this can be done with the appropriate tooling, of course, but that requires knowing about it, having it set up and knowing how to use it.
Glue code or in general interacting with external APIs (or often also internal ones) is a lot easier, until it’s not. You can often one-shot a workable solution that does exactly what you want, which you can then just modify to not be ugly.
I’m not sure how more productive I am with LLMs. But that’s mainly because coding is not all I do. If I was just given a set of things to make and was allowed to crank away at it, then I’m pretty sure I’d be 5-10x faster than two years ago.

mruwnik Jan 21, 2025, 11:15 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Rob Harrison’s comment on: The purpose of the (Mosaic) law
I have a feeling this might be a bit more complex. So I’d say there is vector pointing from where you are to where God want’s you to be, and that if on each step you always minimize the distance, then you’re getting closer to what God wants as the crow flies, but that there are a bunch of traps, detours and other such things along the way. And that if you just directly follow the vector, you’ll probably end up in a bad place because you’ll take a bad path.
So just following the vector would be a form of consequentialism, where a naive approach ends with you falling into a hole from which you can’t get out, or ending under a cliff which you can’t climb. And the main value of religion (either as God’s laws, or a collection of known paths) is that it will lead you along a safe road, even if that doesn’t always seem to be pointing in the right direction.
I like how you frame searching for God’s will as a facet of a more general process, where often the best road to a very complex goal might seem pointless or at least strange.

mruwnik Jan 14, 2025, 7:10 PM
6 points
0
in reply to: simon’s comment on: Passages I Highlighted in The Letters of J.R.R.Tolkien
I can’t remember where it was, but he somewhere talks about the goblin mindset being common. Orcs here is not a specific “team”, it’s people that act and think like orcs, where they delight in destruction, havoc and greed

mruwnik Dec 31, 2024, 2:52 PM
8 points
2
on: AI: Practical Advice for the Worried
There seems to be a largish group of people who are understandably worried about AI advances but have no hope of changing it, so start panicking. This post is a good reminder that yes, we’re all going to die, but since you don’t know when, you have to prepare for multiple eventualities.
Shorting life is good if you can pull it off. But the same caveats apply as to shorting the market.

mruwnik Dec 31, 2024, 1:55 PM
4 points
0
on: Social Dark Matter
This is one of those mechanisms which are obvious once you notice them, and really useful to know about, but weirdly non-noticed. After reading this I started noticing a lot more of these, and (hopefully) became more open to accepting non extreme versions of various things that I previously thought horrific.
It’s sad that Duncan is Deactivated, as there are multiple posts like this one that make me a better person.

mruwnik Dec 31, 2024, 11:42 AM
1 point
0
on: The Talk: a brief explanation of sexual dimorphism
This is an enjoyable, somewhat humorous summary of a very complicated topic, spanning literally billions of years. So it naturally skips and glosses over a bunch of details, while managing to give relatively simple answers to:
- why sex
- why 2 sexes
- why have one sex bigger than the other
I really appreciated the disclaimers at the top—every time I discuss biology, I bump into these limitations, so it’s very appropriate for an intro article to explicitly state them.

mruwnik Dec 24, 2024, 10:21 PM
3 points
−3
in reply to: tup99’s comment on: When Is Insurance Worth It?
Wealth not equaling happiness works both ways. It’s the idea of losing wealth that’s driving sleep away. In this case, the goal of buying insurance is to minimize the risk of losing wealth. The real thing that’s stopping you sleep is not whether you have insurance or not, it’s how likely it is that something bad happens, which will cost more than you’re comfortable losing. Having insurance is just one of the ways to minimize that—the problem is stress stemming from uncertainty, not whether you’ve bought an insurance policy.
The list of misunderstandings is a bit tongue in cheek (at least that’s how I read it). So it’s not so much disdainful of people’s emotions, as much as it’s pointing out that whether you have insurance is not the right thing to worry about—it’s much more fruitful to try to work out the probabilities of various bad things then calculate how much you should be willing to pay to lower that risk. It’s about viewing the world through the lens of probability and deciding these things on the basis of expected value. Rather than have sleepless nights, just shut up and multiply (this is a quote, not an attack). Even if you’re very risk averse, you should be able to just plug that into the equation and come up with some maximum insurance cost above which it’s not worth buying it. Then you just buy it (or not) and sleep the sleep of the just. The point is to actually investigate it and put some numbers on it, rather than live in stress. This is why it’s a mathematical decision with a correct answer. Though the correct answer, of course, will be subjective and depend on your utility function. It’s still a mathematical decision.
Spock is an interesting example to use, in how he’s very much not rational. Here’s a lot more on that topic.

mruwnik Dec 22, 2024, 2:18 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Biological risk from the mirror world
It’s probably not that large a risk though? I doubt any alien microbes would be that much of a problem to us. It seems unlikely that they would happen to use exactly the same biochemistry as we do, which makes it harder for them to infect/digest us. Chirality is just one of the multitudes of ways in which earth’s biosphere is “unique”. It’s been a while since I was knowledgeable about any of this, but a quick o1 query seems to point in the same direction. Worth going through quarantine, just in case, of course. Though that works on earth pathogens which tend to quickly die off without hosts to infect, which very well might not hold true for more interesting environments.
Peter Watt’s Rifters series goes a bit into this topic. This is by no means evidence either way, but I just wanted to let more people know about it.

mruwnik Aug 26, 2024, 1:59 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Michael Roe’s comment on: Liability regimes for AI
A bit of nitpicking: the basic Open Source deal is not that you can do what you want with the product. It’s that the source code should be available. The whole point of introducing open source as an idea was to allow coorporations etc. to give access to their source code without worrying so much about people doing what you’re describing. Deleting a “don’t do this bad thing” can be prosecuted as copyright infringement (if the whole license gets removed). This is what copyleft was invented for—to subvert copyright laws by using them to force companies to publish their code.
There are licenses like MIT which do what you’re describing. Others are less permissive, and e.g. only allow you to use the code in non-commercial projects, or stipulate that you have to send any fixes back to the original developer if you’re planning on distributing it. The GPL is a fun one, which requires any code that is derivative of it to also be open sourced.
Also, Open Source can very much be a source of liability, e.g. the SCO v. IBM case which was trying to get people to pay for linux (patent trolls being what they are) or Oracle vs Google, where Oracle (arguably also patent trolls) wanted Google to pay billions for use of the Java API (this ended up in the supreme court).

mruwnik Apr 29, 2024, 10:30 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: The Inner Ring by C. S. Lewis
It’s not that the elite groups are good or bad, it’s the desire to be in an elite group that leads to bad outcomes. Like how the root of all evil is the love of money, where money in itself isn’t bad, it’s the desire to possess it that is. Mainly because you start to focus on the means rather than the ends, and so end up in places you wouldn’t have wanted to end up in originally.
It’s about status. Being in with the cool kids etc. Elite groups aren’t inherently good or bad—they’re usually just those who are better at whatever is valued, or at least better at signaling that they are better at whatever is valued, depending on the group phase (the classic description being geeks, mops and sociopaths or Scott Alexander’s version). For many people, status is one of the most important things there are. And not just for instrumental reasons, but on a deep terminal level. You can argue that it’s an evolutionary instrumental goal, but for them status is a value in and of itself. From what I’ve read of your comments around here, I’m assuming that’s not true of you, especially as your last paragraph comes to the same conclusion as Lewis does.
People for whom status is so important are easy to manipulate by promising them status. They’re willing to sacrifice other values for status gains. Basically Moloch and moral mazes on a personal level. So the best case scenario of chasing status just for the sake of status is that you spend lots of resources chasing a mirage, as there’s always another group with higher status that you haven’t yet joined. Unfortunately, many such status seekers want to join groups that tend towards immoral/illegal/etc. actions. So to join them, you have to jeopardize yourself. The Russian Kompromat system is a good example of how this works in practice. Or blackmail schemes, where you get the target to do worse and worse things to avoid leaking the previous action. Most inner circles are not that blatant, of course. The problem is that if you value joining such inner circles more than your other values, then there will probably be points where you have to choose between the two, and too many people prefer to sacrifice their other values on Moloch’s alter.

mruwnik Apr 13, 2024, 6:49 PM
8 points
2
in reply to: Stephen McAleese’s comment on: LLMs for Alignment Research: a safety priority?
It’s not just from https://aisafety.info/. It also uses Arbital, any posts from the alignment forum, LW, EA forum that seem relevant and have a minimum karma, a bunch of arXiv papers, and a couple of other sources. This is a a relatively up to date list of the sources used (it also contains the actual data).

mruwnik Jan 3, 2024, 11:49 AM
5 points
0
on: Apologizing is a Core Rationalist Skill
Another, related Machiavellian tactic is, when starting a relationship that you suspect will be highly valuable to you, is to have an argument with them as soon as possible, and then to patch things up with a (sincere!) apology. I’m not suggesting to go out of your way to start a quarrel, more that it’s both a valuable data point as to how they handle problems (as most relationships will have patchy moments) and it’s also a good signal to them that you value them highly enough to go through a proper apology.

mruwnik Dec 22, 2023, 1:42 PM
7 points
0
in reply to: Cleo Nardo’s comment on: AI Safety Chatbot
1. gpt-3.5-turbo for now
2. that’s also being tried
What links here?
- Stephen McAleese's comment on LLMs for Alignment Research: a safety priority? by abramdemski (Apr 5, 2024, 7:08 PM; 2 points)

mruwnik Oct 17, 2023, 12:42 PM
1 point
0
in reply to: Adrià Garriga-alonso’s comment on: The Hidden Perils of Hydrogen
They are perils of assuming that hydrogen is the future, or perils of basing your energy needs on it—i.e. the peril is not in the hydrogen, it’s in making plans involving it

mruwnik Sep 29, 2023, 2:17 PM
3 points
0
in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem
That’s actually what got me to stop eating (or at least buying) meat

mruwnik Sep 28, 2023, 12:17 PM
4 points
1
in reply to: teageegeepea’s comment on: The Talk: a brief explanation of sexual dimorphism
Somatic cells are generally dead ends evolutionary. Your toe cells aren’t going to do much reproducing. Also, mitochondial (or in general organellar) DNA is split between the actual mitochondria and the cells containing them. Biology is fun!
The argument for mitochondria is that they cause the cell environment to be more toxic (what with them being the cell’s powerhouse). This in turn is going to provide a lot of selection pressure. In the same way e.g. global warming is causing a lot of selection pressure.
Runaway sexual selection has limits. This is also sort of the point. If you can carry around massive breasts, tails, noses or whatever and still be very prosperous, that means you’re good. Where “prosper” can mean running away from lions if you’re an antelope, or be the top of the village pecking order if you’re a human. Like a short pro basketball player. If they’re short, but still at a pro level, that’s someone you want on your team. This is known as the handicap principle, and can be explained via signaling mechanisms.

mruwnik Sep 19, 2023, 4:50 AM
3 points
2
in reply to: Daniel Kokotajlo’s comment on: The Talk: a brief explanation of sexual dimorphism
The number of generations controls how long your experiment lasts. The longer (or more generations), the more drift you have, so the more likely for a given gene (or in this case—genders number) to take over. This effect will be weaker in larger populations, but unless you have an infinite population, given enough time (or generations), you’ll end up with the 2 sexes (except for fungi, of course, as always). Eukaryotes first appeared 2.2 billion years ago. For comparison, the Cambrian explosion, with the first complex life, was only ~500 million years ago. That’s a lot of time (or generations) for things to stabilize.
There are multiple mating types around. Mammals have the XY/XX chromosome thing going. Birds have a different chromosome set (denoted as ZW/ZZ). Some families use egg temperature to determine sex. Some fish have one male, and if it disappears, the next ranking individual becomes the male. Insects also have totally different mechanisms. But there are usually only the two sexes (apart from fungi), probably for the efficiency reasons outlined in the OP.

mruwnik Sep 19, 2023, 12:49 AM
14 points
0
on: Where might I direct promising-to-me researchers to apply for alignment jobs/grants?
There is a Stampy answer to that which should stay up to date here.