Year 3 Computer Science student
find me anywhere in linktr.ee/papetoast
papetoast
Karma: 274
There are a few things I dislike about math textbooks and pdfs in general. For example, how math textbooks often use theorems that are from many pages ago and require switching back and forth. (Sometimes there isn’t even a hyperlink!). I also don’t like how proofs sometimes go way too deep into individual steps and sometimes being way too brief.
I wish something like this exists (Claude generated it for me, prompt: https://pastebin.com/Gnis891p)
Many people don’t seem to know when and how to invalidate the cached thoughts they have. I noticed an instance of being unable to cache invalidate the model of a person from my dad. He is probably still modelling >50% of me as who I am >5 years ago.
The Intelligent Social Web briefly talked about this for other reasons.
A lot of (but not all) people get a strong hit of this when they go back to visit their family. If you move away and then make new friends and sort of become a new person (!), you might at first think this is just who you are now. But then you visit your parents… and suddenly you feel and act a lot like you did before you moved away. You might even try to hold onto this “new you” with them… and they might respond to what they see as strange behavior by trying to nudge you into acting “normal”: ignoring surprising things you say, changing the topic to something familiar, starting an old fight, etc.
In most cases, I don’t think this is malice. It’s just that they need the scene to work. They don’t know how to interact with this “new you”, so they tug on their connection with you to pull you back into a role they recognize. If that fails, then they have to redefine who they are in relation to you — which often (but not always) happens eventually.
I would like the option to separate subscribing to posts and subscribing to comments. I mostly just want to subscribe to posts, because it is much easier to decide whether I want to read a post than a comment.
that is much clearer that I think you should have said it out loud in the post
I also mostly switched to browser bookmark now, but I do think even this simple implementation of in-site bookmarks is overall good. Book marking in-site can sync over devices by default, and provides more integrated information.
I want to be able to quickly see whether I have bookmarked a post to avoid clicking into it (hence I suggested it to be a badge, rather than a button like in the Bookmarks tab). Especially with the new recommendation system that resurfaces old posts, I sometimes accidentally click on posts that I bookmarked months before.
This is like raw, n=1, personal feedback.
No, not really. I read it twice but couldn’t bring myself to care. It seems you are going into tangents and not actually talking directly about your technique. I could be wrong, but I also couldn’t care enough to read into the sentences and understand what you’re actually pointing at with all the words. Having conclusion is nice because I jumped straight to that at first, seems kind of too normal to justify the clickbait though. Overall I feel like I read some ramblings and didn’t learn much.
I would suggest using less clickbaity titles on LessWrong
I would love to get a little bookmark symbol on the frontpage
Metaphor rebranded themselves. No and no, thanks for sharing though, will try it out!
Related: Replace yourself before you stop organizing your community.
I think this is a important skill to learn and a important failure mode to be aware of. There are so many nice things that are gone because the only person that is doing the thing just stopped one day.
Unplugging the charger and putting it in my bag (and the reverse) is a trivial inconvenience that annoyed me many times
I found that it is possible to yield noticeably better search results than Google by using Kagi as default and fallback to Exa (prev. Metaphor).
Kagi is $10/mo though with a 100 searches trial. Kagi’s default results are slightly better than Google, and it also offers customization of results which I haven’t seen in other search engines.
Exa is free, it uses embeddings and empirically it understood semantics way better than other search engines and provide very unique search results.
If you are interested in experimenting you can find more search engines in https://www.searchenginemap.com/ and https://github.com/The-Osint-Toolbox/Search-Engines
You can buy a even cheaper one from taobao, this one is $20 before shipping (but I expect the buying experience to be quite complex if you’re outside china)
I pattern matched onto “10 Times Scientists Admitted They Were Wrong” and thought you made some sort of editing mistake, now I see what you’re saying with the added quotes
The title is messed up
I subscribed to your posts and got an in-site notification
(My native language is Chinese.) I haven’t started reading, but I am finding the abstract/tldr impossible to understand. For example, “Is the accuracy higher between forecasts” reads like a nonsensical sentence. My best guess after reading one extra paragraph by click through is that the question is actually “are forecasts predicting the near future more accurate than those predicting a more distant future” but I don’t feel like it is possible to decode just based on the abstract. I have similar issues with all three questions.
I noticed this too, but when trying to rank music based on my taste. I wonder if when people are asked to give their favorite (of something), do they just randomly give a maximal element, or do they have an implicit aggregate function that kind of converts the partial order into a total order
Ranting about LangChain, a python library for building stuff on top of llm calls.
LangChain is a horrible pile of abstractions. There are many ways of doing the same thing. Every single function has a lot of gotchas (that doesn’t even get mentioned in documentations). Common usage patterns are hidden behind unintuitive, hard to find locations (callbacks has to be implemented as an instance of a certain class in a config TypedDict). Community support is non-existent despite large number of users. Exceptions are often incredibly unhelpful with unreadable stack trace. Lots of stuff are impossible to type check because langchain allows for too much flexibility, they take in prompt templates as format strings (i.e. “strings with {variables}”) and then allows you to fill in the template at runtime with a dict, so now nothing can be statically type checked :)