rsaarelm

Karma: 452

rsaarelm 6 Nov 2024 7:26 UTC
1 point
0
on: What’s a good book for a technically-minded 11-year old?
Lewis Dartnell’s The Knowledge—How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch is a sort of grand tour for technological underpinnings of industrial civilization and how you might bootstrap them. Might be a bit dry, but it’s popular writing and if the kid’s already reading encyclopedias it should fit right in. Lots of concrete details about specific technologies.

Might go for a left field option and see what he makes of Euclid’s Elements.

rsaarelm 17 Oct 2024 6:30 UTC
1 point
0
on: Bitter lessons about lucid dreaming
I haven’t tried galantamine, but didn’t find the drugless techniques all the same. The standard advice of keeping a dream diary and psyching yourself to have a lucid dream and to do reality checks never worked at all for me. Wake-back-to-bed on the other hand got me dozens of lucid dreams and often worked the first time I tried it after a break. It’s also annoying to do because it involves messing with your sleep cycle and waking yourself up in the early morning, and it seems to always stop working if I try to do it multiple nights in a row.

Agree with the other parts though, the lucid dreams are generally pretty short, kind of samey. Maybe it takes a longer dream for the narrative to get properly weird, and the WBTB lucids are more often short dreams that start out of nowhere than becoming lucid midway through an involve dream. They’re also too sporadic to get any sort of ongoing active imagination practice going since I don’t have any routine of trying to WBTB once every week or something. There’s Robert Waggoner’s lucid dreaming book that talks more about possible ongoing psychological development you could make happen with repeated lucid dreams, as opposed to just the “hey, lucid dreams are a thing” books, but I guess a regular routine and some kind of intentful approach would help a lot here.

One thing I’ve been thinking is that the stories about shamanic journeys sound a whole lot like lucid dreaming, so maybe you could take a page from there. Try to travel to the underworld or overworld, meet some spirit entities, ask them what’s up and maybe have a nice chat about large integer factorization.

rsaarelm 11 Sep 2024 6:17 UTC
9 points
0
on: Building an Inexpensive, Aesthetic, Private Forum
Everyone who participates probably isn’t a github-using programmer, but if they were, a stupid five-minute solution might be to just set up a private github project and use its issue tracker for forum threads.

rsaarelm 29 Aug 2024 4:05 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: Kaj_Sotala’s comment on: you should probably eat oatmeal sometimes
I had the same problem, then I started mixing cottage cheese in the oatmeal and that fixed it.

rsaarelm 8 Aug 2024 6:26 UTC
6 points
0
on: It’s time for a self-reproducing machine
Back when I read about people claiming a RepRap can reproduce itself, I felt like the claim implied it would build the electronics of the new RepRap from scratch as well and was confused since obviously a 3D printer can’t double as a chip fab. The gold standard for a self-replicating machine for me is something like plants, which can turn high-entropy raw materials like soil and ores into itself given a source of energy. I guess you could talk about autotrophic self-reproducing machines that can do their thing given a barren planet and sunlight, and heterotrophic self-reproducing machines that have selling machined components over the internet and using the income to buy CPU chips and hire workers to assemble the skeleton of a new automated workshop as a valid strategy.

rsaarelm 10 Jul 2024 6:24 UTC
5 points
4
in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Rationalist Purity Test
It’s testing for conformity to folk values, not mythic values.

rsaarelm 25 Jun 2024 6:23 UTC
9 points
0
on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews
Great post. I’ve been trying to find SF reviews that aren’t just blurbs to get an idea about what’s going on with the scene currently. With the exception of Tchaikovsky, most authors whose names keep popping up seem to still be ones who started publishing back in the 20th century. Unfortunately, I already know about most of the books on this list. So I’m going to write a wishlist of books I’ve heard of but don’t know that much about and would like to see reviews of,
- Radix series by AA Attanasio
- Starfishers series by Glen Cook
- The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson
- David’s Sling by Marc Stiegler
- The Truth Machine by James Halperin
- Appleseed by John Clute
- Light and Nova Swing by M. John Harrison
- Gridlinked by Neal Asher
- The Quiet War by Paul McAuley
- Silo series by Hugh Howey
- Imperial Radch series by Ann Leckie
- Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer
- The Thing Itself by Adam Roberts
- Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer
- Crystal trilogy by Max Harms
- Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
- Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton
- This Is How You Lose the Time War by Max Gladstone
- The Last Astronaut by David Welligton
- A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
- XX by Rian Hughes
- Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson
- Virtua by Karl Olsberg

rsaarelm 3 Mar 2024 10:03 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Agreeing With Stalin in Ways That Exhibit Generally Rationalist Principles
James Gleick’s Genius cites a transcript of “Address to Far Rockaway High School” from 1965 (or 1966 according to this from California Institute of Technology archives for Feynman talking about how he got a not-exceptionally-high 125 for his IQ score. Couldn’t find an online version of the transcript anywhere with a quick search.

rsaarelm 11 Feb 2024 13:34 UTC
2 points
0
on: How has internalising a post-AGI world affected your current choices?
I’ve stopped trying to make myself do things I don’t want to do. Burned out at work, quit my job, became long-term unemployed. The world is going off-kilter, the horizons for comprehensible futures are shrinking, and I don’t see any grand individual-scale quest to claw your way from the damned into the elect.

rsaarelm 31 Jan 2024 11:47 UTC
3 points
−2
on: An Invitation to Refrain from Downvoting Posts into Net-Negative Karma
How many users you can point to who started out making posts that regularly got downvoted to negative karma and later became good contributors? Or, alternatively, specific ideas that were initially only presented by users who got regularly downvoted that were later recognized as correct and valuable? My starting assumption is that it’s basically wishful thinking that this would happen much under any community circumstances, people who write badly will mostly keep writing badly and people who end up writing outstanding stuff mostly start out writing better than average stuff.

rsaarelm 8 Jan 2024 9:04 UTC
1 point
0
on: We shouldn’t fear superintelligence because it already exists
On the exponentially self-improving part, No Evolutions for Corporations or Nanodevices.

rsaarelm 7 Jan 2024 7:28 UTC
10 points
15
on: A Challenge to Effective Altruism’s Premises

Please do not vote without an explanatory comment (votes are convenient for moderators, but are poor intellectual etiquette, sans information that would permit the “updating” of beliefs).

This post has terrible writing style, based on your posting history you’ve been here for a year, writing similarly badly styled posts, people have commented on the style, and you have neither engaged the comments nor tried to improve your writing style. Why shouldn’t people just downvote and move on at this point?

rsaarelm 31 Dec 2023 8:37 UTC
22 points
23
in reply to: Unreal’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Is this your first time running into Zack’s stuff? You sound like you’re talking to someone showing up out of nowhere with a no-context crackpot manuscript and has zero engagement with community. Zack’s post is about his actual engagement with the community over a decade, we’ve seen a bunch of the previous engagement (in pretty much the register we see here so this doesn’t look like an ongoing psychotic break), he’s responsive to comments and his thesis generally makes sense. This isn’t drive-by crackpottery and it’s on LessWrong because it’s about LessWrong.

rsaarelm 13 Dec 2023 21:37 UTC
8 points
4
on: Has anyone here investigated the occult community? It is curious to me that many magicians consider themselves empiricists.
Record-keeping isn’t enough to make you a scientist. People might be making careful records and then analyzing them badly, and if there’s no actual effect going on selection effect will leave you with a community of misanalyzers.

rsaarelm 30 Nov 2023 8:29 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The Alignment Agenda THEY Don’t Want You to Know About
The PDF is shown in full for me when I scroll down the academia.edu page, here’s an archive.is capture in case this is some sort of intermittent A/B testing thing.

rsaarelm 13 Nov 2023 18:21 UTC
3 points
2
in reply to: [deactivated]’s comment on: TESCREAL and social justice: a synthesis
There might not be, but it’s not a thing in vacuum, it was coined with political intent and it’s tangled with that intent.

rsaarelm 13 Nov 2023 15:13 UTC
0 points
2
in reply to: [deactivated]’s comment on: TESCREAL and social justice: a synthesis
Blithely adopting a term that seems to have been coined just for the purposes of doing a smear job makes you look like either a useful idiot or an enemy agent.

rsaarelm 1 Nov 2023 7:38 UTC
4 points
3
in reply to: Nik Samoylov’s comment on: Focus on existential risk is a distraction from the real issues. A false fallacy
The post reads like a half-assed college essay where you’re going through the motions of writing without things really coming together. Heavy on the structure, there’s no clear thread of rhetoric progressing through it, and it’s hard to get a clear sense where you’re coming from with the whole thing. The overall impression is just list of disjointed arguments, essay over.

rsaarelm 10 Oct 2023 14:11 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: mako yass’s comment on: “The Heart of Gaming is the Power Fantasy”, and Cohabitive Games
I’ve been gaming some 35 years and I don’t play any multiplayer games at all. I don’t think I remember the ten or so people in my social hangouts who regularly talk about what they’re playing talk much about PVP either, they seem to be playing single-player simulator, grand strategy and CRPG games or cooperative multiplayer games mostly.

rsaarelm 20 Aug 2023 7:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: quetzal_rainbow’s comment on: A short calculation about a Twitter poll
All else being equal, do you prefer to live in a society where many members are madmen and idiots or in a society where few members are madmen and idiots?