Said Achmiz

• Said Achmiz 21 Nov 2024 3:32 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: trevor’s comment on: Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group #12 (Tues­day 11/​26)

  “A space Odyssey” is not watchable without discussing historical context

  … why? I’ve watched this movie, and I… don’t think I’m aware of any special “historical context” that was relevant to it. (Or, at any rate, I don’t know what you mean by this.) It seemed to work out fine…

• Said Achmiz 18 Nov 2024 15:21 UTC

  3 points

  1

  in reply to: TurnTrout’s comment on: An­nounc­ing turn­trout.com, my new digi­tal home

  The main problem with your approach is not that it is counterintuitive (although it is, and more so than ours!), but that there is no way to return to “auto” mode via the site’s UI!^[1] Having clicked the mode selector, how do I go back to “no, just use my browser preference”? A two-state selector with a hidden, ephemeral third state, which cannot be retrieved once abandoned is, I’m afraid, the worst approach…

  ---

  1. ↩︎

     You can go into your browse’s dev tools and deleting the localStorage item, or clear all your saved data via the browser’s preferences. (Well, on desktop, anyway; on mobile—who knows? Not the former, at least, and how many mobile users even know about the latter? And the latter is anyhow an undesirable method!)

• Said Achmiz 18 Nov 2024 7:33 UTC

  10 points

  2

  in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: An­nounc­ing turn­trout.com, my new digi­tal home

  Do you think a 3-state dark mode selector is better than a 1-state (where “auto” is the only state)? My website is 1-state, on the assumption that auto will work for almost everyone and it lets me skip the UI clutter of having a lighting toggle that most people won’t use.

  Gwern discusses this on his “Design Graveyard” page:

  Auto-dark mode: a good idea but “readers are why we can’t have nice things”.

  OSes/​browsers have defined a ‘global dark mode’ toggle the reader can set if they want dark mode everywhere, and this is available to a web page; if you are implementing a dark mode for your website, it then seems natural to just make it a feature and turn on iff the toggle is on. There is no need for complicated UI-cluttering widgets with complicated implementations. And yet—if you do do that, readers will regularly complain about the website acting bizarre or being dark in the daytime, having apparently forgotten that they enabled it (or never understood what that setting meant).

  A widget is necessary to give readers control, although even there it can be screwed up: many websites settle for a simple negation switch of the global toggle, but if you do that, someone who sets dark mode at day will be exposed to blinding white at night… Our widget works better than that. Mostly.

  Is it possible that someday dark-mode will become so widespread, and users so educated, that we could quietly drop the widget? Yes, even by 2023 dark-mode had become quite popular, and I suspect that an auto-dark-mode would cause much less confusion in 2024 or 2025. However, we are stuck with the widget—once we had a widget, the temptation to stick in more controls (for reader-mode and then disabling/​enabling popups) was impossible to resist, and who knows, it may yet accrete more features (site-wide fulltext search?), rendering removal impossible.

  (The site-wide fulltext search feature has since been added, of course.)

  What links here?

  • gwern's comment on An­nounc­ing turn­trout.com, my new digi­tal home by TurnTrout (18 Nov 2024 14:53 UTC; 8 points)

• Said Achmiz 17 Nov 2024 21:22 UTC

  3 points

  0

  on: An­nounc­ing turn­trout.com, my new digi­tal home

  Not bad at all! Needs some work on the details and some bug fixes, but—really not bad! The dropcaps, in particular, are well done; and the overall theme is elegant.

• Said Achmiz 16 Nov 2024 5:09 UTC

  6 points

  0

  on: The Case For Giv­ing To The Shrimp Welfare Project

  I’m just going to link the comment I wrote the last time you mentioned that Rethink Priorities report. That report continues to be of very little use in supporting such arguments as you present here.

Gw­ern Bran­wen in­ter­view on Dwarkesh Pa­tel’s pod­cast: “How an Anony­mous Re­searcher Pre­dicted AI’s Tra­jec­tory”

• Said Achmiz 2 Nov 2024 1:53 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Jar­gonBot Beta Test

  I in fact don’t use Google very much these days, and don’t particularly recommend that anyone else do so, either.

  (If by “google” you meant “search engines in general”, then that’s a bit different, of course. But then, the analogy here would be to something like “carefully select which LLM products you use, try to minimize their use, avoid the popular ones, and otherwise take all possible steps to ensure that LLMs affect what you see and do as little as possible”.)

• Said Achmiz 2 Nov 2024 1:50 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Jar­gonBot Beta Test

  The most important thing is “There is a small number of individuals who are paying attention, who you can argue with, and if you don’t like what they’re doing, I encourage you to write blogposts or comments complaining about it. And if your arguments make sense to me/​us, we might change our mind. If they don’t make sense, but there seems to be some consensus that the arguments are true, we might lose the Mandate of Heaven or something.”

  There’s not, like, anything necessarily wrong with this, on its own terms, but… this is definitely not what “being held accountable” is.

  It happening at all already constitutes “going wrong”.

  This particular sort of comment doesn’t particularly move me.

  All this really means is that you’ll just do with this whatever you feel like doing. Which, again, is not necessarily “wrong”, and really it’s the default scenario for, like… websites, in general… I just really would like to emphasize that “being held accountable” has approximately nothing to do with anything that you’re describing.

  As far as the specifics go… well, the bad effect here is that instead of the site being a way for me to read the ideas and commentary of people whose thoughts and writings I find interesting, it becomes just another purveyor of AI “extruded writing product”. I really don’t know why I’d want more of that than there already is, all over the internet. I mean… it’s a bad thing. Pretty straightforwardly. If you don’t think so then I don’t know what to tell you.

  All I can say is that this sort of thing drastically reduces my interest in participating here. But then, my participation level has already been fairly low for a while, so… maybe that doesn’t matter very much, either. On the other hand, I don’t think that I’m the only one who has this opinion of LLM outputs.

• Said Achmiz 1 Nov 2024 20:14 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Jar­gonBot Beta Test

  Do you not use LLMs daily?

  Not even once.

  In general, I think Gwern’s suggested LLM policy seems roughly right to me.

  First of all, even taking what Gwern says there at face value, how many of the posts here that are written “with AI involvement” would you say actually are checked, edited, etc., in the rigorous way which Gwern describes? Realistically?

  Secondly, when Gwern says that he is “fine with use of AI in general to make us better writers and thinkers” and that he is “still excited about this”, you should understand that he is talking about stuff like this and this, and not about stuff like “instead of thinking about things, refining my ideas, and writing them down, I just asked a LLM to write a post for me”.

  Approximately zero percent of the people who read Gwern’s comment will think of the former sort of idea (it takes a Gwern to think of such things, and those are in very limited supply), rather than the latter.

  The policy of “encourage the use of AI for writing posts/​comments here, and provide tools to easily generate more AI-written crap” doesn’t lead to more of the sort of thing that Gwern describes at the above links. It leads to a deluge of un-checked crap.

• Said Achmiz 1 Nov 2024 19:41 UTC

  −1 points

  −2

  in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Jar­gonBot Beta Test

  I welcome being held accountable for this going wrong in various ways.

  It happening at all already constitutes “going wrong”.

  Also: by what means can you be “held accountable”?

• Said Achmiz 1 Nov 2024 19:40 UTC

  0 points

  −19

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Jar­gonBot Beta Test

  If this is true, then it’s a damning indictment of Less Wrong and the authors who post here, and is an excellent reason not to read anything written here.

• Said Achmiz 30 Oct 2024 6:34 UTC

  16 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Short­form Feed

  Well, let’s see. Calibri is a humanist sans; Gill Sans is technically also humanist, but more more geometric in design. Geometric sans fonts tend to be less readable when used for body text.

  Gill Sans has a lower x-height than Calibri. That (obviously) is the cause of all the “the new font looks smaller” comments.

  (A side-by-side comparison of the fonts, for anyone curious, although note that this is Gill Sans MT Pro, not Gill Sans Nova, so the weight [i.e., stroke thickness] will be a bit different than the version that LW now uses.)

  Now, as far as font rendering goes… I just looked at the site on my Windows box (adjusting the font stack CSS value to see Gill Sans Nova again, since I see you guys tweaked it to give Calibri priority)… yikes. Yeah, that’s not rendering well at all. Definitely more blurry than Calibri. Maybe something to do with the hinting, I don’t know. (Not really surprising, since Calibri was designed from the beginning to look good on Windows.) And I’ve got a hi-DPI monitor on my Windows machine…

  Interestingly, the older version of Gill Sans (seen in the demo on my wiki, linked above) doesn’t have this problem; it renders crisply on Windows. (Note that this is not the flawed, broken-kerning version of the font that comes with Macs!)

  I also notice that the comment font size is set to… 15.08px. Seems weird? Bumping it up to 16px improves things a bit, although it’s still not amazing.

  If you can switch to the older (but not broken) version of Gill Sans, that’d be my recommendation.

  If you can’t… then one option might be to check out one of the many similar fonts to see if perhaps one of them renders better on Windows while still having matching metrics.

• Said Achmiz 30 Oct 2024 5:44 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Short­form Feed

  I am confident the average user experience would become worse if you just replaced the comment font with the body font)

  Yeah, I agree with that, but that’s because of a post body font that wasn’t chosen for suitability for comments also. If you pick, to begin with, a font that works for both, then it’ll work for both.

  … of course, if you don’t think that any of the GW themes’ fonts work for both, then never mind, I guess. (But, uh, frankly I find that to be a strange view. But no accounting for taste, etc., so I certainly can’t say it’s wrong, exactly.)

• Said Achmiz 29 Oct 2024 18:39 UTC

  4 points

  −5

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: Habryka’s Short­form Feed

  You definitely would not want the comment font be the same as the post font.

  This… seems straightforwardly false? Every one of GreaterWrong’s eight themes uses a single font for both posts and comments, and it doesn’t cause any problems. (And it’s a different font for each theme!)

• Said Achmiz 24 Oct 2024 16:00 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: A metaphor: what “green lights” for AGI would look like

  What is a “deontic mesh”? I am not familiar with this term; do you have a link that explains it?

• Said Achmiz 17 Oct 2024 18:16 UTC

  5 points

  3

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Mo­men­tum of Light in Glass

  The bullet-biting here is just “‘real numbers’ are fake”. That makes most of the questions you cite moot.

• Said Achmiz 17 Oct 2024 18:14 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Bunthut’s comment on: Mo­men­tum of Light in Glass

  “Real numbers don’t exist” seems like a good solution to me.

• Said Achmiz 16 Oct 2024 19:42 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: Mo­men­tum of Light in Glass

  So it’s like… the negation of the diagonal supposedly is there, but… not at any specific place?

  Why should this be a problem? On this view, there is no “the diagonal”; there are only diagonals of particular tables for particular values of n, which each have their own negations.

• Said Achmiz 13 Oct 2024 22:42 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: sarahconstantin’s comment on: sarah­con­stantin’s Shortform

  history clearly teaches us that civilizations and states collapse (on timescales of centuries) and the way to bet is that ours will as well, but it’s kind of insane hubris to think that this can be prevented;

  It seems like it makes some difference whether our civilization collapses the way that the Roman Empire collapsed, the way that the British Empire collapsed, or the way that the Soviet Union collapsed. “We must prevent our civilization from ever collapsing” is clearly an implausible goal, but “we should ensure that a successor structure exists and is not much worse than what we have now” seems rather more reasonable, no?

• Said Achmiz 11 Oct 2024 23:59 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: abstractapplic’s comment on: Open let­ter to young EAs

  I concur with @johnswentworth’s comment; I read approximately as far as he did, and came to the same conclusion. I would also like to see the “~1.5 good and important points” listed!