Three-Monkey Mind

• Three-Monkey MindMar 15, 2025, 8:21 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The Dangers of Out­sourc­ing Think­ing: Los­ing Our Crit­i­cal Think­ing to the Over-Reli­ance on AI De­ci­sion-Making

  You could regain this skill easily. What’s stopping you?

  To answer your question more directly:

  In almost all cases, I don’t care enough about the random patch of land on the way to and around my destination to build up a mental map of it before setting out.

• Three-Monkey MindMar 15, 2025, 8:18 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: The Dangers of Out­sourc­ing Think­ing: Los­ing Our Crit­i­cal Think­ing to the Over-Reli­ance on AI De­ci­sion-Making

  A while back, I was driving to a friend’s house every few months to hang out.

  The first time, of course, I used a GPS to direct me there. Had this happened in the early 2000s, I would have printed out Google Maps turn-by-turn directions.

  After a few times, I tried not using the GPS to direct me there, although I screwed up the final turns a bit and might have turned on the GPS to direct me around the twisty maze of curved streets and cul-de-sacs.

  I wouldn’t have done that kind of thing if I had an appointment that I didn’t want to be late to.

  Also, using a GPS insulates you a bit from surprise traffic/​blockages that you might not know about beforehand — it can either just not direct you that way in the first place, or it can suggest an alternate route.

• Three-Monkey MindMar 12, 2025, 2:24 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Elon Musk May Be Tran­si­tion­ing to Bipo­lar Type I

  He plays Diablo 4, right?

  In-game season changes come with balance-patch changes, but if his rift-clearing abilities are tanking, that says something.

• Three-Monkey MindJan 4, 2025, 7:17 AM

  3 points

  1

  on: The On­line Sports Gam­bling Ex­per­i­ment Has Failed

  ow my balls [image] [image]

  I can tell that this is a game being shown on ESPN between the New York Mets and the Milwaukee Brewers. I also think that the earlier estimation of winning is ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ in the first picture and ⁶¹⁄₃₉ (favoring Milwaukee) in the second picture even though all the numbers around MIL are lower than the numbers around NYM.

  I have no idea what to make of the “Live Money Line” part in the first picture.

  For those of us who are interested in betting in the abstract but know nearly nothing about sports betting, would you explain what the picture is showing?

• Three-Monkey MindJan 2, 2025, 11:56 AM

  3 points

  0

  on: Learn to write well BEFORE you have some­thing worth saying

  A stupid question, maybe, but:

  I assume that if I want to get better at writing, I’ll have to get better at editing and revising.

  However, how do I get better at writing if I don’t have anything to say?

  Do I — and this task is likely underspecified/​underdescribed — spend hours polishing turds?

• Three-Monkey MindJan 2, 2025, 11:51 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: chrono’s comment on: Learn to write well BEFORE you have some­thing worth saying

  What’s the causal mechanism behind “read good writing, and you’ll be able to write better”?

  I assume I’m already used to reading good writing, and I’m not going to pick up any additional techniques by mere passive osmosis anymore.

• Three-Monkey MindDec 31, 2024, 7:56 PM

  1 point

  0

  on: Zom­bies among us

  Does this post make its readers more sane? If not, why was it posted to Less Wrong?

• Three-Monkey MindNov 8, 2024, 11:12 PM

  3 points

  4

  on: Big­ger Livers?

  400 kg/​kg/​day

  400 kcal/​kg/​day, right?

• Three-Monkey MindSep 21, 2024, 12:16 AM

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Not ev­ery ac­com­mo­da­tion is a Curb Cut Effect: The Handi­capped Park­ing Effect, the Clap­per Effect, and more

  If even one out of every ten accessibility advocates/​experts/​etc. did these things, then all these bugs would’ve been fixed years ago.

  Maybe you’re aware of an OOM more accessibility advocates than I am, but I come across all sorts of well-written blog posts explaining this or that bug, which browser/​etc. it happens in, and how to work around it. That’s most of the bullet points, although it might not be in the bug tracker of choice for the project.

  What people aren’t doing, as far as I have seen, is starting pooled-funds bug bounties for these things. People pass the collection plate for childhood cancer, especially since I’m told that September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, but not bugfixing.

  This is not insensible: all sorts of people tend to be unwilling to set aside the cost of a new cell phone to fix one bug apiece that, generally speaking, is encountered in one’s day job.

  And there are a lot of accessibility bugs out there, some of which are quite old. I can only assume that accessibility bugs aren’t treated massively more seriously than anything else in the WebKit or Firefox Bugzillas.

  While the world would be a better place if bug-bounty collection plates were more popular, I can see why they’re not as popular as I’d like.

• Three-Monkey MindSep 18, 2024, 8:44 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Not ev­ery ac­com­mo­da­tion is a Curb Cut Effect: The Handi­capped Park­ing Effect, the Clap­per Effect, and more

  They do not have any incentive whatever to help to fix bugs in screen reader programs. What would that do for them? The better such programs work, the less work there is for these people to do, the less there is to talk about on the subject of how to make your website accessible (“do nothing special, because screen readers work very well and will simply handle your website properly without you having to do anything or think about the problem at all” hardly constitutes special expertise…), the less demand there is for them on the job market…

  You don’t even need to describe this as a baptist-and-bootleggers problem to explain most of the lack of actual bug fixing.

  A frontend developer who runs into accessibility-related browser bugs all day and gets very good at working around them and publicizing how to work around them is unlikely to be a competent C++ developer who is capable of going into browser-engine codebases and actually fixing the bugs.

• Three-Monkey MindAug 30, 2024, 4:30 AM

  2 points

  3

  in reply to: Heron’s comment on: First Lighthaven Se­quences Read­ing Group

  While I can imagine why others would want to see this sort of thing, it seems to me that “this will go on your permanent record” would be a strong disincentive to engage seriously with the text or mention anything aloud that you wouldn’t be comfortable with anyone in the world, ever, knowing about you.

• Three-Monkey MindJun 2, 2024, 12:23 AM

  1 point

  0

  on: Web-sur­fing tips for strange times

  I do actually have plans to learn enough html to swap my Wordpress site over to a self-hosted self-designed website, I just have to, like, get good enough with HTML and CSS and especially CSS to get Gwern’s nice sidenotes

  You can start with the Dan Luu aesthetic and then redesign your site, either incrementally or in big leaps, possibly repeatedly, later. Redesigning websites is totally a thing. https://​​gwern.net gets near-constant upgrades, and all sorts of famous web-nerd bloggers have improved their sites’ designs over the years and now decades.

  and hosting and how to do comments. It’s gonna happen, though. Any day now.

  One thing Substack does that you can’t get super-easily from a static site is comments and emailing your readers with new articles (feeds are, unfortunately, mostly a nerd-only technology).

• Three-Monkey MindMay 20, 2024, 9:01 PM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Scien­tific No­ta­tion Options

  I’d like to second this comment, at least broadly. I’ve seen the e notation in blog posts and the like and I’ve struggled to put the × 10 in the right place.

  One of the reasons why I dislike trying to understand numbers written in scientific notation is because I have trouble mapping them to normal numbers with lots of commas in them. Engineering notation helps a lot with this — at least for numbers greater than 1 — by having the exponent be a multiple of 3. Oftentimes, losing significant figures isn’t an issue in anything but the most technical scientific writing.

• Three-Monkey MindMay 12, 2024, 10:01 PM

  1 point

  1

  on: What comes af­ter Roam’s re­nais­sance?

  Is there an alternative to constantly adding endless features? Can software be designed to operate without daily updates, similar to programming languages?

  “daily” in “daily updates” is hyperbole, but you can probably get most of the way there with

  • a subscription-based model (annual and/​or monthly)

  • periodic updates to ensure it works properly when the underlying platform changes (like when Apple adds dark mode to its OS and exposes this to websites with prefers-color-scheme).

  The second bullet point is important, at least occasionally. I dropped my beloved VoodooPad because it never got a publicly-released version that supports dark mode that works on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. I figure VoodooPad is nearly dead because its current owners can’t figure out how to turn it into something that gets enough revenue to justify the time that it would take to make it a modern app.

  At any rate, the notes I had in VoodooPad got moved into Ulysses some time after the Ulysses team added projects back in 2022. Ulysses is not a good personal wiki (internal linking isn’t nearly as low-friction as in Obsidian), but it’s adequate for my purposes and I dislike having a gazillion different personal-wiki software packages that I need to divvy my attention between.

  As far as update cadence goes…

  If you look at Ulysses’ Releases page and make note of the dates in the headings, you can see that they’ve been steadily, but not all that quickly, been releasing features. There’s probably at least one programming language out there with this release cadence, but I wouldn’t know which one it is.

• Three-Monkey MindFeb 1, 2024, 6:23 AM

  1 point

  0

  on: Ten Modes of Cul­ture War Discourse

  Cassandra/​Mule: If Alice knew she were talking to a brick wall, she would give up; and if Bob knew Alice was trying to help, he would actually listen.

  I’ve seen mules in the wild in internet forums (which, admittedly is outside the scope of your post). They usually present as ardent defenders of the faith, repeating well-known talking points…and never updating, ever.

• Three-Monkey MindDec 9, 2023, 1:36 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feed­back thread]

  AI safety posts generally go over my head, although the last one I read seemed fantastically important and accessible.

  AI-safety posts are probably the most valuable posts here, even if they crowd out other posts (both posts I think are valuable and posts I think are, at best, chaff).

• Three-Monkey MindDec 9, 2023, 1:24 AM

  7 points

  9

  in reply to: aysja’s comment on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feed­back thread]

  If there were one dial I’d want to experiment with turning on LW it would be writing quality, in the direction of more of it.

  I’d like to highlight this. In general, I think fewer things should be promoted to the front page.

  [edit, several days later]: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​SiPX84DAeNKGZEfr5/​​do-websites-and-apps-actually-generally-get-worse-after is a prime example. This has nothing to do with rationality or AI alignment. This is the sort of off-topic chatter that belongs somewhere else on the Internet.

  [edit, almost a year later]: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​dfKTbyzQSrpcWnxfC/​​2025-color-trends is an even better example of off-topic cross-posting that the author should not be rewarded for doing.

• Three-Monkey MindDec 9, 2023, 1:17 AM

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: RomanHauksson’s comment on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feed­back thread]

  I’d like to like this more but I don’t have a clear idea of when to up one, up the other, down one, down the other, or down one and up the other.

• Three-Monkey MindNov 20, 2023, 9:55 PM

  16 points

  2

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: For Civ­i­liza­tion and Against Niceness

  Would you rather live in a society that valued “niceness, community and civilization”, or one that valued “meanness, community and civilization”? I don’t think it’s a tough choice.

  This is an awful straw man. Compare instead:

  1. niceness, community, and civilization

  2. community and civilization

  Having seen what “niceness” entails, I’ll opt for (2), which doesn’t prioritize niceness or anti-niceness, and is niceness-agnostic.

• Three-Monkey MindSep 25, 2023, 12:07 AM

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Hand-writ­ing MathML

  That’s a lot of readers to throw away

  Depends on how popular you are. Even if you make the highly questionable assumption that browser statistics collected on sites like cnn.com and such are representative of the readership of jefftk.com, if jefftk.com has hundreds of readers, he’s still doing a lot of work for a group that can only manage to claim that there are “dozens of us”, and in any case really ought to upgrade to a proper browser (and in probably most cases, OS) anyway, for security reasons.