p=1, Soylent still seems to be the top choice at the moment. (They are running into some supply chain problem at the moment / recently.)
(Huel seemed fine too from personal experience. If you care about refined oil/canola oil and protein sources it could be a decent alt)
Good stuff! Though it did take a while for me to extrapolate what M&E is actually suppose to do and looks like; Or “What does good M&E even look like?”.
Non-profit seems quite hard and naturally easy for power to entrench (especially in an environment where people oppose legibility). I hope Abi finds their next venture more meaningful.
Update—HackewNews posts today and Lesswrong posts today are very similar in length. That doesn’t mean they do an equal job at being concise—maybe Lesswrongers say preciously little for the length of their treatises. But deriving the sophistication of the posts is left as an exercise for the readers and beyond my paygrade:
Hackewnews—avg. 2876.125 words. For the current top 10 posts.[1]
Lesswrong—avg. 2581.2 words. For the top ten post in the last 24 hrs. (God damn it Zvi)
A few problem with this 5 minute method of comparison:
Not Weighted: A better way to do this would be comparing some kind of karma weighted score. After all, the people who have high karmas are who we as a community see as people we really embody the spirit. Same with HackerNews.
Not Representative: I only took the most popular posts in hacknews today. There is no reason to think these posts today represents what HackerNews is in the last decade. Similarly, the posts on lesswrong in the last 24 hours are few and also not a very representative cohort.
Non-systematic way to throw out outliers: There was a project Gutenberg book on HackerNews today. It felt wrong to include the book and I feel justified in its exclusion. But this should be done more systematically.
A lot of discussion and culture building is in the comments, I didn’t include that: Ditto
Markdown table below incase I made a mistake:
| 1 | word count | |
| A Course of Pure Mathematics – G. H. Hardy (1921) [pdf] (gutenberg.org) | N/A—It is a book | |
| 107 points by bikenaga 4 hours ago | hide | 23 comments | ||
| 2 | ||
| I keep turning my Google Sheets into phone-friendly webapps, and I can’t stop (arstechnica.com) | 1443 | |
| 26 points by cpeterso 1 hour ago | hide | 2 comments | ||
| 3 | ||
| Dumping Memory to Bypass BitLocker on Windows 11 (noinitrd.github.io) | 1116 | |
| 178 points by supermatou 6 hours ago | hide | 120 comments | ||
| 4 | ||
| I Wrote a Game Boy Advance Game in Zig (jonot.me) | 2432 | |
| 52 points by tehnub 3 hours ago | hide | 10 comments | ||
| 5 | ||
| Beyond Gradient Averaging in Parallel Optimization (arxiv.org) | 6246 | |
| 41 points by shinryudbz 3 hours ago | hide | 8 comments | ||
| 6 | ||
| Lightstorm: Minimalistic Ruby Compiler (llvm.org) | 1408 | |
| 19 points by eutropia 2 hours ago | hide | discuss | ||
| 7 | ||
| Jack Elam and the Fly in ‘Once Upon a Time in the West’ (au.dk) | 2656 | |
| 51 points by chimpanzee 4 hours ago | hide | 9 comments | ||
| 8 | ||
| LineageOS 22 Released (lineageos.org) | 3778 | |
| 38 points by timschumi 1 hour ago | hide | 8 comments | ||
| 9 | ||
| I made a tiny library for switches and sum types in Lua (github.com/alurm) | N/A Code base | |
| 12 points by alurm 2 hours ago | hide | discuss | ||
| 10 | ||
| Learning Solver Design: Automating Factorio Balancers (gianlucaventurini.com) | 3930 | |
| 137 points by kolui 8 hours ago | hide | 21 comments | ||
| 11 | ||
| 2876.125 |
| DanielTan | 1479 |
| AnnaSal | 1565 |
| Habryka | 1562 |
| Zvi | 10212 |
| chanind&Till | 4479 |
| alexey | 148 |
| This Post | 281 |
| Bostock | 1200 |
| N/A ← Cant access | |
| Vishakha | 79 |
| xpostah | 4807 |
| Avg -> | 2581.2 |
See Paul Graham comment for their ranking algos: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013.
While I agree that we don’t live at the Pareto frontier of conciseness, explain-ability and etc, those are some odd examples to use to support your thesis. And the comparison to the hackernews post is likely using the wrong reference class.
Two of the three examples are heavily downvoted. Whether that’s because of untruthful content or stylistic (length, tone, etc) or memetic reason (Eliezer ~ prophet), those posts are hardly the poster child of what Lesswrong can do or even is.
As for Vanessa Kosoy’s piece, the last third was filled with quotations and they had given the “stop here if you don’t want my comments” warning. And it is also otherwise filled with references to many historically important posts and concepts that requires at least a quick refresher to catch the reader up to speed. I suppose Vanessa could have assumed that her readers would have been familiar with all those arguments and the nuances in different positions, but that was not her goal.
The specific example used from hacker news is likely a HackerNews Ask—a format more comparable to the shortforms and quicktake format in Lesswrong. Full fledged posts here vs full fledged posts on Hackernews is actually very comparable. (See below for some data)
And for me, the (correct) reframing of RL as the cherry on top of our existing self-supervised stack was the straw that broke my hopeful back.
And o3 is more straws to my broken back.
Could it be worth it to buy 23andme stocks if you want some of their user’s data?
Naively, the sticker price of 75M USD (today’s market cap) for all of their user data might seem cheap—all together for genomes of roughly 12 million users. It seems reasonably cheap to me on a replacement cost and opportunity-cost basis.
However, the 49% basically-majority shareholder is CEO Anne Wojcicki and a “possibility is that Wojcicki has unreasonable plans to take the company private at a bargain-basement price[1]”. If you takes this path forward as a decidedly important but minority shareholder, the only clear way forward is to hope for a shareholder oppression lawsuit in your favour. And instead of cashing out, you hope you can turn your skill set of “being annoying enough” into data in-lieu of cash (Note: if this is done through bankruptcy process, I can’t see the trustee agreeing to this plan.)
Even given the obstacles, is this a deal? Or is this just a bad price for this particular bag of information? Is 23andme’s information sufficiently low fidelity that it might not be useful at all except to relate yourself to fractional vikings?
Per Matt Levine—Money Stuff, Sep 19, 2024
A super silly heuristic I often use is “What media do you consume?”. Intuitively, it kinda make sense as a sort of an informational parallel to the old adage “You are what you eat.” Look at their spotify/RSS/blogging/shortform-video consumption habit tends to inform me whether A or B would at least have a decent first conversation. But this seems much better at matching friends than partners—presumably common interest and shared consumption of information is a slightly less important factor in continued romantic life (because there are so many other things!).
Is it Moskovitz’s “irrational” responses that got him or a set of rather legible needs like “avoiding funding anything that might have unacceptable reputational costs for Dustin Moskovitz”?
we irrationally expect everyone else to be rational..
I am not sure that we do? I think we are not immune to the typical mind fallacy. But there is plenty of talk around these parts about optimal strategies when confronted with irrational opponents—the correct decision is not always throwing away your own rationality. Communicating with emotional people with the languages they can resonate with seems like a fine practice of rationality.
Now, that is strawmanning a little bit. Perhaps this is talking about a maximum exploitative strategy against irrational/imperfect agents?
Does this some right to you as a toy model?:
You are a chess grandmaster. One day, you are challenged by a youth of hubris—the youth is clearly going to benefit from been taking down a peg or two for his development.
If you play as if you are facing a near-peer opponent, you will likely win but that is not optimizing enough for humiliation (and you knew humiliation is good for his devlopment). Been the chess grandmaster you are and the fact that you had been a callous youth in your haydays, you know you can easily model your opponent’s next moves; they will likely make more inaccuracies than you and you are loathed to not take advantage of the situation. So you do, and you make somewhat inaccurate moves in anticipation of them playing badly and thus, maximizing the humiliation potential.
Woud the chess example be a case where a rational agent is rationally expecting the opponents to be irrational?
Thanks! I have built these before I ran into cleanairkits and the school of thought that “lower efficiency with higher throughput is better”—I think per dollar, their CADR is likely quite a bit better! Looking at their Exhalaron line up—we have what is essentially two of my style of filter glued and tension-ed down in a portable package.
And a similar HEPA filter is used here as well. With two fans that are each nominally figure of 75 CFM. 92cfm / 2 / 75cfm = 61% - instead of the 80% figure I handwaved! (the new numbers should be up soon that is based on a more economical P14 setup instead of the P12.)
I think Thomas’s “Instead of using HEPA to ‘one-shot’ (original design intention) the air filtration task, the ‘few-shot’ approach with much higher through put with a MERV 13ish lvl of efficency is generally better” is mostly correct. I see that Dynomight’s IKEA filter investigations have also made a similar conclusion (although it is more in the case of HEPA vs MORE HEPA).
However, I didn’t want to 3D print/jerryrig an enclosure to fit in the recommended filters, and where I am, I couldn’t source a nice self-supporting (non-HEPA) filter that I can easily plop a fan onto. But if I had some more spare time, the cleanairkits folks that Zac mentioned built basically a “quieter rectangular box with fans on the small sides, and non-HEPA filters on the big sides”—and that’s what I want eventually.
For those interested in Chinese philosophy, I’d suggest 韩非子 (Han Feizi), which offers a thoughtful meta-analysis of earlier philosophers like Laozi and contemporaries such as Xunzi, in so far as their thoughts applied to statecraft. (The first Emperor was a big fan of the work.). Note: Avoid the Burton Watson translation.
This recommendation assumes some basic knowledge of Chinese history.
For those new to the subject, [Recommendation to come, I am trying to find the English version for a children’s book to Chinese Philosophy and History] might be a better starting point. → No translation found. Will update if I run into anything better.
My recommendations are based on several key considerations:
Quality of available translations
Relevance to Western readers
Focus on state-building as both an entry point and a way to understand how philosophy shaped Chinese governance
Historical impact on actual governance
Chinese statebuilding is a very relevant lens because how early the Chinese started to concentrate executive power. The legalist school makes sense because the state was able to codify law staffed with court officers instead of relying on customary law enforced by local notables (thou the latter still happened a lot). And for Confucianism, for almost all of its existence, saw the best way to enact their worldly vision was through influencing the Emperor/King and their imperial/monarchial apparatus; Chinese philosophy is very much Chinese Political Philosophy. (Besides things like Xuanxue, ofc.)
While Mozi and Xunzi are often recommended here, I’ve found they might not be the most accessible entry points. Mozi, while interesting, had relatively limited historical influence compared to other schools of thought—being more well known to lay Chinese audience by his portrayals in historical dramas than his works. It would be somewhat like introducing Western philosophy through a lesser-known PreSocratic philosopher – potentially interesting but perhaps not the most representative starting point.
I’ve found that Chinese philosophy becomes more accessible when viewed through the lens of practical governance, as this provides concrete examples of how these ideas were implemented. Governance, being a universal concept, offers familiar ground for readers from any background and which ever cardinal direction. Additionally, many philosophical classics about governance have been reinterpreted over time, making them more approachable for modern readers.
TLDR: Chinese philosophy is firmly attached to Chinese history just like Western philosophy to the history of the Church. Gonna know both and let them bounce off each other.
I did read the original. It was long and I skimmed it. It was better in the coherence-sense that the OOP didn’t post a probability on whether it is true or not. Hell, the OOP hedged it by saying “ Do I believe what I’m saying? Well, yes and no”.
I guess the core of my confusion is the radical mismatch in confidence projection in its explicit form and implicit form (through tone and context setting). [Note: the updated wording definitely tempers the expectations in the right direction, thou still a bit bonkers at first glance.]
50% is extremely high. And lighthearted tones are often used to convey a sense of “I know this is farfetched theory. But I hold this strong claim very/appropriately weakly”.
Though not meant as derision, it is absolutely wild to read “Though I don’t know that much about orcas” and “50% that orcas could do superhuman scientific problem solving” in the same paragraph.
My uneasiness with this post is that I am not sure how serious/joking the post is. It has some of the hallmark of a relatively lighthearted post written in a serious way. (The interaction with the IP, for example) And tones of conversation is light at parts. Yet the call to actions are confusing—it is not really motivating and seems to offload responsibility too eagerly for someone that actually believes what they are writing about.
I am very confused about the post and not sure what to think about it.
Stephen puts it elegantly. Though for me who is more of a code monkey, I’d like to think of it as “Runtime Non-Zero cost type safety through some const generics”.
I can see how the article can be convincing. But it is worth it to keep in mind that Hunterbrook is also a hedge fund that trades on their own news—an obvious case of potential alignment failure if there ever was one. Though I am not sure if they are shorting this one.
Perhaps more damningly:
Jiangsu Pacific Quartz Co., Ltd. (SHA: 603688) produces HPQ in China. Earlier this year, state legislators evaluated North Carolina House Bill 385, which could ban ownership of local quartz mines by foreign entities from countries designated as adversarial to the U.S., such as China.
Per the Hunterbrook article.
PS: It is likely critical, but I am more uncertain about it being a single point. Unless we are limiting ourselves to the allegorical West.
A quick sanity check on the Chinese side of the web had revealed a couple of manufacturers for semi-conductor grade quartz, allegedly with manufacturing and processing centres in Jiangsu, CN.
My prior on this product type actually being a critical single point of failure is low.
See below: http://www.quartzpacific.com/api/upload/uploadService/dowloadEx?fileId=1113&tenantId=147391 ^Product spec (one of many semiconductor grade product shape) http://zj.people.com.cn/BIG5/n2/2023/0316/c186327-40338436.html ^investment news on new sites and manufacturing capacity
It doesn’t seem like you are arguing that breastfeeding is universally more convenient than formula. But breast feeding can be very inconvenient:
It is often painful
Elevated chance of inflammation
Public spaces are not setup for mothers to breast feed; some may not value it, but a lot of people value privacy.
Formula’s convenience lays in enabling asynchronous feeding of the baby—by separating the role of the producer and the role of the feeder, the other partner can take care of the baby whilst the mother sleeps.
Another compromise to make is store breast milk and reheating it on demand!
On Lesswrong being a dispersed internet community:
If the ACX survey is informative here, discussing local policy works surprisingly well here! I’d say a significant chunk of people are in the Bay Area at large and Boston/NYC/DC area—it should be enough of a cluster to support discussions of local policy. And policies in California/DC has an oversized effect on things we care about as well.
Great stuff! I don’t have strong fundamentals in math and statistics but I was still able to hobble along and understand the post. It reminds me of what Rissanen said about data/observation—that data is really all we have, and there is no true state of nature. Our job is to squeeze as much alpha out of observation as possible, instead of trying to find a “true” generator function. This post hit the same spot for me :)