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Pascal's Wager doesn't go far enough:
Granted, the Christian God offers infinite rewards, but as far as I can find this is always in terms of "eternal" life or "eternal" communion with him, and so we can be confident that he is offering rewards only as large as the cardinality of the continuum.
So come on down to Crazy Georg's Omega Plus First Church of G...d: If you can conceive of a God advertising any size of infinite reward, G...d will match it.
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Granted, the Christian God offers infinite rewards, but as far as I can find this is always in terms of "eternal" life or "eternal" communion with him, and so we can be confident that he is offering rewards only as large as the cardinality of the continuum.
FWIW I think it's plausible that the Greek words used in the NT doesn't have this sort of connotation.
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I found this relevant and interesting chapter from Unsong by thinking "hmm, but Omega is an ancient word in some sense, and it's been more recently used in the context of infinities... and Jesus also referred to 'alpha and omega' to represent something like infinitude. So I can probably make a joke about kabbalah. Oh, but Scott Alexander will have already done that."
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On Friday I tried to show @Daniel Filan how FT8 works, but I was having a really hard time getting QSOs. I was worried something was wrong with my #hamradio antenna setup, since the internet claimed that band conditions should be good. But this afternoon and evening I had a great time and got 17 QSOs across 5 different bands! So I think Friday must have been something transient rather than my (very janky) setup degrading.
I now have confirmed QSOs in 40 states, and unconfirmed ones in all but 3! (North Dakota, Delaware, and Vermont. Almost managed to get one in Delaware today, but wasn't quite able to complete the protocol) Plus 28 "DX entities" (mostly countries, but includes e.g. Alaska and Hawaii separately) on 6 continents!
Map of listening stations that heard me this afternoon:
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Ended up deactivating my facebook yesterday. I wish I could have emotionally handled whatever was going on, but the only way I know how to productively deal with expressions of anger at that depth, apparently doesn't scale past one or two people at a time.
Last night I felt really conflicted about it. Like, I had just been trying to get people to give me harsh feedback, hadn't I? Doesn't this undermine that, or feel like a petty table-flipping move?
I still have some of those worries, but today I'm feeling like it was obviously the right move. Like if I had a gangrenous limb or something and had cut it off: It's pretty awful that I lost a limb, but it's way better than losing my whole self. Plus in this case I can reattach it if I figure out how to get rid of the gangrene.
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Jeroen Henneman, The Long Way Home
From: https://x.com/opancaro/status/186529216161008481
Wilhelm Kranz
From: https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1865291905249980735
#art
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if $3000 is too much to ask them to pay you back, surely they should at least pay you the maximal amount that isn't too much :P
minimally you could be like "I don't think it's fair for me to charge you the full amount but if you could think about what seems affordable / reasonable to you and pay me that I would be grateful"
although tbh I think it kind of is fair to at least suggest they might pay the full amount, even if you don't want to insist on it
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it feels to me like in public writing there is an axis of ownership, personal writing vs. collaborative writing, and there's also an axis of completion, from publishing things that are done and no longer changed, to publishing things that are updated and amended and try to reflect your latest thoughts on something.
personal blogs are a thing
collaborative wikis are a thing
collaborative blogs are... somewhat a thing?
personal wikis are... much more rarely a thing?
but I think I want a personal wiki
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The other downside:
the delimited continuations in OCaml must be used linearly – every captured continuation must be resumed either with a continue or discontinue exactly once. Attempting to use a continuation more than once raises a Continuation_already_resumed exception.
It is left to the user to ensure that the captured continuations are resumed at least once. Not resuming continuations will leak the memory allocated for the fibers as well as any resources that the suspended computation may hold.
whereas I think Koka ensures things don't leak and also lets you resume multiple times, so you can do things like this: github.com/koka-lang/koka/blob…
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Apparently I was wrong about the standard library not having a sort function - it's just undocumented AFAICT! github.com/TimWhiting/advent-2…
Oh, I see, it's in the community std library: github.com/koka-community/std/…
advent-2024/day1.kk at main · TimWhiting/advent-2024
Contribute to TimWhiting/advent-2024 development by creating an account on GitHub.GitHub
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:o
However, I should mention that I may be hallucinating these specific book titles and dates since I don't have access to a current book database.
- Claude Sonnet 3.6
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so I've long had an issue with my laptop battery, and e.g. in Windows had to figure out how to configure it from the command line to really never emergency shutdown when plugged in, which inexplicably you can't do from the UI
on Linux I knew it didn't last long, although mercifully I didn't have that issue specifically
Today (after buying a replacement battery at no small expense, but not having fitted it yet) I tried an experiment to try to set a baseline to see if the new battery would really be better, so I started up my laptop not plugged in. As usual, the battery charge reported immediately like 3%, and shortly thereafter 0%, where it stayed for two hours of normal usage before the emergency shutdown kicked in.
Obviously two hours is not a great battery life either, but I was expecting like five minutes and probably wouldn't have bothered buying a replacement if I knew it was capable of that. Oh well.
New AXRP! With Evan Hubinger!
This time I won't retract it, I swear!
The 'model organisms of misalignment' line of research creates AI models that exhibit various types of misalignment, and studies them to try to understand how the misalignment occurs and whether it can be somehow removed. In this episode, Evan Hubinger talks about two papers he's worked on at Anthropic under this agenda: "Sleeper Agents" and "Sycophancy to Subterfuge".
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EA: run by 1 or 2 extremely powerful guys who sometimes turn out to be deranged and corrupt. A woman called Julia is also involved.
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I think web-of-trust is underused for spam and abuse prevention.
e.g. there could be a pretty simple "endorse" button for each account, which is basically saying "I vouch that this person is a real human and not a troll/spammer". Webs/chains of endorsement could be used to prove that someone ought to be able to interact with you. And for any given active interaction attempt ("react", "friend request", "tag"), there could be an opportunity to mark it as "spam", and accounts with lots of spam could become untrusted, and accounts that endorse lots of spam accounts could become untrusted as well.
In principle you could even implement this in an entirely decentralized way with some public-key crypto, though it might be too expensive in practice.
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Latin practice day 7
These aren't very inspired but:
I. Cūr quaeque littera Graeca pulchrior est quam quaeque littera Latīna?
II. Sī linguam Latīnam scīre vult, quotiēs quamque litteram Latīnam scrībere necesse est?
III. Vōlōne ā magistrō laudārī?
IV. In Capitulō XVI, quia Dominus Iēsus tempestātem facit apud navem Lydiae? Lydia ā Deō dīligiturne?
V. Num medicus labōrans vērē sanat hominēs aegrōs?
VI. Num parēntēs laudant magister discipulōs verberāntem?
VII. Suntne bēstiolae industriorēs quam apēs? Quid facit illae?
VIII. Quia dea est pulcherrima?
IX. Hōdiē, quae bonae rēs daminī ā deī?
Hōdiē sum in domō parentum matris mea, in Arizonā. In hāc domō, saepe dormō in lectō parvō in cubiculō parvō, sed hōdiē habeō magnum cubiculum ac magnum lectum. Cēnābam cum parentibus matris meus, et cum amīcīs suīs. Aliī hominēs ēdēbant magnam avem, sed ego edēbam botulōs quī ex holeribus fīunt, nam Pythagoricus sum. Cōnspiciēbāmus pēs-pilam (harpastum? calcifollem? I guess Vicipaedia uses "Harpastum") - Leōnēs Detroitī, quī amantur ā parentēs matris meus, vincēbant contra Ursōs Sicāgoensis!
(I only know the imperfect past tense, forgive me)
I suspect Relativistic Newcomb doesn't help much. I think most people would say "I'm already in the world where the opaque box contains money" as soon as they were no longer in the past lightcone of the moment where that gets decided, even if they weren't (yet) in its future lightcone either. It's more about whether information can still get from you to it, than about whether information can get from it to you.
The Sleeping Beauty case does seem good, though.
(for the avoidance of doubt, you do not need to explain to me why one-boxing is better :P )
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Every country in the world belongs to America
Shouldn't the US buy the Vatican?
- they're rapidly going bankrupt and could use the money
- Trump would go for it
- the US is the new Rome
- would bring the US tons of geopolitical power
- new place to station US troops without any restrictions
- probably will ensure all Americans go to heaven
- zero downsides
Am I missing something?????
:o vlang looks... very very cool to me. I am surprised that it's more than 5 years old, since it seems to offer many things that I've been wanting from a programming language and periodically searching for without luck:
- Sum types
- interfaces/traits/similar
- generics
- Reasonably fast at runtime (roughly on par with e.g. Go, from what I can tell)
- optional GC
- cares about development time (e.g. compilation times are fast)
- cares about various kinds of safety (not as much as Rust, more than Zig). I think there are some substantial tradeoffs here around what happens if you avoid using the GC, since I think there's no borrow checking; e.g. does the stdlib have types that grow and invalidate your references?
- extremely good cross-platform support (cross-compile GUI libraries for ~any platform including mobile, except that you can only build for macOS from macOS)
Basically it seems like they've added the ~3 features whose lack has made Go unpleasant for me when I've tried to use it.
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I think one of the key helpful things about my OCaml experience was learning about how much typeclass stuff can or can't be replaced with other mechanisms (e.g. making it convenient to locally control namespaces so that you can easily specify "I want X from module Y" instead of having it be type-driven).
It both lets you notice when you shouldn't (or at least needn't) be using ad-hoc polymorphism but also when you really do need it (e.g. OCaml I think would struggle to properly replicate Traversable and some other higher-order-polymorphism things).
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New episode with Jesse Hoogland!
Another short one, I'm afraid.
You may have heard of singular learning theory, and its "local learning coefficient", or LLC - but have you heard of the refined LLC? In this episode, I chat with Jesse Hoogland about his work on SLT, and using the refined LLC to find a new circuit in language models.
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@Daniel Filan apparently the "learning ancient Latin and Greek involves example texts about daily life heavily involving slaves" thing dates at least back to ancient Roman schools for learning Greek.
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Lieke van der Vorst
From: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1861148591479288294/photo/1
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Elena and Anna Balbusso
for Little Knife by Leigh Bardugo
From: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1861127999581528531/photo/1
#art
Franz Karl Leopold von Klenze
From: https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1861121676735586756/photo/1
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Chesley Knight Bonestell, Jr.
From: https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1861297334195495170/photo/1
#art
IMO it's kind of weird that there aren't more blog posts in the rationality-sphere about how to do group house living well. There are a bunch of tricky problems that need solving and opportunities for clever solutions that make people better off, so you'd think there would be much fodder. Possibilities:
- Maybe people just don't think about it very much?
- "Group house living" isn't as culturally salient a category as "parenting", so we're not used to writing about it?
- Most of the problems involve being kind of annoyed at specific people, and so are inherently awkward to talk about?
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Yeah reading this I was like 'wow a lot of our lore is about chores'. I guess because this came up as an issue with us, whereas 'there are conflicts/annoyances with the other people' hasn't come up as much, possibly because two of the relationships were selected specifically for not being mutually annoying :p (and luckily you and Ben seem to not annoy each other that much)
Maybe the main tip is 'try to select people you really vibe with/share living preferences with', and if you manage that you will be well-placed to either not have problems (because your preferences don't clash), or to solve them?
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