I never want to go viral — well, unless I figure out how to become comfortable with getting a ton of mean comments from strangers. It seems like this happens basically no matter what you go viral for.
Like, the mob will be much more aggro if you're viral for something controversial. But even the most innocuous things will attract lots of mean comments, if enough people see it.
And people are biased to weight negative comments more highly, so I worry this has a rough psychological impact even if there's a lot more support than there is hate. (Unsure about this though. Maybe that's not the case. And maybe people who go viral are more ok hearing insults than average?)
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So I've been listening to Hadestown 2010. One of my favorites is Hey, Little Songbird. It's just such a pushy, patient, practical, sinister vibe, and pushes the narrative forward at the same time.
Lyrically:
The extended bird metaphor is really fun. Especially with all these phrases that are flipped from their typical positive connotation.
"fly south for the winter" [south = the underworld]
"I could use a canary" [He wants a songbird for music, but this line comes right after a reference to "down in the mine"]
Structurally:
Whenever Hades comes back in after Eurydice's part, he overlaps on her last word, which adds to the pushy feel to the song. (Eurydice doesn't start singing till he's fully finished.) Also, Hades' part has this lovely AABBC structure. The extra C line on each stanza makes it feel like he's taking his time.
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Happy New AXRP!
Yet another in the Alignment Workshop series.
AI researchers often complain about the poor coverage of their work in the news media. But why is this happening, and how can it be fixed? In this episode, I speak with Shakeel Hashim about the resource constraints facing AI journalism, the disconnect between journalists' and AI researchers' views on transformative AI, and efforts to improve the state of AI journalism, such as Tarbell and Shakeel's newsletter, Transformer.
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Someone linked me to the article Against SQL recently and it resonates with me a lot. I have a temptation to write a new SQL-like relational query language that tries to fix as many of these problems as I can, but this seems unreasonably ambitious for someone whose background is not databases (and who already has like 3 personal projects ongoing...)
(To be clear, I think unreasonable ambition is sometimes commendable. But I want projects that I'll actually finish.)
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Idle thought: I wonder if we'll start seeing "training@home" training runs for open-source LLMs. Anyone care to run some numbers or sanity checks on whether this is possible in principle?
The folding@home project has been hugely successful, reaching at least exaFLOPS of compute.
"Training@home" would have to efficiently do partial gradient updates on extremely heterogeneous hardware with widely varying network properties; I'm not sure if this has any chance of producing base models competitive with e.g. Llama. In terms of ops alone, a 1 exaFLOPS network would have taken 10^7 seconds = ~half a year to train Llama 70b, and I imagine the costs of distributing jobs to such a network and coordinating on weight updates would make this much more expensive. So, probably not going to be competitive?
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I would guess that there will be reasons to at least want an LLM trained on an open corpus, whether it's community-trained or not.
Example reasons include ensuring that the model isn't secretly trying to get you to buy McDonalds, and the possibility that companies start releasing un-fine-tunable models.
Happy new year superstims!
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I am probably being too problem-solvey right now and I hereby to resolve to stop after this round, but in my experience, arborists are willing to produce documentation of their findings that can later be shown to landlords!
You just sound sad about your antenna and I wanna fix it.
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I've been meaning to start donating blood and/or plasma for a few years now, partly because it's a good thing to do, but also as a way to shed accumulating substances (PFASs have been studied, but also background heavy metals in the case of whole blood donation), but I use topical finasteride for hair loss, which I'd have to stop for a month before donating.
So, say I took a month off from finasteride, and then spent a month donating: whole blood once, and plasma 7 times. If my math is right, I'd have donated / regenerated 1 - 0.92^8 = ~half my blood volume; and ~10% of my body weight. Then maybe back to finasteride for two months, another month of no finasteride, and another donation month?
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I'm finding it really hard to make #hamradio contacts in Delaware. Weirdly hard, given that the five states with smaller populations than Delaware were all much easier, even though some of them are further from me, and I've had no trouble making contacts in its neighboring states.
A few days ago I decided to try to be more strategic about contacting every US state since I was really close, and I've now spent probably twice the time trying to contact Delaware, as trying to contact all four of the other stragglers combined.
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Lately I’ve been enjoying listening to the album Inside by Mother Mother, which is very much about pandemic isolation. Makes me think: wow I sure do love a concept album!
Common features in concept albums that I really enjoy:
- Explorations of the same ideas from different angles.
- Connections between songs — a song about infatuation hits different after you hear it referenced later in a heartbreak song.
- figuring out the gestalt ideas and the way they’ve changed in the artist’s head over time.
- Taking the time to explore the little details and nuances that fit between the radio singles ab peak experiences.
- Intros, outros, interludes. Having a structural dynamics like this makes listening to the whole thing a satisfying longform experience.
Happy to hear any recommendations for other compelling concept albums, or other music that hits the above features. (I mostly listen to indie rock, folk, pop, psychedelic, etc, but happy to try new things!)
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Today I was inspired to ask ChatGPT for help with my health issues for the first time since o1 was released. It suggested that I might have Cushing's Syndrome, which actually makes a lot of sense. I don't think any doctors ever suggested this directly, but I do have a recollection of a doctor asking me if I was extremely thirsty or urinating a lot (I wasn't), which might have been a question for a relevant differential.
So hopefully tomorrow I'm going to wake up and go get a cortisol test.
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A question bopping around my mind: are there things like making AXRP or being a MATS RM that I could do instead of those things that would be more valuable? Possible answers:
- just do research that matters
- project manager at a place that does research that matters
- be more directly a competitor to Zvi
- team up with Lawrence Chan and write stuff about various alignment schemes
I think a bottleneck I feel is being unsure about what things are valuable in the info environment, where I think I'm best placed to do stuff.
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Ok random update on this. I now have a suspicion that I had physical trauma-effects that were delayed (and longer-lasting) compared to the psychological effects
The noticeable psychological impacts started after a day or so, and lasted maybe 4-5 days?
And I didn't have post-exertional malaise (PEM) right after the incident. But I started getting PEM really easily from other stuff
Here are charts from one of my health trackers. The incident was on the 17th. The top chart is my physical exertion per day (measured with HR data). (Ignore the final entry -- it's only so low because the day just started.) The bottom chart is my morning HRV readings. As you can see, they trended lower for a while after the incident.
Perhaps this decline will persist, but in the last few days, I started getting the feeling that I'm returning to a somewhat-less-severe baseline
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Solstice notes
- I like that the celebration took place on (or adjacent to) the actual solstice
- I broadly thought this year's was worse than last year's, altho it had its charms
- I liked "Humankind as a sailor" - tricky to pick up but rewarding once you did
- Just because a song takes place in Australia, I don't think it thereby glorifies the negative aspects of colonialism.
- The darkness speech was touching this year
- I feel like a lot of the time the speaker would say something I straightforwardly agreed with in the way I would say it and everyone would laugh.
- It was funny when Ozy said her favourite website was Our World in Data and Scott sang the praises of Dustin Moskowitz while I was sitting next to Oli
- I think "the world is awful" is wrong, and not established by there being awful things in the world.
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A big chunk of my current best-guess political philosophy is somewhat libertarian, the rough intuition being that in many important respects, things very often go better when people make their own choices, especially about how much things are worth to them.
This is a helpful framework when the agents in your economy / political system are relatively static entities. But as far as I know it doesn't really have anything to say about cases where one agent might mold another agent's preferences, or decide which agents to bring into existence.
Some examples include:
- having children
- many aspects of how children are raised
- building AI agents
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Population ethics is the ~one area where my moral intuitions bottom out at "there is no actual answer here". Most questions of morality intuitively feel like there is a right answer but thinking about population ethics consistently leaves me with no solid foundations and nowhere to get foundations.
(Related: how should we think about farming animals for meat, given that mostly they wouldn't exist otherwise?)
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Proposed fun / slightly edgy party game: Perzendo
Materials: index cards and a pencil, or a google doc.
One player is the perzendo master. This perzendo master writes the names of two people in the room, in a list sorted by some secret property.
The other players take turns. On each turn, a player either proposes a name (of any human, living or dead), or tries to guess the property. The perzendo master puts these names on the list, wherever they fall according to the secret property.
The first player to guess the rule correctly wins.
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moving to alameda
I am currently in Sunnyvale, and it's genuinely astonishing how much less stuff there is down here than in the East Bay / SF. Like, people who are physically within San Jose still refer to San Francisco as "the city" despite San Jose having more people. Of the ~six dance events I'd like to be regularly going to, two are in SF and four are in Oakland, and zero are south of SF. Used to be one, where I met my wife, but it never recovered from Covid.
I'd guess there's more families in Sunnyvale than Oakland (... fact check: Sunnyvale is 20% minors, Oakland is 21%, so this is not true unless you quibble about definitions).
On the other hand Alameda is, from what I can tell, basically an ideal place for raising a family, and a lot of the island seems to lean into that (lots of Halloween decorations, e.g.; Halloween is our only child-focused holiday so this is a good signal of caring about doing things for children). And it's close to the rest of the East Bay, so I'm hoping I can get both the "good for family" and the "things ever happen" properties.
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Yeah I've also shaved most of this yak herd before, and found it very frustrating :/ I think last time I ended up using Tutanota?
I guess in the movies they just want to use SMS or something.
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TIL that an experience that I've had ~once every month or so for my whole life, and assumed was near-universal, is actually relatively rare, and correlated with various bad things that I'm not aware of experiencing in relation to it (EBV infection, migraines, head trauma).
Basically, as I experience it (typically right as I'm falling asleep) everything visually starts to feel very small and far away, except that my tongue feels large and cumbersome in my mouth.
It's called Alice in Wonderland Syndrome; other people experience similar size distortions though the details vary a lot.
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Mercer Girls
There are a bunch of places around Seattle named Mercer: Mercer Street, Mercer Island, Mercer Slough. We were walking in Mercer Slough today and I was trying to explain about Asa Mercer (one of the historical figures all this stuff is named after). I looked him up later. He looked like this.
One of his big claims to fame is that he brought the Mercer Girls to Seattle. Saith wikipedia:
The Mercer Girls or Mercer Maids were women who chose to move from the east coast of the United States to the Seattle area in the 1860s at the invitation of Asa Mercer. Mercer, an American who lived in Seattle, wanted to "import" women to the Pacific Northwest to balance the gender ratio. The women were drawn by the prospect of moving to a boomtown with a surplus of bachelors.
Now I'm imagining moving to Seattle in the 1860s and discovering that the men in Seattle did their hair like that. I am not entirely sure I would stay!
How much nesting can we do in English verb tenses, and what controls that? For an example of what I mean, I can say:
- I eat
- I will eat
- I will have been eating
- I will have been going to eat
But I don't think we can say "I will have been going to have eaten".
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One possibility: basically it goes as far as it makes sense to add extra timing information. But this only works if you disagree about your last positive example, which I personally don't actually think I've ever heard used.
Like, imagine a timeline. "I eat" describes a period of time encompassing now. "I will eat" describes a period of time in the future. "I will have eaten" describes two times; one in the future and one in the past of that future. "I will have been going to eat" describes a time in the future, a time in the past of that future, and a time in the future of that past of the first future. But in some sense this collapses back to the semantic content of "I will eat", and so my guess is that it's basically never used.
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I think what I mean is that additional times around the loop aren't really adding any extra information, because they introduce new reference points along the timeline that typically don't connect to anything else.
Like, there's some implicit time T that I'm trying to locate with a given statement, and there's an additional time Now that I get from just being in the present.
It makes sense to be like "Some time between Now and [implicitly / contextually defined] T, X will happen", and this is ~ the two-level wrapping. But if you say "Some time between Now and [newly introduced / 'bound' / 'scoped-to-this-statement'] T1, it will be the case that X happened after [implicit / 'free' / contextual] T2", T1 is kind of irrelevant, since it's introduced and used only within the statement.
In principle I guess you could have extra context that disambiguates, but I think it's also kinda relevant that verbs tend to have a subject, a direct object, and up to one indirect object, and typically not more than that.
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Overall sounds really exciting 🙂 - I hope the holidays are as unstressful as it's reasonable to hope for; sounds like a huge effort!
I have never heard of geezer gyms; maybe I should look into this?
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The UHC CEO murder has made me feel like I'm surrounded by bad people. I get the sense that "the UHC CEO assassination was good" is the default leftist stance.
It seems so absurd to me. They agree that people are innocent til proven guilty, but they're happy for CEOs to get executed based on a really flimsy understanding of their behavior.
Someone who runs prominent events I enjoy posted something that was (IMO) kind of misguided and cruel. I used to think "maybe these people would hate me if they knew my views" -- now I'm thinking "maybe *I* can't accept *them*."
Hank Green expressed sympathy... for the murderer.
This is such hatred. Bigotry feels like an understatement.
I just ordered some colorful genderqueer clothing from an indie brand. Do they support the assassination? I want to pick up fresh local bread from Berkeley Bowl. What about them? Am I supporting bigots? I wish it were practical to get away from this.
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MOAR AXRP
This time with Erik Jenner, on a paper he's presenting at NeurIPS tomorrow - check it out if you're there!
Lots of people in the AI safety space worry about models being able to make deliberate, multi-step plans. But can we already see this in existing neural nets? In this episode, I talk with Erik Jenner about his work looking at internal look-ahead within chess-playing neural networks.
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