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man, dancing is great, I am glad the bay has so much of it
don't get to do it nearly as much now that I get up at 6am (for the child) but it's always worth it when I do
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More AXRP! Joel Lehman!
Typically this podcast talks about how to avert destruction from AI. But what would it take to ensure AI promotes human flourishing as well as it can? Is alignment to individuals enough, and if not, where do we go form here? In this episode, I talk with Joel Lehman about these questions.
Misty morning at Lanhydrock. Cornwall, England. NMP
From: https://x.com/HoganSOG/status/1882211656283111582/photo/1
#art
Junichiro Sekino 1914-1988
Night in Kyoto
#art
From: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1882215670282166390
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Tanaka Ryōhei (1933-2019)
Crow and Persimmon in the Snow
From: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1881097630148907230/photo/1
#art
Adria on AXRP!
Yet another new episode!
Suppose we're worried about AIs engaging in long-term plans that they don't tell us about. If we were to peek inside their brains, what should we look for to check whether this was happening? In this episode Adrià Garriga-Alonso talks about his work trying to answer this question.
6 days!
I'm probably starting my sixth day of feeling a lot more normal, health-wise. (Don't know for sure til later in the day.)
I might have returned to the level of health I was at in mid Dec — which was concerningly-bad at the time, but things got significantly worse after that.
While I'm feeling better, I'm trying to un-decondition my body a bit. Strategy: Walk a few minutes, get tired, and then put myself in a quiet/dark/controlled/alone environment to conduct Optimal Rest
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the desire for portability is so that I can easily take it to and from work
I think for now I will try doing this with my existing keyboard but I suspect it will be annoying
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A partial list of people whose art I've loved, and who I might have liked to be friends with, but who I think would not like me very much (all for different reasons):
- Ursula K. LeGuin (I'm not MtG Green enough)
- Ayn Rand (I'm too MtG Green)
- Ezra Koenig (I'm too MtG Blue)
I'm not really sure how or why I generated this list. It feels related to the thing about wanting to get stronger, and deleting my facebook last month. It's kind of an "edge-y" question: I don't know how to emotionally deal with the existence of people in this category, but they go on existing.
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I feel like I'm living on the internet these days, since my health is too bad for in-person stuff. So it sucks that the internet is so much more aggro.
> My strategy so far in life has just been to avoid being the kind of person who attracts "sharp" / "angry" critics, and also to filter my social bubble to exclude them. But this doesn't scale if you're trying to do the things I'm trying to do.
What are you doing that is incompatible with filtering your social bubble?
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Re: method "c": I'm wondering if you could intentionally give yourself exposure to critics in a way that's less vulnerable. The most obvious ways to do this might be too insincere for your taste, but idk, maybe there's still something you can do?
Like if I were trying to do this, I might create an anonymous account and intentionally share my most controversial (yet unimportant) thoughts/opinions, in places where some people will probably get mad at me. (Hopefully not in a way that, like, antagonizes people? I'd want it to be net good.) Then I'd try to lean into a mindset that getting criticism is a necessary/normal part of getting noticed.
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The raddest palindrome I have ever written
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current progress on Bluesky OAuth login for my web app:
- you give me your Bluesky handle
- I have two methods of turning this into your DID, one via DNS and one via HTTP. I try both and use whichever works.
- Now I have your DID, I need to go get your DID document. There's more than one type of DID, but so far I've only bothered to support one, which I just fetch from the directory.
- Now I have your DID document, I can look up what your PDS is.
- Now I have your PDS, I can ask it where the authorization servers are.
- Now I've got an authorization server, I can ask it for the authorization server endpoints.
- Now I think I can start the OAuth process?
- It's not like the OAuth process is simple either
😵💫
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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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Daniel Filan
in reply to Daniel Filan • •