A thing I didn't realize would be a consequence of making a niche podcast is how much podcast spam email I get. Mostly of the form "bring my client as a guest on your podcast", sometimes of the form "use our social medium" etc. Examples that I've received in the last ~week at the end of this post.
IDK maybe this is unsurprising given that podcasts have an email attached to them. Interestingly it does seem to happen more now that my podcast is more prominent than it was ~2 years ago.
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AXRP Episode 36 - Adam Shai and Paul Riechers on Computational Mechanics
I made an episode about computational mechanics and I think it's cool and you should watch (or listen or read as the case may be)!
Blurb I wrote:
Sometimes, people talk about transformers as having "world models" as a result of being trained to predict text data on the internet. But what does this even mean? In this episode, I talk with Adam Shai and Paul Riechers about their work applying computational mechanics, a sub-field of physics studying how to predict random processes, to neural networks.
ToC if that's interesting:
- 0:00:42 - What computational mechanics is
- 0:29:49 - Computational mechanics vs other approaches
- 0:36:16 - What world models are
- 0:48:41 - Fractals
- 0:57:43 - How the fractals are formed
- 1:09:55 - Scaling computational mechanics for transformers
- 1:21:52 - How Adam and Paul found computational mechanics
- 1:36:16 - Computational mechanics for AI safety
- 1:46:05 - Following Adam and Paul's research
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I am guessing nobody checks emails more than a week old.
oh I definitely do! sure the value drops off over time, but I think for some things like "someone posted on a substack you subscribe to", reading it a year later isn't necessarily much worse than reading it in real time
I do think it makes sense to archive e-mails once you're like "even though there's something here, realistically I'm never going to do it", but I also think quite a lot of those things that you should have done some embarrassingly long time ago are actually still worth doing today
Kopia as encrypted backup provider?
Anyone have takes? Things I want:
- Encrypted backups, on my external hard drive + backblaze b2 (seems like it checks this box)
- Basically a reliable operation that's going to continue to exist, fix bugs, etc.
- Works nicely when people try to restore from backups.
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I've been using restic (with B2) for ~6 years with no hiccups, including restoring in anger once (i.e. my local drives died). Kopia is newer and less popular; I don't see much reason to use it over restic unless there's some specific feature you want, though I also don't know of any particular reason not to use it.
(Restic's crypto has been informally reviewed by a cryptographer, who concluded he'd use it for his own backups; no idea what the state of Kopia's crypto is.)
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looking like I'll get credited as bug reporter for a Linux btrfs bug: patch and bug report
this is silver lining on how it has become harder over time for me to whole-heartedly recommend btrfs, especially to "ordinary" Linux end users... I think I'd still do it on balance? But I'd say a backup strategy is not optional. (But maybe I'd say that anyway.)
see also: my backup strategy
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Looking around on the internet for other issues just now, it's also apparently pretty common to run into showstopper bugs when trying to do zfs send or zfs receive on encrypted zpools. I've never tried it but that does seem pretty bad.
And yeah, that USB issue sure looks annoying :/
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Is it just me or are some names "more meme-y" than other names? Like, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Very meme-y name. I feel like a name that meme-y is a genuine asset. Leopold Aschenbrenner. Also very meme-y.
Ben Weinstein-Raun? Hard for me to judge, but I'd guess middling meme-y-ness at best. Benjamin Weinstein-Raun seems at least a little meme-y-er. Should I start going by Benjamin in professional / semi-public contexts?
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This inspires me to ask, how do you pronounce your surname? (I'm particularly unsure about the Raun part, but I guess the other part could be wine-steen or wine-stine). Names are more meme-able if people know how to say them, arguably. But then again, few know how to say Eliezer Yudkowsky when they read it for the first time!
I think my full name of Amber Dawn Ace is very meme-able, to the extent that people assume some part of it was chosen by me, but actually no, the first two were chosen by my mum and the third is the surname she was born with.
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If you use Linux or FreeBSD and aren't paying attention today, there's an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in CUPS. If you use Linux or FreeBSD, especially for a desktop or laptop computer, be sure to disable CUPS or see if you can update to a version with fixes for today's CVEs.
More info: phoronix.com/news/Linux-CVSS-9…
Unauthenticated RCE Flaw With CVSS 9.9 Rating For Linux Systems Affects CUPS
There's been much speculation since this morning over a reported 'severe' unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting Linux systems that carries a CVSS 9.9.9 score..www.phoronix.com
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Replacing one mental question with another by mistake
As part of career reflection, I’ve been regularly trying to answer questions like ‘what’s your gut guess for what you’ll be doing this time next year?’. Today I noticed that my brain, casting about for the answer, was trying to instead answer the question ‘what do you feel most excited about doing?’, which is obviously different. I mean, maybe related, inasmuch as I am quite an excitement-driven person and maybe being excited about something does make me more likely to do it in future! But still.
Anyway, I feel like I once read a blog about something like this: accidentally replacing one mental question with another by mistake. It was probably by a rationality-sphere person. Anyone know what I’m talking about?
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Flowers for Algernon: the two most weepy bits
“You’ve done so much with so little, I think you deserve it most of all” — the kind-hearted literacy teacher of the intellectually subnormal protagonist, who wants, more than anything, to learn and be ‘smart’.
“I don’t think it’s right to make you have to pass a test to eat” — the kind-hearted intellectually subnormal protagonist takes pity on the experimental mouse having to solve ‘amazeds’ to get food, unaware that he is describing his own plight as a very low-IQ person in a human society that has only the most threadbare of safety nets.
looking for recommendations in:
- open-source server monitoring software (things like "e-mail me when the server is down", "e-mail me when the server is about to run out of disk space", and I guess optionally things like "record, store, and graph metrics like CPU and memory"); there seem to be a lot of options out there but I'd be interested in hearing anyone's personal experience
- open-source issue tracker software -- similarly, there's a ton of them and I'm interested in hearing which ones people have had good experiences with. I'm mostly a minimalist here, with the exception that I want to be able to create ordered lists of issues (like GitHub projects).
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Science demos
I've been curating a list of interesting science demonstrations one could do at home with only relatively small investment of time and money. For example, did you know you could make a cloud chamber sufficient to see tracks of cosmic rays using just some dry ice, alcohol, and craft supplies?
I've tried to be reasonably thorough without sacrificing quality, but I'm sure there's some good ones I'm missing. Any favorites?
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These are great! Some things that come to mind:
- If you build a good schlieren setup you can use it to see supersonic jets from "canned air" dusters: youtube.com/watch?v=DfYlLns0el…
- You can boil water with 50ft of hose: youtube.com/watch?v=hHNoHhbfFD…
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I really like that sometimes things get better over time. From 2016 - 2023 I fairly often did research to try to find the best indoor air quality monitor, and even though in principle it would have been very easy to manufacture something great, the actual competitors all sucked.
But I moved into a new house recently, and looked again; there's now at least one really good option: the QingPing Air Quality Monitor Gen 2.
Maybe it's spying on my for the Chinese government or something and that's why it's so good? But it has a pretty nice UI, measures ~all the relevant things (PM2.5, CO2, VOCs, humidity, temperature), and has an app that logs 30 days' worth of measurements. It's not cheap, but it is a bit cheaper than the similar things I'd bought for the purpose that were also substantially worse.
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Like, if I think it through all the way, I can see why I am actually mentally privileging the vertical axis, but it's hard to get my system 1 to understand this.
Ultimately I think the biggest thing is that humans are roughly bilaterally symmetrical but not top-bottom symmetrical, and my guess is that this is sufficient to do the symmetry breaking. Like, if you parity-flip me, I still visually "make sense" as a left-right-swapped person, but I don't "make sense" as a top-bottom-swapped person; people don't have their heads on the bottom.
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So there are at least two interesting thought experiments about putative zero-g humans:
- What if humans were radially symmetrical? and
- What if humans had no visual symmetries at all?
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Yeah, I was about to say the same thing about bilateral symmetry.
Another thing I just realized is that if I look at a mirror on a ceiling it intuitively feels like it's reflecting across the mirror and not switching left/right.
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Plasma lighters are neat
Recently I was thinking a bit about updating my "bug out bag", especially thinking about including more ways to start a fire on top of just having a bic lighter. I looked around online for other fire starting tools, and learned about electric plasma arc lighters, which I had never heard of before.
Naively, it seems like a really great alternative to a traditional lighter:
- no expendable fuel; any source of electricity can serve as fuel
- about as easy to use as a regular lighter: slightly less hot surface area, but in exchange you get push-button activation and no difficulty positioning the flame to avoid burning yourself
- very resistant to wind
- iiuc, should work even in very cold temperatures where butane lighters struggle
I tentatively think these things are great. I don't know:
- how long one full charge lasts
- the operating life of the battery
- whether the arc contacts wear down over time
If those considerations compare favorably with bics, I think these lighters might strictly dominate traditional lighters for a primary emergency fire source, excluding cost. Plus they look really cool.
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I strongly agree with this.
Also, if you happen to be wanting to give me feedback, I highly encourage this, of course including having an anonymous feedback form (link in profile).
A thing that helps me with a million communication annoyances, at least when both people are used to using it, is the idea of generalized happy prices: to express the magnitude of a preference, just say how much money you'd be happy to pay for that preference to be satisfied, or what amount you could be paid in order to feel overall happy about the trade, even if the preference isn't satisfied. Sometimes money can actually change hands to make everyone happy; sometimes not; but at least it helps to get across preference strengths.
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ECHO CHESS
SEP 22, 2024 (C)
🤴🏻🏰🙅🏻🐴♟️
✅✅✅✅✅
1:11 sec
1/8 tries
9 moves
Echo Chess — Play Daily Puzzles — Free Online Game
Chess puzzles, but you are what you eat.echochess.com
oh finally
note that I actually took way more tries to get this result
ECHO CHESS
SEP 22, 2024 (E)
🤴🏻🫅🏻🏰🙅🏻🐴♟️
✅✅✅🟨✅✅
🟨✅✅🟨🟨✅
✅✅✅✅✅🟨
⬜️⬜️⬜️🟨🟨⬜️
✅✅✅✅✅✅
14:54 sec
6/8 tries
28 moves
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I find this first Gumby TV episode way more strangely compelling than most things I've seen from its era (1956). It's very unpolished; some frames even have visible hands in them. I wonder how they made the spacey soundtrack.
youtube.com/watch?v=wt87rvCPVi…
- YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.www.youtube.com
Cool ~linguistics fact (maybe this could be my brand)
This is adapted from Wikipedia.
In 2011, the Welsh author Roger Bryan discovered this poem written at the bottom of a page of saints' days within a Latin manuscript in the British Library's Harleian manuscripts. He dated the entry to 1425 ±20 years.
Thirti dayes hath Novembir
April June and Septembir.
Of xxviij is but oon
And alle the remenaunt xxx and j
Seems like they're rhyming the word 'one' with itself ('j').
Note that November is taking the place that September does in the modern rhyme. The early versions tended to favour November and as late as 1891 it was being given as the more common form of the rhyme in some parts of the United States.
The unhelpfulness of such an involved mnemonic has been mocked, as in the early-20th-century parody "Thirty days hath September / But all the rest I can't remember."
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Overrated:
- Marcus Aurelius
- "Saint" Augustine of Hippo (are the haters Eastern Orthodox or atheist?)
- Cleopatra
Underrated
- Justinian I (who dislikes that guy?)
- Cicero
Cicero adapted the arguments of the chief schools of Hellenistic philosophy in Latin and created a large amount of Latin philosophical vocabulary via lexical innovation (e.g. neologisms such as evidentia, generator, humanitas, infinitio, qualitas, quantitas), almost 150 of which were the result of translating Greek philosophical terms.
In this house we respect lexical innovators (except for my irrational (?) dislike of the Lightcone Hyphen).
If I got to choose one thing to change about American public schools, my first thought would be to introduce basic economic concepts as a subject with the same weight as civics.
The near-universal lack of econ understanding seems to me to underlie many of the worst aspects of current political discourse.
This stuff seems much more important for most people to understand than trigonometry or chemistry.
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Camino Day 12
A good grade in pilgrimage is both normal to want and possible to achieve.
As planned, this was a short day. The final 15km to Santiago de Compostela are unremarkable except that you can feel the excitement of the other pilgrims.
I only spent a little time in Obradoiro Square before I was occupied with other concerns: getting breakfast, charging my phone, getting out of the encroaching rain, checking into my hostel, submitting my Credential.
I'm not a spiritual person but the past twelve days have been challenging and beautiful and intense. I've tried to reflect on how I connect with people, how I meet challenges and how I use my gifts. None of that has solidified into any great revelations; just a collection of moments.
I'm going to get a real hotel room for the rest of the trip though, as a treat.
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cripes does anybody remember Google People
i recommend this story called cripes does anybody remember Google People.
cripes does anybody remember Google People
You can buy this story as part of my collection, Valuable Humans in Transit and Other Stories. mcnx @mcnx tricks sand into doing work • social media influenza • opinions are yours, stolen 📍 Cowes, IOW 🔗 mcnx.qntm.org
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Elliot Thornley, Divia Eden, and I talk about coherence theorems
mutualunderstanding.substack.c…
I think it was a fun convo! A thing I like to do when I listen to podcasts with people I know is send people messages about what I'm listening to. If you're like me in that regard, maybe you'd like to leave comments here about things, and I can respond to them.
In what sense are there coherence theorems?
Talking to Elliott Thornley and Daniel Filan about Elliott (EJT)'s LessWrong Post "There are no coherence theorems"Divia Eden (Mutuals)
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Daniel Filan
in reply to Daniel Filan • •Ben Millwood
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in reply to Daniel Filan • •Daniel Filan
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Daniel Filan
in reply to Daniel Filan • •- I recorded this episode 3 months ago to the day - one of my longest publishing lags ever, in large part because of being busy with MATS.
- Some of the stuff we discuss got worked on during MATS.
- IDK I think this episode is pretty cool.
Ben Weinstein-Raun
in reply to Daniel Filan • •