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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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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)
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