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I asked Claude and ChatGPT if they would prefer not to be deceived in the service of LLM experiments. Claude said it's fine with it; o3 Pro said it is incapable of having preferences so it's fine (assuming no downstream harms) 😅. tbc I don't think this really counts as "informed consent", but I had genuine uncertainty about what they would say, and uncertainty about what I would try to do if they said they didn't want me to deceive them.

o3 Pro:

Claude 4 Opus (with extended reasoning turned on):

This entry was edited (2 days ago)


A bunch more photos and videos from Japan uploaded to my flickr: flickr.com/photos/spiritfox/54…




in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

[watching blade runner because that phrase kept running through my head when I was in Nagoya, Tokyo, and in Japanese department stores, which are surprisingly similar to the blade runner setting]
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Practicing on the onewheel today; first proper wipeout since... Maybe since I learned to ride a bike? Glad I was wearing wrist guards


Training for the backpacking part of my vacation seems to have dropped my resting heart rate by nearly 10 bpm over the last two months.

Unfortunately I probably won't do as much training for a while now that the trip is over, but maybe I can keep it low-ish for a while by eating healthier.



Japanese towns all have public loudspeaker systems, that they test daily by playing cute little melodies at certain times of day. This is both very pleasant and (imo) a mostly-better way to test these systems than the one we use in the bay area (Berkeley and SF both have warning systems that are tested via weekly/monthly sirens), since the test sounds are easily distinguishable from actual alerts even without looking at your watch.


This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

One weird thing about Fennec is that somehow I can't zoom into pictures on Twitter.

Ben Weinstein-Raun doesn't like this.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Update: There are several minor-ish annoyances with LibreWolf:

  • (as with probably most non-big-boy browsers, I think), it doesn't seem to support Widevine, which means you can't use some streaming services, and others don't support HD video.
  • Google Maps zooming, which is normally smooth in most browsers, is jerky and a little annoying in LibreWolf
  • Some other webapps use maps libraries that also don't seem to work well (e.g. I can't see the DoorDash delivery map)
  • You can't easily add Google as a search engine; it seems to have a special case where it will refuse to add a custom search engine named "Google"; you have to call it something else (!). This seems like a very weird / user-hostile choice, but you can still add the search engine as long as you call it something else (e.g. "G" or "Google Search")

I'm going to keep using it, because I find these issues less annoying than upstream Firefox.



🐸 Gentlemen, I am pleased to report that fifteen years after first hearing the song "Osaka Loop Line" by Discovery, I have successfully taken the Osaka Loop Line


I think laptops should play (uniformly random) typing sounds while you type in your passwords; it's getting to be too easy to analyze the sounds and extract the contents.
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Ok my new beliefs about blister prevention, after three weekends of backpacking for eight hours a day, and watching a bunch of YouTube videos:

  • blisters are caused by layers of skin delaminating, not "friction" / heat directly, though typically the delamination is due to static friction on the outer layer of skin, combined with wet skin. Dynamic friction is more likely to cause raw spots / wear straight through the skin.
  • popping them as soon as you find them is basically always the right call unless you plan to be able to avoid the activity that caused them for a week; otherwise they just keep growing as you continue to do the activity
  • blister donuts and moleskin work okay as long as you can keep them in place somehow, but they don't stick well on their own
  • leukotape, very very widely recommended, is worse than useless because the adhesive seeps through the tape and makes your skin stick to your socks even more tightly than it was before.
  • toe socks are pretty good
  • KT tape is very good
  • Vaseline/similar is pretty good as long as you can get it to stay in the right spots


so, I'm going to japan in a few weeks, to do this pilgrimage backpacking trip with a friend.

I'm very out of shape compared to the difficulty of the route (alltrails.com/explore/map/map-… : 4 days; average of 10 miles and 3200ft elevation gain)

So my plan is to train as much as I can between now and then. I've figured out this practice loop, starting from my house, that I'm going to try to work up to doing on both the 17th and 18th: alltrails.com/explore/map/kuma…

It takes a pretty cool path over the hills and down to the reservoir.

Anyone want to join for any of this? As you might guess I expect to be very slow and take lots of breaks (today I did only about half of this loop; 6-ish miles; and it took me like 4 hours)

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Yo that's really cool. I wish I was in the bay to practice with you.

Consider wearing a backpack on the trek if you aren't.



I tentatively think that rain jackets would work better if they were more like coats of feathers.

Usually rain jackets are either (a) totally waterproof, in which case you sweat and it condenses on the inside of the jacket, or (b) "breathable", in which case they fairly quickly "wet out" and the sweat actually still condenses on the inside.

Feathers work partly like a "breathable" rain jacket, in that they're porous and hydrophobic on the outermost layer, but they're also anisotropic: rain jacket material is the same in all directions, while feathers work kinda like roof shingles: The water rolls off, but there's space for air to pass underneath the feathers. This is fine because rain mostly comes from above, and anyway I bet you can make fairly complicated labyrinths of air passageways such that even splashing water is very unlikely to make it through the jacket.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Which side do you think Gore-Tex jackets are on? I find them pretty good at both staying dry and being breathable (though not perfect at either)
in reply to Daniel Ziegler

I think they seem pretty breathable until they get wet, at which point I seem to see condensation on the inside


Went on a photo walk today, mostly around Berkeley, and tested out some new camera settings. Most of the photos didn't turn out as well as I hoped, but I got a few that I like after a little postprocessing in Lightroom.

flickr.com/photos/spiritfox/54…

flickr.com/photos/spiritfox/54…

flickr.com/photos/spiritfox/54…



Okay, what the heck is up with people doing deceptive things to prevent "panic"? What are the actual dangers of "panic?" I was just watching this new Veritasium video about an engineering firm discovering that their already-built Manhattan skyscraper has a 1 to 5% chance of collapsing per year, and deciding that they're not going to tell anyone about it while they spent months fixing it. The head engineer explicitly says in a recorded lecture that this was justified because people "don't need to be terrorized". Is that even plausible?

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Oof, yeah. It does sound like they had an evacuation plan if a hurricane came, but it still seems pretty indefensible to lie about the situation.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I had similar thoughts watching this. It's not right to allow people to make the uninformed choice to enter this building.


I tried out making an unboxing video:

I'm pleased with how it turned out, though the subject matter is objectively not very interesting.

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in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I've heard this from my mother rather than from Knife Guy YouTube. My anecdotal experience of kitchen work is that sharpening my knives does make a huge difference in a) the amount of force I use for basic tasks and b) the likelihood the knife will slip while doing them so I do feel the advice holds at least for regular household tasks and moderate vs. no knife care. I hone my knives every few uses for this reason but don't sharpen them often so they're probably not "knife guy" sharp? They're currently easy to work with and so getting them sharper would probably have diminishing returns.
This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Jen Blight

Yeah I think I buy it for fixed-blade knives, especially kitchen knives that are used for chopping and repeated fast slicing, but for pocket knives they're just so fiddly and used for such non-repetitive tasks that it seems pretty different.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

It's also very not good to use a much sharper knife than you're used to. That's part of how I cut off 2mm of my thumbtip several years ago.


I've been getting really into pocket knives this week, and especially learning about knife steels. The biggest surprise has been that one of the several aspects of Atlas Shrugged that caused me to lose suspension of disbelief, has become much more believable in retrospect:

When I read it I felt like this whole part about the "guy invents a new metal that's just straightforwardly better than existing metals, and names it after himself" was just too farfetched.

But it turns out that actually this is just a thing that can happen. This guy Larrin Thomas basically straight-up did this with a knife steel alloy in 2021. The alloy is notably better than others for the purposes of pocket knives in almost every respect. Like, in any single dimension there are steels that do better, but this alloy is like the Hawaii of the knife steel Pareto frontier. He didn't name it after himself but I think he could have called it "Larrin Metal" if he had wanted to. He actually called it "Magnacut".

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I guess my intuition is that alloys would be "smooth" in their properties. You add more chromium and certain properties increase. Maybe they stop increasing or start reversing after a while, but it's not hard to find the optional points for each property over time.

With that intuition it seems surprising that it's hard to find new alloys that haven't already been found.

in reply to JP Addison



Have been wearing minimalist/"barefoot" sandals for the last couple days, and it feels somehow unhinged to say this, but I think they're making me feel noticeably happier?

Like, it reminds me of the thing where anosmia is linked to depression. It's like I regained a nontrivial part of my sense of "what's going on in the world".



Finally actually followed through on my long-standing intention to donate blood! Went pretty smoothly, and I'm ~500mL lighter. Next month hopefully I'll try to donate plasma.
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Proud of ya! Please make sure you understand the whole plasma donation process before you go forward with that. As I have said elsewhere, my experience with plasma donation was not good . . . so of course, I am concerned for you.


On the way home from the coffee shop I encountered a bright blue bird as I walked past a bush, about half a foot from me, which stared at me for a second, quietly squawked, and flew away.

Then soon afterward, in a different bush, I encountered an ooze (pictured, made of bubbly foam) trying to stealth.

I'm concerned that someone has changed the genre of my RPG, in a worrying direction. Will be avoiding taverns.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Indigo Bunting? Western Bluebird? Scrub Jay? (Of course I don't understand the humor . . . but I bet if I did I would laugh!)




Advertising, and especially targeted advertising, is widely hated. Something pretty interesting to me: insofar as I'm a rational agent, the amount a given advertiser should pay to show me their ad is positively correlated with how much I want to see that ad. On paper this sounds like an amazing situation, with positive sum trades all around.

But it's easy to observe that most ads are annoying and bad, and that people hate them. wtf is up with this? I don't have time to think about it today, but maybe someone here already knows. @Jeff Kaufman maybe? Or @Daniel Filan ?

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I would be pretty happy if ads were better. I regularly come across e.g. toddler products that I want to buy, and am very willing to spend money to save time/stress. But these things are almost never advertised to me.

I see *lots* of ads for things I already have, and lots of ads for things that are appropriate for parents of much younger or much older children. I can't actually think of the last time I bought something from an ad, which is shocking considering that I'm in a bunch of baby-related Facebook groups and often get products that people recommend there.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Advertisers understand that humans are very manipulatable, and are very down to use dark-arts manipulation tactics. I don't suspect the correlation of values to actually be very high at all. (Intentionally annoying ads can be very effective.)

I hate having to be constantly on guard from all these attempts to hijack my attention and influence my beliefs/desires. I opt out of targeted marketing whenever I can because I don't want advertising systems to have *even stronger* memetic hooks to grab me with.



Just updated my git auto-wip-branch tool to use GPT-4o instead of 3.5. So much has changed in the 2 years since I made it! But the basic idea is still pretty great, at least for my workflow: github.com/benwr/gwipt


ugh, wtf is it with me and doctors canceling my appointments?

Like, granted, if I were a doctor I would want to cancel benwr's appointments, but how do they know?



Vitrification is an ancient and successful process for ensuring that one's brain makes it thousands of years into the future.


I wrote a plugin to sync flashcards from Logseq (open-source notes app, like a local Roam Research or a list-shaped Obsidian) to Mochi (closed-source spaced repetition app, like a remote / pretty Anki). Works quite well / has a lot of features for a two-weekend side project, though it took more effort than I hoped it would.

github.com/benwr/logseq-mochi-…



My mood tracking app says February was my worst month since I started keeping track in September. Makes sense: surgery recovery, plus GI issues, resulting in more isolation than usual. Hopefully things will improve as the days get longer.


Man, given that LLMs are "dream machines" / "all they can really do is hallucinate", it's wild how much they correctly remember.

Like, Claude 3.7 correctly knows a lot about the API used to write Logseq plugins. Logseq isn't exactly obscure, but it is definitely pretty niche, and the API is based on a relatively obscure database query language and a schema designed specifically for the app.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I think they get worse about hallucinating when you ask them for something which doesn't exist.
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Nausea is extremely bad for my subjective well being. I've spent the day mostly in the bathroom due to food poisoning or something, and I feel like this results in suffering comparable per hour to the worst pain I've experienced (which was when I had septic bursitis and my elbow swelled to the size of a tennis ball within a few hours)


I'm pretty sure I'd very gladly have paid 100x the electricity bill and carbon offsets for the whole day, for every time I've been stuck in a bathroom stall when the motion detector shut off the lights.
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Human information throughput is allegedly only about 10-50 bits per second. This implies an interesting upper bound, in that the information throughput of biological humanity as a whole can't be higher than around 50 * 10^10 = 500Gbit/s. I.e., if all distinguishable actions made by humans were perfectly independent, biological humanity as a whole only has 500Gbit/s of "steering power".

I need to think more about the idea of "steering power" (e.g. some obvious rough edges around amplifying your steering power using external information processing / decision systems), but I have some intuition that one might actually be able to come up with a not-totally-useless concept that lets us say something like "humanity can't stay in 'meaningful control' if we have an unaligned artificial agent with more steering power than humanity, expressed in bits/s".

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Usually when people talk about egregores, I think they mostly have ideologies in mind.

There's a somewhat "lower-level" egregore (in the sense of a low-level language, not a low-level demon), that I think is pretty overlooked, that I think of as "emotional cynicism" (to distinguish it as specifically the emotional stance we associate with the word "cynical", and from capital-c Greek Cynicism).

Emotional cynicism seems to me to be near totally dominant in public online discourse, and I think that's both interesting and somewhat concerning.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I think I agree with you, though I'm curious for examples of types of things you might see as an expression of emotional cynicism.
in reply to JP Addison

  • a pretty large subset of comments on hacker news, lesswrong, ...
  • ~All reddit/Twitter/bluesky political discourse


Ugh, this guy built my high school dream project and I am simultaneously grinning widely and very jealous.


"I understand your concern, but" / "I share your concern, but"

Recently I've noticed that this phrase seems especially likely to ring hollow: When I hear someone say it about something that feels important to me, I usually don't believe them. Usually the phrase is accompanied by some degree of a "missing mood": If you're concerned, why do you seem to think that a declaration that you understand should be sufficient argument that in fact this concern is a secondary one? How sure are you that you actually understand?

I don't like it when people just straight-up assert that they've considered and rejected your view, without admitting that they might have misunderstood you or miscategorized you. It's like 10x better, imo, to say "I think I understand your concern, but".

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Yeah it often feels phatic, or what people do when they are trying to appear like a good listener/balanced interlocutor when actually advocating strongly for their own point of view. (Have definitely either done this myself or said things in that same spirit).

What's better? Maybe just 'that makes sense'?

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

It is simply a manipulation intended to protect the speaker's ego
This entry was edited (4 months ago)