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".

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".

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.

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 ?

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?

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-…

GitHub - benwr/logseq-mochi-sync: One-way synchronization of flashcards from Logseq to Mochi

One-way synchronization of flashcards from Logseq to Mochi - benwr/logseq-mochi-sync

^GitHub

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.

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".

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.

"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".

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

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

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.