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):

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.

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)

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.

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…

Eucalyptus and Shadow

Explore tauntaun!'s 110 photos on Flickr!

^Flickr

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?

I tried out making an unboxing video:

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

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".