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After watching Frieren for 3 episodes I claim it is fine but not great. Am I missing something? Does it get better? Have I merely lost my sense of joy?
in reply to Daniel Filan

I think the very first episode is a little weird, but if you've gotten to three then yeah maybe the joy thing! I don't like almost any anime (...or actually shows at all) but I really loved this series.


A Cloud of Outrageous Blue
a book by Vesper Stamper
From: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1848778943329145061


Guess what language has the second-largest Wikipedia, behind English.
in reply to Daniel Filan

Huh. Are you going to say it's Latin? That would be pretty wild.

My guess before you asking would have been Spanish I think.



Latin practice day 1


Ego in ¿Superstimulūs? sum - is that how that goes? probably not.
Ego nōn valeō - had a slightly rough time with a flu+covid shot today after coming off of a cold.

#latinpractice

This entry was edited (3 weeks ago)
in reply to Daniel Filan

Hmm, at least with comments, you can hover over the time marker to see the date. Not sure if that works for the top level post


Found here: https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1848229979785671003/photo/1


David Gentelman, My Town 7
Found here: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1848230231288529300


From here: https://x.com/0zmnds/status/1848239291043815904/photo/1


cat with newspaper meme

I should learn Latin

in reply to Daniel Filan

Current plan is to buy the Lingua Latina per se Illustrata books and go thru them also listening to scipio martianus' pronunciations of them, but only actually do that if continue to feel like it a few days from now.
in reply to Daniel Filan

I think this would also allow me to more forcefully assert my contention that "Italian" is a woke larp.



Recorded a podcast with Divia while I was staying at her house but there was a glitch and the audio is not recoverable, so you all are never going to know which denomination is right about Christianity.


At ProgressCon. Had to help explain to another attendee what a "soyboy" is. I guess that's a good sign?


I wonder if I should modify my policy of arriving at airports one hour before departure for domestic flights, shaving down that margin to 50 min or so. I feel like I never brush with missing a flight and I tend to spend a bunch of time waiting around.
in reply to Daniel Filan

Then yeah, seems reasonable – the biggest variance on wait times is typically security, TSA pre cuts that down a lot in most airports, and the rare cases that cause a significant delay there are likely to delay a lot of people, which means a good chance the flight will be delayed as well. And domestic flights are typically pretty easy to reschedule if you miss them, unlike international.

There are caveats if you're at an unfamiliar airport or checking bags, but I imagine you're accounting for those already.

in reply to Daniel Filan

I recently had the unfortunate experience of an unreasonably long pre-check line at Newark airport. There was a lot of "wait, *this* is the pre-check line??” There were even signs advertising that you could skip this line if you get "pre-check clear." Everyone has a fastpass, so they invented a fasterpass.

(I think it would've been ~30-50 minutes of total waiting in the line if I hadn't apologeticly wormed my way up the line, explaining to people that I was about to miss my flight)




Midnight Sun - Yoshitaka Amano: Icon Aloft (1990)
From this tweet: https://x.com/xe0_xeo/status/1847019755355439221


A Thousand Cranes (full moon detail)
by Kayama Matazō (1927–2004)
Found at this tweet: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1846685050236244376

in reply to Daniel Filan

There's also a statue of Columbus outside the court, as well as an obviously tilted lamp post. I wonder if they're going for an aesthetic of bad things.

in reply to Daniel Filan

Court houses have this kind of Objective Beauty that I find offputting. I think it's something to do with

1. marble floors are too noisy and squeaky
2. hallways are too echoey, makes you feel exposed
3. not enough windows
4. half the people there are miserable for various reasons

(I expect that people in a supreme court are less miserable than in the average court, but more miserable than in the average office building)



Some ads in Time Square:
- move to Thailand
- Kalshi live Trump vs Harris odds

in reply to Daniel Filan

Oreo Coke doesn't sound like something I'd enjoy, but Coke Oreos could be interesting? I tried the pop rocks oreos recently, which was certainly a memorable experience :)


Cold take but the trains in NYC are better than the BART
in reply to Daniel Filan

Say more - I agree but curious why you think this. I think the BART trains feel way cleaner (the newest MTA trains are clean but the rest feel old / grimy - which is a vibe but not one everyone likes)
in reply to Chana

Honestly I forget what I was thinking when I wrote this, but probably just that there are many more stations near where I would want to be and that they seem to run more frequently. Also the thing where you can just use your credit card is very convenient as a visitor.



Have been flossing for a week after a dentist appointment put the fear of God into me and damn, that shit is still bloody and painful. Hope it doesn't persist too long I guess?

Googling this, people say it subsides in a week, but I feel like the fundamental problem is that it's hard to get the floss into the cracks between the teeth, meaning that when they do get in it's with high speed.

Actually googling just now apparently the thing I am doing is a flossing mistake? I don't know how successful their proposed alternative is tho...

in reply to Daniel Filan

I have found that some brands/styles of floss feel comfier than others, you could experiment with some different types?
in reply to Daniel Filan

I got trapped in a cycle of it hurting every time I flossed, so I didn't want to floss again until the pain went away, so I never got back to flossing regularly. Eventually I gave up on strong floss and bought little brushes that are like toothpicks with bristles. I don't have any external evidence on how well they work, but they get between my teeth without hurting 🤷‍♀️


Hishida Shunsō (1874 - 1911)
Twilight, 1901
Found on X: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1843521957448589396


The caption of this picture in this news article seems kinda biased


Uehara Konen, Dōtonbori (1928)
Found here: https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1842981647505101294


So presumably all young hippos look like that right? Are they just taking more photos of Moo Deng? or is Moo Deng simply more inquisitive than most?
in reply to Daniel Filan

Hmmm apparently Moo Deng is a pygmy hippopotamus - maybe those are cuter as infants?


New AXRP with Jaime Sevilla!


Epoch AI is the premier organization that tracks the trajectory of AI - how much compute is used, the role of algorithmic improvements, the growth in data used, and when the above trends might hit an end. In this episode, I speak with the director of Epoch AI, Jaime Sevilla, about how compute, data, and algorithmic improvements are impacting AI, and whether continuing to scale can get us AGI.

Transcript
YouTube link



RSP overhang


A complaint about AI pause: if we pause AI and then unpause, progress will then be really quick, because there's a backlog of improvements in compute and algorithmic efficiency that can be immediately applied.

One definition of what an RSP is: if a lab makes observation O, then they pause scaling until they implement protection P.

Doesn't this sort of RSP have the same problem with fast progress after pausing? Why have I never heard anyone make this complaint about RSPs? Possibilities:
- They do and I just haven't seen it
- People expect "AI pause" to produce longer / more serious pauses than RSPs (but this seems incidental to the core structure of RSPs)

Crossposted from LessWrong

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Daniel Filan

The number of people who read this post on LW and thought "But there are reasons to think that RSPs are better than pauses" was a relevant response is kind of depressing tbh.


William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896)
Acanthus original design

(Taken from @ marysia_cc on twitter, https://x.com/marysia_cc/status/1841750032535765407)



From Twitter account Le monde sensible, who captioned it "Au file de mes idées / In line with my ideas"
https://x.com/Philippe4269/status/1841365949720474004



Cover art of a book I own about the Jesuits. I think it works very well. That said, the book itself didn't hold my attention.


Notes on superstimulus


  • It's very small, and most people who I would want to talk to aren't here
  • I don't find it that rewarding to check because I don't see that much stuff.
  • That said, I do like it
    • I think it's because I feel some obligation to post minimally thoughtful things here. Where on FB / twitter / my personal slack channel, I just post whatever's on my mind.
    • This would be a bad omen if true
    • That said, it's possible that's because there's a decent quality of people here, and/or 2014-era FB was an unusually good architecture for hosting discussions.


in reply to Daniel Filan

I guess one thing about few people being on here is that this feels sort of disconnected from 'real life' such that I tend to say different things here than I would say elsewhere.
in reply to Daniel Filan

My one complaint about my posting is that I could be having more nice pictures.


Sometimes people say that you can't really have law under anarchy. But, inspired by a recent episode of Divided Argument (dividedargument.com/episodes/s…), I think American constitutional law is a counterexample.

Constitutional law looks and acts like law that constrains the federal and state governments. But there isn't a super-government that rules over the federal government that constitutional law appeals to, where if the federal government disobeyed rulings the super-government would punish them. Instead, courts rule on constitutional law, and the federal government follows, probably because the individual humans who work for the government by and large think that's the best for them in the long run.

This doesn't prove that law for humans could work without a state. There are way more humans than there are governments, so even a small rate of people ignoring courts is quite bad (where a small rate of governments ignoring courts is tolerable). And of course there are a bunch of other disanalogies. But it does indicate that stateless law is a conceivable thing.



Notes from my dental appointment:
1. apparently I have recessed gums, and they recommend I get a scaling and root planing procedure, which is pretty expensive
2. apparently my tongue is big enough that there's a good chance I have (undiagnosed and asymptomatic) obstructive sleep apnea

Anyone have opinions about how seriously I should take this? For 1, I have a general sense that dentists sometimes upsell people, and for 2, I don't know if undiagnosed sleep apnea is actually a big deal (or what the cost/benefit of treating it would look like).

in reply to Daniel Filan

OK from looking at sleep apnea stuff it seems like there's not much that can easily be done except for "try strengthening your tongue and soft palate so it doesn't block your airway when you sleep" so I guess I'll just do that.
in reply to Daniel Filan

Got a second opinion which said not to bother so I guess I probably won't?

in reply to Daniel Filan

every time I see a mg of caffeine number I google "caffeine in a cup of coffee" again because I haven't yet managed to store that number in my brain

it's 40mg so this is 5 (!) cups of coffee

in reply to Ben Millwood

Allegedly a single espresso shot can be up to 100mg, so I'm plausibly consuming at least this much caffeine every day (I have a medium-sized moka pot's worth). (This does not imply that this is in fact a hinged amount of caffeine to put in a Huel :p)
in reply to Amber Dawn

@Amber Dawn @Ben Millwood yeah when I google "caffeine in a cup of coffee" I get 95 mg - I think it depends a lot on the cup.


Somehow it feels like all of a sudden, the onset of darkness shifted significantly earlier, in a way that significantly changes the balance between day and night. I guess that the equinox is a real and important thing to be tracking?



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.

This entry was edited (2 months ago)


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)!

YouTube link
Transcript

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

This entry was edited (2 months ago)
in reply to Daniel Filan

Fun facts:
- 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.
in reply to Daniel Filan

Watched the first 30 minutes before I saw this post - will return having seen this!