Biff Wiff

Karma: 9,876

Biff Wiff 31 Jul 2026 16:41 UTC
4 points
0
on: adamzerner’s Shortform
“You don’t like science,” Harry said slowly. “Why not?”
“Those fool Muggles will kill us all someday!” Professor Quirrell’s voice had grown louder. “They will end it! End all of it!”
— HPMoR Chapter 20
The other day I pitched my apartment’s manager on a funny, half-serious idea.
My grandma lives in an elderly community… and the elevator in her building has a bench! It’s the greatest thing in the world. I never knew I wanted a bench so badly when I’m in the elevator, but being able to lay down some packages or just take a seat is awesome. So I mentioned this to my apartment’s manager and joked that maybe we should get a bench for the elevator in our building.
She laughed. She kinda shrugged, thinking that it could actually be convenient. Residents might like it.
But then her mind went to a place that my mind hadn’t. She started wondering about all of the dumb things residents might do if there was a bench and how it could lead to management getting sued. Maybe someone stands on it and falls? Maybe it violates some code?
It’s sad that she has to think this way, but it is also wise of her to think that way. You can’t just get excited about the benefits that a new tool will bring, you have to consider the costs as well. You can’t just think about capabilities, you have to also consider alignment.

Biff Wiff 11 Jun 2026 7:55 UTC
5 points
0
on: adamzerner’s Shortform
I just did some journaling. Like, old school pen-and-paper journaling. I even went to an out-of-the-way sitting area on my apartment complex’s second floor that I tend to go to for quiet analog stuff.
It’s been a while since I did pen-and-paper journaling. I was struck by how slow it was. Like, when I rub the pen against the paper, it produces words, but that process just happens a lot more slowly than I’m used to. When I type on my laptop the words get printed so much faster, and I spent such a large percentage of my time typing.
I think there are pros and cons to the slowness. To, er, thinking fast and slow. When I write slowly, I also think more slowly. As I rub the pen against the paper, outlining a specific thought, my mind can’t quite race onwards to the next thought.
Again, there are pros and cons to this. I’m not quite sure what they all are or what the cost-benefit calculus says. I’m sure it depends on the situation. My gut says slowness is often worthwhile though. That you should spend X% of your time thinking slowly, where X isn’t some negligible number like 1. It’s a meaningfully large number, like, I dunno, at least 20?
I know I fall hilariously below this bar.
One thing I realized when I was journaling is how much of my public writing is, in large part, advice to myself.

Biff Wiff 9 Jun 2026 1:05 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Oliver Kuperman’s Shortform
I agree that these excessively-outsourced posts are bad and that the quality of thoughtfully-prompted posts would probably be fine. I suspect that the more tangential considerations are more important, like how intellectual culture would be affected and how much moderators should be regulating the writing process of authors (the “how” rather than the “what”).

Biff Wiff 9 Jun 2026 0:54 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Brendan Long’s Shortform
I’m not sure what to think about AI-assisted writing in general. As for the “Don’t Use Your Production Database as a Log” post it generated, it seems pretty solid. Some constructive critiques do come to my mind (eg. focusing more on concrete examples). And the vibe feels “manicured” in a way that I don’t love, sorta like a cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood with perfect lawns. But I have my gripes with human-only writing as well; compared to human-only writing, my gripes with the AI-assisted version here aren’t particularly large.

Biff Wiff 25 May 2026 9:49 UTC
6 points
0
on: Heretical Pasta
In Asian cuisines there is often a very flavorful sauce/dish coupled with very plain and bland rice. I see no reason why Italian pasta has to be different.
That said, I think there’s a lot of wisdom in sticking to time-tested dishes that work. I generally don’t buy models that attempt to explain why food tastes good. Good food needs a balance of flavors? What about comfort foods like mac n cheese? No matter the model, I feel like there are always tons of counterexamples. And with that said, maybe there’s some reason why Italian pasta dishes that are heterogeneous don’t work but Asian rice dishes that are heterogeneous do.
But that said, what ultimately matters in the context of cooking for yourself (plus maybe a small number of other people) is individual preference. So if you like heterogeneous Italian pasta dishes, go for it. And in the context of experimenting, I think it is often very reasonable to start off with a traditional dish and experimentally tweak variables to see how you like it.

Biff Wiff 17 May 2026 7:39 UTC
3 points
0
on: adamzerner’s Shortform
I grew up in an upper-middle class neighborhood on Long Island. After graduating high school, there was something of an expectation that you’d go to a four-year college and then become a doctor, lawyer, engineer, or something similarly prestigious.
Furthermore, there were other expectations: get married, buy a single-family detached house in the suburbs, have two kids, send your kids to summer camp, vacation in Boca or Cancun, have dinner dates with other couples at trendy restaurants on weekends, watch Netflix before bed during the week.
Gross, I know. One way I conceptualize this is using object-oriented programming as a metaphor. It’s as if there’s some UpperMiddleClassSuburbanAdult subclass, and most people I went to high school with are instances of that class with very few overrides.
Maybe Alice is a little frisky and likes to vacation in Vietnam instead of Cancun. That’s an override. Maybe Bob takes his family camping over the weekend. Maybe Carol loves food and opened a restaurant. Maybe Dave reads books before bed instead of watching Netflix. These are all overrides. It feels to me like the more overrides you have, and the more meaningful they are, the more… agent-y you are as a person. And interesting. Sometimes I’ll meet someone and think, “Damn, they sure do have a lot of overrides. I love it.”
Well, that’s not quite the right framing, and that’s why this is a shortform post.

Biff Wiff 20 Apr 2026 23:01 UTC
8 points
0
on: If a room feels off the lighting is probably too “spiky” or too blue
“I ask the fundamental question of rationality: Why do you believe what you believe? What do you think you know and how do you think you know it?
— https://hpmor.com/chapter/7
Along those lines, I understand what it is you believe, but I don’t feel like I have a very good understanding of why you believe it. I guess a combination of “the closer our environment matches the ancestral environment, the happier we tend to be”, “personal experience introspecting on what I like”, and “experience talking to people about what they like”?
Relatedly I am not clear on how confident you are in your claims but am interested in knowing how confident you are in your claims.
Personally, I spent some time recently digging into lighting. Amongst other things, I did a little (informal) experiment using an app to measure lux (and color temperature) in various places to see how they made me feel. Hopefully I’ll write more about this some time, but in short, I feel like up to 1,000 to maybe 1,500 lux it felt better, but I don’t feel very confident about that. It’s hard to say, and there are lots of potentially confounding variables.
As for CRI, my research wasn’t very fruitful. The impression I got was that 95+ CRI is useful in contexts involving things like photography and art but not in everyday scenarios, and that brightness is way more important for things like focus and mood. I hadn’t realized that outdoor lighting has great CRI though; I find the evolutionary reasoning to be plausible, so the fact that outdoor lighting has great CRI makes me more bullish about CRI having a more meaningful impact on things like mood and focus.
Maybe I’ll write more about this too, but FWIW, I felt like I was spending too much time researching all this stuff and figuring out what products to buy, so I kinda just punted and bought the Brighter Lamp. It should last like 20+ years and at that longevity, it’s like $5/month. Whatever.

Biff Wiff 19 Apr 2026 8:42 UTC
4 points
0
on: A City Within a City
Some people, when speaking to children or old folks, use simple words spoken in a high-pitched, slow, baby-like voice. But for me, whatever the age of someone—child, adult, elder—I always speak to them like they’re my equal. The only time I use a baby voice is when I’m speaking to my cat.
Yeah, I try to take a similar approach. The following really inspired me:
But that assumes that you can only be normal around someone you know well, which is not true. I started using a new barber last year, and I was pleasantly surprised when instead of making small talk or asking me questions about my life, he just started talking to me like I was his friend or involving me in his conversations with the other barber. By doing so, he spared both of us the massive inauthenticity of a typical barber-customer relationship and I actually enjoy going there now. He doesn’t go by the above graph, but rather, sees things more like three doors that you can choose from:
You’re not required to either smalltalk or pretend to want to get to know someone—it’s a choice to do either and you can choose “Be Normal” instead. Unfortunately, the Social Rulebook doesn’t talk about being normal with acquaintances, only a bunch of chapters about how to survive the terror of an acquaintance interaction, authentic or not. We badly need to make a Rulebook amendment here—until we do, my barber relationship will be a rare one.

— https://waitbutwhy.com/2014/01/the-great-perils-of-social-interaction.html

Biff Wiff 17 Apr 2026 17:53 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: My emergency kit
1. Feels pretty meh. For higher ground I know my area well enough to know where that is. Same with open space. And if I didn’t I don’t think a map would be of much help.
2. Hm, maybe. I have this map of my city printed out and it does list places like schools and hospitals.
3. Yeah but my model is that if, say, out of 100 people 5 know where they’re going, those 5 will tell another 5, and then those 10 will relay to another 10, until the group as a whole has enough of a sense. Do you not expect something like that to happen?

Biff Wiff 17 Apr 2026 17:47 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: My emergency kit
Good points. Volcanic ash, and I suppose other natural disasters could screw with light. Personally I have a battery pack for my phone so I imagine that’d last for some time—enough time to get me through a large majority of disasters—but it’s possible my phone breaks or doesn’t work, so the redundancy that flashlights provide is good.

Biff Wiff 17 Apr 2026 5:28 UTC
4 points
0
on: Laptop stands are a thing your neck may appreciate
I’m flabbergasted that I’d never seen anyone else use one of these (not even at their homes, where they wouldn’t need to carry external peripherals around), nor had I heard of them before my friend told me about their existence.
I see them once in a while when I work from coffee shops. It’s a fun moment when I have my laptop stand, someone else has their laptop stand, and we make eye contact and acknowledge each other.

Biff Wiff 16 Apr 2026 23:17 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: My emergency kit
No GPS. I hadn’t had offline downloaded maps but just downloaded them. Thanks for the idea!
Hm, so you’re saying that maps are useful for situations where you’re trying to escape. A few things here.
1. Personally I don’t have a car. I suppose maybe I’d somehow gain access to one, or be in a car with someone else and need to go somewhere though.
2. Maps only seem useful if there’s a specific location I’d need to get to. If it’s just generally that I need to “get away”, following the roads and winging it seem good enough. And even if it is a specific location, if it’s local enough I very well might be able to figure it out without a map.
3. There’d be people around who I can ask for directions. Yes, things would be hectic and crazy, but I dunno, if everyone needs to evacuate to some area, I feel like people would be relaying messages amongst each other.
What do you think?

Biff Wiff 16 Apr 2026 23:03 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: My emergency kit
Oh, interesting. Thanks for mentioning that. I lean towards grabbing a cheap, small water filter then.
What use cases do you think I should aim to cover?
- I suppose no water filter would help in the event of a nuke.
- Biological attack, I’m not sure but that also seems unlikely.
- In the event of a flood, I guess the scenario would be that I’m trapped, have used up my three gallons of water, the sink doesn’t work, authorities haven’t been able to reach me, and the water filter gives me access to water that I wouldn’t otherwise have? Seems kinda implausible, but not impossible.
- Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are the two natural disasters that seem plausible where I live in Portland, OR. I don’t envision water filters being useful in either of those scenarios, but maybe I’m wrong.
Despite it seeming implausible, I still lean towards buying a water filter. My threshold for plausibility is very low, and the fact that I have trouble imagining scenarios where it proves useful isn’t very strong evidence that those scenarios in fact are implausible.
A big part of where I’m coming from with my questions is that I find it fun and interesting to discuss. Part of it though is genuinely wanting to know what type of water filter would make sense for me to get.

Biff Wiff 16 Apr 2026 22:45 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: mruwnik’s comment on: My emergency kit
Hm. I have a hard time evaluating how handy it is without concrete examples, and I struggle to think of concrete examples of where either would be particularly handy. I guess that’s why I went with “seems”.
Are there concrete examples that come to your mind? For light, the thing is that I am able to get light from the windows and from my phone, so the time that a flashlight would be useful is if I’m not able to get light from either of those sources. Which does seem possible, but doesn’t seem plausible and consequential enough to be “really handy”, although my intuition here isn’t particularly refined.

Biff Wiff 15 Apr 2026 18:04 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Adam Kaufman ’s comment on: My emergency kit
You’re right! Sorry about that. Fixed.

Biff Wiff 15 Apr 2026 17:41 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: My emergency kit
Ah thanks for the catch. Fixed.
They’re these little tabs that provide some basic macro and micro nutrients. They only provide 240 calories per day which isn’t great, but I like the fact that they have a super long shelf life (25 years?) and don’t take up a lot of space.

Biff Wiff 2 Apr 2026 18:49 UTC
5 points
0
on: adamzerner’s Shortform
Communication culture is important. It is a high level action that, if improved, has lots of nice downstream benefits.
One aspect of communication culture to address is interruption. What should the expectations be about interruption? Do you always wait for the other person to finish talking before you can start talking? Are you allowed to interrupt if it seems worthwhile? What determines whether an interruption is worthwhile? Where is the threshold for how worthwhile an interruption needs to be in order for it to be justified?
I feel like there are various conversations I end up in that get derailed by too many interruptions. And I’ve seen it happen in many contexts: at work, with my family, with my friends, at rationalist meetups. This seems important.
I’m not sure what the answers are for how to deal with “interruption culture”, but it seems like something worth discussing. I am seeing this post from 12 years ago, but other than that, I don’t really see much discussion here on LessWrong. I also don’t really recall much discussion of the topic elsewhere, like on other blogs or in academia.
My hunch is that there are probably a handful of archetypes, and different archetypes will work better for different conversations. It seems like it’d be helpful if we kinda outlined what these archetypes are, what the pros and cons are, and when each tends to work best (depends on the people involved, the conversation topic, the emotions, etc). From there, especially if these archetypes were “in the water” and became common knowledge (eg. in our community), then I can envision people saying “hey, do you guys mind if we take archetype A here?” or “hey, I feel like we’re using archetype C right now and it’s not working well, can we switch to B?”.
Another hunch I have is that low levels of interruption is a low risk option. I feel like I see conversations get derailed and ruined when there are high levels of interruption, but with low levels of interruption, I don’t really recall that happening. I guess the exception is if one person rambles chaotically; in that case it seems worth being pragmatic and choosing to interrupt them. So with that said, in the absence of better norms and stuff here, I think it usually makes sense to default to low levels of interruption.
Also consider that it might be more productive to communicate asynchronously via text!

Biff Wiff 31 Mar 2026 8:26 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Karl Krueger’s comment on: adamzerner’s Shortform
I think there’s probably a bunch of non AI related things that just hadn’t been mentioned in the original brainstorming. Stuff like “have you considered building a lumenator?”

Biff Wiff 31 Mar 2026 4:09 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: Brendan Long’s comment on: Take note of how brightness makes you feel
Ah, that makes sense and is interesting. Thanks for pointing it out.
A related data point: the expensive and presumably very high quality Brighter Lamp ranges in color temperature from 2220K (“warm sunset”) to 6500K (“pure daylight”). I think that further points towards optimal color temperature falling somewhere in that range for most people.

Biff Wiff 31 Mar 2026 0:54 UTC
3 points
−2
on: adamzerner’s Shortform
This Shit Rationalists Say video kinda seems like a good way of giving a smart person who isn’t themself a rationalist and idea of what rationalists are like.
Yes, the non-rationalist won’t understand all of the lingo, but they’ll understand some, and I feel like they’d pick up on a lot of vibes. I think the facts that it’s using the medium of video + audio as opposed to text and that it is a fire hose of data points work in it’s favor.