benwr

• benwr 18 Oct 2019 21:49 UTC

  2 points

  on: The best of the www, in my opinion

  My list is similar but also includes

  • The On­line Ety­mol­ogy Dictionary

  • Wikipe­dia, obviously

  • nLab

  • squares.io, pos­si­bly the most whole­some web­site I’m aware of

  • Meteuphoric

  • Lob­ste.rs

  • Bet­ter Explained

• benwr 8 Sep 2019 18:06 UTC

  5 points

  on: benwr’s Shortform

  Doom cir­cles seem hard to do out­side of CFAR work­shops: If I just pick the ~7 peo­ple who I most want to be in my doom cir­cle, this might be the best doom cir­cle for me, but it won’t be the best doom cir­cle for them, since they will mostly not know each other very well.

  So you might think that do­ing doom “cir­cles” one-on-one would be best. But doom cir­cles also have a sort of cer­e­mony /​ spac­ing /​ high-cost-ness to them that cuts the other way: More peo­ple means more “weight” or some­thing. And there are prob­a­bly other con­sid­er­a­tions de­ter­min­ing the op­ti­mal size.

  So if you wanted to have a not-at-the-end-of-a-work­shop doom cir­cle, should you find the largest clique with some min­i­mum re­la­tion­ship strength in your so­cial graph?

• benwr 7 Sep 2019 0:56 UTC

  5 points

  on: benwr’s Shortform

  Yet an­other Short­form-as-fea­ture-re­quest:

  No­tifi­ca­tions and/​or RSS feeds from par­tic­u­lar posts’ com­ments /​ an­swers.

  This would be es­pe­cially use­ful for Ques­tions and Short­form posts (some­times tel­lingly mis-la­beled “short­form feeds”), both of which are things where one par­tic­u­lar post has a col­lec­tion of re­lated com­ments, and which gather con­tent over time.

  I cur­rently sub­scribe to the front page in Feedly, and when­ever some­one asks a ques­tion that I find in­ter­est­ing I men­tally cringe be­cause I know that I’ll have to re­mind my­self to check back (and I prob­a­bly will never ac­tu­ally check back).

  I guess I could come up with some cus­tom Zapier /​ IFTTT sys­tem for this if I spent a few hours on it, but I sus­pect this would be gen­er­ally use­ful func­tion­al­ity.

• benwr 3 Sep 2019 23:38 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: benwr's comment on: Septem­ber Brag­ging Thread

  Up­date: our ap­pli­ca­tion was ap­proved! The Lodge is al­most cer­tainly mov­ing!

• benwr 31 Aug 2019 20:07 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: eigen's comment on: benwr’s Shortform

  One friend pointed out that you might be able to avoid some of the pit­falls by re­leas­ing some­thing like an open source desk­top ap­pli­ca­tion that re­quires you to feed it a database of in­for­ma­tion. Then you could build databases like this in lots of differ­ent ways, in­clud­ing anony­mous ones or crowd­sourced ones. And in this case it might be­come a lot harder to claim that the cre­ator of the ap­pli­ca­tion is li­able for any­thing. I might ac­tu­ally want to talk to a lawyer about this kind of thing, if the lawyer was will­ing to put on a sort of “en­g­ineer­ing” mind­set to help me figure out how you might make this hap­pen with­out get­ting sued. So if you know any­one like that, I’d be pretty interested

• benwr 31 Aug 2019 0:20 UTC

  9 points

  on: benwr’s Shortform

  There should re­ally be a sys­tem that does what We­bMD tried to do, but ac­tu­ally does it well.

  You’d put in your symp­toms and back­ground info (e.g. what coun­try you live in, your age), it would ask you clar­ify­ing ques­tions (“how bad is the pain from 1 to 10?” “which of these pat­terns is most like the rash?” “Do you have a fam­ily his­tory of heart dis­ease?”) and then it would give you a pos­te­rior dis­tri­bu­tion over pos­si­ble con­di­tions, and a guess about whether you should go to the emer­gency room or what­ever.

  Is this just much harder than I’m imag­in­ing it would be? It seems like the kind of thing where you could har­vest like­li­hood ra­tios and put them all into a big database. Is there some reg­u­la­tory thing where you can’t prac­ti­cally offer this ser­vice be­cause it’s ille­gal to give med­i­cal ad­vice or some­thing?

• benwr 30 Aug 2019 23:56 UTC

  24 points

  on: Septem­ber Brag­ging Thread

  I got 4 out of six peo­ple in my group house, plus two oth­ers, to ap­ply for a lease in a new and prob­a­bly-bet­ter house! In or­der to do this I spent prob­a­bly forty hours in the last month, search­ing rental list­ings, reach­ing out to peo­ple, and try­ing to ac­com­mo­date peo­ple’s of­ten-con­tra­dic­tory prefer­ences.

  At one point I wrote a pro­gram to de­ter­mine, given a col­lec­tion of peo­ple larger than the num­ber of rooms, and their max­i­mum prices for each room in a house (which are al­lowed to be con­di­tional on who else is in the house), whether any sub­set of that group would be able to af­ford the house. This script was about a hun­dred lines of python, and af­ter fix­ing one typo it ran perfectly on the first try. This hap­pens to me pretty of­ten these days when I write python code, and I’m fuck­ing pleased about it. Like, maybe ten years ago I set out to be a mas­ter wiz­ard in one par­tic­u­lar spe­cial­iza­tion (“writ­ing pro­grams to solve prac­ti­cal prob­lems”) and yeah, I can just re­ally do that kind of magic now. It just feels like “part of me” in a re­ally ex­hil­arat­ing way.

• benwr 30 Aug 2019 22:32 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raemon's comment on: jp’s Shortform

  This dis­tinc­tion is still rele­vant and use­ful in some con­texts.

• benwr 5 Aug 2019 22:59 UTC

  12 points

  on: benwr’s Shortform

  As long as I’m us­ing short­form posts to make fea­ture re­quests, it would be re­ally use­ful to me to have ac­cess to a feed (of short­form posts, nor­mal posts, or both) where I could se­lect which users I see. Right now I come to LessWrong and have a hard time de­cid­ing which posts I care about—lots of peo­ple here have lots of in­ter­ests and lots of differ­ent stan­dards for con­tent qual­ity, some of which I find ac­tively an­noy­ing. Allow­ing me to build feeds from cus­tom lists of se­lected users would let me filter by both shared in­ter­ests and how valuable I typ­i­cally find those users’ posts. I don’t think “who is in my cus­tom feed” should be pub­lic like it is on Face­book, but Face­book circa 2012 gave me a lot of con­trol over this via friend lists, and I miss the days when that fea­ture was pri­ori­tized.

  I also like the way lob­ste.rs solves this prob­lem for some users, al­though I think the solu­tion above would be bet­ter for me per­son­ally: ev­ery post comes with a se­lec­tion from a group of site-wide tags, and users can filter their home page based on which tags they want to see.

[Question] Do you do weekly or daily re­views? What are they like?

• benwr 31 Jul 2019 18:55 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: habryka's comment on: benwr’s Shortform

  In­ter­est­ing, good to know. I’m cu­ri­ous if you con­sid­ered do­ing some­thing like lob­ste.rs, where the avatar is next to the user­name and the same height as the text.

• benwr 31 Jul 2019 18:05 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Hazard's comment on: benwr’s Shortform

  I should have posted this com­ment here and rephrased it, sorry:

  I also note that avatars could use tricks to solve var­i­ous con­straints I’m imag­in­ing the LessWrong team might want to im­pose.

  For ex­am­ple, if you think avatars might make the com­ments sec­tion too vi­su­ally in­ter­est­ing you could ren­der them in greyscale, or with muted col­ors. And if you think they might lead to peo­ple play­ing weird games with their avatars (I don’t think this is likely, but I can imag­ine some­one wor­ry­ing about it), you could let users choose from a small col­lec­tion of ac­cept­able-to-you, auto-gen­er­ated images based on a hash of their user­name.

• benwr 31 Jul 2019 18:02 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: benwr's comment on: benwr’s Shortform

  Edit: I don’t re­tract this com­ment but I should have rephrased it and posted it as a re­ply to this comment

  I also note that avatars could use tricks to solve var­i­ous con­straints I’m imag­in­ing the LessWrong team might want to im­pose.

  For ex­am­ple, if you think avatars might make the com­ments sec­tion too vi­su­ally in­ter­est­ing you could ren­der them in greyscale, or with muted col­ors. And if you think they might lead to peo­ple play­ing weird games with their avatars (I don’t think this is likely, but I can imag­ine some­one wor­ry­ing about it), you could let users choose from a small col­lec­tion of ac­cept­able-to-you, auto-gen­er­ated images based on a hash of their user­name.

  What links here?

  • benwr's comment on benwr’s un­pol­ished thoughts by benwr (31 Jul 2019 18:05 UTC; 3 points)

• benwr 29 Jul 2019 2:20 UTC

  10 points

  on: benwr’s Shortform

  I re­ally think LessWrong would benefit by giv­ing users avatars. I think this would make the site much more vi­su­ally ap­peal­ing, but I also think it would vastly de­crease the cog­ni­tive load re­quired to read threaded con­ver­sa­tions.

• benwr 29 Jul 2019 2:18 UTC

  13 points

  on: benwr’s Shortform

  A while ago, Dun­can Sa­bien wrote a Face­book post about a thing he called “al­ive­ness”, and pre­sented it on a sin­gle spec­trum with some­thing called “chill­ness”. At the time I felt that al­ive­ness seemed sort of like ob­vi­ously-the-good-one, and like I was ob­vi­ously-bad-for-be­ing-more-chill, and I felt sad be­cause I think there were a lot of pres­sures when I was younger to op­ti­mize for chill­ness.

  But re­cently I’ve been in a cou­ple of sce­nar­ios that have changed my views on this. I now think that al­ive­ness and chill­ness aren’t quite op­po­site ends of the same axis in per­son space. It seems in­stead like they’re an­ti­cor­re­lated fea­tures of a given per­son in a given situ­a­tion, and many peo­ple live their lives with a nearly-fixed level of each. But there are also peo­ple who can con­trol their lev­els of al­ive­ness or chill­ness, as the situ­a­tion de­mands.

  And it isn’t the case that chill­ness is worse. I think it is much, much eas­ier to co­or­di­nate large groups of chill peo­ple than not-chill peo­ple. I think that these peo­ple can also definitely be “al­ive” in the rele­vant way.

  My in­tu­itive feel­ing is that this abil­ity to con­trol your chill­ness and al­ive­ness is strongly re­lated to “lead­er­ship qual­ities”. And, at least for me, notic­ing that these might not be op­po­site ends of a fixed spec­trum makes me feel a lot more hope­ful about the pos­si­bil­ity to grow in al­ive­ness-ca­pa­bil­ity.

benwr’s un­pol­ished thoughts

• benwr 26 Jul 2019 1:19 UTC

  8 points

  on: How/​would you want to con­sume short­form posts?

  I’d like to be able to sub­scribe to in­di­vi­d­ual Short­form feeds via RSS.

• benwr 15 May 2019 23:56 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Why I’ve started us­ing NoScript

  You’re right; I’m sorry that I didn’t read your com­ment suffi­ciently care­fully.

  The rea­son­ing there is purely my ex­pec­ta­tion and isn’t based on data or par­tic­u­lar ex­pe­rience.

• benwr 15 May 2019 23:38 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Said Achmiz's comment on: Why I’ve started us­ing NoScript

  This is a great re­sponse and I’m glad to have read it. How­ever I think you miss one im­por­tant dis­ad­van­tage of your ap­proach: Th­ese al­ter­na­tives are mostly black­lists, and so they be­come less use­ful as you get fur­ther into the less-traf­ficked cor­ners of the web, which is also where you’re most likely to hit, e.g., in­visi­ble com­pro­mised re­sources.

  I’ve also been sur­prised at how lit­tle “whitelist fa­tigue” I’ve got­ten. I would have naively ex­pected to get tired of whitelist­ing do­mains, but in prac­tice it’s con­tinued to feel free­ing rather than ob­nox­iously at­ten­tion con­sum­ing, and site func­tion­al­ity is al­most always easy /​ ob­vi­ous to en­able prop­erly. It’s pos­si­ble that some­times I miss in­tended func­tion­al­ity, but I doubt that this comes close to out­weigh­ing the benefits.

  Edit: the fol­low­ing para­graph mi­s­un­der­stands Said’s com­ment and doesn’t ad­dress the point that it was meant to; apolo­gies.

  Fi­nally, I don’t buy the ar­gu­ment about in­cen­tiviz­ing web au­thors. If track­ers work less well, there is ob­vi­ously less in­cen­tive to use them. If the only thing hold­ing back au­thors from adding track­ers willy-nilly is user an­noy­ance at page bloat, then it’s clearly not enough, and so tel­ling peo­ple to just go on shoulder­ing that an­noy­ance to en­sure that the an­noy­ance is min­i­mized seems like priv­ileg­ing sec­ond-or­der effects that I would ex­pect to be small.

Why I’ve started us­ing NoScript