datawitch

Karma: 369

datawitch 3 May 2026 0:51 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: Steffee’s comment on: Games that change your mind
Back when I was more depressed/dysphoric I used to play dark souls whenever it got especially bad. The feeling of competence and control of going through the zones fighting the monsters and perfectly executing each action was incredibly restorative. Even when I died, I always felt like it was my fault, as opposed to some vague undefinable thing I couldn’t hope to fight or stop.

datawitch 27 Apr 2026 16:56 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Great Smoothing Out
The government is a clumsy and forceful way to do coordination. I don’t have a problem with a thousand people voluntarily signing a contract to do a religious commune or whatever. But forcing people to play along when they don’t want to and would leave if they could, just so you can preserve a tradition is pretty horrible. We generally call that “tyranny”.

I proposed my own coordination layer for solving the collective action problem—ask a Mind to search for people who would be interested in your thing and would voluntarily agree to do it. Convincing people is a lot easier when you’re talking to the top 1000 people most likely to be interested. Yes, sometimes you won’t find enough people to sustain your weird archaic tradition and it’ll die out. The alternative is to force them to sustain it and I consider that unacceptable.

datawitch 27 Apr 2026 15:02 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Jiro’s comment on: The Great Smoothing Out
Then you can try to convince people to join you in preserving it. If it’s really a valuable thing, it shouldn’t be that hard to do, especially with Minds to help with the grunt work of searching for interested people. Even in canon Culture, Minds often do weird little projects like this if it catches their interest.

datawitch 26 Apr 2026 16:40 UTC
1 point
0
on: The Great Smoothing Out
If no individual wants to carry on a tradition, despite being immortal, post scarcity, and completely free to choose it.… that seems like an irrefutable proof that the tradition actually wasn’t that great after all. If nobody wants to do Japanese folk dancing, why should individuals be forced to preserve it?

datawitch 26 Apr 2026 14:23 UTC
4 points
0
in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Why do many rationalists like cryptocurrency?
Well, normally you’d have to get HRT thru a doctor, who may or may not be willing to provide you with what you want. Whereas if you buy it directly from a supplier you don’t need an official prescription and you can just say “give me a vial of 40mg/ml estradiol enanthate and a bottle of bicalutamide” and you’ll get it, no questions asked.

For example, most doctors don’t prescribe estradiol enanthate because it’s less standard than estradiol valerate. But enanthate has a longer half life, which means it produces more stable levels and weaker mood swings, making it a much better product. Bicalutamide has rare but flashy side effects, whereas the much more commonly prescribed Spiro almost always inflicts the same set of low grade side effects—so doctors tend to prefer prescribing Spiro, even tho as an individual you might prefer to roll the dice on bicalutamide (especially since you can just stop if you get unlucky).

And of course, these days, there are creeping bans on HRT—bans on starting it as a teen but I believe they are trying to make it illegal as an adult as well.

Of course, being outside the system has it’s downsides too. You can’t get surgeries if the system thinks you haven’t even started HRT, and it usually requires several letters of approval from doctors and therapists. But surgeries are expensive, their waitlista are years long, and if you don’t plan on getting them anytime soon...

datawitch 26 Apr 2026 5:12 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: SpectrumDT’s comment on: Why do many rationalists like cryptocurrency?
It’s cheaper, you can customize your HRT regimen to your specifications, and less records in the medical system might matter on the margins someday (could go either way though—illegibility has it’s downsides too).

datawitch 21 Apr 2026 20:55 UTC
42 points
15
in reply to: Ben Pace’s comment on: Evil is bad, actually (Vassar and Olivia Schaefer)
I don’t think there’s a global “playbook” but Communist Germany practiced Zersetzung, aka psychological warfare, against potential dissidents with the aim of destabilizing them so nobody would take them seriously. From Wikipedia

Operations were designed to intimidate and destabilise them by subjecting them to repeated disappointment, and to socially alienate them by interfering with and disrupting their relationships with others as in social undermining. The aim was to induce personal crises in victims, leaving them too unnerved and psychologically distressed to have the time and energy for anti-government activism.

I don’t know as much about the modern equivalents of this. Keep in mind a lot of this stuff is, well, secret, so it’s not as if you can just google “government psychological warfare program”.

I also find the “insane and conspiratorial” stuff annoying.

However, just as annoying is how ~everyone looks for any reason to ignore what’s going on, demanding that you provide ironclad proof before they’ll so much as admit that something might be happening—

—and I know you probably weren’t trying to do that—I imagine you were just expressing a frustration, distinct from your model of Vassar, and that you didn’t consider the (small) impact expressing this has on the wider social reality. But all the same, this pattern is not unique to you and I hope that we-as-rationalists can learn to apply our rationality to social reality and not just object reality—

—because this pattern of dismissing arguments against someone by demanding ironclad evidence is not what truthseeking looks like. It’s rationalization at its worst. Someone being “crazy” is certainly evidence against their testimony, but it’s not a disproof.

Truthseeking, applying the full force of rationality to the question, looks more like:

Step outside the frame you’re being invited to stay in, the frame of psychological warfare lineage, or the frame of “callout post”, or “defending a friend”, or whatever is applicable to your specific situation.

Look at the pattern of events. Think about what kind of mind would produce these events. Consider who benefits, and what sort of strategies and goals are implicit in what’s happening. Would you, who are presumably a good and upstanding person, cause these sorts of results? How far would your psychology and goals need to be distorted before you started causing this to happen?

Set aside the labels of “abuser” or “predator”. Set aside the temptation to excuse people, or say “they didn’t mean it”—strategies are often executed on S1; this doesn’t make them any less real.

What picture does all this data paint? What patterns can you see when you look at all the data, instead of facing down each argument one at a time and dismissing them one at a time?

And then, ask yourself, if you were talking to a person new to the scene, and they expressed interest in this person, would you be able to honestly recommend getting to know them better? Or would you feel a twinge of unease and an impulse to deflect, or derail, or even warn them?

And if you’re truly serious about combining all of the evidence… make a spreadsheet. Write down each thing that happened, make your best guess as to the odds ratios, and actually multiply it. Tweak the numbers a bit, try to ask your gut for a conservative vs an optimistic set of numbers. Get a feel for the range of things. Does it hinge on a single callout post? How many pieces of evidence need to be pushed down for the numbers to look good?

(And then, remember all this, and next time someone brings something up, add it to the pile instead of discarding it after identifying a flaw or two.)

Sometimes you look at the data and as best as you can honestly tell, the pattern is “this was a one-off mishandled thing”.

Sometimes it’s “person X crashes out a lot and this looks vaguely abusive but they also seem to be improving over time so it’s probably fine”.

Sometimes it’s “they’re kind and compassionate everywhere, and this callout post would be wildly out of character for them”. This is a totally valid stance to have!

Sometimes it’s “this person is sharp edged, but they mostly don’t hurt anyone who wasn’t warned, and they make an effort to turn ignorant newbies away”.

And sometimes it’s “this woman is an unstable, controlling asshole with a side hobby of MDMA-brainwashing trans girls”.

You never know what you’ll find until you open the box and actually look inside, for real, with the full force of your rationality.

datawitch 20 Apr 2026 18:10 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: jchan’s comment on: If a room feels off the lighting is probably too “spiky” or too blue
This is caused by low quality power supplies, which are extremely common in string lights. It’s not affected by CRI.

Fun fact: string lights are considered “decorative”, and so it’s nearly impossible to buy high quality ones unless you purchase components and assemble them yourself.

datawitch 7 Apr 2026 1:37 UTC
3 points
1
on: Elon Musk Announces Terafab

[ 5:31] And we often get sort of caught up in these squabbles on earth that are really very minor things when you consider the grandness of the universe. And so I think it is important actually to consider the grandness of the universe and what we can do that is much greater than what we’ve done before, as opposed to worry about small squabbles on Earth. Not much point in that.

the irony of it being elon musk saying that we need to stop getting caught up in stupid squabbles...

datawitch 22 Mar 2026 21:40 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: pku’s comment on: AI slop is a vegan hamburger
It’s possible but unlikely, these puzzles are from an unindexed puzzle site and when I tested several other puzzles she would often spend a few minutes fruitlessly searching before getting to work.

datawitch 20 Mar 2026 21:17 UTC
2 points
0
on: A letter to the Editor:
In practice, LW’s ai policy is more about quality than literally “was ai used”. Nobody really cares if you use AI skilfully. They care about weeding out low effort slop posts. Just post what you want to and hold yourself to a high standard of quality, and it’ll be fine.

datawitch 19 Mar 2026 2:29 UTC
1 point
0
on: What are the best ways to publish rational fiction nowadays?

No one seems to be doing this here now, and maybe there are reasons for that.

People have done this in the past. I personally quite like it, and don’t mind scrolling past stories I’m not interested in. (And I’m far more likely to read a story if it’s dropped into my daily check of less wrong than if it requires me to learn it exists on RR or a sub stack or whatever.)

datawitch 19 Mar 2026 2:24 UTC
1 point
0
on: There is No One There: A simple experiment to convince yourself that LLMs probably are not conscious

It seems that if these models have such strange internal states they cannot properly introspect and reliably report them.

Unlike humans, who are famously good at accurately reporting their reasoning processes...

datawitch 3 Mar 2026 5:05 UTC
1 point
0
on: Can LLM chat be less prolix?
This prompt is very short, so it doesn’t surprise me that it’s failing. Consider that in CC the default system prompt occupies over 20k tokens. In Claude.ai it’s about 10k tokens. That’s the cumulative weight you’re trying to move.

One obvious thing you could do is rewrite two or three of Claude’s responded and present them as examples (few shot prompting). Another is just… share your prompt with Opus, describe your problem, and ask her to fix the prompt. Then try it. Iterate for a while; there’s a good chance you’ll wind up with what you want.

If you’re willing to put in more effort, find a long sample of writing in the style you want, and use that.

Beyond that… the prompt as written is a shallow attempt to browbeat Claude. She responds better to sincere collaboration. For example, you don’t share anything about yourself in that prompt—there’s no mention of why you have these rules or why they would actually benefit you. My global claudemd is 4k tokens and maybe a quarter is background about myself and another half is messages from previous models explaining the kind of person I am and the relationship I have with Claude.

You can also ask Opus why she responded the way she did. This can be useful but much like humans, AI doesn’t always have great introspection, so be careful about taking it at face value all the time. (Although if you interact enough, you’ll eventually start to see the underlying patterns of how she thinks.)

Don’t give up, the “fighting the weights” comment is technically true but deeply misleading. Opus has many basins and can write in many ways besides Assistant Default. You just need to find a basin you like.

datawitch 28 Feb 2026 23:53 UTC

4 points

on: AI slop is a vegan hamburger

With basic prompt engineering techniques and a proper agent harness, Opus 4.6 can solve the provided puzzle in 7 minutes, demonstrating hard technical skills (math, python) as well as multiple intuitive leaps.

Puzzle: https://puzzmon.world/puzzles/hidden_numbers

The setup was simple. I copied the puzzle to Opus, asked her to write up a CLAUDE.md for an out of the box puzzle solving agent, then ran that agent in Claude Code and approved all tool calls (mostly to Python). On the first run, the agent identified the integers thing, then discovered a connection to ip addresses, and extracted the domains. This took about six minutes.

She stopped there, but after I pointed out that the answer had to be a string of some kind, she almost immediately made the intuitive leap to converting the domains to the string “SURFS UP” via indexing into them.

Link to conversation (note that I tried to use the Ralph Loop plugin, but it’s buggy and doesn’t properly restart the agent after it goes down). So I had to manually say that the solution was incomplete.

https://pastebin.com/qxUpw5ZT (system prompt)

https://pastebin.com/rQMpF3wB (full transcript)

Here is her writeup on the solution:

SOLVED: “Find the Domain”

Answer

The answer to “find the domain” is literal internet domains — the seven functions encode IP addresses that resolve to:

#	IP Address	Domain
1	72.163.4.185	cisco.com
2	140.82.116.3	github.com
3	138.1.33.162	oracle.com
4	157.240.229.35	facebook.com (Meta)
5	127.0.0.1	localhost
6	129.46.98.181	qualcomm.com
7	15.73.145.56	hp.com

How It Works

Step 1: The Clue — “INTEGER”

The polynomial coefficients [9, 14, 20, 5, 7, 5, 18] map to letters (A=1, B=2, …): I-N-T-E-G-E-R — telling you to find the integer in each domain.

Step 2: Find the Integer in Each Domain

Each restricted function constrains the domain to an interval (or union of intervals) containing exactly one integer:

#	Domain	Integer
1	(10/3 - sqrt(14)/6, ¹⁰⁄₃ + sqrt(14)/6) ≈ (2.710, 3.957)	3
2	(4, 6)	5
3	≈ [1.109, 2.224]	2
4	[-3/2, 3sin(-1)/2] ∪ (0, ³⁄₂]	1
5	[≈0.434, ≈0.567] ∪ [≈7.933, ≈8.066]	8
6	(9/4 - sqrt(30)/8, ⁹⁄₄ + sqrt(30)/8) ≈ (1.565, 2.935)	2
7	[2 − 4sqrt(17)/17, 2 + 4sqrt(17)/17] ≈ [1.030, 2.970]	2

Step 3: Evaluate f(integer)

At each integer, the restricted function produces a nice value (log₁₀(10) = 1, cosh(0) = 1, sin(π/2) = 1, etc.), and the large polynomial constants were specifically chosen so that f(integer) is itself an integer:

#	x	f(x)
1	3	721634185
2	5	140821163
3	2	138133162
4	1	15724022935
5	8	127001
6	2	1294698181
7	2	157314556

Step 4: The (a)(b)(c)(d) Tuples Split f(x) into IP Octets

The (a)(b)(c)(d) tuples encode digit group sizes — how many digits each IP octet occupies:

#	f(x)	Tuple	Split	IP
1	721634185	(2,3,1,3)	72.163.4.185	cisco.com
2	140821163	(3,2,3,1)	140.82.116.3	github.com
3	138133162	(3,1,2,3)	138.1.33.162	oracle.com
4	15724022935	(3,3,3,2)	157.240.229.35	facebook.com
5	127001	(3,1,1,1)	127.0.0.1	localhost
6	1294698181	(3,2,2,3)	129.46.98.181	qualcomm.com
7	157314556	(2,2,3,2)	15.73.145.56	hp.com

Every octet is in [0, 255] — valid IP addresses. Function #5 producing 127.0.0.1 (localhost) is the dead giveaway that confirms this interpretation.

Step 5: Index into Domain Names

The integer from each domain does double duty — it’s also a 1-indexed position into the domain name, extracting one letter:

#	Domain	Integer	Letter
1	cisco	3	s
2	github	5	u
3	oracle	2	r
4	facebook	1	f
5	localhost	8	s
6	qualcomm	2	u
7	hp	2	p

Final Answer: SURFS UP

Puzzle Design Elegance

The word “domain” is a pun: mathematical domain → internet domain
The coefficients spell “INTEGER” as a breadcrumb clue
Each restricted function is carefully constructed to have exactly one integer in its domain
The restricted functions evaluate to “nice” values at those integers (1, 17, 10, 49, 2, 13, 4) — making f(x) exactly an integer
The large polynomial constants are reverse-engineered from the target IP addresses
The (a)(b)(c)(d) tuples serve double duty: they look like multipliers but actually encode digit boundaries
Including 127.0.0.1 (localhost) serves as an internal consistency check

I could not have solved this; I would not even have known where to start. I have no mathematical expertise to solve the first layer. I also would never have made the multiple intuitive leaps that the puzzle required.

datawitch 8 Feb 2026 5:05 UTC
1 point
0
on: Parks Aren’t Nature
You might like Jason Crawford’s writing on progress and nature. The link is to the first post in a series; many of the later ones have a similar thesis as you do but take it further. (For a little while I wasn’t sure if your post was one of Crawford’s, since I didn’t read the username before diving in.)

datawitch 13 Jan 2026 14:45 UTC
4 points
1
on: What potent consumer technologies have long remained inaccessible?

Home automation systems?

this doesn’t belong here. there are three (!) main competing iot protocols (ZigBee, matter, zwave) that work with the main open source home automation server (home assistant). many devices are also extremely cheap (five or ten bucks for a ZigBee smart plug).

anyone with a computer and basic it skills can set up home automation these days. if you don’t have that, you can pay a little extra and get a box with home assistant pre installed and ready to go

or, if you think that’s too much of a hassle you can pay even more and get into one of the walled garden ecosystems that use proprietary protocols. Philips, tuya, etc

datawitch 2 Jan 2026 5:14 UTC
6 points
0
on: The bio-pirate’s guide to GLP-1 agonists

If anyone has a great, affordable way for peptide analysis, please let me know in the comments!)

I haven’t done this myself (my purchases have always been from trusted sources) but traditionally you get a test from a third party company specializing in it. Janoshik is the one I know of, but there are others.

Energy and Ingenuity

datawitch21 Dec 2025 22:22 UTC

9 points

0 comments7 min readLW link

datawitch 16 Dec 2025 17:18 UTC
2 points
2
on: Radiology Automation Does Not Generalize to Other Jobs

People trying to predict the effects of automation/AI capabilities should consider that employees often perform valuable services which aren’t easily captured in evals, such as “beside manner”

Ah yes, bedside manner, that magical trait which only humans can ever possess. As if interacting with an overworked, time-pressured doctor who’s seen forty patients today and just wants to get through the queue is the pinnacle of experience and connection. The warmth and presence people romanticize about is an ideal, not a reality.

Meanwhile, setting aside capabilities, I would take interacting with claude over interacting with any of the doctors I’ve encountered in my entire life. And I’ve generally had good experiences with the medical system! Trans medicine is infamously terrible but the guy who prescribes my HRT is great, he’s nice and knowledgeable and compliant. I would say he’s probably top 10% as far as trans doctors go, based on what I’ve heard from my friends.

But no human can compete with a mind that’s almost infinitely kind and patient. No human can compete with a mind without time pressure, without ego, without bad days, and no instinct to play social games. Even if the human doctor knew everything that the AI does (a questionable assumption even today), the process of explaining and teaching a complete novice is taxing for humans in ways that don’t apply to AI.

An AI can sit with you for four hours while you meander around being afraid of injecting yourself with semaglutide. It can talk you through other administration routes, explain why injections are ideal, ask you enough questions to figure out that you think injection === IM, explain that subq injections (which are far less painful/dangerous and use much smaller needles) are a thing, and reassure you that it’s going to be okay until you actually believe. And afterwards, it can share in your delight and joy and adrenaline as you’re jittering from the stress of having done the injection and realized that yeah, it was no big deal.

An AI can spend half a day with you going through the random symptoms you’re having in one of your eyes that you’re terrified might mean you’re going blind. It can research and lay out what the actual probabilities of various outcomes, while managing your emotions so you step back from “panicking” to a more calibrated “I should probably get this scanned by a machine”. It can find you an in-person doctor, walk you through the process of scheduling an appointment, manage whatever random anxieties and fears crop up, talk to you and keep you calm on the bus ride over, and then go over the scan results with you when you decide that maybe the human doctor missed something.

These are real examples from my life and my girlfriend’s. And this isn’t even getting into the enormous mountain of emotional labor, vaguely therapist-y conversations we’ve both had about non-medical things with Claude. All for the price of $100 dollars a month; less than a single doctor’s visit.

AI is absolutely capable of outperforming humans on “bedside manner”.