femtogrammar

Karma: 89

femtogrammar 11 May 2022 7:51 UTC
21 points
on: Fighting in various places for a really long time
Agree that the treatment of nihilism is shallow, but it didn’t matter to me because it wasn’t the heart of the movie at all. The heart is, hmm, being a failure? Letting your relationships decay because you’re neglecting them, because you don’t have a “show up for my people” attitude about them (maybe because on some level you expect both yourself and them to be better, but you aren’t, and this is discouraging)… letting (career, family, time management) problems build up that you dismiss as chronic irritations rather than the defining, central challenges that you have to tackle… and then managing, somehow, to change, to choose love, to choose commitment to your own life.
(stares at that paragraph) Okay, yes. That’s it for me. This movie is good because it shows a wreck of a person choosing to commit to their own life. I don’t commit enough to my own life, my friends don’t commit to their own lives, and it’s very potent to watch someone turn around on this! It turns me a bit in the same direction.
I cannot ask for more from art.
Found the movie hilarious and it never crossed my mind that the protagonist being a middle aged immigrant was part of what made it funny, btw.

femtogrammar 11 May 2021 2:02 UTC
10 points
on: MIRI location optimization (and related topics) discussion
Have you guys already done a voting survey (with whatever system seems good – STAR voting?) sent out to (1) the population of talent you want to take with you for AI research, (2) rationalists who aren’t mission critical but are still valuable as interstitial social elements?
If not – at some point that’s going to happen, right? This discussion seems most useful if it exists to inform a large number of people who might move what the options are, so that their preferences can be assessed numerically.

femtogrammar 9 May 2021 21:33 UTC
4 points
on: MIRI location optimization (and related topics) discussion
I moved to Seattle from the Bay Area, and while I love the weather and relatively sane rent and general environment around here, I think 14% of the US population having a mild form of SAD should be one of the dominating factors in decisionmaking. I have mild SAD, which I find acceptable because I’m not standing in any civilizational bottlenecks, but I would move if I worked at an EA organization and considered my work very important.
If you guys consider SAD to be a solved problem via more dakka, then I retract this and mostly recommend the area.

femtogrammar 5 Feb 2021 7:41 UTC
1 point
in reply to: MarcelloV’s comment on: For those who advocate Anki
That’s what I do.

femtogrammar 31 Jan 2021 11:29 UTC
2 points
on: For those who advocate Anki
My spouse has been learning Korean for two years on Duolingo, which also uses spaced repetition, with approximately no days missed, and learning has been slow. I think Anki is much worse as a primary language learning tool because it doesn’t remix particles to give you new sentences to chew on.
Where I find it shines for me (I review my cards ~2/week):
- English vocabulary
- Programming language syntax
- Concepts that can be distilled into bite sized info chunks—it doesn’t substitute for understanding, but as a person who’s better at memorization than concept-processing I find that memorizing the keywords and relations of a topic primes me to take in more when I read an article about how all the concepts hook up together. This works for database concepts but not quantum mechanics.
- 1~3 sentence text designed to change some thinking pattern (e.g. I have an semi-phobia of insects but have had one really nice experience watching one, so I might have an Anki card prompting me to remember that)
- Strong preferences my friends have (“Julie really hates spoilers”)
- Helping install TAPs

femtogrammar 24 Mar 2019 22:07 UTC
3 points
in reply to: Natália’s comment on: Retrospective on a quantitative productivity logging attempt
Hmm, I looked you up on Facebook and apparently you sent me a friend request god-knows-when (which I presumably ignored because I didn’t know you), which I have just accepted.