gwillen

Karma: 2,604

gwillen 30 Apr 2026 17:12 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: fluxxrider’s comment on: The Terrarium
The only time I’ve ever had a chat flagged, I was asking Claude to try decoding a very simple Vigenere cipher (from an old children’s magazine.) So perhaps anything that looks encoded will raise a flag for trying to conceal a prompt injection.

gwillen 14 Feb 2026 22:44 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
(Long-delayed response, because I’m not good at staying on top of my notifications, sorry.)

I think by “go insane”, what I meant is things like:
- believe things that are harmful, counterproductive, or nonsensical, which people around you also believe / support you in believing;
- do things which are harmful, counterproductive, or nonsensical, which people around you also do / support you in doing.
So, yeah, specific things and not insanity in the abstract, although not quite the same sort of specific things I think you were pointing at. In the context of Eliezer’s speech, he did give a slightly more specific interpretation:

I will not write internal scripts which say that I am supposed to / pseudo-predict that I will, do any particular stupid or dramatic thing in response to the end of the world approaching visibly nearer in any particular way.

In other words, if people around you are freaking out unproductively about the end of the world, don’t take that as social license (or mandate!) to freak out unproductively about the end of the world. I (Eliezer) here provide you with social license to instead not do that.

gwillen 4 Jan 2026 18:46 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: JohnWittle’s comment on: How I stopped being sure LLMs are just making up their internal experience (but the topic is still confusing)

I think a lot of people got baited hard by paech et al’s “the entire state is obliterated each token” claims, even though this was obviously untrue even at a glance

can you link this, I can’t immediately find it by googling.

gwillen 11 Dec 2025 0:49 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
Someone mentioned “mass hysteria” above. I think there are cases where, surrounded by a certain culture or context, people feel positive-tribal-emotions about going insane. If that’s true, it seems perhaps quite helpful—to some particular people, in some particular context—for a Big Tribal Leader (or a friend!) to say, “I strongly recommend not going insane! To the extent that this seems interpretable as a choice, I strongly recommend choosing the other thing!”

gwillen 26 Nov 2025 8:28 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: The skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1
Yeah, that’s what I went to—I didn’t realize that was a standard term for it. Mine was arranged through the BMWCCA, for some reason; few of the people attending had BMWs. (Although they mostly had much sportier cars than my 2012 Honda Civic; I think I might have been the only attendee with front-wheel drive.) They “required membership”, perhaps for liability reasons, but were selling it as a package deal with the class. Unfortunately, that specific outfit seems to run them very rarely these days, and their online scheduling interface is crap, or I would recommend an upcoming one.

gwillen 26 Nov 2025 1:13 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Alex A’s comment on: The skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1
You can take classes, which are done in large open flat areas where skidding or spinning your car won’t harm anything. I have taken the very beginning level myself, just to improve my driving skills, with no intention of ever racing. They had you do it in your own car, no specific prerequisites (other than being a legal driver, and an adult or appropriately supervised by one), maximum 25 mph (which turns out to be more than enough to start getting a feel for traction.) The next class, which I didn’t take, involved more safety equipment and higher speeds.

You totally start to get a feel for when your car is losing traction, after very little practice. (This helpfully taught me that, in a scary prior incident on a mountain road, my car had been starting to lose traction, and something about how and why. This kind of knowledge is why I took the class.)

gwillen 26 Nov 2025 1:02 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: jimmy’s comment on: The skills and physics of high-performance driving, Pt. 1
Although, for safety’s sake, I (who am not the article author, and not a race driver, but have a lot of opinions anyway...) actually go out of my way NOT to fly straight through a fresh green at full speed. In fact, my approximate goal is to avoid going through a very fresh green any faster than someone starting from a dead stop. Because that’s the amount of time that an aggressive red-light runner in the crossing direction believes they have to “safely” get through. (And they’re in the wrong, and I absolutely have the right of way, and I don’t want “he absolutely had the right of way” on my tombstone.)

gwillen 26 Nov 2025 0:52 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: avturchin’s comment on: Out-paternalizing the government (getting oxygen for my baby)
You can see in the description that this is an oxygen concentrator—it pulls oxygen from the room air. It’s the same type of device Ruby discusses in the post. I assume they call it a “generator” in the headline because people don’t know what a “concentrator” is.

There is such a thing as a “chemical oxygen generator”, like they typically use for the emergency oxygen masks on airplanes. Those are quite hazardous, because in addition to oxygen, they produce immense amounts of heat, easily enough to start fires. (They also “generate” the oxygen from a solid “fuel” material, which makes them one-time-use emergency devices only.)

gwillen 23 Nov 2025 16:35 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Gretta Duleba’s comment on: Status Is The Game Of The Losers’ Bracket
When I was at Google, I conducted a technical interview of an engineering candidate who wore a suit exactly once in my time there. I found it confusing and sus, but actually he was very good, and he did get the job. I guess he just didn’t get the memo. (And he was clearly a person who enjoyed dressing up, atypically for an engineer; he wasn’t just doing it for the sake of interviewing.)

gwillen 10 Nov 2025 19:18 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Linda Linsefors’s comment on: People Seem Funny In The Head About Subtle Signals

What persentage of people around you, do you think are trying to signal anything with their outfit?

This seems… close to unanswerable? I think it depends enormously on what you mean by “trying to signal anything”. I think there are reasonable definitions for which the answer is very high. (I was going to say “close to 100%”, but then considered that this is untrue of e.g. small children, who may be both incapable of desiring to socially signal things yet, and also not choosing their own clothing. Although in that case, their parents may be trying to signal something instead.) Anybody who is aware that clothing signals things, and is choosing between multiple items of clothing, is very likely (although not certain!) to be putting some consideration, however little, into what their clothes are saying.

gwillen 27 Aug 2025 5:10 UTC
3 points
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on: Shallow Water is Dangerous Too

After she recovered she told me she was trying to push her legs down and stand up, but they wouldn’t go down.

I see an electrical cord going into that fountain (I assume for the pump), and I would like to point out a hidden danger which might or might not have played a role here. Faulty electrical wiring in water (such as a pool or a fountain) can cause current to flow through the body of a person in the water, leading to muscle contraction / paralysis. If the leakage current is large enough, it can directly kill; but even if it’s fairly small, the resulting paralysis can cause drowning, due to the inability to right oneself or exit the water.

The reason I’m not sure this was the cause here, is that you didn’t describe any sensation of shock when reaching into the water. However, it’s possible that you were wearing well-insulated shoes, or that you just didn’t notice the sensation because of adrenaline.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_shock_drowning it’s apparently most common with malfunctioning electrical systems on boats/piers; but it does occasionally happen in fountains or pools. It can result in a very tragic problem that also sometimes happens with confined space / toxic atmosphere rescues; the would-be rescuers (not perceiving the danger) end up as additional victims.

Because of this, I tend to be very careful about entering pools / hot tubs whose maintenance status is not known to me. (Anything electrical that’s in/near water, if installed to modern code, will have a GFCI, which will trip instantly in case of leakage current.) Obviously this does not help someone who slips in by accident. I am also very nervous about any sort of electrical device that is used in water (such as the fountain pump in the picture.) If it’s got 120V going into the water, the hazard is obvious; but even if the immersed cord is low-voltage, it’s still likely to be one malfunction (of the power brick) away from electrifying the water to 120V, if the brick is not plugged into a GFCI. And if the fountain / the brick was obtained from Amazon, it’s likely not made to American electrical safety standards.

gwillen 18 Aug 2025 18:31 UTC
6 points
2
in reply to: cata’s comment on: Debugging for Mid Coders
I would describe myself as an expert-level debugger (which you sound like also), and all of this is describing experiences I have also had.

gwillen 16 Jan 2025 4:05 UTC
2 points
1
on: Unregulated Peptides: Does BPC-157 hold its promises?
Ultrapersonal Healthcare appears to have forgotten to pay Squarespace to renew their website, which doesn’t seem like a great sign.

gwillen 7 Jan 2025 19:21 UTC
8 points
4
in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: Ruby’s Shortform Feed
I think this makes sense as a reminder of a thing that is true anyway, as you somewhat already said; but also consider situations like:
- A given reviewer was only reviewing for substance, and the error is stylistic, or vice versa;
- A given reviewer was only reviewing for a subset of the subject matter;
- A given reviewer was reviewing an early draft, and an error was introduced in a later draft.
In general a given reviewer will not necessarily have a real opportunity to catch any particular error, and usually a reader won’t have enough context to determine whether they did or didn’t. The author by contrast always bears responsibility for errors.

I think the point of the caveat is that it is polite to thank people who helped, but putting someone’s name on something implies they bear responsibility for it, and so the disclaimer is meant to keep the acknowledgement from being double-edged in an inappropriate way. Someone familiar with the writing and editing process will already in theory know all these things; someone who is not familiar maybe won’t be. But ultimately I see it as kind of a phatic courtesy which merely alludes to all this.

gwillen 23 Dec 2024 23:01 UTC
27 points
14
in reply to: philh’s comment on: When Is Insurance Worth It?

Whether or not to get insurance should have nothing to do with what makes one sleep – again, it is a mathematical decision with a correct answer.

I’m not sure how far in your cheek your tongue was, but I claim this is obviously wrong and I can elaborate if you weren’t kidding.

I agree with you, and I think the introduction unfortunately does major damage to what is otherwise a very interesting and valuable article about the mathematics of insurance. I can’t recommend this article to anybody, because the introduction comes right out and says: “The things you always believed about rationalists were true. We believe that emotions have no value, and to be rational it is mandatory to assign zero utility to them. There is no amount of money you should pay for emotional comfort; to do so would be making an error.” This is obviously false.

gwillen 8 Dec 2024 21:04 UTC
3 points
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on: Luck Based Medicine: No Good Very Bad Winter Cured My Hypothyroidism
Have you been testing serum (or urine) iodine, as well as thyroid numbers? If so, I’m curious what those numbers have been doing. (In fact, I would love to see the whole time course of treatments and relevant blood tests if you’d be willing to share, just to help develop my intuition for mysterious biological processes.) Do you expect to have to continue or resume gargling PVP-I in the future, or otherwise somehow keep getting more iodine into your body than it seems to want to absorb (perhaps through some other formulation that’s neither a pill nor a gargle?)

Thanks for posting about this!

gwillen 16 May 2024 4:52 UTC
2 points
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on: Reconsider the anti-cavity bacteria if you are Asian
This paper seems like an interesting counterpoint: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5421578/
Estimates of Ethanol Exposure in Children from Food not Labeled as Alcohol-Containing
They find that:
… orange, apple and grape juice contain substantial amounts of ethanol (up to 0.77 g/L).
… certain packed bakery products such as burger rolls or sweet milk rolls contained more than 1.2 g ethanol [per] 100 g.
… We designed a scenario for average ethanol exposure by a 6-year-old child. … An average daily exposure of 10.3 mg ethanol [per] kg body weight (b.w.) was estimated.
This is estimated ethanol exposure just from eating and drinking regular non-alcoholic food and beverages. A dose of 10mg/kg of ethanol is hundreds of milligrams total, per day—more than an order of magnitude higher than the highest estimate discussed here for the bacteria.
(I will note that I had difficulty verifying any of this; there are lots of news stories on this topic, but they are all fairly fluffy, and link back to the same single study.)

gwillen 13 Dec 2023 21:34 UTC
5 points
1
on: Do websites and apps actually generally get worse after updates, or is it just an effect of the fear of change?
One possible factor I don’t see mentioned so far: A structural bias for action over inaction. If the current design happened to be perfect, the chance of making it worse soon would be nearly 100%, because they will inevitably change something.

This is complementary to “mean reversion” as an explanation—that explains why changes make things worse, whereas bias-towards-action explains why they can’t resist making changes despite this. This may be due to the drive for promotions and good performance reviews; it’s hard to reward employees correctly for their actions, but it’s damn near impossible to reward them correctly for inaction. To explain why Google keeps launching products and then abandoning them, many cynical Internet commentators point to the need for employees to launch things to get promoted. Other people dispute this, but frankly it matches my impressions from when I worked there 15 years ago. It seems to me that the cycle of pointless and damaging redesigns has the same driving force.

gwillen 26 Jul 2023 18:09 UTC
9 points
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in reply to: Adam Zerner’s comment on: Secure Hand Holding
If a car is trying to yield to me, and I want to force it to go first, I turn my back so that the driver can see that I’m not watching their gestures. If that’s not enough I will start to walk the other way, as though I’ve changed my mind / was never actually planning to cross.

I’ll generally do this if the car has the right-of-way (and is yielding wrongly), or if the car is creating a hazard or problem for other drivers by waiting for me (e.g. sticking out from a driveway into the road), or if I can’t tell whether the space beyond the yielding car is safe (e.g. multiple lanes), or if I just for any reason would feel safer not waking in front of the car.

I will also generally cross behind a stopped car, rather than in front of it, at stop signs / rights-on-red / parking lot exits / any time the car is probably paying attention to other cars, rather than to me.

gwillen 27 Apr 2023 21:25 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: Boris Kashirin’s comment on: Gas and Water
You are wrong! Ethanol is mixed into all modern gas, and is hygroscopic—it absorbs water from the air. This is one of the things fuel stabilizer is supposed to prevent.

Given that Jeff did use fuel stabilizer, and the amount of water was much more that I would expect, it feels to me like water must have leaked into the gas can somehow from the outside instead? But I don’t know.

I agree with Jeff that if someone wanted to steal the gas they would just steal the can. There’s no conceivable reason to replace some of the gas with water.