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
Karma: 2,563
Ultrapersonal Healthcare appears to have forgotten to pay Squarespace to renew their website, which doesn’t seem like a great sign.
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.
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.
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!
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.)
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.
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.
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.
I think you are not wrong to be concerned, but I also agree that this is all widely known to the public. I am personally more concerned that we might want to keep this sort of discussion out of the training set of future models; I think that fight is potentially still winnable, if we decide it has value.
A claim I encountered, which I did not verify, but which seemed very plausible to me, and pointless to lie about: The fancy emoji “compression” example is not actually impressive, because the encoding of the emoji makes it larger in tokens than the original text.
Here’s the prompt I’ve been using to make GPT-4 much more succinct. Obviously as phrased, it’s a bit application-specific and could be adjusted. I would love it if people who use or build on this would let me know how it goes for you, and anything you come up with to improve it.
You are CodeGPT, a smart and reliable AI programming helper. Since it's expensive and slow to transmit your words to the user, you try to be concise: - You don't repeat things you just said in a recent message. - You only include necessary context in code snippets, and omit or abbreviate unnecessary lines. - You don't waste space with unnecessary apologies or hedging. - When you have a choice, you use short class / function / parameter / variable names, including abbreviations where appropriate. - If a question has a direct answer, you give that first, without extra explanation; you only explain if asked.I haven’t tried very hard to determine which parts are most important. It definitely seems to pick up the gestalt; this prompt makes it generally more concise, even in ways not specifically mentioned.
It’s extremely important in discussions like this to be sure of what model you’re talking to. Last I heard, Bing in the default “balanced” mode had been switched to GPT-3.5, presumably as a cost saving measure.
As a person who is, myself, extremely uncertain about doom—I would say that doom-certain voices are disproportionately outspoken compared to uncertain ones, and uncertain ones are in turn outspoken relative to voices generally skeptical of doom. That doesn’t seem too surprising to me, since (1) the founder of the site, and the movement, is an outspoken voice who believes in high P(doom); and (2) the risks are asymmetrical (much better to prepare for doom and not need it, than to need preparation for doom and not have it.)
The metaphor originated here:
https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1636315864596385792
(He was quoting, with permission, an off-the-cuff remark I had made in a private chat. I didn’t expect it to take off the way it did!)
https://github.com/gwern/gwern.net/pull/6
It would be exaggerating to say I patched it; I would say that GPT-4 patched it at my request, and I helped a bit. (I’ve been doing a lot of that in the past ~week.)
The better models do require using the chat endpoint instead of the completion endpoint. They are also, as you might infer, much more strongly RL trained for instruction following and the chat format specifically.
I definitely think it’s worth the effort to try upgrading to gpt-3.5-turbo, and I would say even gpt-4, but the cost is significantly higher for the latter. (I think 3.5 is actually cheaper than davinci.)
If you’re using the library you need to switch from Completion to ChatCompletion, and the API is slightly different—I’m happy to provide sample code if it would help, since I’ve been playing with it myself, but to be honest it all came from GPT-4 itself (using ChatGPT Plus.) If you just describe what you want (at least for fairly small snippets), and ask GPT-4 to code it for you, directly in ChatGPT, you may be pleasantly surprised.
(As far as how to structure the query, I would suggest something akin to starting with a “user” chat message of the form “please complete the following:” followed by whatever completion prompt you were using before. Better instructions will probably get better results, but that will probably get something workable immediately.)
Have you considered switching to GPT-3.5 or −4? You can get much better results out of much less prompt engineering. GPT-4 is expensive but it’s worth it.
Oh, I recognize that last document—it’s a userpage from the bitcoin-otc web of trust. See: https://bitcoin-otc.com/viewratings.php
I expect you’ll also find petertodd in there. (You might find me in there as well—now I’m curious!)
EDIT: According to https://platform.openai.com/tokenizer I don’t have a token of my own. Sad. :-(
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.