joec

• joec 23 Feb 2026 6:44 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: CarolusRenniusVitellius’s comment on: CharlesRW’s Shortform

  One nitpick is that the a part of the immune system (your population of B-cells) can rewrite its source code between generations, and surprisingly rapidly! In fact, because their goal is to produce antibodies which grab on to pathogens, B-cells will actually mutate the genes encoding for these antibodies at an extraordinary rate. And, they’ll reproduce more the more their antibodies are shown to work (that is, to bind to a piece of a pathogen!) This allows your body to run evolution far faster than a lot of microbes, which have selfish genes that “want” to be passed on without mutation.
  
  Now, your main thesis still remains. The adaptive immune system, which includes all B-cells, is only found in vertebrates. The majority of the animal kingdom does have an immune system which is specified once, and they get by just fine. However, it’s also worth noting that the largest and most complex animals are ~all vertebrates, and this might have something to do with the immune system, among other things.

In­nate Immunity

• joec 10 Feb 2026 3:12 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Chris­ti­anKl’s Shortform

  building the data center on the moon where everything is cold and the moon is a big heat sink.

  The moon can get surprisingly hot! 120 degrees celsius in some parts which is enough to boil water at atmospheric pressure. The cold parts of the moon are “craters of eternal darkness” which have a stable, extremely low temperature so one might be able to use those.

  Also, I’m not sure to what extent the moon can be used as a heat sink, given its low thermal conductivity. Then again, if your surroundings are in the tens of kelvins, that might be good enough on its own.

• joec 4 Nov 2025 2:52 UTC

  2 points

  2

  on: The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect

  I find it interesting how nobody seems to make Mr. Humman’s arguments about chess, but plenty of people seem to make his arguments concerning ASI.
  
  Now, if I were arguing with Mr. Humman, I’d get him to try to play against stockfish (or to play against me, and cheat using stockfish) to let him know what it really feels like to play against a superior mind. I feel like it would be pretty hard to continue arguing his point about chess after Stockfish punched his lights out for the 5th time in a row (or however long it takes to sink in). As a side-note, I do find it interesting that chess engines were only briefly mentioned here. Nor was a large lookup-table-type chess engine.

  Now, it might be that there are no Mr. Hummans (with respect to chess) these days, but I wonder if there ever were any. That is, someone claiming that a machine would never be able to reliably beat a human at chess. Was this a notion that more than a handful of people actually held? Was it shattered by the advent of chess engines or something else?

• joec 8 Oct 2025 6:44 UTC

  4 points

  2

  on: You Should Get a Reusable Mask

  That’s an interesting recommendation. I’m unfamiliar with buying reusable masks, do you know a good way to decide whether to buy a small, medium or large mask?

• joec 14 Jul 2025 1:15 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: An Opinionated Guide to Us­ing Anki Correctly

  Great post!

  I think I’d argue something similar but distinct at the beginning. My impression is that people only quit anki for one reason, and that reason is that they don’t like it. All “how to stick with anki” advice is only useful insofar as it makes anki more fun or enjoyable. I genuinely look forward to my reviews (almost) every day. Sometimes I do a lot, sometimes I do a little.

  The 20-card/​day limit is probably more useful at the beginning, when it can be tempting to try to add in tons of new cards. But more reviews can be fun too! I don’t have a hard limit, and I think I do something like 40-50 reviews/​day (and often at the end I still want more!) There’s definitely such a thing as too many reviews, but that threshold is different for everyone. I’d recommend everyone reading this to test their limits, but as soon as you get annoyed, move back into easy-mode.

  Also, I’d like to second @Random Developer that knowing to DELETE cards with little provocation is essential to making anki fun. If your cards are annoying, you will start to associate that annoyance with anki more generally. If you are annoyed with anki, you’re more likely to drop it.

  From my own experience, the closest I came to deleting anki was when I was trying to learn a bunch of esperanto quickly, doing hundreds of reviews/​day (and getting many of them wrong) and became annoyed with it. I tried to push through, but I started to not want to do my other reviews, either. One of the best decisions I ever made was giving up and deleting that entire deck. I think I would have slowly faded away from anki in general if I had stuck with it for a few more weeks. “You must not dread anki; you must not treat it like a chore. If a card causes you to avoid reviewing, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better to give up on one card than to lose the benefits of spaced repetition forever.”

• joec 2 Dec 2024 22:10 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Mag­ni­tudes: Let’s Com­pre­hend the In­com­pre­hen­si­ble!

  One example of a web of interrelated facts that I have concerns molecular simulations, with bold/​italic denoting things that I have in my anki deck, or would make good cards.

  One interesting thing about moleculaes bouncing around is that a nanosecond, which sounds really short, is actually a decently long time. Consider that molecules at room temperature are typically moving at about the speed of sound (340 m/​s) and a typical chemical bond length is about 0.1 to 0.2 nanometers. This means that a typical molecule (if nothing bumps into it) will go 1700-3400 bond-lengths in a nanosecond! Of course, molecules in liquid, which are jammed pretty close together, won’t move that far without interruptions- they’ll bump into each other, switch direction and bump into others many times over the course of a nanosecond. This means that the typical timestep (the $dt$ when integrating the differential equations of motion) for a molecular dynamics simulation has to be much shorter. In practice, for a molecular dynamics simulation that simulates all the atoms of a system, $dt$ is about a femtosecond. With these timesteps, it becomes possible to simulate about a microsecond of simulation time per day of all atoms of a medium-sized protein moving around on a modern GPU like an A40. This is a big reason for why we can’t just simulate a protein folding to crack the protein folding problem. Protein folding takes about a second or on the order of a million GPU-days if you were to simulate it.

• joec 2 Dec 2024 21:37 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Shankar Sivarajan’s comment on: Mag­ni­tudes: Let’s Com­pre­hend the In­com­pre­hen­si­ble!

  One thing that’s useful for me is to draw analogies. For instance, the earth is about as big compared to the kilogram as benzene ($1.3\times {10}^{-25}$ kg) is small.

• joec 2 Dec 2024 21:29 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Measure’s comment on: Mag­ni­tudes: Let’s Com­pre­hend the In­com­pre­hen­si­ble!

  That’s true. The specific energy of antimatter is also actually double the “maximum” if you don’t count the mass of the matter (1 gram of antimatter + 1 gram of air produces about 2 grams worth of energy). Funny enough, this is analogous to combustion fuel. The reason combustion fuel (on the order of 50 MJ/​kg for most hydrocarbons) seems to be able to store much more energy than, say a high explosive (on the order of 5 MJ/​kg) is because high explosives contain their own oxidizers, while combustion fuel uses the air as an oxidizer.

• joec 1 Dec 2024 3:37 UTC

  0 points

  0

  in reply to: ojorgensen’s comment on: You should con­sider ap­ply­ing to PhDs (soon!)

  I’ll have to push back on this. I think if there’s one specific program that you’d like to go to, especially if there’s an advisor you have in mind, it’s good to tailor your application to that program. However, this might not apply to the typical reader of this post.

  I followed a k strategy with my PhD statements of purpose (and recommendations) rather than an r strategy. I tailored my applications to the specific schools, and it seemed to work pretty decently well. I know of more qualified people who were rejected from a much higher proportion of schools who spent much less time on each application.

  (Disclaimer: this is all anecdotal. Also, I was applying for chemistry programs, not AI)

Mag­ni­tudes: Let’s Com­pre­hend the In­com­pre­hen­si­ble!

• joec 19 Sep 2024 20:22 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Gen­er­a­tive ML in chem­istry is bot­tle­necked by synthesis

  Another way to assess the efficacy of ML-generated molecules would be through physics-based methods. For instance, binding-free-energy calculations which estimate how well a molecule binds to a specific part of a protein can be made quite accurate. Currently, they’re not used very often because of the computational cost, but this could be much less prohibitive as chips get faster (or ASICs for MD become easier to get) and so the models could explore chemical space without being restricted to only getting feedback from synthetically accessable molecules.

• joec 20 Aug 2024 21:50 UTC

  0 points

  0

  on: If AI is in a bub­ble and the bub­ble bursts, what would you do?

  If this happens, it could lead to a lot of AI researchers looking for jobs. Depending on the incentives at the time and the degree to which their skills are transferable, many of them could move into safety-related work.

• joec 8 Aug 2024 1:20 UTC

  1 point

  1

  on: It’s time for a self-re­pro­duc­ing machine

  I really like this idea, especially the part about doing it on Baffin Island. A few questions/​comments/​concerns

  1. During the winter, the polar ice cap expands to the point that Baffin Island is surrounded by ice. This makes shipping things to and from the island difficult for a large part of the year. I also imagine most people don’t want to be there during the winter to check up on things. Do you imagine things progressing more slowly during the winter because of this?

  2. Looking at the climate data for Baffin island and comparing mean daily maximum in July and mean daily minimum in January, it looks like there’s a range of about 40 Celsius, which seems significant (and over a range pretty different from what most engineers are used to building for). Do you expect this will interfere with the equipment? Will the Autofacs need some kind of temperature control?

  3. Do you have any ideas for how to deal with defective/​broken AutoFacs? My first thought is that you could automatically disassemble them, throw away the defective parts and use the working parts to build new Autofacs. There’s probably something more clever.

  4. Will the AutoFacs be able to clean themselves or fix the other normal, small things that worsen performance as machinery operates? If so, how?

• joec 10 Jun 2024 2:18 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Myron Hedderson’s comment on: Just ad­mit that you’ve zoned out

  Do you do this during conversation or just during lectures? I feel like I should perhaps start doing this in lectures, although I might feel some qualms about recording a speaker without permission.

• joec 10 Jun 2024 2:15 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Mikhail Samin’s comment on: Just ad­mit that you’ve zoned out

  Interesting! Have you noticed that people repeat more or less than the past 20 seconds when you request that they repeat the past 20 seconds? I feel like I would find that more difficult to accurately measure 20 seconds of conversation than if someone told me to repeat everything I said after <particular talking point>. I don’t think the difficult gap is huge, though, and I’m not sure if this is the case for most people.

• joec 5 Jun 2024 1:33 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: cubefox’s comment on: Just ad­mit that you’ve zoned out

  I struggle with this frequently. Of course, in many cases I waltz into a talk where (I think that) the rest of the audience knows more than me, and in those cases I don’t say anything. The best solution I’ve seen is to first build up a ton of social credit and then ask tons of questions. I’ve seen a few cases of fancy professors asking very basic questions that I was too afraid to ask, and knowing that nobody thought they were stupid afterwards.

  If you feel like you’re in danger of giving this talk at the beginning, it might be best to explicitly say at the beginning that you encourage all questions, even if they’re naive. I recall going to a talk where the speaker did this twice, lots of people asked questions, and I learned that the axes of a graph meant something different than I first assumed.

  On the weirder side of solutions, you could try classically conditioning yourself not to take embarrassment so poorly. If you’re a sugar fiend, bring some candies to a talk and eat one for each question you ask.

  I also struggle with the fact that sometimes during a talk, I zone out and don’t know whether the speaker already answered the question I have, precisely because I was zoned out when they might have answered the question. In this case, I tend not to ask the question, since I don’t want to take the time away from other people listening to the talk.

• joec 5 Jun 2024 1:09 UTC

  2 points

  1

  in reply to: SorenJ’s comment on: Just ad­mit that you’ve zoned out

  Yeah, this sounds very reasonable. However, in a situation where the speaker won’t take offense, I think specifying the reason for why you requested to repeat something could be nice. Sometimes people take “could you repeat this” to mean “could you summarize the last few minutes” or “I didn’t understand, could you explain in more detail”. Of course, this is a pretty minor cost, and it’s better to ask someone to repeat things without saying why than to not ask at all.

Just ad­mit that you’ve zoned out

• joec 24 Apr 2024 19:46 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Is there soft­ware to prac­tice read­ing ex­pres­sions?

  I think with a decent training set, this could make a pretty nice Anki deck. The difficulty in this would be getting the data and accurate emotional expression labels.
  A few ideas:

  1. Pay highschool/​college drama students to fake expressions. The quality of the data would be limited by their acting skill, but you could get honest labels.

  2. Gather up some participants and expose them to a variety of things, taking pictures of them under different emotional states. This could run into the problem of people misreporting their actual emotional state. Learning with these might make the user more susceptible to deception.

  3. Screenshot expressions from movies/​videos where the emotional state of the subjects are clear from context.