Hello! I work at Lightcone and like LessWrong :-). I have made some confidentiality agreements I can’t leak much metadata about (like who they are with). I have made no non-disparagement agreements.
kave
Karma: 3,091
My writing is often hard to follow. I think this is partly because I tend to write like I talk, but I can’t use my non-verbals to help me out, and I don’t get live feedback from the listener.
Interesting! Two yet more interesting versions of the test:
Someone who currently gets use from LLMs writing more memory-efficient code, though maybe this is kind of question-begging
Someone who currently gets use from LLMs, and also is pretty familiar with trying to improve the memory efficiency of their code (which maybe is Ray, idk)
Moderation note: RFEs with interesting writeups have been a bit hard to frontpage recently. Normally, an announcement of a funding round is on the “personal” side, but I do think the content of this post, other than the announcement, is frontpage-worthy. For example, it would be interesting for people to see in recommendations in a few months time.
With the recent OpenPhil RFE, we asked them to split out the timeless content, which we then frontpaged. I would be happier if this post did that, but for now I’ll frontpage it. I might change my mind and remove it from recommendations if I see it showing up and it feeling strange.
(Another thing that would help me feel comfortable frontpaging it would be a title change, where the new funding round was mentioned parenthetically).
This popped up in my Recommended feed, and it piqued my interest: I think it relates to a design skill I’ve picked up at Lightcone. When staging a physical space, or creating a website, I often want to stop iterating quite early, when the core idea is realised. “It would be a lot of work to get all the minor details here, but how much does stuff feeling a bit jank really matter?”
I think jank matters surprisingly much! When creating something, it’s easy to think “wow, that’s a cool idea. I’ve got a proof of concept sorted”. But users, even if they think similar thoughts, either experience delight and ease, or they don’t.
In design, it’s kind of easy to “turn off your eyes” for a bunch of problems, and stop being able to notice them as things to improve. Which seems a bit different from mortgages and driving.
I had terrible luck with symbolic regression, for what its worth.
Two options I came up with:
European Roulette has a house edge of 2.7%. I think in the UK, gambling winnings don’t get taxed. I think in the US, you wouldn’t tax each win, but just your total winnings.
I’m seeing bid-ask spreads of about 10% on SPX call options. Naïvely, perhaps that means the “edge” is about 5% for someone looking to gamble. I think that the implied edge is much worse for further out-of-the-money options, but if you chain in-the-money options you’d have to pay tax on each win (assuming you won).
Yes, I expect they will mostly be negative EV. I’m interested in those
Yeah, I’m looking for how one would roll one’s own donor lottery out of non-philanthropic funds
[Question] What are the best standardised, repeatable bets?
Meta: I’m confused and a little sad about the relative upvotes of Habryka’s comment (35) and Sam’s comment (28). I think it’s trending better, but what does it even mean to have a highly upvoted complaint comment based on a misunderstanding, especially one more highly upvoted than the correction?
Maybe people think Habryka’s comment is a good critique even given the correction, even though I don’t think Habryka does?
I’ve fixed the spoiler tags
Do we know how many silver pieces there are to a gold piece?
In particular, it’s hard to distinguish in the amount of time that I have to moderate a new user submission. Given that I’m trying to spend a few minutes on a new user, it’s very helpful to be able to rely on style cues.
Eusocial organisms have more specialisation at the individual level rather than non-eusocial organisms (I think). I might expect that I would want a large amount of interchangeable individuals for each specialisation (a low bus factor), rather than more expensive, big, rare entities.
This predicts that complex multicellular organisms would have smaller cells than unicellular organisms or simple multicellular organisms (i.e. those were there isn’t differentiation between the cells)
A relevant plot from the wonderful calibration.city:
Early in a prediction questions lifetime, the average Brier score is something like 0.17 to 0.24, which is like a 1-8% edge.
I quite like the article The Rise and Fall of the English Sentence, which partially attributes reduced structural complexity to increase in noun compounds (like “state hate crime victim numbers” rather than “the numbers of victims who have experienced crimes that were motivated by hatred directed at their ethnic or racial identity, and who have reported these crimes to the state”)
They’re looking to make bets with people who disagree. Could be a good opportunity to get some expected dollars
Have you ever noticed a verbal tic and tried to remove it? For example, maybe you’ve noticed you say “tubular” a lot, and you’d like to stop. Or you’ve decided to use “whom” ‘correctly’.
When I try and change my speech, I notice that by default my “don’t do that” triggers run on other people’s speech as well as my own, and I have to make a conscious refinement to separate them.
I’m inclined to agree, but at least this is an improvement over it only living in Habryka’s head. It may be that this + moderation is basically sufficient, as people seem to have mostly caught on to the intended patterns.
We’ve actually been thinking about something quite related! More info soon.
(Typo: Lightcone for a writing retreat → Lighthaven for a writing retreat)