I would expect grad students to have very little experience and you could hire people with similar levels of experience (junior engineers) with normal university wages.
korin43
Karma: 1,062
I agree that the connection to lithium seems pretty weak, although it’s possible there’s still something special about potatoes (maybe potassium?). The two weird things with the potato diet are the increased energy (the opposite of how most diets work?) and that it seems to work fine even if you “cheat” constantly. Note that olive oil and (lots of) salt were recommended as part of this, so I think most of us weren’t eating bland boiled potatoes.
That said, it’s possible the only special thing here is that potatoes are just really convenient for a no-variety diet.
For the weirdness around how they did this / didn’t preregister, I thought they were pretty upfront about how this was exploratory (trying to generate hypotheses and see if the effect is plausible, not confirm a hypothesis). The next step would be a more serious experiment like the Potato Camp they mentioned.
Doing it this way lets them figure out what to focus more expensive / complicated studies on without wasting time and money (like if they ran a big experiment without peeling the potatoes and it ended up being a complete waste).
I think doing this kind of thing is really important because trying to make everything safe means we frequently don’t do useful science (see: we let millions of people die to avoid letting volunteers take risks in vaccine studies). Doing more mad science is a useful correction. That said, I think it’s important to remind volunteers that they shouldn’t keep going if the mad science is hurting them. I get the impression SMTM was trying to tell people this but they probably should have been more direct about telling people saying they’re not feeling good to stop.
The only cases I can think of where cars are an important signal are dating (not having a car signals that you’re poor) and entry level jobs (where the ability to show up to work on time is 90% of the qualifications). I don’t think either of those things apply to you though.
Major brand prebuilts have a bad reputation (I’ve never bought one so I don’t know), so if you wanted something close to what you’d get by building it yourself, here’s a similar configuration from iBuyPower:
https://www.ibuypower.com/store/intel-z690-plus-ultra-pc-daily-deal?wid=1765335
Note that this wouldn’t ship until 7⁄22 so I’m not sure if that’s even an option. You can pay $50 more to have it supposedly ship around 7⁄15.
Due to some deals they have going on, you might as well get a slightly nicer CPU than I’d bother with on the Dell, and I suspect this PC would be quieter than the Dell version.
This version cuts a few things you could upgrade if you wanted to:
Make it a little quieter by picking one of the 360mm processor cooling fan options (bigger fans don’t need to spin as fast so they’re quieter) ($133 more)
Make it a little easier to upgrade memory in the future by picking the 2-stick RAM configuration ($100 more)
Upgrade to a Corsair power supply to have a vague feeling of better reliability ($56 more)
Increase memory or pick a different video card if you want to
Oh, and I’m not really sure how to handle quietness in pre-builts, although all RTX cards should have decent settings to spin down when they’re not doing anything, and you can probably replace the case fans with quieter ones (or have a friend do it) if they bother you. Even really nice case fans are super cheap: https://www.amazon.com/quiet-BL066-SILENTWINGS-1450RPM-50-5CFM/dp/B01JMEDDYY/
The Alienware you posted seems good, although you could probably turn most of those specs down if you wanted to save money at the expense of only having amazing gaming performance instead of insane gaming performance.
The way I’d approach this is:
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You need enough memory to never run out and no more than that. Memory speed doesn’t matter in any practical way. This is an easy choice since 16 GB is slightly too low for a lot of things and 32 GB is usually more than you need. Presumably you can open the resource monitor on your current computer and have a decent idea of how much memory you need. Don’t bother future-proofing this since memory usage seems to have plateaued for a while.
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Gaming performance is going to almost entirely determined by your GPU, but the entire RTX series is so ridiculously overpowered that the 3060 Ti is good enough for most purposes, including some single-monitor 4K gaming. Any GPU that has good gaming performance will be ridiculously overpowered for displaying browser tabs on three monitors.
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One additional consideration is that you should get an Nvidia graphics card since you’re likely to want to run accelerated machine learning code. A consideration for higher-end cards is that some of them have more memory, which increases the size of models you can accelerate.
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Within the range of CPU options where a pre-built will have 32+ GB of memory and an RTX card, it probably doesn’t matter which one you pick. I’d just get the cheapest i7 or Ryzen that they offer since they’re all going to be overkill. I don’t recommend the Lenovo option you posted since it has a Threadripper, which is really good CPU for a use-case that you don’t have (saturating 20+ threads). You’d be better served with a similar-price CPU with better single-threaded performance. (It’s possible that loading massive spreadsheets could use a bunch of threads, but I doubt that Google Sheets actually does)
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The power supply just needs to provide enough power for your CPU + graphics card + a little breathing room. Note that the RTX 3070 + i7-12700KF only use about 500 W together so a 750 W power supply is plenty.
So I think the base model I’d recommend to you is this XPS tower:
… and then turn up the memory / GPU if that doesn’t seem good enough. The Alienware you posted is similar and would be worth it if you want liquid cooling and don’t mind being forced to upgrade to at least an RTX 3070.
You might also consider getting an older desktop with an RTX card, since an older CPU and memory really wouldn’t affect the performance much.
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I thought the idea of this post was interesting, but didn’t upvote because there’s also hyperbolic political statements sprinkled in everywhere and that’s not a good fit for the kind of reasoned discussion I like about LessWrong.
Just wanted to leave feedback as a comment since there was a bunch of downvotes when I showed up.
I’m confused about what distinction you’re making. What’s the difference between the value of the trade and the actual value the participants expect to receive? Is the distinction if one trader is mislead about the deal?
There’s sort of answers deep in this thread but I want to answer directly.
Large amounts of food in your kitchen trash will definitely smell bad and should be tied up and taken outside immediately if you don’t want your kitchen (or entire house in some cases) to smell bad, but in general I think most people don’t have large amounts of food in their kitchen trash can most of the time.
Also note that as you get better at cooking, the parts that smell the worst when they go bad (high water and starch content) are usually the parts you eat, and you throw away the parts that don’t smell (dry parts like the papery part of an onion or the dry ends of asparagus).
My heuristic is that I take trash out immediately if I’m cleaning out my fridge or pantry, but I usually don’t take it out immediately after cooking (unless I’m doing something like peeling 20 potatoes).
So I think the answer to your confusion is that most people either don’t cook from scratch at all (and have nothing smelly in their trash) or have been cooking for a long time (and don’t frequently throw out large amounts of smelly ingredients), and you’re just in the annoying middle part and it will get better as you get more experience.
Agreed, this is what I do when I need to get rid of food. Keeping it in the house gets smelly surprisingly fast so it’s worthwhile to move them to the outside trash can quickly (even if the trash can isn’t full).
It seems like “How Not to Die” is pretty sketchy and frequently cherry picks or misrepresents evidence: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/how-not-to-die-review
But, how do I get rotting food out of my home? The garbage man only comes once a week. If I leave it outside, an animal might get into it, or the neighbors might complain.
These are probably both smaller problems than you’d expect unless you have unusual circumstances (like living near a forest with bears, or in an apartment building with individual trash cans near the front doors).
Trash that’s kept in a trash can in your house will smell worse for several reasons:
There’s much less air exchange inside of a house vs outside, so the smell doesn’t dilute well
Since you’ll tie up the top of the trash bag before putting it out, and then cover it with a lid, there’s a smaller opening for smells to seep out of (vs the big opening bag opening and frequently uncovered indoor trash cans)
You probably spend a lot more time right next to the trash can in your kitchen than the one outside
Even the “tie up the bag and put it in a can with a lid” method works well enough that the trash can in my garage doesn’t bother me at all even though it doesn’t get much air exchange.
Most likely your neighbors won’t even notice, and it’s completely normal to put your trash out either way.
If you do have animal problems, there’s probably trash cans that are harder for them to get into but I don’t have specific experience with that.
That’s not really true. Get a bunch of health food, throw it into an instant pot and wait 15 minutes. The vegetables are going to be softer than they would be if you would fry them, but that’s more an issue of taste than of healthy eating.
I really doubt the average person would find the result of this palatable, and people with the willpower to force themselves to eat this probably don’t need diet advice. It’s true that you can make good meals with a relatively small amount of equipment, but making it taste good is more complicated than “throw it in an instant pot and then eat the gloop that comes out”.
The issue is that probabilities for something that will either happen or not don’t really make sense in a literal way (any single macro-scale event has ~0% of ~100% chance of happening).
I think when EY says he had a 10% chance of HPMoR being successful, the claim should be taken in the context of calibration, not that he’s actually going to attempt it 10 times and then see how often he succeeds:
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/calibration
To see if it’s accurate, you’d need to take some other predictions in his 10% probability bucket, find out how often they all happened, and then see how far that is from 10%. I’m not sure if EY does this, but you can see an example from Scott here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/04/08/2019-predictions-calibration-results/
I don’t think writing about abortion will automatically be downvoted, but a lot of things people want to say about abortion aren’t a good fit for LessWrong. In particular, most abortion articles on the internet are about how the outgroup are obviously-wrong monsters and/or idiots. I have a vague worry that it would be hard to write something interesting about abortion given that people mostly agree on the facts (how fetal development works) and disagree about moral intuitions, but maybe you do have something interesting to add?
I wouldn’t worry too much about people in the comments making a good post bad. If you’re worried about it, you could just remove any off-topic comments (I think LessWrong gives post writers some moderation powers).
Can you explain how you got from this post to zoning laws? (Not complaining, but I don’t see the link and I’m curious)
Thanks for writing this. This is exactly where I’m trying to go as my next step, but I’m not quite sure how to get there.
Is there any path to getting to this level at a smaller organization, or would I basically be required to work somewhere huge if I don’t want to top out my career at Senior Engineer?
I’m a step lower here (senior engineer) and the reasons I and the people I know mostly don’t apply to EA orgs is that we get signals that they don’t want or value us: No remote work, generally not many actual engineer openings, various posts saying the way to get a job is to work unpaid for months in the hopes of getting attention, and at least one EA org lowballs salaries.
I largely agree, but most apps will let you listen to things at faster speeds if you want to (my max speed is 1.25x − 1.5x depending on content dryness though).