lalaithion

Karma: 660

lalaithion 23 Aug 2025 3:58 UTC
8 points
0
on: Pasta Cooking Time
Meanwhile here at 5300 feet above sea level it consistently takes one to three minutes longer than the number on the packaging.

lalaithion 29 May 2025 22:24 UTC
4 points
0
on: Do you even have a system prompt? (PSA / repo)
I mostly use LLMs for coding. Here’s the system prompt I have:
General programming principles:
1. put all configuration in global variables that I can edit, or in a single config file.
2. use functions instead of objects wherever possible
3. prioritize low amounts of comments and whitespace. Only include comments if they are necessary to understand the code because it is really complicated
4. prefer simple, straightline code to complex abstractions
5. use libraries instead of reimplementing things from scratch
6. look up documentation for APIs on the web instead of trying to remember things from scratch
7. write the program, reflect on its quality, simplicity, correctness, and ease of modification, and then go back and write a second version
What links here?
- AI #119: Goodbye AISI? by Zvi (5 Jun 2025 14:00 UTC; 42 points)

lalaithion 3 Feb 2025 21:28 UTC
6 points
3
in reply to: Knight Lee’s comment on: Pick two: concise, comprehensive, or clear rules
I don’t post on LessWrong much but I would much rather be explicitly rate-limited than shadow-banned, if content I was posting needed to be moderated.

lalaithion 12 Jun 2024 23:54 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Vivek Hebbar’s comment on: Worked Examples of Shapley Values
Perhaps there is a different scheme for dividing gains from coöperation which satisfies some of the things we want but not superadditivity, but I’m unfamiliar with one. Please let me know if you find anything in that vein, I’d love to read about some alternatives to Shapley Value.

lalaithion 25 May 2024 1:52 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: peterbarnett’s comment on: peterbarnett’s Shortform
I had a weird one today; I asked it to write a program for me, and it wrote one about the Golden Gate Bridge, and when I asked it why, it used the Russian word for “program” instead of the English word “program”, despite the rest of the response being entirely in English.

lalaithion 20 Feb 2024 20:11 UTC
1 point
0
on: Lessons from Failed Attempts to Model Sleeping Beauty Problem
I don’t think the Elimination approach gives P(Heads|Awake) = ¹⁄₃ or P(Monday|Awake) = ²⁄₃ in the Single Awakening problem. In that problem, there are 6 possibilities:

P(Heads&Monday) = 0.25

P(Heads&Tuesday) = 0.25

P(Tails&Monday&Woken) = 0.125

P(Tails&Monday&Sleeping) = 0.125

P(Tails&Tuesday&Woken) = 0.125

P(Tails&Tuesday&Sleeping) = 0.125

Therefore:

P(Heads|Awake)

= P(Heads&Monday) / (P(Heads&Monday) + P(Tails&Monday&Woken) + P(Tails&Tuesday&Woken))

= 0.5

And:

P(Monday|Awake)

= (P(Heads&Monday) + P(Tails&Monday&Woken)) / (P(Heads&Monday) + P(Tails&Monday&Woken) + P(Tails&Tuesday&Woken))

= 0.75

lalaithion 31 Dec 2023 1:28 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
I also consider myself as someone who had—and still has—high hopes for rationality, and so I think it’s sad that we disagree, not on the object level, but on whether we can trust the community to faithfully report their beliefs. Sure, some of it may be political maneuvering, but I mostly think it’s political maneuvering of the form of—tailoring the words, metaphors, and style to a particular audience, and choosing to engage on particular issues, rather than outright lying about beliefs.

I don’t think I’m using “semantics” in a non-standard sense, but I may be using it in a more technical sense? I’m aware of certain terms which have different meanings inside of and outside of linguistics (such as “denotation”) and this may be one.

lalaithion 31 Dec 2023 0:20 UTC
6 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
I owe you an apology; you’re right that you did not accuse me of violating norms, and I’m sorry for saying that you did. I only intended to draw parallels between your focus on the meta level and Zack’s focus on the meta level, and in my hurry I erred in painting you and him with the same brush.

I additionally want to clarify that I didn’t think you were accusing me of lying, but merely wanted preemptively close off some of the possible directions this conversation could go.

Thank you for providing those links! I did see some of them on his blog and skipped over them because I thought, based on the first paragraph or title, they were more intracommunity discourse. I have now read them all.

I found them mostly uninteresting. They focus a lot on semantics and on whether something is a lie or not, and neither of those are particularly motivating to me. Of the rest, they are focused on issues which I don’t find particularly relevant to my own personal journey, and while I wish that Zack felt like he was able to discuss these issues openly, I don’t really think people in the community disagreeing with him is some bizarre anti-truth political maneuvering.

lalaithion 30 Dec 2023 22:23 UTC
2 points
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
I haven’t read everything Zack has written, so feel free to link me something, but almost everything I’ve read, including this post, includes far more intra-rationalist politicking than discussion of object level matters.

I know other people are interested in those things. I specifically phrased my previous post in an attempt to avoid arguing about what other people care about. I can neither defend nor explain their positions. Neither do I intend to dismiss or malign those preferences by labeling them semantics. That previous sentence is not to be read as a denial of ever labeling them semantics, but rather as a denial of thinking that semantics is anything to dismiss or malign. Semantics is a long and storied discipline on philosophy and linguistics. I took an entire college course on semantics. Nevertheless, I don’t find it particularly interesting.

I’ve read a human’s guide to words. I understand you cannot redefine reality by redefining words. I am trying to step past disagreement you and I might have regarding the definitions of words and figure out if we have disagreements about reality.

I think you are doing the same thing I have seen Zack do repeatedly, which is to avoid engaging in actual disagreement and discussion, but instead repeatedly accuse your interlocutor of violating norms of rational debate. So far nothing you have said is something I disagree with, except the implication that I disagree with it. If you think I’m lying to you, feel free to say so and we can stop talking. If our disagreement is merely “you think semantics is incredibly important and I find it mostly boring and stale”, let me know and you can go argue with someone who cares more than me.

But the way that Zack phrases things makes it sound, to me, like he and I have some actual disagreement about reality which he thinks is deeply important for people considering transition to know. And as someone considering transition, if you or he or someone else can say that or link to that isn’t full of semantics or intracommunity norms of discourse call-outs, I would like to see it!

lalaithion 30 Dec 2023 21:42 UTC
2 points
2
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
Yeah, what factual question about empirical categories is/was Zack interested in resolving? Tabooing the words “man” and “woman”, since what I mean by semantics is “which categories get which label”. I’m not super interested in discussing which empirical category should be associated with the phonemes /mæn/, and I’m not super interested in the linguistic investigation of the way different groups of English speakers assign meaning to that sequence of phonemes, both of which I lump under the umbrella of semantics.

lalaithion 30 Dec 2023 21:00 UTC
1 point
−5
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: If Clarity Seems Like Death to Them
What factual question is/was Zack trying to figure out? “Is a woman” or “is a man” are pure semantics, and if that’s all there is then… okay… but presumably there’s something else?

lalaithion 6 Nov 2023 22:32 UTC
8 points
2
on: A new intro to Quantum Physics, with the math fixed
I think this post could be really good, and perhaps there should be an effort to make this post as good as it can be. Right now I think it has a number of issues.
1. It’s too short. It moves very quickly past the important technical details, trusting the user to pick them up. I think it would be better if it was a bit longer and luxuriated on the important technical bits.
2. It is very physics-brained. Ideally we could get some math-literate non-physicists to go over this with help from a physicist to do a better job phrasing it in ways that are unfamiliar to non-physicists.
3. It should be published somewhere without part 2. Part 2 is intracommunity discourse, Part 1 is a great explainer, and I’d love to be able to link to it without part 2 as a consideration.

lalaithion 3 Nov 2023 21:03 UTC
6 points
2
on: Averaging samples from a population with log-normal distribution
There are distributions which won’t approach a normal—Lévy distributions and Cauchy distributions are the most commonly known.

lalaithion 9 Sep 2023 2:05 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Rob Bensinger’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
Yeah, to be clear I don’t have any information to suggest that the above is happening—I don’t work in EA circles—except for the fact that Ben said the EA ecosystem doesn’t have defenses against this happening, and that is one of the defenses I expect to exist.

lalaithion 8 Sep 2023 16:20 UTC
31 points
12
in reply to: aphyer’s comment on: Sharing Information About Nonlinear
Yeah, this post makes me wonder if there are non-abusive employers in EA who are nevertheless enabling abusers by normalizing behavior that makes abuse popular. Employers who pay their employees months late without clarity on why and what the plan is to get people paid eventually. Employers who employ people without writing things down, like how much people will get paid and when. Employers who try to enforce non-disclosure of work culture and pay.

None of the things above are necessarily dealbreakers in the right context or environment, but when an employer does those things they are making it difficult to distinguish themself from an abusive employer, and also enabling abusive employers because they’re not obviously doing something nonstandard. This is highlighted by:

I relatedly think that the EA ecosystem doesn’t have reliable defenses against such predators.

If EAs want to have defenses, against these predators, they have to act in such a way that the early red flags here (not paid on time, no contracts just verbal agreements) are actually serious red flags by having non-abusive employers categorically not engage in them, and having more established EA employees react in horror if they hear about this happening.

lalaithion 7 Sep 2023 19:53 UTC
9 points
3
on: How did you make your way back from meta?
Find an area of the thing you want to do where quality matters to you less. Instead of trying to write the next great American novel, write fanfic[1]. Instead of trying to paint a masterpiece, buy a sketchbook and trace a bunch of stuff. Instead of trying to replace your dish-ware with handmade ceramics, see how many mugs you can make in an hour. Instead of trying to invent a new beautiful operating system in a new programming language, hack together a program for a one-off use case and then throw it away.

[1] not a diss to fanfic—but for me, at least, it’s easier to not worry about my writing quality when I do so

lalaithion 3 Jun 2023 17:00 UTC
5 points
2
on: Yudkowsky vs Hanson on FOOM: Whose Predictions Were Better?
I think an important point missing from the discussion on compute is training vs inference: you can totally get a state-of-the-art language model performing inference on a laptop.
This is a slight point in favor of Yudkowsky: thinking is cheap, finding the right algorithm (including weights) is expensive. Right now we’re brute-forcing the discovery of this algorithm using a LOT of data, and maybe it’s impossible to do any better than brute-forcing. (Well, the human brain can do it, but I’ll ignore that.)
Could you run a LLM on a desktop from 2008? No. But, once the algorithm is “discovered” by a large computer it’s being run on consumer hardware instead of supercomputers, and I think that points towards Yudkowsky’s gesture at running AI on consumer hardware rather than Hanson’s gesture at Watson and other programs run on supercomputers.
If there really is no better way to find AI minds than brute-forcing the training of billions of parameters on a trillion tokens, then that points in the direction of Hanson, but I don’t really think that this would have been an important crux for either of them. (And I don’t really think that there aren’t more efficient ways of training.)
On the whole, I think this is more of a wash than a point for Hanson.

lalaithion 5 May 2023 15:41 UTC
1 point
−1
in reply to: matto’s comment on: How to get good at programming
General principles of OSes and Networks is invaluable to basically everyone.

How programming languages, compilers, and interpreters work will help you master specific programming languages.

lalaithion 4 May 2023 2:54 UTC
5 points
1
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is
Hmm, no, I don’t believe I use sex and gender interchangeably. Let’s taboo those two terms.

I think that most people don’t care about a person’s chromosomes. When I inspect the way I use the words “sex” and “gender”, I don’t feel like either of them is a disguised query for that person’s chromosomes.

I think that many people care about hormone balances. Testosterone and Estrogen change the way your body behaves, and the type of hormone a person’s body naturally produces and whether they’re suppressing that and/or augmenting with a different hormone is definitely relevant for sports and medicine.

I think that many people care about appearance. Most people’s sexual attraction is keyed to whether a person looks a certain way. Examples include: Straight men being attracted to gay men in feminine clothing, masc lesbians and gay twinks accidentally hitting on each other or even making out without realizing they’re not “technically” attracted to their gender, straight women being attracted to butch lesbians.

I think that many people care about “intent-to-fit-into-and-interact-with-the-world-as-a-specific-social-role”, which is pretty hard for me to point at without the word gender. But our society does have two primary social roles, and committing to living in one social role is important to people. I think lots of people track who is in which social role and interact with those people in different ways.

It sounds like our disagreement is that you doubt that anyone cares about the “intent to fit into and interact with the world as a specific role”, whereas in my experience lots of people care a lot about this.

I’m not really sure the Harvard thing is a good analogy? Consider the following phrases:
- I identify as a woman
- I identify as a person with XX chromosomes
- I identify as a Harvard Graduate
- I identify as a Bostonian
- I identify as an academic
- I identify as a Christian
- I identify as a lesbian Which of those identify phrases mean things? It’s the ones which are about primarily social roles and not about physical fact. I think all of these are meaningful except the second and third.
Now, some of these could be lies, (I could say I’m an academic but not actually care about academics!) but they’re not nonsensical.

Now, obviously, you’ll tell me that the social role is the good-enough sorting mechanism and so we should discard it for better sorting mechanisms involving physical characteristics. That’s pretty close to gender abolitionism, to be honest, and I don’t really understand where you get off the following train:

Let me analyze an example you gave while my terms are tabooed: changing rooms. Our goal is to “avoid the discomfort that might come with attracting sexualized attention from strangers”. Obviously, if we look at all four categories I proposed above, (XX/XY, testosterone/estrogen, masculine appearance/feminine appearance, male-social-role/female-social-role), all four of them have approximately the same distribution of attraction to the opposite category. However, only one of them is directly visible to strangers in the dressing room—masculine appearance/feminine appearance. (We could introduce a new category, penis vs. vagina, but then you’ll have very masculine vagina havers in the vagina room and very feminine penis havers in the penis room.)

I would guess that you don’t agree that segregating changing rooms by masculine appearance/feminine appearance is correct? If I’m right about that, what part of the above analysis do you object to?

lalaithion 3 May 2023 17:54 UTC
11 points
1
in reply to: ymeskhout’s comment on: What Boston Can Teach Us About What a Woman Is
I think that one thing you’re missing is that lots of people… use gender as a very strong feature of navigating the world. They treat “male” and “female” as natural categories, and make lots of judgements based on whether someone “is” male or female.

You don’t seem to do that, which puts you pretty far along the spectrum towards gender abolition, and you’re right, from a gender abolition perspective there’s no reason to be trans (or to be worried about people using the restroom they prefer or wearing the clothes they prefer or taking hormones to alter their body in ways they prefer).

But I think you’re expecting that most people act this way, and they don’t! For example, there are lots of people who would be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a feminine gay man, but wouldn’t be uncomfortable doing X with/to/around a trans woman, even if the two hypothetical people look very similar.

Some examples of X that I have seen include:
- Women sleeping in the same room or tent as this person
- Muslim women not wearing a headscarf in their presence
- Women going to a bathroom or changing room together
- Straight men or lesbian women being attracted to this person
I don’t really know how to explain this any more than I already have. To lay it out simply:
1. Here is this thing, gender.
2. Lots of people care about gender a lot
3. It’s a valid position to say “I don’t care about this thing and don’t understand why anyone else does”
4. Nevertheless, understanding that people do care will help you better understand why a lot of stuff around gender happens.
Note: I am not trying to convince you to care about gender! I am merely trying to explain some of the ways other people, both trans and cis, care about gender.