listic

Karma: 313

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate… Forget that.

I’ve been working in the large gas power plant, a sprawling monster creeping over a city, large enough to power some European nations. A lake is kept warm in winter with just effluent waters. Everywhere you look in the city you can see traces of it. At any given time there’s always something breaking or leaking somewhere. It looks like it can break down at any moment. Yet the constant labour of thousands of workers always keeps power plant humming along. It’s an impressive feat of human engineering.

listic Apr 3, 2014, 1:20 PM
0 points
on: Group Rationality Diary, April 1-15
I realized that when the number of projects in my life exceeds 2 (1 work and 1 hobby) the other things in my life are hardly ever done. I have decided to embrace GTD to stop being stressed about it and get more done.

I’m 70% through the book, bought myself a smartphone and going to buy a tablet as my new computer (actually, I could use your help with delivering the lartter). Never owned any of those, because I believed that they are only good for distractions. Please share your GTD setup and experience: what works for you and what doesn’t?

If you have implemented GTD, please share your advice here in the Open Thread: what worked for you and what didn’t? Which software do you find useful?

listic Apr 3, 2014, 1:18 PM
0 points
on: Group Rationality Diary, March 1-15

listic Apr 3, 2014, 12:51 PM
2 points
on: Open Thread March 31 - April 7 2014
Please share your GTD setup and experience: what works for you and what doesn’t?

What software do you use and how?

I never owned a smartphone or a tablet, because I believed that they are mostly good for wasting time and effort on distractions (I have a Nokia 1202), but recently I gave in and bought an HTC One mini, because I believe it will help my productivity. Still getting used to the fact what goes for ‘mini’ these days, but that’s the best phone I could find that looks well-made and not overly huge, short of the iPhone.

For my main computer I am running Ubuntu on a ThinkPad X series and I plan to upgrade to Microsoft Surface Pro 2; I think that it might finally be a tablet that I would use (because, if nothing else, it’s a very portable PC). Yes, I want to buy a Microsoft hardware to wipe Windows and use with Linux, I believe it’s that good.

So, I’m looking for your positive experience with GTD and related productivity software on Android, or maybe even native Linux platforms. I should be able to run Web-based, Java or even Windows apps via Wine, if really needed: in the best case scenario I just double-click exe-file and it works; I even used to play Hearthstone, when I had the time.

Do you find the use in a smartphone as a separate productivity device, even if you are near a computer?
What links here?
- listic's comment on Group Rationality Diary, April 1-15 by therufs (Apr 3, 2014, 1:20 PM; 0 points)

listic Apr 3, 2014, 3:23 AM
2 points
in reply to: Stabilizer’s comment on: Open Thread March 31 - April 7 2014
1. He has a lot of things to do. Offloading some of them is kind of the whole point of having assistants.
2. Buying me a computer as employee benefit is difficult for the MIRI’s accounting.
Did I answer your question?

listic Apr 1, 2014, 7:16 PM
2 points
on: Open Thread March 31 - April 7 2014
If you live in the USA, I could use your help to buy a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 computer for myself. I live in Russia and Microsoft doesn’t sell those here and refuses to ship; I have already tried using a US proxy and reshipping service, but the order doesn’t go through: maybe it detects that I’m not in the US, or my debit card is not issued by US bank, or something else. Either way, I need someone’s help in this.

Also, if you are a student, you should be eligible for 10% discount. But I’m not sure whether Microsoft actually checks this: I could click a certain link, and after that the prices of Surface and accessories that I saw just went down 10%. It’s just that I couldn’t place my order, neither with the discount, nor without it.

We could do it like this: I transfer you the funds, you buy the computer and order it to a certain U.S.-based P.O. Box. The reshipping company will do the rest.

I am working as lukeprog’s assistant, I guess he can vouch that I’m not pulling any tricks on you. Links to my identity are in my LW profile.

Update: I think we have a case of bystander apathy here. What should I do: plead and appeal personally?

Hello. Yes, I mean you, who is reading this now. Wouldn’t you please help me buy a computer? Please contact me in the comments, via PM or email:
What links here?
- listic's comment on Group Rationality Diary, April 1-15 by therufs (Apr 3, 2014, 1:20 PM; 0 points)

listic Feb 13, 2014, 12:39 AM
4 points
on: Open Thread for February 11 − 17
I am going to organize a coaching course to learn Javascript + Node.js.

My particular technology of choice is node.js because:
- If starting from scratch, having to learn just one language for both frontend and backend makes sense. Javascript is the only language you can use in a browser and you will have to learn it anyway. They say it’s kind of Lisp or Scheme in disguise and a pretty cool language by itself.
- Node.js is a modern asynchronous web framework, made by running Javascript code server-side on Google’s open-source V8 JavaScript Engine It seems to be well suited for building highly-loaded backend servers, and works for regular websites, too.
- Hack Reactor teaches it to make 98% of graduates earn $110k/year, on average, after 3 months of study. But their tuition is $17,780. We will do much cheaper.
I wanted to learn modern web technologies for a while, but haven’t gotten myself to actually do it. When I tried to start learning, I was overwhelmed by the number of things I still have to learn to get anything done. Here’s the bare minimum:
- html
- css
- javascript
- node.js
- git
I believe the optimum course of action is to hire a guru to do coaching for me and several other students and split the cost. The benefits compared to learning by yourself are:
- personal communication (via Skype or similar) and doing tasks along with the others provides an additional drive to complete your studies
- guru can choose an optimum path for me to reach the desired capabilities in shortest time.
The capabilities that I want to achieve are:

i. To be able to add functionality to my Tumblr blog (where I run a writing prompt) by either using custom theme + Tumblr API or extracting posts via API and using them to render my blog on a separate website. node.js is definitely not needed here, rather than this is the simplest case of doing something useful that I need to with web technologies and node.js is my web technology of choice.

ii. To hack on Undum, a client-side hypertext interactive fiction framework. My thoughts on why I think Undum and IF are cool are here.
- To port features from one version of Undum to another and create a version of Undum that is able to run all existing games (about 5 of them)
- To abstract away Undum’s internal game representation and state so that they can be loaded and saved externally, over a network
- To create a server part for Undum that controls the version of the book you’re allowed to read (allows to read one new chapter a day, remembers the branch you’re reading, up to the end, if you’ve read to the end, etc.)
- To create a website that works as a YouTube and an editor for Undum games
iii. To create new experiments that utilize modern web technologies to interesting and novel effect. I know that this sounds really vague, but the point is that sometimes you never know what can be done until you learn the relevant skills. One example of the kind of thing that I think about is what this paper is talking about:

Lee et al. - Real-Time Disease Surveillance Using Twitter Data, Demonstration on Flu and Cancer

Friend’s advice: Skype Premium + Dropbox + Piratepad + Slideshare + Doodle should be enough. What do you think?

Want to join? Questions? Suggestions for better videoconferencing software than Skype?

Native Russian speakers wanted, for help with translation of LW texts

listicFeb 11, 2014, 5:37 PM

10 points

0 comments1 min readLW link

listic Jan 9, 2014, 2:25 AM
0 points
in reply to: Armok_GoB’s comment on: Tulpa References/Discussion

the thing that tulpas contribute is something 99% of people have in overabundance

And that is..?

listic Jan 8, 2014, 11:17 PM
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Tulpa References/Discussion

I believe that tulpas expend host’s attention, unless proven otherwise.

Why do you think that attention is a central part of human thinking?

Here’s what I am thinking: Attention seems to be a crucial and finite resource. I could certainly become more productive if I become more attentive, and vice versa. If creating a tulpa expends my attention, it is a negative-sum game for me; if it makes me training attention as a side effect, that’s good, but not better than just training attention.

Have you never had the experience that you searched for a piece of information in your mind and can’t find it, then two hours later it pops into your mind?

Sure! Sometimes I try hard to remember a piece of information, but can’t. Then later, when I don’t try, it just pops. Interesting, but usually unhelpful.

From what I read of the field there nobody even making a business out of the topic

Shouldn’t the fact that nobody ever made a business out of the topic be counted as evidence towards impossibility to make a business out of the topic? If tulpas were monetizable in any way, why wouldn’t there be people monetizing them?

Now, I fantasize that maybe our minds just need some tiny little upgrade for tulpas to become a clear advantage? Can you help me imagine what would that be?

listic Jan 8, 2014, 10:02 PM
0 points
in reply to: Armok_GoB’s comment on: Tulpa References/Discussion
I’ve thought at your reply for a while and I still can’t understand it. Care to explain?

Why would one want to “turn duplicates of the same person into new unique persons rapidly” and how? How would that help and why would one otherwise have to simulate an entire childhood?

listic Jan 4, 2014, 5:15 PM
0 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Tulpa References/Discussion

One of the documented features of Tulpa is already waking up people from sleep.

That’s interesting. Do you have a link for this?

I believe that tulpas expend host’s attention, unless proven otherwise. Tulpamancers haven’t proven that they can be more effective than other people by any metric, and I suspect that having a tulpa is a zero-sum game in absence of some brain upgrade that would expand some bottleneck in our mind.

listic Jan 2, 2014, 8:31 PM
2 points
in reply to: mwengler’s comment on: What if Strong AI is just not possible?
Then, what would that make homo sapiens who can hunt wild beasts in savannah and design semiconductor chips if not generally intelligent?

listic Jan 2, 2014, 8:25 PM
2 points
on: Tulpa References/Discussion
Here’s a science-fiction/futurism kind of question:

What minimal, realistic upgrade to our brain could we introduce for tulpas to gain an evident increase in utility? What I have in mind here is make your tulpa do extra work or maybe sort and filter your memories while you sleep; I’m thinking of a scenario where Strong AI and wholesale body/brain upgrades are not available, yet some minor upgrade makes having a tulpa an unambiguous advantage.

listic Jan 2, 2014, 5:55 PM
2 points
in reply to: drethelin’s comment on: Tulpa References/Discussion
It would be nice if you found its name. Doesn’t one’s body need rest?

listic Jan 2, 2014, 5:30 PM
0 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Tulpa References/Discussion

Think about the impact on the whole society; anyone you meet anywhere could be a virtual personality.

That doesn’t seem to imply much. It’s still some distinct personality. What should have an impact is the fact that now there are two personalities inhabiting a single body at different times: when you meet me at daytime, it’s really me, but when you meet me at night—that’s a different person. Unless I’ve borked my “sleep” schedule and that’s still me; then I might be not-me at some time during the day. That should… take some getting used to.

Also, doesn’t the body need sleep, only a (part of the) brain?

What does it think it do during 16 hours of your uptime?

False memories. Your choice. You have an equivalent of full hypnotic power over them. To avoid too much work with programming them every day, a reasonable default choice would be to make them remember everything but think that they did it.

I see. It doesn’t make sense to make those memories too false, though, or the reality will take increasingly more effort to cover up. Suppose, I decide to start going to gym and conceal it from my alter-ego. Suddenly they will notice that their body started to bulk up for no apparent reason.

listic Jan 2, 2014, 3:44 PM
0 points
in reply to: Viliam_Bur’s comment on: Tulpa References/Discussion
My ideas of sci-fi story may be similar to yours; though they require some fleshing out.

In your story idea, does the second personality ever take physical control of your body? Can it physically go to work or should it be limited to working online, say via brain implant, while your body is sleeping? If the latter, how does it perceive its 8 hours of work? What happens if you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night?

What does it think it do during 16 hours of your uptime?

Can you directly communicate to your second personality? I guess, you can (like you’re supposed to do with a tulpa), but you don’t have to: you are the master personality and you can directly control their experience (this would be somewhat like servitor, I believe), right?

listic Jan 2, 2014, 3:27 PM
5 points
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Tulpa References/Discussion

If you explain things away with magical technology you aren’t really writing sci-fi but you are writing fantasy.

What is your problem with a story where it is possible to create a second personality in your brain using technology? (let’s discuss just this story idea here, but not Inception, for clarity). As far as my understanding of the issue goes, tulpas are likely using their host’s mental resources in a way, so to create a second personality that is capable of independent work during host’s downtime, some kind of hardware upgrade for a host’s mind should be necessary.

I imagine the necessary mind upgrade should be similar to upgrading single-core CPU to single-core CPU with hyper-threading.

listic Jan 2, 2014, 3:09 PM
1 point
in reply to: TsviBT’s comment on: What if Strong AI is just not possible?
That’s another possibility I didn’t think of.

I guess I was really interested in a question “Why could Strong AI turn out to be impossible to build by human civilization in a century or ten?”

listic Jan 2, 2014, 3:05 PM
1 point
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Open thread for January 1-7, 2014

As far as Tuplas go, Tulpas are mainly about qualia.

Aren’t hallucinations about qualia? At a glance, science seems pretty well informed about hallucinations. What’s the important difference?

If you are looking at far out mental phenomena there no reason to expect that they are well investigated by scientists.

What makes tulpas significantly more far out than hallucinations?

listic Jan 2, 2014, 2:53 PM
9 points
−1
in reply to: anominouscowherd’s comment on: The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You
I.D. - That Indestructible Something is a My Little Pony fanfiction somewhat along these lines.

It’s the kind of fanfiction that I like and believe all fanfiction writers should aspire to, in the sense that it doesn’t require familiarity with the canon, but is self-sufficient and shows and explains everything that should be shown and explained.

Acknowledgements for this story are numerous and include Franz Kafka, Nick Bostrom and Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann.

listic

Na­tive Rus­sian speak­ers wanted, for help with trans­la­tion of LW texts

Native Russian speakers wanted, for help with translation of LW texts