nsokolsky

• nsokolsky 14 Jul 2025 7:09 UTC

  1 point

  0

  on: Mon­day Din­ner at the Safe­house—Seattle

  Is it OK to park in the driveway (visible on Google Maps street view when clicking the address) or would you prefer that attendees park somewhere else, such as alongside 23rd Ave? My likelihood of attending does not change based off your answer, just asking in case I find parking 5 blocks north and then it turns out I could’ve just parked in the driveway :-)

• nsokolsky 1 Oct 2024 22:58 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Nik­ita Sokolsky’s Shortform

  If you have a Substack blog, consider using Datawrapper embeds for inserting tables or charts. For some reason Substack has been somewhat hiding this cool feature as its not visible in the menu and poorly advertised but it lets you create highly customizable charts/​tables for your Substack posts—and is also supported on Wordpress or in the form of an HTML embed if you have a self-hosted blog/​website. I wrote a brief guideline on how to use it in my blog—and you can see cool Datawrapper embeds in Nate Silver’s substack.

  Sadly Datawrapper not supported on LessWrong (yet) but LW already has native support for table embeds, so its less relevant.

Nik­ita Sokolsky’s Shortform

• nsokolsky 30 Sep 2024 21:05 UTC

  13 points

  4

  on: on bac­te­ria, on teeth

  Whatever happened to Lumina, btw? Was anyone able to see any changes in their dental health so far?

• nsokolsky 26 Sep 2024 19:33 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Ex­am­ine your assumptions

  Side note: The original ‘chickenpox bomber’ illustration (using the Douglas F-4 Phantom) first appeared in Robert Ball’s 1985 book “The Fundamentals of Aircraft Combat Survivability Analysis and Design”, later refined in the 2nd edition from 2003. He never mentions Wald, Wallis or the SRG in the entire book, so I’m likewise convinced that the “mathematician outsmarts the military” story is pretty much BS.

  

• nsokolsky 25 Sep 2024 23:19 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: gwern’s comment on: OpenAI: Facts from a Weekend

  Do you think this will have any impact on OpenAI’s future revenues /​ ability to deliver frontier-level models?

• nsokolsky 20 Aug 2024 4:22 UTC

  1 point

  0

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

  Here’s the corrected link: https://​​pastebin.com/​​B824Hk8J

  Are you running this from an EC2 instance or some other cloud provider? They might just have a blocklist in IPs belonging to data centers.

• nsokolsky 19 Aug 2024 22:13 UTC

  3 points

  0

  in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Be­ware the sci­ence fic­tion bias in pre­dic­tions of the future

  Thank you! Here’s the transcript: https://​​www.lesswrong.com/​​posts/​​4kphivjxngJmEdWsN/​​transcript-tyler-cowen-on-stories

• nsokolsky 19 Aug 2024 22:12 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Sherrinford’s comment on: Be­ware the sci­ence fic­tion bias in pre­dic­tions of the future

  Sorry for not being clear. My question was whether LW really likes the nanobot story because we think it might happen within our own lifetimes. If we knew for a fact that human-destroying-nanobots would take another 100 years to develop, would discussing them still be just as interesting?

  Side note: I don’t think the “sci-fi bias” concept is super coherent in my head, I wrote this post as best as I can, but I fully acknowledge that its not fully fleshed out.

• nsokolsky 19 Aug 2024 22:02 UTC

  5 points

  0

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

  Hm, are you sure they’re actually that protective against scrapers? I ran a quick script and was able to extract all 548 unique pages just fine: https://​​pastebin.com/​​B824Hk8J The final output was:

  Status codes encountered:
  200: 548
  404: 20

  I reran it two more times, it still worked. I’m using a regular residential IP address, no fancy proxies. Maybe you’re just missing the code to refresh the cookies (included in my script)? I’m probably missing something of course, just curious why the scraping seems to be easy enough from my machine?

• nsokolsky 19 Aug 2024 20:00 UTC

  1 point

  0

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

  They could but if you’re managing your firewall it’s easier to apply a blanket rule rather than trying to divide things by subdomain, unless you have a good reason to do otherwise. I wouldn’t assume malicious intent.

• nsokolsky 19 Aug 2024 17:49 UTC

  5 points

  0

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

  They do have a good reason to be wary of scrapers as they provide a free version of ChatGPT, I’m guessing they just went ahead and configured it over their entire domain name rather than restricting it to the chat subdomain.

• nsokolsky 19 Aug 2024 17:32 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Sherrinford’s comment on: Be­ware the sci­ence fic­tion bias in pre­dic­tions of the future

  Nanobots destroying all humans at once are indeed poor sci-fi. But how much of this story’s popularity hinges on it happening within our lifetimes?

• nsokolsky 19 Aug 2024 6:59 UTC

  1 point

  −2

  in reply to: lc’s comment on: The other side of the tidal wave

  It’s essential to my ability to enjoy life
  
  This assumes that we’ll never have the technology to change our brain’s wiring to our liking? If we live in the post-scarcity utopia, why won’t you be able to just go change who you are as a person so that you’ll fully enjoy the new world?

Be­ware the sci­ence fic­tion bias in pre­dic­tions of the future

• nsokolsky 15 Jul 2024 0:20 UTC

  12 points

  2

  on: Robin Han­son AI X-Risk De­bate — High­lights and Analysis

  I’ve watched the debate and read your analysis. The Youtube channel is great, doubly so given that you’re just starting out and it will only get better from here.

  Do you imagine there could be someone out there who could possibly persuade you to lower your P(doom)? In other words, do you think there could be a collection of arguments that are so convincing and powerful taken together that you’ll change your mind significantly about the risks of AGI, at least when it comes to this century?

• nsokolsky 2 Jul 2024 18:12 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: My 5-step pro­gram for los­ing weight

  I’ve found a new box of Dexcom G7 on Ebay for just $90, ordered it now to try it out.

• nsokolsky 2 Jul 2024 17:21 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Ruby’s comment on: My 5-step pro­gram for los­ing weight

  I’ve checked Nutrissense and they want $250/​month? Definitely way too much for a glucose meter! :)

• nsokolsky 2 Jul 2024 17:17 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Mo Putera’s comment on: My 5-step pro­gram for los­ing weight

  I’ve been doing weightlifting 5-6 days a week for 14 months now and progress has been very slow, so my metabolic rate hasn’t budged all that much. But if you’re lucky and can progress faster then its a valid strategy.

• nsokolsky 1 Jul 2024 21:30 UTC

  1 point

  0

  in reply to: Francis Bacon’s comment on: My 5-step pro­gram for los­ing weight

  Thanks, looks like Dexcom Stelo is coming out this summer that will be available without a prescription. I’ll order it as soon as its available.