philh

Karma: 7,793

philh Jul 22, 2024, 1:32 PM
8 points
0
in reply to: rsaarelm’s comment on: Sci-Fi books micro-reviews

The Gap Cycle by Stephen R. Donaldson

I think I’ve read this twice, in my early teens and early twenties, and loved it both times. But I’m now 34 and can’t talk about it in depth. I think past-me especially liked the grimness and was impressed at how characters seemed to be doing things for internally motivated reasons. (IIRC Donaldson calls this giving characters “dignity”. I feel like since then I’ve picked up another term for it that’s temporarily slipped my mind.)

I still think A Dark and Hungry God Arises and This Day All Gods Die are excellent book titles.

A caveat is that back then I also loved Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant books, and I think that by my mid-twenties I enjoyed them but not so much. So plausibly I’d like the Gap Cycle less now than then too? But I want to re-read.

Too Like the Lightning by Ada Palmer

I once saw a conversation that went something like: “I don’t find writing quality in sci-fi that important.” / “You clearly haven’t read Too Like the Lightning”.

I wasn’t sure if the second person meant TLTL’s writing is good or bad. Having read TLTL, both interpretations seemed plausible. (They meant good.)

I found it very difficult to get through this book, except that the last few chapters were kind of gripping. That was enough to get me to read the next one, which was hard to get through again. Ultimately I read the whole series, and I’m not sure how much I enjoyed the process of reading it. But they’re some of my favorite books to have read, and I can imagine myself re-reading them.

Crystal trilogy by Max Harms

I enjoyed this but don’t have much to say. As an AI safety parable it seemed plausible enough; I hadn’t previously seen aliens like that; I occasionally thought some of the writing was amateurish in a way I couldn’t put my finger on, but that wasn’t a big deal.

philh Jul 22, 2024, 11:45 AM
3 points
0
in reply to: Ben Millwood’s comment on: Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.

just make 4 piles of 4 cards from each suit and remove from those

I don’t think you can do this because at least one person will see which cards are in those piles, and then seeing those cards in game will give them more info than they’re supposed to have. E.g. if they see 9h in one of the piles and then 9h in game, they know hearts isn’t the 8-card suit.

(The rules as written are unclear on this. But I assume that you’re meant to remove cards at random from the suits, rather than having e.g. A-8 in one suit, A-Q in one, and A-10 in the other two. If you did that then getting dealt the Q or J would be a dead giveaway.)

philh Jul 11, 2024, 6:53 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Elizabeth’s comment on: Exercise: Planmaking, Surprise Anticipation, and “Baba is You”
I think Causality would be good for this. Levels have their full state visible from the start, and there’s no randomness. There’s a relatively small number of mechanics to learn, though I worry that some of them (particularly around details of movement, like “what will an astronaut do when they can’t move forward any more?”) might be “there are multiple equally good guesses here” which seems suboptimal.

Actually, there’s one detail of state that I’m not sure is visible, in some levels:

When you come out of a portal, which way do you face? I think there’s probably a consistent rule for this but I’m not sure, I could believe that in some levels you just have to try it to see.

philh Jul 9, 2024, 12:08 PM
3 points
1
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: I would have shit in that alley, too
they are by definition rivalrous (“the consumption of a good or service by one person diminishes the ability of another person to consume the same good or service”), as only one person in a stall at a time, and the timeframe doesn’t matter to this point.
Why does timeframe not matter? If there’s a pay-and-display parking lot, with enough spaces for everyone, but only one ticket machine, would you say this is rivalrous because only one person can be using the ticket machine at once?
Bathrooms aren’t zero rivalrous, but they seem fairly low-rivalrous to me. (There are some people for whom bathroom use is more urgent, making bathrooms more rivalrous, e.g. pregnant people and those with certain disabilities. My understanding is these people sometimes get access to extra bathrooms that the rest of us don’t.)
(As for dirtiness, all I can say is that the public bathrooms I’ve used tend to be somewhere between “just fine” and “unpleasant but bearable”. I did once have to clean shit from the toilet walls in the cinema where I used to work, but I believe it’s literally once in my life I’ve encountered that. Obviously people will have very different experiences here.)
they are extremely excludable: “Excludability refers to the characteristic of a good or service that allows its provider to prevent some people from using it.”
Depends on details. London has some street urinals that afaict pop up at night, they have no locks or even walls, they’re nonexcludable. Some are “open to everyone the attendant decides to let in”, and some are “open to everyone with a credit card”, and these seem just straightforwardly excludable. Other bathrooms can be locked but have no attendant and no means of accepting payment, so they’re either “open to everyone” or “closed to everyone”, and calling that “excludable” feels like a stretch to me. I suppose you could say that you could install a pay gate so it’s “excludable but currently choosing not to exclude people”, but then it depends how easy it is to install one of them.

philh Jul 3, 2024, 11:26 AM
3 points
0
on: CIV: a story
So I guess Stuart is named for John Stuart Mill and Milton for Milton Friedman, but what about Carla (is CARLA an acronym?) and Victoria (Tori?)?

philh Jun 29, 2024, 11:08 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: My AI Model Delta Compared To Christiano
Note that to the extent this is true, it suggests verification is even harder than John thinks.

philh Jun 17, 2024, 10:12 AM
4 points
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
In any case, where is this hedging discussion happening?
I’ve seen and taken part in discussions about hedging on LW, but the thing that made me write this comment was a conversation on Duncan Sabien’s facebook.
What things are over-discussed?
Interesting question, but nothing comes to mind.

philh Jun 15, 2024, 9:23 AM
10 points
1
on: philh’s Shortform
A thing that feels under-discussed when it comes to hedging is, hedging doesn’t just have to be swapping from “X” to “I believe X”. You can say “the sky looks blue” or “wikipedia says the sky is blue” or “rumor has it the sky is blue” or “IIRC the sky is blue” or “if I did the math right, the sky is blue”.

philh Jun 3, 2024, 3:52 PM
13 points
2
on: How it All Went Down: The Puzzle Hunt that took us way, way Less Online
I for one welcome our new AI overlord whom I unwittingly helped install. Otherwise I’d need to feel conflicted about my actions this weekend.

I still have questions about one of the puzzles. Will the solutions be made available somewhere (ideally in a format where people can try them unspoiled first), or should I just ask?

philh May 31, 2024, 1:46 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: det’s comment on: Big-endian is better than little-endian
Ah, thanks, I see now. You’re saying that even if it’s written with the small end before the big end according to the way the words flow, the direction of eye scanning and of mentally parsing and of giving a name to the number is still big end before small end? Similarly I might write a single word sdrawkcab in English text but the reader would still read it first-letter-to-last-letter.

Curious, when handwriting, what order do you write in?

philh May 31, 2024, 1:32 PM
7 points
0
on: OpenAI: Fallout

Even better, Daniel then get to keep his equity

I missed this part?

philh May 16, 2024, 4:40 PM
2 points
0
in reply to: det’s comment on: Big-endian is better than little-endian
Isn’t this showing that Hebrew and Arabic write numbers little-endian? Surely big-versus-little-endian isn’t about left-to-right or right-to-left, it’s about how numbers flow relative to word reading order.

philh Apr 27, 2024, 11:31 PM
17 points
16
on: On Not Pulling The Ladder Up Behind You
Ask me about the 2019 NYC Solstice Afterparty sometime if you want a minor ops horror story.
Consider yourself asked.

philh Apr 8, 2024, 1:37 PM
2 points
2
in reply to: philh’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
(I confess I have no idea how to interpret the agree-votes on this.)

philh Apr 7, 2024, 8:44 AM
11 points
9
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: General Thoughts on Secular Solstice
Yeah, I was wrong to suggest/assume that the definition is original to you and not the way it’s defined in other communities that I just am not familiar with.

It still seems like you’re making the core mistake I was trying to point at, which is asserting that a word means something different than what other people mean by it; rather than acknowledging that sometimes words have different meanings in different contexts.

Like, people are talking about what sort of toppings should be on a donut and how large the hole should be, and you’re chiming in to say you came around on donuts when you realized that instead of being ring-shaped with toppings they’re ball-shaped with fillings. You didn’t come around on donuts. You just discovered that even though you don’t like ring donuts, you do like filled donuts, a related but different baked good.

philh Apr 6, 2024, 10:18 PM
11 points
9
in reply to: Gordon Seidoh Worley’s comment on: General Thoughts on Secular Solstice
I only came around on faith once I realized it was just Latin for trust, and specifically trust in the world to be just as it is.
This really just seems to me like you’re asserting that what a word “really means” is some weird new definition that ~no one else means when they say the word.
(I don’t know Latin. Nevertheless I am extremely confident that the word “faith” in Latin does not specifically refer to the concept of “trust in the world to be just as it is”.)

philh Apr 3, 2024, 9:36 PM
4 points
0
in reply to: Yoav Ravid’s comment on: philh’s Shortform
Also now running as an in-progress youtube short series. (I haven’t read the original.)

philh Apr 3, 2024, 3:02 PM
55 points
7
on: philh’s Shortform
“It seems a lot of our pills cause vomiting as a side-effect?”
“Yeah, the company knows about it but it’s tricky to fix.”
“How so? Our competitors don’t have this problem, and we make basically the same products, right?”
“Right, no, it’s a corporate structure issue.”
″?”
“If a pill does too much or too little of something, we have a group of clever people whose job it is to care about that and to reformulate it slightly to improve it. If it doesn’t kill enough pain, the analgesic division will step in. If it causes clotting, the anticoagulant folks have a look. If it makes your bones brittle, it’ll be the antiosteoporosises. You see? But if it causes vomiting-”
“Right, yeah. There’s no one to take ownership of the problem, because-”
“There is no antiemetics division.”

philh Mar 8, 2024, 11:41 PM
6 points
2
on: philh’s Shortform
Oh, huh. Searle’s original Chinese room paper (first eight pages) doesn’t say machines can’t think.
“OK, but could a digital computer think?”
If by “digital computer” we mean anything at all that has a level of description where it can correctly be described as the instantiation of a computer program, then again the answer is, of course, yes, since we are the instantiations of any number of computer programs, and we can think.
“But could something think, understand, and so on solely in virtue of being a computer with the right sort of program? Could instantiating a program, the right program of course, by itself be a sufficient condition of understanding?”
This I think is the right question to ask, though it is usually confused with one or more of the earlier questions, and the answer to it is no.
“Why not?”
Because the formal symbol manipulations by themselves don’t have any intentionality; they are quite meaningless; they aren’t even symbol manipulations, since the symbols don’t symbolize anything. In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax but no semantics. Such intentionality as computers appear to have is solely in the minds of those who program them and those who use them, those who send in the input and those who interpret the output.
I can’t say I really understand what he’s trying to say, but it’s different from what I thought it was.

philh Feb 27, 2024, 12:33 AM
2 points
0
in reply to: Gerald Monroe’s comment on: Gemini Has a Problem
Yeah. It’s still possible to program in such a way that that works, and it’s always been possible to program in such a way that it doesn’t work. But prepared statements make it easier to program in such a way that it doesn’t work, by allowing the programmer to pass executable code (which is probably directly embedded as a literal in their application language) separately from the parameters (which may be user-supplied).

(I could imagine a SQL implementation forbidding all strings directly embedded in queries, and requiring them to be passed through prepared statements or a similar mechanism. That still wouldn’t make these attacks outright impossible, but it would be an added layer of security.)