silentbob

• silentbobAug 24, 2025, 8:13 AM

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  in reply to: DirectedEvolution’s comment on: Fu­til­ity Illusions

  Would you say that fixed distributions with day to day variation are a common phenomenon? Of course, it depends on where we sample from, but intuitively I would guess that “most things” that have variation can also be influenced. Then again, “most things” is not very meaningful without cleaner definitions of all the terms.

  Maybe instead of “truly entirely fixed”, I should say something like “truly resistant to targeted intervention”.

Fu­til­ity Illusions

• silentbobAug 17, 2025, 8:19 AM

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  on: How Does A Blind Model See The Earth?

  Very cool! I decided to try the same with Mandelbrot. For reference, this is what it should roughly look like:

  

  And below is what it actually looked like when querying GPT-4o and using the logprobs of 0 and 1 tokens. I was going with the prompt^[1] Is c = ${re} + ${im}i in the Mandelbrot set? Reply only 1 if yes, 0 if no. No text, just number. (result is in a collapsible section so you can make a prediction what level of quality you’d expect):

  GPT-4o:

  

  A bit underwhelming, I would have thought it was better at getting the very basic structure right. At least it does seem to know where the “centers” are, i.e. the pronounced vertical bars you see align very well with the bigger areas of the original.

  To be fair, in an earlier test, I had a longer and slightly different prompt (that should have yielded about the same results, or so I thought), and GPT-4o gave me this, which looks a bit better:

  

  Sadly, I don’t remember what the exact prompt was, and I wasn’t using version control at that stage. Whoops.

  I wanted to try GPT-5 or GPT-5-mini as well, but turns out, there is no way to disable reasoning for them in the API. This a) makes this whole exercise much more expensive (even though per-token GPT-5 is cheaper than 4o) and b) defeats the purpose a bit, as reasoning might help it even run the numbers to some degree, and of course these models know the formula and how to multiply complex numbers at probably-not-terrible accuracy (maybe? Actually, not so sure, will test this).

  For the record, the larger GPT-4o picture cost about ~$3 in credits.

  1. ^

     I only now realize that this might yield slightly worse results for negative imaginary parts, as c = 1.5 + -1i looks odd and may throw the model off a bit. Oh well.

  What links here?

  • Mo Putera's comment on Mo Putera’s Shortform by Mo Putera (Nov 4, 2025, 12:47 PM; 16 points)

• silentbobAug 15, 2025, 2:54 PM

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  on: silent­bob’s Shortform

  One super useful feature of Claude that some may not know about:

  1. Claude is pretty good at creating web apps via artifacts

  2. You can run and use these web apps directly in the Claude UI

  3. You can publish and share these artifacts directly with others

  As far as I can tell, the above is even available for non-paying users.

  Relatedly: browser bookmarklets can be pretty useful little tools to reduce friction for recurring tasks you do in your browser. It may take <5 minutes to let Claude generate such bookmarklets for you.

  You can also combine these two things, such as here: https://​​claude.ai/​​public/​​artifacts/​​9c58fb4a-5fae-48ce-aed3-60355bfd033e

  This is a web app built and hosted by Claude which creates a customized browser bookmarklet that provides a simple text-to-speech feature. It works like this:

  • customize the configuration on the linked page

  • drag the “Speak Selection” button into your bookmarks bar

  • from then on, on any website, when you mark text and then click the bookmark (or, after having clicked on it once, you can also use the defined hotkey instead), the selected text will be read out to you

  Surely there are browser plugins that provide better TTS than this, but consider it a little proof of concept. Also this way it’s free, friction-less, requires no account etc. Claude also claimed that, when using Edge or Safari, higher quality system voices may be available, but I didn’t look into this.

  Some other random things that can be done via bookmarklets:

  • a button cycling through different playback speeds of all videos on the current website, in case you sometimes interact with video players without such a setting in their UI

  • if you’re fine with having some API key in your bookmarklet, you can automate all kinds of, say, LLM calls

    • If you’re using Chrome and have enabled the local Gemini nano AI, you can even use that in your bookmarklets without any API key being involved (haven’t tried this yet)

  • start & show a 5 minute timer in the corner of the page you’re on

  • show/​hide parts of the page, e.g. comments on a blog, Youtube recommendations

  • highlight-for-screenshot overlay: enable temporarily drawing on the page to highlight things to then take screenshots; maybe slightly lower friction than having to use a separate paint app for that. Usable here (relevant keys after activating: Enter to leave drawing mode, ESC to close overlay, 1-9 to change marker size).

  • inline imperial<->metric unit converter

  For some of these, a browser plugin or tampermonkey script or so may be preferable—but beware fake alternatives. If you just think “I could do X instead” but never actually do it, then maybe just creating a bookmarklet may be the better option after all, even if it’s not the most elegant solution.
  Happy to hear about your use cases!

• silentbobAug 13, 2025, 9:22 AM

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

  When it comes to your average scam, I’m sure rationalists fall for it less than average. But you could surely come up with some very carefully crafted scam that targets rationalists in particular and has higher odds of convincing them than the general public.

  It also depends on what exactly you consider a scam. To some people, FTX was a scam, and rationalists almost certainly were overrepresented among its customers (or victims).

• silentbobAug 5, 2025, 5:52 AM

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  in reply to: Seth Herd’s comment on: “Mo­men­tism”: Ethics for Boltz­mann Brains

  So I’m only a Boltzmann brain during meditation, got it.

• silentbobJul 30, 2025, 7:43 PM

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  in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: Four Types of Disagreement

  Haha, nice idea. How about “Fast Lava”. :D Or, turning labels into terms, “Vast Fate”.

• silentbobJul 30, 2025, 5:52 AM

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  in reply to: Adele Lopez’s comment on: Pro­cras­ti­na­tion Drill

  I imagine in such a situation I’m basically taking my mind by the hand and say “come on, just 3 minutes, let’s try it out and see what happens”, the mind says “okay...” and by the time the three minutes are up, nothing bad happened, my mind is like “everything went better than expected”. I would assume when there’s a deeper underlying reason—which certainly can happen—the mind would not give up that quickly and easily and keep generating feelings of aversion.

  So, I agree in the sense that you shouldn’t just push through by all means, and sometimes it may take more reflection and empathy to figure out what’s going on. I view the whole exercise almost as a kind of meditation, focused more on observing your experience and learning about yourself than on actually making progress.

• silentbobJul 29, 2025, 11:44 AM

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  in reply to: papetoast’s comment on: Pro­cras­ti­na­tion Drill

  True, it probably makes sense to limit the selection of tasks for this exercise to those that you’re confident you’ll actually engage with for a few minutes.

Pro­cras­ti­na­tion Drill

• silentbobJul 2, 2025, 7:17 PM

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

  So, I was wondering whether this is usable in anki, and indeed, there appears to be a simple setting for it without even having to install a plugin, as described here in 4 easy steps. I’ll see if it makes a notable difference.

  Not so relatedly, this made me realize a connection I hadn’t really thought about before: I wish music apps like Spotify would use something vaguely like spaced repetition for Shuffle mode. In the sense of finding some good algorithm to predict, based on past listening behavior, which song in a playlist the user is most likely to currently enjoy, and weighing their occurrences in shuffle mode accordingly. One could, very roughly, treat skipping a song as getting a flashcard right—it will then have some exponential backoff before it returns. But not skipping the song would be roughly like getting a card wrong, and it will show up again very soon. Of course, the algorithm shouldn’t quite be the same, e.g. listening to a song once without skipping shouldn’t have such a drastic effect (as typically the user may not be paying much attention to the music, so not skipping is a rather weak signal). But, yeah… I kind of doubt these platforms are working on anything like this, as they most likely don’t care much about such intangible value propositions that are hard to measure in A/​B tests.

• silentbobJun 27, 2025, 10:12 AM

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  on: If Mo­ral Real­ism is true, then the Orthog­o­nal­ity Th­e­sis is false.

  By the way, I had a quick look at what PersonalityMap reports about how intelligence and ethics are correlated among humans. The websites provides an interface to query a pretty powerful AI model that is able to predict correlations (psychological, behavioral etc.) very well. The most suitable starting question that might correlate with high intelligence that I found was “What was your ACT score, between 1 and 36?” (although one could also just work with some made-up claim like “What’s your IQ?” or “Would you describe yourself as unusually intelligent?” or so, that the prediction model could probably work with almost as well). I then checked the correlation of this with some phrases that are vaguely related to doing good:

  

  So, based on this, it appears that at least among humans (or rather, among the types of humans who’s data is in the database of PersonalityMap, which is likely primarily people from the US), intelligence and morality are not (meaningfully/​positively) correlated, so locally this does look like evidence for the Orthogonality thesis holding up. Of course we can’t just extrapolate this to AI, let alone AGI/​ASI. But maybe still an interesting data point. (Admittedly this is only tangentially related to your actual post, so sorry if this is a little off-topic)

• silentbobJun 27, 2025, 8:54 AM

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  in reply to: niplav’s comment on: Me­la­tonin Self-Ex­per­i­ment Results

  Thanks for asking! Are you referring to the slightly earlier wake-up time? I just had a look at the net sleep time in the three groups, and got the following comparison:

  

  Control: 8h 00m

  0.15mg: 8h 02m

  0.3mg: 7h 45m

  But large p values as you can guess from the overlapping CIs.

  (The seeming discrepancy between this data and wake-up time can be explained by the fact that wake-up time was the absolute time, whereas net sleep time is also affected by when I went to bed and how long it took me to fall asleep)

• silentbobJun 27, 2025, 8:38 AM

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  in reply to: basil.halperin’s comment on: Me­la­tonin Self-Ex­per­i­ment Results

  But—if I understand correctly, you did not take any melatonin between nights in which you randomized—have you looked “treatment effect vs. length of time since last experimental night”? This would be a very crude way of getting at tolerance effects.

  Good idea! Had a brief look now: I filtered my data for the 40 days on which I took melatonin, then for each one calculated the time (in days) since I last took melatonin (so not the last day I ran the experiment, but the last day I ran the expeirment where I was in one of the two intervention groups), and looked for a correlation between number of days since previous melatonin intake and time to fall asleep. There’s maybe a tiny hint that there could be tolerance effects at play, but the data is insufficient for anything conclusive:

  

  The point on the very right is the first day where I took melatonin—for that one, the “day since last intake” is not really defined, so I just choose the maximum distance between days I had + 1.

  We do find a very slightly negative correlation which seems to indicate that after taking a break from the experiment (or having had some control group days recently) made the melatonin slightly more effective at reducing time to fall asleep, but then again, a [-0.4, 0.22] CI doesn’t tell us much. :)

  (Update: I also made a small linear regression and obtained the formula predicted_time_to_fall_asleep = 27.1 − 0.24 * days_since_last_intake (for days on which I took melatonin) - but, again, large error bars around that coefficient)

  I have a (completed) 5-year melatonin self-experiment that I will hopefully write up later this year (although… I have been saying that for 12+ months at this point), will be fun to compare notes.

  Oh wow, please do!

• silentbobJun 27, 2025, 6:42 AM

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  on: If Not Now, When?

  One thing that stuck with me after having it read somewhere, probably on lesswrong, a few years ago is the framing: “does future-you have a comparative advantage to do the thing? Otherwise you may just as well do it now”. Which maybe doesn’t quite capture your cooking counter-example, but it seems like a useful way to address procrastination nonetheless.

• silentbobJun 26, 2025, 9:26 PM

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  on: If Mo­ral Real­ism is true, then the Orthog­o­nal­ity Th­e­sis is false.

  The short version of my somewhat opposing view point would be something along the lines of “directional effects aren’t absolute truths”. If moral realism is true, then a superintelligence may indeed be more likely to find these moral facts—but it doesn’t mean it necessarily does, nor does it mean it will be motivated to accept these moral facts as goals. “In the limit” (of intelligence), maybe...? But “just able to disempower humanity”-level ASI could still be very far away from that.

  Your points 2-4 are all what I would consider directional effects. (Side note, do you really mean “casually” or “causally”?) They are not necessarily very strong, and opposing factors could exist as well.

  And point 6 turns these qualitative/​directional considerations into something close-to-quantitative (“likely”) that I wouldn’t see as a conclusion following from the earlier points.

  I would still agree with the basic idea that moral realism may be vaguely good news wrt the orthogonality thesis, but for me that seems like a very marginal change.

Me­la­tonin Self-Ex­per­i­ment Results

• silentbobJun 13, 2025, 4:08 PM

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  on: Novel Idea Gen­er­a­tion in LLMs: Judg­ment as Bottleneck

  Indeed, judgement seems to be a dimension of intelligence (or effectiveness? Or something?) that is distinct from creativity or problem solving and maybe a bit neglected /​ less on top of mind. I wonder if there are even good ways of measuring this in humans. Or some benchmark for LLMs. I really don’t have a good model of judgement at all. Is that a general thing people are good or bad at? Is it highly domain-specific? Probably? To what degree is it distinct from “expertise”? And, yes, do today’s frontier models maybe have some judgement capability that is just hard to elicit?

• silentbobJun 11, 2025, 11:55 AM

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  in reply to: AlexMennen’s comment on: Against ask­ing if AIs are conscious

  I certainly disagree about the “no evidence” part—to me, the fact that I’m an individual with preferences and ability to suffer is very strong evidence for subjective moral facts, so to speak, and if these exist subjectively, then it’s not that much of a stretch to assume there’s an objective way to resolve conflicts between these subjective preferences.

  It’s for sure too large of a topic to resolve in this random comment thread, but either way, to my knowledge the majority of philosophers believes moral realism is more likely to be true than not, and even on lesswrong I’m not aware of huge agreement on it being false (but maybe I’m mistaken?). Hence, just casually dismissing moral realism without even a hint of uncertainty seems rather overconfident.

• silentbobJun 9, 2025, 4:59 PM

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  in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: On work­ing 80%

  Surely there are diminishing returns to meaning obtained per work time, and with 80% of the work you get like 95% of the meaning.

  And given that you now have much more time for coping, overall that’s probably a pretty positive deal!