Three-Monkey Mind

Karma: 194

Three-Monkey Mind 30 Aug 2024 4:30 UTC
2 points
3
in reply to: Heron’s comment on: First Lighthaven Sequences Reading Group
While I can imagine why others would want to see this sort of thing, it seems to me that “this will go on your permanent record” would be a strong disincentive to engage seriously with the text or mention anything aloud that you wouldn’t be comfortable with anyone in the world, ever, knowing about you.

Three-Monkey Mind 2 Jun 2024 0:23 UTC
1 point
0
on: Web-surfing tips for strange times

I do actually have plans to learn enough html to swap my Wordpress site over to a self-hosted self-designed website, I just have to, like, get good enough with HTML and CSS and especially CSS to get Gwern’s nice sidenotes

You can start with the Dan Luu aesthetic and then redesign your site, either incrementally or in big leaps, possibly repeatedly, later. Redesigning websites is totally a thing. https://gwern.net gets near-constant upgrades, and all sorts of famous web-nerd bloggers have improved their sites’ designs over the years and now decades.

and hosting and how to do comments. It’s gonna happen, though. Any day now.

One thing Substack does that you can’t get super-easily from a static site is comments and emailing your readers with new articles (feeds are, unfortunately, mostly a nerd-only technology).

Three-Monkey Mind 20 May 2024 21:01 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Scientific Notation Options
I’d like to second this comment, at least broadly. I’ve seen the e notation in blog posts and the like and I’ve struggled to put the × 10 in the right place.

One of the reasons why I dislike trying to understand numbers written in scientific notation is because I have trouble mapping them to normal numbers with lots of commas in them. Engineering notation helps a lot with this — at least for numbers greater than 1 — by having the exponent be a multiple of 3. Oftentimes, losing significant figures isn’t an issue in anything but the most technical scientific writing.

Three-Monkey Mind 12 May 2024 22:01 UTC
1 point
1
on: What comes after Roam’s renaissance?
Is there an alternative to constantly adding endless features? Can software be designed to operate without daily updates, similar to programming languages?

“daily” in “daily updates” is hyperbole, but you can probably get most of the way there with
- a subscription-based model (annual and/or monthly)
- periodic updates to ensure it works properly when the underlying platform changes (like when Apple adds dark mode to its OS and exposes this to websites with prefers-color-scheme).
The second bullet point is important, at least occasionally. I dropped my beloved VoodooPad because it never got a publicly-released version that supports dark mode that works on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS. I figure VoodooPad is nearly dead because its current owners can’t figure out how to turn it into something that gets enough revenue to justify the time that it would take to make it a modern app.

At any rate, the notes I had in VoodooPad got moved into Ulysses some time after the Ulysses team added projects back in 2022. Ulysses is not a good personal wiki (internal linking isn’t nearly as low-friction as in Obsidian), but it’s adequate for my purposes and I dislike having a gazillion different personal-wiki software packages that I need to divvy my attention between.

As far as update cadence goes…

If you look at Ulysses’ Releases page and make note of the dates in the headings, you can see that they’ve been steadily, but not all that quickly, been releasing features. There’s probably at least one programming language out there with this release cadence, but I wouldn’t know which one it is.

Three-Monkey Mind 1 Feb 2024 6:23 UTC
1 point
0
on: Ten Modes of Culture War Discourse

Cassandra/Mule: If Alice knew she were talking to a brick wall, she would give up; and if Bob knew Alice was trying to help, he would actually listen.

I’ve seen mules in the wild in internet forums (which, admittedly is outside the scope of your post). They usually present as ardent defenders of the faith, repeating well-known talking points…and never updating, ever.

Three-Monkey Mind 9 Dec 2023 1:36 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Chris_Leong’s comment on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feedback thread]
AI safety posts generally go over my head, although the last one I read seemed fantastically important and accessible.

AI-safety posts are probably the most valuable posts here, even if they crowd out other posts (both posts I think are valuable and posts I think are, at best, chaff).

Three-Monkey Mind 9 Dec 2023 1:24 UTC
7 points
9
in reply to: aysja’s comment on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feedback thread]

If there were one dial I’d want to experiment with turning on LW it would be writing quality, in the direction of more of it.

I’d like to highlight this. In general, I think fewer things should be promoted to the front page.

[edit, several days later]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SiPX84DAeNKGZEfr5/do-websites-and-apps-actually-generally-get-worse-after is a prime example. This has nothing to do with rationality or AI alignment. This is the sort of off-topic chatter that belongs somewhere else on the Internet.

Three-Monkey Mind 9 Dec 2023 1:17 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: RomanHauksson’s comment on: How do you feel about LessWrong these days? [Open feedback thread]
I’d like to like this more but I don’t have a clear idea of when to up one, up the other, down one, down the other, or down one and up the other.

Three-Monkey Mind 20 Nov 2023 21:55 UTC
16 points
2
in reply to: titotal’s comment on: For Civilization and Against Niceness
Would you rather live in a society that valued “niceness, community and civilization”, or one that valued “meanness, community and civilization”? I don’t think it’s a tough choice.

This is an awful straw man. Compare instead:
1. niceness, community, and civilization
2. community and civilization
Having seen what “niceness” entails, I’ll opt for (2), which doesn’t prioritize niceness or anti-niceness, and is niceness-agnostic.

Three-Monkey Mind 25 Sep 2023 0:07 UTC
5 points
0
in reply to: gwern’s comment on: Hand-writing MathML

That’s a lot of readers to throw away

Depends on how popular you are. Even if you make the highly questionable assumption that browser statistics collected on sites like cnn.com and such are representative of the readership of jefftk.com, if jefftk.com has hundreds of readers, he’s still doing a lot of work for a group that can only manage to claim that there are “dozens of us”, and in any case really ought to upgrade to a proper browser (and in probably most cases, OS) anyway, for security reasons.

Three-Monkey Mind 24 Sep 2023 23:47 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Said Achmiz’s comment on: Hand-writing MathML
Daring Fireball, a site you’ve probably heard of, seems to do OK with only browser-supplied fonts:
```
	font-family: Verdana, system-ui, Helvetica, sans-serif;
```
Also, jefftk said “requiring”. Sure, he could have a site that uses Inter, either loaded from his own site or from a CDN like Google Fonts, but if Inter doesn’t load (mostly likely because of user preference), then everything will be fine.

If TeX fonts don’t load…then what happens? Does the user see raw TeX, or nothing at all, or…?

Three-Monkey Mind 5 Sep 2023 20:30 UTC
36 points
9
on: Defunding My Mistake
I’m someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM’s policy proposals

BLM’s policy proposals have changed since you wrote that. Currently, they’re at https://impact.blacklivesmatter.com/policy/. They are:
- defund the police
- No On Prop 25
- voting-rights legislation
- support for the Congressional Oversight of Unjust Policing Act (COUP Act)
- Medicare for All
- the police not using stuff made for the military
- opposing Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court
- DC statehood
- ending the filibuster
- “climate justice”
(emphasis added)

Keep clicking on “Next Pillar” at the top right of the page; eventually they get around to bragging about how they’ve countered Amazon’s attempts to keep a union from forming.

I’m not really a libertarian any more, but is this close enough to your beliefs that you still think the organization is worth supporting? Or have you considered voicing support for some other organization that has enough cachet in your social circle to ensure that you don’t spend weekend nights alone?

Three-Monkey Mind 5 Sep 2023 20:08 UTC
23 points
10
on: Defunding My Mistake

Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn’t logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do.

20 years ago or so, Eliezer Yudkowsky said that the biggest obstacle to raising the sanity waterline was religion. This seemed very reasonable at the time.

I’m unconvinced that’s still true in the West. What seems the larger barrier now are the things people say and believe that ensure they’ll keep getting invited to dinner parties.

I’m likely overlooking other factors of course, and there’s the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I’ll be better equipped to unearth it.

You’ve identified a very powerful bias. If you’re looking for easy wins to root out incorrect beliefs, have you considered first looking at all the ones that would dry up your dating pool if you stopped believing in them and told other people in your social circle about how you changed your mind?

Three-Monkey Mind 28 Jul 2023 20:54 UTC
6 points
0
on: Semaglutide and Muscle

A key problem to loss of LBM is that you’re either losing bone density (a terrible thing) or muscle (a pretty damn bad thing).

Could also be skin. Losing skin if you’re losing fat is a good thing, I’d think, since you don’t want to weigh 200 pounds yet still have all the skin you had when you were 300 pounds.

Has any work been done to see where the LBM has been coming from?

Three-Monkey Mind 2 May 2023 4:39 UTC
2 points
in reply to: jp’s comment on: jp’s Shortform
Oh, that’s something significantly different from what I had in mind. Thanks for pointing me to the page that explains the concept.

Three-Monkey Mind 30 Apr 2023 3:21 UTC
1 point
in reply to: Viliam’s comment on: jp’s Shortform
Would it be useful to examine what exactly “low energy” means?

I’m not jp, but:
- too awake to sleep
- too brain-fogged to do thinking work
- possibly too brain-fogged to listen to a podcast and retain anything from it
- too physically tired to go for a walk or do other similar low-intensity exercise, like easy yoga
- probably too brain-fogged to read — and really digest — the web articles that I’ve been postponing for months because they seem great, but I can never get around to
Meanwhile, here’s what I can do in a low-energy state, some of the time (but I frequently don’t want to):
- balance a checkbook, but it seems like I get roughly $n$ hours/week of low-energy time, but maybe $n / 10$ hours/week of time that I need to spend balancing checkbooks
- delete e-mails, but not be able to think of a couple good new categories that I’d need to get my inbox to zero
- get photos off my phone and file them appropriately, but possibly spend a little too long thinking of good, descriptive filenames that I’ll be able to use to search for them later, or just fail to have a name with the words that I’ll want to use to retrieve it later

Three-Monkey Mind 24 Apr 2023 22:27 UTC
11 points
9
in reply to: Raemon’s comment on: Moderation notes re: recent Said/Duncan threads

We might iterate on the exact implementation here (for example, we might only give this option to users with 100+ karma or equivalent)

I could be misunderstanding all sorts of things about this feature that you’ve just implemented, but…

Why would you want to limit newer users from being able to declare that rate-limited users should be able to post as much as they like on newer users’ posts? Shouldn’t I, as a post author, be able to let Said, Duncan, and Zack post as much as they like on my posts?

Three-Monkey Mind 22 Aug 2022 0:42 UTC
4 points
0
on: Ways to increase working memory, and/or cope with low working memory?
writing things down

A good idea but too general to be good advice.

More specifically (not an exhaustive list):
- If you have a multistep 1- or 2-hour task, strongly consider scribbling down a quick checklist of what needs doing before your working memory gets swamped with the details of a subtask or three.
- If you’re in the middle of a programming project and need to pause your work, strongly consider typing out a message in a sticky-note-equivalent app like Tot that says “Welcome back. You were frobnicating the gleeberks because the gleeberks don’t snozzle as well as they should.”
More generally, consider dumping your mental state to a written medium more often. You should probably have a way to do this on both your phone and computer that doesn’t take too much thinking to summon up a text field that you can edit and then have the text get stored in an inbox or similar catch-all folder somewhere.

If you feel silly writing down trivial stuff, it’s helpful to think “I want to remember all of it, not just most of it.”

Three-Monkey Mind 30 Jun 2022 2:05 UTC
3 points
4
on: any good rationalist guides to nutrition / healthy eating?
Two responses:
1. It’s unclear to me what would make diet advice “rationalist”.
2. The only novel, actionable consensus I’ve seen seems to be “avoid eating or drinking things with sugar added to them, especially if there’s a lot of added sugar”.

Three-Monkey Mind 9 Jul 2020 6:28 UTC
2 points
in reply to: George3d6’s comment on: Obsidian: A Mind Mapping Markdown Editor
This appears to be a personal wiki.