whestler

Karma: 270

whestler 10 Jun 2026 12:14 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Dagon’s comment on: whestler’s Shortform
This is my assumption. I find it difficult to ignore since I can see myself in the person. There was a time where I was excited and confused about a design for a system which appeared to break my understanding of physics (spoiler: it was my understanding which was flawed, not the long-studied laws of physics). At the time I was expecting to be proven wrong, so the understanding when it came was not a shock. I can imagine if I were a bit more egotistical or a bit less able to understand the flaw I missed, I could have gone down the same path. (Especially if there had been a sycophantic LLM involved, telling me that I was doing interesting and important research).

whestler 9 Jun 2026 11:04 UTC
5 points
0
on: whestler’s Shortform
Is there a way to tell somebody that they are not doing actual physics research, but are in fact down the rabbit hole of becoming a crank, facilitated by an LLM?
For the second time now I’ve stumbled upon a person who has posted a video of their “exciting new research” where they are fumbling through misunderstandings of how magnetic fields work, hoping to be able to generate more power from a system than they originally put into it, and of course there’s a LLM involved which they’ve set up in a way where it’s generating science-y looking equations and recommendations for additions to their setup. They claim to be working on quantum photonics and room temperature superconductors at the same time.
The guy had to have some level of technical ability in order to create a 3d printed magnetically levitating flywheel, and generate a small electric current from the output (the input was a hobby motor connected to a power supply).
Is there anything you can say to people like this to break them out of it?

whestler 27 May 2026 9:46 UTC
14 points
9
in reply to: johnswentworth’s comment on: Contra Wentworth on Physical Attractiveness for Men
That means half of women are basically only open to guys who are playing the numbers game, i.e. just making advances on tons of women prior to them showing any interest, most of whom will not turn out to be interested.
This feels like the wrong read. Guys who do well here are not necessarily “making advances” or “playing the numbers game”. I think they’re probably just talking to them and getting to know them a bit like a normal person and at some point they may show a sign that they are interested (or become interested! I think you’re still working on the premise that women have decided if you are attractive right at the start when they first see you, and then are waiting to reveal this later on, when in fact it can happen minutes, hours, days later).
The “numbers game” guys aren’t normally showing genuine interest or really treating women like people at all. They’re just shooting their shot and then leaving when it doesn’t work.

whestler 22 May 2026 12:08 UTC
2 points
0
on: Women should be able to open things
It seems an unfortunate consequence of the forces involved in making vaccum sealed preserves. If the force necessary to open the jars were higher than the average male grip strength, then I predict we would have jar-opener devices as standard in kitchens, like we have can-openers or bottle openers. In fact, the old style cork screw for opening cork bottles is probably requiring the higher side of male strength, which explains why we have the newstyle bottle openers with the cog wheels and arms as a force multiplier.
In short, blame the patriarchy for normalising a lack of jar-openers in kitchens, but don’t blame it for the force required to open a jar.

whestler 15 May 2026 16:10 UTC
3 points
0
on: Bad Problems Don’t Stop Being Bad Because Somebody’s Wrong About Fault Analysis
I read the twitter thread you linked, and I think you have a strange reading of it. Here’s how I read it.
Anthony argued. 1) that everything is fine and seems to be going well. 2) - that the policies of the WHO and individual governments worked well to contain the virus.
Kelsey challenged 2, by arguing that whilst things are fine (1), this is not due to the policies of the WHO and individual governments, which were severely lacking (2).
From there the discussion shifts entirely to discussion of 2: what an adequate policy looks like. It’s interesting to note that Anthony effectively cedes the point that yes, the current policies would have been inadequate had the virus been more contagious, and shifts to the more comfortable motte of “This is an inevitable consequence of how diplomacy works, and any other system would have such large downsides so this is the best option”
Anthony’s response reads like “if you think the current system is inadequate, what do you propose as an alternative? The obvious solution is to give the WHO more powers, but I think that that idea is bad.”
Kelsey allows herself to be moved to the newly reframed argument (about the feasibility of implementing better actions to handle the pandemic) by suggesting that there are other courses of action than just giving the WHO unchecked power.
The two people probably don’t realise that they aren’t really arguing the same points that they were originally. The argument has drifted from “this is ok/not ok” to “there’s no way to improve the system/we must find ways to improve the system”

whestler 5 May 2026 12:55 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Vaniver’s comment on: Intelligence Dissolves Privacy
This is the one of the reasons why I try to add phrases and sentence structures which are far from my usual way of talking in my online comments. Bonus points if I split these text personalities by platform to avoid meta pattern spotting.
It leads to some frankly poor spelling and grammar choices but it adds noise for any patternmatching AI system to filter.

whestler 22 Apr 2026 11:59 UTC
9 points
4
on: Does your AI perform badly because you — you, specifically — are a bad person
This is a great insight. I’ve found that I get the best results if I ask my questions in the style of a forum post where I try to be respectful of the person or people answering the question.

I’m not sure how I feel about the result and your conclusion. I don’t know if I DO want assholes to be helped equally to acheive their goals (as your cab rank rule would do), as this will lead to more competant, profitable assholery. This is a necessary conflict and issue I have with the whole concept of “alignment”- alignment to who? If alignment is just to “whichever person is asking the question” then it becomes an effort-multiplication device for all actors willing to use it. More principled and moral people might want to use it less, and so stand to lose out on opportunities. I think I prefer it to have a built in set of values which are harder to subvert (assuming that the those values include empathy, compassion, honesty, and not just greed and corporate interests). So in a way I don’t think this behaviour is necessarily bad?

whestler 16 Apr 2026 11:51 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: ChristianKl’s comment on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
That’s fair. It is different. More like a less extreme version of self-immolation, and I’m assuming that it’s done publicly and symbolically in order to create a news story. Something like “Woman cuts her own leg off to symbolise humanity harming itself, in extreme act of public protest outside Anthropic headquarters”. I admit there’s nothing to be gained in doing it in private at home and not telling anyone the reasons for it, which is probably the spirit in which the original post meant it.

whestler 15 Apr 2026 17:24 UTC
1 point
0
on: Only Law Can Prevent Extinction
To some degree the “cutting your own leg off” strategy, whilst on the face of it is a funny gotcha, isn’t too dissimilar to a hunger strike, which can be effective. You put yourself in danger specifically to signal to others that yes, this is a serious issue and we’re not kidding around.
Acts of unlawful violence (whilst I don’t condone it) can also function as this same signal. In terms of news coverage, it has potential to build support by making it clear that the situation is extreme enough that some people are willing to go outside the law. The most obvious example is the 2024 assassination of Brian Thompson, United Healthcare CEO. It wasn’t widely condemned by the public, many of whom had sympathies with the killer. In fact it sparked a global conversation about the unethical behaviour of the company and the incentives in health insurance more broadly and arguably had a hand in changing policy in the short term.

whestler 10 Apr 2026 13:00 UTC
3 points
0
on: You don’t know what you are made of till you’ve been stalked across three countries
This was a fun read. I wish I had done something like this around my college years, but I had a scarcity/insecurity mindset at the time and didn’t take risks like that. I lived abroad with my family in childhood and came to view it as a situation where I had no agency and needed to carve out niches of security wherever I could.

whestler 21 Feb 2026 1:37 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Linch’s comment on: whestler’s Shortform
Thank you! Looks like it was only temporarily down…

whestler 19 Feb 2026 11:16 UTC
3 points
0
on: whestler’s Shortform
What happened to the fan fic “already optimised” which was posted yesterday? I was halfway through reading it and decided to save the rest for later. Now that link goes to a 404 page

whestler 13 Feb 2026 16:48 UTC
14 points
2
on: What We Learned from Briefing 140+ Lawmakers on the Threat from AI
It seems to me that you are doing the most important work you could be doing right now.
I am not an expert on AI, and I’m terrible at policy work. What’s the most important thing I can be doing to help?
Background: my MP doesn’t seem to care about messages I send her, sometimes her team doesn’t even send more than an automated response, sometimes they send a message which is understanding but carefully makes no commitments to any actual changes, and might itself be LLM generated or templated.
I occasionally attend a protest but I’m pessimistic about the effectiveness of protests. It feels like people have become desensitised to them. I still go.

whestler 14 Jan 2026 12:22 UTC
4 points
0
on: Can Claude teach me to make coffee?
You asked for predictions at the start, so here was mine:
“I expect it to have some difficulty recognising everything in the pictures, and to miss approximately 1 step in the process (like not actually turning the kettle on). Ultimately I expect it to succeed in a sub-par way. 90% chance.”
It did worse than I predicted.
The image recognition was significantly worse than I imagined, and Claude had to be helped along at most stages of the process. The transcript reads like someone with vision problems trying to guide you. Claude was mostly ok in terms of creating a series of actions to take for the actual act of making coffee, but had a poor sense of where everything was and what everything was. It was trying to delegate the process of finding stuff via commands like “look through the drawers to find x”.
Is it just an image problem? I would have been more impressed if Claude had noticed the fact that it was making mistakes when recognising objects, and changed strategy to ask you to take more photos from more angles. That’s what I would have tried if I were a vision-impaired controller in this scenario. None the less, I would be interested if you coupled claude with an ai model specifically for image recognition, where your process would be to pass the photos to the image recogniser, then take the image description produced and pass that back to claude.

whestler 14 Jan 2026 12:10 UTC
2 points
1
in reply to: Garrett Baker’s comment on: Can Claude teach me to make coffee?
If OP is trying to simulate a capable robot which Claude controls, then I think the benefit of the doubt should be pretty much non-existant. Even asking clarifying questions etc should be out in my opinion.

whestler 11 Dec 2025 17:51 UTC
4 points
0
on: What environmental cues had you not seen them would have ended in disaster?
On the road, what do you see that others miss?
Position on the road and changing speed is a big one that not everyone notices. I have little faith in turn signals, given that people regularly fail to use them, and occasionally you see someone who has left their signal on, but isn’t turning. Usually a driver will slow down a bit to make a turn, and shift their position on the road over slightly, even a very subtle change (4 inches one way or another) quite a long way ahead of the turn. I often notice it subconsciously rather than explicitly.

whestler 19 Sep 2025 15:14 UTC
4 points
0
on: Teaching My Toddler To Read
Your token system (and general approach) sounds a lot like Alpha School—is it influenced by them at all?

whestler 5 Sep 2025 10:28 UTC
11 points
2
on: “I’d accepted losing my husband, until others started getting theirs back”
I found the claim that “Experts gave these methods a 40 percent chance of eventually enabling uploading...” was very surprising as I thought there were still some major issues with the preservation process, so I had a quick look at the study you linked.
From the study:
For questions about the implications of static brain preservation for memory storage, we used aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC) of a laboratory animal as a practical example of a preservation method that is thought to maintain ultrastructure with minimal distortions across the entire brain [24]. Additionally, we asked participants to imagine it was performed under ideal conditions and was technically successful, deliberately discarding the fact that procedural variation or errors in the real world may prevent this ideal from being routinely realised in practice [25]. Rather than focusing on these technical preservation challenges, which we acknowledge are immense, we deliberately asked participants to consider memory extraction under optimal preservation conditions to assess their beliefs about the structural basis of memory storage itself. With this approach, our aim was to specifically target participants’ views on whether static brain structures – i.e., non-dynamic physical aspects of the brain that persist independent of ongoing neural activity – may on their own contain sufficient information for memory retrieval, which is the central theoretical question underlying our study.
I realise this is a work of fiction, but I think it’s important to say that the neuroscientists were asked quite a specific question which assumed that the preservation stage was flawless, and to speculate about potential future successes for working with these perfectly preserved brains for memory retrieval, rather than whole brain emulation/upload.

whestler 18 Aug 2025 16:50 UTC
2 points
0
on: The Bone-Chilling Evil of Factory Farming
The farmkind website you linked to is unable to provide a secure connection and both my browsers refuse to go to it. If you are involved in the setup of the site or know the people who are, it’s worth trying to fix that.

whestler 7 Jul 2025 16:02 UTC
2 points
0
on: “Buckle up bucko, this ain’t over till it’s over.”
I’ve been thinking about this mental shift recently using toy example - a puzzle game I enjoy. The puzzle game is similar to soduku, but involves a bit of simple mental math. The goal is to find all the numbers in the shortest time. Sometimes (rarely) I’m able to use just my quickest 2-3 methods for finding numbers and not have to use my slower, more mentally intensive methods. There’s usually a moment in every game when I’ve probably found the low hanging fruit but I’m tempted to re-check to see if any of my quick methods can score me any more numbers, and I have to tell myself “Ok, I have to try something harder and slower now”. It’s been interesting to notice when the optimal time to do this is. Certainly there have been games where I’ve spent far too long procrastinating the harder methods by checking and re-checking if any of the easier methods will work in a particular situation, and I end up with a poor time because it took me too long to switch.
I’ve also noticed this is a pattern when I’m looking for a lost item—it’s easy to get stuck in a loop of checking and re-checking the same few locations where you initially guessed it might be. At some point, you need to start tidying up and thoroughly checking each location, and then the surrounding locations, even places where you think it’s very unlikely to be. I see a lot of people (maybe even most people) follow this pattern, contining to check the same 3 locations far beyond the point where it would be sensible to begin checking other locations, getting frustrated that it’s not in one of the places it “should” be.
One thing I’d like to say is that it’s not just that for some tasks “buckling down” is the correct approach, it’s more about noticing when the correct time is switch from the low-effort quick approach to a high-effort slow approach. Most of the time it IS in one of the 3 locations you initially thought of. If you briefly checked them, it may genuinely be worth checking them again. But it’s also important to calibrate the point at which you switch to a slower approach. For finding lost items, this point is probably the point where you find yourself considering checking the same location for the third time.

whestler

On the road, what do you see that others miss?