JhanicManifold
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User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Evolution is not an algorithm at all. It's the term we use to refer to the cumulative track record of survivor bias in populations of semi-deterministic replicators.
This is just semantics, but I disagree with this, if you have a dynamical system that you're observing with a one-dimensional state x_t, and a state transition rule x_{t+1} = x_t - 0.1 * (2x_t) , you can either just look at the given dynamics and see no explicit optimisation being done at all, or you can notice that this system is equivalent to gradient descent with lr=0.1 on the function f(x)=x^2 . You might say that "GD is just a reification of the dynamics observed in the system", but the two ways of looking at the system are completely equivalent.
a transformer is wholly shaped by the pressure of the objective function, in a way that a flexible intelligent agent generated by an evolutionary algorithm is not shaped by IGF (to say nothing of real biological entities). The correct analogies are something like SGD:lifetime animal learning; and evolution:R&D in ML
Okay, point 2 did change my mind a lot, I'm not too sure how I missed that the first time. I still think there might be a possibly-tiny difference between outer-objective and inner-objective for LLMs, but the magnitude of that difference won't be anywhere close to the difference between human goals and IGF. If anything, it's really remarkable that evolution managed to imbue some humans with desires this close to explicitly maximising IGF, and if IGF was being optimised with GD over the individual synapses of a human, of course we'd have explicit goals for IGF.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Do you think the COVID vaccine will literally take 5 years off most people's lives? There have been semaglutide studies going up to like 24 months without adverse effects for weight loss, and weaker stuff in the same GLP-1 class like liraglutide has been used for years. We might find negative effects later on, but In general, stuff that doesn't have massive negative effects in the medium term won't suddenly get massive negative effects in the long term.
And regardless of this, if any negative effects happen in 30 years, I fully expect future AI medicine to make them completely trivial.
Semaglutide works really, really fucking well.
JhanicManifold
7mo ago
I'd say it's for the same reason that I "support" north korean refugees not being sex slaves in China. Or I support african children not getting malaria. In fact essentially no world affair news truly ever relates to me directly, not even news in my own country. Having opinions on global news is something on the level of a hobby, it serves to be more interesting in conversation.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
on this site, in the top right you see a "contact supplier" section, and in the top right of that, there's a little button with a "business card" hover-on text, if you click on that and enter you email, it'll send you a whatsapp contact number, and then you can ask for semaglutide, payment is a bit of a hassle, and is done through wise, or moneygram, or westernunion (or some other international money transfer site). I can confirm that you do indeed receive some powder which has the effects I'd expect of semaglutide when injected.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
This probably has to do with sleep quality, the 4 main things that I've noticed make a noticeable difference for me are
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stopping caffeine
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magnesium supplements before sleep
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Some form of bed cooling system (I use the bedjet 3). If you're hot or sweating or cold while you sleep, this will make a massive difference
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A weird vibrating ankle bracelet called the Apollo Neuro that works kind of by magic (see this)
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
For machine learning in particular and scientific computing more generally, you have the following extremely useful libraries, all in python, because that's the most common language here:
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Numpy, short for Numerical Python. This is a very deep library that does everything from numerical derivatives, integrals, matrix multiplication, everything in linear algebra, sorting arrays of numbers, and even simple linear regression. The main workhorse here is the "ndarray" datatype that numpy defines, which allows you to create an object which stores a multi-dimensional array of numbers very efficiently.
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Scipy, short for Scientific Python. This is an extension of numpy, which includes optimisation routines, solving differential equations, algebraic equations, etc. Less overwhelmingly used than numpy, but still very common
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Scikit-learn. This is the library to use if you want off-the-shelf classical machine learning algorithms, so anything outside of deep-learning stuff. Decision trees, linear/logistic regression, clustering, nearest neighbors, or whatever, this does basically all of it.
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matplotlib. This is the most common visualisation library to make graphs or charts. Endlessly customizable, and hence kind of a pain to use, but it's the most common and very useful.
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Pytorch. Now we're getting into deep learning and GPU computing. Pytorch essentially does much of the same job as Numpy, but it also automatically interfaces with your GPU, so that all your matrix multiplies are run much, much faster. This is the library you use to define your deep learning models, and the one you use to write your training code.
And so on and so on. There are other libraries like Pandas for data analysis, and all the huggingface libraries for deep learning, which get you even more abstraction, so that you can use transformers without even knowing. I don't think there is any more pleasant way of getting to know these libraries than reading a few textbooks and then inevitably drudging through their documentations when the need arises.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
I am "out of the hole" in the sense that once you've lost all the weight, you can start eating at maintenance again, which is much easier than eating at a deep deficit. So pre-semaglutide my daily maintenance calories might have been like 3500, and I was eating at like 3600, very slowly gaining weight. During semaglutide I'm eating 2300, which is a very deep deficit, made much easier due to the appetite reduction. After semaglutide, my reduced body weight will push my maintenance calories at around 3000, which will be much easier to maintain, either with discipline or with low-dose semaglutide. I think that the state of being obese does some kind of permanent damage to appetite regulation, so that anyone who has ever been significantly overweight will basically need to be on some sort of permanent diet for the rest of their lives, and there's no scenario in which they eat "naturally" and don't gain all the weight back.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
Great point about the relationship to SMV increase possibility, really obvious in retrospect. Though I didn't mean to suggest that the women's myth was stupid, just that I didn't resonate with it the way that women don't resonate with what I like.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
Dharma
Wow, super interesting to see how the Hindu use of the word seems to differs from the use of the word in western meditation circles, which might be more like "Ultimate Truth", or "Behaviors in harmony with the Ultimate Truth", where Ultimate Truth is understood to be the truth of No-Self, achieved by enlightened beings. So there "Dharma" means something like "the set of knowledge and behaviors that lead to Enlightenment, as well as the knowledge gained from Enlightenment"
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
The monthly price of not being morbidly obese seems that it will come to about 500$/month
Much less if you're willing to buy from chinese sources, who sell it for around 7$/mg, which comes out to like 60$/month for the typical high dose of 2mg/week.
Ah, in my case it was extreme fat loss, yeah, I didn't really gain muscle, just revealed what was there. People who haven't seen me in a while tell me I got jacked out of a misunderstanding of where muscle comes from.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
I'm not sure what you mean by that, does Emily Ratajkowski's SMV really depend on her parents and social status? I guess maybe I'd find her a bit less attractive if I knew she had a deep Appalachian accent or something, but I truly don't give a single fuck about her social status, she could be an outcast with no friends for all I care, and it wouldn't matter a bit.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I've had the same "I can do it myself" mentality for years, and I did have intermittent successes before starting semaglutide. I can stick to a diet perfectly for roughly a month at a time and lose 10 lbs, the problem always comes when life gets stressful and suddenly my mental energy assigned to the diet starts to decline, if It's crunch time and I have an important presentation tomorrow, I can't also be really fucking hungry because I'm in a 1000cal/day deficit, I'll just throw the diet out the window for the stressful time period.
Semaglutide takes care of all that, and I don't need to have zero stress in order for me to stick to the diet, that now happens more or less effortlessly. I still need to have enough mental space to prep my diet foods at regular intervals so I don't eat out instead of eating my home-cooked stuff, but that's a much lower bar than tolerating hunger.
arccos is gonna give you too sharp a result near the equator (i.e. predict that the last few degrees as you get closer matter the most). What you want is just cos(latitude/90 * pi/2).
edit: the way you visualise this is by holding a square piece of paper in front of you, and tilting it until you're looking at it edge-wise. The "visual area" of the piece of paper in your field-of-view is what will give you the proportionality factor.
JhanicManifold
7mo ago
Doesn't Hamas put bases under hospitals specifically because of this? The two options are either to never bomb hospitals and hence to accept Hamas as the leader in-perpetuity of the region, or to give every available warning to the population to evacuate and then bomb the terrorist base...
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
look on the bright side, she's gonna go through the same thing when you ignore her in a year after you've gotten jacked as fuck from the motivation this rejection brought you. (speaking from personal experience)
JhanicManifold
5mo ago
defeat Where I Really Tried
I think this is the crux of it, I notice the same aversion to Really Trying in myself. If you win without really trying, then it doesn't feel good because that means that your achievement was well below your means, you might as well feel good about putting on your socks in the morning. And if you lose without really trying, it doesn't feel that bad because you can still imagine yourself winning if you really tried.
This is all an ego-protection mechanism. If you're like me, then you started conceptualizing yourself as "smart" somewhere in adolescence, and from that moment on you started trying to avoid any experience that would imply not being worthy of that label. I think the key to enjoying competition is letting go of this fixed mindset that thinks every True Loss is evidence that you permanently suck, instead of just being evidence that you temporarily suck.
As for actual practical advice, I think it's hard to practice Really Trying on the big, long-term stuff. You need a hobby you care about with a really short time-to-feedback. I started Jiu-Jitsu a few months ago, and I think it's perfect for this. The prospect of actually getting chocked out in a match of physical dominance against another man really brings out the competitive part of me, in a way that no other sport I've ever tried managed to do. Though as a woman Jiu-Jitsu might not be ideal for this unless you find a gym with a decent number of other women, against whom you actually have a chance of winning.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
My god, can you imagine the drama inside that tiny ship over the past days? I think I'd bet at 90% that the CEO is already long dead, killed by the 4 others in order to save oxygen. Two of the people are a father-son duo, and in a power struggle they might have killed the others too, knowing that they can only trust family. I really hope they find that thing so we get to know what actually happened.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
It's not clear to me either, and it wouldn't be clear to the occupants too, but life and death situations don't tend to make you more reasonable and level-headed, killing the CEO is the "we must do something, and this is something" option here.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
The Manhattan Project scenes are pretty good, the best part is seeing all the characters from your college physics textbook show up for their contractually mandated appearance
I wanted so much more of that. I honestly couldn't give less of a shit about Oppenheimer's communist orientation, I wanted an actual history of the manhattan project, and I wanted all my childhood physics heroes to actually be portrayed in the film, but all I got was some guy putting marbles in a jar as a metaphor for the enrichment process. I went to see it with my mom who had no background physics knowledge, and she was left hopelessly confused about almost everything (which I guess is normal for a Nolan film). We left an hour before the end.
JhanicManifold
6mo ago
Doing tren just for the hell of it would be profoundly stupid, it would shut off your own test production, make you (even more?) depressed, possibly turn you gay, irritable, frustrated for no reasons whatsoever, possibly give you life-altering acne, hair loss, increased fluid retention in the face, and then of course there is the systemic organ damage that it would cause. Literally the only positive effect would be that you'd have increased muscle growth, but from what I've gathered of your comments you haven't exactly optimised protein intake, sleep and workouts, so you have plenty of low-hanging gains to be had.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
This would heavily penalize the True Nerds, the sort who win math Olympiads, build particle accelerators in garages and hack the NSA at 15. By and large these nerds don't give a flying fuck about writing ability when they're that young (I know I certainly didn't), they don't even really try to play the game of maximizing admissions probability by volunteering or something, their life is entirely consumed by their passion and they just kind of hope that colleges will make a place for them. So under your system geniuses would no longer go to Harvard.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Eh, I just don't read the threads that don't interest me or where I can easily predict the responses. I've had periods without reading the motte, but then a world event would happen, and again and again TheMotte was the only place I could find to discuss it in an intelligent manner.
We've become like Harvard, almost none of the value is in the content provided, it's rather in the pre-selection mechanism for who ends up here.
JhanicManifold
7mo ago
Money won't solve this. The EU tried building water pipes in Gaza and the pipes just ended up being repurposed as homemade missiles. You can't solve this by sending money to someone who cares more about killing you than they care about making a good life for themselves.
"You will not be punished for your sins, you will be punished by them"
Conversely, a good deed is its own reward, and a good conscience can really bring a lot of pleasure intrinsic to it.
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