JhanicManifold
No bio...
User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
8mo ago
For regular consumption, creatine is the king, there's no other supplement with as clear and massive of a benefit, it makes you stronger, helps cognition and 30 years of intense research hasn't found a single negative effect (maybe apart from slight intestinal distress in some people).
I also use phenibut and modafinil on special occasions. Phenibut is amazing at lowering social anxiety in particular while leaving your reasoning capacities essentially untouched, and modafinil is good at boosting concentration and making you stay awake. You shouldn't take these daily, phenibut in particular will fuck up your life if you take large doses daily, the best is to use it for occasional job interviews or presentations, for which it works amazingly well.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
Hmm, I would say that if the secret is like "AI will kill everyone and there's nothing you can do to stop it", don't tell her. If the secret is like "your father was a murderer" or "you have terminal cancer", then do tell her, because it's "her business" in some sense. Another factor is how much knowing the secret will eat at you over time, if the person is a close friend of yours, keeping this secret forever will be a great burden and you should tell them, if it's just an acquaintance, then not so much.
If you think you're good at acting and deception, you could even indirectly ask for their opinion on the matter, all you have to do is invent a new secret with all the relevant characteristic about some distant friend, then ask them whether you should tell your distant friend.
JhanicManifold
10mo ago
Hmm, basically all the libraries I listed except maybe for pytorch haven't changed all that much since 2021, gpt-4 should really still be very useful with all of them. What it will have trouble with is a library like "Transformer" by huggingface, which lets you automatically download and use pretrained deep learning models. But to even use a super-high-abstraction library like that one you still need a bunch of "glue skills" like knowing how to load a .png image from your computer into a format that the high-level functions can understand, and how to interpret and visualise the output of those high-level functions. GPT-4 would be amazing for all of that.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Bob Lazar is a lying hack, but that particular point of his is true, it's just that in that case, there's no downside to revealing the secret. Other countries won't do much better at deciphering the hidden tech, so we might as well use the US's dominance in science to make as much progress as possible with this.
JhanicManifold
9mo ago
So, I went to see Barbie despite knowing that I would hate it, my mom really wanted to go see it and she feels weird going to the theatre alone, so I went with her. I did, in fact, hate it. It's a film full of politics and eyeroll moments, Ben Shapiro's review of it is essentially right. Yet, I did get something out of it, it showed me the difference between the archetypal story that appeals to males and the female equivalent, and how much just hitting that archetypal story is enough to make a movie enjoyable for either men or women.
The plot of the basic male story is "Man is weak. Man works hard with clear goal. Man becomes strong". I think men feel this basic archetypal story much more strongly than women, so that even an otherwise horrible story can be entertaining if it hits that particular chord well enough, if the man is weak enough at the beginning, or the work especially hard. I'm not exactly clear what the equivalent story is for women, but it's something like "Woman thinks she's not good enough, but she needs to realise that she is already perfect". And the Barbie movie really hits on that note, which is why I think women (including my mom) seemed to enjoy it.
You can really see the mutual blindness men and women have with respect to each other in this domain. Throughout the movie, Ken is basically subservient to Barbie, defining himself only in the relation to her, and the big emotional payoff at the end is supposed to be that Ken "finds himself", saying "I am Ken!". But this whole "finding yourself" business is a fundamentally feminine instinct, the male instinct is to decide who you want to be and then work hard towards that, building yourself up. The movie's female authors and director are completely blind to this difference, and essentially write every character with female motivations.
JhanicManifold
2mo ago
For maximum attractiveness to women, being lean (say 10~12% body fat) at something like 21 to 22 ffmi is probably the optimum, see this calculator to play around with your own stats. Regarding specific muscles, side delts are #1, then chest, back, and arms. Girls don't care about legs as long as they're not ridiculously out of proportion with the rest of your body. Glutes are also important for the overall silhouette from the back.
See this video for discussions about the optimal muscle level for attractiveness.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
9mo ago
I genuinely cannot imagine preferring a lifetime of pill popping to just riding a bike.
As someone currently using semaglutide, and having lost 40 lbs with it after around 10 years of trying to lose the weight, you are severely underestimating the variance in the willpower required for people to lose weight. Of-fucking-course the healthiest choice is to never have been fat in the first place, just like it's better to never start smoking cigarettes, but once you're addicted and fat, it makes no sense at all to insist on trying (and failing) to do it without help. Semaglutide helps you make better choices and dig yourself out of the hole, sure, it might not be healthy by itself (just like nicotine patches), but it sure as shit is healthier than having a 45lb plate strapped to your back all the time.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I have to say that I really, really want all this UFO stuff to be true, mostly because this implies that there's an "adult in the neighborhood" who won't let a super-intelligence be created, it would imply that we'd have to share the cosmic endowment with aliens, but I'll take the certainty of getting a thousand bucks over the impossibility a billion.
However, If the US has had alien technology for decades and kept it a secret, this implies that the US has essentially sacrificed unbelievable amounts of economic and technological growth for the sake of... what, exactly? Preventing itself from having asymmetric warfare capabilities?! Isn't asymmetric warfare the entire goal of the US military? The rationale for maintaining this unbelievable level of secrecy for 8 decades, through democrat and republican presidents, through wars and economic crises, just doesn't seem that strong to me.
So therefore, barring actual physical evidence, it seems that the US intelligence apparatus is trying to make us believe that alien tech exists, and I have no clue why. This is obviously a fairly complicated operation given all the high-level people who keep coming forward, but I can't see what is to be gained here. So overall, my impression at the whole UFO phenomenon is massive confusion, I can't come up with a single coherent model of the world which makes sense of everything I'm seeing.
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
"Any man who must say, 'I am the king' is no true king"
There is no way to not appear weak when complaining that the mother of your child went clubbing with Usher, the war was already lost when that dude decided to make someone like Keke the mother of his child. This sort of thing can only be enforced through the cultivation of respect, never becoming explicit, otherwise it's like your boss explicitly demanding you call him "sir", or a PhD reminding you to call him "doctor". Just unbelievably cringy and weak. Your gf/wife is just supposed to know, without you telling her, that sending nude photos to other dudes is a big no-no. If she doesn't understand that automatically, there's no fixing her without sacrificing significant amounts of your own authority and generally ruining the relationship.
It's a close cousin to benzodiazepines (though much easier to acquire), so the withdrawal symptoms are massive as fuck, there's a reddit community dedicated to people who've fucked up their lives taking phenibut everyday, though I can't seem to find it right now. I also notice increased anxiety on the day after I take a dose. It works very well for my use case, but I periodically remember not to treat it lightly.
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