JhanicManifold
No bio...
User ID: 135
I'm continuing to lose weight from semaglutide (down 25lbs so far in about 3 months), these past few weeks at a rate of 2lbs/week. I'm also working out 6 times a week doing high-volume bodybuilding style training in order to preserve every shred of muscle I've built over the past 10 years of intermittently working out, and of course eating very high amounts of protein.
I'm still roughly 22 or 23 percent body fat, so not shredded by any means, but beneath the fat I have about 165lbs of lean body mass at a height of 5'9.5, and the large body frame that caused me so much anguish as a teenager is starting to play in my favour because it turns out that my shoulders are wide as fuck (21inches across from shoulder to shoulder measured on a wall, and 53inch shoulders circumference, and it turns out that girls like wide shoulders the way guys like tits?) ... so the overall figure is starting to come together, and the face has slimmed down too. Overall I look ok and muscular in clothes, but kind of unimpressive naked.
I have noticed... changes... to the way I'm perceived socially. Lots of furtive glances when I pass by (and some direct staring), lots of girls staring at my chest when I talk to them, a lot more inexplicable hair-playing and lip-licking, groups of high-school girls giggling when I pass by (which caused me a fucking spike of anxiety when it first happened, high-school-girl-giggling was not associated with anything good the last time it happened to me). I notice that people seemingly want to integrate me into conversations significantly more than before, I've noticed a subtle shift in energy when there's a casual group discussion.
It's also kind of fun to see new people I meet kind of be perplexed after talking to me for the first time. Bear in mind that my fundamental personality is that of a physics nerd (though now I do machine learning), that was the archetype that crystallised inside me during my adolescence, and getting muscles and a bit leaner has done nothing to that aspect of me. But this means that people kind of get visibly perplexed when I ask good questions during ML poster sessions, and when I don't fit their idea of a dumb muscle-bound jock. So far this has mostly amused me, we'll see how It'll get as I get even leaner.
As I get leaner the changes accelerate, every 5lbs decrease has produced more changes of this sort than the last. Overall this has been a strangely emotional experience, I'm basically in the process of fulfilling the dream of my 14-year-old self, and I don't really see any obstacle that could prevent me from getting to 12% body fat in a few more months.
I'll write a much longer top-level post with pictures and everything once this is all over.
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.
There are a few ways that GPT-6 or 7 could end humanity, the easiest of which is by massively accelerating progress in more agentic forms of AI like Reinforcement Learning, which has the "King Midas" problem of value alignment. See this comment of mine for a semi-technical argument for why a very powerful AI based on "agentic" methods would be incredibly dangerous.
Of course the actual mechanism for killing all humanity is probably like a super-virus with an incredibly long incubation period, high infectivity and high death rate. You can produce such a virus with literally only an internet connection by sending the proper DNA sequence to a Protein Synthesis lab, then having it shipped to some guy you pay/manipulate on the darknet and have him mix the powders he receives in the mail in some water, kickstarting the whole epidemic, or pretend to be an attractive woman (with deepfakes and voice synthesis) and just have that done for free.
GPT-6 itself might be very dangerous on its own, given that we don't actually know what goals are instantiated inside the agent. It's trained to predict the next word in the same way that humans are "trained" by evolution to replicate their genes, the end result of which is that we care about sex and our kids, but we don't actually literally care about maximally replicating our genes, otherwise sperm banks would be a lot more popular. The worry is that GPT-6 will not actually have the exact goal of predicting the next word, but like a funhouse-mirror version of that, which might be very dangerous if it gets to very high capability.
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
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
11mo ago
Ross comes close to understanding what the real risks are in his top-right "unforeseen consequences" node, but then he somehow links that with free will and consciousness, which is just a moronic misunderstanding of the AI-risk position. Unfortunately he doesn't seem to have found a convincing argument against AI doom.
JhanicManifold
10mo 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
11mo ago
I've got to look like I could compete in physique bodybuilding competitions, be impeccably dressed, and be extremely kind AND make...hmm...maybe a million a year?
Bro, that's not top 10%... that's top 1 in 10^4 or 10^5, how many kind millionaire bodybuilders do you see walking around in daily life? top-10-percent isn't that hard to do...
JhanicManifold
7mo 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.
What GPT does is predict the next token. That's a simple statement with a great deal of complexity underlying it.
At least, that's the Outer Objective, it's the equivalent of saying that humans are maximising inclusive-genetic-fitness, which is false if you look at the inner planning process of most humans. And just like evolution has endowed us with motivations and goals which get close enough at maximising its objective in the ancestral environment, so is GPT-4 endowed with unknown goals and cognition which are pretty good at maximising the log probability it assigns to the next word, but not perfect.
GPT-4 is almost certainly not doing reasoning like "What is the most likely next word among the documents on the internet pre-2021 that the filtering process of the OpenAI team would have included in my dataset?", it probably has a bunch of heuristic "goals" that get close enough to maximising the objective, just like humans have heuristic goals like sex, power, social status that get close enough for the ancestral environment, but no explicit planning for lots of kids, and certainly no explicit planning for paying protein-synthesis labs to produce their DNA by the buckets.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Okay... Today on the subway a ridiculously attractive girl literally started blushing when our eyes met, like, her cheeks and nose became very visibly red, and she wasn't wearing blush make-up, this also happened a few times over the past few weeks. Is that a muscles-dependent effect, or a "you're handsome" effect?
JhanicManifold
7mo 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
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
9mo 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
9mo 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.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Hmm, somehow I doubt that. It's not like all schoolgirls I pass by giggle, but it's happened like 3 times over the past month (I probably pass by more schoolgirls than you because I take the subway). But then I'm curious, what things did you notice in your case?
JhanicManifold
9mo 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
This part never usually pans out lol.
Oh it did for me, I still remember her reaction when she saw me for the first time in like 6 months: * looks at me, does a double take, eyes widen, face becomes fully red, furtive looks the whole evening *. I actually feel a little bit guilty about just how good revenge feels.
JhanicManifold
8mo 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
9mo 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
9mo 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
11mo ago
I'd be super happy to be convinced of the contrary! (Given that the existence of mesa-optimisers are a big reason for my fears of existential risk) But do you mean to imply that gpt-4 is explicitly optimising for next-word prediction internally? And what about a gpt-4 variant that was only trained for 20% of the time that the real gpt-4 was? To the degree that LLMs have anything like "internal goals", they should change over the course of training, and no LLM is trained anywhere close to completion, so I find it hard to believe that the outer objective is being faithfully transfered.
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.
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.
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