JhanicManifold
No bio...
User ID: 135
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
** per kg of lean body mass, so at 20% body fat this would be around 1.92g/kg, which is a bit closer to the 1.8g/kg number
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
11mo ago
Why do you think that? This combination of features would be selected against in evolutionary terms, so it's not like we evidence from either evolution or humans attempting to make such a virus, and failing at it. As far as I can see no optimization process has ever attempted to make such a virus.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Well, in some sense, there's already so incredibly much fiction out there that it doesn't make too much sense to try to reinvent something for film. You have an entire industry preselecting the stories that appeal to people, why would you not use that?
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
11mo ago
Yeah, the only thing that's preventing me from getting laid a lot right now is my own internal sense of perfectionism and fairly high standards (both for myself and the girl).
There's also a strange sort of muted anger towards women that I have to work through. I don't feel like I've changed internally at all, I'm the absolute exact same person as I was 40lbs ago (I lost 15lbs before starting semaglutide), and it feels like losing the fat shouldn't make such a big difference in a fair world. Of course this is naive of me, and I'd absolutely treat an obese girl differently from a slim one, but the black pill is still hard to swallow...
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
11mo ago
Yeah cutting cycles and bulking cycles are different, but your training in the gym shouldn't differ too much between them. The things you do in the gym to gain muscle during a bulk are the things you need to do to maintain muscle during a cut. What I do is a 6 weeks training -> 1 week deload cycle. So for 6 weeks I eat in a hypocaloric diet, and add weekly sets to all my muscle groups over those 6 weeks, then I take a week completely off from training to recover, during which I eat at maintenance, then repeat the cycle.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Yeah semaglutide is making literally all the difference for me, but only through the "I'm much less hungry" pathway, I don't think it has some special fat-burning ability outside of its appetite suppression, so if that hasn't historically been a problem for you, then semaglutide probably won't help.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
It really took me like 6 weeks to see the full effects. These have half-lives of about a week, which means that the concentration in your blood after a few weeks of taking it is actually twice as high as it was the first week. The initial weeks were also spent slowly escalating the dose to make sure I minimised side-effects. I'm taking 1.0mg/week of semaglutide spread into 2 injections each week, at this dose my appetite is very clearly suppressed, and I could already feel effects when my dosing was 0.6mg/week.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
It's kind of both, smaller meals fill me up more than before, before semaglutide I'd still kind of be hungry after eating a full 12'' subway sandwich, now eating like 650 calories makes me satiated and good to go for the next 6 or 7 hours. It also calms late night cravings (which were my main weakness), so I don't go to sleep hungry if I eat in a calorie deficit. There's also massively less desire to buy sweets at the weekly grocery run. But hunger signalling still works: I still get hungry before a meal, it's just a lower level than before.
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
11mo ago
I just make sure to always buy loads of pairs of identical socks, and I replace them all at the same time, so I don't have to worry about that shit.
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
11mo ago
Unfortunately if you want that level of detail probably nothing beats just using google sheets. That's what I do for tracking weight, daily calories, measurements, etc.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I haven't had much luck at making gpt-4 come up with genuinely novel ideas for the fields I'm interesting in (Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning), the most it can do is serve as a sort of litterature review, where I describe an idea I have, ask it if it exists, and if it does to link me the papers. Sometimes it hallucinates papers that don't exist in this way because it thinks that generating positive answers is more useful than negative ones, but I've gotten real value out of this procedure a few times, where it spit out fairly obscure results that I would've never found on my own.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
I'm barely half into the first chapter, but man, I already fucking love this! I can sense that this story is going to scratch an ungodly number of literary itches for me...
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
aah I don't know, I've had a few obscure papers from 2013 and 2014 come up that basically implemented aspects of a few of my projects. And at one point it pointed out that what I thought was a shiny new idea was in fact called "Optimal Importance Sampling", and linked me a paper from 1991 that explained it. So it's still pretty useful unless you're doing stuff that is basically the next obvious thing to try conditional on current research, and as such are worried about people scooping you.
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
11mo ago
Here's gpt-4's answer, which isn't bad all things considered, not especially out-of-the-box necessarily, but it seems fairly competent to me. Though of course the implementation details are where the real problem lies.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Nah his current risk model is more like "AI discovers fundamental new principles of science, and exploits phenomena we don't know about to kill everyone", that's what the "send an air-conditioner blueprint to the past" example he keeps talking about is meant to illustrate. The nanotech/biotech distinction doesn't seem especially sharp or important to me, it's just different ways of getting at fine-grained control of very small things.
And in the typical FOOM scenario (which is admittedly probably unlikely), you might get an AI that can do like 100 years of intellectual work of an entire civilization made of Geniuses every single second, at which point it seems like it could solve nanotech trivially.
JhanicManifold
11mo ago
Eh, looks fine to me, I don't see the exterior of my house that often, and especially not from a drone's point of view, if building it that way made the interior more suited to my needs by a small margin, the tradeoff would've been worth it.
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
11mo ago
I mean, if you want large costs for the same benefits, there are plenty of effective weight loss drugs with a shit ton of unhealthy side effects, DNP and trenbolone will make you lose weight, they just might also kill you lol, their side effects are not subtle at all. Free lunches are rare in the world, but there's certainly lunches that are more expensive than others.
The recommended RDA is way, way too low if you want to maximise muscle gain and minimise muscle loss on a calorie deficit, same for the 1.6g/kg for athletes. The real number is more like 2.4g/kg of lean body mass. It's true that protein "completeness" is not that big of a deal, since it's pretty easy to get all amino acids with a few different vegetables. What is, however, hard to do on a vegan diet is eat a high-protein, low-calorie diet, which is what you'd want to be able to do if you're planning on losing weight and either maintaining or building muscle at the same time. All vegan foods that contain protein either contain even more fat, or even more carbs. You can get your protein needs from vegan stuff, but you'll need to eat a shit ton of calories to do so. On the other hand, my 2300 cal/day non-vegan diet gives me 190g of protein without that much effort.
More options
Context Copy link