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1yr ago
I say okay, and ask how I am supposed to close the account and transfer the remaining balance. He said I can close the account and withdraw the remaining balance only in cash. Cash? At this point, I literally asked: "like, green paper money cash?" He says yes. The balance in the account is somewhere around $1M.
[...]
This manager is very helpful, if not a bit gruff. He explains to me that each local branch has some sort of performance metric based on inflows and outflows at the given branch. Therefore, funding a $1M cash withdrawal was not attractive to them. I'm learning a lot in a really condensed period of time at this point. I don't even know if what he's telling me is true, or legal, all I hear is "this is going to be hard to do if you want it all at once."
But we do want it all at once. And we want to close the account. Now. He is not happy, but he says he'll call me back in 24 to 48 hours. True to his word, he calls me back the next day. He says that he had to coordinate to ensure his branch had the proper funding to satisfy this transaction, and that the funding would be available at a specific date a few days hence. He said I have to do the withdrawal that day because his branch will not hold that amount in cash for any longer.
He also subtly suggested I hire personal security or otherwise deposit those funds somewhere with haste. I believe his exact words were "if you lose that check, I can't help you." Again, this was a one time event, and I don't know how true that all is, but it was said to me.
A few days later, I walk into the branch (I did not hire personal security). I tell the teller my name and there is a flicker of immediate recognition. The teller guides me to a cubicle, the account is successfully closed, I'm issued a $1M cashier's check, and I walk out the door.
https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-startup-banking-story - Interesting story about a startup founder's interaction with the world of banking.
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1yr ago
This is commonly used technology IMO - the same thing as the Pledge of Allegiance, or daily prayers. Many cultures have regular rituals designed to align the individual's psychology towards the group's values. There's no reason why this couldn't work to align the individual to their own values.
My gut feeling is that using "I am ..." statements would work better than just reciting the factual benefits of exercise. E.g. "Exercising is a priority of mine. I enjoy exercise. I am someone who exercises regularly. I am often in the mood to exercise, and even if I'm not, I will do so anyway." and so on. These target your identity, how you think of yourself, so are more likely influence your actions (e.g. I think you want to compile a list of the scientific benefits because you have as part of your identity "I am someone who updates their behaviour based on scientific evidence").
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1yr ago
Marginal revolution have free online courses, but I haven't taken them and can't vouch for them
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1yr ago
Not sure what you mean but tech companies have all got their own in-house GPT-3 equivalents.
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6mo ago
This is just normie thinking. Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, moving the goal posts, generally incoherent. The "reasoning" is a veneer. The conclusions are foregone. Analysis or steelmaning of the object-level is not worthwhile.
MR X: The trouble with Jews is that they only take care of their own group.
MR Y: But the record of the community chest shows that they give more generously than non-Jews.
MR X: That shows that they are always trying to buy favour and intrude in Christian affairs. They think of nothing but money; that’s why there are so many Jewish bankers.
MR Y: But a recent study shows that the per cent of Jews in banking is proportionally much smaller than the per cent of non-Jews.
MR X: That’s it. They don’t go for respectable businesses. They would rather run nightclubs.
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1yr ago
A few months ago OpenAI dropped their API price, from $0.06/1000 tokens for their best model, to $0.02/1000 tokens. This week, the company released their ChatGPT API which uses their "gpt-3.5-turbo" model, apparently the best one yet, for the price of $0.002/1000 tokens. Yes, an order of magnitude cheaper. I don't quite understand the pricing, and OpenAI themselves say: "Because gpt-3.5-turbo performs at a similar capability to text-davinci-003 but at 10% the price per token, we recommend gpt-3.5-turbo for most use cases." In less than a year, the OpenAI models have not only improved, but become 30 times cheaper. What does this mean?
A human thinks at roughly 800 words per minute. We could debate this all day, but it won’t really effect the math. A word is about 1.33 tokens. This means that a human, working diligently 40 hour weeks for a year, fully engaged, could produce about: 52 * 40 * 60 * 800 * 1.33 = 132 million tokens per year of thought. This would cost $264 out of ChatGPT.
https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/11fn0td/the_implications_of_chatgpts_api_cost/
...or about $0.13 per hour. Yes technically it overlooks the fact that OpenAI charge for both input and output tokens, but this is still cheap and the line is trending downwards.
Full time minimum wage is ~$20k/year. GPT-3.5-turbo is 100x cheaper and vastly outperforms the average minimum wage worker at certain tasks. I dunno, this just feels crazy. And no, I wont apologize for AI posting. It is simply the most interesting thing happening right now.
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6mo ago
Usually parents have autonomy over their children's treatment. If doctors believe that the parents are acting massively against their child's best interest, then they'll take it to the courts. This is because under law the doctors have a duty of care for the child, otherwise the doctors would be deemed negligent. So here it is a case of doctors vs parents.
In these case, the court will act in the child's best interest. So here, you might think paradoxically, the best interest is to withdraw care and allow the child to die. Modern medical technology can prolong death and make it a long and painful process. See Scott's blog for more on this.
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3mo ago
Yeah, I learned to code.
Why do to want to switch careers? What's the issue with your current one? It is important to understand yourself. I found working a simple service sector job far more tiring than programming, because it takes me a lot of energy to talk to normies all day. I didn't understand this about myself for a while, but it would have helped when choosing a career.
I don't trust any "career councilor" type person. The best way to learn about a career is to talk to someone who does it. In retrospect, I should have gone to meetups much earlier to get to know people and the industry. I would suggest doing that for careers you are interested in.
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4mo ago
I omitted my priorities for last year for brevity, but 2023 was a success. I think we are getting hung up on the term "new years resolution". For me, it is not some frivolous goal picked out of a hat that I don't really care about.
Your entire life is psychological framing and you shouldn't underrate it.
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6mo ago
There were a couple posts on Lesswrong about "optimal exercise" that you might like. This update, and the original one it links to.
WRT resistance training, I don't pursue any of the powerlifts (squat, bench, deadlift) anymore, instead focusing on other exercises that don't load the spine/knees as much but allow you to load the requisite musculature easily. Weighted step ups instead of squats can be loaded quite heavy. Hyperextensions, one-legged hypers, and reverse hyperextensions can work the posterior chain with 1/2-1/3 the load on the spine as deadlifts. Bench doesn't exactly load the spine but it is the most dangerous lift going by statistics (dropping the weight on yourself is the most common severe gym accident) and can be replaced with incline bench, dumbbell shoulder presses, and/or dips. These exercises are substantially easier to cue people on in a single session.
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6mo ago
Try https://maroofy.com/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34635352)
Also spotify is tremendous value
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7mo ago
- Extroversion: 24
- Emotional stability: 98
- Agreeableness: 45
- Conscientiousness: 89
- Intellect/Imagination: 52
I'm surprised others here have low conscientiousness. You guys may be underrating yourself, or I may be overrating. My extroversion and agreeableness are as I expected. Emotional stability is higher than I thought, but I have been described as calm and unreactive by others. I would expect my openness to be 90th+ percentile, but I don't rate my own imagination very highly (maybe because I can imagine having a much better imagination?).
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7mo ago
Yes you can just write down the names after the meetup and review later. It doesn't take that many spaced repetitions for a name to stick. I've also considered using a personal CRM to keep track of friends and acquaintances. I think this kind of thing is underrated.
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8mo ago
I thought that what prison already is like, at least in the UK.
Probably the worst thing about prison is the company.
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8mo ago
Also, what’s going on with the tattoos and piercings? Does anyone think that stuff looks attractive?
In short, yes. There is also the Girardian mimetic desire thing going on. If you spend time around people with piercings and tattoos, you will desire them.
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9mo ago
Sarno's Healing Back Pain could help, or also see https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/26/book-review-unlearn-your-pain/
both are along the same lines as the other comment
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10mo ago
I don't have strong conviction. More of an assumption on my part. Many may very well be bi, which would fit better with the theory.
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1yr ago
I guess either you have product-market fit, or you don't. PMF = customers knocking down your door, can't keep up with demand, servers on fire, bottlenecked by scaling, etc. The company struck gold and you must dig it out as fast as possible. No PMF = nobody cares, no users, no problems.
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1yr ago
You can kinda do this in chatGPT - ask a question as a chain-of-thought prompt, then a follow up asking it to extract the answer from the above.
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1yr ago
What are the current usage limits? Does the history work? What is the maximum input length for a single comment (presume 8k tokens)?
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1yr ago
Chatgpt is great for a certain class of question where you know the answer is true once you see it. E.g. ask it how to do something with a certain JavaScript library and it will give you the code. It's then very easy to confirm the validity by cross checking the documentation.
Generally I treat chatgpt as a wise but crazy old man. It will say insightful things, give you reference and names and ideas, but it's up to you to go away and confirm and research and come back with followup questions. Using chatgpt has to be embedded with your own research process. It can't be used in isolation, like you say.
Yes true. My sense of magnitude is not fully calibrated
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