josephinesotherman
No bio...
User ID: 1389
josephinesotherman
2mo ago
I think that if we're judging by generally unreleased, highly expensive tech demos then virtually every company releasing frontier models could pony up more impressive analogues.
The only benchmark I care about when it comes to LLMs is LMArena, nothing else really matters to me if people cannot judge with their own eyes with some level of blinding, there's just too much fitting to the training data going on, or use of cash to fudge benchmarks with economically unviable models.
josephinesotherman
2mo ago
By my own estimate, around 0.15% of Executive Branch staff is hired directly or indirectly by the President. The remaining 99.85% is permanent staff of the bureaucracy. The president in all cases has received more votes than the bureaucracy, which has received 0 votes.
I don't really know how you can possibly pay any lip service to "our democracy" in light of those facts--the modern US system is much more like a technocratic oligarchy than anything resembling a republic (even calling it a democracy is a common mistake).
I think it's really funny how neoliberals define an utterly narrow range of acceptable policy for prosperity, look down upon and fight against any experimentation outside of that range, then claim vacuous truth of an "economic disaster" if any of that policy actually might be implemented. The "consensus order" is disturbed precisely because the Trump administration has figured out how much the bureaus sit in the way of any meaningful change.
My back of hand calculations for the percentage above:
- Roughly ~4K presidential employees between senate confirmed appointees, appointees, schedule C, non-career senior executives.
- Roughly 2.4MM executive branch career civil employees.
I'm sure we could bikeshed over the exact numbers, but I think it's quite clear that the bureaus massively outweigh political staff.
josephinesotherman
9mo ago
Tulsi Gabbard, a former US congresswoman and presidential candidate, revealed that she and her husband were placed on a terror watch list and followed by government agents under the "Quiet Skies" program, almost completely uncovered in US media:
https://www.racket.news/p/american-stasi-tulsi-gabbard-confirms
josephinesotherman
9mo ago
If he was lucid enough to write that letter he’s lucid enough to jump on TV for a couple of minutes.
josephinesotherman
11mo ago
Elaborate
You can find a collection of them here (https://attachmentrepair.com/meditation-library/?_sft_techniques=perfect-nurturer-reinforcement).
The perfect nurturer meditation is an attachment theory associated visualization technique to facilitate secure attachment by reparenting yourself through some combination of imagining an ideal "parent" figure and applying their guidance and care to memories or composite memories (applying some form of emotional memory reconsolidation in the process).
josephinesotherman
11mo ago
Has anyone significantly increased their capacity to visualize? Like after practice inner visualizations are clearer, richer, and full of finer details?
I’ve been doing these perfect nurturer meditations that involve visualization, and they’ve been really great—and I’ve found the more I set the scene the more impactful they are. I hypothesize that with advanced visualization skills I could “practice” a variety of activities in my mind’s eye and use it to get better at a bunch of things; I’m just wondering if visualization is a tractable and trainable skill.
josephinesotherman
11mo ago
I just got prescribed Adderall for the first time-- my wife and I long suspected I had some form of mild inattentive ADHD, but I'm a successful software engineer so it wasn't incredibly apparent.
I was always able to focus on things interesting to me, and often get into extreme tunnel vision hyperfocused states where I can quite literally not hear anything around me except what I'm focused on. My impression after 2 weeks of ~10mg Adderall in the mornings is something like:
- I don't feel like I'm using stress or willpower to get things done or get them started. I would often end work with terrible neck-and-shoulder pain and a lot of exhaustion, stress, and frustration, but I haven't felt that once since starting.
- I'm able to focus on bigger picture more effectively -- like I'm considering and doing tasks that are most important but not necessarily most interesting to me at the time. This is subtle, but it's an incredible improvement.
I've also cut down my coffee consumption from around 4-6 cups per day to 1, which is significant. Ultimately, I think Adderall has been effective in ways I didn't expect, I anticipated that it would just increase hyperfocus and ultimately not really help, but it has had some surprising effects. I think the only negative side effect is that I have noticed more headaches at night, but I figure that'll slowly go away as I develop some tolerance to the acute effects.
josephinesotherman
11mo ago
Really going to lean into "in a grey area". I'd be incredibly careful with phenibut, it's extremely dangerous and addictive.
For longevity: Rapamycin
For focus/attention/productivity: Phenylpiracetam (it's harder to get now from good suppliers in the US now because of a "soft ban" by the FDA, and I think phenotropil in Russia was potentially discontinued a bit back).
... in fact, you can probably look at a lot of OTC Russian pharmaceuticals:
- Selank
- Semax
- Cerebrolysin
- Mildronate
- Noopept
- Picamilon
- Bemethyl
- Emoxypine
YMMV, of all of these I've tried: Phenylpiracetam, Emoxypine, Selank, and Semax (the latter two in Russia, I have a lot of phenylpiracetam leftover from when nootropicsdepot used to sell it). I really like phenylpiracetam.
For the future, you can get 300mcg pills from Nootropics Depot.
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