Wouldn't “Neuron Polysemanticity is not 'just' Superposition” be a more fitting title?

A piece of advice I frequently hear: always make sure you call somebody in the company you're applying for.

Is this still up-to-date advice? Or is messaging someone over LinkedIn or similar more appropriate? Mostly asking because I got the impression that the internet changed the norms to no one doing phone calls anymore.

4. If you find that you’re reluctant to delete computer files / emails, don’t empty the trash

In Gmail I like to scan the email headers and then I bulk select and archive them (* a e thanks to vim shortcuts). After 5 years of doing this I still didn't run out of the free storage in Gmail. I already let Gmail sort the emails by "Primary" , "Promotions" , "Updates" etc. Usually the only important things are in "Primary" and 1 or 2 in "Updates".

Can anyone here recommend particular tools to practice grammar? Or with strong opinions on the best workflow/tool to correct grammar on the fly? I already know Grammarly and LanguageTool, but Grammarly seems steep at $30 per month when I don’t know if it is any good. I have tried GPT-4 before, but the main problems I have there, is that it is too slow and changes my sentences more than I would like (I tried to make it do that less through prompting, which did not help that much).

I notice that feeling unconfident about my grammar/punctuation leads me to write less online, especially applying for jobs or fellowships, feels more icky because of it. That seems like an avoidable failure mode.

Ideally, I would like something like the German Orthografietrainer (It was created to teach middle and high school children spelling and grammar). It teaches you on a sentence by sentence basis where to put the commas and why by explaining the sentence structure (Illustrated through additional examples). Because it trains you with particularly tricky sentences, the training is effective, and I rapidly got better at punctuation than my parents within ~3 hours. Is there a similar tool for English that I have never heard of?

While writing this, I noticed that I did not have the free version of Grammarly enabled anymore and tried the free version while writing this. One trick I noticed is that it lists what kinds of error you are making across the whole text. So it is easy to infer what particular mistake I made in which spot, and then I correct it myself. Also, Grammarly did not catch a few simple spelling and punctuation mistakes that Grammarly caught (like “anymore” or the comma at the start of this sentence.). At the end, I also tried ProWritingAid, which found additional issues.

Trying to learn a language from scratch, just from text is a fun exercise for humans also. I recently tried this with Hindi after I had an disagreement with someone about the exact question of this post. I didn't get very far in 2 hours though.

Trydactyl is amazing. You can disable the mode on specific websites by running the blacklistadd command. If you have configured that already, these settings can also be saved in your config file. Here's my config (though careful before copying my config. It has fixamo_quiet enabled, a command that got Tridactyl almost removed when it was enabled by default. You should read what it does before you enable it.)

Here are my ignore settings:

autocmd DocStart https://youtube.com mode ignore
autocmd DocStart https://todoist.com mode ignore
autocmd DocStart mail.google.com mode ignore
autocmd DocStart calendar.google.com mode ignore
autocmd DocStart keyma.sh mode ignore
autocmd DocStart monkeytype.com mode ignore
autocmd DocStart https://www.youtube.com mode ignore
autocmd DocStart https://ilias.studium.kit.edu/ mode ignore
autocmd DocStart localhost:888 mode ignore
autocmd DocStart getguestimate.com mode ignore
autocmd DocStart localhost:8888 mode ignore

Juggling: Anthony Gatto's juggling routine from 2000. Anthony Gatto holds several juggling world records. This routine is infamous in the juggling world (here's a decent juggler commenting on it). As well as the fact that he gave up juggling to work with concrete instead (because it pays the bills). Here's more context on Gatto and his routine (the guy picking up the balls for him in the video is his father, for example):

Agreed. Especially the “electoral college is good actually” part is where I started laughing. If you don't want tyranny by the majority, perhaps just not crippling your system by not using first-past-the-post voting would be a first step to a more sane system.

Absolutely love this essay! The green from the perspective of non-green thoughts really resonated with things I thought in the past and made me notice how I have been confused by green. Helpfull for AGI or not, this is is giving me a bunch of fresh thoughts about problems/confusing areas in my own life, so thanks!

A quick intuitive check for whether something is a natural latent over some parts of a system consists of two questions:

• Are the parts (approximately) independent given the candidate natural latent?

I first had some trouble checking this condition intuitively. I might still not have got it correctly. I think one of the main things that got me confused first, is that if I want to reason about natural latents for “a” dog, I need to think about a group of dogs. Even though there are also natural latents for the individual dog (like fur color is a natural latent across the dog's fur). Say I check the independence condition for a set of sets of either cats or dogs. So if I look at a single animal's shoulder height in those sorted cluster, it tells me which of the two clusters it's in, but once I updated on that information, my guesses for the dog height's will not be able to improve.

An important example for something that is not a natural latent is the empirical mean in fat tailed distributions for real world sample sizes, while it is in thin-tailed ones. This doesn't mean that they don't have natural latents. This fact is what Nassim Taleb is harping on. For Pareto distributions (think: pandemics, earthquakes, wealth), one still has natural latents like the tail index (estimated from plotting the data on a log-log plot by dilettantes like me and more sophisticatedly by real professionals).