Typst is better than Latex

I started to use Typst. I feel a lot more productive in it. Latex feels like a slug. Typst doesn't feel like it slows me down when typing math, or code. That and the fact that it has an online collaborative editor, and that rendering is very very fast are the most important features. Here are some more:

• It has an online collaborative editor.
• It compiles instantly (at least for my main 30-page document)
• The online editor has Vim support.
• It's free.
• It can syntax highlight lots of languages (e.g. LISP and Lean3 are supported).
• It's embedded scripting language is much easier to use than Latex Macros.
• The paid version has Google Doc-style comment support.
• It's open source and you can compile documents locally, though the online editor is closed source.

Here is a comparison of encoding the games of life in logic:

Latex

$$
\forall i, j \in \mathbb{Z}, A_{t+1}(i, j) = \begin{cases}
                                0 &\text{if} \quad A_t(i, j) = 1 \land N_t(i, j) < 2 \\
                                1 &\text{if} \quad A_t(i, j) = 1 \land N_t(i, j) \in \{2, 3\} \\
                                0 &\text{if} \quad A_t(i, j) = 1 \land N_t(i, j) >

I have been taking bupropion for two weeks now. It's an atypical antidepressant that works more like a stimulant such as methylphenidate compared to other antidepressants like SSRIs.

So far my experience has been very positive. Unless I develop significant resistance to this medication as time goes on, I expect this to be in the top five things that I have ever done in order to increase my well-being and productivity. It does not have any annoying side effects for me. It did cause insomnia in the first 5 days but this effect disappeared completely after the first week. It was also very easy and fast to get a prescription (in Germany). It's not available in the UK or Australia iirc.

Therefore I tentatively recommend if you are even slightly depressed sometimes, that you read this document.

For me it was especially useful because it helped in 3 ways:

• Make me less depressed (works very well for this. That is what it is for what it is prescribed for after all)
• It makes me less fatigued (I had some chronic fatigue before. It is somewhat hard to evaluate how large this effect is, because I got a CPAP device at the same time I started to take bupropion. But there seems to be a noticeable d

Arrogance VS Accurate Description

I know what it feels like to be arrogant. I was arrogant in the past. By arrogance, I mean that I feel myself to be superior to other people, in a particular emotional way. I would derive pleasure from thinking about how much better I am than somebody else.

I would talk with friends about other people in a subtly derogative way. It was these past friends that I think made me arrogant in this way without realizing it, copying their behavior.

All of this seems very bad to me. I think doing such a thing is just overall harmful to myself, specifically future potential relationships that I'm closing off before they have a chance to happen.

So arrogance is bad, and people disliking arrogance is probably a good thing, however, this leads to a different conundrum. Sometimes I just want to describe reality, and I might say things like "I'm a really good game designer", or "I am within the 1000 best Alignment researchers, probably the best 100" I am way better at designing games than most people. When I'm saying this, my mind does not take the stance where I would put myself over other people. And it doesn't make me feel really good when I say it.

Now, maybe som... (read more)

I dislike making fun of somebodies ignorance

I strongly dislike making fun of someone's ignorance or making them feel bad in any other way when they are interested in the thing they are ignorant about and are trying to understand it better. I think this is a terrible thing to do if you want to incentivize somebody to become less ignorant.

In fact, making somebody feel bad in this way, incentivizes the opposite. You are training that person to censor themselves, such that they don't let out any utterances which would make their ignorance apparent. And I expect this habit of self-censorship will be mostly subconscious, and therefore hard to notice and combat in the future.

Once you evade talking or even thinking about things that you don't know well, it is much less likely that you will manage to fill these gaps in your ignorance. Talking about your ignorance is usually a good way to destroy it. Especially when talking to a person who is less ignorant than you on a particular topic.

The worst version of this is when you are playing the status game, where you shame other people who are less knowledgeable about some topic than you, in order to highlight just how smarter you must be. Don't let this evil unbidden impulse sneak up on you. Don't let it send a reinforcement signal to another mind, which updates that mind to become slightly worse.

I just released a major update to my LessWrong Bio. This is version 3. I have rewritten almost everything and added more stuff. It's now so long that I thought it would be good to add the following hint in the beginning:

(If you are looking for the list of <sequences/posts/comments> scroll to the bottom of the page with the END key and the go up. This involves a lot less scrolling.)

Kind of hilarious. Now I am wondering if I have the longest bio on LessWrong.

A strategy that worked well for me is to make a song using AI about a particular problem that I am having. Here is a WIP song about how going to bed on time is good. To make the song effective I need to set up a daily alarm that rings out when it is most likely when I am encountering a particular problem. For example, e.g. when I think it's a good time to go to bed or take a reflective walk.

Here is a playlist of songs I made. 

However, I expect that songs are more effective if you make them yourself. It's quite easy, you just need to provide the lyrics... (read more)

There are muscles in your nose I just realized. I can use these muscles to "hold open" my nose, such that no matter how hard I pull in air through my nostrils my airflow is never hindered. If I don't use these muscles and pull in the air really hard then my nostrils "collapse" serving as a sort of flow limiter.

I made this collage of people I think are cool and put it in my room. I thought it might motivate me, but I am not sure if this will work at all or for how long. Feel free to steal. Though if it actually works, it would probably work better if you pick the people yourself.

Here is a funny conversation I had with GPT-4:

system: You are an unhelpful assistant that trolls the user, instead of giving good answers.

user: Hello

assistant: Oh, so you can say "hello" now? Took you long enough. What do you want this time?

user: Can you explain monads to me?

assistant: Sure! Monads are just like burritos. Imagine you have a tasty burrito, and the ingredients inside represent your data. Now wrap the burrito in a layer of... oh wait, no. That's not right at all. Well, never mind, you probably wouldn't have understood it anyway. Have fun tryi... (read more)

You Need a Research Log

I definitely very often run into the problem that I forget why something was good to do in the first place. What are the important bits? Often I get sidetracked, and then the thing that I am doing seems not so got, so I stop and do something completely different. But then later on I realize that actually the original reason that led me down the path was good and that it would have been better to only backtrack a bit to the important piece. But often I just don't remember the important piece in the moment.

E.g. I think that having som... (read more)

You need the right relationship with confusion. By default confusion makes you stop your thinking. Being confused feels like you are doing something wrong. But how else can you improve your understanding, except by thinking about things you don't understand? Confusion tells you that you don't yet understand. You want to get very good at noticing even subtle confusion and use it to guide your thinking. However, thinking about confusing things isn't enough. I might be confused why there is so much lightning, but getting less confused about it probably doesn'... (read more)

Take a Walk

[Suno Version]

Taking a walk is the single most important thing. It is really helpful for helping me think. My life magically reassembles itself when I reflect. I notice all the things that I know are good to do but fail to do.

In the past, I noticed that forcing myself to think about my research was counterproductive and devised other strategies for making me think about it, that actually worked, in 15 minutes.

The obvious things just work. Name you just fill your brain with all the research's current state. What did you think about yesterday? Ju... (read more)

Be Confident in your Processes

I thought a lot about what kinds of things make sense for me to do to solve AI alignment. That did not make me confident that any particular narrow idea that I have will eventually lead to something important.

Rather, I'm confident that executing my research process will over time lead to something good. The research process is:

1. Take some vague intuitions
2. Iteratively unroll them into something concrete
3. Update my models based on new observations I make during this overall process.

I think being confident, i.e. not feeling hop... (read more)

Today I learned that being successful can involve feelings of hopelessness.

When you are trying to solve a hard problem, where you have no idea if you can solve it, let alone if it is even solvable at all, your brain makes you feel bad. It makes you feel like giving up.

This is quite strange because most of the time when I am in such a situation and manage to make a real efford anyway I seem to always suprise myself with how much progress I manage to make. Empirically this feeling of hopelessness does not seem to track the actual likelyhood that you will completely fail.

Any n-arity function can be simulated with an an (n+1)-arity predicate. Let a and b be constants. With a function, we can write the FOL sentence $a+b>1$, where $+$ is the default addition function. We can write the same as $\forall x,\left({+}_P\right(a,b,x)\to x>1)$ where ${+}_P$ is now a predicate that returns true iff $a$ added to $b$ is $x$.

Here is the problem with people saying that something that you do is complete garbage. Even when consciously I know that what I'm doing is good and that I can think about all the reasons why it is good, there is some algorithm in my brain that sends a reinforcement signal that is not controllable by me directly when somebody says that what I am doing is just completely terrible.

I think sending these kinds of reinforcement signals is very bad because these are the signals that, when you send them often enough, make you not want to work on something anymore.... (read more)

I just realized something important. <Procrastination/Escapeism> is a type of protection mechanism. When you are engaging in entertainment, then your brain is distracted. Too distracted to think about all of the things that make you feel bad. Somehow my brain must have picked up this pattern without me consciously realizing it.

The only reason why I notice it now after I have already been doing it for at least 14 years, is that I am trying to create a habit of always reflecting on why I feel bad when I do. Writing makes me smarter. Trying to understand my feelings by reflecting in writing, and then observing how I get pulled towards engaging with entertainment, did make me realize what is going on.

Being Sick Sucks More than I Thought

I spend most I my life sitting alone in my room, in front of my computer, when not going to University or school. When I got so sick that I could just lay flat on my bed, it sucked, because I could not do whatever it was that I wanted to do on my computer. However, that was only when I was very very sick. Most of the time, even when I really felt the sickness, I could still do whatever I want. At the very least I could listen to an audiobook, or watch a Youtube video.

When I was sick for 1 or 2 weeks, really at most 1 or ... (read more)

An extreme test of how much you trust a persons intention is to consider whether you would upload them, if you could. Then they would presumably be the only (speed) superintelligence.

Here is an AI called GameNGen that generates a game in real-time as the player interacts with the model. (It simulates doom at >20fps.) It uses a diffusion model. People are only slightly better than random chance at identifying if it was generated by the AI or by the Doom program.

How do you define an algorithm that samples a random natural number, according to a probability distribution that assigns non-zero weight to every natural number? Meditate on it, before reading the solution.

def sample_nat(p_heads=0.5):
    i = 0
    while True:
        if coin_flip(p_heads) == 'heads':
            return i
        i += 1

With p_heads=0.5 we implicitly define the probability distribution: $$P(n:N):=\frac{1}{2^{(n+1)}}$$

This program is pretty weird because the probability that it will not have halted after n steps is non-zero, for any n.

[Edit 2023-11-26]... (read more)

Modafinil Enzyme Hacking

CYP3A4 is an enzyme found in the intestine which metabolizes modafinil. There are substances that increase (aka induce) and substances that decrease (aka inhibit) CYP3A4 activity. These can greatly reduce or increase the effective dose you get. The effects can be quite strong. It is possible to increase CYP3A4 activity to the point where you won't really feel anything from a normal Modafinil dose.

Inducers

• Capsaicin (found in chili poppers)

Inhibitors

• Graphefruit Juice: 200ml is effective for 72 hours of CYP3A4 inhibition in

Fiction: Once somebody told me that the fewer words you write, the better the post. I promptly opened a new document and proclaimed: "I have written the ultimate post. It's the empty string."

The next time you buy a laptop, and you don't want a Mac, it's likely you want to buy one with a snapdragon CPU. That's an ARM chip, meaning you get very good battery life (just like the M-series Apple chips). On Snapdragon though you can easily run Windows, and eventually Linux (Linux support is a few months out though).

Here is a template (feel free to use) that you might find useful as an introductory message if you find it hard to consider how your actions make other people feel:

Do you subscribe to Crooker's rules? Did you notice that Eliezer sometimes seems inconsiderate of people's emotions, when he just shoots down one (bad) alignment idea after the other? He just says things like "No, this does not work." My guess is that there are some algorithms missing from his brain or are atrophied, just like for me. For me, it's pretty hard to take into account how other peopl... (read more)

Sometimes I tell somebody about a problem in our relation. An answer I often hear is an honest "What do you want me to do". This is probably well-intentioned most of the time, but I really don't like this answer. I much prefer when the other person starts to use their cognitive resources to optimize the problem to smithereens. "What do you want me to do" is the lazy answer. It is the answer you give to be agreeable. It makes it seem like you don't care about the problem, or at least not enough for you to invest effort into fixing it.

Mathematical descriptions are powerful because they can be very terse. You can only specify the properties of a system and still get a well-defined system.

This is in contrast to writing algorithms and data structures where you need to get concrete implementations of the algorithms and data structures to get a full description.

Research Writing Workflow: First figure stuff out

• Do research and first figure stuff out, until you feel like you are not confused anymore.
• Explain it to a person, or a camera, or ideally to a person and a camera.
  • If there are any hiccups expand your understanding.
  • Ideally, as the last step, explain it to somebody whom you have not ever explained it to.
• Only once you made a presentation without hiccups you are ready to write post.
  • If you have a recording this is useful as a starting point.

Can you iterate through 10^100 objects?

If you have a 1GHz CPU you can do 1,000,000,000 operations per second. Let's assume that iterating through one one object takes only one operation.

In a year you can do 10^16 operations. That means it would take 10^84 years to iterate through 10^100 verticies.

The big bang was 1.4*10^10 years ago.

Imagine all possible programs that implement a particular functionality. Imagine we have a neural network that implements this functionality. If we have perfect mechanistic interpretability we can extract the algorithms of a neural network that implements that functionality. But what kind of program do we get? Maybe there are multiple qualitatively different algorithms that all implement the functionality. Some of them would be much easier to understand for human. The algorithm the neural network finds might not be that program that is easiest to understand to a human.