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AI #131 Part 1: Gemini 2.5 Flash Image is Cool
athom8d10

Fwiw, human underperformance on vending-bench is an elicitation problem. The human was only given a set amount of time (iirc 5 hours), whereas the LLMs run until they lose coherence. The human maintained coherence throughout but types slower, and therefore sees less days of simulation.

The human is also the only case with n=1.

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Better Air Purifiers
athom4mo10

There might be a better chance of this becoming widely used if the design is pitched to IKEA (or similar), over being developed in a new, dedicated company

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British and American Connotations
athom5mo30

In BE 'quite' can also be used sarcastically, becoming a negative intensifier. If you say something's "quite nice" that could mean it really wasn't good at all. 

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Offering Completion
athom1y35

Less so once they've done enough RLHF

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Are the majority of your ancestors farmers or non-farmers?
Answer by athomJun 20, 202330

Populations got much bigger post-Industrial revolution, after which very few people were farmers. I'm pretty sure more people who have existed were non-farmers just from that growth, by a huge margin.

But I'm not sure whether or not that should carry over to ancestors. On one hand, you can only have so many ancestors at a time, and explosive industrial population growth doesn't change that. But smaller farming populations might mean more of my family tree crossing over itself, and so fewer unique farming ancestors?

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Notes on Courage
athom5y20

Thanks for the post!

The Zach Weinersmith quote you mentioned goes further, in a direction that might also be relevant:

"...bravery is not cross contextual... Conversely, recklessness *is* cross contextual. Unsafe sex correlates to drug abuse."

I'm pretty reckless in some ways, but need to build courage in other areas.Fostering courage where I need it, turning my recklessness into courage where it's helping me, and minimising it where it isn't, all seem like worthwhile things to try.

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Stupid Questions - September 2017
athom5y30

Best guess: because they've found the Haskell expertise they were after. That tweet is nearly two years old now, and I'm pretty sure Ed Kmett joined more recently than that.

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[Link] "Where are all the successful rationalists?"
athom5y20

Is there any data on how people feel like rationality has changed their lives? Somewhat separate to what we're doing as a community / what some of the most successful rationalists are up to, it seems worth trying to work out how engaging more with rationality changes things for people. I'm pretty sure my engagement with rationality has helped me become stronger; if it turned out not to help most people that would definitely change how I presented things.

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Babble challenge: 50 ways of hiding Einstein's pen for fifty years
Answer by athomOct 16, 2020140

Ordered chronologically. In retrospect, I've assumed some pretty weak evil forces here, and mostly gone for variations on a needle-in-a-haystack type theme. 

  1. Surgically implant the pen in myself
  2. Theseus-duplicate the pen, give one duplicate to the evil forces so they leave me alone
  3. Make a second, cooler-looking pen, ‘accidentally’ lose it to evil forces
  4. Cut a hole in a dictionary/similarly boringish book, put pen in there
  5. bury the pen somewhere random
  6. carve a hole in a tree, put pen in, wait for tree to regrow over it
  7. bury the pen, in a construction site, so it ends up underneath a building (harder to get to)
  8. Hide the pen in the shaft of another, bigger pen
  9. Sew the pen into the lining of a bag
  10. Same but hem instead of lining
  11. Make a box/piece of furniture, hide pen in the wood itself
  12. Take pen apart, hide each bit somewhere different, reassemble as much as I can keep
  13. Ingratiate myself with evil forces, ‘recover’ pen for them, betray them after the fifty years
  14. Hand pen over to evil forces, steal back after 49 years (embed some tracking method in pen that will work in 1905)
  15. Befriend a winemaker, hide pen in corked bottle of wine, keep wine for a long time ‘as an investment’
  16. Hide pen in someone’s grave
  17. Hide pen in someone’s grave, but by hiding it in their body and then waiting for them to die. Hope autopsies aren’t a thing yet.
  18. Take pen somewhere remote, pay someone there to keep it for you
  19. Keep a gun with you ‘to defend against evil forces’. Hide pen in barrel. Hope you never have to actually use the gun.
  20. Convince art collectors the pen is valuable, sell to the highest bidder. Rely on whatever security they use for their collections. Fifty years later, buy the pen back.
  21. Inscribe something on the inside of the barrel (so you can identify it), find as many identical pens as possible, hide them all. Good luck finding the right one in fifty years.
  22. Hide at the bottom of a lake, hope lake doesn’t silt over/get dredged
  23. Use the pen like you would with any other pen. Evil forces assume you’d be hiding the real pen, so that can’t be it.
  24. Taxidermy
  25. Become an expert in art conservation. Re-frame an old, valuable painting (hide pen in frame). Fifty years later, re-frame it again.
  26. Hide pen in the walls of a new building. Demolish after fifty years.
  27. Take one part off pen. Destroy the rest. Attach remaining part to a different pen after fifty years. Claim that if the ship-of-theseus thing before counted, this does too.
  28. Offer pen as collateral for a huge, long-term loan.
  29. Or just open a bank account and put it in your safe-deposit box, I guess.
  30. Convince a member of evil forces to turn their coat. Give pen to them.
  31. Hide pen in fake brick. Make building out of that plus other real bricks. Remember which brick it was, demolish building later.
  32. Bury pen, plant a tree over the top (so that hopefully its root system surrounds it).
  33. Give pen to nomadic group for safe-keeping, hope evil forces can’t find them.
  34. Sell to pawn shop, along with as many other pens as you can get your hands on. Hope evil forces don’t know what kind of pen they’re looking for, or which of the many pawn shops you sold pens to has the right one. Inconspicuously buy back after a while.
  35. Hide pen in walking stick, horribly cripple yourself, claim you just have the walking stick for the obvious reason.
  36. Actually, just hide the pen in someone else’s walking stick instead.
  37. Hide pen in an umbrella handle.
  38. Give pen to church, claim it was, idk, used to sign Jesus’ death warrant. Have them hold on to it as a relic.
  39. Remove ink from pen. Leave in the stationery cupboard at a university. Assume no-one will want it, but no-one will bother to throw it out.
  40. Choose someone at random, give them the pen, tell them to keep it. Make sure evil forces don’t find out who you picked.
  41. Same, but hide it under the floorboards of a random house, without its occupants knowing.
  42. Using future-telling powers, give to a random future classmate of Einstein’s. Tell them to give it to Einstein when they meet him.
  43. Leave pen in the stationery cupboard of the relevant patent office (again without ink if necessary).
  44. Use future telling powers to work out how you’ll manage to hide the pen. Do that.
  45. Decide it doesn’t matter which exact pen Einstein uses. Go into the pen-selling industry anyway. Sell him a different pen when the time comes.
  46. Throw into a river, which probably then silts up and then changes course. Dig up from where the river used to be fifty years later.
  47. Bury pen in an area high in some mineral people might want in fifty year’s time but don’t at the moment (silicon? uranium?). Get in to the mining industry.
  48. Drop the pen in the ocean near the Netherlands. Dig up a tulip farm fifty years later.
  49. Leave the pen in the dead sea for a while, until a huge salt crystal forms around it. Donate to a museum as an interesting geological specimen.
  50. Bury the pen in an already-discovered archaeological site. (Become an archaeologist). Decide there was more to that area than was initially discovered, and dig it up further fifty years later.
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