espoire

I’ve noticed I can only concretely work at recursion layer 3 on a good day, and even when it works, it gives me a nasty headache and brain fog following.

Best example I can remember: I was doing a character voice (like, all day, for everything). Call this character-1. On that day, I read a story book aloud.

Yeesh, I’m getting a mild headache just composing this text.

When reading story books, I create, remember, and do voices for the characters who speak. Since I was in-character all day, I was doing those character voices as if character-1 was doing them. C... (read more)

I figured the lich might’ve been Harry JPEV, what with how he carries a phylactery with the soul of an immortal dark wizard in it. (His ring containing the transfigured Voldemort.)

Wait, what? I write JS daily and I still thought an arrow function was just syntactic sugar for a regular function, and behaviorally identical. Wild.

I guess my habit of basically-never passing ’this’ into nested functions (and explicitly using .bind or .call every time when I need to control ‘this’) has been more beneficial than I knew.

A self-described witch once taught me a spell for “freeing oneself from [the ongoing bad vibes left behind by] someone who has hurt you“.

Write out a big long letter addressed to that person, listing the major ways they wronged you, and how you feel/felt, and how that has affected your life since that time. Fold the pages of the letter all up, and seal with wax. Go to a natural scene. Arrange and light a ring of five candles. Place the letter within the ring. Burn the letter. Extinguish the candles one-by-one. Bury or scatter the ashes once cool.

And like, t... (read more)

I’d imagine one form of death involves more suffering, but I have no idea which one.

This is a thing my brain does sometimes. It’s very counterproductive when it happens.

In my case, I believe it was caused by childhood violence. When I was ~six plus or minus a few years, I lived in an environment where being blamed for ~anything could result in being beaten bloody, so my hindbrain learned to drop everything and deflect blame, if blame is pointed at me.

I’m not in an environment like that anymore. Yet I can’t unlearn the response. It sucks. The part of me that can see “drop everything, deflect blame, escape as soon as blame is shifted” as hu... (read more)

I think you’re being overly charitable. I don’t think anyone knows anything about nhPredict. I think they just have a strong “CEO = guilty-by-default” prior. The closest thing to an argument I’ve seen undergirding the “eat the rich” meme soup is “X, Y, and Z billionaires are actively getting people killed” completely skipping the question of whether that’s representative of all wealthy folks, skipping to: therefore “kill all billionaires”.

I’ve definitely encountered situations where it was important to prefix the numeric info when working with humans, specifically. (Though my original remark was facetious; I only say “dollars sign after the numerals” as a matter of taste, not as implied because it’s instrumental in any way.)

When leading World of Warcraft raids, calling “Use Bloodlust in 20 seconds” gets VERY different results from calling “In 20 seconds, use Bloodlust”. Indeed, the timing information in the former cannot usually be heard over the Bloodlust sound effect itself.

Speaking from experience, maybe gender transition ought to raise that specific concern.

At my legal name change hearing, I was asked to affirm that I wasn’t attempting any fuckery like trying to outrun a debt or something. Which I was not. I had no debts save for whatever credit card spending from the same month, which I’d pay off in full end-of-month, same as every month.

…but since then, having an old unused name that immediately reveals the party trying to find my old name as being not-approved-by-me has been surprisingly helpful. It’s significantly downg... (read more)

Chiming in with another causal mechanism: hot soup lets off steam. Humid air in general plays nicer with our lungs, and can noticeably help when people are having a cough, or having trouble breathing. I sometimes use “just have them sit over a canteen of steaming-hot water” as a palliative for both issues.

I do much the same, plus a fair bit of effort on preserving my health more thoroughly than those around me do. Obvious stuff like aerobic exercise, eschewing smoking, eschewing alcohol, eschewing highly processed foods, but also less obvious stuff like going substantially out of my way to avoid dust inhalation, reducing driving time or rescheduling driving for lower-risk times.

Keeping up with current medical research has been surprisingly fruitful. I did a micro-dose self-experiment based on the results of this paper, and it appears to both work in humans ... (read more)

I retained the ability to believe and act upon the belief that children need to be allowed the freedom to make sub-critical mistakes. I think if you were to go into it averse to smothering children, believing-in taking children seriously, etc., that those beliefs will survive the process.

I think merely taking estradiol for gender transition triggered the caring-terminally-about-children effect for me. Possibly related: my blood estradiol levels got too high for a while, and I essentially had a pregnant woman’s hormone mix, for a while.

I’d previously liked kids somewhat, enjoyed teaching, enjoyed playing with them. Now they’re aggressively cute, makes me actively happy to notice children being happy or learning with or without my involvement, etc.

Oh, the British figured this out, too?

I also put the dollars sign after the numerals, *where it belongs*.

human sexuality itself is immoral and forcibly modifies humans to not have sexual organs or desires

I must have one of my 100 morality bits missing, because this seems weird but not bad to me.

…but point taken.

Re: no human training/test separation:

Epistemic status: random thought I just had, but what if there kind of is. I think maybe dreaming is the “test” part of the training cycle: the newly updated weights run against outcome predictions supplied by parts of the system not currently being updated. The being-updated part tries to get desirable outcomes within the dream, and another network / region plays Dungeon Master, supplying scenario and outcomes for given actions. Test against synthetic test data, supplied by a partially adversarial network.

I feel like,... (read more)

Wow. Thanks a lot for that. Your depiction of brain architecture in particular makes a lot of sense to me. I also feel like I finally understand-enough-to-program-one the stable diffusion tool I use daily, after following up on “latent diffusion” from your mention of it.

Still. I feel like my brain has learned an algorithm that is of value itself apart from its learning capability, that extracting meaningful portions of my algorithm is possible, and that using it as a starting point, one could make fairly straightforward upgrades to it — for example adding ... (read more)

Huh, I’d only noticed the one instance, but now I’m noticing it even in other articles. Color me curious!

My only remaining concrete hypothesis is “overzealous autocorrect”, but I’m reasonably sure that’s not the answer.

I’d assume it’s a typo on some unfamiliar-to-me keyboard layout.

Disagree?

The version of ‘honest’ that I have would highly rank a cherry-picked or even fabricated narrative optimized specifically for improving the truth of the belief that it creates.

That’s a bit beyond my skill and indeed not something I trifle with for fear of psychic damage (I discovered many many years ago that I’m susceptible to lying addiction, and freeing myself of the addiction was long and difficult), but were I greater than I am, I would endorse strategies like that.