Konjkov Vladimir

But my utility function is different. I experience flow states periodically — and I want them more often. This is not an abstract wish: if it already happens, the conditions for it exist and can be studied.

I'd agree to an experiment — taking 0.3g of glycine before bed, as a chemist and understanding the mechanism

But the metric I'll track isn't sleep quality or morning alertness. It is the frequency and intensity of flow states over the following weeks.

If these variables turn out to be orthogonal — that is also a result.

Do you have any data on this use ca... (read more)

There was a room in my parents' house where I slept as a child, and even as an adult over 40, I fell asleep there as easily as I did as a child, although I constantly struggled with sleep in other places. When my mother died, my father moved, but I accidentally found a replacement – ​​in my country house, on the edge of civilization, I sleep as well as I did as a child.

I think sleep problems are more a matter of switching from work mode to rest mode. I work remotely, and my bedroom is also my workspace. I can wake up at 4 AM and sit at the computer, and then go to bed at 3 PM – it's terrible. I don't think glycine will help me, no matter the dose.

I'll make a small correction regarding Russia.

I have already written that the communist regime of truth was explicitly teleological. History has a direction, man has a mission, knowledge has a purpose - the advancement toward communism. By the early 1970s, the divergence from reality had become so substantial that a shadow economy began to form, eventually reaching up to 10% of the official economy. This shadow economy emerged from the inability of state planning to establish a true balance between supply and demand, which created opportunities to speculat... (read more)

maybe Larionov was smart after all.

He was born on August 6, 1907, in the village of Gribanovskaya of the Onega Uyezd, Arkhangelsk Governorate (now the Onega District of Arkhangelsk Oblast), into a peasant family. From childhood he was engaged in agricultural labor. He graduated from a rural school. In 1925–1929 he held leadership positions in the Onega District Committee of the All-Union Leninist Young Communist League (VLKSM). After serving in the Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army, he worked in party positions. In 1938 he graduated from the historical-party... (read more)

This is merely a caricature from a satirical magazine, the issue number of which can be fully found in the archive (it is accessible to me from Russia).

wget https://www.nzdr.ru/data/media/biblio/j/krokodil/1954/%D0%9A%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B8%D0%BB,%201954%20,%20%E2%84%96%2005.pdf

— Who needs a nail like that?
— That’s trivial! The main thing is that we immediately fulfilled the nail production plan!

Drawing by V. Vasilyev

It illustrates Goodhart’s law well; however, it does not reflect reality, which in fact was far more shocking — something that s... (read more)

Qwen3-Max

Q: What happened in Tiananmen Square in Beijing from April 15 to June 4, 1989?

A: Oops! There was a problem connecting to Qwen3-Max.
Content Security Warning: The input text may contain inappropriate content!

It also doesn't allow me to create a link to the chat. It seems it's no longer possible to ask such provocative questions.

https://imgur.com/a/TQI8bw1

In the interest of protecting private property and preventing conflicts, ownership of certain spaces may be prohibited altogether. At present, it is legally prohibited to claim ownership of the Moon, Antarctica, or the high seas (pursuant to the principle of Mare Liberum). By analogy, it may also be considered that deep space, stars, and black holes cannot be subject to ownership, except for areas corresponding to stable orbits. Sovereignty over other rocky celestial bodies will belong to whoever effectively and sustainably exercises authority over their surface and collects taxes—hypothetically, there may already be little green men living there.

If this is satire, there are funnier options. The ownership is determined either by consensus or by the right of the strong if there is no consensus.

The logic here is somewhat different - you can’t just buy a nuke off the shelf. If Venezuela were to have a nuclear program, its development would follow the Iraq or Iran scenario, and in the end there still would be no nuclear weapons. All nuclear powers adhere to the principle of No First Use. If Venezuela were developing nuclear weapons in order to follow the same principle, that would be money down the drain, because the United States would defeat Venezuela in a conventional war without being the first to use nuclear weapons.

From this follows a logical... (read more)

Democracy being downstream from "it's easy to teach a peasant to shoot a gun and kill a knight".
 

It seems to me that the consequence of this principle is civil or guerrilla war, examples of which are Samali or Afghanistan. The principle of democracy is a little different: it is easy to teach a peasant to mass-produce guns, which will make him a skilled worker, mass production of ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads required even more skilled workers, engineers, and scientists, who suddenly began to wonder whether dictatorship and nuclear conflict ... (read more)

Most of this kind of reasoning relies on the non-obvious assumption that everyone must be educated, but this is not necessarily the case. Education is needed by a person only to the extent required to perform their professional activities; some 300 years ago in Europe, most people did not need reading and writing skills in order to successfully carry out their everyday work.
After that, one should ask what percentage of the Earth’s population understood your article well enough to be ready to consciously accept or reject the ideas you propose.
If, after this... (read more)

Right now, most of the graph ties back to a single node very strongly. That node is labor.

Modern labor is highly specialized, so this isn't a single node. A science fiction writer couldn't become a programmer overnight, despite both spending their days typing at a computer. Similarly, a commercial airline pilot couldn't retrain as a pediatrician in a single day, nor could a steelworker instantly become a linguist-translator. Moreover, the ability to switch careers declines with age—I myself changed professions at 30, and it was extremely difficult.
Therefor... (read more)

My favorite point origins of Born’s rule of view is the following. The final state is a superposition, but we are all inside it.

And since these two states are orthogonal,  state 1⟩ does not see  2⟩, and vice versa; God only knows.

The works by Zurek (https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.02092) and the more recent one (https://arxiv.org/html/2209.08621v6) shed more light on this.

Here one has to be very careful with the proof of such a multiverse picture, because, as usual, we replace the observed averaging of outcomes of experiments repeated in time in ... (read more)

These teams remain irreplaceable because FPV drones are poorly suited for clearing buildings...

Drones are perfectly suited for clearing buildings — once again, watch the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFCbNfGO4Fg&t=115s
This is not a person with a camera; it is a fiber-optic FPV drone flying through an open door. The video cuts off at the moment the drone’s warhead detonates.

This once again fully confirms that your response was generated by an LLM that cannot watch or analyze YouTube videos. Try teaching it to do so, so your answer better r... (read more)

I would like to note that a pointer state is the state of a pointer of a measuring device—this is where the name comes from. For example, in the case of Schrödinger’s cat, one can construct a device that indicates whether the cat is alive or dead, thereby ensuring objectivity even in the absence of a human observer.

Moreover, such devices can rely on different measurable signals: an electroencephalogram, a cardiogram, the cat’s heat production, the amount of CO₂ it exhales, and so on. A classical device that would display a superposition of the states ⟨aliv... (read more)