papetoast's Shortforms
Explicitly welcomed: * Help to develop the ideas * Link to related concepts/pre-existing posts * Writing critique of everything
Jan 20, 20231
papetoast
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Thank you for double checking.
Overall I am still very uncertain, but lean towards it being fine. Even dentists are giving mixed signals.
Unfortunately Chinese sources but these are dentists saying you can brush immediately
- https://www.facebook.com/starlitdental/posts/pfbid0SdX4RLmkxdzUYSXDRfnsbH6kpPJrFCjsKVFrJGjEprzkseKs85oYVwH4e3kii1Wrl (archive)
- https://dentistry.tw/when-brushing-teeth/ (archive)
Definitely there are dentists saying you should wait too
Update: Brushing after eating acidic food is likely fine.
Context: 7 months ago, me in Adam Zerner's shortform:
I remember something about not brushing immediately after eating though. Here is a random article I googled. This says don't brush after eating acidic food, not sure about the general case.
https://www.cuimc.columbia.edu/news/brushing-immediately-after-meals-you-may-want-wait
“The reason for that is that when acids are in the mouth, they weaken the enamel of the tooth, which is the outer layer of the tooth,” Rolle says. Brushing immediately after consuming something acidic can damage the enamel layer of the tooth.
Waiting about 30 minutes before brushing allows tooth enamel to remineralize and build itself back up.
WARNING: I didn't read these papers except the conclusions
Should We... (read more)
Update: Brushing after eating acidic food is likely fine.
Should We Wait to Brush Our Teeth? A Scoping Review Regarding Dental Caries and Erosive Tooth Wear
Key messages: Although the available evidence lacked robust clinical studies, tooth brushing using fluoridated products immediately after an erosive challenge does not increase the risk of ETW [Erosive Tooth Wear] and can be recommended, which is in line with recommendations for dental caries prevention. Furthermore, we suggest updating the international guidelines to promote individualized recommendations based on risk factors to prevent either ETW or dental caries.
Timing of dietary acid intake and erosive tooth wear: A case-control study
Results: [...] Toothbrushing within 10min of acid intake was not associated with erosive tooth wear following adjustments for dietary factors (OR 1.41 [95% CI: 0.82-2.42], p=0.215]).
Conclusion: Significantly increased odds ratios were observed when acids were consumed between meals in this cohort of patients. Universal advice to delay brushing after meals may not be substantiated.
Obsidian ended up being less of a thinking notepad and more of a faster index of things I have read before. Links and graphs are mostly useless but they make me feel good about myself. Pulling numbers out of my ass I estimate it takes me 15s to find something I have read and pasted into obsidian vs 5-30 minutes before.
Native Chinese speaker here. All the translations are accurate except for "What is your favorite work of fiction?", where work of fiction should be novel instead (from 小说 in 你最喜欢的小说是哪一部？).
Isn't "explosion from a single point grows spherically" just an intuitive thought that people who have never saw a real large-scale explosion would have?
Replying toLogical Rudeness
My takeaways:
- Don't make logical mistakes
- Don't motte-and-bailey
- Be clear when you changed your mind
- State the cruxes
Collecting occurrences of people complaining about LW
A decision theorist walks into a seminar by Jessica Hullman
... (read more)This is Jessica. Recently overheard (more or less):
SPEAKER: We study decision making by LLMs, giving them a series of medical decision tasks. Our first step is to infer, from their reported beliefs and decisions, the utility function under revealed preference assump—
AUDIENCE: Beliefs!? Why must you use the word beliefs?
SPEAKER [caught off guard]: Umm… because we are studying how the models make decisions, and beliefs help us infer the scoring rule corresponding to what they give us.
AUDIENCE: But it’s not clear language models have beliefs like people do.
SPEAKER: Ok. I get it. But, it’s also not clear what people’s beliefs are exactly or that
Thoughts inspired by Richard Ngo's[1] and LWLW's[2] quick take
Warning: speculation but hedging words mostly omitted.
I don't think a consistent superintelligence which have a single[3] pre-existing terminal goal would be fine with a change in terminal goals. The fact that humans allows their goals to be changed is a result of us having contradicting "goals". As intelligence increases or more time passes, incoherent goals will get merged, eventually into a consistent terminal goal. After this point a superintelligence will not change its terminal goal unless the change increases the expected utility of the old terminal goal, due to e.g. source code introspectors, (acausal) trading.
- ^
Partial Quote: In principle evolution would be fine with the terminal genes being replaced, it's just that it's computationally difficult to find a way to do so without breaking downstream dependencies.
- ^
Quote: The idea of a superintelligence having an arbitrary utility function doesn’t make much sense to me. It ultimately makes the superintelligence a slave to its utility function which doesn’t seem like the way a superintelligence would work.
- ^
I don't think it is possible to have multiple terminal goals and be consistent, so this is redundant.
The Fight For Slow And Boring Research (Article from Asterisk)
This article talks about how the US's federal (National Institutes of Health / National Science Foundation) funding cut for science starting from 2024/early 2025 may cause universities to create more legible research because other funders (philanthropies, venture capital, industry) value clear communication. This is a new idea to me.
What coding prompt (AGENTS.md / cursor rules / skills) do you guys use? It seems exceedingly difficult to find good ones. GitHub is full of unmaintained & garbage `awesome-prompts-123` repos. I would like to learn from other people's prompt to see what things AIs keep getting wrong and what tricks people use.
Here are mine for my specific Python FastAPI SQLAlchemy project. Some parts are AI generated, some are handwritten, should be pretty obvious. This is built iteratively whenever the AI repeated failed a type of task.
AGENTS.md
# Repository Guidelines
## Project Overview
This is a FastAPI backend for a peer review system in educational contexts, managing courses, assignments, student allocations, rubrics, and peer reviews. The
Raw feelings: I am kind of afraid of making reviews for LW. The writing prompt hints very high effort thinking. The vague memory of other people's reviews also feel high effort. The "write a short review" ask doesn't really counter this at all.
How I use AI for coding.
I wrote this in like 10 minutes for quick sharing.
- I am not a full time coder, I am a student who code like 15-20 hours a week.
- Investing too much time on writing good prompts make little sense. I go with the defaults and add pieces of nudges as needed. (See one of my AGENTS .md at the end)
- Mainly codex (cloud) and Cursor. Claude Code works, but being able to easily revert is helpful, so Cursor is better.
- I still try out claude code for small pieces of edits, but it doesnt feel worth it.
- I have no idea why people like claude code so much? CLI is inferior to
One of my pet peeves is that the dropcaps in gwern's articles are really, really offputting and most of the time unrecognizable, even though gwern's articles are so valuable that he has a lot of weirdness points in my head and I will still read his stuff regardless. Most of the time I just guess the first letter.
I hate dropcaps in general, but gwern's is the ugliest I have came by.
image source: https://gwern.net/everything
Explicitly welcomed:
- Help to develop the ideas
- Link to related concepts/pre-existing posts
- Writing critique of everything
Smallrig RC120B seems to be 53k lux not lumens. Perhaps it still works for a lightbox but probably not for general illumination.