yowayb

I hate ads until I need them, then I complain that the algorithms still suck. My wife recently reminded me I have to give Shopee time to surface good options when I don't have the exact words. I expect this to improve as their models improve.

I rode Waymo in SF recently and was impressed at how calm it was. We just got in and a guy on a bike was riding in the opposite direction, and the Waymo just stopped and waited for him to yell something, and we went on our way.

Unrelated, I asked Grok to "Generate ANSI art of the cover of the first issue of Iron Man War Machine" (I did this back in the BBS days for a friend's welcome screen) and it repeatedly outputs:

|_______|\n |_______|\n

It's been going for a minute and still going as I submit this comment

I'm grateful for low-level work, but what I really need is massive mocap datasets of cats moving so I can make a cat game with realistic motion (none of this walking on an invisible treadmill that rotates), and access to everyone's tax returns so I can make tax-filing software that actually works easily (for complex returns).

The hardest part about making a game is the art.

Tangent: many in IT and engineering don't work on soft skills. I hope this shows it's not that hard.

There are benefits to publishing certain things and hiding certain things. Even children know this (yes lying/hiding is an innate capability). The word "privacy" itself is almost as poorly defined (or overloaded terms perhaps) as "AI", yet nearly everything I see about these subjects take these terms in some absolute sense. I don't know how you can actually argue one way or another (binary!...there's actually many more than two ways to argue these topics).

It was always strange to me that scientists (people that are expected to be rigorous in their experimentation and analysis) would not include history in their analysis.

However, the Latin root of the word "science" is about cutting or taking something apart and zooming in. Perhaps another word is needed to describe the process of putting whatever is scientifically discovered within a larger context to account for so many variables that are ignored during the scientific process.

I personally suspect that all the biomarker stuff are really just the biochemical remnants of processes that begin at the sociocultural level.

How would X benefit from such an acquisition?

There are many things (I frankly don't think there's a more specific word for this) like diets and psychedelics where many of us (rigorously minded) are constantly seeking proofs within systems containing sufficient complexity to render conclusions nearly impossible.

No warm up but I was 35 yo

I must agree, but I think the global public's awareness has been shocked into growth. I find the biggest problem with social media is actually user error. Unfortunately social media apps have become so complex that many have given up on curating their feeds. This is critical. If you can tune your social media to show you _interesting_ things, you can stay informed, possibly get good context, and not lose your mind.

Fair question. There's no way to know rigorously but many friends have said it increased their base muscle permanently

No just 3 reps of each then out

I'm in Vietnam and have a bunch of extended family around. The key is social bonds. Outside of the kids' school/sports/arts they're allowed total freedom. And the variety of play (both on and offline) is astonishing. But the thing that stands out is that a good half of them are curled on a couch or hiding in a corner on their phones...and the parents don't care...because as soon as a parent asks for something to be done, the kid drops everything and jumps to do it.

By having real people around (that love them) they know that everything in the phone is less real.

I think Minimum Effective Dose applies. I quit most media for 4 years. The next 2 years were 2 hrs/day on Reddit for jokes. It was the best.

But 1 year into that, I read an article by Swyx on how to use social media. I tried but gave up for another 2 years. But the end of that last 2 years was the election...and I was curious...so I went to X.

Within 3 days my opinion of the outcome flipped.

And...since I already read Swyx's article, I was ready to effectively navigate other topics of interest.

But the key to effective media usage is to ALWAYS be on guard. Your mental filters have to be running all the time. The second you drop your guard, you're vulnerable because the stream never lets up.

But when you do this, you find that you quickly run out of truly interesting things to read. Luckily I've also got physical hobbies. I now spend a TOTAL of 2 hrs/day across all media, and my mental health is just fine!

But also I find it highly rewarding in many areas such as investing, history (the X format works so well!), international (language, culture, politics).

I also highly recommend taking a second to put each post in scale or context. This does 2 things: helps decide importance of post, and slows scrolling so your brain doesn't get DDOSed into a mental health crisis.

And the (increasingly cheap, powerful and ubiquitous) LLMs can be used to either save time or power you further into the conversations.

I spent most of college in the gym. I quickly hit my size limit. Strength seemed to improve slowly. Then I did a popular steroid cycle. Of course I got huge. 5 years later I did trenbolone so I got big AND strong.

But the relevant bit is 5 years after that, I tried 1/4 the dosage, plus only 15 minutes in the gym every day (1 set of 3-rep max of each of the major lifts). I got just as big, and was actually stronger than I had ever been thru the full dose cycles.

Outside of the gym, I regularly halve the dose of any prescriptions or suggested dose of recreational drugs. A friend even told me he saw a Buddhist monk take a tiny shot of liquor and sit and meditate on that single shot for hours.

And finally, if I may take a sad turn, my father got trigeminal neuralgia but he's largely avoided all drugs all his life, so the standard dose hits him way too hard.

Those of us in the west tend to forget that much of what we see is a form of propaganda, whether by governments or businesses, or even a large number of people. When you keep this in mind, everything you see becomes an opinion and your mind can comfortably (or at least not emotionally/hurriedly) form your own opinion over time.

I think the fundamental conceit that underlies all the surprise at AI's progress is that we humans rely more on figuring things out than mere chance. Trial and error is a huge part of human (indeed of all beings) progress.

Haven't read the entire interview yet, but I have to say so far it has been very helpful.

Isn't this why magnetism is used to contain plasma in stellerators?

Cool game, but it's an infinite arms race, plus bugs. It's important, as an individual, to approach every interface carefully, even one's you're already familiar with.

The meanings of both life and intelligence have been obscured by human conceit. We simply cannot accept that we came from what is essentially a random process over eons (which makes it no less extraordinary, but imo far more understandable). The science and math of LLMs and GPTs has been around for a while, but it took time and effort (people putting stuff online plus GPUs) to finally make it usable.

I find most fiction to be a weak substitute for life, but I found the ending of Twin Peaks (when Agent Cooper is turned by The Lodge) profound

Interesting! I have no evidence but I got the impression that Turkiye's sugar industry (the richest man owns Ülker, a confectionary conglomerate) was unnaturally large and not always that way...

True. Small frauds are common. I know people that have gotten away with pump-dumps. I know people that have raised obscene money for terrible ideas. I even helped close one customer while at one company, and then when I moved to another company, I had to meet the same buyer and he chewed me out in front of my rep because of the shady deal from my last company. And I even had a customer that kinda defrauded us! And when I was younger, I saw a lot of tiny behaviors that might be considered fraudulent if looked at from the angle of a transaction. I had to stop working for a while because it was destroying my soul. Nate says there was no danger or specific reason to close, but I very much doubt this.

Somewhat tangential, but a big part of math proficiency is varied repetition (eg, Kumon's practice sheets where you repeat the same operation with different numbers) and you can almost just make these yourself now.

There's a guy on X named Gad Saad writing a book called "suicidal empathy". I think this term captures it better than "wokeness".

It's not just the USA. Vietnam and Turkiye use lots of sugar in non-traditional foods while Thailand has included palm sugar in even their traditional foods for as long as I can remember.

Community, exercise, species-appropriate diet, and psychological richness also reduce the risk of Alzheimer's and a variety of neurological disorders.