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[silverspawn]

Anyway, for unrelated reasons that certainly have nothing to do with 1900, I will now retire chess until, say, the end of the month. It eats too much time. And 1905 is really solid anyway.

[silverspawn]

Here is the game with which I reached 1900. I hope you won't watch it since it is no more or less special than any other of the thousands of games I've played (in fact I clearly got outplayed so it's a bad choice to show), and it would be weird to watch a completely arbitrary game with no special significance whatsoever.

[silverspawn]

Step #1: play tic-toc against GPT-4.
Step #2: miss a win
Step #3: win anyway a turn later
Step #4: lose the game because GPT-4 wins on its next turn and doesn't care about my win
Step #5:
Step #6: Profit!

[Awaclus]

Here is the game with which I reached 1900. I hope you won't watch it

Well, the fact that it returns a 404 error makes it a lot more likely that things will turn out as you hope.

[silverspawn]

Yeah https://imgbb.com/ wasn't working and I used another site instead, which seemed to have killed the image after a few hours. Worked out very well!

[silverspawn]

the last book of the series of unfortunate events is so amazing

[silverspawn]

Evidence that image classifiers still don't understand the prompt:



I also suspect that they understand less than they could if they were optimized for it because understanding just isn't necessary for images. The complexity typically required for images is just much smaller than that for language, so you can really get away with just doing a rudimentary guess of what the human wants based on what words they use (and there the words appear and so on, it'll be more sophisticated, but less so than what LLMs do).

When Scott Alexander tested this about a year ago and concluded that they are almost perfect, he made the big mistake of (a) being too lenient, but also (b) asking for things that are typical, so the AI can just do the normal thing and get it right. That's why the bell has to be at the front leg, not around the neck. If I had asked it to wear it around the neck, it would have gotten it right by chance.

And yes, the spatial arrangement is also not right.

[silverspawn]

Again the big takeaway from LLMs and image classifiers that no one draws is how much you can do without understanding

[silverspawn]

So David Pakman said something that made me go back a little on age as a key factor for the next president. Which is simply that Biden will surround himself with very capable people. It sounds sort of obvious, but I never quite realized that, oh yeah, to the extent that Biden loses it cognitively, it will just increase the influence of his surroundings, which seem to be just fine. There's a difference between doing random shit and just sort of being slow.

Also Nikki Haley seems to consider exiting the Paris agreement, which is an extremely stupid idea so I might actually prefer Biden over her -- I realize this super doesn't matter for several reasons, but is something I've been thinking about a little.

That said, on the political side, I still feel like Republicans are making an idiotic choice by nominating Trump. If Haley was the nominee -- someone who's decisive, articulate, strong, a woman (which statistically does help with Democrats), and not insane -- I think she would be a significant favorite over Biden. Whereas with Trump, I continue to think Biden has the edge. Trump is just a weak candidate; this is what I think betting markets are largely not seeing. I think there's too much reversed stupidity / over-updating going on. In 2016, Trump won an election by .77% (that's the margin in the tipping point state) against a very weak candidate on top of a political scandal that came out at a maximally opportune time, and lost in 2020 by .6% as the incumbent against an okay candidate. And also did poorly in both mid terms. These are bad results. Despite his invincibility and stranglehold over his own party, he's empirically a weak general election candidate.

And there really is a thing where people freak out way more over poll results that show Republicans being ahead. People still seem to assume polling must have a Republican bias. I think there's more reason to suspect the opposite.

Then again, Biden is at 39% approval, which is kind of incredible (and without knowing the details, very weird).

[silverspawn]

*polling must have a democratic bias. Which means the results will be pro-republican relative to the polling, which is what I was thinking.

[silverspawn]

Based on the very limited things I've heard, and the fact that I've heard limited things, Biden seems to have done a surprisingly good job overall.

[silverspawn]

Been watching some professional tetris

Hot take: the community attracts autistic people. That may in fact be why they're so wholesome. You usually don't see people congratulating the player who just beat them with such consistency.

[silverspawn]

Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D04wb7P_v-4

[silverspawn]

I would love to be a professional tetris player. I won't be, but still. I used to play it in between prismata matches.

[silverspawn]

Something I've thought for a while now: patience is incredibly important.

Of course, patience is an overloaded term that refers to two different things. One of them is the observable behavior, which basically means that you don't complain if stuff takes long. This doesn't tell you what's really going on in someone's head though since you can be incredibly annoyed and still display social patience by just hiding your annoyance. Which, of course, is a necessary social skill and sth you'll have to do to some extent no matter what.

The other thing is the extent to which you get annoyed in the first place. With specific things, this depends a lot on expectations; it's much less annoying if someone is 30 minutes late if you already expected them to be 30 minutes late in the first place. Since people generally don't do stuff they they announce, that's also an important hack that I use all the time, but it's still not what I mean here.

What I do mean is basically patience as the absence of the buddhist notion of craving. It's about being generally fulfilled for no external reason vs. constantly wanting stuff. And this translates to observed patience in numerous instances across the day. Like the patience to watch a movie without clicking away or even to sit through a 30 second waiting screen without switching to another tab.

I increasingly view this as one of the main input variables for productivity if you're working without hard external pressure. It's just very very hard to work on something you don't need to work on in the constant presence of craving. Which means a very key skill is just to figure out how to curate a non-craving state of mind.

[silverspawn]

Meditation is sometimes sort of phrased as a practice to end craving but it's usually way to abstract imo, and all the concrete mechanisms of how it actually works are left out. Reducing craving isn't some ethereal goal that you can only attain with perfect enlightenment. And even when people talk about being mindful of craving and not acting on it, I actually don't think that's really hitting on the important stuff. Maybe some people can consistently escape craving that way, but I think most actual successes are based on changing your mind such that less craving arises.

[silverspawn]

The highest quality smash game ever played

[silverspawn]

I programmed a tetris that can be played with an N64 controller. Why? It's complicated. But it's kind of cool.

[silverspawn]

On Trump's health:

Mr. Trump posted a letter from Dr. Bruce A. Aronwald on Truth Social in which he says “he is pleased to report that President Trump’s overall health is excellent.”

[...]“President Trump has reduced his weight through an improved diet and continued daily physical activity while maintaining a rigorous schedule,”[...]

Trump's doctor saying his health is excellent is of course nonsense, but the thing that jumps out to me here is the weight loss. I think it's quite unlikely that Trump started improving his diet, and unintentional weight loss is a really bad sign afaik -- and GPT-4 agrees

[Awaclus]

Why? It's complicated.

[silverspawn]

The version of the Sam Altman story I've heard is that he made power grab (the last one in a series), the board decided they had to kick him out,  he blackmailed them, and now he's back on although the composition of the new board is still not clear. And that'll decide whether he's now in a better or worse position than before. If the new board primarily consists of adults, it'll be a loss for Altman. Regardless of how it plays out, he's the villain in the story.

[silverspawn]

Adult here means people who care about the fate of the world and have a reasonable model for how to achieve that goal.

[silverspawn]

Legitimate description, advanced academic poetry, or both?

[silverspawn]

I genuinely had no idea that there was a greek letter called Upsilon. Just about every other one sounds at least vaguely familiar. I guess it's pretty unusable in math since the upper and lowercase just look like Y and u or v, respectively. Though it would be funny if someone used



to denote three different vectors. u and v are already hard to tell apart in the standard math font, why not embrace the difficulty?

[Awaclus]

The version of the Sam Altman story I've heard is that he made power grab (the last one in a series), the board decided they had to kick him out,  he blackmailed them, and now he's back on although the composition of the new board is still not clear. And that'll decide whether he's now in a better or worse position than before. If the new board primarily consists of adults, it'll be a loss for Altman. Regardless of how it plays out, he's the villain in the story.

You've heard only one version of the Sam Altman story? I keep hearing new ones like every couple of hours or so.