Gwern

Philosophical fiction or a prose poem about suffering innocents and the theodicy In the bestiaries of Borges are always to be found some mention, however oblique, of the Tzadikim Nistarim , the sadly...

Poem about man & his machines. “How long will this last? I’m so tired of these games.” «We’ve only begun; how is it the same? Just wait and this soon will pass.

Once long ago in the dawn of the World, when all tastes were more savory than now, all smells more pungent, all hues more brilliantly dazzling, when tigers smoked pipes—Panther was lying by a road in...

But of course, we use ‘respect’ in contexts other than historical discussions or when talking about accomplishments (“I really respect Jimmy’s ability to long-jump 13 feet!”).

Poem about Hal Finney announcing beginning tracheostomy before dying of ALS. He will die outside, he says.

There is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. Oscar Wilde The morality of books has long been a debated question.

Poem on memory inspired by the anime Angel Beats! ; do you remember love?

So. It came to pass that I should read a slim book within my library, pushed back by neglect.

In 2007 19ya , Haskell began to experience some real growth; one of the new users was myself.

Comics using the format of Ryan North’s Dinosaur Comics When I was a high-schooler, I greatly enjoyed Ryan North’s formalist Dinosaur Comics ; I was impressed by how much he could do within the...

Around 1200 B.C. (the story goes) the Greek forces were gathering in preparation for their assault on the city of Troy.

[ Animerica volume 4, issue 2; PDF scan ] [caption left: “ otaku : (oh-TAH-koo) n. Term used to refer to fanatical devotees of anime or manga.

A chapter in a fanfiction reminded me of an old philosophical point about contradictions and tautologies—that they imply everything else.

For lack of diagrams, I represent the graphs of elemental transformation textually. A directed graph has nodes. A node is bi- or uni-directional.

Was it that different from what had gone before? There was no shortage of Gunbuster or Nadia merchandising, and General Products did a lot of merchandising for other series.

Back of envelope financial calculations: Warranties, fine; insurance, no! Consider the poor consumer considering ‘insurance’.

[Page 19] [Image, right, of Hideaki Anno with short black hair, thin mustache and beard, wearing a hoodie vest, rolled-up over long-sleeved white shirt, flashing a V-sign.

And if we accept #1, we’re saying that no one will ever attain the heights of power necessary to simulate worlds—that the necessary computing power will not come into existence.

Network effects & benefits of gritting one’s teeth & submitting to a Wikipedia’s rules, rather than using Wikia or one’s own site. “You also raise an interesting point about specialized wikis.

by Noi Sawaragi Translated by Linda Hoaglund [pg187] Caption right, opposite page: Godzilla , 1954 72ya , Film poster, Approx.

The thief of time gives us memories, the safecracker of hearts restores them. I sent away for: a four year course (Bachelor of Science)— certified, cheap, easy, genuine.

There are so many tools one could use, it’s not always clear what software to pick in the open source world.

Archiving using Wikipedia Recent Changes RSS feed (obsolete).

The anime/manga Death Note is interesting on many levels.

Suppose we have levels which are specified by a pair of numbers and then a long list of numbers, often very repetitious.

Cynical tactics encouraged by Wikipedia’s abdication of thought known as ‘No Original Research’ and ‘Reliable Sources’ One of the most distasteful aspects of Wikipedia editing these days...

Google’s Wikipedia-killer, Google Knol , has passed some anniversaries; in January 2009 17ya , it reached its 6-month anniversary.

[pg62] [Image caption, left top: “It’s not clear if bitcoin is legal, but there is no company in control and no one to arrest.

[pg208] How do you write stories too big for one book? That is the question I am supposed to answer here, and I ought to confess at once that I may know no more about it than you do.

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game SF novel is famous, and its ending well-known: the protagonist Ender Wiggin is tricked into commanding a pre-emptive invasion fleet which destroys all the enemy...

The unexpected critical depths of a single throw-away scene In the 3 rd episode of Full Metal Panic! The Second Raid , there is a curious introductory scene I’ve always enjoyed .

Multilevel modeling of effect of small group’s meditation on math errors A small group of Quantified Selfers tested themselves daily on arithmetic and engaged in a month of meditation.

Munch on this conspiracy theory: just as The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya is actually about how Kyon is god and not Haruhi (see The Melancholy of Kyon ), so the true story behind Aria has to do with...

This interview was published in the 2003 23ya Japanese book RahXephon Complete (ISBN 4840110190); it has not been officially translated, but the ANF user Vir arranged for a rough translation.

[ "logo boring" , "https://github.com/" , "/plans" , "/explore" , "/features" , "/blog" , "/login?return_to=https://github.

Game theory on BSD versus GPL: partnership? Is GPL an evolutionary stable strategy against invasion by proprietary copyright strategies?

Why Wikipedia and YouTube will never be integrated. Criticisms of Wikipedia tend to fall into 2 categories—the clueless and the cliche.

by Toshio Okada & Kaichiro Morikawa; moderated by Takashi Murakami , and translated & annotated by Reiko Tomii [pg165] [Figure opposite: From DiGiCharat 1999 27ya TV anime series] Figure right...

‘Lolicon’ opened the door to increasingly explicit representations of minors involved in all manner of sexual acts with other minors as well as with adults.

Has Google Alerts been sending fewer results the past few years? Yes.

The first time you see the Silk Road website there’s a creaking disconnect between your eyes and all the evidence they deliver, and your preconceptions up to that point.

No longer a child, not yet an adult… Being “fourteen years old” symbolizes problems of the heart.

Do mindless positive/negative comments skew article quality ratings up and down?

The published work left by this novelist is easily listed.

Waka/haiku on Genshiken , clubs, and Comiket; allusions to Fujiwara no Teika and Shōtetsu.

Email interview with McCaleb on early history of his MtGox, verifying it did not trade real but online Magic cards In February 2014 12ya , the Bitcoin exchange site MtGox began collapsing due to an...

Copyright considered paradoxical, incoherent, and harmful from an information theory and compression perspective as there is no natural kind corresponding to ‘works’, merely longer or shorter strings...

Descartes’s God is pantheism; a reductio ad absurdum of his ontology In Meditation 3 of Rene Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy , Descartes demonstrates the existence of God in several ways.

This transcript has been prepared from a PDF scan of pages 9–10, 40, 52–53, 70, & 88 of Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture , edited by Takashi Murakami, published 2005-05-15, ISBN...

Break down survival as Drake equation, see how plastination differs from cryonics, try to calculate advantage No man is an iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of...

Spirulina users’ randomized trial on self-rated allergy symptoms: null result. The supplement Spirulina has been suggested to help allergy symptoms.

I discuss melatonin’s effects on sleep & its safety with research up to 2015 11ya ; I segue into the general benefits of sleep and the severely disrupted sleep of the modern Western world, the cost...

I was reading a new blog, ribbonfarm.com by the interesting Venkatesh Rao, because one post on the true organization of corporations had been linked approvingly on LessWrong ; he presents a lifecycle...

Compiling academic and media forecaster’s 2012 American Presidential election predictions and statistically judging correctness; Nate Silver was not the best.

Art lovers sometimes write or talk as if economic costs do not matter.

An LLLT user’s blinded randomized self-experiment in 2013 on the effects of near-infrared light on a simple cognitive test battery: positive results A short randomized & blinded self-experiment on...

https://forum.evageeks.org/post/437636/Evangelion-20-CRC-Anno-Interview/#437636 The response to the “Break” [ Evangelion 2.

# gather and clean data weather1 <- read.csv ( "https://www.wunderground.com/history/airport/KISP/2012/2/16/CustomHistory.

Online education like Khan Academy has been hailed as a major innovation which will revolutionize higher & lower education, educate students better, and cut costs.

How would we estimate the evidence of “Charley Parlapanides” ? The names of the writers could either be: present and wrong Very strong evidence it is fake: who puts their own name down wrong?

A precis of my old work on the English Wikipedia, 2004–2017 (edit counts, articles by subject, and particularly notable articles)

The first thing to note is that taking his data, converting to long format, and plotting it: melon <- read.csv ( stdin (), header= TRUE ) Date,Exercise,Bitter.Melon,Read.wake,Read .10 am,Read .

Once upon a time, there was a city fair to look upon in a black forest. It was ruled by the strong and just Scion Prince, who was beloved by all the townsfolk.

Still, 7% is not negligible - there is still a chance that we are making a mistake in not using the new boxes, as we did get evidence suggesting the new boxes are better.

Notes relating to my use of a treadmill desk and 2 self-experiments showing walking treadmill use interferes with typing and memory performance.

Self-experiment on whether consuming caffeine immediately upon waking results in less time in bed & higher productivity. The results indicate a small and uncertain effect.

Vitamin D is a hormone endogenously created by exposure to sunlight; due to historically low outdoors activity levels, it has become a popular supplement and I use it.

The first night (10/12) involved falling asleep in 30 minutes rather than my usual 19.6±11.9, waking up 12 times (5.9±3.4), and spending ~90 minutes awake (18.1±16.

China & Egypt used wooden pillows; my recreations fail My major experiment the summer of 2009 17ya was experimenting with various polyphasic sleep schedules.

After putting up with slow glitchy WiFi Internet for years, I investigate improvements.

Some years ago my family was in Pittsburgh, where we were visiting my sister for Easter. At the time she was a student at Carnegie Mellon University.

Can terrorist motives be taken at face-value? No. There is a commonly-believed “strategic model” of terrorism which we could describe as follows: ‘terrorists are people who are ideologically...

A few honest men are better than numbers. Oliver Cromwell , letter to Sir William Spring (September 1643 383ya ) If we were bees, ants, or Lacedaemonian warriors, to whom personal fear does not exist...

On the last day, the aliens took the iron. They settled in a polar orbit, and slowly stripped the world of its mettle.

The unprecedented gap in Methods of Rationality updates prompts musing about whether readership is increasing enough & what statistics one would use; I write code to download FF.

Is sleep affected by the phase of the moon? An analysis of several years of 4 Zeo users’ sleep data shows no lunar cycle.

Iodine improves IQ in fetuses; adults as well? A meta-analysis of relevant studies says no.

So going back to our problem. Our problem is that we want to take all the articles of the English Wikipedia, somehow extract all the external links from said articles, transform those URLs according...

The following materials were published in the 2011 15ya Right Stuf boxset release of Revolutionary Girl Utena ( 1 , 2 , 3 ); they were produced at various dates 1997 – 14 2011 15ya .

Emails in 2009 between Wei Dai and Satoshi Nakamoto discussing Bitcoin draft proposal and B-money.

A retrospective of 8 years of SoC, and lessons learned A compilation of Haskell -related student projects 2006 – 7 2013 13ya , with evaluations of their usefulness to the Haskell community, thoughts...

Brain emulation requires enormous computing power; enormous computing power requires further progression of Moore’s law ; further Moore’s law relies on large-scale production of cheap processors in...

It is interesting to apply probability theory in various situations in which we can’t always reduce it to numbers very well, but still it shows automatically what kind of information would be...

Local archives are useful for personal purposes, but sometimes, in investigations that may be controversial, you want to be able to prove that the copy you downloaded was not modified and you need...

—by Gene Wolfe …The next morning, when we had eaten and everyone was awake, I ventured to ask Foila if it was now time for me to judge between Melito and Hallvard.

Optimal choice of which bets to make and how much to offer is simplified by the upper bound of 18 years, the high probability that most bet offers will be declined, the inability to reinvest gains...

The R survival library supports the usual right/left-censoring but also the interval-censoring.

I discuss my beliefs about Quantified Self , and demonstrate with a series of single-subject design self-experiments using a Zeo.

Daily ratings: mp <- na.omit ( read.csv ( "~/selfexperiment/mp.

A randomized blinded self-experiment of the effects of ZMA (zinc+magnesium+vitamin B6) on my sleep; results suggest small benefit to sleep quality but are underpowered and damaged by Zeo measurement...

It is of course possible for a new mutation to be fitter or for the environment to change and render some alternative more fit. This is sometimes true, but it is overwhelmingly usually false.

Modafinil is better, but the problem is that a number of forms are patented, and in addition, it’s a proscribed drug in the US & Canada.

Analysis of 2013–2014 LessWrong survey results on how much more self-identified EAers donate suggests low median donation rates due to current youth and low incomes.

…More interesting was the fact that Heptapod B was changing the way I thought.

increase from 1 month to 2 months ‘A “reason for stopping modafinil” if applicable question could yield some interesting insight.

#!/usr/bin/Rscript # attempt to load a library implementing the Bradley-Terry model for inferring rankings based on # comparisons; if it doesn't load, try to install it through R's in-language...

Autonomous AI systems (Agent AIs) trained using reinforcement learning can do harm when they take wrong actions, especially superintelligent Agent AIs.

Literary analysis of the light novel/anime series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya : Haruhi is not God, Kyon is The light novel series The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya , featuring a character named...

A time dilation tool from an anime is discussed for its practical use on Earth; there seem surprisingly few uses and none that will change the world, due to the severe penalties humans would incur...

The cypherpunk movement laid the ideological roots of Bitcoin and the online drug market Silk Road; balancing previous emphasis on cryptography, I emphasize the non-cryptographic market aspects of...

After reviewing hits and reading all the relevant looking papers and following citations, the most useful were: The overall thrust of the meta-analyses is that there is consistent and substantial...

2011 essay on how Bitcoin’s long gestation and early opposition indicates it is an example of the ‘Worse is Better’ paradigm in which an ugly complex design with few attractive theoretical properties...

The odds against today were insurmountable, until it happened. If you can’t take the first step, take the second.

English Wikipedia is in decline. As a long-time editor & former admin, I was deeply dismayed by the process.

set.seed ( 7777 ) # for reproducible numbers # TODO : factor out common parts of `png` (& make less square), and `rma` calls library (XML) dnb <- readHTMLTable ( colClasses...

Google Surveys, as mentioned, doesn’t seem to support any elegant way of repeating a series of questions, so I hardcoded questions for up to 5 cats, producing a ‘wide’ survey format in which each row...

We can approximate it with our pre-existing value function for a known stopping time/edge/max wealth, sampling from the posterior; for example, we might draw 1000 values from 𝒩(300,25), the Pareto,...

This is an interactive JS-based visualization of the difference in optimization potentials of a single-stage pipeline vs a multi-stage pipeline, in which new samples/measurements can be generated at...

A record of nootropics I have tried, with thoughts about which ones worked and did not work for me.

The idea of iterated embryo selection —conducing multiple generations of embryo selection in a petri dish by exploiting gametogenesis or stem cells—has a complicated history.

by William Gibson , TATE , pg108, issue 1, September/October 2002 From bottom to top: how to make hikaru dorodango , shiny balls of mud. Courtesy Association of Nippon Dorodango Science, Japan .

The future of technology isn’t what it used to be—a discussion of the collapse of Japanese influence on technology & design.

In the dusk, a tradesman dressed entirely in fuligin walked slowly through the lanes of that bright city. The many citizens gave him a berth, but not a wide one: death was a necessary craft too.

I lived near a sump as a child, and on the fringe grew a mulberry tree.

In the year 454 after the Hegira of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), the Blessed Calif Rashid-ad-Din, Lion of the Faithful, Commander of the Guardians of the Flock, Protector of the...

C : Many things in life are low odds. Let’s just say “is possible for it to become a human being”. That sounds reasonable to me.

A char-RNN is simple: during training, it takes a binary blob (its memory or “hidden state”) and tries to predict a character based on it and a new binary blob; that binary blob gets fed back in to a...

In the four chapters of this concluding section, themes of the previous section are carried further and brought into contact with common social dilemmas and, eventually, the current world situation.

It is seldom, if ever, that human beings are not actively searching for something.

set.seed ( 7777 ) # for reproducible numbers library (survival) library (randomForest) library (boot) library (randomForestSRC) library (prodlim) # for 'sindex' call library (rms) # Generate Google...

Western liberal socialist capitalism is the attractor state for industrialized humanity for the foreseeable future, and that barring existential risks etc.

Designed formal notations & distinct vocabularies are often employed in STEM fields, and these specialized languages are credited with greatly enhancing research & communication.

In cryptography, it is easy to adjust encryption of data so that one, some, or all people can decrypt it, or some combination thereof.

[pg3] Evaluations of social programs have a long history, as history goes in the social sciences, but it has been only in the last two decades that evaluation has come close to becoming a routine...

So once we are interested in prediction markets and would like to try them out, we need to pick one. There are several.

When should one review? In the morning? In the evening? Any old time?

He was right, though NASA preferred the less flowery term “space euphoria.

Or to put it perhaps more clearly, for a fixed amount of computation, at each greater level of intelligence, a smaller increase in intelligence can be realized with that amount of computation.

Silk Road 1 2011-01-31 2013-10-02 FALSE raided TRUE silkroadvb5piz3r.

A classic cognitive bias in technological forecasting is motivated-stopping and lack of imagination in considering possibilities for a steelman .

After running out of socks one day, I reflected on how ordinary tasks get neglected.

Human and animal sunk costs often aren’t, and sunk cost bias may be useful on an individual level to encourage learning.

4 Australians were arrested for trying to buy guns from US LE-controlled seller “weaponsguy” February - March 2015 11ya , searches also turning up “Four illegal firearms, ammunition, two clandestine...

Every human is different in a myriad of ways, from their memories to their personality to their skills or knowledge to intelligence and cognitive abilities to moral and political values.

1963 Yuki no Taiyou Sanae F Japanese American 1964 Cyborg 009 Joe Shimamura M American Japanese brown brown TVTropes says “half-Japanese (mother), half-American (father), and in the manga he was...

catnip <- read.csv ( stdin (), header= TRUE ) Family,Genus,Species,Name,Study, Year, Responders, N, Country, Sex, Breed Felidae,Panthera,leo,African lion,McElvain et...

Our legions are brim-full, our cause is ripe. The enemy increaseth every day. We, at the height, are ready to decline.

Computer “Generalized Problematic Internet Use Scale 2” (GPIUS-2) total 0.00 Hahn et al 2017 Computer “Problematic Internet Use Scale” (PIUS) total 0.

Some early experimental studies with LSD suggested that doses of LSD too small to cause any noticeable effects may improve mood and creativity.

Criticizing studies and statistics is hard in part because so many criticisms are possible, rendering them meaningless.

Hunter Elementary is a small elementary school in New York City enrolling ~50 students each year starting in preschool/kindergarten since the 1940s, who then typically enroll in the associated Hunter...

I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering...

Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant.

In keeping with its gradual rollout plan, observing no particular misuse in the wild (aside from a few anecdotes about content mills), OpenAI released the final and largest model, GPT-2-1.

When put this way, one might wonder how to improve the design of simple randomized experiments : if you have a group with too many women and too few men, why not change your coin flip to instead...

Ashirgo: “To be honest, I do not feel any obvious difference. There are moments in which I perceive a significant improvement, though, as well as particulars task which are much easier now.

The metal lithium is a well-known mood stabilizer & suicide preventive widely used in psychiatry. It is also a trace mineral present to various levels in all drinking water and much food.

I have noticed I seem to be unusually willing to bite the correlation ≠ causation bullet, and I think it’s due to an idea I had some time ago about the nature of reality.

Mainstream science is flawed: seriously mistaken statistics combined with poor incentives has led to masses of misleading research.

The earlier melatonin experiment found somewhat weak effects with >100 days of data, and one would expect that actually consuming 1.

1 Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy, #1) Marlon James 2019 3.49 3.323 2 Space Opera Catherynne M. Valente 2018 3.50 2.714 3 Little, Big John Crowley 1981 3.83 2.

Because of the potential to select for arbitrarily many generations, IES (or equally powerful methods like genome synthesis) can deliver arbitrarily large net gains—raising the question of what one...

It’s a GAN AI, and it just sits there, endlessly generating fake anime characters along with gibberish anime story-plots. Bruce Sterling The full GPT-2-1.

To expand the ABC GPT-2 model to cover a wider variety of musical genres, I turn to the next-most compact widespread music encoding format: MIDI .

Hydrocephalus is a damaging brain disorder where fluids compress the brain, sometimes drastically decreasing its volume.

Climb Mount Improbable Richard Dawkins created a series of computer programs in the 1980s designed to show how evolution works. This interactive site is based on his original code.

The enduring phenomenon of holy wars in computing, such as the bitterness around the prolonged Python 2 to Python 3 migration, is not due to mere pettiness or love of conflict, but because they are...

Description of 3 anime datasets for machine learning based on Danbooru: cropped anime faces, whole-single-character crops, and hand crops (with hand detection model).

Chemicals active at the nanogram scale are invisible, difficult to observe, and near-impossible to clean or remove; but they are still psychoactive enough to torment you like demons.

[pg2] Dear Major Grosjean, I have written RAND concerning the machine description. This was handwritten and was sent to NSA late last spring, I believe, or sent to someone there.

Creative works or vaporware that survive ‘ development hell ’ often disappoint those waiting for them, and often are among the worst things their creators ever make.

Of course, music and animation need something worthwhile to adorn; you can have individual elements of music, animation, kindness, honesty etc.

[pg18–21] When I was a kid, I don’t think I was quite the geek I am now. As far back as I can remember, television was always a part of home life.

Setting this up in JS turned out to be a little tricky since there is no built-in function for getting day-of-year or for hashing numbers/strings; so rather than spend another 10 lines copy-pasting...

To test out the water, I ran three BigGAN experiments: I first experimented with retraining the ImageNet 128px model.

translated by Linda Hoaglund [pg98–99] The scent of summer is a kamikaze [divine wind] A vanished future dreams of tomorrow Gleaming wings, a terrified profile Feigning blissful ignorance when we all...

Used Glow ( Kingma & Dhariwal 2018 ) official implementation . Due to the enormous model size (4.

Because there is no real original in this world but one’s life.

A number of other datasets are known to exist but are unavailable or available only in restricted form, including: law enforcement scrapes (see the Force briefing ), seized server images National...

Some interesting links on local optima/greediness/risk-aversion/creative destruction (eg. Porter hypothesis or equity premium puzzle), sometimes demonstrated by disasters.

Compilation of links demonstrating that it is common to find order-of-magnitude speedups in software, especially when designed carefully for (extraordinarily powerful) contemporary computer hardware...

Defining the security/hacker mindset as extreme reductionism: ignoring the surface abstractions and limitations to treat a system as a source of parts to manipulate into a different system, with...

Any ‘computer’ is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts.

Programming folklore notes that one way to get better lossless compression efficiency is by the precompression trick of rearranging files inside the archive to group ‘similar’ files together and...

Review of DARPA history book, Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983 – 10 1993 33ya , Roland & Shiman 2002 , which reviews a large-scale DARPA effort to jumpstart...

In MLP:FiM, the 3 pony races sometimes bear offspring of other pony races; I review 4 complicated Mendelian models attempting to explain this, and note that a standard polygenic liability-threshold...

Links on the circularity and mimetic desire basis of fashions in consumer goods, ideologies, politics, organizations like academia, religion etc.

A list of examples of claims I have had the misfortune to spend time looking into which, on closer investigation, turned out to vanish with the dew: Most discussions of Thomas Robert Malthus are...

Did John Calhoun’s 1960s Mouse Utopia really show that animal (and human) populations will expand to arbitrary densities, creating socially-driven pathology and collapse?

In looking at historical paintings & statues, I’ve always been struck by how, athletes & warriors look subpar by contemporary standards (eg.

I try to trace back “Littlewood’s Law of Miracles” to its supposed source in Littlewood’s A Mathematician’s Miscellany .

Incompetence is the norm; most people who engage in a task (even when incentivized for performance or engaging in it for countless hours) may still be making basic errors which could be remedied with...

[ { "query" : [ 0 , 0 ] , "sample0" : [ 27 , 91 , 437 , 1659 , 5239 , 91 , 29 , 55 , 25 , 23349 , 198 , 51 , 25 , 14874 , 1252 , 25308 , 22495 , 198 , 44 , 25 , 17 , 14 , 19 , 198 , 43 , 25 , 16 , 14 ...

Cookbook of code for common selection & order statistics scenarios in economics, psychology, decision theory, drug development etc.

A useful variation on AI Dungeon -style (AID) text games would be to turn them into shared public game trees of pre-generated options which the player selects...

Pain is a curious thing. Why do we have painful pain instead of just a more neutral painless pain, when it can backfire so easily as chronic pain, among other problems?

Alice Sheldon’s SF short story ‘The Screwfly Solution’ is misread by most readers as an alien attack driving men to insane violence; a closer revisionist read shows that the alien attack...

Transcript prepared from pages 44–51 of RahXephon: The Motion Picture booklet, 2004 22ya ADV release. Discussion between Mamoru Oshii & Yutaka Izubuchi .

Skip to main content

Frank Herbert’s SF Dune series features as a central mechanic a multi-millennium human eugenics breeding program by the Bene Gesserit, which produces the main character, Paul Atreides, with...

Does creatine increase cognitive performance? Maybe for vegetarians but probably not. I attempt to meta-analyze conflicting studies about the cognitive benefits of creatine supplementation.

To quickly visualize this dump, here’s 100 random lines from 1,000 random files: find .

Cloning is widely used in animal & plant breeding despite steep costs due to its advantages; more unusual recent applications include creating entire polo horse teams and reported trials of cloning...

Space Battleship Yamato ( 1974 52ya ) Finishing Macross and going back still further to its influences, we arrive at one of the wellsprings of SF anime: Space Battleship Yamato .

Online & mainstream media and social networking have become increasingly misleading as to the state of the world by focusing on ‘stories’ and ‘events’ rather than trends and averages.

GPT-3, announced by OpenAI in May 2020, is the largest neural network ever trained, by over an order of magnitude.

A logically-valid argument which takes the form of a modus ponens may be interpreted in several ways; a major one is to interpret it as a kind of reductio ad absurdum , where by ‘proving’ a...

A classic pattern in technology economics, identified by Joel Spolsky, is layers of the stack attempting to become monopolies while turning other layers into perfectly-competitive markets which are...

What is the “collecting mentality”? Is it a dimension of which hoarding is the extreme?

How do researchers transition from uncritically absorbing research papers or arguments to actively grappling with it and questioning it?

Gotham . Night. Fading stars peep through the smog. “On any ordinary summer night, the Tombs Gotham Waterworks would be silent as the broken stones of their namesake, save for the gurgle of water...

Countless genres of art start in appropriating objects long incubated in subcultures for originally practical purposes, often becoming fashionable and collectible because no longer practically...

While some recent SMPY papers have made a splash, most SMPY-relevant publications are obscure, scattered, published in books decades ago, and there is no single bibliography providing descriptions of...

“How study design affects outcomes in comparisons of therapy.

GPT-3, announced in May 2020 by OpenAI , was a breakthrough in neural net modeling of natural language and natural-language-related tasks; the June 2020 API opened up GPT-3 use to outsiders,...

This RNN progressed steadily over time, although by the end the performance on the held-out validation dataset seem to have been stagnating when I plot the validation...

The memoized function has 3 arguments, so memoising on the fly would seem to be the best one could do, since one cannot precompute all possible combinations of the n /mean/SD.

Timothy Falcon’s quantitative-finance interview problem #14 asks for the optimal stopping strategy when playing a card-drawing game of l cards where red = +$1 & black = −$1; the value approaches 0.

Complete supported tag list (excluding individual characters, which are tagged...

Systems stress-test page for Gwern.net functionality, a sandbox for exercising Markdown/HTML/CSS/JS features at scale to check that they render correctly in mobile/desktop.

A catalogue of software constructs, languages, or APIs which are unexpectedly Turing-complete; implications for security and reliability.

A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.

A gallery of typographic and graphics design examples of rubrication, a classic pattern of using red versus black for emphasis.

What is the “afterglow effect” ( 1 / 2 , /r/hangovereffect ) where some people with ADHD-like symptoms report abrupt temporary relief during the hangover the next morning after consuming large...

What did he make of those problems? Newton declined to commit his beliefs to publication, but an interesting summary survives thanks to a relative of his.

Archiving the Web, because nothing lasts forever: statistics, online archive services, extracting URLs automatically from browsers, and creating a daemon to regularly back up URLs to multiple sources.

Anime in the 1980s–1990s was famous for its diversity and edgy content like sex & violence, enabling the early careers of famous directors.

For private Twitter accounts, follow requests must be approved manually by the private account.

The copypasta lends itself to be written in many domains (see the /r/NavySealCopypasta ).

By this point in the run, it’s 3AM Pacific Time and no one is watching the TensorBoard logs when HQU suddenly groks a set of tasks (despite having zero training loss on them), undergoing a phase...

Presenting a tag’s contents in a logical order— sorting by semantic similarity , which looks like a “sort by magic”: But we can go further.

Statistical folklore asserts that “everything is correlated”: in any real-world dataset, most or all measured variables will have non-zero correlations, even between variables which appear to be...

A 1974 52ya Richard Feynman speech recounts an anecdote about a scientist, Mr Young, who in 1937 89ya discovered serious flaws in rat maze-running psychology research: the rats were using information...

Proposal for incentivizing meta-learning of exploration in deep reinforcement learning: domain randomization with reward-shaping, where there is a fixed-length ‘play time’ with no rewards/losses at...

In order to make the information in the talk more widely available, the tape recording that was made of that talk was carefully transcribed [in 1986 ?] .

Is it possible to prove the existence of retrocognition if precognition also exists, because precognition could be used to foresee any proof found of retrocognition?

Catalogue of errors or problems caused by cats randomly doing things (ie. real-life fuzz testing).

I review John Bradshaw’s book on domestic cat psychology, Cat Sense , after difficulties with my own cat.

Heather Murphy, “Why Stanford Researchers Tried to Create a ‘Gaydar’ Machine” (NYT), 2017-10-09: So What Did the Machines See? Dr. Kosinski and Mr.

Blockchains or tokens for carbon dioxide removal have sometimes been proposed, but provide little advantage.

Fonts are a rare highlight in software design—stable, with well-defined uses, highly-compatible software stacks, and long-lived.

A description of advanced tips and tricks for effective Internet research of papers/books, with real-world examples.

Analytics traffic records 485,524 page-views by 251,483 unique visitors over the 182 days, or 2,667 page-views per day for an increase of +365 page-views a day compared to the previous 6 months.

Miscellaneous waka/haiku, by season Verses composed on particular occasions: None remain to see, under pouring skies, the first strawberry ripen Long after petting the armies of black insects march...

Cats are not humans, but we design things like they are, for our convenience.

Now that the acronym generation is working, we can look at GPT-4’s revised whole script, which it prints out as follows: This code looks reasonable, and appears to run successfully.

The 2007 19ya film Timecrimes shows the horror & metaphysical implications of stable time loops: over a single day, the protagonist commits escalating crimes while trapped in a 3-iteration loop...

In the sprawling Star Wars Expanded Universe (EU), one of the most memorable characters was Grand Admiral Thrawn .

What is most interesting is the intellectual history we can extract from it in terms of inventing heritability and as important, one of the inventions of progress in the gradual realization that...

For serious ideas, see my project wishlist ; and also my list of open research questions .

Annotations sorted by machine learning into inferred 'tags' . This provides an alternative way to browse: instead of by date order, one can browse in topic order.

John Irving ( Paris Review interview ) appears to write mostly in the morning to afternoon: A novel is such a long involvement; when I’m beginning a book, I can’t work more than two or three hours a...

Italics are preserved from the original. I have added hyperlink references for obscurer terminology or references, & links to later commentary sections: As I was reading last night—reading a book, I...

Me [when yoga instructor demonstrates the bhujapidasana asana ]: “Weird flex but OK.

Thomas [the protagonist] shrugged. “Why? For starters.

Description of a useful service for web development: a website which wraps a neural network trained to classify images by whether they would look better inverted in a website/app dark-mode, or faded.

Generative modeling proposal for increasing diversity of samples by a helper NN memorizing past samples and ‘repelling’ new samples away from old ones.

The primary purpose of Utext is to generate the coolest output, so the main challenge is just achieving any of the suggestions above.

Western TV animation is often shockingly ugly and crude compared to other animation like French or Japanese. Why, when it’s not even cheaper? Degenerate echoes of what were once cutting-edge art.

# On the Impossibility of Superintelligent Rubik’s Cube Solvers Abstract: This paper argues that superintelligent machines will never be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube as well as a human being can.

Annotations sorted by machine learning into inferred 'tags' . This provides an alternative way to browse: instead of by date order, one can browse in topic order.

criticism of teeth-removal experiment in rats https://www.lesswrong.

Proposal to create a ‘search engine’ like OEIS but for individual numbers, allowing fuzzy lookups, by training a neural net embedding on the scientific & mathematic literature’s corpus of...

As well as asking about doing podcasts, people sometimes ask me whether I am going to write a book or turn Gwern.net into a book.

Matt Levine is the most well-known newslettrist ( “Money Stuff” ) in the financial industry, having blogged or written since 2011 15ya , finding his niche in popularization after stints in Wall...

Acne is a good way to learn self-experiments for teenagers. I offer tips on what one could do, and an initial list of crowdsourced interventions to test from CureTogether.

Choose-Your-Own-Adventure generative fiction for efficiency/editing (2021-06-06) CYOA generative fiction Try directly optimizing reward generation (2019-12-16): backpropping reward...

How close does formal mathematical proof empirically come to perfection?

Midjourneyv5 prompts: Capital letter T in simple blackletter, monochrome, abstract, German, machine clockwork, simplistic vector art, typography, Dave gibbons, robotic expressionism, mid-century...

One idea for more precise English writing which I think could be usefully revived is broader use of subscripts .

Discussion of whether there is a general ‘unsorting’ list operation to avoid redundancy, repetition, or lack of novelty. Probably not, there are too many things you might want to maximize or minimize.

To extend Gwern.net link-icons to include site-specific color when interacting with them, I collected 225 RGB hex colors from websites or their logos.

Hampering the current life+ n years system of unregistered copyrights is the dual problem of mismanagement & orphan works .

S o, this is a sentence about lives. This is before the third sentence in this section but after the first one; it is therefore the second life sentence.

One of the weakest parts of 2024-era LLMs , and where user opinions differ the most from the benchmarks, is anything to do with ‘diversity’ and ‘creativity’.

The kind of water used in tea is claimed to make a difference in the flavor: mineral water being better than tap water or distilled water.

Danbooru2021 is a large-scale anime image database with 4.9m+ images annotated with 162m+ tags; it can be useful for machine learning purposes such as image recognition and generation.

Speculation on why 3-move games like Rock-Paper-Scissors are so common in games & decisions: aside from allowing ties, is this design information-theoretically optimal in game difficulty vs...

Looking into the oldest edible food suggests a range of 0.05–20 mya food, after discarding myths like honey or woolly mammoth.

James Reason , inventor of the Swiss cheese model of complex disasters & errors, recently died .

A list of papers/books/materials I have failed to obtain, and financial bounties for anyone who can provide copies to me or the Internet.

Harold Bloom amusingly recommends all students as his ‘best student ever’; modeled as a ‘record value’ order statistics problem, this is more common than it seems.

Sidenotes and margin notes (sometimes also called “asides”) are an alternative to footnotes/endnotes in design.

One might wonder: is an AUNN truly the very simplest possible NN architecture? Maybe not. We still have the index input making it more complex.

the main issue with video games is that a guy who, if he lived in 1820s germany, would have done something like document every type of beetle in his local province instead ends up making a 26 part...

Often the most interesting part of any design are the parts that are invisible—what was tried but did not work.

Annotations sorted by machine learning into inferred 'tags' . This provides an alternative way to browse: instead of by date order, one can browse in topic order.

Annotations sorted by machine learning into inferred 'tags' . This provides an alternative way to browse: instead of by date order, one can browse in topic order.

Do people like watching cats because of neoteny? I doubt it, because adult cats don’t look at all like babies.

M. Trente has furnished a signal service to the scholarly world with his éclairage of one of our unsung research bodies, worthy of [translation error: the anonymous translator is a...

Annotations sorted by machine learning into inferred 'tags' . This provides an alternative way to browse: instead of by date order, one can browse in topic order.

Proposal & discussion of how default mode networks for LLMs are an example of missing capabilities for search and novelty in contemporary AI systems.

While petting cats , I accidentally discovered about half of cats are fascinated by the smell & taste of earwax , particularly that of humans (both dry & wet), and this interest can last indefinitely.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-024-01710-0 : “Genetic Modifiers of Rare Variants in Monogenic Developmental Disorder Loci” , Rebecca Kingdom, Robin N. Beaumont, Andrew R. Wood , Michael N.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/elon-musk-tesla-x-xai-executives-leave-fcdc6795 : “Elon Musk Is Back at Work and Burning Through Executives: Renewed Executive Churn Marks the Billionaire’s Return to...

1. For the End of Pre-Training To an LLM while training —So goes a lab tale— Data said (not without malice): “Had I revealed to people from what dead mouths you were made, they could not call...

Can 2024-era LLMs reason successfully about how to write using only words that could not have appeared in any Bible ever? Mostly.

Satirical Christmas monologue by unreliable narrator disavowing his sins to Santa Claus; 16-stanza 64-line comic monologue in rhyming couplets, using regular iambic pentameter.

Kimi K2 Thinking : …The poem is worse , and that is why it is more beautiful . The Beauty of the Sin Your annotations are the confession of the lock .

Checking for ghosts with his rifle, he paced through the night, Father stood guard in our hallway, the noises behind.

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/832/transcript#act2 : “I Wish I Knew How to Force Quit You” , This American Life , Simon Rich link-bibliography https://www.npr.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.10316#deepmind : “Proper Value Equivalence” , Christopher Grimm, André Barreto, Gregory Farquhar , David Silver , Satinder Singh link-bibliography https://arxiv.

Trying out having Gemini-3-pro-preview write system prompts compatible with creative fiction writing (sci-fi short story examples), and trying it out on GPT-5 Pro and Claude-4.

In this last pain’s morning light, The Lord shall guide us through the night; The sweetest mercy He will send, Our joyous hope forever shall transcend.

We were in bat country now, Silicon Valley bats with baby faces, all gibbering madly with the voices of our dead consciences.

“Spaced repetition” helps one remember facts by creating discrete flashcards which one tests oneself on at increasingly distant ‘spaced’ time periods, repeating the fact just before one probably...

Can deer evolve under the selection pressure of car accidents to learn to avoid roads? Probably, but it’ll take a long time. I’ve noticed while driving many deer corpses over the years.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15103#facebook : “Continual Learning via Sparse Memory Finetuning” , Jessy Lin, Luke Zettlemoyer , Gargi Ghosh , Wen-Tau Yih, Aram Markosyan, Vincent-Pierre Berges, Barlas...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016028962500025X : “Psychometrically Derived 60-Question Benchmarks: Substantial Efficiencies and the Possibility of Human-AI Comparisons” , Gilles...

American public survey suggests meaningful support for organ donation from anencephalic (terminal) babies.

After setting up the full suite of poem formatting, the biggest problem turned out to be finding the poems to markup. Gwern.

Annotations sorted by machine learning into inferred 'tags' . This provides an alternative way to browse: instead of by date order, one can browse in topic order.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.24187 : “NeuRa L a T e X : A Machine Learning Library Written in Pure L a T e X ” , James A. D. Gardner, Will Rowan, William A. P. Smith link-bibliography https://arxiv.

[` The unrecognised simplicities of effective action #2: ‘Systems engineering’ and ‘systems management’—ideas from the Apollo programme for a systems politics`` {=html}](https://dominiccummings.

This page is the Manual of Style for Gwern.net, defining house conventions for prose, typography, and citations in a terse “classic style”.

To estimate the actual number of shower controls, you need to estimate how much probability mass is sitting in undetected rare controls.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.07258 : “On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models” , Rishi Bommasani, Drew A. Hudson, Ehsan Adeli , Russ Altman , Simran Arora, Sydney von Arx, Michael S.

Video games are art. But they are a strange art. They are an art without good art criticism, and they occupy a peculiar position in popular culture: universal and dominant, and yet almost invisible...

Pindaric ode commemorating millions of laboratory animals sacrificed for science, in a strict alliterative meter.

Gwtar is a new polyglot HTML archival format which provides a single, self-contained, HTML file which still can be efficiently lazy-loaded by a web browser.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02754#facebook : “Fast and Simplex: 2-Simplicial Attention in Triton” , Aurko Roy, Timothy Chou, Sai Surya Duvvuri , Sijia Chen, Jiecao Yu, Xiaodong Wang , Manzil Zaheer,...

It’s been just a month [since [ Stable Diffusion ](!W) was released] . What about in a year? I probably won’t be able to find my work out there because [the Internet] will be flooded with AI art.

Welcome, friends, to the Rotten Library, an unforgettable collection of all that mankind swore to forget, but which we have trapped in agonizing clarity to remember always.