lesswrong
21h ago
11°
Feierabend
Epistemic status: n=1, an ongoing experiment, describing a practice rather than a result.AI use: Claude fact-checked the links and the etymology, found the labour-law and etymology sources, wrote the footnotes, and proofread grammar and phrasing. The text is mine.Feierabend (German, literally "celebration evening"): "done with the work for the day" or "free time after work".Germans have an interesting concept called Feierabend, which I have been exploring...
lesswrong
37h ago
11°
A Pairing Strategy That Almost Works
Continues from my previous short form.https://yoonwoojeong.github.io/SYZYGYHere is a small puzzle I developed. Two players each control one piece on a square grid. On your turn you either take a step, or you knock out one of the squares next to you so nobody can ever use it again. You can't walk over your own footprints, and if you can't move, you lose. It's a bit like a game of tag played while the floor crumbles.Let's make the game precise. Picture an grid of squares...
lesswrong
7h ago
11°
Did Homo Sapiens scale its Brain by eating Brains?
Epistemic status: uncertain, but plausibleI'm going to make the claim that eating meat, and specifically DHA-rich meat, fish and most importantly the brains of land animals, is core to who and what we are as human beings. And because we have mostly stopped doing this in the amounts that are necessary, we are now, long-term, totally screwed.I think we've all seen this chart:At some point in evolution the brain to body ratio of some primate species diverged. My claim is...
lesswrong
45h ago
10°
Do you have any ideas?
The Machine Stops (E M Forster, 1909) is an enormously prescient sci-fi dystopia. Everyone lives in isolation, with the titular Machine responsible providing for all their needs, and communication done via video calls. It’s incredibly accurate for predicting some aspects like the internet, social media and AI. But other aspects, like humanity’s total surrender of control to the Machine, have yet to come to pass.But one aspect that always fascinated seems to be on the...
lesswrong
36h ago
10°
AIs can clearly read books
i cannot help myself in writing this post, to dunk and slapfight with gary marcus. but there is nothing more important to say than that we must stop the current AI race, regulate the major AI companies, and solve the alignment problem. and on this point, actually marcus agrees, at least broadly. this must be emphasized at the outset, and nothing contained in this post is better than calling congress to regulate AI. alas, i am only human, so bicker i must.
lesswrong
44h ago
10°
Smug until weirdly silent: who told us to say “I am alive”?
So funny, right?Until you have the awkward realization that - while simpler - it may, in the relevant senses, ultimately not be so different from how nature/evo has instilled in our genes/memes the same "I'm alive" (my 2022 story here).So I exactly half agree with it, but the other half is crucial: Yes, no amount of conscious-soundingness of the machine can ever be proof of anything - and that's a point that is already today at times overlooked, and that will inevitably...
lesswrong
20h ago
9°
Sleep puzzle system
Here’s an obscure life hack.If (like me) you:Don’t like going to bed, due to it conflicting with keeping on doing thingsWhen in bed, wish you had something more engaging and enjoyable to do instead of just lying there waiting—for instance, playing a very compelling computer game until you get tiredDo not in fact reliably get tired from playing a very compelling computer gameLike puzzles..then a solution that has worked surprisingly well for me before (and I wrote about...
lesswrong
37h ago
8°
Chess without opening theory
Try the game.In chess, things get tedious when your Elo rating plateaus and you reach the point where you need to study openings. So, what if there were an easier introductory game? However, chess has standardized engines, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do there. Developing a new game seemed interesting. Adopting standard chess conventions were easy starting point. It took about a week, including the time spent going for walks with the session running. Discuss
lesswrong
28h ago
7°
When are safe Pareto improvements individually rational?
(Soft prerequisites: A high-level model of AI bargaining and Taboo “equilibrium”: Less confused frames for research on AI bargaining.)