Bragging Thread May 2015

Had a 30 day dry spell without alcohol and even after that my habit / addiction came back lighter than before. Will try a longer dry spell now, eventually leading to complete stoppage. It is seems it is not so hard after that choice is made, the hard thing seems to be making the choice. This was not during May though, more March-April.

I recently prevented myself from taking on at least 10 micromorts of risk (and an increased copay) by noticing a medical error before undergoing a procedure.

While I'd rather not go into the exact details of my medical history, I'll say that the procedure that I was supposed to (and did) undergo didn't require anesthesia, and was less invasive than the procedure that the hospital staff would have performed otherwise, which would have required anesthesia. I'm using 10 micromorts as an estimate of the risk I avoided taking on, because a quick Google search suggests that that's the average (though ostensibly age-independent) risk incurred by undergoing anesthesia.

The surgeon/diagnostician who was in charge of my case later claimed that he would have noticed the error before he began working on me. Regardless, taking an active role in my medical care felt nice.

I've spent about 30% or so of my total productive hours for the last year working on a single programming problem: a high performance GPU implementation of a complex new algorithm. I"ve had the general idea in my head for over two years, and I've evaluated perhaps a dozen approaches, none of which reached even 1% work efficiency in the general case.

A few months ago I finally saw a path that could get up to 25% efficiency and beyond, but it was really complicated with dozens of subpasses which each required highly tuned specific parallel algorithms and lots of inner loop critical code.

Four days ago I finally saw a way to do all of that in a single pass (< ~ 1k lines of kernel code) while still meeting all of the constraints, and just today I got this new codepath compiling into a cubin that looks reasonably on target.

I made the front page of Hacker News.

Finished my doctorate in mathematics, in PDEs.

Started my new job at a private research lab.

I published a book! And Amazon ran out on the second day of it's release!

My book, Arriving At Amen: Seven Catholic Prayers that Even I Can Offer explains how I learned seven kinds of Catholic prayer after conversion.

I can promise it's the LW-iest book you've got to read on prayer, so, if you want to better understand a religious friend or have some ways to open a conversation, you might like it. Plus it cites Ender's Game and Terry Pratchett.

I had to learn prayer in the language of reference I spoke, so my chapter on Confession has a big section on the Sunk Cost Fallacy, and how it makes us afraid to make our sins "real" by acknowledging them. The chapter on Mass explains the communion of saints by referring to cartesian coordinate systems and explaining how people can all be aligned along one dimension of interest.

I had a great time writing this, and, I should mention, Beeminder helped me pull it off!

• A couple months ago I started learning the Elm programming language, and to make things interesting I resolved to push one non-empty code commit to GitHub every single day (ideally also non-trivial, but not everyone's definition of "trivial" will match mine). I'm now on day 67 of that streak, having written six proto-games (playable here if you're so inclined, though they're not hugely entertaining). So far the habit has resisted a new job and a ten-day vacation. I've also been keeping a daily journal since Feb 21.

• Used my 3D printer (Prusa i3) to print the entire set of plastic printed parts for a different printer (FoldaRap), very much a non-trivial project (~ 50h of printing for 30+ distinct parts) that requires a well-tuned printer. I'm particularly proud as this comes on the tails of completing a major conversion of the Prusa from its original direct-extrusion design to a Bowden setup.

• Got hired by the French government to promote a more agile style of programming and project management.

• I finally finished all the work to leave grad school with an MA, and am officially graduated in just over a week's time.

• I am getting a visa so that I'll be able to move to my boyfriend's country and move in with him. If you're in doubt about how awesome that is, you should see the mountain of bureaucracy I've had to deal with...

I read about an art exhibition / contest, made an entry, sent it in, it was accepted and exhibited. I didn't win the prize but the exhibit has been in the international news for weeks. Two men apparently tried to murder those who were in attendance at the exhibition. I wrote an essay about the experience, submitted it to a publisher, it was accepted and published. I was paid for my essay.

http://freethinker.co.uk/2015/05/07/trigger-warning/

Over the last 2.5 years, my co-founder and I grew the Dev Shop we founded (Purple Bit) into a very profitable small company, employing 7 people.

Purple Bit has just been acquired by a former client of ours, Autodesk Inc. Autodesk are the makers of AutoCAD, 3D Studio Max, Maya and many other professional 3d software products.

(Note: this didn't happen this month, but it wasn't public until now).

Got at least 6.5 hours of sleep for four out of the last 7 days and woke up with my alarms for three of them.

Walking at least 2 miles per day seems to be the key.

• I make a Naive Bayes classifier for a AI in a RTS game I was making.

• I realized the game I was making was overly ambitious and it will be weak for its category, so I halted it a month ago, and now I'm half way into another game small enough, so it can be in the top of its category.

• After reading models from mark Manzon a month ago (I found it in a post here in lw), I got 2 girlfriends (I'm still with the second), with zero social Anxiety and for a bonus, I can make friends more easily.

This one is pretty personal. After being surprise broken up with at the end of a very rewarding 5 year long relationship, I immediately looked up papers on how people recover from break-ups, what leads to best outcomes, how people can internalize lessons learned in relationships, etc.

When I discovered that getting over the relationship itself is different from no longer liking the person on the other side of the relationship, I was able to do the work to get over the relationship itself in about 4 to 5 days. (actually, it was exponential, most of the results were in the first day, with a long tail of results over the past two weeks). I'm defining being over a relationship as no longer identifying with it, no longer feeling like half of something bigger, no longer missing the feelings of that relationship, feeling that it really was for the best, and being genuinely happy with the current state of affairs.

While I realize I might never "get over" having affection+lust this person, who I still consider my best friend, I am now no more likely to want to take action on those feelings than on my feelings for the many friends I've had crushes on over the years, and in fact probably a lot LESS likely since science says it would be a bad idea. So a lingering crush is really no big deal. I can comfortably hug or have real talks with this person without feeling the pangs of missing out on more, and can happily reflect on good memories without any tinge of sadness.

I am now dating someone else, and not in a rebound way. I considered waiting longer than two weeks, but after looking at the literature, I decided not to because of the measurable happiness gains of being in a relationship, plus my general tendency not to ruminate/dwell, plus my genuine not-wanting to get back together (plus, obviously my feelings for this new person).

My free course on landing your dream job after college is finally available to the world. http://newgradblueprint.com/

I managed to get more than 20 experts to contribute to it, built out the whole backend when freelancers didn't work out, animated all the videos, got them voiced by voice actors, landed on top of the r/jobs subreddit and have tentative partnerships with City Year, College Autism Spectrum, and several other large organizations.

I created the world's first micropayments forum... RudeBagel. Some additional info.

This may not make much sense to people outside University of Chicago, but every year we have a huge scavenger hunt, one of the biggest in the world, where we do things like make a keyboards that can perform logical operations, made a MONIAC cycles of natural systems, and has in the past included one team making a working nuclear reactor.

Me and one other person decided to form a team for this year, and we co-captained this team. We did way better than anyone expected, beating every team that wasn't an established house team that had over 100 people and lots of monetary resources, while our team had only 15 people.

I got an honorary mention in the 2014 Putnam Competition. I have taken the test at December and I heard the results on April, but I haven't posted this other bragging threads, so I'm not if this is appropriate here.

[redacted]

On my midterm exam in my college class Computer and Networking Security, I scored 88%, the highest in the class. About 18 other students took the test, and the mean of our scores was 62%. The exam will be graded on a curve, so my score is probably equivalent to A+.

I was the second-to-last student to finish the exam. This surprised me at the time, but now I think it must have been because I took more time to thoroughly think about the questions and show my work. On the other hand, I studied very little – only for 20 minutes, right before the exam. I am thankful that that turned out to be enough, and proud that I skimmed the slides effectively enough and paid enough attention in class that that’s all I needed.

Hi people, I just wanted to say thank you to the LessWrong community for exposing me to the concept of "bayesian probability". Apparently human motor programs function in a bayesian way, with each movement prior predicted including predicted sensory feedback of said movement, which enables a comparison of prediction with perceived reality. Pretty cool.

Learned of the observational evidence supporting random practice over blocked practiced as they relate to motor learning and retention, 14/5/2015.

Wrote a new lesson plan for my squash juniors, based upon the aforementioned idea of random practice, which I offer freely to LW.

Squash training, psuedorandom

1. Serve from right
2. Move to t
3. Chase own ball
4. Serve from left
5. Chase own ball
6. Throw ball with left hand to front wall right side
7. Play forehand drop shot
8. Move to T
9. Gather ball
10. Move to t
11. Throw ball to front wall, left side
12. Play backhand drop shot
13. Move to t
14. 1 push-up
15. Gather ball
16. Move to t
17. Throw ball to left wall softly.
18. Play a backhand drive deep
19. 1 squat
20. Gather ball
21. Move to t
22. Throw ball to right wall softly
23. Play a forehand drive deep
24. 1 lunge
25. Gather ball
26. Rest, drink, provoke THINK.
27. Move to front left court with ball n racket.
28. Play a backhand cross court, like a serve.
29. Move to t
30. Do a split step jump
31. Gather ball
32. Move to front right
33. Play a backhand cross court, like a serve.
34. Move to t
35. 1 situp
36. Gather ball
37. Move to front right.
38. Play a forehand cross court, like a serve.
39. Move to t
40. 1 one legged swan pose, 5 seconds
41. Gather ball
42. Move to front left
43. Play a forehand cross court, like a serve
44. Move to t
45. Balance racket on one finger, 5 seconds.
46. Gather ball
47. Move to t
48. Throw ball to right wall softly with non racket hand
49. Play forehand boast
50. Move to t
51. Gather ball
52. Move to t
53. Throw ball to left wall softly
54. Play backhand boast
55. Move to t
56. Do right side plank, 5 seconds.
57. Gather ball
58. Move to t
59. Do left side plank, 5 seconds.
60. Rest, drink, provoke THINK.
61. NOTE TIME TO DO 59 tasks. Repeat

Implemented an approximation of the above program in today's session, after explaining why the changes are occurring. I observed that the young athletes were more enthused.

I started a HPMOR follow up fanfic called Ginny Weasley and the Methods of Rationality and finished the first chapter. I am not a native english speaker and have still decidet to write in english. While i needet quite a lot of help with mistake correction I was told by someone that my writing was better than what he had seen from some native speakers.

Not nearly as impressive as the others in this thread, but I finally told the company owner that 8 years working on the same 80s technology is quite enough and I expect him to let me to work on the projects that lets me stay current, or else. He promised.