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Comment by janshi on Frontier AI Models Still Fail at Basic Physical Tasks: A Manufacturing Case Study · 2025-04-17T20:15:23.610Z · LW · GW

I just asked Gemini 2.5 Pro to explain how to tie shoelaces to someone who has never done that before, a task probably works in its favor because it is so common, plenty of descriptions exist and most people can perform it with little cognitive effort within few seconds every day. It took about 1.5 letter-sized pages of text and still missed a little bit of detail but I think a humanoid robot could follow it and get to the right result. I imagine many tasks of machinists and craftsmen are more complex but simply don’t exist in writing, so I agree that lack of data is the obvious problem. (Cooking would be another field where AI models today may perform above their baseline.)

Also, professions like law and obviously math and software have invented their own languages that only vaguely resemble everyday-language. If we had the goal of capturing the tacit knowledge of craftsmen, like this last surviving stucco worker, we would probably also first invent a more precise language to do that.

Comment by janshi on Frontier AI Models Still Fail at Basic Physical Tasks: A Manufacturing Case Study · 2025-04-16T08:06:45.196Z · LW · GW

However, there are a ton of diverse manufacturing processes, many of which don’t have good simulation solutions.

I’m interested to know which processes these are, what general categories they fall into and why we don’t have simulations for them? Is the bottleneck physics, computation, economics…?

Comment by janshi on AI 2027: What Superintelligence Looks Like · 2025-04-07T20:32:30.181Z · LW · GW

They expand their contract with OpenBrain to set up an “Oversight Committee,” a joint management committee of company and government representatives, with several government employees included alongside company leadership. The White House considers replacing the CEO with someone they trust, but backs off after intense employee protests.

This seemed relatively less likely to me in 2027 compared to 2023 given that a few paragraphs earlier it is described that

But Agent-4 now exercises significant control over OpenBrain’s day-to-day operation.

How many human employees are working at OpenBrain at that point? What are their roles?

An employee protest in 2023 was powerful because at that point the employees were what made OpenAi valuable. In the hypothetical scenario the White House may just reply „thanks for the SSH keys“

Comment by janshi on Announcing Rational Newsletter · 2024-08-13T07:10:01.318Z · LW · GW

Hey Alexey, any update on the status of the newsletter?

Comment by janshi on Anti-social Punishment · 2023-06-29T07:46:44.941Z · LW · GW

Psychologically, I would be angry because, apparently, everyone else was littering but it was just me who was picked for the punished. It would be unjust. Also, there were no trash bins so I couldn't had behave even if I wanted to. That doubles the injustice. Moreover, I was carrying the cup for hours, you do-gooder moron!

Historically people had to develop a thick skin if they wanted to be pro-social because of exactly this. I think from there you get the "turn the other cheek" phrase (personified in Jesus being crucified) or the idea of an invisible being watching you doing good or bad deeds and rewarding/punishing you in the afterlife. 

The Ostblock, of course, got rid of these ideas. Not sure what's going on with the Muslim countries though (something something colonialism?)

Comment by janshi on Sleep Quality: Strategies that work for me · 2023-02-15T18:05:42.458Z · LW · GW

The "Moment of Maximum Tiredness"

To me, this sounds unreliable because I've experienced that tiredness can be triggered very reliably within minutes via breathing techniques such as NSDR (1, 2) therefore shifting my sleep window forward 1-2 hrs.

Comment by janshi on How and why to turn everything into audio · 2022-09-28T07:09:06.027Z · LW · GW

Hint: Macs and iOS devices come with build-in “accessibility” tools that read out loud everything on screen. The voices can be improved even more by downloading the “Siri enhanced” voice in the settings.

Comment by janshi on The Death of Behavioral Economics · 2021-08-30T21:08:57.494Z · LW · GW

Here is a little detail I learned in behavioral finance class: you don’t need behavioral finance/econ to discover loss aversion. All you need is a rational utility maximizing agent in a standard neoclassical framework who has a concave utility function (such as LOG which is commonly assumed to model diminishing marginal utility). From this you see that the rational agent has more to loose from a one unit negative change than a one unit positive change i.e. loss aversion.

Comment by janshi on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2019-08-18T06:28:41.763Z · LW · GW

I did actually unfollow ~95% of my friends once but then found myself in that situation where suddenly Facebook became interesting again I was checking it more often. I recommend the opposite and follow as many friends from high school and work as possible (assuming you don’t work at a cool place).

Comment by janshi on Benito's Shortform Feed · 2019-08-18T06:22:13.924Z · LW · GW

Try practicing doing nothing I.e. meditation and see how that goes. When I have nothing particular to do my mind needs some time to make the switch from that mode where it tries to distract itself by coming up with new things it wants to do until finally it reaches a state where it is calm and steady. I consider that state the optimal one to be in since only then my thoughts are directed deliberately at neglected and important issues rather than exercising learned thought patterns.

Comment by janshi on What is the evidence for productivity benefits of weightlifting? · 2019-06-11T18:53:36.136Z · LW · GW

I suspect doing long-term (or any) studies on people diagnosed with depression and weightlifting would be difficult, since the motivation required to do regular heavy exercise is either preventing people from following a strict routine or it would disqualify them from the clinical diagnosis of depression. I have tried exercise as part of my life-long battle against depression and in a recent conversation with a therapist was told that I am in fact not depressed, because a depressed person "is not be motivated to invest effort into doing something about their depression".