Posts

Weighing Animal Worth 2023-09-28T13:50:06.752Z
Commonsense Good, Creative Good 2023-09-27T19:50:07.486Z
Text Posts from the Kids Group: 2022 2023-09-26T20:40:06.656Z
Feedly Breaks MathML 2023-09-25T13:40:05.759Z
Honor System for Vaccination? 2023-09-24T11:50:05.809Z
Hand-writing MathML 2023-09-23T11:20:07.870Z
Fund Transit With Development 2023-09-22T11:10:05.645Z
Ward 5: Jack Perenick and Naima Sait 2023-09-21T13:00:10.017Z
Weekly Incidence Including Delay 2023-09-20T14:00:09.643Z
Ask for Feelings not Tunes 2023-09-18T02:10:03.450Z
Keeping Dresser Drawers In 2023-09-17T02:10:03.458Z
Inline Plotting in iTerm2 2023-09-14T20:30:03.166Z
Padding the Corner 2023-09-13T01:30:04.009Z
Apple Cider Baklava 2023-09-12T02:10:04.251Z
Weekly Incidence vs Cumulative Infections 2023-09-07T02:30:03.414Z
Text Posts from the Kids Group: 2023 I 2023-09-05T02:00:04.118Z
Plum Cooking Temperature 2023-09-02T01:30:03.086Z
Cleaning a SoundCraft Mixer 2023-08-31T13:20:02.568Z
Biosecurity Culture, Computer Security Culture 2023-08-30T16:40:03.101Z
Loft Bed Fan Guard 2023-08-29T13:30:02.682Z
No More Freezer Pucks 2023-08-28T15:20:02.929Z
Trying a Wet Suit 2023-08-27T15:00:08.728Z
Lemonade Stand Costs? 2023-08-25T20:20:03.382Z
Regreasing a KitchenAid Mixer 2023-08-24T02:30:04.121Z
State of Generally Available Self-Driving 2023-08-22T18:50:01.166Z
Downstairs Opening: 2br Apartment 2023-08-21T00:50:02.915Z
Predicting Virus Relative Abundance in Wastewater 2023-08-10T15:46:55.554Z
Perpetually Declining Population? 2023-08-08T01:30:00.897Z
Bad Imitation Instruments 2023-08-03T02:30:02.937Z
"Building a House" Review 2023-07-31T19:20:01.248Z
Is Light Drinking Protective? 2023-07-31T03:00:02.658Z
Are Guitars Obsolete? 2023-07-29T13:20:01.482Z
Secure Hand Holding 2023-07-25T01:40:01.553Z
Replacing the Big Air Purifier 2023-07-22T12:10:01.050Z
Cooking Air Quality 2023-07-21T19:30:01.598Z
Growth of Publicly Available Genetic Sequencing Data 2023-07-20T19:50:01.004Z
House Grocery Spending 2023-07-19T03:00:01.229Z
Accidentally Load Bearing 2023-07-13T16:10:00.806Z
Lightweight minimal speech recognition? 2023-07-12T12:00:01.191Z
3D Printed Talkbox Cap 2023-07-08T13:00:00.671Z
Weekday Evening Beach Picnics 2023-07-08T02:20:00.910Z
AI Intermediation 2023-07-06T01:50:01.852Z
MXR Talkbox Cap? 2023-07-05T01:50:01.059Z
Park Toys 2023-06-23T16:00:01.482Z
Relational Speaking 2023-06-21T14:40:00.849Z
Public Transit is not Infinitely Safe 2023-06-20T18:40:02.011Z
Approaches to Thump 2023-06-20T01:50:01.006Z
Alaska Trip 2023-06-18T13:40:02.026Z
Alewife Train is Now Arriving 2023-06-17T13:20:02.499Z
June and Mulberries 2023-06-17T01:30:01.274Z

Comments

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on EA Vegan Advocacy is not truthseeking, and it’s everyone’s problem · 2023-09-30T10:45:16.371Z · LW · GW

I'm confused why this has so many agreement votes when the only potential example anyone has given doesn't actually have this problem?

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Feedly Breaks MathML · 2023-09-28T22:17:28.570Z · LW · GW

Thanks!

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-26T17:13:47.906Z · LW · GW

Copying that equation from LW with Chrome on Mac, anything I paste it into (pbpaste, standard website, Google Docs) I get:

P
(
x
i
)
=<
x
i
,
v
>

But when I use the GW version I get:

P(x_i) = <x_i, v>

Did you mean to link to the LW version of the post?

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Fund Transit With Development · 2023-09-26T17:10:47.436Z · LW · GW

In the scenario I'm imagining, the builder has capacity constraints (limited capital, organizational scalability)

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Honor System for Vaccination? · 2023-09-26T15:56:02.041Z · LW · GW

accept that the choice of an event to mandate vaccination or not makes very little difference to the odds of getting covid

I don't disagree.

I assume if you require a covid vaccine you're also requiring a flu vaccine?

I mean, I'm not requiring anything. But I do think that events that decide to require covid vaccinations should generally also require flu vaccination, yes.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Fund Transit With Development · 2023-09-26T14:30:58.862Z · LW · GW

This doesn't sound right to me. Let's take a very simplified situation.

  • Imagine there are several identical places where I'm considering buying a bunch of land and then building transit there to make it more valuable.
  • The value of land if this option were removed is
  • The value of land after I build transit to it is

I get all the land owners together and we have an auction, where I offer to buy from whichever owner gives me the best price, wouldn't you expect to end up with a price much closer to than ?

In a real scenario properties wouldn't be identical which makes an auction a poor fit and it wouldn't look exactly like this, but it doesn't seem that far off?

Now, you might say that is actually quite high, nearly or exactly as high as because these land owners could sell to someone else who also has a "buy land, build transit" approach. Then I agree there's no profit, but that's a standard result in economics: under perfect competition economic profits are zero.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Fund Transit With Development · 2023-09-26T11:11:29.205Z · LW · GW

I'm not trying to say that the possibility of increased density via transit has no effect on land values relative to today: I agree the possibility of transit raises land values. My claim is that it doesn't raise land values very much.

But it also sounds to me like you're giving a mistaken framework for how to value things where there are many different amounts they could be worth in the future? I would propose using expected value: value the land in proportion to how much it would be worth in all of these different potential futures, scaled by their probability.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-26T01:55:21.891Z · LW · GW

I don't know -- when I used Linux on my main machine I was happy with how things looked and generally preferred sites and programs that fit in with the rest of the environment. And Linux users are disproportionately the kind of people who, if they don't like their system's default font, will pick something they prefer.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on You should just smile at strangers a lot · 2023-09-25T20:28:35.748Z · LW · GW

Smiling is communication. The information content of a message is inversely proportional to its probability. If you smile at strangers in places or situations where that's very unusual, you're communicating pretty strongly, and not necessarily what you intend to communicate.

For example, I live in a part of the world (Northeast US) where the culture is to leave strangers alone. You don't talk to them, smile at them, etc; everyone just does their own thing. If someone here smiled at me out of nowhere, my first reaction would be trying to figure out where I knew this person from, and I'd probably smile back to be polite. Then if they moved on and I really didn't know them I might wonder why they had smiled at me; were they flirting? Visiting from out of town and didn't know the customs? On drugs? Indicating support for something I'm signaling with my appearance or attire?

I can report that nearly half of the strangers will smile back, although often they'll look away as they do.

I'm not sure that's as positive as it sounds? The "look away" part seems to me like it's indicating discomfort, or that they're worried returning your smile will escalate the interaction.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Honor System for Vaccination? · 2023-09-25T19:17:47.482Z · LW · GW

The organizers considered A, B, and C, and chose B. An attendee asked why not C, and I wrote up my personal views on why I don't think C is a good choice.

(I was trying pretty hard not to get into the object level stuff here, but ok, let's go. On why I don't rank A very highly, I think vaccination, especially the initial series, is great at protecting the recipient from the severe effects of covid. In terms of protecting others, which is the main thing that matters if you're deciding whether to restrict some people from attending the event, I think someone who had covid three months ago is probably less of a risk to others than someone who was boosted nine months ago. Other people's vaccination status just isn't a very good proxy for how much risk they pose.)

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Honor System for Vaccination? · 2023-09-25T18:13:32.438Z · LW · GW

At the current time, I think . When conditions were different I thought . I have a lot of trouble imagining a situation in which I wouldn't think .

A decision procedure where you eliminate and then decide between and even if you think or is a pretty bad one.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Honor System for Vaccination? · 2023-09-25T17:04:45.051Z · LW · GW

It's pretty clear that 1 is true. I think 2 is false, and therefore 3 is false.

In which case a group should not choose C, because A is better.

My overall point with this post is that groups should not be choosing C.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Honor System for Vaccination? · 2023-09-25T17:02:45.011Z · LW · GW

I don't understand the inclusion or discussion of B (which seemed to be the bulk of the post)

The bulk of the post is about my objections to C, though?

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Fund Transit With Development · 2023-09-25T17:00:09.957Z · LW · GW

There's lots of land that could have transit built to it, but won't unless someone does. The two specific projects I gave as examples are unusual in that they are atypically good fits for transit expansion, but this general approach makes a lot of sense even if you give that up. And has lots of historical precedent.

This is a bit like saying no one would sell rural land cheaply to be used for a charter city because once the city is built that land would be really valuable, ignoring that there are many sites a potential charter city builder can choose among.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-25T15:54:09.870Z · LW · GW

Breakage is the union of all breakages. ...

I don't disagree, but none of the things you pointed out are actually breakage as far as I can tell:

margin-left: em;

That was a typo for margin-left: 1em, but the browser ignoring the directive doesn't actually do anything because it only ever appears immediately to then right of something that has margin-right: 1em. Fixed!

<li> list items which are... not... inside any <ol>/<ul> lists

Looks like at some point I missed the <ul>; added. (This is already only semantic -- I have css removing all the list-specific display already)

I have no idea what <script nonce="this-is-not-a-real-nonce" type="text/javascript"> is supposed to do, but it very much makes me wonder if it's doing what it's supposed to do for anyone at all.

The validator is complaining because type="text/javascript" is no longer something you need to write, but it's not really wrong to include it.

The nonce="this-is-not-a-real-nonce" is something I added when I temporarily served my site with a CSP (but without taking the time to fully set it up) as part of verifying that some other code I was testing on my site did the right thing in the presence of a CSP. It's not doing anything, but also not breaking anything. This is annoying enough to rip out that I'm leaving it for now.

immaculate HTML/CSS and carefully code to the standards, you will still run into hilarious breakage for many users

As long as you verify that you're coding to a standard that's supported by the versions of the browsers you're trying to support, what sort of breakage are you thinking about? This does happen (ex: Chrome/iOS advertising in its Accept header that it supported webp when it didn't support inline webp) but it's pretty rare, especially in the last ~5y.

For my own site I normally approach this by testing in multiple browser engines: Chrome + Firefox, sometimes also Safari. When I worked in this area professionally I additionally used careful A/B tests, but that's not worth it for my personal site.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Honor System for Vaccination? · 2023-09-25T15:27:14.906Z · LW · GW

[ I agree that this is getting a bit silly, but happy to keep going if you're interested ]

if an event is considering C they're better off with at least one of A or B

I don't know how to read the "or" or "at least one of" that doesn't lead me to the reduction that C<A and C<B

I think this is the core misunderstanding. I take my quoted text as pretty clearly claiming that exactly one of the following is true:

  1. C < A
  2. C < B
  3. C < A and C < B

I think you're reading it as claiming only (3)? For my quoted text to claim only (3) I think it would need to be something like "if an event is considering C they're better off with any of A or B".

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-25T01:55:03.169Z · LW · GW

Two updates:

  • I went and coded a verbosifier, so it's possible to write <msup>a 2</msup> + <msup>b 2</msup> = <msup>c 2</msup> and not <msup><mi>a</mi><mn>2</mn></msup><mo>+</mo>...: https://github.com/jeffkaufman/mathml_verbosifier

  • It turns out Feedly (and maybe other RSS readers?) strip out MathML, so even if they're using a rendering engine that supports it you see nothing. So I'll stick to ascii math for a while longer.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-25T01:49:37.974Z · LW · GW

After shooting my mouth off I went and tried it, and even programs that I would expect to handle it well (ex: Google Docs) didn't. Sorry!

(I think my statement is still literally true, except for the problem that ~no destination program currently supports it)

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-25T01:46:58.420Z · LW · GW

i.e., it looks bad.

For what it's worth I think the Linux screenshot is fine -- that's the default font on that system.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-24T23:44:56.416Z · LW · GW

I wouldn't be ok serving pages that didn't work for 10% of my visitors, but I'd be really surprised if the number is really that high.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-24T20:53:05.666Z · LW · GW

MathML should copy fine, as long as the destination program supports it. What program are you pasting it into?

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Honor System for Vaccination? · 2023-09-24T20:51:19.245Z · LW · GW

I don't really understand what you're trying to accomplish with this policy? I can't think of any social dances that exclude unvaccinated people because the organizers find anti-vaxxers annoying; they're trying to reduce infection risk.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Honor System for Vaccination? · 2023-09-24T20:47:36.345Z · LW · GW

> I don't think you've shown that "mandatory + not checked" is worse than "optional" for this case.

But I'm not claiming that. I'm claiming that , not , where is mandatory and checked, is optional, and is mandatory but not checked.

That is, if an event is considering they're better off with at least one of or .

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Honor System for Vaccination? · 2023-09-24T17:37:29.713Z · LW · GW

My claim is that if you're considering doing "mandatory + not checked" you'd be better off with at least one of "mandatory + checked" or "optional".

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-24T11:37:36.609Z · LW · GW

In general I don't think it makes sense for site owners to make changes to support users who are running dangerous configurations, and skimming caniuse it looks to me like this 10% is almost all people running very old versions of browsers.

I also suspect that a lot of what looks like people running really old browsers is actually bots, since it's common to make a bot that emulates whatever the current version is at the time you made it (often because it's based on that browser version and they're not getting around to updating, or because they hardcode a UA and don't prioritize updating).

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-24T11:23:13.344Z · LW · GW

Yes, I don't use any webfonts. I'm happy with the default fonts across platforms, don't care whether my site looks consistent across platforms, and don't want the performance penalty of requiring each visitor to load a new font to view my page.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Paper: LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A” · 2023-09-24T02:20:40.481Z · LW · GW

Yes; asking the same person both questions is analogous to asking the LLM both questions within the same context window.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-24T02:19:00.388Z · LW · GW

That's a lot more complexity than I want to be maintaining in my publishing pipeline.

I'm also not excited about requiring external fonts.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-24T02:17:07.486Z · LW · GW

It seems that Chrome only supports MathML starting with Chrome 109, which is not compatible with my version of macOS.

That's not a great setup to be running: there have been several serious vulnerabilities since then, including the WebP zero-day.

specifically support MathML Core

Pretty sure there's nothing I would be interested in hand-coding that's outside of MathML Core.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Hand-writing MathML · 2023-09-23T20:53:19.275Z · LW · GW

In terms of what browsers support, MathML is the best way to do it in a modern browser. In an older browser you could do canvas, images, or something with custom fonts.

Most users, though, are in authoring environments that offer something else, usually a way to write LaTeX-style math and have it automatically converted into something the browser can handle.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Paper: LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A” · 2023-09-23T20:52:53.769Z · LW · GW

Prediction: this works when asking humans questions too.

(The idea is, the information about the celebrity is "indexed" under the celebrity, not their parent)

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Fund Transit With Development · 2023-09-22T20:43:55.863Z · LW · GW

But I'm describing exactly the sort of exceptional situation where the owner is changing the value of the land. If you buy land and then pay the local transit agency to build transit to it, your land (and all surrounding land) becomes more valuable.

(And so an ideal version of a land value tax would go up for your neighbors, who didn't cause the value increase, but not for you)

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Housing Roundup #6 · 2023-09-21T02:07:37.377Z · LW · GW

If a financial advisor told a client 'you should lever yourself up to invest 5x your net worth in one undiversified asset', they would end up in jail.

Really? We jail financial advisors for giving unreasonably aggressive financial advice?

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Anthropic's Responsible Scaling Policy & Long-Term Benefit Trust · 2023-09-20T12:58:21.387Z · LW · GW

From a business perspective, we want to be clear that our RSP will not alter current uses of Claude or disrupt availability of our products. Rather, it should be seen as analogous to the pre-market testing and safety feature design conducted in the automotive or aviation industry, where the goal is to rigorously demonstrate the safety of a product before it is released onto the market, which ultimately benefits customers.

What happens if you are pretty sure that a future system is ASL-2, but then months after release when people have built business-critical systems on top of your API, it is discovered to actually be a higher level of risk in a way that is not immediately clear how to mitigate?

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-17T01:23:21.560Z · LW · GW

Rereading my emails, it looks like I noticed the provision and pushed back on it, and was told I needed to follow up with a different person. I can't find any record of having done that, and don't remember any of this well. Looking at timestamps, though, my guess at what happened is that I was intending to follow up but ran out of time and needed to accept the offer as-is.

(We did have enough of a financial cushion that we could have waived severance without risk to our family, but it was also enough money that I didn't want to risk it.)

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-17T01:14:24.869Z · LW · GW

Well, either the information is worth that much or more (to someone), in which case the true value of the option Wave is offering is ~0, or it's not, in which case the package deal is worth some non-zero amount that might still be significantly less than the headline value of the unencumbered financial benefits.

What do you think the altruistic value in 2017 (ex-ante) was of negotiating releasing one laid off Wave employee from a non-disparagement+non-disclosure? (When the alternative is that they stay quiet about their time at Wave, not say selectively positive things.)

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-16T21:19:57.321Z · LW · GW

For the future, you might want to announce to your friends now that, if they forgo signing a severance agreement in order to share information with you, you'll reimburse them

Uh, this could be quite expensive. For example, if someone with a salary of $250k is given 16 weeks plus two weeks for every year of service that could easily be $100k+.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Contra Yudkowsky on Epistemic Conduct for Author Criticism · 2023-09-14T14:27:08.532Z · LW · GW

It then goes on to make a bunch of (wrong, laughably overconfident) object-level arguments about very obviously non-settled topics in science and philosophy.

But that's the real problem, no? If it had opened with a "bunch of inflammatory remarks" and then solidly backed them up you'd be fine with it, right?

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-13T21:39:56.373Z · LW · GW

Below you can see Elizabeth writing about how she successfully pushed back and got it removed from her agreement, so it does seem like my guess was correct! [EDIT: except nothing in her post mentions Lincoln, so probably not]

(I didn't know about Elizabeth's situation before her post)

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Duty to rescue / Non-assistance à personne en danger · 2023-09-13T13:08:25.686Z · LW · GW

The map has MA in blue, representing a duty to rescue, but for most purposes the state isn't. It has a good Samaritan law, but you don't have a duty to rescue a stranger you have no connection to. You would have a duty toward your child, student, employee, invited guest, or similar. As well as if you caused the danger they need rescuing from. http://tramontozzilaw.com/the-good-samaritan-law-in-massachusetts-bystander-protection-and-responsibility/

The map also has CA in blue, but as far as I can tell it only has a limited duty to report and no duty to rescue? https://alexanderlaw.com/articles/2018/02/is-there-a-duty-to-assist-in-an-emergency-situations/

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-12T17:57:00.926Z · LW · GW

I would be a bit surprised if "should we include a NDA & non-disclosure" had even risen to the level of a conscious decision of Lincoln's at any point throughout Wave's history

I think it's pretty likely that at least one departing employee would have pushed back on it some, so I wouldn't be surprised?

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-12T11:23:26.877Z · LW · GW

There are enough EA orgs that I know something about (and that other people know I know something about) that I think the number of bits I was leaking here was pretty low?

Another thing that's not visible is that I sent Lincoln an email linking to this thread, which I expect is why he jumped in with more context. I really appreciate him doing so, and don't want him and Wave to end up worse off than in a world in which he'd stayed quiet.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-12T11:19:56.192Z · LW · GW

They are basically forced to lie when asked about their takes on the organization, since answering with "I cannot answer that" is now no longer an option due to revealing the non-disparagement agreement. And because of the disparagement clause they are only allowed to answer positively. This just seems like a crazy combination to me.

I agree this is very awkward.

If people asked about my time at Wave I would just not talk about it; I wouldn't selectively say positive things.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-12T00:02:36.342Z · LW · GW

^^^

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-11T11:10:14.865Z · LW · GW

The latter, often coupled with the former to prevent disclosure of the existence of the agreement.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-10T13:02:50.927Z · LW · GW

I'm working on figuring out what I can say, sorry!

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-08T14:15:55.912Z · LW · GW

an NDA to prevent people from publicly criticizing their former workplace seems line-crossing to me.

I don't like these, but they are (were) depressingly common. I know at least one org that's generally well regarded by EAs that used them.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Weekly Incidence vs Cumulative Infections · 2023-09-08T01:48:13.131Z · LW · GW

Awesome, thanks!

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-07T23:26:29.277Z · LW · GW

I'm trying to support two complementary points:

  • The norm I've been pushing of sharing things with EA organizations ahead of time is only intended for cases where you have a neutral or better relationship with the organization, and not situations like this one where there are allegations of mistreatment, or you don't trust them to behave cooperatively.

  • A threat to sue if changes are not made to the text of the post is not cooperative.

Comment by jefftk (jkaufman) on Sharing Information About Nonlinear · 2023-09-07T23:19:08.640Z · LW · GW

For what it's worth, I also interpreted the "if published as is" as "if you do not edit the post to no longer be libelous" and not "if you do not give us a week to prepare a contemporaneous rebuttal".

I think if you wanted to reliably communicate that you were not asking for changes to the text of the post, you would have needed to be explicit about that?