Posts

Sacramento LW/ACX Meetup 2023-11-22T23:52:20.274Z
Evening Wiki(pedia) Workout 2023-10-19T21:29:06.091Z
Deep folding docs site? 2023-03-28T06:01:23.567Z

Comments

Comment by mcint on Daniel Dennett has died (1942-2024) · 2024-04-19T17:01:45.963Z · LW · GW

Thank you, I was looking for a post.

Of interest, Daniel Dennett | From Bacteria to Bach and Back | Talks at Google in 2017. It's worth reviewing his other notable ideas and views of philosophy that he explored, from his Wikipedia page. I look forward to reading other testimonies of his influence and the effects of his work.

Comment by mcint on What Helped Me - Kale, Blood, CPAP, X-tiamine, Methylphenidate · 2024-01-05T01:12:56.213Z · LW · GW

It looks like kale has been absolved of high oxalate concerns, in contrast to spinach.

You might benefit from mixing in ground mustard seed (or fresh / thawed chopped cruciferous vegetables), per https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/kale/.

Chopping it and then waiting at least 40 minutes before cooking it or mixing some mustard powder to cooked kale helps produce the anti-cancer nutrient, sulforaphane.

For other dark leafy greens, boiling is not best nutritionally, although if you're drinking the water, you're probably well covered.

“The main purpose of cooking vegetables is to make them more edible, palatable, and digestible.” The downside, though, is that “cooking may adversely affect the levels of nutrients, especially the heat-sensitive and water soluble ones.” But even if you boil greens for 10 minutes, the drop in antioxidant capacity, for example, which is a rough proxy for phytonutrient retention, isn’t that much. Yes, there’s a significant drop in each case—a 15 to 20 percent drop—but most of the antioxidant power is retained, even if you boiled lettuce for 10 minutes. The single nutrient that drops the most is probably vitamin C, but as you can see, collards start out so vitamin C-packed that even collard greens boiled for 10 minutes have twice as much vitamin C compared to even raw broccoli.

You can see the vitamin C in spinach really takes a hit. Even just blanching for five minutes can cut vitamin C levels more than half, with more than 90 percent dissolving away into the water after 15 minutes, though most of the beta carotene, which is fat soluble, tends to stay in the leaves. But just keeping it in a regular plastic bag, like you get in the produce aisle, can protect it. The refrigeration is important, though. Even in a bag, a hot day can wipe out nearly 50 percent. Not as bad as drying, though, which can wipe out up to 90 percent of the vitamin C, suggesting that something like kale chips may pale in comparison to fresh—though vitamin C is particularly sensitive. Other nutrients, like beta carotene, are less affected across the board.

 

What does cooking do to it? Fresh is best, but steaming’s not bad, with microwaving coming in second, and then stir-frying and boiling at the bottom of the barrel.

on

Cooking by microwaving and steaming preserves the nutrition more than boiling, here measured in watercress. A little steaming or microwaving hardly has any effect compared to raw, though boiling even two minutes may cut antioxidant levels nearly in half. Watercress is a cruciferous vegetable, though—a cabbage- and broccoli-family vegetable—so it’s prized for its glucosinolate content, which turns into that magical cabbage compound sulforaphane.

Explaining sulforaphane production with respect to cooking techniques, pre-nutrient plus enzyme reaction time between mechanical breakdown and cooking.

 

Sorry, this comment is not well editing for length. I find myself wanting to explore these interactions with a graph model, taking inspiration from wikidata and software mindmaps, beyond just tree relationships.

Comment by mcint on What Helped Me - Kale, Blood, CPAP, X-tiamine, Methylphenidate · 2024-01-05T01:01:00.323Z · LW · GW

It reduces a lot if you exclude the water. It's quite easy to eat if you can serve it mixed with grain and protein, rice, lentils, thick stew, as a kind of hot salad (in cuberule.com sense, or "nachos").

Comment by mcint on What Helped Me - Kale, Blood, CPAP, X-tiamine, Methylphenidate · 2024-01-05T00:55:31.272Z · LW · GW

And timely reminder to take with Vitamin C which promotes absorption, and not with Zinc which is absorbed competitively.

Comment by mcint on Open Thread With Experimental Feature: Reactions · 2023-11-23T02:26:27.757Z · LW · GW

I find myself wanting to react (Actionable) / (Non-actionable). Or to say: yes, let's act on this. This reflection makes me want, (Can we make this actionable) / ... I suppose the opposite is covered by existing Concrete and Examples reactions. I don't find my thinking well-factored to these categories of reactions.

I find myself a little frustrated needing to scroll out sideways to engage with reactions. Maybe a pop-down option, and maybe a more stateful modal, I might find easier.

These reactions strike me as remarkable compatible with Web Annotation WG recommendations and standards at W3C, and currently fairly usable, and social, within hypothes.is. I have created reading groups with multiple groups of friends with great satisfaction on hypothes.is. It would be nice to grow toward eventual compatibility, and these W3C standards seem much more succinct than the largest they're known for.

Comment by mcint on Evening Wiki(pedia) Workout · 2023-10-20T02:01:52.570Z · LW · GW

Updating the online meeting link to https://meet.google.com/khc-enob-xzi

Comment by mcint on Paper: LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A” · 2023-09-29T01:50:15.094Z · LW · GW

It's nice to think about this paper as a capability request. It would be nice to have language models seamlessly run with semantic triples from wikidata, only seen once, and learn bidirectional relations.

Comment by mcint on Paper: LLMs trained on “A is B” fail to learn “B is A” · 2023-09-29T01:40:51.946Z · LW · GW

For this particular question, you could try both orderings of the question pair. (Or long question sequences, otherwise confusing, overloading, semantic satiation)

With this question and others where reversal generalization is hoped for, they have to be uncommon enough that the reverse doesn't appear in the dataset. Some things society (*social text processing) has not chewed on enough. 

While I disagree with the premise of the abstract, I laud its precision in pointing out differing, critically differing, understandings of the same words. It also gives me the sense of being sniped by a scissor statement, like the dress color / display gamma kerfuffle.

Comment by mcint on AGI-Automated Interpretability is Suicide · 2023-08-30T00:33:03.566Z · LW · GW

Please fix (or remove) the link.

Comment by mcint on Luck based medicine: my resentful story of becoming a medical miracle · 2023-06-26T07:39:56.271Z · LW · GW

Your link is broken, and while Wikipedia may be a guide to problems, generically, I'm curious about the apps, and the problems specifically relevant.

Comment by mcint on Luck based medicine: my resentful story of becoming a medical miracle · 2023-06-26T07:35:54.409Z · LW · GW

The blinded aspect is hard.

  • If you're concerned about supplement interactions, you should be concerned about supplements effects at all. People should seek based on possible luck, but should know (and be able to tell doctors) what they're putting into their bodies, and take contextual advice from relatives, friends, and community.
  • Collecting individuals susceptible to effective treatment with intervention X and having them ready for researchers to talk to, test more directly—is this already done? I suppose around individual notable conditions: celiac disease and gluten intolerance, or n=1 genetic issue self-diagnosis.
  • Some conditions have an intermittency, that makes it hard to assess interventions with unknown timing.

Perhaps blinded timing studies, self-studies, after something is found to work. Perhaps helping people to log and journal symptoms and effects during the blinded periods, as well as analyze, interpret, and share them—especially in ways that make it easier for others to trust.

Comment by mcint on Deep folding docs site? · 2023-03-30T06:10:49.932Z · LW · GW

I am indeed, thank you!

Comment by mcint on My understanding of Anthropic strategy · 2023-03-12T23:09:09.573Z · LW · GW

Yes, benefit corporation were created to provide an alternative to "shareholder primacy", otherwise widely accepted in law and custom, per Wikipedia: Benefit_corporation#Differences_from_traditional_corporations. Further quoting:

By contrast, benefit corporations expand the fiduciary duty of directors to require them to consider non-financial stakeholders as well as the interests of shareholders.[28] This gives directors and officers of mission-driven businesses the legal protection to pursue an additional mission and consider additional stakeholders.[29][30] The enacting state's benefit corporation statutes are placed within existing state corporation codes so that the codes apply to benefit corporations in every respect except those explicit provisions unique to the benefit corporation form.

Registering as a Public Benefit corporation means that they, the board of directions of the corporation, can't be sued for failing to maximize shareholder value, and potentially could be challenged if they "fail to consider the effect decisions on stakeholders beyond shareholders."


It would be interesting if they filed as a certified benefit corporation, B Corp, but I'm not sure what would be at stake if they failed to live up to that standard. Perhaps B Lab (non-profit who certified B Corps), or a similar new entity, should endeavor to create a new status for recognizing safe and responsible creation, handling and governance controls of powerful AIs. With external certifications one worries about Goodhard's law, and "safety-washing" to take the place of "green-washing", especially given the (current) non-enforceability of B Corp standards.

Do you find OpenAI's LP entity more credible? Do you have ideas about another legal structure?