vonunov
Joined 17 years ago
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Member since
Dec 12
Recent submissions
Comment · 14 days ago
Comment · 1 month ago
But not in America? I mean, we have our little smoker subculture with at least some semblance of etiquette and shibboleths, and the protocols for bumming a cig (ideally, ask to buy one instead, whereupon the other party should just give you one, unless they're nearly out), and so on. We had ashtrays at the ends of the aisles in the grocery store, and restaurant hostesses asking us "smoking or non?" and bringing us ashtrays. People at work grumbling about smokers getting extra breaks all the time, and the smokers for their part having to hike to the smoking area (or enclosure, even). Common memories of the strange experience of being sent to the corner store at a one-digit age to buy a pack for someone. I'm sure that's not all there is to it but I can't think of anything else at the moment. Anyway, what are we missing? I think I sound a little bit defensive about whether America has a significant smoking culture, but I'm just curious.
Comment · 1 month ago
Have you read gwern on nicotine? Particularly, in this case, regarding MAOIs in tobacco, so I suppose the hop through gwern isn't entirely necessary, but it's where I first heard of this, anyway.
Comment · 1 month ago
On dogs [not] having thoughts, do you say this based on the premise that thoughts are necessarily articulated (internally verbalized)? That seems to be a fairly popular perspective in discussions about human thought. But as to that (not to strawman or anything) I see it as just one of various forms of mental imagery[1] that can arise from something that I would say already arguably constitutes a thought.
That kind of unsymbolized thoughtform is fragile in my experience, as it strongly tends toward crystallizing into some kind of mental imagery. But I find it's possible in the right conditions to be conscious of chains of wordless, imageless propositional thoughts (by which I mean thoughts with truth values, of course, but also ones that are "propositional" in the sense of considering a plan of action or a causal chain).
Does it mean that dogs are evaluating truth conditions in the same manner but merely lack the linguistic components? I don't know; maybe that's wishful thinking. But they appear to have structured modeling/reasoning of causal and spatial relations in a way that's at least functionally equivalent to propositional thought.
1. That is, rather than just "images" or visualizations, the full spectrum of sensory/perceptual/motor emulations that can be experienced. See, for example, <https://hurlburt.faculty.unlv.edu/codebook.html>, though I'm not sure if this covers everything. I think there is, for example, a kinesthetic form of mental imagery -- which I would suggest is what coaches [don't know they] really mean when they tell you to visualize an action -- that consists of aborted motor commands that are still expressed just enough for their purpose (cf. the mostly aborted motor commands to the vocal cords, lips, etc. that can be observed in a person subvocalizing while reading).
Comment · 1 month ago
This works for me in PurelyMail. This behavior is configurable: https://i.vgy.me/oprwJz.png
IIRC it may also be necessary to add the desired sending address as an "identity" in the webmail config of the real mailbox.
Pretty sure this will be a feature more or less anywhere
Comment · 1 month ago
This is quite nice; I've been finding the time to do it every day so far (missed the first few days though) despite lately neglecting wordle/revealed/etc. In my case the email reminders are useful and effective.
Any plans for public[-ish] user profiles? Or a message board / daily comments thread?
Also, not sure if you have any desire to branch out, but this game is one I've played from time to time on one of those new-reddit integrated game things they have, and it's great to have a place to do it that's not reddit. There's another game there that I would nominate if you have any such interest:
You start on a Scrabble board populated with two words, and you have to build a connection between them with the tiles you're given (a persistent/common set, I believe, that replenishes as needed, also with the same letters in the same order for everyone). The surface objective is to do it fast (I want to say you get a minute but I'd have to check later to be sure), but there are other ways to approach it. I like to iterate toward a maximized score in the time allotted (in the reddit-games implementation, you can exit and restart without penalty, and you can make plays that aren't directly productive in the sense of connecting with the other pre-populated word; play ends once the connection is made).
Comment · 1 month ago
At some point I started just installing ABP/uBO without even bothering to ask/tell them, if I had the opportunity. So far my reads seem to have been correct regarding whether this would conflict with each person's typical web use, as I've never heard back about any trouble.
Comment · 1 month ago
In the spirit of good pedantic fun, I'll point out that en dashes are no less inconvenient than em dashes for the average Windows user to insert. The hyphen-minus immediately accessible on the keyboard was (and is) used for the common typewriting kludge attested in Garner's[1] as well as the LaTeX-syntax triple-hyphen em dash (which, might I add, for lack of a better place to do so, isn't one of the ways I've seen dashes used by LLMs or disguised by their operators).
1. (. . . Modern American Usage) https://i.vgy.me/UYqs89.png
Comment · 1 month ago
I don't know if I'm really at an ideal state, but I have at least the cumulative results of meeting immediate needs over time:
I have a domain.tld with MX to Purelymail and a duplicate MX record also for a sub.domain.tld. New account registrations get [email protected] (and a unique password/phrase using EFF Large Wordlist and generated in KeepassXC (so not real diceware, I think, despite the little icon of a die)). Random other things also get similar ad-hoc addresses as needed. All of the addresses already theoretically exist; all mail for *@[sub.]domain.tld routes to my super trendy and cutting-edge three-initial-username catchall mailbox.
I don't know your situation, but a whole domain just for friends and family to send mail to each other seems somewhat overprovisioned. But maybe you have a large family and a lot of friends, and maybe you all still email each other a lot.
> Is it worth running a Gmail . . .
I wish it weren't useful or necessary, but it seems to be somewhere between those things. I'd like to be able to ditch them entirely, but there's still regularly some utility to the "main", the "main real-name", and the half-dozen or more "alt/'anon'/junk/slush" Gmail accounts I made years ago (can you even still get away with that anymore?)
Comment · 2 months ago
Engineering manager and individual contributor, I think
Comment · 2 months ago
Comment · 2 months ago
As they say, ignorance of the law is [generally] no excuse; "knowingly" and "intentionally" here are about knowing what you're doing and meaning to do it, rather than whether you know it's illegal.
This section of the USC is about false ID offenses, but it discusses culpable states of mind generally. I think the context helps illustrate it though.
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
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> A knowing state of mind with respect to an element of the offense is (1) an awareness of the nature of one's conduct, and (2) an awareness of or a firm belief in the existence of a relevant circumstance, such as the "stolen," the "produced without lawful authority," or "false" nature of the identification document. The knowing state of mind requirement may be satisfied by proof that the actor was aware of a high probability of the existence of the circumstance (e.g., stolen or false nature of the document), although a defense should succeed if it is proven that the actor actually believed that the circumstance did not exist after taking reasonable steps to ensure that such belief was warranted.
> As we pointed out in United States v. United States Gypsum Co., 438 U.S. 422, 445 (1978), a person who causes a particular result is said to act purposefully if `he consciously desires that result, whatever the likelihood of that result happening from his conduct,' while he is said to act knowingly if he is aware `that the result is practically certain to follow from his conduct, whatever his desire may be as to that result.
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This Congressional Research Service Report discusses mens rea further, including a brief mention of the CFAA. The whole thing is worth a read if you're interested in the topic.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R46836
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> The approach largely reflected in the MPC and some federal precedent is to distinguish between "intention" or purpose on the one hand as being limited to a conscious object or desire, and "knowledge" on the other hand as capturing a requirement of awareness of a high probability or to a practical certainty.
> The Supreme Court in Bailey referenced this distinction approvingly and suggested that intention or purpose "corresponds loosely with the common-law concept of specific intent, while 'knowledge' corresponds loosely with the concept of general intent." Some federal courts utilize a definition of "knowing" that approximates the MPC approach, instructing that to act knowingly a defendant must have "realized what he was doing and [be] aware of the nature of his conduct" rather than acting "through ignorance, mistake or accident."
> Congress has also signaled an intent to distinguish between the two mens rea terms in this way in particular statutes. For instance, prior to 1986, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) proscribed "knowingly" accessing a computer without authorization or exceeding authorized access in certain circumstances. In its 1986 amendments, however, Congress changed the standard from "knowingly" to "intentionally," and the Senate report emphasized that the change was meant to require "more than that one voluntarily engaged in conduct . . . . Such conduct . . . must have been the person's conscious objective."
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(Note, for reference, what requires a "knowing" vs. "intentional" state of mind in the CFAA: <https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030>)
The Justice Manual also has some relevant detail (the rest of this page is also worth a look, as it addresses the practical (and nominal) matter of what is and isn't likely to be prosecuted (IANAL though, and I should stress that I'm not speaking to whatever might be the true realities of how the CFAA is applied):
https://www.justice.gov/jm/jm-9-48000-computer-fraud
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> In either a "without authorization" case or an "exceeds authorized access" case, the attorney for the government must be prepared to prove that the defendant knowingly accessed a computer or area of a computer to which he was not allowed access in order to obtain or alter information stored there, and not merely that the defendant subsequently misused information or services that he was authorized to obtain from the computer at the time he obtained it.
> As part of proving that the defendant acted knowingly or intentionally, the attorney for the government must be prepared to prove that the defendant was aware of the facts that made the defendant’s access unauthorized at the time of the defendant’s conduct. Such an awareness could potentially be proven through various means, including the presence of technology intended (however unsuccessfully) to limit unauthorized access; written or oral communications sent to the defendant that unambiguously informed him that he is not authorized to access a protected computer or particular areas of it; or the defendant’s own statements or behaviors reflecting knowledge that his actions were unauthorized.
> Experience has demonstrated that in the large majority of "exceeds authorized access" cases brought by the Department, the operator of the computer system made some technological effort to protect the information at issue, thereby signaling the importance or sensitivity of that information. It is not necessary that this technological effort erect an impenetrable "technological barrier" or that the technology succeed in its intended purpose of preventing access. To the contrary, when the CFAA is violated, the technology all too often "permits" the defendant’s illegal access, often despite network defenders’ unsuccessful technological attempts to prevent it.
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Comment · 3 months ago
The em dash (at least from an American perspective) is the "regular dash". Referring constantly to the "em dash" is a new thing; in my experience, it used to be understood that "dash" by default referred to the function/role of the punctuation mark that in America we format as an em dash, and that in the UK they (mostly) format as a spaced en dash. You have that function formatted as a hyphen: a dash in the abstract but not typographically.
Comment · 3 months ago
More to the point, even if you type fast enough to transcribe the lecture (or you know steno or pen shorthand or whatever), transcribing simply doesn't do the job of note-taking. (I speak from direct experience -- I did audio transcription work for a few years, and I generally wouldn't have been able to pass a test on something I'd just finished transcribing, even after having gone back through to do proofreading/editing at the end. There was some degree of mental engagement with the substantive meaning of things in the moment, but it was largely a "pass-through" sort of activity, if that makes sense.)
The idea isn't to merely take down a record of what was said, but rather to integrate the concepts into your own understanding: What associations can be made with existing knowledge, can you demonstrate to yourself your understanding of an abstract by contriving examples of it, can you explain it to your grandma, do you have a clear model of its scope/boundaries/limits and of where it fits into its domain, do you know the why as well as the what, etc.
The part where we have to condense what we're hearing into something concise enough that we can keep up is a feature. For that reason I wouldn't really recommend transcribing the lecture and then making notes out of it later, either (ideally we should be reviewing and organizing the notes into a more structured / fleshed-out / pared-down (as needed) form later anyway, so it would just seem to add an extra step). I don't know what everyone's courses are like, though, so maybe that approach could be useful or necessary for someone.
(And of course the takeaway here is that, assuming my understanding of it is well-grounded, and provided there isn't truly something inherent to handwriting that makes it cognitively advantageous, typing should have the potential to be just as workable a medium.)
Comment · 3 months ago
>But then again I also never seen anyone writing a word and doing the dots afterwards.
Interesting, I'd never really heard of it being done any other way. I suppose it occurred to me that it could be done otherwise, but I'd more or less assumed the "all in a batch at the end of each word" way was all but universal. (When writing at speed -- trying to keep up with an overflowing buffer -- this tends to lead to all the 't's in a word sharing one long crossbar, and the dots floating somewhere high and right of where they should be, depending on how far I'm lagging behind the verbal "point of focus", if that makes any sense.)
> But I suspect it goes deeper. Why does it seem to begin sentences with "Additionally" a bit too much? My guess is that it's because humans would tend to base their writing much more on, I don't know, maybe an underlying narrative structure of sorts, such that the relevance of things and the connections between them can more often be implied.
> Meanwhile AI has little or none of this kind of context, so it needs to use a lot more explicit connectors, and it's forced to risk being mildly patronizing for lack of a nuanced reader persona to write for. It doesn't encapsulate opinion in the subtext and details of factual statements, there is nothing to be found between the lines, and no arcane divination is needed to see what the angle is.
Scattered throughout the section before that (by which I mean that the next quotes weren't contiguous) is some tracing around the core problem that I later realized is a lack of qualia. Is it that the bot has no capacity for qualia? I mean, I would think so. I'm not sure if that's strictly compatible with the concept of qualia, since I'm under the impression that they're supposed to be ineffable anyway, so how would we really know? But either way, it obviously lacks direct knowledge of the qualia of a lot of things it pretends to have experienced. This also shows in its attempts at metaphor and analogy (but bear in mind this is all from early 2025).
> You might also find some detached or glossed-over metaphors. Is this "[I'm just a normal person, not some] superhero with a secret morning routine" really a particularly meaningful concept to you? It feels empty to me. Who has a "secret morning routine"? Who would have been thinking of such a thing before it was forced into the frame by the writer? There will often be a lot of this kind of disingenuous pretending at human experience.
> The scenario . . . where someone is having fully articulated, coherent, and civil self-talk about their alarm while it is still going off, seems unrealistic to me.
> Oh, you sat wrapped in a hoodie with the morning's hot drink to watch the sunrise? Were you also cradling the mug in both hands? It's a good thing you included such a relatable and human detail by dropping in a reference to "that soft morning light". . . . Thanks!
> "It felt kinda magical in a chill way." Seriously?
> "It's like my brain worked better without all the usual distractions." If you pause again and contemplate this bit, as well as the one from earlier about the "texts" and "chaos" that used to make his mornings so hectic, is it not empty? . . . It's alluding to things without actually talking about them. It is using many words to say nothing. It's essential to be able to notice this. --
1. https://v-n-n-v.github.io/chatgpt-voice