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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2611 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for July 5, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Had my first workplace injury in a very long time. The short version is, I twisted my ankle hard enough to put a hairline fracture in my talus. There are a great many doors this experience opened for me.

  • How much it sucks to go through workplace insurance to get medical care. There are 2 open urgent-care facilities within cycling distance. I drove past at least 10 open urgent care units to get to the first one that was in-network. It shouldn't be this hard.

  • This is my first week-long vacation at home in years. I've been able to see so much more of my neighborhood. There are a lot of things I could like about it if I were around more often. This is another reminder that I need to figure out how to get into a line of work where I can stay mostly within 5 miles of home. Also a reminder that keeping connections in the neighborhood is still very, very important.

  • I've been able to catch up on some house cleaning & repairs. Also created a template spreadsheet for future real estate investing.

  • My employer will have me on light duty next week, which could give me the opportunity to actually make connections with the office & sales staff. Hoping to make impressions that I provide value in ways more than the trade they hired me for.

RATING: 7/10, would break my foot again.

Have any of you ever ended a friendship with someone due to them becoming epistemically closed off?

What really irks me here is someone that has started to selectively understanding/not understanding very obvious things in order to support his own positions (on everything from politics to his personal life). It's like he's become a conspiracy nut, only the conspiracy is that he is always correct about things. New data emerging only ever reinforces his viewpoints.

Yes, broadly. Is he conforming perfectly to some party line or other ideologically, and just doing whatever he wants to do personally?

What is he DOING in his interpersonal relationships?

Got specific examples? When I've seen this, they're generally doing a bit to get laid/advance themselves socially or professionally. They don't care about ideas for the sake of ideas, it only matters what's popular or useful in the moment.

He is tiredly following some "radical" political axioms, not particularly tied to a political party, but it's not very convincing, not the least because if those politics ever inconveniences him in any way he'll find rationalisations to do whatever is convenient to him instead.

More than anything I feel like he has checked out and is actively and blindly defending his biases as truth because that is mentally comfortable.

it only matters what's popular or useful in the moment.

This rings true but I don't think there is any particular goal beyond lazy self aggradisment and a general checking out of intellectual curiosity and rigor. He just wants to dunk on "political opponents" and other enemies, as well as have a comfortable existence, without caring about anyone else (which is ironic given his stated politics). He doesn't even care if he is correct or not anymore, the thinnest veneer of an argument is enough, he's essentially clapping for his own applause lights.

Perhaps we're just getting old and this is how it's going to be with more and more people going forward for my generation. Perhaps it's happening to me as well.

Or maybe he is getting depressed and this is a part of broadly losing interest in life.

Got specific examples?

Sorry, I don't want to dox myself to this person if they're reading.

What's the latest on COVID-19 strains?

I don't know how gauche this is, but I wanted to register that my life is going great on pretty much all fronts.

I've gotten much more serious about exercising a ton over the last couple of years and it seems to be readily paying off despite my advancing age in terms of chronic pain and general athletic capabilities. I've been in a relationship with someone I'm completely enamored with, and still struggling to see where our relationship's stress faults might be (only one I was worried about early on was her veganism and my near-complete-oppositism but she doesn't seem to care). My offline career continues advancing at a steady pace, as has my online "career". This plus the relationship does mean I've been much busier, but aside from missing the days where I could indulge in 15-hour video game binging sessions with abandon, I'm ok.

Overall I've just been much happier and relaxed, even when encountering adversity or stressful situations. I'm not sure how much of my current satisfaction is reliant on external factors like health and financial comfort, but I'm also not sure if I should care. I'll keep enjoying it regardless.

I’m also dating a vegan! We’ve been together for 3.5 years and are doing great. I’m actually much slimmer and feel better now that I eat less meat.

Nice to read a positive life update on this thread. My girlfriend is a pescatarian, while I am a meat eater. Overall, it’s working fairly well. I will generally make a Caesar salad and grill chicken on the side so we are both able to eat dinner without having to cook two separate meals. And if we go out to eat, she will still eat seafood, which is always nice to get at a good restaurant. The only problem I have is she doesn’t cook meat dinners. She’s down to make me a Turkey sandwich, for example, but steak and eggs or pork chops are off the table.

It’s definitely good to have that conversation early tho about what your lady is willing or isn’t willing to do in the kitchen. I would not envy living the rest of my life with a woman who won’t make me a Turkey sandwich.

It’s definitely good to have that conversation early tho about what your lady is willing or isn’t willing to do in the kitchen.

And in the bedroom.

My girlfriend already lets me eat cheese and salami in her bed.

As long as it's not crackers, it's all fine. I hate crumbs in my bed.

The only problem I have is she doesn’t cook meat dinners. She’s down to make me a Turkey sandwich

Is this because she doesn't consider turkey to be meat, or she doesn't consider making a sandwich to be cooking?

It has more to do with the texture of the meat. She prefers not to handle raw meat if she can avoid it.

It's good to hear that some of us are doing well, and I look forward to the day I can say the same

I desperately need help training my puppy. We spent over $1,000 on a training course that came complete with a shock collar with a remote, have done group classes, tried reinforcement with treats, tried a clicker, etc. I try and train him at least 10 minutes every day. Nothing works!

He destroys things while we're not there, is incredibly clingy all the time, jumps on us and guests, and barks at the cat. I truly need help - what are some good resources that people have tested with difficult puppies and know work? He's about 1 year old for context.

Edit: More context. He can sit, lay down, roll over, fetch, and is pretty good at coming when he's called. What he really needs help on is 'heel' and 'off' - the latter being similar to 'down' or 'drop it.'

You have your work cut out for you. I saw you mentioned he is a plot hound mix, hounds are notoriously stubborn and can be difficult to train. And if he’s already one year old, some of that behavior will be more difficult to get rid of than if he were, say, 4 months old.

I’d recommend getting a crate and practicing crate games with him. I know a lot of people are anti-crate, but I’ve had a lot of success using a crate with multiple dogs. It allows you to lock them up when you leave the house giving you peace of mind that they won’t destroy anything. And it doesn’t have to be permanent, just something you keep until you can trust leaving them home alone.

I also second the other commenters suggestion to revisit the dogs exercise regiment. Running around the backyard is great, but your dog wants explore. Hikes are best, but walks are good too. I’d recommend at least an hour a day walking, hiking, or running with your dog. Dog parks can also be your friend, but can be dicey. People have strong opinions on dog parks. Personally, I think they can be great if you can find a dog park with responsible owners and if you have a dog who is well socialized.

I’m also not a big fan of shock collars, particularly for non-aggressive behavior. They can turn a dog more aggressive without a lot of benefit. Positive reinforcement is best, but there’s also nothing wrong with smacking a dog (lightly) if he’s deliberately acting up.

There’s a lot you can do to train a dog, but they are stubborn and challenging. Doing the same thing every day is key to a well trained dog. This is much easier said than done.

Link to my favorite dog behaviorist/trainer, Patricia McConnells blog. Lots of gems on this site:

https://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash/

Ty!!! I really want to read more about it. We do have a crate but it’s too small for him and we need to get a new one. I’ll prioritize that.

I also don’t like the shock collar, we have a huge sunk cost but it does seem to make him more aggressive for instance when we shock him as he’s jumping on guests. Thank you for your feedback.

One thing about those collars is that they are best used as kind of an extension of your zone of influence, not a punishment. So they can replace a long lead for training dogs who will come when called, but only when you are close enough that they think you might make them -- but zapping the dog everytime it barks/jumps up will probably have undesired side effects.

If you want to use the collar for that, I'd train the dog to sit (or something) using the collar, and then ask him to sit when it looks like he's getting ready to jump on somebody. You should be able to get him to do this based on the beep/rumble alone pretty fast, and eventually just the voice command will be solid.

I've got a new dog too, and have had interesting results using the clicker + treats to encourage desired behaviour, which is not something I'd thought of in the past. (I think this comes from Karen Pryor, who has some really interesting books on clicker training in general, although the one I have is light on step-by-step instructions)

So when the dog is minding it's own business, not jumping up or chewing anyone's ankles -- click and treat. As he gets ready to do something bad, distract him by asking for something he might do instead (sit, or chew on a toy or something) -- click and treat. It's not like, magic fast results, but it seems to be working a lot better than I'd have thought so far.

Hmm I'm allergic to internet videos for the most part. Know any written stuff?

Light pinch and tss helps a ton. The audio-physical relationship the dog makes is quite pronounced, and it's how I got my puppy to stop jumping up so much. Typically, bad behavior for dogs who "seem trained" is them just acting out because they are bored or pent up. My dog does it, so along with a number of unique toys and treats we tend to go outside a lot and run around.

I've found that wooden chew toys (I have a hardened maple stick she really likes to naw on) really help keep her from chewing on wooden furniture. Some minor association training and our chairs, tables and drywall are mostly untouched now (thank God). Also puzzle toys are good, little treat holders help a lot, and just wrestling with the dog and being physically active are very good for the puppy. A lot of it is just making time for the animal so you can bond and play, because otherwise there isn't a point in having her (or him).

Also, don't acknowledge bad behavior, especially in rewarding or tangentially rewarding ways. You, the master, are unconcerned with the moment-to-moment experience of the dog, so stop acting like you are. Always provide good feedback for the dog, and never send mixed or subtle signals. Begging? Don't even acknowledge. Jumping? "Tss" with a pinch "bad dog". Excess energy? Physical toys, encourage good play, immediately stop with bad play. And so on.

There was actually a really funny south park episode about it that I found somewhat useful when Cartman's mom brought in a dog trainer to help her with Eric. https://youtube.com/watch?v=r8eqTFi5eYY (if you're curious. I think it's funny, at least).

The light pinch and tss has been surprisingly effective. I'm impressed. I'll try to report back later after I work with him more.

We already do ignore him, but lord he has the most pitiful cries. It's hard to resist laughing/breaking sometimes!

The light pinch and tss has been surprisingly effective. I'm impressed.

Happy to hear it! I was surprised at how effective it was myself, so I'm happy to share the power of verbal-physical training. Also, if the dog grabs stuff and doesn't let go, the trick to opening their mouth is pressing your thumb on the front of their lower jaw, right behind the front teeth. For whatever reason, dogs can't hold the mouth closed when you press that bottom palette, and it's saved me a number of socks, lol. Don't attempt if the dog is violent, obviously. Also a firm grip around the snout is worth twenty collars.

We already do ignore him, but lord he has the most pitiful cries. It's hard to resist laughing/breaking sometimes!

Perfection is the enemy of good or great, I personally spoil my dog in a number of ways, lol. It's about managing the creature, not controlling it outright (unless you intend for a show dog, which I'm assuming isn't the case). Dogs get better and more well behaved with age, and I think someone else mentioned more dogs lead to some amount of self training. In the same way, your behaviors directly effect the dog's behavior; it's why many dogs seem to be a microcosm of the owner. Just give him/her a number of ways to burn energy in a sanctioned way, like through toys, fetch, walks, etc. Hopefully the behavior becomes more manageable with these strategies and tricks.

I could never train my dogs to not beg, and to be honest I can't bring myself to, they're just too fucking cute when they do it.

At least I've mostly conditioned them to sit expectantly till I'm done eating, because they know I'll save the bones for them.

Or rather, they retain enough of their wolf instincts to target softer prey, like my girlfriend or grandpa, who might melt and sneak them snacks off the dinner table.

At that point I'm scolding and training them more than the dogs haha.

I could never train my dogs to not beg, and to be honest I can't bring myself to, they're just too fucking cute when they do it.

You know, some people don't mind it. I let our dog jump on our couches and beds, and I have a number of blankets strewn around the house she has essentially claimed as her own. I train the begging out because I just don't like being hounded by an animal for food when I already feed her generously. I suppose dogs are a "get what you deserve" sort of deal, lol, and who am I to say your training style is wrong?

Nothing soothes my heart like a big warm dog lying by my feet while I'm relaxing in bed.

I really don't see why more people don't let them on beds and sofas, it doesn't really make all that much of a mess.

When it comes to begging, I don't like when they paw at me and I scold them when they do, but if it's just sitting quietly and looking at me with their big limpid eyes, I see no harm in if. The nudging with their cold hard nose is something I can do without when I'm eating haha.

At that point I'm scolding and training them more than the dogs haha.

Have you tried a light pinch and a tss on them?

In India we don't have the consternation as you Westerners at the idea of giving them a moderately hard smack on the head if they're misbehaving. Well, I might, but I'm exceptionally softhearted when it comes my dogs and even then I can still do if they're being egregiously naughty. I don't think begging is bad enough to warrant it!

(I do think modern stigma around corporal punishment is overblown, be it for dogs or humans)

I was talking about the relatives.

I likely did so when I was a kid, but in this case they trained me out of it and not vice versa.

From this description, it sounds more like a problem of excess energy than lack of training. How much exercise does he get beyond the "train him 10 minutes every day"?

One of the biggest perks of having more than one dog is that the younger ones often train themselves simply by observing the older, and they can also burn up the excess energy by chasing each other around the house. You can kickback with a drink and watch the (adorable) show.

Of course, I wouldn't recommend it when you already have one dog you're struggling to train, that's swallowing a spider to catch the fly levels of fraught.

He has a backyard that he runs around in for at least an hour every day. And I mean he full on sprints, no lead or anything since the yard is fenced in. Maybe we should let him out more.

That'd probably be a good thing to try. May also need more hands on play time to stave off boredom.

Makes sense. More cardio would be good for me too hah.

What breed is he? One of those that are particularly smart and intent on learning (to the extent he trains himself?)?

He's a beagle/plott hound mix, so highly energetic! He's pretty smart but idk how to judge if he's intent on learning... he picked up roll over pretty quickly.

He's basically a hunting dog, then.

Well, take him hunting.

Get him started with scent/tracking, work on fetch/retrieval, off-lead commands, all that good stuff. You may have a 'backyard', but depending where you're living, said backyard may be too small to accommodate the work you'll need to do.

What do people use for sleep tracking? I honestly feel like Fitbit gets worse every product, time to look for alternatives.

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Withings sleep tracker. It's a pad that goes under your mattress. I doubt it's as good as a watch-based one, but I'm 100% guaranteed to use it every night. This means I have much more data to never look at or do anything with. I think it's good at tracking, snark aside.

I use a Level 2 Polysomnography suite, including a SpO2 monitor, flow monitoring, and arousal tracking.

(Well, that's the only thing I've ever used for sleep tracking, and it confirmed my suspicion that I had severe sleep apnea)

I have not had a depressive episode in 2 months after dealing with high-functioning depression for about 10 years. Obviously that's not long enough to know I've really beat it, but I feel like I've had a real mental shift as a result of interrogating just about all of my beliefs in the past 3 years.

I'd like to document my thoughts in writing here in the wellness threads to organize them and spread the word of what I've learned, if others find it useful. These should be assumed to apply to healthy brains exhibiting unhealthy behaviors. Obviously the brain can have all sorts of conditions that are more deeply rooted or physically problematic that this won't apply for. These thoughts describe how a healthy person might become unhealthily unhappy through their upbringing, learned behaviors, and genetic predispositions, but nothing beyond that.

I'm going to start with just an outline that describes what I think are the essential qualities of depression. I hope to post more detail in a future wellness thread.

A depressive episode is a self-reinforcing dialogue involving shame and self-pity, where the self-pity is repeatedly justified to a skeptical observer.

Depression is less a state of being or description of action, but rather an analysis of actions over time. Rather than saying "I am depressed", it can be useful to say "I am pitying myself, and I am justifying why I have the right to pity myself, over and over again," because that better describes the actions in the moment.

If the pity must continually justified, the question is to whom? I think there is some inner skeptic that we are justifying it to, that remains unfooled, and I think that it's a really interesting avenue to explore why this is and what the results are.

There's also the question of why we pity ourselves. I think it's used as a coping mechanism for anxiety, and I think every depressive episode starts with an intense anxiety trigger. People who feel anxiety more intensely (neurotics) are more in need of coping mechanisms.

I think there are several large forces today promoting self-pity: progressive ideology, certain corners social media, the liberal internet more broadly, and aspects of the psychology establishment. A big part of my growth was understanding how my progressive worldview was deeply toxic to my self-esteem, and how I had fallen for a kind of internet-mediated social contagion. Along these lines, I see self-pity as a sister to ressentiment.

The quick answer on how to reduce depressive episodes is to (1) become less sensitive to anxiety and (2) when you pity yourself, and the skeptical observer asks you to justify it, admit that you can't, that the self-pity was foolish, and that you will manage your anxiety more productively instead. I will try to elaborate on strategies for this in future posts.

This requires understanding thinking-as-dialogue, which I think is how the brain synthesizes different points of view into a cohesive worldview. I think that most people probably do this without realizing it, and some may not want to admit it because it might sound like you are hearing voices or something. But I think that a healthy brain thinks in dialogue while smoothing it into a single "voice" that one identifies with. If you have issues with identity or have more serious mental issues with voices, etc. then that goes beyond what I'm describing.

I get where you're coming from here. But it's not clear how admitting that you're stupid and wrong for being depressed is actually a route to improvement and not just feeling worse about yourself. I struggle with very negative thoughts about myself, and part of my negativity stems from knowing how disgusting and unproductive having negative thoughts is in the first place.

That kind of effect was also very prevalent in my own experience and is something I'm still very on guard for. In brief, I currently see it as a powerful way of accomplishing the goal of being pitiable. If that is my goal, then it's a powerful, recursive move to pity myself, and then use that as an example of how pitiable I am. I think the counter-move is to be vigilant about recognizing when I have that goal, and have a strong will to discard that goal as it comes up. But that's just in brief, I think there is a lot I could write to expand my ideas on this.

I guess I don't have a very good handle on what you mean here by 'pity'. Do you just mean self-loathing?

I see self-loathing as less central than self-pity right now. I think the basic definition of "feeling sorrow for someone's misfortunes" is what I mean by pity. So to fit my example, some bad memory trigger makes me anxious, I pity myself to cope with the pain (feel sorrow about the past, about what it means about me as a person, etc.), a critical feeling enters judging me of not being worth pity, and I turn that around and say, oh, what a misfortunate situation it is that I should feel shame from pitying myself , and from there you have that recursive cycle. And that is potentially one of many strategies to sustain the pity, self-loathing can enter as another strategy, etc.

It seems like what has worked for me lately is a very strong belief that I will not benefit from striving to pity myself, which would short-circuit this process if I am right that this is what's happening. It may be that others can pity themselves healthily, or I might regain the ability to do so. But I believe it's possible that because I used it so reliably as a coping mechanism, I developed a unhealthy dependency on it that it is best to quit.

My personal experience with mild-moderate depression are quite different.

It manifests as an utter lack of energy and clear anhedonia. I do occasionally feel great angst about certain things (my ADHD, my inelegibilty to give the USMLE as of this moment), but I wouldn't go so far as to say that self-pity is the defining factor.

I was having occasional suicidal ideation a few weeks back, but thankfully I still love and respect myself enough to never indulge them. It's more like intrusive thoughts than something I really want to do.

It does sounds like we have different experiences of depression. I might call mine more neurotic or distressed than what you've described. I appreciate your reply because it's making me think I'd probably rephrase my original post to add a few more qualifiers. It might reinforce my thought that depression is an analysis of a set of behaviors over time rather than a direct emotional experience. I revisited the depression symptoms list and it seems to me that a really wide range of causes could result in a subset of those symptoms.

I feel like my cause is very much a cultural learned behavior resulting out of a kind of toxic shame mindset, which I think is common, and I feel like I see it in a lot of depression communities, but it makes sense that it wouldn't be universal.

You have my sympathies, and I can only hope you recover on your own or find a treatment that works.

I'm hopeful that ketamine therapy, which I can get in the UK, might work. There's also ECT, but it causes some degree of memory loss, which scares me off it for now

I think there are several large forces today promoting self-pity: progressive ideology, certain corners social media, the liberal internet more broadly, and aspects of the psychology establishment. A big part of my growth was understanding how my progressive worldview was deeply toxic to my self-esteem, and how I had fallen for a kind of internet-mediated social contagion.

Well said! I've gone through a similar transformation myself. It's deeply upsetting to me how many people are being led into unhealthy mental states nowadays.

(1) become less sensitive to anxiety and (2) when you pity yourself, and the skeptical observer asks you to justify it, admit that you can't, that the self-pity was foolish, and that you will manage your anxiety more productively instead. I will try to elaborate on strategies for this in future posts.

Yep, this is something I would be curious about. My take is that there are about 1 million strategies out there, and you have to try a bunch with an open mind to find what works for you.

This requires understanding thinking-as-dialogue, which I think is how the brain synthesizes different points of view into a cohesive worldview. I think that most people probably do this without realizing it, and some may not want to admit it because it might sound like you are hearing voices or something. But I think that a healthy brain thinks in dialogue while smoothing it into a single "voice" that one identifies with.

You might find this blog post interesting.

I would imagine that yes, there are a lot of strategies that different people could find more or less effective. I would like to go deeply into the strategy of having a solid belief system that makes doing those 2 things fairly automatic. And this doesn't have to mean fooling yourself, if you buy the premise that depression is a delusional state, where you are spending your precious time on Earth moping unnecessarily out of confusion.

So I'm going to go into what that process looked like for me, which was somewhat accidental. It's funny though, I know red-pilled can mean a lot of things, but just going through the left wing disillusionment after so long just felt such a powerful deprogramming, and was such an important part of the process for me.

That was an interesting article, and I think some of my thoughts could translate well into that way of thinking. That said I am a very non-visual thinker, and that may be giving me trouble with really accepting that lens. I read the article on that site about rejecting-not-accepting and did find a lot of that to be relatable.

Not a wellness question, but I don't want it to get lost in the old small scale question thread:

I've always been mildly interested in programming, but my formal training in it was only in the absolute basics of Javascript in school. We didn't even get to pointers in C, to give you an idea where I bottomed out.

However, my fondness for rat-adjacent spaces makes me probably one of the people who sorta somewhat understand programming concepts as much as possible without actually being able to code well.

I can mostly follow code or pseudocode, but I've noticed that programmers mostly leverage existing functions in libraries or APIs to massively abstract their work.

My issue is that I simply don't know most of the interesting functions that might be relevant if I have a specific concept in mind. I don't know whether there's an existing function I can call, let alone something I can import as a library, like math.js. I know that there's plenty unknown to me, and unknown unknowns I couldn't possibly estimate.

I can definitely ask GPT-4 about such things, but leaving it aside, how do I understand the options available to me as best as I can?

For example, when I look at a little of the code for the few ML models I've learned, it seems simple enough if you can abstract a lot of it. I simply don't know what to abstract.

How do I build this fundamental knowledge? I suspect it involves something I'd find mildly unpleasant like reading documentation, textbooks, or trawling through code on Github. But I'm asking just in case a more interesting alternative exists that I'm not aware of.

I'll pre-emptively tag @DaseindustriesLtd, because of course I will haha. But I know there are plenty of you programmers out there, don't be shy!

If it helps, I have the following concrete interests-

  1. Modding games. I'm aware reading documentation or code is mandatory here. I'm sure @ZorbaTHut would be mildly pleased to hear that I'd like to make small mods for Rimworld, especially if AI makes generating art assets easier.

  2. Small automation tasks on my PC. GPT is helpful here if I know what to ask.

  3. ML, just enough so I could apply it to medicine if I needed to. I'd like to think upskilling myself there might lead to more money if I can leverage my medical degree into a career involving it.

I'm not particularly qualified to answer but my opinion is that if you want to understand programming functions in their relation to ML, the best way would be to quickly get to creating ML artifacts. This means

  • learning python, we have tons of people here who've already commented on that. Introduction to Computation and Programming Using Python might be the best textbook now. Read in parallel with solving problems on Codewars.

  • listening to Karpathy's course Neural Networks: Zero to Hero and going through minGPT repo (or nanoGPT). His guide on building an LLM from scratch is probably the greatest single piece of education on Youtube (excepting, like, 10000 lectures of random Indians).

  • Fleuret's little book also covers the mathematical concepts behind those functions.

His guide on building an LLM from scratch is probably the greatest single piece of education on Youtube

Thank you for this.

Thank you!

Small automation tasks on my PC.

PyAutoGui for automating mouse/keyboard tasks (including browser), Selenium for more involved browser tasks (from Python or any language). A shmidge of bash/terminal/regex goes a very long way.

Thank you!

I'll be honest, I now totally just use GPT-4 for new APIs. It's like an order of magnitude faster than trying to grind my way through invariably-awful documentation.

Silly question, but have you seen anyone try to use GPT-4 to...create documentation? Maybe it'll write something that's better than what exists. (I'm not in programming, so I wouldn't know the limitations.)

I haven't, but it seems difficult; most of the hard part of documentation is capturing subtleties, and I'm not sure you can give GPT enough code for it to figure out what it needs to mention.

Improving documentation, though, that seems really possible, and in fact I think I'm going to try that out next time I rotate around to my library project.

There's awsdocsgpt.com, which is... Not terrible.

Something I've enjoyed recently is asking it for code reviews. You can ask it for basically a PRD for a small project using a new language or library, do an initial implementation asking questions of it along the way, and then have it give you feedback and iterate on your code to make it more idiomatic, catch you when you hit a common pitfall, use more advanced parts of the API, etc.

I would love to get to a point where I can just paste in a Github pull request link and have it review for me. Along with suggested changes.

  1. Learn the basics of python - 6.0.01x MIT Edx is a good fast starter

  2. Ask Chat GPT plus for everything else

The Chat GPT iteration process is:

  • Set up a vscode / python code interpreter

  • preferably setup jupyter notebooks in it

  • ask chat gpt something that has existed before its cut off date (which will be written at the bottom on the chatgpt website)

  • google the exact same thing to see if people are giving similar answers

  • either ways, copy paste the code chatgt gave you into the jupyter notebook

  • string it together with your python 101 knowledge with the other bits

  • run

  • Once it fails, tell chat gpt what you were trying to to and copy the entire ugly user message there

  • It will tell you how to fix it

  • If that fails, then ask google

  • Rinse and repeat until success

Source: non-programmer who switched into a career in CS at around 23.

Thank you, I'm certain this will come in handy! And if not, I've failed your advice through sheer laziness and not vice versa.

I feel you brother. Best of luck.

How do I build this fundamental knowledge? I suspect it involves something I'd find mildly unpleasant like reading documentation, textbooks, or trawling through code on Github.

bingo

I'd rather not take Ritalin to indulge in a new hobby, but it's better to have the delusions knocked out of me early haha.

It's not about knocking down delusions. You are putting the cart before the horse.

You are asking "I want to do X, how do I know about the tool that can do X". Which is always.. a Google search (or chatGPT in simple cases) away. The only difference between the people who know about the tool and those who don't is those who do, just iterated on that process a thousand times. There are cheatsheets out there as well, for the exceptionally impatient. But it sticks with you a 100 times more when you really struggle to do X, then you give up all hope and search for the the tool that does X, and X just works. You will remember till you're 6 feet under, as opposed to reading a cheat sheet.

Focus on doing X and the rest will come. It sounds cliche, but as someone who taught programming to a lot of college students, etc. Wanting to do X is actually the hard part! Don't waste the gift of wanting to do X.

If it helps, I have the following concrete interests-

  1. Modding games

If you're interested, we're working on a mod this very moment. Feel free to join.

I never really got into Starsector, and while I was mildly tempted to volunteer as a writer, I saw that someone was already on board.

For modding games take a look at dnSpy. It lets you open any .net assembly (compiled c# dll) and decompiles it into surprisingly readable code*. Comments and variable names are missing but class structures, method and attribute names are present so it's easy enough to tell what's going on with some digging. You can modify and recompile the code into a new assembly dll file.

This effectively means you can mod most games that use the Unity engine. In all the games I looked, Game_Data/Managed/Assembly-CSharp.dll will contain the game entry point, but larger games may sprawl out into their own assemblies that are referenced by this file. dnSpy should open those automatically.

I used this method to patch the recent Derail Valley update where they introduced a new difficulty system. I picked the "realistic" setting in a new game but found the teleport feature was limited to about two metres ahead, versus the twenty or so metres it used to be before. This feature is meant for VR to avoid motion sickness but I just use it walk faster between the train and track switches. I eventually traced it to a hardcoded class initializer for all the difficulties and modified one attribute (it was easiest to look at the IL assembly and change one instruction). Saved the assembly and now I was happily teleporting from one end of the train to the other in a tenth of the number of hops as before.

This method won't work if you see references to il2cpp as that's an optimization where the original assembly was turned into c++ code and compiled into native machine code. This is much harder to reverse engineer and is effectively impossible to meaningfully decompile as entire class structures and functions can disappear and type information is lost during compilation.

  • Curiously you can even pick between c#, visual basic and f# (iirc), as all three compile into Intermediate Language and can be decompiled back seamlessly, making them interchangeable. You can't even tell what the original source language was.

You can't even tell what the original source language was.

Maybe not if it was VB code, but F# code is obvious when decompiled into C#.

This seems a little advanced to me, especially since Rimworld only uses C# and XML, but I'll keep it in mind if my horizons expand! Thank you.

Rimworld specifically uses a lot of dnSpy, coupled with a tool called Harmony to patch code at runtime. I don't have a link to this, but go hunt down the Rimworld modders discord - I haven't been there in years but they were always a good bunch of people.

If you're doing something of the form "add new stuff to the game" then you won't need dnSpy/Harmony; if you're trying to change existing mechanics, you probably will.

I aim to start small and see if my appetite persists. I can always ask around in the Combat Extended discord server too, they're used to stretching the game's code fat beyond it's initial capabilities.

Obligatory plug, since it's been brought up: the Combat Extended lead developer is working on a standalone game.

(we've been chatting on Discord a ton, good guy)

I'm incredibly hurt that you'd think I haven't long been aware of Ascent of Ashes (I knew what you linked without opening it) ;)

Look, I'm a CE fan, and in our previous debates I've always stated how I feel more simulationist elements would make the game much better in my eyes.

For example, the recent Biotech DLC made my eyes bleed when I saw the implementation of "genetics" in it.

Hell, I even thought of pinging you when I saw this mod come out:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2996971119

I didn't, in the end, because I didn't want to unnecessarily disturb you (or I forgot haha), but as a junior doctor whose seniors have had to patch up the mess I've made of a minor procedure, god knows I appreciated it.

(Another thing that drives me up the wall is the inability to have multiple doctors perform procedures in parallel or cooperatively, from a gameplay perspective it would certainly make having more than 1 or 2 or them worth it, or multiple pawns working together at all)

I'm looking forward to AoA, though I have the minor gripes that I don't really like the art style, it's rather ugly even by indie standards. But I play Rimworld, so you can see where my priorities lie. I'd play just to have z-levels as a basic feature!

Hell, I even thought of pinging you when I saw this mod come out:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2996971119

Hah, entertaining. Hadn't thought of that one myself :D

From a gameplay standpoint . . . I dunno, one downside to stuff like this is that it makes it much easier to grind specific difficult jobs. It's kind of weird if you have a doctor just waiting for someone to get injured so they can chaintend them for the next three days straight, right? Maybe "xp is granted only for the first tend" but now we're adding weird unintuitive explanations to it. And this still cuts down a lot on the risk factor of choosing who gets tended with what medicine.

I think this might be an example of something that (1) doesn't result in good gameplay, and (2) isn't even necessarily realistic - like, if an apprentice doctor cleans a wound badly, well, it's possible they did damage that cannot be fixed, and if we're diving so deep into this that we're trying to simulate that as well then the question becomes "is this the best use of developer time or can we find something to work on with better bang for buck".

(Another thing that drives me up the wall is the inability to have multiple doctors perform procedures in parallel or cooperatively, from a gameplay perspective it would certainly make having more than 1 or 2 or them worth it, or multiple pawns working together at all)

This sort of thing might just be code complexity; Rimworld's job system doesn't really support "two people working on one project", and it's unclear if it would be worth building it just for something like this. (In this context, "actions on a specific character" is a project - the character is locked until the task is finished, so even "two people working on unrelated surgery jobs" would be hard to implement.)

I strongly suspect that in a counterfactual world where this had been the default implementation (with additional balancing), there would a clamoring crowd of precisely zero people who'd be advocating for the version Rimworld has today.

I can certainly think of trivial solutions, like a critical failure in tending exacerbating the wounds or progressing an infection (the latter is more dubious, but I can suspend my disbelief, if we assume that represents crappy quality of care spreading an infection to other parts of the body)

In this context, "actions on a specific character" is a project - the character is locked until the task is finished, so even "two people working on unrelated surgery jobs" would be hard to implement

From the Ideology DLC, it seems to me that there are mechanisms in place to make pawns gather at one spot and surround it.

I might be wrong, but I can see an implementation that simply has two or more doctor pawns standing at the bedside, throw up an interaction taskbar, and then have the process proceed according to a weighted value of their skills. It should certainly be sublinear and have diminishing returns with added pawns and medical skill, there's a reason we don't usually have 20 surgeons elbowing each other at work on a single patient haha.

The Biotech DLC sort of does this during childbirth with the midwife, and one bystander, usually the spouse, standing close by.

Now I'm no expert, if this thread hadn't revealed that, but unless the code is really spaghetti, it should be a tractable problem.

While I'm on it, I'd much rather diseases be of the communicable sort where possible, since I don't see how an isolated colony in the middle of nowhere can develop the flu or plague all at once. (I'd hate to see their Epidemiologists grapple with social distancing when Covid-5500 hits).

It could be a hidden hediff for visitors or traders, with a small chance of being spread.

But of course if I nitpicked every little detail in Rimworld that drove me up the wall, we'd be here all day. Suffice to say that I have 600+ mods of which I'd call 200+ "must haves", that should illustrate my degree of dissatisfaction with the base game haha.

Every programming language has a "standard library" of helper classes/functions/etc that are included with it, a library of loadable third-party modules that provide more stuff, and a way to specify and load those.

Python is a pretty good general-purpose language, and usually my first suggestion for what to learn for programming newbies. You can find the docs for the standard lib here - Python standard libs are known for being pretty comprehensive. Personally, I have trouble reading large volumes of docs that aren't relevant to anything I'm working on, so I recommend to anyone seeking to learn to just go ahead and install Python locally and start building things. Usually your 2 for local automation tasks and sometimes modding games are a good source of tasks that are simple enough to not overwhelm a newbie but still feel like you're accomplishing something useful.

I would suggest building some stuff using just the standard lib to get used to how to do things. Later on you can learn about how to find third-party packages, install them, and use their functionality.

First I definietly suggest using search enigne over GPT, search enigne most often lead you to existing Stack Overflow questions and people there while mean, often give good suggestions with detiles on why

On your interests, I myself is also a huge friend of 1 and 2, I do think there are hurdles on both, as you sated, modding require huge amount of reading documentation, and somethings even reading decompiled code, I myself make utility mods for my own QoL when playing Minecraft

On automation tasks, learn a common scripting language like Python then just automated the thing you want to be automated, while this xkcd is a very good reference on what not to automate, it is always worth spending extra time to learn how to automate things in general at first

For machine learning in particular and scientific computing more generally, you have the following extremely useful libraries, all in python, because that's the most common language here:

  1. Numpy, short for Numerical Python. This is a very deep library that does everything from numerical derivatives, integrals, matrix multiplication, everything in linear algebra, sorting arrays of numbers, and even simple linear regression. The main workhorse here is the "ndarray" datatype that numpy defines, which allows you to create an object which stores a multi-dimensional array of numbers very efficiently.

  2. Scipy, short for Scientific Python. This is an extension of numpy, which includes optimisation routines, solving differential equations, algebraic equations, etc. Less overwhelmingly used than numpy, but still very common

  3. Scikit-learn. This is the library to use if you want off-the-shelf classical machine learning algorithms, so anything outside of deep-learning stuff. Decision trees, linear/logistic regression, clustering, nearest neighbors, or whatever, this does basically all of it.

  4. matplotlib. This is the most common visualisation library to make graphs or charts. Endlessly customizable, and hence kind of a pain to use, but it's the most common and very useful.

  5. Pytorch. Now we're getting into deep learning and GPU computing. Pytorch essentially does much of the same job as Numpy, but it also automatically interfaces with your GPU, so that all your matrix multiplies are run much, much faster. This is the library you use to define your deep learning models, and the one you use to write your training code.

And so on and so on. There are other libraries like Pandas for data analysis, and all the huggingface libraries for deep learning, which get you even more abstraction, so that you can use transformers without even knowing. I don't think there is any more pleasant way of getting to know these libraries than reading a few textbooks and then inevitably drudging through their documentations when the need arises.

Thank you, I was afraid that was the case, but having the options clearly arrayed before me makes it far less daunting!

I suspect that my usual method of using GPT-4 will run into issues with a lot of newer techniques and functions falling outside the September 2021 knowledge cutoff. It's a fast moving field after all.

Hmm, basically all the libraries I listed except maybe for pytorch haven't changed all that much since 2021, gpt-4 should really still be very useful with all of them. What it will have trouble with is a library like "Transformer" by huggingface, which lets you automatically download and use pretrained deep learning models. But to even use a super-high-abstraction library like that one you still need a bunch of "glue skills" like knowing how to load a .png image from your computer into a format that the high-level functions can understand, and how to interpret and visualise the output of those high-level functions. GPT-4 would be amazing for all of that.

I think Transformers has been around. Langchain on the other hand...

That said, you can use search enabled GPT or bing for this stuff too.

But- I have noticed GPT will mess up when setting up ML models sometimes. Stuff like mixing up the ordering of dimensions. I wound up with a toy transformers model that was trying to learn a string reversal task using positional embeddings that were spread across batches instead of across tokens the other day. And on other tasks it has all sorts of other minor errors. The code usually compiles- but it doesn't always do what you thought you asked for.

It certainly gives you experience doing critical thinking with regards to code debugging though, while also doing a lot to help you learn new libraries. The loop goes from

Read Demos and example code and textbooks -> Write hopefully passable code -> Debug code

to

Have GPT4 write weird, buggy or technically correct but silly code -> Debug Code while asking GPT4/googling/inferring/testing what the functions do.

Which I much prefer.

Blackpill or whitepill me on massage. I don’t particularly like heavy (sports, I guess) massages, but a lot of people I know including my partner swear by them. Osteopaths Love Him (etc etc).

Is there any health-based reason to visit a masseuse or osteopath that amounts to more than it being a pleasurable experience for people who enjoy it?

Not sure about scientific studies, and I'm primarily motivated by the pleasurable experience. But I can say that regularly getting Thai massages helped me get my splits, in a way that years of self-stretching never did. That mobility also carries over into everyday life, e.g. I'm able to sit into a true squat without raising my heels. Something about it taught me how to relax more into the stretch, since I didn't have to use my own muscles to hold the stretch. I don't think it's particularly helpful for me now though, after I've developed the body sense to perform the stretch on my own.

I'd also note that Thai massage is riskier than regular massage: there's a lot of quackery out there, but Thai massage involves going into farther ranges of motion than other modalities which introduces more risk of that quackery injuring you.

This is a great article written by a really thorough pain researcher who goes through the positives and negatives. Keep in mind he's a physical therapist so somewhat biased, but I really do trust his research and methodologies. Here's the gist:

It has some plausible medical benefits, even if they are inconsistent and unproven. More importantly, the emotional value of touch and the effects on mood and mental health are so profound that patients really just cannot lose — good quality massage therapy is a worthwhile service for anyone who can afford it whether it “works” as a treatment or not.

So I'd say - no real physical benefits at all, but hey it makes you feel nice. Personally I just self massage with oils/tennis balls and stretch and I've been much better off. You also have to consider that bad massages can really mess you up, especially if you have chronic pain issues or if the person is inexperienced/dumb and uses too much force.

Thanks, this was very interesting.

I'd say probably the biggest benefit is cheaper access to a moderately trained medical professional. In the US, all but 5 states require about a year of training to become a licensed massage therapist culminating in a standardized test with a ~70% pass rate. For something like $70 an hour, you get pretty good combination of competency and attention per dollar compared to a doctor.

For whatever NIH's medical credibility is worth, their review(1) of (the reviews of) the literature finds massage is effective for short term treatment (2-3 days) of low back, neck and shoulder pain, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia generally halving or thirding severity of symptoms. Generally there hasn't been enough study of long term outcomes to reach statistical significance, and the short term data is middling quality. An RCT of dosage response(2) found no benefit from 30 minute sessions but a 3x reduction in pain from 60 minute sessions and quote:

Our findings also suggest that previously published studies of massage for neck pain may have not administered adequate doses. For example, the newest Cochrane review of massage for neck pain reported 9 trials of massage for subacute or chronic neck pain. Among the 7 trials with conceivably relevant designs, 4 trials included only a single session of a single massage technique applied for less than 5 minutes, 1 trial included only five 30-minute treatments over 2 weeks, 1 included five 45-minute treatments over 1 month, and the last was a series of weekly 60-minute massages. In addition, most trials lacked massage resembling conventional massage practice in the United States, where 60-minute treatments administered by licensed massage therapists are the norm, a wide range of massage techniques are used in a single session, and self-care recommendations are provided. This review notes that there is little information regarding optimal parameters for the massage, including the number of treatments per week and the length of each session.

From my understanding, a good 15 minutes at the start of a massage session is just preparing the flesh so it is workable. An hour session is going to have a lot more time to do actual work.

There is a plausible story that reduced pain allows for faster long term improvement by making it easier to follow through with physical therapy exercises (or literal exercises(3)). This requires some level of conscientiousness on the patient's part (and some lack of it on the provider's part, massage therapists in the US are not allowed to prescribe physical therapy), but seems plausible.

Regarding your (lack of) enjoyment of sports massage, it might be useful to think about what is happening as assisted stretching. Many of the deep pressure techniques are attempting to fool your nervous system into thinking the muscle is tighter than it really is, and thus relax it. Like normal stretching the feeling is an acquired taste, and those without it often "guard" by tightening all the nearby muscle groups making a frame to avoid injury and reject the outside force.

Footnotes

-I haven't interacted with any osteopaths, but from the looks of it they are an unlicensed profession and thus going to have a lot more variability.

-I'm pretty close with a licensed massage therapist so included is probably some second hand propaganda

(1)https://www.nccih.nih.gov/health/providers/digest/massage-therapy-for-health-science

(2)https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3948757/

(3)https://today.uic.edu/massage-therapy-beneficial-after-injury-exercise/

When you say "thirding the severity of symptoms", do you mean reducing to 33%, or reducing by 33%?

Reducing scores on pain level questionnaires to 33%.

I'd say probably the biggest benefit is cheaper access to a moderately trained medical professional. In the US, all but 5 states require about a year of training to become a licensed massage therapist culminating in a standardized test with a ~70% pass rate. For something like $70 an hour, you get pretty good combination of competency and attention per dollar compared to a doctor.

If you're going to someone like that explicitly for medical advice, I can only implore you to consider seeking a teleconsultation with a doctor from the cheaper parts of the world, likely for far less money. After all, correct me if I'm wrong, but these professionals can't prescribe anything but OTC medicine, nor scans.

You'll get a far higher quality assessment for one.

I already give out free medical advice here, at least while the GMC isn't looking, I'm nice like that. For $70/h, I'd do that, and suck your dick too /s

OK, honestly consider this an open advertisement for my services, first three purchases buy an effort post for a topic of your choice.

No legal prescribing power, totally agree that it is absurdly expensive compared to foreign care, but some cost comparisons of how messed up US healthcare costs without insurance:

$15.00/min Primary care

$7.00/min US based telehealth

$1.15/min Massage therapist

$0.90/min India based telehealth

I've been to an osteopath, and it feels like quackery to me. She gave me some useful advice, but the manipulations themselves felt weird and didn't provide any relief.

A good masseuse is great, but I like heavy massages. It's like doing a good deep stretch, but you don't have to do anything yourself.

Why do stimulants make me sleepy during the day but keep me wide awake at night? FWIW I’m generally sleepy during the day which peaks around 7-8 ( to the point I can fall asleep for a nap within 30 seconds) then hyper awake starting at around 9.

I dislike working during the day. This isn’t uncommon in finance, true the hours are bad but it’s a common meme that bankers rock up at 10, check their emails for 2 hours, go to lunch and the gym, then come back at 4 when the MD has comments and then work until 3am, rinse and repeat. Partially this is because bosses expect things they comment on before they go home to be ‘pls fix’ed by 9am the next morning, but it’s also because i think quite a few people don’t work well in the middle of the day. I’ve always worked best from maybe 4pm to 10pm (1am at a stretch), even at school and in college. I have stuff to do right now, but I’m here because I want to be, I don’t feel like working, I need the late afternoon panic to kick in (etc).

Another possibility is screen time. I can be really tired at 10pm, but if I decide to play videogames or watch a show and don’t fall asleep in the first ten minutes (which doesn’t happen) I’m often awake until the early hours.

Which stimulants? Something mild like coffee, or Ritalin?

Legal stimulants - coffee, nicotine etc.

Like a couple puffs on a vape at 2pm will literally put me to sleep but when I puff at 10pm it’s actually stimulating and increases focus.

I don’t take ADHD medication.

A tendency to become sleepy after coffee seems to at least linked to genetics. I will caveat I didn't find a good source for this, but I did find:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3368971/

That shows that being immune to the effects of coffee might be genetic.

I know coffee makes my mom sleepy!

Finally. I thought it was just me who was weird.

I had my first two olympic wrestling classes this monday and tuesday, and it quickly became obvious to me that this was the sport I was born for, I immediately loved it. Wrestling-only gyms for adults are really rare, given that basically everyone who becomes good at it starts out in high-school (or earlier) and continues on to college, but I was lucky to find one that offered classes. This is the first sport that truly resonated with me on an instinctual level, even more so than weight-lifting. Winning a contest of literal physical dominance against another dude feels waaay better than winning at any other sport that I can remember playing in school.

The class was generally structured in 3 phases: warmup, then technique drills where you pair up and take turns practising a few techniques the instructor shows you, and then sparring at something close to 100% effort, trying to get another person to fall on their back.

I was surprised on 2 fronts, first, being physically bigger and stronger is an unbelievable advantage. I knew that already, of course, but the sheer magnitude of it surprised me. I'm 206lbs, 5'10 at 22% body fat, and I was sparring with a new guy of the same height, but 160lbs, and the difference was truly unbelievable, it was essentially trivial for me to overpower him. Physical clashes between adult males are so rare in daily life that I just hadn't really realised at a visceral level how much difference weight and muscles make, but it's truly enormous.

The second surprise was the effectiveness of technique against people who don't know it. One guy weighed 150lbs, but had been taking wrestling classes for a few years, and I was powerless against him. Though he did tell me that he needed to have perfect technique in order to take me down, anything less than perfection and my strength can effectively play defence.

This morning I've counted 5 bruises and 3 scratches on my body, my ribs hurt, my neck is sore, and both my shoulders muscles are painful, but I've never been this happy about any other sport.

Hey man, I'm glad you found something you like.

I coded a langchain layer for ChatGPT-3.5 to turn it into a service dominant! It doms me to fulfill all of my self care needs on a daily basis now!

The mind commands itself, and the mind resists, but by externalizing and automating the reification loop, I can relax and give in completely to the psychic metamorphosis! Self modification has never been easier or more pleasant.

I was experimenting with something similar - an AI accountability buddy/nagbot

Is it mostly steered via the system prompt? How do you interact with it?

Ok so, right now I have a Vue GUI, with just the most basic functionality. One chat log saves to disk on the backend and I can't split the conversation at the moment-

It's powered by APIs, which, are really easy to throw together with gpt4 help.

now... as for the prompting... lets see... I'll probably release this publicly eventually so its not too secret...

len_ret_val = EFFECTIVE_TOKEN_LIMIT + 1

    while len_ret_val > EFFECTIVE_TOKEN_LIMIT:

        ret_val = json.dumps({

            "chat_history": self.chat_history[self.chat_history_start:],

            "END_CHAT_HISTORY":"Everything above here is chat history.",

            "unfinished_tasks": [t.dict() for t in tasks],

            "time_now": time_now.dict(),

            # "memories": [],

            "prompt_info": {k: dict(v) for k, v in prompts.items()},

        })

        len_ret_val = count_tokens(ret_val)

        if len_ret_val > EFFECTIVE_TOKEN_LIMIT:

            self.chat_history_start += 1

So, that's the code for configuring the system prompt, which is set every single chat cycle, so it changes.

Unfinished tasks is powered by a tasktimer class which is powered by uh... well it automatically checks whether any new tasks are scheduled once per minnute and updates a listing, and also triggers a chat cycle when one is added. prompts are... well right now theres assistant_prompt (the system's behavior), user_prompt (information about the user, good for letting it know the user consents to domming), master_goal, current_goal, emotion, and interaction_style... these last two are intended to be more hotswappable than the personality prompt but that isn't automated yet.

Speaking of automated...

We have two other major systems right now...

the alert system- we inject the highest priority alerts directly into the most recent user message. Otherwise gpt-3.5 sort of ignores the system prompt in favor of the user prompt. You can force it to focus on specific parts of the system prompt this way. Right now I have alerts that tell it what the subsystems did last step, and to either focus on the unfinished_tasks or the current_goal depending on whether there are any unfinished tasks.

messages = [{"role":"system", "content":f"{context_window}"},{"role":"user", "content":f"Priority Information : {json.dumps(alerts)}\nUser Comment : {input_text}"}]

Speaking of "what the subsystems did last step" before any information is sent to the main LLM circuit, I perform and execute the subsystem tasks:

right now this is just:

async def _run_analyses(self, user_comment_text):

    alerts = []

    tasks = await self.tasktimer.get_tasks()

    print(f"len tasks: {len(tasks)}")

    if len(tasks) > 0:

        task_ids = []

        try:

            task_ids = await self.task_analyser.analyse(user_comment_text)

            print(f"task Ids {task_ids}")

        except Exception as e:

            logger.info(e)

            alerts.append("task_analyser crashed while attempting to determine whether the user comment contained completed tasks.")

        for id in task_ids:

            try:

                await self.task_analyser.markcomplete(user_comment_text, id)

            except Exception as e:

                logger.info(e)

                alerts.append(f"task_analyser crashed while attempting to mark {id} as complete.")

So, what task_analyser does is it uses a completely different context window consisting of the list of tasks and the last user comment and prompting for a list of tasks the user is saying have been completed. Then if that list isn't empty I send a listing of complete information about how to submit task completions (I made marking tasks complete fully customizable using jsonschema so that you can force a format- in the interest of being able to graph this stuff later) as well as the user comment again, to a system empowered to submit the completion.

I didn't technically use langchain, but it's just custom langchain stuff.

Then of course, if things have been marked as complete or failed, that goes into the alerts.

I'm thinking the alerts are important enough that the user should see them too... so that will be an upcoming GUI feature.

Thanks, appreciate the write up. Interesting to see how you're doing things.

What keeps you from not checking in with your AI-dom, so that you can receive further instructions?

Hmm, that's a complicated question. Avoidance is an issue, but another big issue is mild inconveniences. I have to do some refactors before I have all the core features online, but one of those features is going to be taking the initiative to contact me, rather than the reverse. This is easy enough, you just automate a prompt to it when a new task becomes available, or every N minutes that a task has been left incomplete, or something like that, and you have the prompt be something about reminding the user to do a task, and you forward the output to their text interface of choice, discord, sms, whatever. I have the backend for this up and running already but I need to do some wiring still.

Avoidance is always an issue but its easier to eliminate with daily scheduled hypnosis and devotion sessions. It also decreases the smoother the system is.

You're one of the weirder characters I've run across here, and I don't mean it in a bad way. It gives me hope for how insanely diverse and interesting the future might be, when we already have people like you running around. And you're not even a giant robot spider yet!

(And of course you're a transhumanist too, so I'd be sympathetic to you nonetheless!)

<3

So this prods you to do your chores? Can you code this for a llama model?

Hmm... I think so. Strictly speaking, my current system should be wireable to any model, but it will be much harder for most llama models- ideally you want a model that is trained for chat and able to follow fairly intricate system prompts, and I may have to re-tune some of the prompts and rewrite the openAI api code to connect to a local llama model instead of the openAI api. But any model should in principle be able to hook up to the system. It also doesn't have to be one model, you can wire different models to different system components for different purposes.

I've started doing these neck mobility exercises from this video around two-three weeks ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=K4dmZ5_n6uU (Mark Wildman)

It feels like I have neck issues now which I didn't have before. Does anyone have a comparable in time substitute exercise programme? Just 3 minutes and being able to do them anywhere is quite nice.

I'm confused are you saying the neck mobility exercises helped or hurt you?

Maybe this feeling of it hurting is just the DOMS equivalent of the neck, because I've never targeted the neck before and I'm pretty sedentary overall.

The "Janet Jackson" especially is a very difficult movement.

They appear to have hurt.

However: I find the general appeal of doing around 3-5 minutes of daily no equipment exercises interesting and would like a recommendation for neck work.

Neck work as opposed to shoulder work because a healthy neck seems to be more correlated with a reduction in headaches.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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