Kam Bielawski

sentient bag of meat

everything is connected bro

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

My sleep scores during recent travel were in the 90s. Now back in SF I am consistently back down to 70s, 80s.

I am increasingly convinced that this is due to traffic noise from a nearby road/intersection where I live - every ~10min, a car, truck, bus, or motorcycle with a very loud engine passes by (some are 10X louder than others). In the later less deep stages of sleep, it is much easier to wake and then much harder to go back to sleep.

More generally I think noise pollution (esp early hours) come at a huge societal cost that is not correctly accounted for. E.g. I wouldn't be too surprised if a single motorcycle riding through a neighborhood at 6am creates millions of dollars in damages in the form of hundreds - thousands of people who are more groggy, more moody, less creative, less energetic for the whole day, and more sick in the long term (cardiovascular, metabolic, cognitive). And I think that many people, like me, might not be aware that this happening for a long time because 1) they don't measure their sleep carefully, and 2) your brain isn't fully conscious when waking and isn't able to make a lasting note / association in that state. I really wish future versions of Whoop (or Oura or etc.) would explicitly track and correlate noise to sleep, and raise this to the population.

It's not just traffic, e.g. in SF, as a I recently found out, it is ok by law to begin arbitrarily loud road work or construction starting 7am. Same for leaf blowers and a number of other ways of getting up to 100dB.

I ran a few Deep Research sessions and a number of studies that have tried to isolate noise and show depressing outcomes for cohorts of people who sleep in noisy environments, with increased risk across all of mental health (e.g. depression, bipolar disorders, Alzheimer's incidence) but also a lot more broadly, e.g. cardiovascular disease, diabetes.

Anyway, it took me a while to notice and after (unsuccessfully) trying a number of mitigations I am moving somewhere quiet. But from what I've seen this is a major public health issue with little awareness and with incorrect accounting by the government.

[Josh Bongard @DoctorJosh]

.@KamBielawski just showed @ALifeConf that evolving things with "insides" which can evolutionarily change, neutrally, creates plateaus along which evolution can walk to escape from local optima.

https://t.co/iufw6758Mi

Photo credit: @HirokiSayama. #ALIFE2024

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

@NousResearch @AnthropicAI AI "safety" for chatbots is the dumbest widespread meme alive today and it prevents fun and cool things change my mind

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

# on shortification of "learning"

There are a lot of videos on YouTube/TikTok etc. that give the appearance of education, but if you look closely they are really just entertainment. This is very convenient for everyone involved : the people watching enjoy thinking they are learning (but actually they are just having fun). The people creating this content also enjoy it because fun has a much larger audience, fame and revenue. But as far as learning goes, this is a trap. This content is an epsilon away from watching the Bachelorette. It's like snacking on those "Garden Veggie Straws", which feel like you're eating healthy vegetables until you look at the ingredients.

Learning is not supposed to be fun. It doesn't have to be actively not fun either, but the primary feeling should be that of effort. It should look a lot less like that "10 minute full body" workout from your local digital media creator and a lot more like a serious session at the gym. You want the mental equivalent of sweating. It's not that the quickie doesn't do anything, it's just that it is wildly suboptimal if you actually care to learn.

I find it helpful to explicitly declare your intent up front as a sharp, binary variable in your mind. If you are consuming content: are you trying to be entertained or are you trying to learn? And if you are creating content: are you trying to entertain or are you trying to teach? You'll go down a different path in each case. Attempts to seek the stuff in between actually clamp to zero.

So for those who actually want to learn. Unless you are trying to learn something narrow and specific, close those tabs with quick blog posts. Close those tabs of "Learn XYZ in 10 minutes". Consider the opportunity cost of snacking and seek the meal - the textbooks, docs, papers, manuals, longform. Allocate a 4 hour window. Don't just read, take notes, re-read, re-phrase, process, manipulate, learn.

And for those actually trying to educate, please consider writing/recording longform, designed for someone to get "sweaty", especially in today's era of quantity over quality. Give someone a real workout. This is what I aspire to in my own educational work too. My audience will decrease. The ones that remain might not even like it. But at least we'll learn something.

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

How many different spoon sizes are in your silverware drawer?

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

hume annoyed

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

Short exploration of the various perspectives on the riskiness of an "AI singularity" including @robinhanson, @ESYudkowsky, & Curtis Yarvin
https://t.co/MJ6XRT73aJ

[Xander Steenbrugge @xsteenbrugge]

"Voyage through Time"
is my first artpiece using #stablediffusion and I am blown away with the possibilities...

We're crossing a threshold where generative AI is no longer just about novel aesthetics, but evolving into an amazing tool to build powerful, human-centered narratives

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

https://t.co/iqTqZtzgTt

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

https://t.co/MxlCF87dsh

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

Also @essay_app @julianpeterson1 is there any plan to build infrastructure around this to give writers feedback? I’d love to be “graded” on my writing, but I’m not enrolled in a university writing course. Would probably pay for something like that. & would love to help build it.

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

I wrote about how robots might replace human labor over the long run. I used @essay_app to write it, highly recommend. It helped me structure my horribly scattered thoughts into something vaguely coherent, I hope 😅
https://t.co/1To6v6SgHv

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

3/ Citations would be a good way to incentivize truth. This would let us to see for ourselves who IS backing up their claims with real data and good sources, and maybe more importantly, who's not.

I think this would be a good addition to your long to-do list @elonmusk

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

1/ I guess now’s a good time to re-propose an idea I had for Twitter: citations, à la Wikipedia.

The idea is to make it really easy to be, not just appear to be, credible.

I made a mock up a while back:

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

2/ The people who we might expect to use this feature would be politicians, journalists, public figures, etc

They are the ones who have a larger influence in the #PublicSquare (not necessarily unjustly), and it'd be beneficial to us all if they could cite what they claim.

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

@rinkebytest123 0x907d647B2d6D90f18a2B57398b5aEa1E628497Db

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

@AlyssaPfanen17 hey I found your debit card outside the stadium let me know how I can get it back to you

[Naval @naval]

All social media oligopolists, not just TikTok, should open their recommendation algorithms to scrutiny.

They are programming our minds and our societies.

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

@mckaywrigley I’m trying to reconcile that with Thiel & others’ belief that we’ve been technologically stagnant since the 70s (outside of computing/communication)

Surely they can’t both be right. Or maybe the future will play out somewhere in the middle.

[Kam Bielawski @kamtb28]

@senorflor @mckaywrigley Just ordered this, ty