Dynomight
· 11 min · Original

Optimal virulence and the Android lockdown

When you get a cold, the virus hijacks your cells and uses them to make copies of itself, destroying the cells in the process. The virus does not care about you. And yet, if you get a cold, your body doesn’t dissolve into a pile of virus-enriched goo as a result of all your cells disregarding survival to focus on virus manufacturing. Why? Well, you have an immune system. But also, if that did happen, other people would say, “Oh no, Alice has dissolved into a pile of virus-enriched goo; we should stay away lest we also become goo piles.” Better to just hijack some of your cells, so you can walk around and spread the virus to other people. Thus, the theory of optimal virulence says that a more laid-back cold virus will be more successful in the long run, which is why the cold viruses that thrive today are the non-goo-pile-converting kind. Anyway. Most people reading this have paid Apple $400-$1600 for a phone on which you can’t do anything without Apple’s permission and monitoring. That was a strange decision, but on Android phones you can run whatever you want. For example, I noticed a couple of months ago that all RSS apps were terrible, so I spent 15 long minutes having AI make me a non-terrible one. I copied the file to my phone, installed it, and entered RSS nirvana, no registration, no app store, no nothing. It seems ludicrous that I wouldn’t be able to do that. And yet, Google plans to change things. Soon, you won’t be able to run any app on an Android phone unless the person who made it bends the knee by paying a fee, giving Google their government ID, listing all apps they’ve ever made, etc. There will be an “escape hatch” for users to install other apps, but it involves secret menus and scary warnings and a 24-hour waiting period. Google says they’re doing this…

Dynomight
· 8 min · Original

Psychometrics, vaccines, meat, Kowloon, luggage destruction

This is a real paper that actually exists Assessing the Psychometric Properties of the Dynomight™ MBTI: A Comparative Analysis with the Original Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Journal of Psychology and Behavior Studies, 4(1), 27-37. Zrari, A., & Sakale, S. (2024). A cohort of n=77 participants consented to engage in the study, meeting the inclusion criteria of being currently enrolled at the Tulua institution and expressing willingness to participate in both the initial assessment and the follow-up session. To assess the longitudinal consistency of the Dynomight™ MBTI, a second administration of the test was scheduled six weeks after the initial session. […] Empirical findings, as delineated in Table 1, manifested significant positive correlations across all dichotomies, indicative of a substantial concordance between the two assessments. The correlation coefficient for the Introversion-Extroversion axis was notably high (r = .938, p < .01), suggesting a pronounced alignment in the measurement of this dimension. Comparable strong correlations were observed for the Sensing-Intuition (r = .879, p < .01), Feeling-Thinking (r = .862, p < .01), and Judging-Perceiving (r = .847, p < .01) axes, underscoring the Dynomight™ MBTI’s proficiency in mirroring the evaluative scope of the original MBTI across the core personality dimensions. “Dynomight™” is repeated in text 77 times. Yeast vaccines More is Different has a post on yeast-based vaccines, describing both why yeast-based vaccines are cool (if not self-evident) and how IRB rules can violate free speech and bodily autonomy make self-experimentation difficult: Buck submitted an Institutional Review Board (IRB) proposal to gain permission to bring home the yeast and then use them to brew beer for his own consumption. To his…

Dynomight
· 11 min · Original

Scattered thoughts on how doing math feels these days

This is a weird moment. I have a hunch that we’ll look back later and tell ourselves stories in which it seemed obvious where things were going. So I wanted to lay down a little time capsule and register just how confusing everything felt at the time. This is a personal view from the trenches. 1. If you’re a normal person, you may feel that AI has been good at math for a long time.1 But for “real” math, this is roughly what it felt like: When Feeling 2024 LLMs are toys Summer 2025 LLMs are interesting toys Early Autumn 2025 LLMs can do useful stuff sometimes Mid Autumn 2025 …a lot of stuff Late Autumn 2025 …a lot Early 2026 holy god Even having been astonished by AI progress in the past, it was still astonishing to see AI move in a matter of months from a mildly-useful toy to something that many people now consider almost impossible to do without. 2. Personally, I’d say that current AI makes me around 50% more productive at “doing math”. That’s despite the fact that AI can now often do in a few minutes things that would have taken me hours to do myself. The main reason is that my concept of “doing math” involves various steps, like coming up with ideas for theorems, trying to prove them, writing things down, reorganizing everything to make it more clear, and so on. AI is good at some parts of this, but still pretty bad at others, so the overall speedup isn’t as high as you might expect. (Even if planes could go 10× faster, your door-to-door travel time from your apartment in London to your friend’s place in Rome wouldn’t decrease that much, because you still have to get to the airport and wait to board.) 3. But then, I’m still (sort of; more on this later) trying to follow my old “doing math” workflow, just automating certain parts of it. That can’t be right, can it?…

Dynomight
· 22 min · Original

Why is the human body so crap except for the liver?

[Epistemic Status: Speculative unifying theory of biology.] I don’t know about you, but I greatly resent having to be a biological organism and subject to all the poor engineering and design decisions that entails. This has many manifestations. A recent one is often wondering, why is the entire body such garbage except for the liver? Take the kidneys. Once you reach adulthood, they start to slowly decay. You can damage them through not-obviously-dangerous stuff like taking too much vitamin D or taking ibuprofen while dehydrated. Significant damage typically leads to scarring and a permanent reduction in function. Or take the gums. If you brush too hard or don’t floss enough, they may retreat down your teeth, never to return. Most of the body is like that. But the liver. My friends, the liver! If it’s injured, it will usually heal without scars. As you age, it typically maintains near full strength. You can give half of your liver to someone else and it will regrow to full size and function in a few months. I’d like to find whoever designed the liver and have them make me a full body. Except here’s a theory: It’s good that most of the body is fragile crap. It would be better if some parts of the body were more fragile. Some other ways the body would appear to be poorly designed Menopause. We’re still struggling to reconcile modernity with the short human reproductive interval. But did you know that menopause is almost unknown outside of humans? Even the other great apes remain fertile for almost their entire lives. The only known exceptions are (1) killer whales, (2) pilot whales, (3) beluga whales, (4) false killer whales, (5) narwhals, and (6) one specific population of chimpanzees in Uganda. Inuries. If your leg gets chopped off, that’s it, no more leg. Your body…

Dynomight
· 12 min · Original

Indirect lessons from human alignment

(Inspired by a post from Eli Tyre.) Many people make some variant of the following argument: Evolution is an “outer optimizer”. It is trying to make us maximize reproductive fitness. We are “inner optimizers”. We just do what feels good. But what feels good has been set by evolution, which is hoping that it will make us maximize reproductive fitness. But we don’t maximize reproductive fitness. In fact, birth rates are dropping everywhere. Therefore evolution failed. The standard interpretation is that this shows that alignment is hard. We have one example of an attempt (by evolution) to align the behavior of an intelligent system (us) towards some goal (maximize reproductive fitness). And as soon as that intelligent system (still us) was put in a different environment (modernity) it failed to continue to pursue that goal (you reading existential angst+science blogs instead of making/nurturing babies). To be clear, it’s likely good that evolution failed. A world where everyone woke up every day and threw everything they’ve got into maximizing their number of descendants sounds grim. But say that you want to build a new intelligent system and tune it to do what you want. Will it keep doing what you want after circumstances change? The one example we have says: Maybe not. But perhaps we can learn more from this example. Say your friend Alice does something. Maybe she buys a grapefruit or starts hosting a weekly board game night. If you ask her why she did that, she’s unlikely to say, “I thought it would increase the number of my genes that are recursively present in future generations.” Instead, she’ll probably say that it advanced some simpler goal like “not being hungry” or “fun”. That is to say, evolution didn’t just try to align us to maximize reproductive fitness: It…

Dynomight
· 10 min · Original

The modern formatting addiction in writing

EXHIBIT A Here is some text. It is made out of words. Here is a subsection And here are some bullet-points: Here is one. Here is another. Hierarchy Here is a numbered list. And now: Look at this. Bullets inside a number inside a section inside a section. What a time to be alive. Pictures The text can also contain pictures for you to look at with your eyes¹. ¹ There can also be footnotes; have an eye emoji: 👀 Quotes The text can also include quotes. Actually, let’s do one inside of a list. A deeply nested list. This is going to be awesome. The awful thing about life is this: Everyone has his reasons. Nailed it. Back up Wait a second. Are we currently in a section or subsection or a subsubsection? What parent section encloses this one? Where are we in the hierarchy? What are we doing? EXHIBIT B This is also text. It is also made out of words. But instead of jerky fragments, these words are organized into sentences, like normal human language. Do you see how relaxing this is? After the torment you suffered above, isn’t it nice to have words that come in a simple linear order? And isn’t it nice that you just have to read the words, and not worry about how they fit into some convoluted implied knowledge taxonomy? These sentences are themselves organized into paragraphs. The first sentence of each paragraph is a sort of summary. So if you want to skim, you can do that. But you don’t have to skim. This text also has italics and parentheses and whatnot. But not too much. (Just a little.) Why I bring this up Thanks for enduring that. My purpose was to illustrate a mystery. Namely, why do so many people today seem to write more like Exhibit A than Exhibit B? People sometimes give me something they wrote and ask for comments. Half the time, my reaction is Good god, why is 70% of…