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Interview with gwern

(www.dwarkeshpatel.com)
308 points synthmeat | 3 comments | 14 Nov 24 08:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.424s | source
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Quinzel ◴[14 Nov 24 10:11 UTC] No.42134707[source]▶
I don’t believe Gwern lives as frugally as he’s described in this (if this even actually is the real Gwern). I’m 100% sure that he has a persona he likes to portray and being perceived as frugal is a part of that persona. When it comes to answering the question “who is gwern?” I reckon Gwern’s a plant a seed in people’s mind type of guy, and let them come up with the rest of the story.

Still, I like a lot of his writing. Especially the weird and niche stuff that most people don’t even stop to think about. And thanks to Gwern’s essay on the sunk costs fallacy, I ended up not getting a tattoo that I had changed my mind about. I almost got it because I had paid a deposit, but I genuinely decided I hated the idea of what I was going to get… and almost got it, but the week before I went to get the tattoo, I read that essay, and decided if small children and animals don’t fall victim to sunk costs, then neither should I! Literally - Gwern saved the skin on my back with his writing. Haha.

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dash2 ◴[14 Nov 24 12:14 UTC] No.42135475[source]▶
Have you got any real evidence behind your first paragraph?
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michaelt ◴[14 Nov 24 13:14 UTC] No.42135873[source]▶
I don't follow gwern's work closely.

But I do know he created an enormous dataset of anime images used to train machine learning and generative AI models [1]. Hosting large datasets is moderately expensive - and it's full of NSFW stuff, so he's probably not having his employer or his college host it. Easy for someone on a six-figure salary, difficult for a person on $12k/year.

Also, I thought these lesswrong folks were all about "effective altruism" and "earning to give" and that stuff.

[1] https://gwern.net/danbooru2021

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1. esdf ◴[14 Nov 24 16:22 UTC] No.42137757[source]▶
Hosting large datasets can be expensive but the hosting for the danbooru datasets was not. It's "only" a few terabytes in size. A previous release was 3.4TB, so the latest is probably some hundreds of GB, to a TB~, in size larger. The download was hosted on a hetzner IP, which is a provider known for cheap servers. You can pay them $50/m for a server with "unmetered" 1gigabit up/down network + 16TB of disks. $600 a year would not be difficult.
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2. itake ◴[15 Nov 24 16:59 UTC] No.42148668[source]▶
$600 a year is a lot of money..
3. gwern ◴[16 Nov 24 03:19 UTC] No.42153849[source]▶
I think people tend to wildly overestimate how expensive hosting a large dataset has to be, because of cloud.

If you only need a few terabytes, you can rent from Hetzner for more like <$20/month. Maybe <$10 at this point, if you are patient. And you can use the server for other things too, since it's a fixed cost, like your website or encrypted backups or other files you host. I spent a while figuring this out before I decided to do Danbooru20xx, to make sure it was very cheap. Given how my website has grown in size, and how absurdly exorbitant cloud bandwidth and object/hard drive space is, the Danbooru dataset was practically free at the margin!

> Also, I thought these lesswrong folks were all about "effective altruism" and "earning to give" and that stuff.

Some people are, some people aren't. I'm not. (I have intellectual sympathy with EA, but not emotional.)