Interview with gwern

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.

Have you got any real evidence behind your first paragraph?

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

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.