𐤌𐤕

no, niplav, you won’t get sucked into reading the heraldry wikipedia articles, even though “escutcheon” looks like a really good word to drop in a conversation.

• North Korea

list of countries whose emblems contain overhead power lines:

SBF f-bomb counter

one then checks that the following diagrams commute [devil god diagram]

three aspects of feedback loops: 1. speed (how quickly do you get feedback); 2. thickness (how much information do you get about your performance); 3. signal (how related is that feedback to your performance)

ẞẞẞẞẞẞẞẞẞẞẞ

the famous unix command ʪ

🙰 c

ffs

on the overwhelming irrelevance of plant epistemology

“We don’t come with guarantees, that’s absolutely for sure.”

[snowpiercer] fan theory: they’re all actually patients in a mental asylum, dreaming this up as a collective delusion

[SPOILERS SPOILERS] [snowpiercer spoilers] the osweiller guy is learning one important lesson the hard way: don’t stick your dick in crazy

[SPOILERS SPOILERS] [snowpiercer spoilers] you know, i wouldn’t have been angry if all the new-eden people hadn’t found anything at the horn, fallen off the bridge and died—looks straight into camera because sometimes in real life, you make a fatal thinking error and everyone dies

power is wasted without science

When the last superforecaster has given up, when the last bet has been resolved, you will discover that you can’t eat living by the sword

some people are better at some things than others. also, some people are better at nearly all things than others. maybe there are also people that are better at all things than some others.

stands up from the battlefield “I am TetraspaceWest” gets shot immediately

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions/Gwern&offset=&limit=500&target=Gwern

tried to figure out how to use university springer access to download a textbook, gave up after two minutes and just used libgen. lmao

at the moment, all medicine merely delays the moment of death

9 wikipedia edits today! yay me! (also a bunch of small scale contributions to other people’s texts: https://niplav.github.io/contributions.html)

so, would people in 1920 have been irrational in worrying about the development of nuclear weapons? would they have been irrational thinking about the resulting dynamics between countries, the safety of those weapons?

the joy of having written down a possible improvement for a wikipedia article, only to go & find out somebody else has already done it. glorious

scaling laws for dogs

vipassana is all about the vibes (the fundamental vibrations that make up all experience)

while we’re on the topic; what’s the gender-neutral term for fuckboy?

you can only call someone a pickup artist if they don’t sleep with the people they seduce, otherwise they’re just sparkly fuckboys/gals.

who has experienced at least one jhana?

is there at least one billionaire who is also a stream-enterer?

the anti-“hairy ball theorem” of decision theory: it’s always newcombeable

open your textbooks on page one.

fun fact: there’s around 10 mio. times more bacteria on this planet than neurons

this is a partial answer to http://mindingourway.com/rest-in-motion/

to leave every Pile behind, to stop doing my Anki cards, recording data on my life, and just be Done.

sometimes i think i should return to a cleaner state of mind, abandon all big never-to-be-finished projects, and write simple text-processing utilities on a raspberry pi running plan 9, improvising fractile jazz over a lonely lake and spend most of my remaining time meditating.

My website is very Piling. look at the todo list: https://niplav.github.io/todo.html! i can’t tell you much about how it will look like in a year, but i can tell you that it won’t shrink. it’s piling. everything is piling up, forgotten drafts, half-finished experiments, buggy code—fixed over time, sure, but much more slowly than the errors come rolling in. it’s an eternal struggle.

Piling, on the other hand, is when you have something that is infinitely extendable in scope and size, where every paragraph can have a subparagraph, every feature can be customizable, the dataset could be 10% bigger, the party could be a bit more extravagant, …, …, ……….

Doneness is when something is temporarily finished, but if it is modified in any way, it is either fixed because the winds of time have buried under the bitrot, and it must be dug out, or because something was found that could be removed.

fifth, small & nifty programs. https://niplav.github.io/code/99_klong/sol.kg being exemplary, but i want to write some more code. every single function there is Done. there is only stuff to remove, if at all, and nothing to add.

fourth, let’s look at music, especially jamming. if you improvise, you are riding that same edge of time as with meditation, all music you create is there right now, and only the causal vibe carrying it all forward. that’s why i mostly don’t compose or record (also because my music is shit)

third, let’s look at daygame. if you ask someone out in a social circle/hobby group, that leaves residual social cruft lying around: awkwardness & mutual avoidance. the whole thing is not Done the way it is when you get cleanly rejected on the street. (online dating has a similar quality of Doneness to it, I think, but matches might stack up and old leads might spring to life sometime, but that’s the same with DG).

second, there’s predictions. a prediction is Done when it’s made. you could add comments, explanations, models &c, but the prediction can be Done and stand there on its own. (there is a slight problem with the fact that predictions need to be updated over time, though, so there is some Piling there as well).

there is this property of Doneness that I really like, and that tracks a lot (but not all) of my interests. First, let’s take meditation: every single moment in meditation is really Done after it’s over, it doesn’t linger around, the sensations don’t pile up somewhere. They might influence each other, sure, but at the end of the day it’s just the present experience, slashing into and out of existence in its clear luminosity.

truly Weapons From a More Civilized Age material

i remembered i liked structural regular expressions, but re-reading the paper reminds me of how cool they are

in general, lw feels like a place where it would be good for many people to cross-post to, a content aggregator/archiver

idea: upvote-only lw shortforms posts: the karma isn’t counted on the user karma score, but it also can’t be downvoted, which encourages more wild and possibly wrong speculations

the elephant seal in the brain

okay, so here’s a claim: axes of personal development à la Kegan are in principle orthogonal to meditative attainments

“there’s still canyons worth of work this winter”

squiggle number one

ahhhhh pdfs with columns aaahhhh

all linear programming is integer linear programming if you try hard enough

“Lines of Flight in Intelligence Explosions: Queering the Causal/Evidential/Functional Trichotomy”

i imagine postrats who learn esperanto have a huge problem with the word for school,,,

the curse of academia: having to build complex models when simple ones would be sufficient

bworse

Cowen’s second law: there is a literature on everything

probably quite fun at parties

im gonna go out onna limb here and claim that theres not enough positive utilitarians around

Christmas dinner at Aella’s family must be…interesting

best known to me as the youtube skull & swords guy that breadtube made fun of

still amazing (davis?) aurini was an early lesswronger

Gwern’s law: Well-known quotes are often wittier and more memorable than the original.

what do you mean, Infinite Jest is not a blogpost by Andrés Gomez-Emilsson?

is every normal-form game representable by a tree a potential game?

you heard of Différance, now get ready for Différance 2: Convergance

party game idea: MNIST debate

por vs. pro in esperanto always trips me up

What’s astonishing is not that people try so hard to establish a positive reputation online, it’s that they try so little.

the best time to participate in a community is after it has died

for what i’ve invested in my site, it’s now probably time to move it off github.io on my own domain

I wish more people would number their podcast episodes

domain pestile.nz

Ramanujan voice “Oh, AI alignment? That’s just a continued fraction” pulls out a notebook

you know what’s interesting? if you randomly replace some words in a conversation with “redacted”, very few people will notice

some minds start cutting themselves if not dulled repeatedly.

what’s a bijection between ℝ and ℝ^2?

people talk often about power in a way that is not clearly physical power. i have never understood those people, but i suspect that there is some thing there, and that i often perceive its shadow which is epistemic bullshit.

rereading the wikipedia page on ramanujan, we should absolutely clone him and von Neumann, and have them talk to each other. this is either going to destroy the world or usher in utopia, not sure which

we could also clone Ramanujan

introduction to coq continued, now i have learned what the codebase is supposed to do when it’s finished

see http://lukemuehlhauser.com/industrial-revolution/#footnote_79_3108

so the British colonized most of world, but they also made lots of countries abolish slavery, so it’s impossible to tell whether they’re good or bad,,,

it’s crazy how rob miles and toby ord sound almost exactly the same

I also mostly didn’t get Chapo Trap House (although the stuff I did get was sometimes pretty funny)

to fend off possible accusations of bias: good leftist humor was /r/liftcommunism, /leftypol/ was great too sometimes, and I liked the political catgirl comics. Existential Comics is not funny (except the Beetle in the Box comic), although some of the old comics were indeed existenital. I don’t have a strong opinion on /r/COMPLETEANARCHY and /r/FULLCOMMUNISM.

for a given graph G, there is a set of graphs \mathcal{G} so that for every G’ ∈ \mathcal{G}, the transitive closure of G’ is G. does \mathcal{G} contain only one element?

if you believe that blue-collar republicans are voting against their own interest, well, what about white-collar democrats?

wikipedia redirects shitcoin to cryptocurrency. heh

if you’re not special, generating passwords is like running from bears: you don’t need to be good, you just need to be better than the majority

the status incentives might not be interested in you, but you are surely interested in the status incentives

not the best move on the side of the red cross to call me and tell me it’s because of my blood donation — i nearly had a panic attack for the 10 seconds that they didn’t tell me it was all fine (why would you call me then‽ and why speak as if you’re going to tell me i’ll be dead in a month‽)

/r/sneerclub believes that everybody in the bay is attending ceremonies where peter thiel and moldbug sacrifice black children on the altar of acausal capitalism, of course, they are right.

guy who takes mdma at a techno rave and says “so this is what it’s all about”, but not just about raving culture, but, like, life in general

this firefox isn’t just leaking memory, it’s gushing as if someone had performed shechita on it

use known inconsistencies of human preferences as value-learning trip-wires: if the value learning algorithm hasn’t learned them yet, it’s operating at the wrong level of abstraction.