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