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Made an image that looks like a bunny or a bird depending on the orientation, with AI, based on this: youtube.com/watch?v=FMRi6pNAoa… It's not perfect, and there are better examples in the video, but it was fun!


Doctrine of the Mean trutherism


Doctrine of the Mean is a Confucian text. It's pretty cool IMO. Anyway Wikipedia claims that "The authorship of The Doctrine of the Mean is controversial." But I think I've figured it out, and the implications are immense.


Cool picture


Allegedly by Ishimura Masayuki, according to twitter user marysia_cc
#art


Figuring out Friendica


in reply to Gina Stuessy

I get "Like not successful (Network error)" sometimes. I think it's just a bug: superstimul.us/display/19e8876…


Conflicts with friends




Camino Day 10 & 11


Yesterday I woke up to the smell of smoke. There are several wildfires now I'm Northern the and the smoke has been blowing into Galicia for the past two days, creating a haze in the atmosphere. It feels awful to know that the beautiful country I just walked through is being damaged.

I continued traveling with the woman I met at the monastery. We walked from the monastery at Armenteira down along a gorgeous wild-looking river and through vineyards to Villanova de Arousa (23km). We had hoped to catch the boat that afternoon but instead we watched it pull away from the dock just as we came into view of the harbor so we checked into the municipal albergue in the local albergue.

Today we caught the boat at 1:30 and traveled up the Arousa river to Pontecesures. I left my companion at the monastery in Hebron and continued another 15km to O Faramello so that I would have less to walk tomorrow.

Everything feels more intense now that's I'm so close to finishing. Tomorrow I will walk the remaining 15km to Santiago de Compostela.

(Pictures aren't uploading, will try adding tomorrow)





David Mears reshared this.

in reply to Kevin Gibbons

wow, these are shockingly good. I feel like I noticed an example a while ago, but I'm not able to recall it now.
in reply to Kevin Gibbons

Apt indeed! The writing I thought of in this vein is the 1909 short story "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster, which describes things like the internet.


Hello world!


Obligatory "I'm new here" post. I'll post some other things soon; posting on Facebook has been feeling aversive and it's the only social media I ever use.

Meanwhile, in what may be news to those of you who know me: I have a child now! Interested in talking to other child-havers. She's two months old. This part is honestly kind of boring - babies start out _extremely_ limited in their abilities. Her most recent milestone is that she can now somewhat consistently move her hand to her mouth. I expect it to get more interesting later. She's cute though!

I'm also interested in programming languages (I'm one of three editors of the JavaScript specification), math, language, and reasoning about the world in general. I have a draft of a long essay about reading the news I need to get around to finishing someday and if that sounds interesting to you feel free to poke me about it. I might end up using this instance for that kind of somewhat-less-polished-but-therefore-actually-existing writing.

in reply to Kevin Gibbons

I hope y'all can successfully make it up to East Bay this weekend, I am interested in meeting this small new friend of yours. (Weirdly, I had a dream the other day where I met Sage, and she was already a toddler)
in reply to kip

Also interested in reading your essay about reading the news
in reply to kip

Still planning on trying! It'll be the longest car trip she's been on by a factor of two.


Translate things


Sometimes people are like "noooooooo I can't just translate Tian as Heaven or Dao as Way or junzi as gentleman, the terms have slightly different connotations and are used by this writer in a sort of distinct way". Nah. Writers in English use common terms idiosyncratically all the time. If you're worried we'll misunderstand, put an asterisk the first place the terms are used and refer us to a glossary. In the meantime, the reader will have a better understanding of what the terms mean.

In general I think we should translate more things so that you can understand what people are saying. E.g. "Hamas" is just short for "the Islamic Resistance Movement", call them that or the IRM if you want to save space. Most English speakers don't speak foreign languages, and it's important to be comprehensible!

in reply to Daniel Filan

I disagree...? Why not just include more foreign words in our vocab? It works pretty well, and English is already known for doing it.
in reply to renshin

In these cases I don't think they meaningfully add richness to the vocab, they're just covering space for which we already have words. Or if they are meant to mean something importantly different, I'm not getting that anyway.
in reply to Daniel Filan

i dont know words like junzi or Tian. With Dao I think we should use Dao. But shrug.

If this were about Buddhist terms I'd have more specific things to say.

But my sense of English is that it just doesn't even act like these other languages in very relevant ways. Pali/Sanskrit is super different as a language, for instance, and so you just can't translate the words into English without losing ~70% of the background meaning and connotation.

in reply to renshin

Yeah I think it depends on the topic for sure. And probably people who are specialists should use the original term. At the same time, one thing I worry about is: there's some instinct that like 70% of the meaning/connotation gets lost in translation. But do you really retain that meaning when you don't translate? Like presumably you're going to use some Pali/Sanskrit term that I won't immediately understand and tell me what it means, right? If so, couldn't you also just use an English term and tell me what it means? I think this doesn't work for terms that cross concepts in English (like 'dharma' kind of does), but does work for words that are close enough to an English equivalent.
in reply to Daniel Filan

oh i see.

yes i agree that context is important.

if you're just a casual audience, then i should use an English phrase in the conversation so you know what i'm saying at all.

in reply to Daniel Filan

So you're saying people should write more like official subs and not fan subs youtube.com/watch?v=YvNxgHTWIl…

(I have never watched a fan sub but I have observed the urge of people who are really into a hobby using obscure language because they care too much about capturing nuances)



I can't do polls here so FYI I have a few polls about the {sun, moon} x {dog, cat} personality typing system on my twitter profile: https://x.com/freed_dfilan


Camino Day 8 & 9



in reply to Daniel Filan

Is Friendica open source and is this the sort of thing an enterprising person could fix? (Also, is this the sort of thing gpt 01 could just... figure out?)


Any good art accounts I should follow here in the fediverse? I'm thinking of things like the following:
- https://x.com/marysia_cc
- https://x.com/0zmnds
- https://x.com/opancaro
- https://x.com/PaulWelsh89
- https://x.com/JaimeV3ra
- https://x.com/WilhelmGustloff
- https://x.com/fraveris



controvert: someone who gains social energy from arguing with people


Something really wild to me is the extent to which archaeology seems to believe that artifacts were used for some kind of religious / worshipful purpose.

Like, in the modern world, relatively very very few objects are used for worship. If a future civilization finds a figurine, it's probably a Barbie doll or a Funko Pop or something.

Future civilizations might find our most treasured artifacts and presume that we worship glass rectangles or something.

Seems kinda weird if this is the default assumption for unexplained historical artifacts, as it naively appears (to a non-archaeologist). Like, why do we think that these figurines are fertility goddesses rather than toys or instructional tools or even pornography?

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I contend that we do worship glass rectangles.

Nobody thought Christianity was a 'religion' when it was dominant. They thought of it as 'the way things really are' and no one described it in terms of religion.

Our current 'secularism' is also a 'religion' in this same way. We don't see it as religious activity to go to a supermarket or post on Facebook. But ... it is?

in reply to renshin

> Nobody thought Christianity was a 'religion' when it was dominant. They thought of it as 'the way things really are' and no one described it in terms of religion.

FWIW I don't think this is true. If you want to talk about the New Testament authors, the last bit of James 1 seems to talk about Christianity as a religion, James and Paul talk a lot about "the faith", Hebrews 11 talks about faith as belief in things unseen and seems to indicate it's a good thing. The proceedings of the Council of Trent talk about "the Christian Religion" (e.g. history.hanover.edu/texts/tren…).

[I mean TBC they also thought it was "the way things really are"]

This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Daniel Filan

Hmm lemme clarify.

RE: 'Religion' as 'worldview you can select into or out of' -- at the time of Christianity's dominance (which wasn't until much after New Testament being written anyway), no one thought of Christianity as a worldview. They thought of Christianity as the way things really are.

"Religion" was more like those pagan traditions that you could opt into or out of but were clearly wrongheaded, outdated, nonsensical, and everyone knows are made up. That's what I mean.

Now we use 'religion' in the same way, without recognizing that our dominant worldview is also a religion in fact.

in reply to renshin

FWIW this wasn't clear from the way I wrote things up but the Council of Trent was held in the 16th century as a reaction to Protestantism. People at the time really did use words like "faith" and "religion" to describe Christianity, altho I'm not sure they would have said you could opt out of it or that it was made up.

At any rate, zooming out, I feel like we can drop the word "religion" and there's still an important thing here. My understanding is that most religious practitioners think that there's something importantly different about the rituals I'd be tempted to call "religious" (e.g. going to mass / church service, sacred artwork, etc) and stuff I'd be tempted to call "secular" (e.g. drinking a can of soda, going on my phone), even when they think mass / sacred art is super important and real. So there's still a live question of "was this pot related to by people back then more like the way believers relate to sacred artwork, or more like the way believers relate to cans of soda".

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun



Recently I've had some physical issues that have kept me from being physically active (not that I'm usually very active, but this has been even worse than normal):

  • About a month ago I learned I have a hernia after doing some wood-chopping (which is really fun btw), and I've been having an upsettingly difficult time setting up an appointment for surgery to fix it
  • A week after that, I broke my pinky toe by accidentally kicking a staircase in the dark

The hernia has kept me from feeling good about doing any kind of weightlifting, and the broken toe has made it hard to walk more than a few blocks. This kinda sucks and I'm not sure what to do about it.

Maybe I should be cycling more? Anyone have other ideas?

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

@Rick Korzekwa would know better than me but I would have assumed that cycling would use some abs for pulling your legs up, the same way jumping does?
in reply to Daniel Filan

Yeah, it will depend on the style of bike and how it fits you. Most bikes people use for things other than racing can probably be adjusted to keep you relatively upright so you don't need to use your core as much.


Camino Day 7


Tui to Mos, 21km. Another beautiful stretch of forest. I stopped early today because I had a big day yesterday and the next stretch of road is supposed to be very hilly.

I had a nice moment in the early morning, running into some bagpipers playing in the middle of the forest. It was cool because you could hear them for a long time before you could see them so there was a stretch that felt very fairy-like and mysterious

in reply to Jen Blight

To be fair, there's some selection bias in what I post. Sometimes it looks like:


Maybe you're not supposed to say this in public, but I feel like if Islamist terrorists were serious they'd also threaten people with death for depicting Jesus.
in reply to Daniel Filan

I think the different response is related to different inferences about the intent of the artist. That is, they know that Christians like to depict Jesus as part of their religion, and this doesn't bug them to much. But they think that the only reason to depict Muhammad is to insult their religion, so they take it as a deliberate insult.
in reply to Guive

Sure but it communicates that the thing they care about is being insulted, rather than ensuring that people follow God's commandments. Which is sort of a weak and embarrassing stance.
in reply to Daniel Filan

(1) There's some truth to this. Violent islamists are on average, worse than most people in various ways.

(2) But also, they may see it more as a direct insult to God as opposed to an insult to them personally or their human social group. Compare their stance towards practicing Christians and Muslim apostates. Both groups go to hell, on the conventional conservative Muslim understanding. But they are much more bothered by apostates.

in reply to Daniel Filan

I agree that terrorists are in some sense not serious and tbh I think it's for the best

or rather, second best, behind "not being terrorists"



I feel like the "introvert/extravert" axis bundles (at least) 3 things together in a kind of unhelpful way:
- low vs high need to socialize
- low vs high gregariousness
- low vs high desire to talk to people you don't know

These are sort of related, but I feel like usually when I hear people talk about extraversion or introversion they would usually be better served by appealing to a sub-factor rather than the bundle.

in reply to Daniel Filan

Yeah, this seems true. How do you define 'gregarious' separately from the other things?

Other dimensions could be related to social anxiety, awkwardness, and/or masking. A lot of the time when I "don't want to talk to people" or it drains my energy to do so, it's because I feel uncomfortable in the situation, rather than because there's something I inherently dislike/find tiring about talking to people.

in reply to Amber Dawn

@Amber Dawn by "gregarious" I'm trying to say something like "tendency to socialize / talk a lot / more than you 'need to'". So "feel bad if you don't socialize" vs "feel good if you socialize a lot".



in reply to kip

FWIW, my experience has been that nurses are often more concerned about the discomfort than I am, and almost never less concerned. But maybe this is mostly due to the kinds of things I've experienced in hospitals. Like, I've had lots of things with very minor discomfort where I'm not bothered by it, but they warn me or try to be supportive about it, because some people care a lot. And then I've had things that are super painful, but they know this, warn me before hand, and they try really hard to make it less bad. But I think there are intermediate cases where the thing really sucks, but it's not quite in the "obviously extremely painful" category, where there can be a significant disconnect between patient experience and provider concern.
in reply to Rick Korzekwa

I'm glad you've had a good time with nurses. There's a lot of variance, so I expect many people feel this way overall.

I think there are intermediate cases where the thing really sucks, but it's not quite in the "obviously extremely painful" category, where there can be a significant disconnect between patient experience and provider concern.

Yes -- I think in many of these situations, the provider does not believe that the patient is suffering as much as they claim. As a patient, it's very distressing. I've had a lot of good healthcare experiences as well, but bad experiences have the potential to be intensely bad.




Free Manifold alpha


In this market about how many episodes of AXRP I'll publish in 2024, there's an 11% chance I'll publish less than 9, the number I have published so far. manifold.markets/DanielFilan/h…

(The motivation of the market was to test whether I'd succeed in publishing a ton - in fact, I've been down an editor for a bit which slowed me down, as did having a real job, but I still think I'll beat my all-time record of 10 episodes in 2022)

in reply to Daniel Filan

For more AXRP markets:
- How many episodes I'll release in 2025: manifold.markets/DanielFilan/h…
- How many YouTube views my peak episode will get in 2025: manifold.markets/DanielFilan/h…


"Coherence theorems"




Camino Day 6


I'm in Spain now!

Today I turned off the Coastal route and walked inland along the Minho river, culminating in the medieval cities of Valença (on the Portuguese side) and Tui (on the Spanish side), for a total of 29km. I chose to take the cycling path along the river most of the way rather than the official route which runs through several towns. On the way, I came across a huge open air market and bought myself a Weird Little Guy (pretty sure it's Saint Anthony)

The cities were particularly cool. The route runs directly through the old Valença fortifications and as you approach the bridge you can see Tui cathedral on the hill above the river.

Tui is 118km from Santiago. Meaning that I have gone 142km already but also that tomorrow I start collecting my stamps to qualify for the Compostela rather than because it is fun.



What are the norms about sharing screenshots of posts on this site (without usernames), with third parties for discussion? For example, if I see a post asking for book recommendations, and I want to ask my friends in a private group chat whether a certain book would be a good recommendation, can I do that?
in reply to Guive

If I know the post you mean, I think it's set to "public", so I'd say it's fair game. For posts that aren't set to "public", I think I want to recommend using your judgement, erring on the side of not-sharing-without-permission.


markdown




limited-audience posts


I'm planning to write misc techy blog posts here. I wish when I wrote stuff for a niche audience, I had some way of saying "if this post is not for you, you can filter out posts like these". When I write a post there's a "categories" input field, but I don't yet know what they're for, and I don't see an easy way to configure my ignored categories (maybe this is what channels are for? but I think people don't look at channels / know what they are by default). For the sake of experimentation, I added a "meta" category to this post.

For the time being I'm just going to post stuff and not worry about it, but I'd be interested to hear from people who have already solved this problem.

in reply to Ben Millwood

Probably you don't want to do it this way, but in principle you could make a sub-user or even a group (i.e. a sub-user that auto-reshares things you tag it in) for this.

I do think you can use channels for this, by making a new channel that excludes the tags you don't want to see. I haven't tried it though.

in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

I just enabled a content filter addon called N.S.F.W. (with periods removed) that lets you collapse posts that trigger simple rules including words, tags, or regexes. Hoping the performance impact isn't massive.
This entry was edited (1 month ago)
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

This does seem to have made perf much worse for me, I'm going to disable it again :/
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun

Yeah, I think a group is what I'd go for if people did complain it was noisy, but the drawback is that it's opt-in: people need to specifically follow the new thing if they want to see the posts.


Bounties that take into account the time cost


#2
in reply to kip

This makes me think of how in normal society there are a variety of expensive-to-verify tasks that have their quality/correctness guaranteed by the threat of reputational damage, or even malpractice/liability lawsuits.

Say a civil engineer submits a design for a bridge, and then it collapses on day #2 after the expensive construction is complete. Even if he can't get sued to cover the construction company's loss, he'll have trouble finding work afterwards.

But with internet bounties, generally people aren't laying their expertise and credibility on the line with their suggestions, so there isn't much of an incentive to hold back from offering dubious solutions.

#2
in reply to kip

I've seen bounties like "$X if your solution works, -$Y for every solution you suggest that doesn't work/every 10 minutes I have to spend making your solution work."


Camino Day 4 & 5


Castelo do Neiva to Carreço and Carreço to Seixas. Both 22km stages.

As I've gotten farther from Porto the towns have gotten smaller and more of the route had consisted of forest paths and walled alleys, typically routing into town whenever there's a Big Old Church to get a stamp at

The past two days I've been traveling with other solo women that I met on the road, one from the UK and the other from Lithuania, both friendly and enthusiastic. B, who I spent both days with, was excited to learn it was my birthday and told everyone we ran into at the hostel (something I wouldn't have done myself). A big group of us went out for dinner and everyone sang happy birthday in their native language.

I've enjoyed the sense of community among the pilgrims; the one thing everyone has in common is that we're all on a Big Adventure.