Court houses have this kind of Objective Beauty that I find offputting. I think it's something to do with
1. marble floors are too noisy and squeaky
2. hallways are too echoey, makes you feel exposed
3. not enough windows
4. half the people there are miserable for various reasons
(I expect that people in a supreme court are less miserable than in the average court, but more miserable than in the average office building)
like this
Daniel Filan likes this.
Chana likes this.
Daylio (popular mood tracking app; I've been trying it for about two weeks) is pretty nice. It feels wholesome to spend a couple minutes reflecting on my day in a kinda structured way, even though so far I haven't really gotten any insight out of it.
My guess is that it feels healthy for some reason like, if I'm spending a little metacognition on (nonjudgmentally) remembering my day, it feels clearer that I care about myself, and maybe that I'm not trying to erase parts of my experience.
I've been a little surprised to notice that most days have been "good" over those two weeks. No "rad" days yet, but also only two "meh" days, and no "bad" or "awful" days. I would have expected that my modal day was "meh". I might just have been lucky recently, though.
like this
I'm curious how you evaluate your days. When I tried Daylio for a year, I struggled to figure out how to consistently apply the 5 star scale. What's a tired day where I wake up sick, and thoroughly enjoy taking a break and being indulgently be lazy. What's a day full of Eustress?
(I was also recording three ratings a day. Maybe it would have been easier to see trends if I did the normal single daily rating)
I'm mostly evaluating a question like "how far from my depression and anxiety low-water-line was I today?"
So eustress is just solidly good; tiredness is bad but not very bad, even anger or wholesome sadness are basically fine. Really bad stuff, for me, is like, feelings of worthlessness or despair, and things that are not those things mostly count upward.
Have you ever wanted to do something like cp -r
, but doing something different for certain subpaths?
... You haven't?
Well here is how to do it anyway:
find . -false \
-o -path . \
-o -path ./log -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
-o -path ./view/smarty3 -exec ln -s /home/friendica/{} $out/{} \; -prune \
-o -name .git -prune \
-o -type d -exec mkdir $out/{} \; \
-o -type f -exec cp --reflink=auto {} $out/{} \;
that is: don't do anything with
.
, with ./log
or ./view/smarty3
populate them with a symlink and then don't descend any further into them, ignore any .git
directory anywhere, and with any other path, copy it normally. (The -false
is just so I can start every line with -o
.)(This example in particular could be ~mostly replicated with rsync --exclude
and putting in the symlinks afterwards, but minor modifications would make that not work anymore; also, it's possible to combine the two symlink branches in this case, but it's ugly.)
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
About two years ago I got a ham radio license. I haven't done anything with it so far, but I just ordered my first HF radio transceiver, and materials for a ~100ft temporary antenna in my back yard (I'm extremely lucky in that my new house has a 120ft tree in the back that I can lift a wire into).
We're approaching a peak in the solar cycle, which means that over the next year or so it will be unusually possible to communicate over extremely long distances. You can look at dxmaps.com/spots/mapg.php (especially the "10m" and "40m" tabs) to see real-time examples of the kind of distances I'm talking about: In the evenings, if my setup works well, I'm expecting I'll be able to have conversations with people in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, without any intermediate infrastructure at all. This is such a wild thing to be able to do; I'm really excited.
like this
A crystallization of a realization that's been percolating for about a year:
Credit and money (at least representative money, though I think also ultimately fiat money and even sort-of commodity money) are fundamentally the same kind of thing: they're markers of trust in a specific entity, to uphold specific but highly-fungible commitments.
They basically only differ in which entity is being trusted.
like this
the other day I was feeling bad about expressing needs and had a moment of "oh, I have cast myself as Gandalf", and it felt insightful at the time; it doesn't feel as insightful now but I am going to explain it anyway
The Gandalf archetype is capable and wise, and can solve your problem whether your problem is a giant fire demon or a moment of wavering courage, having both material and emotional skills. Gandalf is seen as important and respected by his peers, but he doesn't exactly want anything himself, it be a little bizarre for him to be needy at anyone. He worries on behalf of the world, and everything he asks of others is what the world needs, that he is simply a conduit for, not something for him personally. He wields and channels forces greater than any individual, in response to threats greater than any individual, and he as a person ends up abstracted almost entirely away.
sorry if you know more about Lord of the Rings than I do and this seems wrong to you; this status is not really about Gandalf :P
like this
like this
Have been flossing for a week after a dentist appointment put the fear of God into me and damn, that shit is still bloody and painful. Hope it doesn't persist too long I guess?
Googling this, people say it subsides in a week, but I feel like the fundamental problem is that it's hard to get the floss into the cracks between the teeth, meaning that when they do get in it's with high speed.
Actually googling just now apparently the thing I am doing is a flossing mistake? I don't know how successful their proposed alternative is tho...
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
Daniel Filan likes this.
Daniel Filan likes this.
looks like from siliconvalley.com/2024/10/05/p…
phew, don't have to adjust which sources I pay attention to since I've never heard of siliconvalley.com
New AXRP with Jaime Sevilla!
Epoch AI is the premier organization that tracks the trajectory of AI - how much compute is used, the role of algorithmic improvements, the growth in data used, and when the above trends might hit an end. In this episode, I speak with the director of Epoch AI, Jaime Sevilla, about how compute, data, and algorithmic improvements are impacting AI, and whether continuing to scale can get us AGI.
I set up my own friendica instance for testing + potentially developing addons to propose to @Ben Weinstein-Raun . (Main experience: surprisingly large amounts of "this is broken, why doesn't it log anything anywhere?")
I've been away from PHP for a long time and had forgotten how normal it is that you put your code in all the folders that your webserver is configured to send to your clients, and you have to make some of the folders writable by the webserver or it won't work. I can kind of imagine lots of PHP-native people being like "sure, that makes sense" but it sounds so insane to me. How many security compromises would never have happened if someone early in PHP's development demanded better filesystem-level separation of code and data, and demanded that the places you could write to and the places you ran code from weren't the same places?
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
It's also worth pointing out that the questions of "what could I exchange for one more hour of work?" and "who should get moral credit for my ability to work one more hour?" are different questions, and arguably it's the first and not the second that you should use when deciding whether to take the bus or a cab or whatever. So, for example, the man supported by his wife may already receive enough support for him to work longer hours than he does, so while the wife is an important part of why he's able to work that much, she doesn't have to do any more work for him to work an additional hour, so he should value freeing up an extra hour without taking the cost of her work into account.
Similarly, if e.g. my commute experience is not restful, then maybe I think that all my rest supports the total time I spend commuting and working, and so I'm justified in spending up to my hourly work rate to reduce my commute.
cribs should not tell me about my baby suffocating
Irrationally annoyed at the bit of US law which mandates that cribs have warnings printed on them about babies suffocating. I do not wish to read about babies suffocating every time I put my child to bed. A removable tag, fine; printing it on the crib itself, not fine.
Anyway I fixed it.
like this
RSP overhang
A complaint about AI pause: if we pause AI and then unpause, progress will then be really quick, because there's a backlog of improvements in compute and algorithmic efficiency that can be immediately applied.
One definition of what an RSP is: if a lab makes observation O, then they pause scaling until they implement protection P.
Doesn't this sort of RSP have the same problem with fast progress after pausing? Why have I never heard anyone make this complaint about RSPs? Possibilities:
- They do and I just haven't seen it
- People expect "AI pause" to produce longer / more serious pauses than RSPs (but this seems incidental to the core structure of RSPs)
Crossposted from LessWrong
like this
Chana likes this.
Oh nice, I figured out how to enable embedded videos. So here's the cool drone video but you don't have to click a link:
Daniel Filan likes this.
https://x.com/Philippe4269/status/1841365949720474004
like this
kip likes this.
kip likes this.
like this
Notes on superstimulus
- It's very small, and most people who I would want to talk to aren't here
- I don't find it that rewarding to check because I don't see that much stuff.
- That said, I do like it
- I think it's because I feel some obligation to post minimally thoughtful things here. Where on FB / twitter / my personal slack channel, I just post whatever's on my mind.
- This would be a bad omen if true
- That said, it's possible that's because there's a decent quality of people here, and/or 2014-era FB was an unusually good architecture for hosting discussions.
like this
Chana likes this.
like this
Sometimes people say that you can't really have law under anarchy. But, inspired by a recent episode of Divided Argument (dividedargument.com/episodes/s…), I think American constitutional law is a counterexample.
Constitutional law looks and acts like law that constrains the federal and state governments. But there isn't a super-government that rules over the federal government that constitutional law appeals to, where if the federal government disobeyed rulings the super-government would punish them. Instead, courts rule on constitutional law, and the federal government follows, probably because the individual humans who work for the government by and large think that's the best for them in the long run.
This doesn't prove that law for humans could work without a state. There are way more humans than there are governments, so even a small rate of people ignoring courts is quite bad (where a small rate of governments ignoring courts is tolerable). And of course there are a bunch of other disanalogies. But it does indicate that stateless law is a conceivable thing.
Ben Weinstein-Raun likes this.
Notes from my dental appointment:
1. apparently I have recessed gums, and they recommend I get a scaling and root planing procedure, which is pretty expensive
2. apparently my tongue is big enough that there's a good chance I have (undiagnosed and asymptomatic) obstructive sleep apnea
Anyone have opinions about how seriously I should take this? For 1, I have a general sense that dentists sometimes upsell people, and for 2, I don't know if undiagnosed sleep apnea is actually a big deal (or what the cost/benefit of treating it would look like).
like this
Daniel Filan
in reply to Daniel Filan • •