A partial list of people whose art I've loved, and who I might have liked to be friends with, but who I think would not like me very much (all for different reasons):

• Ursula K. LeGuin (I'm not MtG Green enough)
• Ayn Rand (I'm too MtG Green)
• Ezra Koenig (I'm too MtG Blue)

I'm not really sure how or why I generated this list. It feels related to the thing about wanting to get stronger, and deleting my facebook last month. It's kind of an "edge-y" question: I don't know how to emotionally deal with the existence of people in this category, but they go on existing.

current progress on Bluesky OAuth login for my web app:

• you give me your Bluesky handle
• I have two methods of turning this into your DID, one via DNS and one via HTTP. I try both and use whichever works.
• Now I have your DID, I need to go get your DID document. There's more than one type of DID, but so far I've only bothered to support one, which I just fetch from the directory.
• Now I have your DID document, I can look up what your PDS is.
• Now I have your PDS, I can ask it where the authorization servers are.
• Now I've got an authorization server, I can ask it for the authorization server endpoints.
• Now I think I can start the OAuth process?
• It's not like the OAuth process is simple either

😵‍💫

I never want to go viral — well, unless I figure out how to become comfortable with getting a ton of mean comments from strangers. It seems like this happens basically no matter what you go viral for.

Like, the mob will be much more aggro if you're viral for something controversial. But even the most innocuous things will attract lots of mean comments, if enough people see it.

And people are biased to weight negative comments more highly, so I worry this has a rough psychological impact even if there's a lot more support than there is hate. (Unsure about this though. Maybe that's not the case. And maybe people who go viral are more ok hearing insults than average?)

So I've been listening to Hadestown 2010. One of my favorites is Hey, Little Songbird. It's just such a pushy, patient, practical, sinister vibe, and pushes the narrative forward at the same time.

Lyrically:
The extended bird metaphor is really fun. Especially with all these phrases that are flipped from their typical positive connotation.
"fly south for the winter" [south = the underworld]
"I could use a canary" [He wants a songbird for music, but this line comes right after a reference to "down in the mine"]

Structurally:
Whenever Hades comes back in after Eurydice's part, he overlaps on her last word, which adds to the pushy feel to the song. (Eurydice doesn't start singing till he's fully finished.) Also, Hades' part has this lovely AABBC structure. The extra C line on each stanza makes it feel like he's taking his time.

Someone linked me to the article Against SQL recently and it resonates with me a lot. I have a temptation to write a new SQL-like relational query language that tries to fix as many of these problems as I can, but this seems unreasonably ambitious for someone whose background is not databases (and who already has like 3 personal projects ongoing...)

(To be clear, I think unreasonable ambition is sometimes commendable. But I want projects that I'll actually finish.)

Idle thought: I wonder if we'll start seeing "training@home" training runs for open-source LLMs. Anyone care to run some numbers or sanity checks on whether this is possible in principle?

The folding@home project has been hugely successful, reaching at least exaFLOPS of compute.

"Training@home" would have to efficiently do partial gradient updates on extremely heterogeneous hardware with widely varying network properties; I'm not sure if this has any chance of producing base models competitive with e.g. Llama. In terms of ops alone, a 1 exaFLOPS network would have taken 10^7 seconds = ~half a year to train Llama 70b, and I imagine the costs of distributing jobs to such a network and coordinating on weight updates would make this much more expensive. So, probably not going to be competitive?

I've been meaning to start donating blood and/or plasma for a few years now, partly because it's a good thing to do, but also as a way to shed accumulating substances (PFASs have been studied, but also background heavy metals in the case of whole blood donation), but I use topical finasteride for hair loss, which I'd have to stop for a month before donating.

So, say I took a month off from finasteride, and then spent a month donating: whole blood once, and plasma 7 times. If my math is right, I'd have donated / regenerated 1 - 0.92^8 = ~half my blood volume; and ~10% of my body weight. Then maybe back to finasteride for two months, another month of no finasteride, and another donation month?

I'm finding it really hard to make #hamradio contacts in Delaware. Weirdly hard, given that the five states with smaller populations than Delaware were all much easier, even though some of them are further from me, and I've had no trouble making contacts in its neighboring states.

A few days ago I decided to try to be more strategic about contacting every US state since I was really close, and I've now spent probably twice the time trying to contact Delaware, as trying to contact all four of the other stragglers combined.

Lately I’ve been enjoying listening to the album Inside by Mother Mother, which is very much about pandemic isolation. Makes me think: wow I sure do love a concept album!

Common features in concept albums that I really enjoy:

- Explorations of the same ideas from different angles.
- Connections between songs — a song about infatuation hits different after you hear it referenced later in a heartbreak song.
- figuring out the gestalt ideas and the way they’ve changed in the artist’s head over time.
- Taking the time to explore the little details and nuances that fit between the radio singles ab peak experiences.
- Intros, outros, interludes. Having a structural dynamics like this makes listening to the whole thing a satisfying longform experience.

Happy to hear any recommendations for other compelling concept albums, or other music that hits the above features. (I mostly listen to indie rock, folk, pop, psychedelic, etc, but happy to try new things!)

Today I was inspired to ask ChatGPT for help with my health issues for the first time since o1 was released. It suggested that I might have Cushing's Syndrome, which actually makes a lot of sense. I don't think any doctors ever suggested this directly, but I do have a recollection of a doctor asking me if I was extremely thirsty or urinating a lot (I wasn't), which might have been a question for a relevant differential.

So hopefully tomorrow I'm going to wake up and go get a cortisol test.

A question bopping around my mind: are there things like making AXRP or being a MATS RM that I could do instead of those things that would be more valuable? Possible answers:
- just do research that matters
- project manager at a place that does research that matters
- be more directly a competitor to Zvi
- team up with Lawrence Chan and write stuff about various alignment schemes

I think a bottleneck I feel is being unsure about what things are valuable in the info environment, where I think I'm best placed to do stuff.