Does anyone know how to productively/supportively receive "venting"-shaped communication, when you don't want to reinforce or implicitly endorse the frame or set or assumptions that the venting is based in?
I feel like I have this dilemma a lot of the time: like, someone wants to share something that they're angry or upset or annoyed about, and clearly wants me to be entirely on their side about the thing, and I want to emotionally support them, understand where they're coming from, and help them process and/or strategize.
But honestly about 80% of the time, especially if it's someone who I'm not extremely close to, I find it really hard to straightforwardly do those things because I feel triggered about the context somehow, either because it seems like it's assuming things I don't believe, or because I feel attacked in some way, e.g. because I often have substantial sympathy toward the target of the anger or annoyance, as well as toward my friend.
I wish I knew what to do in these situations.
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HomeAssistant. Wow. How had I not heard of this before this year?
It's allegedly an open source home automation system, but I keep running into ways that it's actually way better than that. You can connect it to just about anything: Sure, air conditioning and lighting and smart locks and all the other home automation stuff. But also fitbit, mattress coolers, various internet data sources; you can use it to set up a custom ChatGPT-powered Google Home replacement (finally!).
And it's all so polished! Like, yes you need to be a level-1 technical person to set it up, and to use the more advanced features, but the flows are so reasonable and reliable. I'm genuinely kinda shocked.
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Misophonia has become a serious problem in my life. There's a person, who is totally great, and who is friends with all my friends and gets invited to everything I'm invited to, that I cannot be around for long periods because when they laugh my brain instantly jumps to an emotion not too far from blind rage.
I don't know what to do about this; it's very intense and basically preventing me from doing most social activities, even things in my own house.
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Sorry to hear it, this sounds very inconvenient and also socially very difficult to approach
My misophonia feelings have varied over the years FWIW. Certain mouth sounds bothered me a few years ago, then they didn't stand out again til a few weeks ago. But my thing has always been much milder than the thing you're describing.
Have you tried loop earplugs? I think they say they can help with misophonia, and my friend with more widespread misophonia said they help a bit. Idk if they'd help with someone's laugh though.
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I spent the whole weekend building this... Err... "Portable" directional 2m #hamradio antenna with @Jen Blight, and it was pretty great.
(It's portable in the sense that it only weighs about 2lbs, and can be taken apart to fit in a backpack. I hope to make substantially more portable ones in the future).
The elements are made from 0.5" PEX irrigation tubing (think hula hoop material), wrapped in copper-coated fabric and copper tape, with a layer of clear "repair" tape to prevent tarnishing, while preserving the mad wizard staff vibes.
Each tube is connected to itself using Anderson powerpole connectors, so they can be easily unplugged, and twisted into a smaller footprint for travel.
The boom is a fiberglass driveway marker, and the mast is a telescoping fiberglass pole.
I don't yet know how well the antenna performs, and as you might be able to see from the VNA, it needs a little tuning. But my radio didn't emit any smoke when I transmitted using it! And the signal made it clearly to its intended target (who was about 30ft away).
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Update: I definitely see a fair chunk of gain! Not enough to communicate with Jen all the way in SF from my back yard, but my field strength meter shows ~40 units when my standard whip antenna only gets ~10. I'm not sure how to interpret this, but if it's roughly proportional to power, I think this implies roughly 6dBd / 8dBi? Also as far as I can tell the front/back ratio is excellent; saw barely any movement in the meter when placed behind the antenna.
I'm pleased with this as a first attempt!
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I'm currently using my 64-core Linux desktop to run a genetic algorithm to optimize my design for an emergency #hamradio antenna. About an hour ago I submitted a patch to the (Haskell) codebase of the optimizer to allow it to support curved wires, which I needed because my design is made of four circular hoops. Despite being a fairly low activity project, the PR was merged within about 10 minutes, which felt awesome.
Am I cool yet? How many more layers of nerd do I have to add before I'm cool?
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While researching, I've seen a few similar designs with several different names; "circular quad beam", "cylindrical quad", "E-Z-O" etc.
I'm very new at this so I don't have as much equipment as I'd like for testing this stuff. Just ordered a cheap field strength meter, so hopefully will be able to do better than the "can you hear me now?" test.
Seriously interesting project. I've used the optimiser in 4NEC2 but it only has preset things you can choose to optimise. Being able to use a Python script as an objective function would be so much nicer 🙂
Anyway looking forward to hearing about what you end up with ...
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Trying a couple different materials for my "emergency kit highly directional #hamradio antenna":
- Stainless steel spring-crafting wire (idea credit: @flammifer@superstimul.us) isn't the best choice of antenna material or diameter, but it is extremely portable: I'd add connectors so I could unplug the ends and twist the wire up, to have it fit in about one square foot.
- PEX tubing is much lighter than it looks, is much sturdier and harder to accidentally deform, and covering it in copper foil tape should produce an excellent antenna. But it would be much harder to fold a PEX antenna down into an emergency kit sized package.
I think I'm just going to make both and compare them.
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Maybe you can start in Zone 1/2 and stop in Zone 5/6 or vice versa, but you cannot get off in Zones 3/4?
This made more sense when I thought that Zones 3/4 would be the central ones but obviously no, 1 is central and 6 is furthest out, so ???
Do you get some tax or some premium for living very-far-out from the centre as opposed to kinda far out?
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Oh my, that dwarf mood is the same thing that exists in the webfic Worth The Candle. A blind focus descends on someone randomly ('forge frenzy') and they create a unique magical item, to the exclusion of food and sleep. In WtC, such magical items are called entads, referring to magical artefacts that are created in this way.
So either Alexander Wales (author) played Dwarf Fortress, or it's a wider trope that both are drawing from.
OK I did a google and I found the author saying in an AMA that he wasn't inspired by Dwarf Fortress:
I have never played Dwarf Fortress, so no. The closest inspiration I can think of is one of the Drizzt books, where Wulfgar gets the mythical warhammer Aegis-fang made for him by his adoptive dwarf father Bruenor Battlehammer. It's been probably twenty years since I read the book, but the chapter where it got forged really stuck with me. Forge frenzy is kind of that, amped up, with worse materials.
Entad
An Entad is a magic item, created by means of a forge frenzy. Conceptually they tend to be most similar to magic items as seen in Dungeons and Dragons.Contributors to Worth the Candle Wiki (Fandom, Inc.)
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I tend to have "strange moods" that last about 6-8 weeks at work, roughly every 1.5 years.
Over the last 7 years at my current job, only two of these have produced anything useful, but they've probably been about as valuable as everything else I've done combined. One weird pattern is that the valuable ones made the least sense up front – like "rewrite key data pipelines in a language none of us have heard of" or "move a bunch of stuff from one piece of infrastructure to a seemingly identical piece of infrastructure." The ones that seemed to make sense up front, on the other hand, never amounted to anything. It's gotten to the point where my cofounders actively encourage me to work on things that don't make sense!
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Another cool #hamradio fact is that, since right now we're near a maximum in the solar cycle, around dusk and dawn you can basically communicate directly with any place on the planet. To communicate with daytime places, you use the 10m band, and to communicate with nighttime places, you use the 40m band. The pink speech bubbles on this map show people who reported hearing my 10m signal in the last hour. If I switched to transmitting on 40m, you'd see a similar set of speech bubbles but going east instead of west.
When the solar cycle is in a trough, only the nighttime signals get through.
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A slightly horrifying / cool thing I learned from doing #hamradio and in particular the FT8 mode:
Every 15 seconds, thousands of computers let out a wavering, wailing tone into the void. Then there's 2 seconds of silence. And then they do it again. Since they're doing this by sort-of "pretending" to be sending audio signals, you can listen to it: soundcloud.com/vartchcodpiece/…
It sounds kinda like a mashup of whalesong and digital ghostly wailing. Wailsong, I guess.
What are they saying to each other, you ask? They're basically having the same conversation over and over again. I'll tell you how it goes:
"Hi, anybody there? I'm Alice and I live in Appalachia."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I live in Bermuda."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and I hear you really clearly."
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and I hear you not-so-clearly."
"Hi Bob, I'm Alice and goodbye!"
"Hi Alice, I'm Bob and goodbye!"
FT8 - 3.573 Khz - 80m
FT8 or Franke & Taylor 8 is a form of digital communication used primarily by amateur radio operators to communicate on amateur radio bands with a majority of traffic occurring on the HF amateur bandsSoundCloud
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Some #hamradio updates:
- Because US amateur radio licenses are public and include addresses, you can see a map of everyone with a license. It's way denser than I would have expected in Berkeley:
And hey, there's @Daniel Filan with his fancy Extra-class license a bit further down on the map!
- Today I managed to hear my first trans-pacific signal, from Nauru (a tiny island country 5,000 miles from here). Apparently it's what's called a "DXpedition", where a group of radio amateurs go on holiday in order to help other amateurs check "rare" countries off their lists. Unfortunately from their website, it looks like they're transmitting with more than ten times as much power as I have (or at least they brought equipment for broadcasting at that power level), so this isn't much evidence about whether I'll be able to have a full conversation with them or not.
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I mean, sure, but my mind unfairly translates that section into "yeah, you're right, but I can't be bothered to actually change my mind just because of something like that. Don't @ me."
He points out that many popular views are self-defeating, and is like "well surely all these self-defeating views can't be wrong!" But, like, yes they can? And also this is an especially apt case, since the question is directly about what-to-believe! You're not even really going up a meta level.
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Yeah I don't necessarily buy his counterargument either, just wanted to point out that it has been discussed :P
I guess in fact if you believe in epistemic modesty, deferring to the fact that most people don't believe in it doesn't actually fix your problem, because that tells you to not defer and follow your own beliefs, but then your own beliefs tell you to defer again. It's not just that it recommends that you don't use it, it's actively paradoxical.
I think you and I probably disagree about how much it matters to have an inconsistent / seemingly arbitrary "do epistemic modesty unless it's paradoxical, then don't" rule. I think I can make it sound more reasonable if it's something like "it's surprising if you alone are right while a large number of relevant experts are wrong, so usually reject this thesis, but in some cases this rejection is even more surprising / obviously incorrect, so in that case you have to stick with your beliefs".
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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.
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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.
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.
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Ben Weinstein-Raun tagged Ben Weinstein-Raun's status with #hamradio
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.
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.
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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:
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Is it just me or are some names "more meme-y" than other names? Like, Eliezer Yudkowsky. Very meme-y name. I feel like a name that meme-y is a genuine asset. Leopold Aschenbrenner. Also very meme-y.
Ben Weinstein-Raun? Hard for me to judge, but I'd guess middling meme-y-ness at best. Benjamin Weinstein-Raun seems at least a little meme-y-er. Should I start going by Benjamin in professional / semi-public contexts?
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This inspires me to ask, how do you pronounce your surname? (I'm particularly unsure about the Raun part, but I guess the other part could be wine-steen or wine-stine). Names are more meme-able if people know how to say them, arguably. But then again, few know how to say Eliezer Yudkowsky when they read it for the first time!
I think my full name of Amber Dawn Ace is very meme-able, to the extent that people assume some part of it was chosen by me, but actually no, the first two were chosen by my mum and the third is the surname she was born with.
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Quoting bmcgee.ie/posts/2023/10/numtid…
This year, I met some new members of our federation [...], including what has to be the best example of nominative determinism I’ve ever encountered: Linus Heckemann (a.k.a. LinuxHackerman).
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If you use Linux or FreeBSD and aren't paying attention today, there's an unauthenticated remote code execution vulnerability in CUPS. If you use Linux or FreeBSD, especially for a desktop or laptop computer, be sure to disable CUPS or see if you can update to a version with fixes for today's CVEs.
More info: phoronix.com/news/Linux-CVSS-9…
Unauthenticated RCE Flaw With CVSS 9.9 Rating For Linux Systems Affects CUPS
There's been much speculation since this morning over a reported 'severe' unauthenticated remote code execution (RCE) flaw affecting Linux systems that carries a CVSS 9.9.9 score..www.phoronix.com
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I really like that sometimes things get better over time. From 2016 - 2023 I fairly often did research to try to find the best indoor air quality monitor, and even though in principle it would have been very easy to manufacture something great, the actual competitors all sucked.
But I moved into a new house recently, and looked again; there's now at least one really good option: the QingPing Air Quality Monitor Gen 2.
Maybe it's spying on my for the Chinese government or something and that's why it's so good? But it has a pretty nice UI, measures ~all the relevant things (PM2.5, CO2, VOCs, humidity, temperature), and has an app that logs 30 days' worth of measurements. It's not cheap, but it is a bit cheaper than the similar things I'd bought for the purpose that were also substantially worse.
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Like, if I think it through all the way, I can see why I am actually mentally privileging the vertical axis, but it's hard to get my system 1 to understand this.
Ultimately I think the biggest thing is that humans are roughly bilaterally symmetrical but not top-bottom symmetrical, and my guess is that this is sufficient to do the symmetry breaking. Like, if you parity-flip me, I still visually "make sense" as a left-right-swapped person, but I don't "make sense" as a top-bottom-swapped person; people don't have their heads on the bottom.
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So there are at least two interesting thought experiments about putative zero-g humans:
- What if humans were radially symmetrical? and
- What if humans had no visual symmetries at all?
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Yeah, I was about to say the same thing about bilateral symmetry.
Another thing I just realized is that if I look at a mirror on a ceiling it intuitively feels like it's reflecting across the mirror and not switching left/right.
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Daniel Filan
in reply to Ben Weinstein-Raun • • •