zeno timer trick

One of my mundaner inner shifts has been the value of timers. It just became more visceral. There’s pain in starting, and i decided to just be gentle with myself. So if a timer comes due and i still don’t wanna, i don’t force it. I ENSURE the feeling of missing it pulses in me (not painful, just a pulse), then reset the time BUT i halve the time. So I don’t spend more than twice the time to my date with the concept of time. The pulsing is what makes it work out, since my thoughts pull towards my task faster and faster.

WHY ARE YOU SO CALM?! My scooter accident

I was riding my scooter and when I got to 6th and Market, another guy popped a wheelie and hit me. I don’t want to make this about his appearance, but he looked super homeless. Including having one inexplicably nice thing — the bike.

Beyond strength

You are strong, child. But I am beyond strength.

The amount of honor to go around is very limited

A year of random voice notes, stitched. Only my words, with the filler trimmed.

From Priests to Software Engineers

The grand course of history — one of the first grand jobs are basically warriors and priests. Warriors, starting with the ancient Greeks and the creation of jobs like the Archon, displaced priests as the rulers of society. But then warriors themselves got displaced. And they viewed merchants before that, but kind of like rats.

All Their Pretty Persons

I once went to a 2 Chainz concert with my friends back in undergrad. It’s weird to see how unhype something can be. Like watching a drunk guy sing alone in front of an uncaring audience.

the last slop post

The PIE root *skel- means to cut. From it you get shell, scale, skull, skill. Skill is just cutting well.

why homeless people hide drugs from kids

one of the strangest things about people is how much can be destroyed without everything being destroyed

Are you strong enough to stop?

Shabbos is one of the strangest ideas human beings ever took seriously.

Contra Emet Hirsch on whatever the fuck he was talking about

I don’t care if this is AI slop, it’s based on my notes.

Underdog

People love comeback stories because most people suspect they’ve been reduced.

talking past each other

A lot of disagreement happens before the disagreement.

Greatness

I’ve been thinking about what greatness actually is. Not the word — the structure.

A Field Guide to Nonstandard Definitions

Sensing and Intuition

Richard Sutton wrote The Bitter Lesson: the history of AI research shows that general methods leveraging search and learning beat specialized methods every time. Every time a researcher hand-codes knowledge into a system, it works for a while. Then someone throws more compute at a dumber method and wins. Forty years of this. Chess, Go, vision, language. The lesson is always the same.

What Does Big Mean?

What does it mean for a number to be big?