reacting to posts by various internet nerds

"nerd" being of course entirely unjudgmental; I like some of these nerds and dislike others

seeing like a state

I keep meaning to, but I still haven't read this book. but this SSC review is pretty fun to read. similarly, this about warrens vs plazas. when you start seeing it, you see it everywhere: top down wants plazas, bottom up wants warrens. (when you work with computers, you want plazas: your data, your code, everything. but your data comes in in warrens. this is often what we mean by "data cleaning.")

speaking of states, ok, politics:

podcast with guest david shor

- measurement is really hard

- mostly super-engaged super-lefty people work on campaigns, while more centrist (for the US) people vote

- *sigh* I hear people on twitter gripe that we should go for big important ideas (m4a, defund the police, etc) but the more I hear from people who know politics it sounds like those are less successful because of what Shor talks about, which is a bummer because we really need most of the far left's big ideas. (again, this is "USA far left", which would get us in line with European centrists)

- side side gripe: I agree that ACAB is a terrible slogan if you wanna convert white people - they'll all think about the one cop they know and "that C isn't AB!" and "abolish the police" sounds radical too, sure. but how is "defund the police" so controversial? like, ... that could literally mean shrink the police by 99% or 1%. "centrists", seriously, if that's too radical for you, give me a slogan that means "maybe we should consider thinking about changing something please." or do you really not wanna consider changing anything please?

about meritocracy: obviously it's broken now. is it even worth striving for?

Callard argues that "achievement" (where we judge people) is different from "weight management" or "mental health" (where we don't judge people) because in weight/mental health, you can only screw up. If you're average, you're good; if you're off average in any direction, you're bad. Meanwhile, with achievement, if you're average, you're fine; if you're under average, that's bad; but you can be way over average and that'd be awesome.

 

I disagree with this premise. In mental health, you can also be average, below average, or way above average. Some people have ... just really great mental health. They're not just getting by, they're really flourishing and have extra love left over for everyone around them. And with weight - well, that's one narrow slice of "physical health", and it's not fair to compare a narrow thing like weight with a broad thing like "achievement." And in physical health, you have people who are average, people who are below average, and the LeBrons of the world who are just super fit.

 

Well... regardless, she ends up at a conclusion that I think I agree with: we should reward people for their triumphs and not blame people for their failures. This sounds great. The one question I have is: can we do that? As we celebrate wins, do we not also implicitly anti-celebrate the losses? I think she agrees that this is a big challenge.

techno-optimism

I am unimpressed! covid is like... sorta a techno-optimist success story, because we did a vaccine in a year. but that's because "make a vaccine" fits into a category that we're very good at: executing on a well-defined technological problem (that we've been sort of preparing for). everything else covid-related, we are botching pretty miserably. Most of the rest of the techno-solutions are like... not actually solving our big problems (lab meat, self-driving cars, VR), or not actually working (fusion, "AI" whatever that is). and the necessary ideas that are not "tech lab solving tech problem" (like Yglesias's "government guarantees to buy electric cars" or even just "immigrants are good") are political, and therefore stalled forever by our f'ed-up federal government.

meta-post

I'm not sure if doing this kind of post is serving me. I like collecting links and having a record of things I've thought at various times, but I don't know if it's worth the effort. I spend a couple hours collecting stuff I've read and it's kind of tiring, not a lot of fun, and I don't think I have any deep thoughts that are worth sharing.

best of twitter 2020

how to sum up this year? as usual, I maintain that twitter is good at one thing, and that is dumb jokes, and we have had plenty of time to scroll it this year, so it seems about right. here are some of the bests of 2020ish:

 

toots other people made that I love:

- the circular circular (god I'm still in awe of this one)

- wisemind (memes of the year)

- I sent youse two to whack that guy

- doctor doctor, gimme the news

- ganfield

- king's hand

- AI memes

- tell me why

- trump speech. joke: 5/10, execution 10/10

- "mother!" with david byrne songs

- gpt3 words

- jimi halloween

 

and because I'm vain, my toots that I'm proud of:

- the Big Challenges series

- Pagliacci footprints

- facebook core value or bruce willis movie

- I'm sorry Ms. Pac-Man (actually a reddit comment)

- alexander haroldhill

- the Kabpaulah and the mystery of Ron Sean

- up all night to bitbucket

- I am a free

- famous karls

- cartoonist retirement

expertise, football, covid, uh, wisemind

Expertise For Sale

Noe Valley still barely has a video store. Of course Netflix is basically putting them out of business. But that's a shame, because "loaning you the newest Avengers DVD" is only half their business, if that; half of it is recommending movies and having hard-to-find stuff. I want to pay people for the 2nd part, though; I want to give them $5 to just tell me what movie to watch.

This bartender started doing this on https://cocktailsforendtimes.com/. Tell her what you have and the kinds of things you like, and she sends you recipes using them. This requires pretty deep knowledge of drinks! I am happy to pay her for this. This is great.

 

Speaking of expertise, I would still pay for regular, customized, sports run-downs so I can keep up with a couple teams in like 5 min/week. Especially if they had a bit of:

Football for nerds

Scorigami, scoring just one point

y'all nerds: if you wanna Get Into Sports in order to talk with friends, family, SOs, whatever, read everything by Jon Bois. Including 17776 and 20020. (ok those won't help you talk sports. but they're great.) I wish I could talk more about the Browns and the Indians and college football and stuff when I see family, which brings us to:

Covid and travel worries

Actually, side note: I've seen very little actual advice about what to do if you get Covid. Here's a thread; bookmarking this for later, just in case.

 

Covid and travel worries: I feel like despite how much I evangelize Microcovid, I'm the only one I know who actually uses it. A lot of friends have canceled holiday trips. And that's great; collective risk reduction is cool. But I think it's a little out of proportion; your individual trip to see 2 family members at Christmas, say, can be pretty low risk. Ok, ok, I'm not gonna tell anyone I know how to weigh risks for them; I guess I'm just feeling defensive because I feel like I'm the only one still planning on traveling. I feel like I'm doing the equivalent of "still drinking water at restaurants in a drought", because your water glass is not the main thing causing a drought anyway. But I guess I'm still thinking about it because I'm afraid of getting called out! which leads to:

"Calling people in"

this has ... just always been a good idea? problem is, most people who are "against cancel culture" are ass-clowns. (indeed; I fear that y'know Ben Sh*piro is gonna link this article too and then I'm agreeing with ass-clowns!) this is because "cancel culture" means everything from canceling some kid who misspoke once, to canceling bill cosby, and of course some of these are bad and some are good. maybe I'll continue to steer clear of any conversation involving the words "cancel", "woke", "sjw", etc; usually the people on the "woke" side are right; yes there's a crummy edge where people don't realize that they're delighting in yelling at people for not being woke enough and not furthering justice and that's a real thing that should be fixed BUT the bigger problem here is our society is so unjust; this is exhausting, I need a dose of:

Gen-Z absurdity

I think there's something to this tweet. 2020 is messed up enough as a secure-enough 30-something; I can't imagine if I were growing up or trying to make my way in the world right now. This goofy-ass humor would totally resonate.

An example: #wisemind is the best thing on twitter 6 months ago. this is poetry. if there were a pulitzer for tweets it should go to dril; if there were one for memes I'd give it to jay dragon.

It's easy to look at this and see it as Dadaist post-war nihilism, but I don't think this is? Or at least, not in a bad way? It's flowering creativity, world-building using the tools we have available.

Swole, Smash, Dr

I should post more frequently, instead of waiting til I have 3 topics and posting 3 at once.

Getting Swole

I'm lifting weights again. Or rather, doing mostly bodyweight exercises in my apartment every other day. It's good. There seem to be 5 main benefits:

 

1. Number Go Up

I like seeing numbers go up in basically anything I do! When I started, doing like 3 dips was hard. Now I can do 3x15! When I started, doing 10 push-ups was hard, now I can do 3x20! And doing 3 pull ups used to be hard, now I can do more than 3x10.

(I recently completed a life goal, sort of! When I was ~20 I thought it'd be cool to do my age in pull ups. I never did, but now I can (... in 3 sets). That's cool.)

Numbers Go Up even more if you have barbells or dumbbells; alas, I don't right now.

2. Loss Of Any Kind Of Neuroses Around Food

I never had a ton of neuroses (I'm lucky to be a not-overweight man), but like... as a friend recently said, we live in the Bad Place, you know? So I was always a little bit like "I'd *like* to eat more but I *shouldn't*." Now I eat whatever I want! I sort of have a goal to gain ~5 lbs, I don't really care if it happens, but it means I really don't have to worry about it at all; I eat what I want. To be so self-regulating feels great.

3. General health

Yeah yeah this is probably good for me in the long term whatever

4. Actually You Sometimes Have To Lift Heavy Things

I used to think "why lift weights? I never lift heavy things." But actually I do! Moving furniture, cleaning things, carrying bike, and someday carrying small children. Making all that easier will be nice.

5. Looking A Little Better

One time like 7 years ago I joined a gym because I "should" (see point 3) and bought their intro package of 5 classes + a personal consultation or something. It was not a gym for swole bros, they were all kinds of alternative movement-based exercises and bodyweight exercises and stuff, it was probably pretty cool. But at one point the guy I had my consultation with was like "so... do you want to get big, or do you want to get strong?" and I was like "Strong! pff, who cares about how you look." And he was kinda subtly like "yeah, cool."

What I should have taken from that is, "this gym focuses on getting strong, not big. (not that they're exclusive at all; you'll probably get one as you get the other, to some extent.)"

What I did take from it is "I gave the Right Answer; wanting to look muscley is vain."

But you know what? Looking muscly is a little bit cool! I'm not gonna get all Schwarzenegger here, but I like looking at myself and thinking I have good muscles. It's not the whole picture, but y'know it's one benefit out of 5.

Smash

Super Smash Bros Melee was a game for Gamecube released in 2001. It was great, I played it in high school, it was great. But it's had a behind-the-scenes competitive scene for almost 20 years now, which is pretty incredible. Some documentaries if you find this as fascinating as I do:

The Smash Brothers

"there will never ever be another melee player like Hungrybox"

Metagame (haven't seen yet)

I saw a tournament in 2018 in Oakland. It was wild - there were hundreds of people there. (not knowing anything, I rooted for Hungrybox because I also "main" Jigglypuff ("main" meaning I played Puff in a tournament once, and was proud to only get 2-stocked)). I think that's like rooting for the Yankees. Whatever, he's kind of a heel, that's cool :D

I love this image - I think it's supposed to be Mew2King on the left and Mango on the right? For the record, when I'm playing games, I'm more like the guy on the right.

 

I get something out of watching it, in the way that I imagine a lot of people get about tennis or chess. Different players have different styles, sometimes you can see real particularly good moves that they did, it's real tense, etc.

uh but downside: it's super nerdy in a way that I'm not really happy about; gamers, y'know? It's the only community I've seen that's maybe even more uniformly male than Magic. The documentaries touch on this, but only briefly. to me, seems like the community is not toxic gamer shit, and has built some bridges between people of different races and backgrounds: cool! but, it does seem 95%+ men, and there's a decent amount of casual low-grade sexism and homophobia. That's not real compelling.

Dr

ok obv if anyone wants to use Dr and they've done the Thing We All Agree Lets You Use Dr and you tell them they shouldn't, then go to hell. But side thing I've wondered for years before it became a news item: should I start using Dr. more for myself? Should I list myself in Linkedin/etc as Dr. Dan Tasse? I never did because I thought it was vain and silly, but there's always that nagging doubt: "I should normalize calling myself Dr so that other less-privileged Drs can call themself Dr and thereby level the playing field." I wanna support women and minority Drs, but I think the idea of Dr in general is pretty dumb. How come you get a title for working 6 years in some career paths and not others?

 

Is the idea that Dr-achievements (phd/med/etc school) are harder than the corresponding other kinds of work you could be doing? ... maybe! grad school is tough. but geez, getting to change your name because you've "done a hard thing", we as a society are definitely gonna miscalibrate that one.

 

Is the idea that Dr-achievements are somehow Good for humanity and we should reward them? uh, I should give mine back, mine was "all this data seems cool but is pretty useless, I guess you could use it for this shitty feature if you're airbnb." (I still cringe about parts of that thesis.)

 

Should we all have collectively ignored this froth, because it's a case of Someone Wrote Something Bad Somewhere? yeah probly :shrug:

Trying to think about risks for holiday travel

Like probably many of you, I'm thinking about traveling for the holidays. Really, the number I'd like to know is: if I travel, what's my chance of getting Covid?

Microcovid.org has been helpful in this. 1 microcovid = 1 in a million chance of catching covid. 10k microcovids = 1% chance. They're roughly additive, so doing one thing worth 10k microcovids is the same as doing 50 things worth 200 microcovids*.

Normal life, I try to stick to about 200 microcovids a week. I don't really calculate it, but here are some things I regularly do:

go to the grocery store for 1/2 hour with a cotton mask: 30 microcovids

see a few friends outside for 2-3 hours, with cotton masks, not really worrying about spacing: 50 microcovids

go biking with 2 friends all day: 10 microcovids

and I probably do about 3-4 of these a week; add in a x2 fudge factor because I'm probably forgetting all kinds of stuff and I'm at about 200/week.

Now, what are travel risks like? Before counting, I'm going to say that 0.1% chance would be ok. That's 1000 microcovids**. Let's imagine some scenarios:

- spending 1 week with parents from Cleveland, who have been quarantining long enough that we can model them as "they only grocery shop": 300 microcovids.****

- same but with sister's family in Charlotte exurbs: 100 microcovids.

- 1 hour in SFO before a flight where I'm wearing a well-fitted n95 mask: 100 microcovids***.

- 6 hour flight from San Francisco, n95 : 50 microcovids.

- 1 hour in Charlotte airport before a flight, n95: 300 microcovids.

- 6 hour flight from Charlotte, n95: 100 microcovids.

 

So imagining I do all these things; that's only about 950 microcovids, or a 0.095% chance. Maybe a little less if I spend 2-3 days with them, not a week. I'm really not trying to cook the numbers here, but it looks like I might be just under my risk budget. Some things I learned:

 

- the well-fitted n95 (really, kn95, but same thing AFAICT) is a game changer. Without it all these airport numbers go up by about a factor of 5.

- adding a layover makes this much worse. 1 hour in Denver: 600 microcovids. Chicago: 500. And who knows with layovers; especially in the Christmas season, you might be there much longer!

- but uh when you're in the airport, if you stand 10ft+ apart from people, your risks halve again - so I'll be hiding in a faraway corner as much as possible.

* this breaks down when probabilities get big. Imagine doing something worth 500k microcovids, then doing it again - you'd have a "100% chance of covid", but clearly that's not the case. But for our purposes, when we're in the hundreds or thousands of microcovids, it's pretty close. For example, doing 2 things worth 100 microcovids each should really be counted as 199.99 microcovids, not 200... but this is not going to be the biggest source of error in your calculations!

** is this number reckless? did I just inflate my okayness with risk from 1% to 1.1% over the course of the year? I'll try to compensate by doing less stuff most weeks - like this week I'm under 100 for sure - but I'm open to the possibility that I'm fooling myself. (in the same way, though to a lesser degree, than most people who are fooling themselves.)

*** tracking the risks for the airports/planes is a little weird because who knows where these people come from? but let's just model them as all coming from the city that the airport is based in. that's probably true for half of them at least.

**** upon re-checking this page, these numbers have shifted. that's a good sign: it's being updated! as of Dec 18, we're at even lower than 950 microcovids.

A compendium of everyday research

(roughly stolen from #6 on this list of things that would all be great)

 

Tati and I disagreed about whether we should get plastic or glass food containers, for long-term health-and-safety reasons. Like... BPA was a thing, but we're fine now, right? But what about, I don't know, if you put hot food into plastic? Is it still safe then? We had different instincts and that makes it difficult to make a shared decision.

Another question someone challenged me on is: how bad is cannabis for you? I have it in my head as "roughly as bad as alcohol" but that answer isn't very thorough. How bad is vaping vs. edibles? Raw flower vs extracts and processed things? How many mg of THC should I be thinking about as equivalent to one beer? Is that even a fair comparison?

I'm sure one of my friends has researched both of these thoroughly, but I don't know who. As it is, I'll probably spend an annoying couple hours looking up articles and trying to fit them into my brain. It'd be nice if I could just look into the Google Drive folder where a friend has written a thing about it and decide.

(I assume this will be a major thing in the future, assuming we have kids! so many questions about what's good for kids! eesh.)

This is not just reinventing wikipedia, because I think this has to be local-ish. Answers are somewhat context specific. If I were in the Yukon, maybe I'd have to worry more about freezer storage. If I already knew I was allergic to plastic (? I dunno), I'd just buy glass. If I couldn't afford glass containers, I'd just buy plastic. If I were 14 years old, I think the answer on weed is "don't do it; it will mess with your developing brain." So I don't think there's One True Guide for everyone. But my friends are likely to be in roughly similar life situations, and they're likely to roughly share my values, so I could probably just use their research.

(yes, Wirecutter does this for some "which X do I buy" questions. indeed, they have a pretty good answer here. but most questions are not "which X do I buy" and maybe I wouldn't trust a NYT/Amazon hybrid to answer many questions anyway.)

 

edit a couple hours later: geez, researching plastic food container safety is awful - I think the answer is something like "who knows?" and so I'm landing on "try not to mix heat and plastic; maybe don't reuse plastic containers a ton, and buy glass reusable containers instead of plastic when given the choice; otherwise don't worry about it"

Some smaller thoughts about links

Happiness won't save you (contains talk about suicide) (read with bypass paywalls)

1. Those studies about how lottery winners and car-accident paraplegics all went back to the same baseline they started from, after some time? Not, uh, super true. ("not true" is glib shorthand; science is hard) This is both scary (oh man if I got in an accident my life probably would get worse) and empowering (if I feel like I'm on a new better baseline, that's not just an illusion.)

2. Man this poor guy! Academia is bad, sure, but uff I'm always so sympathetic to people who are in this situation. I think about logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain a lot. While there's more to suffering than just a number, the "logarithmic" part is what's so scary; it can get real bad in there.

3. Every discussion about suicide contains a link to the suicide prevention hotline. ... kinda curious, do they mind that a million people keep linking to them? Also, what happens when they get overloaded? I imagine "sorry, there's nobody here to talk to you" is like the worst possible failure mode, so they probably super-prepare against it; I wonder how.

Tech isn't neutral: a list of resources. Mostly just bookmarking this because one time I had to argue that tech isn't neutral and I was unprepared. It's so obvious! gosh.

 

Rumcakes and rainbows; or how meaning is interactively constructed through things, not inherent in them or totally in your head. This is also just a link to this whole ongoing Meaningness book project that seems to me generally pretty good. It's like a philosophy book but you don't have to know philosophy. It also AFAICT is trying to address the main question that I'm pretty interested in: what even matters, and why?

Mozilla "privacy not included" gift guide. This is always going to be an oversimplification but this seems to be a pretty good start. I like how they show what data is collected, and then let people vote on "... so, how bad is it?" to address the fact that "gathering X" isn't inherently creepy. If a Fitbit checks my pulse, fine; if a "smart fork" does so, gtfo. Reminds me of Privacy Grade, which also used this kind of "analyze data use then let people vote" kind of thing.

rehydrating a little this week

I feel kind of like I exist again. gosh was really that much mental energy taken up by the Tr*mp show?

Jung

I've been reading about him, mostly through Jung's Map of the Soul.  It's mostly comprehensible, and full of interesting ideas.

Some concepts:

Libido - I want to know more about this. I feel like this book just briefly touched on it, but it's one of my big questions here. There's some kind of "energy" (not woo here, just like, sometimes you feel energetic and sometimes you don't and it's hard to explain it all just physically. oh and unlike with Freud this doesn't just mean sexual energy.) - how does it move? Where does it come from? Have some people figured out how to get more of it?

Archetypes and the collective unconscious - these are pretty exciting too. Sometimes your experiences aren't just yours! You can see this obviously sometimes: kid grows up in Great Depression, becomes a miser but manages to become well off, passes that tendency on to kids who are penny-pinchers despite never experiencing poverty. Sometimes it's weirder (and more interesting), like when you're feeling things that go way back to ancestral stuff. I'd love to hear more stories of these. I'd also like to understand the difference between instincts and archetypes more - like, you startle when you hear a strange sound at night, is that archetypal?

Anima/Animus: I think I've kinda understood the bits about ego, complexes, persona, and shadow. But what the heck is the anima/us? What do later people say about it? Can you do certain things that will get you in touch with your anima/us? How would you know? Or maybe, what are other people's stories of their anima/uses?

Oh but look out there's some garbage too: diagrams of "quaternities" and talk about "synchronicities" and stuff that's either just straight up nonsense or else way over my head :P

psychedelics

Oregon legalized psilocybin therapy! And Scott Wiener's introducing legislation to get CA on the same track! This is great for 3 reasons:

- War on Drugs is bad, duh

- even if you think we shouldn't legalize/decriminalize all drugs, psychedelics are among the most harmless.

- and they can actually be very helpful. I know people who they have really helped dramatically with depression.

 

other notes

can you bring anything through the tunnel? ("tunnel" being nitrous in his case, but this also applies to dreams or whatever else.) and is the experience still useful even if you can't?

this on sutra vs tantra - did I just not click with Buddhism because all the Buddhism I learned was "sutra"?

*exhales, but maintains really quite a lot of tension throughout the body anyway*

so many feelings!

 

- thank god, etc. I almost cried, and maybe still will; this ate up a lot of mental/emotional space.

 

- this actually is good; the president is just one guy but does get to appoint a whole lot of people; also there's a lot of symbolism and diplomacy and stuff. ok cool, relieved, whew! uh oh here come the rest of the thoughts...

- oh god for all this hype about Biden, we basically lost the election. We thought we'd be at 52 in the senate - but we're at 48 and hoping against hope for Georgia. We lost seats in the house. We lost a lot in state legislatures. If like a few hundred thousand votes went the other way, we would be either still fretting, or unconditionally sobbing. As it is, we will probably be unable to do anything for at least 2 years and then there'll be another election involving...

 

- oh god the next Trump - a new strongman dictator who's actually competent? we are so lucky that our first Trumpist president was this one and just mostly bad at stuff in addition to being corrupt, lying, racist, sexist, selfish, and awful. The next one might be good at stuff too.

- point is, Trump is not a one off, he is a product of his party, which voted for him more than ever this time. can we please stop pandering to the center and start doing policies that most of America likes and just winning the game of elections more? how are we so bad at this?

- ... speaking of "winning elections more", I tried volunteering in a new way (technical help with sending emails for a state house candidate in FL.); it was kinda painful and I don't want to do it any more probably. plus we lost big. uh, gotta keep playing around with good ways to help. I know there is a third option besides "sacrifice my life doing drudgery work that I hate" and "sit back and watch while the world explodes" but I still haven't found it.

...

still, despite all these very true feelings, I do feel some relief, and it's nice.

*holds breath*

(no wait dammit, I'm *new, more enlightened* Dan! (breathes deeply for a couple breaths - then goes back to holding breath after mind wanders even the tiniest amount))

 

I wish I had something wise or caring to say here! basically, tomorrow I'll have one of three feelings:

- f'in thank god + a little crazy exultation + ok, we haven't solved anything, but now we can start making forward progress

- despair and rage

- still holding breath

and none of these are brilliant or beautiful or wise! sometimes we are none of these things, I guess.

Bob Goff and the Goff Family

so I went to catholic high school, right. and they had a tradition of starting classes with prayers, if the teacher wanted to. and they had a sub-tradition of "special intentions" - before they do the prayer, the teacher would ask, "any special intentions?" and you could ask for a prayer for someone if you want. like, you could raise your hand and say "my aunt Suzy" or "my neighbor, who has cancer" or whatever. or you could just say "special intention" if you want to keep it private. then we'd all say a Hail Mary or something, and then we'd get on with class.

 

junior year theology class, my teacher was, uh, brusque. you could say "a hardass", and you'd be only slightly unkind. I kinda liked him, because he was also pretty sharp and funny. plus, the class was "world religions", which was by far the most interesting of the theology classes. I sat near these kids Joe and Dan and Rich, who were into, like, Radiohead, and therefore really cool. (look, this was right after Amnesiac. this was the era of AIM away messages, and I could never decipher Dan's or Rich's, but I knew they must be cool. Dan also got me into the Dismemberment Plan, which actually did indirectly change my life, but that's another story.)

almost every day, we'd have 3 or 4 intentions for the prayer, and every couple days one of them would be Joe or Rich asking for an intention for "Bob Goff". After a couple months, sometimes they'd ask for one for "Bob Goff and the Goff Family", or sometimes "Brendan Goff and the Goff Family."

these were supposed to be semi private, but after months of prayers, I couldn't help but ask Joe, "hey, who are Bob and Brendan Goff?" and Joe, deadpan: "I don't know, I just saw "Bob Goff" on a truck once. Brendan I just made up."

somehow that's always stuck with me. what legends! it's like, it's not really a heartfelt prayer; but it's also not mocking the prayer; it's not like they particularly cared to pray, or had anything against it. it's walking that beautiful line between "laughing at" and "laughing with." so hats off to you, Joe and Rich and Dan. and of course, the Goff family.

A few short links, mostly about feelings

Imagined Vastness: yes this! I love when I see this in movies/books/etc, and it's cool that the dependably-solid blogger Matt Webb has also tried to put a name on the same feeling. See: The Cleaners in Labyrinth, the room above the convenience store in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (and, really, most of season 3), the space jockey in Alien.

Excerpt from Perfume: the Alchemy of Scent: I love this kind of thing. It's like, ways to sharpen your senses almost give you more life; you get the same amount of time but you feel things more during it. See also: coffee tasting wheel.

Speaking of, Modeling psychedelic tracers: (First, don't do drugs, kids, but:) when I have talked to people who have used certain drugs, their vocabulary about their experience is often pretty fuzzy. Now, they're talking about big super-complex experiences, so on the one hand, of course it is. But on the other hand, it'd be neat if we could understand these a little better. FMRIs are one, but if we could say "this experience is kind of strobey, that one is kind of color-pulsey", that might help distinguish a little bit.

As someone who once thought emotion detection was a cool idea, everyone who thinks emotion detection is a cool idea should read this: "Emotion detection doesn't work, but it will try to change your behavior anyway."

Edit: a couple podcast episodes, both from planet money, that I feel like sharing, or at least linking for my future self:

1. REDMAP - a good explanation of how the Republicans won the game so damn hard (and if Trump weren't such a weirdo, they would probably still be winning)

2. Waste Land - how we got lied to about plastic recycling and how we're still getting lied to

warning: both are hard listens if you're prone to hopelessness! but the Planet Money folks are pretty upbeat so maybe not so bad?

san francisco: how to vote 2020

I want to get this out early this year so that, as soon as you get your ballot, you can fill it in and send it back or deposit it, help the post office, etc. I tried to get an opinion on everything and mostly succeeded. (it's a long ballot!) I may update this as I learn more.

People

President: lol

House: lol again, nothing matters, Pelosi will never lose; Buttar is uh probably not the opponent we've been waiting for, vote for whoever you want, I don't care

State Senate: I'm a Scott Wiener stan, dude has been correct so many times and really merges my two ethoses: "be real lefty" and "do what will actually help the cause you want to advance."

Assembly: David Chiu has been real solid too (so has Phil Ting, depending on which half of SF); besides, your only other choice is Starchild the libertarian (and I am sneering more at the "libertarian" than the "Starchild", to be clear)

BART board of directors: looks like Bevan Dufty's got it in the bag and he's been good I think

School Board and Community College Board: I said I wanted to have Opinions on everything but I have no idea. A friend of a friend said "they're all good!" so, :shrug:

D9 Supervisor: mine's Ronen; she's bad at housing but good at bikes; housing is more important; but she doesn't have a challenger so it doesn't even matter. But check the Yimby endorsements: vote Philhour, Sauter, Brown, Melga, or Safai if they're on your ballot.

SF propositions

Shorthand: yes on all but B and I

A (mental health/homelessness/parks/infrastructure bond): Yes

B (new dept of sanitation): No; splitting one department doesn't make it work better, and does increase admin costs

C (remove citizenship requirements for city bodies): Yes

D (sheriff oversight): Yes

E (remove mandatory minimum number of police): Hell Yes

F (business tax simplification): Yes

G (let 16 year olds vote in SF): Yes

H (speed up review of small businesses): Hell Yes

I (real estate transfer tax): No - this sounds good, but will mostly hit apartment buildings, I guess

J (tax for schools): Yes

K (let SF build 10k units of affordable housing): Yes

L (more tax if CEO makes more than 100x median employee): Slight Yes; probably irrelevant

RR (Caltrain): Hell Yes. if we don't pass this, Caltrain shuts down.

CA propositions

Shorthand: Yes on 14-18, No on 19-24, Yes on 25

14 (bonds for stem cell research): Slight Yes but it's complicated? maybe this isn't the right way to fund science? this was once a band-aid because Bush Jr banned stem cell research; now stem cell research is unbanned; what's the end result of this? who knows man

15 (School and community funding): Hell Yes

16 (unban affirmative action): Yes

17 (restores right to vote for parolees): Yes

18 (17-year-olds voting in primaries if they'll be 18 by the general): Yes; I also support the much stronger form of this bill in Prop G

19 (Let people transfer property tax assessments, slightly limit transfers to kids): Slight no; Main thing is limiting transfers to kids, that's cool (aka the "Lebowski loophole"; if 19 passes, parents can only transfer property tax assessment to their kids if it's their primary home). But also lets people transfer assessments 3x instead of 1x; I was convinced because Fred thinks that downside is greater than the upside. I could be wrong.

20 (be tougher on crime): Hell No; are we in 1990? haven't we learned what "tough on crime" does?

21 (allow cities to expand rent control): uhhh man what a mixed bag, very slight No, rent control is ok in some limited cases and generally bad but maybe good given where we're at now but maybe will make the whole thing worse longer

22 (let Uber/Lyft/Doordash keep exploiting workers): Hell No; don't let corporations write laws. (especially awful corps like Uber.)

23 (dialysis something someting): No; handle it, y'all

24 (data privacy): No (uh... it's complicated; this is weirdly written; yes more privacy is good but as written it's not clear what it will do, and will just make it impossible to write better laws)

25 (End cash bail): Yes because cash bail sucks, though I'm concerned about turning it over to a "bail algorithm"; someone please pre-write the "turns out, algorithm is racist" article so we can publish it in 2021

Other voter guides for more info

SPUR

Yimby Action

someone from the internet who seems smart?

League of Women Voters

SF Bike Coalition

A friend of a friend named Fred who seems smart

one wolf, got those evil feelings, that's what I said now; other wolf, gonna bring you healing, ain't in your head now

"Two Wolves"

(summary to save you a click and because links die: "grandson, there are two wolves inside each of us, one good one and one evil one, fighting forever." "which one wins, grandpa?" "the one you feed.") - when I first heard this story I dunno 20 years ago it felt trite, like "yeah ok there is good and bad, whatever." If it came up ~10 years ago, it'd feel impossible - like, you don't get to feed one or the other wolf; life just happens, and I hope you get lucky that the good wolf gets fed.

To me the wolves feel not like good and evil (because what are "good" and "evil" anyway, etc etc etc) but like hope and hopelessness. It's really easy to see the universe as a cold uncaring (cosmicismic?) place. If life is pretty pleasant for you, then fine; if not, well... you can try to have a "meaningful" life. But there's no god, which presents a problem; if you're really good at compartmentalizing, maybe you can live a happy life by convincing yourself that there is a god. (But what a heck of a compartmentalization! Wow! Staring into just infinite unimaginable darkness, just madness-inducing complexity and horror of the universe, and being like "that one's going in The Vault." Props, I guess, if you can do that!)

Sometimes, though, occasionally, maybe twice in recent memory, it felt like "hmm, maybe there's something pretty decent underneath all this; maybe we're not wired to be miserable after all."

 

I was a little hung up on "but, hope or hopelessness, which of these is truuuuue???" until someone pointed out, eh, probably neither, probably it depends on which wolf you feed. Today, it feels like, sometimes, I have a chance to choose to feed a wolf. Sometimes!

Related: on playing life on the easiest difficulty level

(save you a click: "being a straight white male is like playing life on the easiest difficulty level.") I heartily believe this! Especially when you add in also "able-bodied, reasonably wealthy, mostly neurotypical, cisgender, not very old or very young, living in the rich parts of the US, married, just happened to be interested in computers which means I'll always have a cushy office job, reasonable multigenerational wealth and privilege, etc etc." The trick my mind pulls, though, is to then say "therefore, because I'm not curing cancer, and because I feel bad a lot, I'm kind of a shit." Like, "some people are able to enjoy life even on very hard difficulty levels - I must be just terribly weak and selfish if I'm suffering on the easy levels!"

I know I'm tying my mind into knots and just making things worse; shooting a second arrow at myself, if you will. I know the answer to this is "nobody's judging you based on your life's difficulty level; it just doesn't work like that." But my mind goes: "why not?" Why doesn't it work like that? How do I get to say "I'm a decent human, even if I'm grumpy or worried or sad a lot, on difficulty level 1?"

 

I don't know, but I'm trying it out. Trying to feel out, "what if it's ok that I'm on difficulty level 1 and haven't yet cured cancer?" Sometimes it feels all right. Again, sometimes. Baby steps, here!

"Reasons to dislike reasons"

This essay pulls together so many things that I like. I'm falling back to "hmm, X feels right" a lot. (with a probably-overdeveloped sense of ways that "feeling right" can steer me wrong, don't worry!) It feels like being able to trust your feelings is part of a happy life.

also, lol

"When you browse instagram and find former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott's passport number" - I wish everything about security were written this way.

"becoming the person" vs "learning to do the thing"

At my job, performing in real time doesn't matter. I'm trying to build/do something, but it's slow and the product matters, not the performance. It's like being an author: John Grisham could be a shlubby awful incoherent dude in person, but as long as he cranks out the books, he gets paid. At the other end of the spectrum, for performers or athletes, each minute matters. We don't know what Mick Jagger or Michael Phelps do in their spare time usually, but they don't have to be creating something. They could sit around twiddling their thumbs for hours; as long as they are amazingly perfect for a few minutes, that's good enough.

Of course, performers and athletes don't twiddle their thumbs in their "off time", they practice. But they're practicing not so that they can "remember how to do something cool", they're practicing so that they are a certain person when they get on stage.

Been thinking about the gom jabbar test. (Lynch version) Isn't that the same thing? You've been training your whole life for this instant, to see if you can withstand the pain enough. There's not really any strategy you can think about to pass it, you just have to be the person who passes it.

Another way you could put this distinction is, "do you think about it cognitively, or just do it?" Like, I bet Stephen King thinks about how he's writing a lot, but I doubt LeBron is thinking much during a play. (Maybe there's some cogitating while setting up the play, but you've kinda got to just do it.) So, it's "does this thing live in System 1 or System 2", ok. But I think while talking about System 1/2 we get hung up on "how does my brain do the task", and sometimes thinking about it as "I'm becoming the person who ____" helps.

For example, confidence. Like when you're dating, say, and you're real nervous, and that's just not going to go well. But you can't really fake your way to "being confident"; you have to become the person who is confident. Likewise, a friend recently suggested, when you're presenting a big report, it may be important to have been very thorough and tracked down all the edge cases, not so that they can be in your presentation, but so that you are now confident about what you're saying.

(This line of thinking can go wrong a few ways: 1. "I just failed at X; must mean I'm just not a good enough person." 2. motivational speeches about transforming yourself or whatever. 3. being just a debate over minutia.)

other things

this overview of how GAN artist Helena Sarin works

"I had an idea"

places to buy mp3s (besides Bandcamp, which rules but doesn't have everything, or Amazon, which is Bad)

Graeber, AirSpace, MicroCovids, Rilke

David Graeber

This toot by Darius Kazemi - links to this book (which I haven't read) and these essays on flying cars and bullshit jobs (which I have read). I didn't recognize his name when he recently died, but he's indirectly had a decent-sized effect on me! Bullshit Jobs, especially, is such an important and well-written wake-up call. You can argue back (and indeed I do; mostly because it's easy to say a job is bullshit from the outside, and I think he's a little pessimistic about what percent of jobs are bullshit) but you probably can't shake the feeling that, at some level, he's probably right.

(Next question: what percent of Silicon Valley is bullshit? And how high up the ladder of abstraction do you have to go? Say your job is very effective at helping your company make money, but your company doesn't actually help anyone; can we still call all them bullshit?)

AirSpace

(y'know, how every coffee shop looks the same, every airbnb has the same ikea furniture, and every song on spotify sounds the same)

Ironic how my generation rages against AirSpace 1.0 (an Applebee's, Dave & Buster's, and Cheesecake Factory in every town, so you can travel around the US but still only eat colossal plates full of chicken parmesan) but then creates AirSpace 2.0. Further impetus for my future coffee shop to be more Fiery Furnaces/Midnight Gospel/Room of Requirement and less Apple/Everlane/Ritual Valencia.

MicroCovids

Like Micromorts, but for your chance of catching covid, not dying. I think I'd be ok with a 1% chance of catching it over the next year - which is to say I can have 10k Microcovids, which means 200/week. This means flying in a plane is 1.5 weeks' worth of risk; my d&d group eats up half my risk for a week; etc. The d&d group could go down from 100 to 50 if we sit 6ft apart, or 30 if we mask! Hmm. This is getting closer to "actually helping me make decisions."

Rilke quote

I heard some quote from him (maybe in this podcast ep?). A student asked him "how do you become a poet?" Rilke answered something like "if you can live your life otherwise, do so. If you absolutely have to, then be a poet." The more I see myself hitting mid 30s and not becoming a monk or Nat Geo photographer or Nobel winner, this is almost comforting. "Those people" are singularly driven (for some reason that's a combo of nature and nurture). Not to be judgmental - I'm not better than them for being not-pathologically-driven - but maybe for my own sanity I can start to put more achievements in the "NBA player" category: not gonna happen for me and that's ok.

This isn't new; "being ok with not winning a Nobel Prize" has been a theme for me ever since I realized that might not happen (college, I think?). But it's been coming up a little differently recently. Now I'm asking: do I care about being known in my field? (and what is my field?) Like, not even "respected professor" but maybe just "guy who gives conference talks or something." Do I even want that? If so, how do I get there? If not, how do I deal with the bad feelings that come up with accepting that?

some places you can donate money to, to avoid fascism

this was a slow thread on twitter but I think it's worth unrolling into a blog.

I want the good guys win this election. (it's more clear than it's ever been; I'm not against conservatives, but the entire Republican party has shown itself to be spineless, fascist, and corrupt to the core.) However, I am super low on emotional energy (pretty low on all kinds of energy) these days. I have some money. I can donate that money. Fine. But how much and where to?

How much?

I have no idea. It feels kind of sane to pick a number and then disperse all that, instead of trying to evaluate each thing on a case by case basis. I picked about 1 paycheck's worth. I don't know if I should do more; it feels ok enough though.

Where to?

Well, I could just give to Biden, say, and hope that the Biden org is the best at turning out voters. But I don't imagine they are, and I imagine they have plenty of money. I think that small races are better at turning out people, and then those people will just incidentally vote for Biden too. Plus, diversification of risk - if I give to 15 different races then it's not like all my money will be wasted, even if one race does badly for whatever reason.

Who should I look to to tell me where to give to?

Again, I think let's pick from a few people to diversify risk. If person A has some strategy to pick the best house races but they turn out to be wrong, I don't want all my money to go to waste.

So I came up with the following sources:

Preet Bharara's Housework 2020

Pinboard/Maciej Ceglowski's Great Slate and State Slate

Give Smart by the Future Now Fund and Data for Progress

Swing Left

Sister District

And a couple one off things, I'm not perfect. When given a bunch of equally good seeming candidates (as in Housework) I erred on the side of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina (swing states + personal connections), and I think Michigan and Arizona (swing states and a couple races going on).

List of Links

- Great Slate (US congress) 10%

- State Slate (state houses) 10%

- Swing Left Ohio fund - 10%

- Swing Left PA fund - 10%

- The Give Smart Slate - state house/senates - 10%

- Julie Slomski (PA state senate) - 5%

- Ricky Hurtado (NC state house) - 5%

- Sydney Batch (NC state house) - 5%

- Jackie Grimes (WY state senate) - 5%

- Elissa Slotkin (US congress, MI) - 5%

- Carolyn Bourdeaux (US congress, GA) - 5%

- Hiral Tipirneni (US congress, AZ) 5%

- Pam Keith (US congress, FL) 5%

- Eugene DePasquale (US congress, PA) - 5%

- the pro-housing SF supervisors - 5% (1% each)

 

anyway go give some money now; it doesn't help if you wait till November.

 

post script: Biden too

I realize as I talk about "diversifying risk" I should have diversified across "maybe the best impact is with the biggest richest org." Like, I can see that story too: Biden campaign and their Big Money are more poised to, like, buy a ton of facebook ads in a smart way or something. So I gave 10% to them too, which brings it to 110%, which is unsatisfying mathematically but feels good.

groups, brands, money, covid, capitalism

something about small groups

been thinking about scenius. where's that happening? how can I get in? or maybe, have I already been in a couple? related: small groups. seems like not quite the same, but similar - maybe this is like the 12-person and 150-person Dunbar numbers. this is probably like dating; you can't make this happen, you can just create the opportunities. (anyway credit to Matt Webb for congealing most of these)

something about brands

all your favorite brands, from BSTOEM to ZGGCD (read with bypass paywalls if you like)

I'm continually fascinated with words meaning things. I mean, maybe, the creation of words to mean things. or even symbols to mean things. and even like, "let's trademark 1000 brands in case we accidentally get one of them to mean something." I guess it's overall kinda bad for a bunch of reasons, but given everything else out there it's hard to get upset about right now. meantime, it's kinda funny and intriguing.

a lot about money

money's fungible, right? that's almost the defining characteristic of it. every dollar is the same as every other dollar.

if you don't realize this, you get problems: you start spending more because you start making more, or you start keeping higher interest debt while paying off low interest debt, or whatever.

but if you do realize this too much, you get other problems. like, it's frustrating when I get a gift card, because like, why not just give me the money? at times I have sold a gift card online for like 70% of its value cash, just so I didn't have to think about it. that's a little pathological. like, sometimes "well I just lucked into 20 dollars, so now I don't have to worry about how I accidentally lost 20 dollars" is a nice smoothing function that helps you live a sane life.

I guess the smoothing function is the thing - you've got to know how much or little to worry about money, and I think sometimes I'm on the "worrying too much" side.

something about covid

covid is aerosols. I guess droplets is, like, water droplets, and aerosols is like someone smoking. "One just has to imagine that others they encounter are all smoking, and the goal is to breathe as little smoke as possible." ok, I'm getting a model of how this works, and this is consistent with that model. cool. it continues to be weird to see everyone develop risk models that are similar or at least compatible enough.

I agree with all this

how to destroy surveillance capitalism - at a "109 minute read", it's a short book. is this useful? is this a good overview guide I can point people to and say "this is why all the internet is bad"?

mostly a links roundup, plus adventure time

cosmic _____

meaning, "cosmic horror but not necessarily horror."

 

Adventure Time is so good. we're on season 4 and there are just, like, stretches of gold - the two-part Nightosphere episode (5-6), Goliad and Beyond this Earthly Realm, King Worm through The Hard Easy - it's this great blend of silly, trippy, beautiful, cute, heartfelt, real.
 

blaseball. blaseball. blaseball.

coronavirus

it's so often that I want to just see the graph and if it's going up or down; until I discovered the NYT tracker it was hard to find that.

 

I like this explainer of how to think about infection risk in places - mostly people breathing/talking close to you, or maybe on stuff.

 

guess I should stop wearing a knit neck mask. (I find their use of "fleece" confusing - what about other neck gaiters, I can't imagine they matter - but at any rate all the "informal" ones were worse than the cheap surgical masks, which you can get now, so might as well use those) Edit: it's complicated, maybe they're fine

jobs

"young people who aren't from a pretty wealthy (/academic/high cultural capital) background have no idea what jobs there are except the quite obvious ones"

 

11 jobs common only in romantic comedies

 

I don't know what to say about this, besides that that's basically my experience too (and I'm pretty wealthy/academic/high cultural capital!). Really, you need someone in a particular field to talk to, to know anything about who does what in that field. 

other

I wanna go through this math to figure out why SVD is the best matrix decomposition 

 

the Roguelike Celebration is in October and you can attend this year

time makes no sense right now

about this time we find ourselves in

my life story doesn't make a lot of sense these days, and that's hard. I thought I was really coming out of a (long!) depressive spell around feb/mar, really getting some mental/emotional stuff together and moving on and life was going to be noticeably better. but then these last few months have been the hardest in a while. days blend together, I'm not sure what's to look forward to, it's hard to feel connected to people when I rarely see any of them, work feels hard though it should be objectively easyish, focusing is difficult, and I can't really start anything new. It's like being in stasis, and because it's so rare, I didn't appreciate how hard that'd be. so as not to highschoolishly vaguebook, I want to say it could be worse, I mean, I'm doing ok; I've got food and shelter and love, and that's more than a lot of people can say right now. just, this blog is in some ways a diary and I'd be remiss not to mention my current notable mood!

about neural network art

I would like more of this! some artists I've been particularly drawn to are Refik Anadol (Machine Hallucinations - Nature Dreams, some landscapes from MH - ND) and Helena Sarin (A blue wave, make it double; De Chirico, De Vaguely; Chameleons, reptilians, GANCommedians: the sanctuary).  (I have no idea if those are all titles, but I've got to have some text to put the link on.)

Things drawing me to this are:

- gosh, like, MH - ND just feels rejuvenating to look at, in the same way that nature does. it naturally draws your eye. that's weird and cool.

- it feels like... conceptually new? like I can't quite describe it. that feels good. it kind of connects with other things I like (cosmic horror, maximalist art) in that it's incompressible.

- given the "conservation of difficulty" principle, I feel like I'm closer to ever making it. (like, if any unit of art of goodness N will take 100 difficulty units... well, picking up a pencil takes 1 difficulty so 99 of the difficulty is in doing it well. if "running a GAN" takes 30 difficulty itself, well, if I can do that then I'm a little bit closer here! I don't mean to be reductionistic or to imply that GAN artists only need to try 70% while pencil artists need to try 99% - I guess just, because people have been drawing for ages, they've sorta mined the field of "what's to be drawn" more than people have mined the field of "what's to be GANned." this is all a hypothesis.) but then, should I just do art in a certain medium because I'm already doing it? (honestly, maybe. doing anything is one step towards doing good things.)

about food and drinks

I've been cooking a lot and making fancy drinks. (this and this are recent favorites.) Some of this is just necessary. But some of it feels like a coping mechanism: you do some (totally manageable) effort, and then one part of your day seems a little bit special. Plus, you have complete control over it and can perfectly master it. I think there's some psychological need being served here.

(granted, being a little careful especially with making drinks; most hobbies don't involve addictive drugs that ruin your life if you do them too much! still, even despite the ongoing wider-world difficulty, it's not problematic.)

about social networks

I'm back on Twitter after trying giving it up for a week. here's what I tweeted about it:

- I really do miss the bits of ephemeral connection, especially now
- yes it leads to the "bored for 10 seconds at work" loop, but that loop always happens, just with worse and worse sites. (found myself on orange site once! 😱)

- there's ppl I love/find interesting, but I can't deal with the outrage they post. time for a cleaning and re-listing.

- I wish twitter didn't notify ppl what list they're on - I mean no judgment if I put you on "anger generator" list but the name kinda implies it :-/ (later note: I think you can avoid it by making a private list! ok.)

but also I wish all my friends were on Mastodon, because it's great, I just don't know enough people there. Related: Darius Kazemi about friend.camp and runyourown.social. I totally love his vision. The problem is with the spidery topology of my social network. This has been a problem forever since I left school: I know person A, B, and C, but they don't know each other. I would love to have a "all my friends" discord, but why would anyone join an "all dan's friends" discord? (not pity-mining, it's just a hard thing. what if all your friends start a discord, then you're joining all of them?)

about housing, again, I guess

Community lashes out at new building proposed for 22nd and Mission, the site of a deadly 2015 fire: saving this for my eventual "why I'm leaving San Francisco" email. I went to this meeting. (the proposed building is next to where I live, on a vacant lot since 2015.) It was like ... I dunno, 20% support, 60% opposition, 20% unrelated/other. Doesn't matter, it's not a vote. This is tougher than the typical "Sunset/Noe/Bernal/PacHeights/etc rich white people oppose housing", because it's not rich white people, so anything I say risks coming off as "rich white person tells less-rich less-white group he knows best", so I don't know, but... isn't 28 affordable units + 120 market-rate units + no cars + some retail space better than a fenced-off empty lot? Gentrification's happening anyway, the janky 2br next door to you rents for $5000; ongoing shortage just means it rents for $5500 next year instead of $4500.

about the largest city in each 10-degree-by-10-degree bucket

this rules. I bet if you set out to visit as many of these as possible, you'd have a pretty interesting time. (I've been to 20, depending on how you count!)

good things don't scale, part N

I've tried signing off twitter for the last 3 days and I think I might as well keep it up.

- a large part of my feed is indeed righteous anger about cops and racism; I can't argue with this, except that like... twitter has an incentive to keep us all maximally angry, because clicks.

(an interesting side note: I think from this recent deconstructing yourself episode, I've been trying to notice the difference between feelings that are pleasant, and feelings that just want more of themselves. anger is maybe the #1 of the latter. you feel so angry and then like - "but I want to keep feeling angry!" but you don't. a more skilled blogger, or meditator, than I could turn this into a whole post.)

- a big chunk right now is about slate star codex shutting down. this whole thing makes me sad. I love the shit out of this blog, most of the time. great stuff about like antidepressants and AI and brain things and whatever; solid creation of memes ("moloch" and "slack" have found their way right into my lexicon, for example); the occasional rambling about something maybe he's not qualified to comment on; this rollicking great fiction book. I dislike a lot of its followers. but I like a lot of its followers too. one thing that makes me sad is that somehow it's become positioned "against social justice warriors" - or maybe people who talk about it say that they're against social justice warriors. which like -- I kinda don't like some parts of social justice warrioring, but I really don't like people who go out of their way to be explicitly "against social justice warriors." we should all probably be sjws, like jesus and buddha and mr. rogers. sometimes an internet mob or real mob focuses on the wrong things. "sjws" is such a motte-and-bailey.

- some of it is the usual reminders that things that are bad: SF is bad at housing, every US city is bad at cars/bikes/humans, the US federal government is bad at everything right now but especially managing the pandemic

- a small bit is good jokes and comics! that used to be a big bit!

- some of it is neat computational-art things that it's cool to get inspired by. more of it is computational-art things that don't really inspire me, but that's art, I guess.

- another small bit is people I know, some of whom I can keep in touch with in a pretty low-contact way with a toot here or there, and that's pretty nice.

- another small bit is people I met once and will probably never talk to again but haven't unfollowed, :shrug:

most of this I kind of hate and maybe I should quit this. buuut, I'm often desperate for any kind of social interaction these days. maybe I should ... start a discord? I don't know, man - but large-yet-private places have been so much more rewarding than internet-scale public places. start a newsletter? heck, that's just like this. convince all my friends to join mastodon? I mean, yes, obviously; still follow me at @dantasse@mastodon.cloud.

I don't know, I'm still undecided, but getting rid of one of my dopamine slot machines seems healthy, anyway. next up, reddit?

CV, moving, cops, covid, Ring (see also: cops), art

Is computer vision Bad?

I'm doing some work with computer vision. Some cool things with GANs, some things with getting features out of images. In a sense, I want to reduce every image to a vector that describes it well. That's kinda the dream; reductionism is my job.

... most applications of this turn out to be Bad. And I thiiink I'm in a case where my reductionism is not so bad. (clothing images, eesh, it's fine.) But I'm open to the possibility of everything I'm doing being bad.

Related: YOLO creator Joseph Redmon stopped computer vision research due to ethical concerns.

IBM is exiting the face recognition business. Even this garbage about Amazon and Rekognition - though "we're suspending it for 1 year" seems suspiciously like "we want good press now and then will sneak it back in while you're not looking."

What went wrong in the move process?

Moving caused me a heck of a lot of stress, and that seems avoidable. Why was it so stressful?

• important scarce markets. I hate being in scarce markets; I usually try to just structure my life to avoid them. when other people want something, I try to want it less. like, theme parks and concert tickets - usually I just don't want them. but housing is always kinda scarce - especially housing for one particular apartment is really scarce, there's only one of it!
• not clear what you can logic and what you can feel. It's sorta clear; you can say "the apartment needs to check these boxes: N bedrooms, M bathrooms, X minute walk to the Bart, etc." But most of the things are not actually that clear! Like, I wanted an in-unit washer/dryer, but I certainly wouldn't say that was a deal-breaker. And even more shaky examples: "we need a place for our cat to sleep; will this little room be ok?" "bike storage is necessary... this one has a bike storage situation that is already pretty full, so, maybe that will be a problem for me. maybe it won't!"
• ego and pride while being in a powerless situation. all the garbage from this previous post.
• it's kind of stressful to keep searching. each new apartment you look at costs at least 2 hours: 1 hour setting up times to see it, 1 hour walking to/from it and seeing it and saying "nope." That's if it's very nearby and is a clear no; most cases are harder. Because people don't provide good information (like a floor plan), and because many listings are a waste of time (landlords are greedy, overpricing their place and just hoping), you'll spend 2 hours * a lot of apartments. So the decision of "do I want to keep searching another week" is roughly "do I want to do another 15 hours of work next week?"

In which our government turns covid-19 into Your Problem

edit: turns out I'm rather angry, which means the rest of this post isn't for kids, which I mention only so the babies out there will know how cool they are for reading.

our country has decided that we're just gonna spend our 3 "flatten the curve and screw your life" months fucking around and not bothering to increase testing or contact tracing or anything that actually makes things safe for our people, so there's a new constant danger out there, 1000 people will die every day, the rich will be mostly pretty protected, but even the rich might fall into the "unfortunate" bucket at any time and if you do then fuck you. (this seems verrry American, tbh; I'm surprised I guessed it might ever go another way.) Given all this, I'm trying to get a better sense of how viruses spread and what is more/less safe given that I know nothing about what anyone else's deal is; this article seems decent.

Protest and cop shit

I've mostly gone to "G-rated" protests that happen during the daylight, because I'm kind of ill-informed about protest time/places, kind of "too busy" (ugh gosh), and kind of a pansy. I feel like I'm failing a little bit; like, I firmly believe that those who are getting tear gassed are moving this conversation forward more than us. So, if/when I do go to PG-13 protests, I want to more thoroughly follow this article. Meantime, probably everyone should follow a couple steps in this article.

"Confessions of a former bastard cop" - I feel like this makes the case that ACAB pretty well? I'm kinda always curious for like, if I ever have a conversation with a family member and they're like "ACAB, isn't that going a little far?" I want to have the right backup, and maybe this is it?

(I do think ACAB would be easier to sell to family members if it weren't about the individual cops. like, yes it's possible to be a cop and not, holistically, a bastard in all of your life; just like it's possible to be a Facebook employee and not a bastard. What we're saying is, their work is guaranteed to be net evil, not that they are bad people; "x is a bad person" is always hard to prove. I guess I'd say something like "All cops are participating in a corrupt and broken system and therefore their work cannot be good" but ACAPIACABSATTWCBG doesn't have as nice a ring.)

Speaking of ring, I see Ring cameras around, and they've been pissing me off more and more. I was thinking about setting up RingSellsDataToCops.com, which would just link to some appropriate news articles and a PDF you can print "RingSellsDataToCops.com" onto cheap printable labels, and y'know if anyone just happens to print them out and stick them on top of people's Ring cameras, :shrug:. Activism by stickers, maybe this is my (tiny, pathetic, but manageable) thing.

Art

"my paint brush is alive"

SuperRare: owning online art. I'm not sure if this is the best or the worst thing.

"Folders is a language where the program is encoded into a directory structure." aw geez aw hell - I'm never surprised that this exists, really - just, I'm often curious about the question, "X is an idea that someone could do; is the world big enough that someone out there will do that?" In this case, the answer is yes.