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.

June 2020, man.

ultimately, we did move. like, on the one hand, we picked the building that we want to live in. Our building has every convenience! It's gonna make life easy for me. I'm gonna be able to get things done! I will relax along with my loved ones!

on the other hand, definitely worry about the government, duh.

I've tried and failed at posting a few things. weird time, of course. I don't have much to say besides that it's all really hard (for personal reasons more than for societal ones for me right now, "everyone's fighting a battle you know nothing about" and so on, but the constant influx of injustice and virus certainly don't help).

I'm not very happy about the housing hoops we jumped through to find an apartment. It feels demoralizing and humiliating. (again, this is like 1% of the struggle people have with the police; I'd love to popularize the term ALAB but I'll wait until we've all agreed ACAB first.)

My company fired/relocated 1400 stylists (the part-time employees who pick out the clothes to send you), to save money (firing Californians, hiring elsewhere), and that feels pretty icky.

I got a year older and don't have much to say about it! I know that one thing I'm missing in my life is joy and celebration and I'd be happier if I did that more, but man, celebrating anything feels pretty bad right now.

a tiktok about SF home searching

(read this in the voice of one of those quick-cut videos)

"two bedrooms! ok, cool. so here's bedroom number 1, and ... oh, I see, bedroom 2 is if you just turned the living room into a bedroom, and then you wouldn't have a living room, but yeah I'm sure that'd be fine"

"wow, ok, newly renovated, granite countertops, great"

"three bedrooms! ok, so here's bedroom number 1, and bedroom 2, and ... oh yeah this 6x8' room could be considered a bedroom but it's more like a walk-in closet, ok"

"well ok that tiny room would work for our cat, he likes to sleep somewhere enclosed at night, otherwise he gets lou-- I mean uh nah he just likes to be somewhere small, he's so sweet, never a problem at all"

"yeah these granite countertops are really, uh, nice. and these stainless steel appliances! yes, I care what color my appliances are."

"oh great, it's got bike storage! ok, yeah, can we go see it? yeah, I'm sure it's great, but I just want to see it, yeah. yeah, just downstairs, sure, ok, ... oh I see there's one dinky bike rack crammed full of bikes, so there's, uh, not really bike storage, is there? haha, sure, it's cool, I'm sure we can figure something out."

"oh the bike storage is in this locked room? and you don't have a key? ok, sure, I'm sure it's good. do you ... have to reserve spaces? oh, you do? ok, glad I checked, and then, can I get it in writing that there will be two spaces reserved for us? because we are, like, two people, and haha we both have a bike! I know, how crazy. oh, there's only one space reserved. so you actually have half bike storage, kinda like if you had rented me a parking spot but only one of us was allowed to drive the car, huh? hahaha! that would be so crazy. anyway while we're down here is there anywhere I could store my amontillado cask"

"yeah, the construction next door that's kinda spilling into your property. they said it'd be done in 6 months? and... when do they start every morning? and... uh yeah no I'm sure they'll be done ahead of schedule, of course"

"granite countertops. it's like that's the cheapest way to say you "renovated" and make your place look fancy and modern, isn't it? haha! stainless steel appliances."

"oh, it was formerly a hair salon? haha, that's funny! well, that's neat, that explains why the layout is a little weird, and why one of the bedrooms is 8 feet wide, and why there's no windows in the living room, and literally zero closets, ok it's ... $5000 a month?"

"can I ask you some questions? oh, you ... know literally nothing about this place? do you work for the rental company? no? ... how did you get the keys here?"

"1300 square feet! that's great. hmm, but when we saw it, it seemed smaller than that. can you send us measurements of each room? just so we can, you know, plan where we'd put our furniture. oh wait, when I add up these numbers of room dimensions, it's like, 900-some. oh, you mean it's only 970 square feet? so you, basically, lied. or, more likely, made a pretty negligent mistake. your day job is as a realtor? anyway, yes, we'll still take it."

"in the lease here, you said "there's no extra storage allowed" but you did tell us there's bike storage, right? so, I don't know, maybe it should go there! oh, you don't want to, well, ok, that's fine."

"it says, tenant must pay with electronic payment, no checks. ok, so you've got a website that processes it, right? no? oh, paypal then? also no?... what do you mean, 'just have my bank send an electronic payment'? do you want a wire transfer each month? look, in our backwards-ass country there is no other electronic payment unless your bank happens to offer that service to customers of the same bank and I open an account at your bank and that is an insane thing to ask a tenant to do. I mean, haha, yes of course I'll do it."

more dispatches from staying-at-home

hobbies: "do hobbies suck?"

there have been times in my life when I would have had an opinion about this. I think from approx years 16-27 my opinion would have been "the hobbyist is right and the anti-hobbyist is wasting their life." Then from years 28-31 it would be "the anti-hobbyist is right and the hobbyist is an obnoxious tryhard." I think right now I am just really getting more and more comfortable with saying "both are ok", and furthermore, "both can be equally good." like, it's not like the anti-hobbyist is less capable but we say "it's ok" because we don't want to be ableist or something; they're just both actually ok ways to be.

speaking of hobbies, it would probably be fun (and useful) to order and cook a bunch of food from this list of farms in the bay area that are delivering during covid. bookmarking for when I get a minute.

speaking of covid, it's wild how articles seem to circulate in the Covidverse. this one, "the risks: know them, avoid them"... I haven't yet seen an article saying "actually it's wrong" (like happened with that biking article - here's what's wrong with it), it has a lot of coherent internal logic, and it seems to match what little I know about infectious diseases otherwise. I'm not qualified to say if it's "right" or not but the guy looks like a real professor of this stuff, and like I said, I haven't seen any posts about why this is wrong, so :shrug: works for me.

speaking of anxieties, this article about "parenting in an anxious age." one of the biggest challenges of my last ~5 years has been to manage my own anxiety while dealing with others. (this is not something I thought about much! I thought, I'm depressed, not anxious! but of course nothing is ever that simple...) I hope that, when I have kids, I will not pass on my anxieties to them, or make theirs worse. but I bet, the harder I try at that, the worse I'll do.

speaking of trying vs not, this feels kind of like the vipassana-ish vs non-dual traditions. (this post got me thinking about it; dunno if it's helpful.) maybe I should have started with something more non-dual; doing vipassana just gets me thinking and trying hard. the deconstructing yourself podcast has been interesting to me over the last yearish, in addition to other practices I've been working on.

speaking of something completely different, "best medium-hard SQL interview questions" - I'm not even interviewing and this was kinda interesting. like, it's easy to get from 0 to ok at sql, but I don't know what's the next step.

speaking of data scientists - "yes, they're all data scientists... but what kind of data scientists are they?" while dickering about what is and isn't data science is exactly what I got out of academia to try to avoid ("but why is it HCI??"), knowing what kind of job I do and don't want to do will be helpful. (still, this is all a little silly and I have to post the obligatory far side)

speaking of silly, I can't believe I hadn't seen the "Dmitri finds out" meme yet.

posts from coronalife

"Why was the daily screaming at 8pm instead of 7pm tonight?"

lol at Lyft for saying it out loud: we made everyone data scientists because title inflation

re Animal Crossing: "Imagine if everyone had a job that they enjoyed, that they were good at, and that could sustain them. What if they could thrive with no job at all, a step well beyond universal basic income?"

depression and smell - hahaha, but actually. I used to think sensory input was just a thing you could carve off on its own - like your life would be equally rich regardless of how well the senses work. I don't think that anymore. this feels relevant; how your body feels (as you take it in through your senses) has a big effect on how you feel emotionally which has a big effect on how you think.
(side note: I'm not sure how strong that effect is; it's not infinite, because otherwise why not just take super feel-good drugs all the time? but it's probably stronger than we give it credit for.)
also it'd be hilarious if "aromatherapy" turned out to be a real thing that worked just like this.

my friend Daniel made this Assassin Chess, which is reasonably fun despite being playable on your own with just dice, and having only a few pieces. I think I can almost always win, but it's not trivial, and that seems like a step in itself.

other notes, I finally defeated a20 heart on all characters in Slay the Spire, and I think its hold on my life has loosened as a result. oh, and I beat Shandalar. I've cooked a lot, managed to bike basically daily despite not having my commute, and hosted half of a short Monster of the Week (think Dungeons and Dragons but simpler) campaign. so, like, there's my quarantine achievements.

wow! gosh!

usually when I say "wow!" I am speaking in doge. today I'm not! I'm gonna write "covid-19" and "coronavirus" so that if I'm ever searching for this blog post I can find it, but obviously it's what we're all thinking about all the time.

should I have seen this coming, and how?
Scott Aaronson says yes, but I don't get it. Similarly, SF (and Breed) is getting a lot of credit for handling it right. Clearly, I'm glad we did, and it's better to be SF than NY here. But like... SARS (2002) could have been this bad too. What's the thing that was different here, that led to it being obviously the right thing to do to shut down hard, while in 2002 it would have been a big overreaction? I'm not saying "there isn't one", I'm just curious what it is. (maybe some rule like, "we saw a case in the US that we didn't know where it came from"?)

life right now is really pretty fine; we're just working from home and seeing friends on the internet instead of in person. got some ergonomic chairs and monitors and so working from home isn't actually terrible. cooking a lot. riding bikes daily - I don't have my guaranteed hour of commute/exercise so I'm being physically active somehow.

more worried that, somehow, the world gets even worse because of this. like, what are some good things we still had? a bunch of local restaurants and coffee shops that we liked? how about an economic problem that just wipes them all out :-/ Tyler Cowen was saying, there's not as much value being destroyed here - if you're a landlord and you can't pay the mortgage and have to sell the building, well, I mean, someone's buying; the building's not destroyed and so the value isn't all lost. But I just assume it's all consolidated. Who will be buying? Some big nameless property-management company that happens to have deep pockets. The rich get richer, etc. And you'd hope that federal bungling this so badly -> voting out every republican everywhere, but Trump approval ratings "crisis bump"; hard sigh.

I do feel like I can't concentrate great these days, and haven't been sleeping amazingly; ah well. Something something collective psychic blahs, ok. It could be worse, thankfully, basically everyone I know is fine, and not much immediate monetary worries.

maybe everything *isn't* hopeless bullshit

content warning: discussion of whether everything is or isn't hopeless bullshit; the word "suicide" comes up briefly; it's all actually pretty hopeful; maybe that's a bummer depending on your depressedness

I've had a great week or so, precipitated by a very good weekend, and I'm starting to feel a different way about one of my usual thought experiments. The experiment is, "if you could have never existed, would you?" (Note that this is very different from "do you want to die", because dying once you're alive really sucks, while never having existed isn't good or bad, it's just nothing.)

In fact, we can imagine a ladder of feelings:

4. I'm glad I'm alive.

3. I don't want to die, but I'd rather never have existed.

2. I don't want to die, but I don't want that badly not to die, like if I got randomly hit by a meteor that's ok.
1. I want to die but not badly enough to take action on it.

0. Actually suicidal-with-a-plan.

Luckily I've never been at level 0 and rarely am at 1 for more than a few seconds (and even then my mind still overpowers it), but I usually hover around level 3, and when I have dipped into level 2 I've started seeking more help (therapy and antidepressants, luckily not something destructive like bad drugs or embarrassing memes with fake beards). But lately I've been kinda testing the waters of level 4. Like, maybe being alive is... good, actually?

(Some of you probably reacted to that last sentence with "duh" and some of you are probably like "wtf no way dude"; I acknowledge and honor all these feelings.)

For me this started with a physical feeling. I can't logic it out, but at one point I felt good enough to think "oh yeah life right now feels good, and what if I accept that as truth?" It had some of the noetic quality around it, like it just seemed inherently true. So... what if I just accept that truth, that life is ok?

I see two possible objections:
1. You gonna trust something just because it seemed true once?
Well, it seems less scary than some noetic knowledge, like "quit your job and become a monk" or something. "Life is good" seems like pretty harmless noetic knowledge.

2. It's hard to sustain.
Yeah, since then I've had some moments where I'm again like "eh heck with it all, that was just nonsense." How do you argue "well last week I thought it was good" with "but it feels so bad now"? "It feels bad now" tends to win. I guess, insisting "I want to feel good again" is the kind of clinging that won't get me anywhere; so maybe in those cases, I just sit and watch the feelings, and then regroup after they've passed and see where I'm at then. At least for the past week or so, it ends up back at "yeah life is ok still."
(I've got some thoughts too about how I'm managing mood more generally, but they're too premature to post still.)

We'll see, man. This stuff comes and goes and this may be another swing of the pendulum, but we can hope that there's a positive effect in addition to the cyclical one.

some cool things

I used to post stuff like this and maybe I should again! Honestly, it feels like mostly clearing my brain - stuff that was in a tab somewhere, now I've voiced my thought about it and I can move on. Anyway, here is more of it:

List of fractals by Hausdorff dimension - if you know your Sierpinski Triangle and your Cantor Set but you want more cool mathy objects, they're all here, and there's a dimension for "how noisy it is." I know nothing about any of this but can only gawk at it, Keanu-like. Whoa. Shout out to:- the Mandelbulb and its Annihilation connection
- the coast of Ireland
- cauliflower

Garbage Language (or, corporatespeak) post in 2020. Yeah. "It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide." I think a lot of these terms are because of fear or self-delusion. I'm afraid to ask you "can you do two things at once?" so I'll ask "can you parallel-path these"?

This post about conjugal love struck me as more than the usual "love is patient, love is kind" wedding speech. "Is it paradoxical that conjugal love requires lifelong commitment without contingency plans, yet at the same time is contingent in a way that parental love is not? No, there is no paradox. If you believe something is permanent, you can make lifelong promises and commitments contingent upon it, because you believe the thing will never fail you." Like, you have to believe this thing is permanent, even while you know it's conditional. I have had both reactions: "yeah of course" and "that's impossible."
I also think "Both partners must have matured enough that their core values are stable." is a pretty important sentence here.
(also from the same guy: Philosophy through science fiction; I want to read this.)

Insightful post about gifted education in the middle of a Best-of-tumblr. (usually these threads are silly. ok here's your best-of-tumblr-thread silly post. it's a good one too.) (while we're playing dumb language games, this skit was the highlight of the (uh, 2) SF Sketchfest shows I saw.)

Actual maps of medieval kingdoms. Lol; Game of Thrones seems super orderly and unified by comparison.

"jubilee barrier sings Song 2" - this is so dumb and I love it, it's like "smells like teen shovel"

"try yes"

this is the most Oblique Strategy blog post

I was bummed about something and going "ugh, no no no" the other day, details aren't important but ask me if you want, and someone else was walking by, singing a song, and as an aside mid song says to me, like under his breath as if he was a top secret spy, "try yes." and then keeps singing his song as if nothing had happened. It was the most bananas thing. I could not believe it even happened. In two words, totally owned me, but also he was smiling like he wasn't trying to be a jerk, but also didn't seem like a smarmy ass, and I can't probably convey how he managed to do both those things. Hit me at just the right time. Anyway.

I have many more thoughts but it's hard to write them down, so I will just say this is my mood the last few days:


("maybe everything isn't hopeless bullshit" image from here)

I hope it lasts, but at least in the meantime it's a very good feeling.

feel like I should have figured out "managing my feelings around the news" by now

I've developed a mental/emotional sore spot, it seems, around the US government. Or most governments these days, including but not limited to California, Pennsylvania, the UK, Brazil, Hungary, uh I dunno anywhere that fascism or nimbyism is gaining. The way the sore spot works is that, if anyone mentions anything about it, I become a black hole of depression. Everything they say is either stupid or obviously correct and despair-inducing. I feel worse, and I bet they feel worse, and then I feel worse for making them feel worse. It's not great.
Behind this are a few obvious feelings:
- worry/fear that our world is going to become a really awful place to live
- anger at all the people who are so bad
but I think also less obvious feelings:
- responsibility, like "I've got to do something"
- fear that I'll become the target of scorn from Angry Internet People if I'm not angry enough ("if you aren't depressed what the fuck is wrong with you" - someone on twitter)
- worse: fear that I'll lose respect from real-world friends if I'm not angry enough

Meanwhile, another huge terrible problem is world hunger. Hundreds of millions of people are still in extreme poverty or chronically hungry or food-insecure. And yet, it doesn't consume my life, and I don't turn into a monster whenever anyone mentions hunger. Maybe I should do a similar thing for the government.

(possible counterargument: "but you can do something about the government." sort of. I still vote and stuff, but I have so far been pretty bad when I've tried getting involved with anything beyond that. Like, both ineffective and hating it. I remain open to the possibility, but not optimistic, that there's a way I could be useful.)

I guess this is just the ongoing job of continuing to care without being angry. Maybe I'm still, after all these years, erring on the side of "being too angry." And maybe I'd unlock a little more energy in my life, which could be used to do something about something, if I didn't spend a lot of it on being so angry.

Mystery Hunt, take 2

Mystery Hunt just wrapped up again. It was so fun! I think my post from last year still mostly holds true. If you want some examples, they're at http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2020/. Some of my favorites this year:
Player Piano
Goldilocks
Trebuchet
Story (you will need to know that there is a co-op house at MIT called "Pika"; this website will help at some point)
Tunnel of Love
Creatures from Outer Space
If this interests you, I'd be happy to walk you through any of these!

Some thoughts:

1. I went to Cambridge (Boston) this year to do it. That's been pretty cool. We all rented a house together; some ppl stayed in the house, others (including me) stayed in a nearby hotel. But we spent all day in the house, sitting around on our laptops, cooking meals and stuff. It felt extreme in the way that putting on theater shows as an undergrad felt extreme: staying up late, suffering through periods of being stuck together, having to do the necessities to keep your body healthy but just because you have to and not because breakfast is the high point of your day.

2. It's nice to get to know some of these folks more. It's less social than you might think; it's so focused on doing the thing that you sometimes end up not really socializing. Also, it's very sober; not that you need to be in mildly-altered states to build up relationships quickly, but it often helps. But being in a place with people for 36 hours, you're going to get to know them at least a bit.

3. But though puzzling doesn't strike me as super social, it's still really communal. It's weird; I imagined it being like an Ocean's Eleven kind of thing where one person smooth-talks the guards, one person hacks into the mainframe, one person does the laser dance, etc. And maybe it is, accidentally - like, if you don't like doing laser dances and you open a puzzle and the way to solve it is to do a laser dance, then you'll just close it and ignore it. But there's very little explicit division of labor. There's also very little attribution of glory; when you solve a puzzle everyone celebrates for like 10 seconds and then moves on. I tried to dish out props as much as possible but nobody seemed to care. Nobody talks about great insights they had afterward.

This... might be healthy? Like, you could go very ego-tripping on this, and like build up identities about how good you are at this, because it seems pretty connected to some kind of pretty-general intelligence, and we nerds love being good at intelligence. So, if the cultural default is not to ego trip, then great!

OTOH I wanna get better and/or get specialized so that some time they can be like "a laser maze! we need someone to dance through the lasers!" and I show up and do the thing with the music playing and everyone loves it and I feel important. Some basic human desires don't go away overnight.

4. Seriously, though, there seems to be a big difference between "being competitive" and not. We were definitely not, for a few reasons: our team (Threemoji) is only ~40 ppl instead of 100+, we've only been around for 3 years, and ... I mean, we're not that good. Which is not to say we're not good; I witnessed many feats of advanced black-belt level 9000 puzzle-solving this weekend, and it was awesome, but we still got about halfway through the thing by the time the winners had finished it. It's like someone was telling me about chess: "the difference between the #1 and #50 chess masters is bigger than the difference between the #50 chess master and you or me." (I don't know if that's true about chess, but let's believe it for now.)

To be competitive, we'd have to practice and we'd have to grow. (We'd also have to be willing to write an entire puzzle hunt if we did win; the winning team writes all the puzzles the next year, and that takes a long time.) So we're explicitly not being competitive, now.

And that's great - I don't really even want to be competitive. It feels like it'd make it stressful instead of fun. But I want to get better, mostly because getting better is fun. It's like being very fluent at a programming language - you can just think, less-hampered by needing to google function names. And just-thinking is so joyful; the higher-level (because you're fluent at so many lower levels), the better. So basically, I'd love for Puzzle Dojo to exist.

5. I've got an ongoing hypothesis that one reason I'm depressed, in general, is that I spend too much time thinking/in my head/in my ego, and not enough time feeling/in my body/just being. In that case, just thinking real hard for a whole weekend is going to set me way back! Should I not focus so hard on thinking-type events like this because they're going to reinforce this big thinking-focused way of life that only feels good after coffee?

For the meantime my response is: nah, let's not overthink it here, puzzling is great. Mind/body might be like biceps/triceps or quads/hamstrings. If you exercise only one, you'll be sad... but like, you can't make your biceps stronger by skipping your tricep exercises! To improve the body, just improve the body, don't give up on the mind.

But it's also possible that mind/body is like weights on a scale: if you're too developed in the mind, quit putting weights on that side of the scale. I'm keeping my mind (hah) open to this hypothesis.

6. A trip to Boston was a great excuse to see 4 really good friends outside the puzzling world, and I should continue to find excuses to do this. There's very little that's as good as old friends.

I swear, only a little bit of decade-recapping

Happy new decade. I'm on kinda an emo tear right now, and I was going to post something more mopey and grim about how I'm not gonna post a best-of list because the earth is a cold dead place or something, but I tend to regret doing that. It's been a hell of a decade. Here's some highlights in media that are somehow roughly connected to when they came out or when I first experienced them. These are the moments that stick with me.

2010
Life in Cartoon Motion by Mika
For the best parts of Burning man. I tried this! I tried a bunch of things in Seattle. None of them stuck. I always felt like I was intruding on someone else's party. (Especially at Burning man.) But when you're at someone else's party and they're having a great time, sometimes you can get a little infected by their joy. It's not enough to live on, but it's fun in the meantime.

2011
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kanye West
Gosh I mean, this is a masterpiece and can be all things to all people. To me it's originally two memories: "Lost in the World" walking over the bridge on Pine St feeling a sense of well-being, and singing along to "Monster" riding my bike as I "visiting scholar"ed (read: sat in a lab and did my own thing) at UW. Monster in particular is still a favorite.

Eye Contact by Gang Gang Dance
I started my gap-year-travel by flying to Delhi, busing to Manali and then on to Leh, just jumping as far into the deep end as possible, and spending 3 days in bed with altitude sickness. This album is about as out-there as you feel at 15,000 feet, trying to stay warm in a parachute dhaba in the More Plains.

Sir Lucious Left Foot the Son of Chico Dusty by Big Boi
This one, on the other hand, is a welcome taste of home when you're just leaving the dark Nepalese border town of Mahendranagar where you spent a mildly worrying night, strapping into a 12 hour bus ride, and wishing that something could be easier.

2012
Odd Blood by Yeasayer
I'm in Pecs, Hungary, just killing time looking at whatever local medieval castle. It's sunny and pleasant. Somewhere around "ONE" or "Love Me Girl" I wonder about the travelers I've met who are basically wandering indefinitely, and I get a sense that I'm wasting time. I'm glad I'm headed back to the US and getting back to nerdy computery things, and building a life. But dang this is nice in the meantime.

Juicy Lucy by Jupiter
Turn back on the adrenaline; I'm back in Pittsburgh, starting grad school, meeting new friends and an exciting new relationship, and everything's working. Wow. This music is what I would make if life was always working so well. Bouncy, infectious, smooth, perfectly produced. Makes even me want to dance.

2013
Shrines by Purity Ring
6 months later: OH WAIT grad school is awful and I am bad. And we call my house the Pretzel House because it feels like it's made of pretzels. This album, though, opens with a creepy synthy bit about "they'll sew their own hands into their sleeves, to keep the crawlers out" and just gets better from there. I played it in the Pretzel House kitchen in Pittsburgh fall/winter and immediately put it on repeat. In contrast to the previous album, Shrines is dark and weird and beautiful. I don't care if I can only use that word once in this whole post. This is probably my favorite album of the decade.

DUKE 2 by Mrs. Paintbrush
Part of what helped me deal with grad school was the Pittsburgh connection. I have friends, and I know some local culture and stuff, and Mrs. Paintbrush (half of Grand Buffet) is all the things I love about Pittsburgh. A rapper who's funny as hell, but doesn't act like he thinks he's funny as hell.

2014
Inspector Norse by Todd Terje
This summer was electric as it seemed like a way out of the grad school doldrums. Tati interned at Facebook, I interned at HP Labs, I lived in a shared house in San Francisco, I did a lot of Caltrain and burritos, but it was ok because this seemed like an exciting new world that's worth going for more. Inspector Norse is a song that seems right at home exploring this goofy new city, or a song that you can listen to on headphones while you work.

Edit: Space Is Only Noise by Nicolas Jaar
This is the dark shadow side to the excitement. The title track especially, but really the whole album, is the moodiest dark-sidewalk-at-night kind of music that's a great accompaniment to being a bit of a stranger in a bit of a strange land.

2015
Art Angels by Grimes
Man, this year's kind of a blur. I was traveling back and forth between SF and Pittsburgh, trying to finish up grad school, and geez I don't know what was happening but this album is start-to-finish brilliant multifaceted pop. "Over the first 6 tracks you go from epic symphonic overture to top-40 to aggressive Taiwanese hip-hop back to top-40 to... whatever Kill v. Maim is." - me, at the time.

Edit: Strange Desire by Bleachers
If all emo music sounded like this, I'd listen to more of it. Tracks 1-4 remind me of Silent Alarm in that they'd all be great on their own, but make a solid album kickoff all together. I can't really access this year's emotions very much, but neither can I very well tell what this album feels like, but hey that is fine.

2016
Edit: Without My Enemy What Would I Do by MADE IN HEIGHTS
This and Strange Desire make me want to be a producer. (Or a singer, but I don't think I could ever sing as well as Bulkin. Not that I could produce as well as Sabzi, but eh, one can dream.) I don't know what any of these songs mean, but there are really great sounds on it. It's so crisp and polished and just like... a peppermint? It's not just straight sugar; it makes me feel good afterward.

Stop Making Sense by Talking Heads
Ok this isn't new, but: the key event of this year was Tati and me getting married. Our first dance was This Must Be The Place. I still cry when I watch David Byrne sing this song to a lamp. There's something about that: weird smart nerd who sings about buildings and food realizes he can sing love songs too.

2017
Life Will See You Now by Jens Lekman
The lyric "it's been a long, hard year" in "Evening Prayer" is my version of "I'm gonna make it through this year if it kills me": a kernel of real, hard truth wrapped in a juicy pop song. This year was kind of a long, hard year: finish a thesis, graduate, move, find a job, get frightening imposter syndrome. Jens writes the kind of songs that make me feel like someone gets me: "To know your mission" and "Wedding at Finistere" especially. Plus, I challenge you to find a better riff than "How we met, the long version."

Solitary Flight by Theo Parrish
I started spending a lot of time in an open-office workplace. I got into deep house for a while - it's pretty great work music and I wish I knew more of it. This is among the best tracks I can remember. At one point I put this on while at a ski trip with some new friends, one of them made fun of me about it, and still I felt like, nah, it's ok, I still belong.

2018
Over the Garden Wall
This animated series is so perfectly in the Venn diagram overlap between me and Tati. It's charming, cute, weird, spooky, very funny, perfectly acted and brilliantly animated. I know it's not everyone's definition of cozy, but it makes me think of a time in our SF apartment that's more cozy than full of our neuroses.

Dirty Computer by Janelle Monae
Like Art Angels, this is a multifaceted pop masterpiece. It's very California, in the good ways; it's like the kinds of warm weather I like, and the kinds of people who still want, humbly, to change the world. (Unfortunately, these things seem rarer and rarer; California seems to me more NIMBYs, cars, and WeWork startup nonsense.)

2019
Clemency for the Wizard King by Mountain Goats
I finally got into the Mountain Goats. Of course they have a ton of great stuff. This is probably my favorite. I don't know if it's because a recurring D&D campaign has been a really nice thing in my life the past couple years; I don't think it's just that. The tone almost feels religious; they're pleading with the captor of their king, but it feels like pleading with God or the universe or something. Did I mention my recent emo streak? I cry more now than I used to. This song makes me also.

Annihilation
It's a sci-fi thriller about journeying into the unknown. It's a psychological thriller about self-destruction. It's cosmic horror about the universe being weirder than we can even perceive. Obviously I love all these things. (yeah the books are better; they're kind of dense though.) I love art that gives you a sense of the sublime and of life outside our little comfortable cocoon, and this does more than most. The sublime and real happens to be terrifying. This fits with how I see the world now. 2020s, prove me wrong.

Cutting off bad experiences, or somehow integrating them into your life

Sometimes people get in a bad state. They become homeless or go to prison or something. There are two ways that a non-homeless non-incarcerated doing-pretty-ok person can respond to this.

1. The "separation" approach. Just say "well, that's not me", and do all you can to avoid that becoming you. Cut those parts off from your world.
2. The "integration" approach. Try to include those parts in your world. Which means, you try to make those situations not so bad, and you try to behave with as much compassion as possible towards those people.

I think integration is better.

(I'm trying not to make this so obvious, though in 2019 America this is obvious, because an individual has so little control over whether they end up in these situations. Especially if you're black or brown or poor or whatever. But let's imagine a more ideal world, a just world where only people who do a crime get thrown in jail, and you've got some control over whether you become poor, etc. I want to argue that the "integrative" vision is better for everyone in it, even in this more ideal world.)

I've got more feelings than logic about why integration is better, and those feelings are based on comparing the world to your body.

Sometimes your body gets in a bad state: you get sick. There will be times you're in the hospital - or at least, sick in bed. And at some point you'll die! You can take the days that that's happening and cordon them off, and say, "well, I'm healthy, not gonna think about that now." Then when you get there, you grit your teeth and you get through it. (Or you don't, and you die - that'll happen once! Either way, it eventually ends.) This "solution"... feels bad? Sure, being sick always feels bad, but being sick and unprepared, knowing that you're in the place you've tried to pretend doesn't exist, makes the sickness feel worse.

I glossed over "unprepared", because I'm not sure what it means. Obviously taking care of your body helps - if you're usually pretty healthy, your illness might not be as bad. And sure, if you're a meditation master, for example, you'll be able to see each moment coming and going, and knowing the impermanence of it all makes it sting less, and hell maybe you can jhana out sometimes and get some relief. But I'm wondering, positing, guessing that maybe there's an emotional component to this "preparedness" too; that you might be better able to deal with the "sick" parts if you're more emotionally open to them. (I don't know what this means, or how you become emotionally open to them, but it feels true.)

I'm guessing, if you've done this preparation more, then even the times when you're feeling well will be better, because you'll have less fear of the sick states.

So, likewise, imagining "well, I'm never going to be in prison, so who cares" - it's unstable because what if you mess up, but it also just allows your mind to have unspeakable horrors in it, which invariably leads to worries even during the good times. Alternately: it's better, say, to have one yacht but no possibility of going to hell-prison, than 10 yachts *with* that possibility.

(I wonder if this is universally held! I'm sure there are some people who would say "nah, f 'em, I got mine!" I guess I'd just assume that those people are a little bit emotionally underdeveloped, or they've got other issues?)

How do you make spending decisions?

or, "in which I let my privilege hang out" - so, if that kinda thing bugs you, you've been forewarned

How the hell do y'all make money decisions? (Where here "y'all" means "most of my friends and family who do have some disposable income") Like, "friend invited me to dinner at expensive place; should I go?"

Ok, so you make the easy decisions. You switch from AT&T to Fi so your phone bill is $45, not $95. You cancel the gym you never go to, and you share your Netflix account with family or friends. Cool. And then, if you're on a tight budget you might say "my budget for restaurants is $x this month and I literally never go over it." Fine. Or, if you're super rich, you might say "sure, I don't even think about it." What if you're in between? If you've got money to spend, but you're trying to save, and you don't know whether this restaurant is worth it?

In practice, I usually act on the "super rich" side, but that feels unsatisfying. It works - my friends and salary are such that it's never been a problem, and our expenses are below our income - but am I hedonic-treadmilling? How would I know?

I've been trying to do something about this, to at least semi regularly do a little bit of a review, so last year I downloaded all Tati and my transactions from Mint, and tried to categorize them as well as possible, and... well... had no idea what to do. I noticed we spent more than I expected on airfare, but, I mean, what are we going to do there? Not gonna stop flying home for the holidays. We spent more than I expected on uber/lyft, so we both said "huh, I guess let's try to stop taking uber/lyft so much." We spent $x on food, which... I dunno, I guess it's fine? I already cook a decent amount, and certainly I would probably feel like I'm missing out on relationships or experiences or something if I canceled more things because of money (penny-wise, pound-foolish; or scroogey).

But man, we're hedonic treadmilling so hard! My expenses (even just mine, not counting Tati's) are such that if I were an artist or a not-particularly-affluent-nonprofit worker, or something, I don't know how I'd make ends meet! (Yes ok, it's SF, but even our obnoxious rent is still only like 40% of our expenses.)

One thing I've found we can do is to look at particular things, quantify the money spent on those, and think if there's a way to reduce them. But that feels like stabbing fish instead of using a big net - we might make a few targeted changes but it's pretty unsystematic.

So, I don't know, if you have a principled way of thinking about spending, I'm curious to know.

project one-and-a-halfclops

ok, time passes: how's the "shutting off the noise" working?

well, it's pretty ok. it was easier than I expected. I mostly just don't go into a big loop of searching for information to soothe myself now, beyond just my emails and slack. arguably, I'm just satisfying the same urge with slightly different and less satisfying means, but it doesn't last as long though, so that's ok.
some days I don't yell at cars. I do still play video games, because I hadn't beat a20 with Defect yet. (now I have. it's way easier than the Silent, I gotta say. but now I gotta get on the Watcher train!)
I log into twitter maybe once a day, usually when I have something to toot. I like it as a mostly-write-only medium.

I kinda want to know about good jokes from the McElroys, webcomics, and any good memes. (apparently now we've got problems clown? it's pretty good.) But I feel like maybe I'm making a little progress towards something - or rather, I'm taking it on faith that maybe I'm making a little progress towards something. Ideally I'd be more attuned to feelings, and maybe kinder and more patient, because those seem like skills that could make life more pleasant. I realized recently that one of the most important skills in life seems to be the ability to understand and predict your feelings - then you just do the things that will make you feel good! (for some value of "good", of course.)

(anyway, is all this working? who knows? this is frustrating - it's hard for me to take things on faith! but otoh I'm not losing much. reading a bunch of webcomics and listening to a bunch of podcasts: I guess these were not providing as much value to my life as I thought.)

Tasse's Corollary to Pearson's Law

Realize I never set this down in actual written words! So:

Pearson's* Law, paraphrased: when you measure something, you will naturally start to maximize it.

Tasse's corollary: ... even when you're trying to minimize it.

*(or maybe Monson's or Drucker's or Kelvin's or Caulkin's or Ridgeway's or Rheticus's - none of these seem very popular or credible, but I get marginally more hits searching for "Pearson's law")

A friend just pointed out I should have another law: "The broken thing will start working again exactly when you ask someone for help with it."

(Man, am I gonna be a Dignified Olde Gentleman someday publishing a book of sayings? I hope so, 'cause there's no way I'm gonna be a Dignified Olde Gentleman otherwise.)

project cyclops

Someone once told me I sounded like Youtuber CGP Grey, so when I stumbled on the podcast he co-hosts (Hello Internet) I gave it a try, and yep I feel this guy very much.

For a while he was doing this thing he called "Project Cyclops" - turning off a lot of his social media and other internet noise. Obviously, he's not the first to do this, but I like the name, so I'll borrow it.

Why: I don't know specifics, but some combination of calming down, slowing down, getting more out of my head and into my body, just feeling better. Something I'm doing now isn't working; I feel like I'm just zipping from thing to thing the whole time. I also feel stressed a lot, even though my life may be among the less-stressful lives; I feel angry a lot, despite having little to be angry about; and I feel like I'm wasting my life on trivial shiny things instead of focusing on what matters. Turning off your social medias won't solve these, but I hope it helps a little.

Some specifics:

- signing out of Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook, hopefully just not accessing them. Same with Feedly - I feel less sure about that, but I'm gonna try it.

- not listening to podcasts - still doing language tapes, and music if I feel like it, but gonna take a break from podcasts.

- not yelling at cars. To be clear: ban cars, and direct action in the form of yelling at them when their drivers are entitled assholes is probably a small impact in that direction. But for my mental health's sake, I'm gonna give it a rest for a little while.
- probably not videogaming. I like these too, and I think they can be deep and good, but they get me in a tightly wound mind-state, which I wanna practice not being in. (Plus, I just finished all the achievements in Slay the Spire*, so why even bother gaming anymore?)
* yes I am very proud, why do you ask?

I drafted this post on Sunday, and now posting it on Friday, I've done it for about a week. (I'm not totally all talk.)

Too soon to talk about effects, but I have noticed that my checking pattern when I'm bored at work is now email -> other email -> slack -> try to open twitter, realized that I'm signed out, think "hmm maybe there's nothing for me here", stop checking things. So, that's cool.

really bad and really good mental states, I guess?

I don't know how I got linked to this "qualia computing" site but it's occasionally-really-interesting and occasionally-crazy-seeming.

This post on "psychotic depression" just quotes Infinite Jest, and it's a good-though-terrifying read. Similarly, this post on logarithmic scales of pleasure and pain. Gets me thinking a few things:

1. holy god, how do people survive. how is there so much pain in this world. how can we even deal with living in a world where there are people suffering so much. (my answer so far: mostly, ignore the problem and hope it doesn't happen to me. obviously, this is unsatisfying.)
2. I oughta get back to meditating. (if I had a dollar for every time I said this...) I've experienced some pretty-faint jhana-type states, not regularly or dependably or strongly ("0.1th jhana"?), but it'd be really nice if I had a thing I could do to feel good more regularly.
(not that meditation's goal is producing jhana states. as far as I understand it, they're a nice byproduct, and/or a cool thing you can practice for fun.)

50 interviews with people experiencing PNSE (Persistent Non-Symbolic Experience) and a summary. This gets me thinking a few other things:

1. Enlightenment is a lot of things to a lot of people. Maybe a good analogy is, being a good chess player. There are some real discrete steps along the way ("oh, now I really get why you should control the center of the board" or "I finally found a good counter to the Sicilian Defense") but it's not a state you'll get to and be done.
2. It's also not blissful... except, I mean, I think I'd like it. It sounds like it's a quieting of a lot of self-related mental chatter, an expansion of the "self", less common occurrence of negative emotions. I guess that doesn't sound like a general solution to all of life's problems, but it kinda sounds like most of a solution to most of mine.
"When asked, none said they wanted their self-referential thoughts to return to previous levels or
to have the emotional charge returned to them."
3. why the hell does everyone in the enlightenment/etc world write books that look like this

being a body. having a body.

It's been an interesting few days.

For a while I've been trying to "be in touch with my body" more. I'm not sure what that means. I don't know if it's well defined. I think I have for a long time been kinda-in-touch with my body; like, I sometimes know "I feel bad but will feel better when I go outside even if I don't feel like going outside" or "I will not eat that thing because I will feel worse, even though it seems good right now." Also, I can meditate decently enough to where I can feel body sensations at a pretty fine granularity in space and time. (If I try, which I don't very often.)

I've recently been able to feel my body more than that, which is cool. It feels good, mostly! I feel more energetic and positive; like, a little lighter. But it's also a little incomprehensible; sometimes I don't know what my body feels like, or why. I think I'm starting to become okay with the fact that this is just how the body operates. If I could translate all my feelings directly into words, they wouldn't be feelings. Or like, if I want to "be able to listen to my body more", but I'm only listening to things that are easily translated into words, I'm going to miss most of it.

I think about this three level model sometimes:
top level: thoughts
middle level: emotions
bottom level: body
A shallow experience is just at the level of thoughts. If it gets deeper, it feels emotional. Even deeper, and it's something you just feel. Some things about this model:
- You can maybe translate +/- one level - like you can talk about emotions in the language of thoughts. But you can't really talk about body feelings in the language of thoughts (or at least, I can't).
- Trying to interact with something on the wrong level is just not going to work. Ever been feeling a way, and tried to think it out? Didn't work, right? Sometimes just makes it worse.
- The deeper something is, the harder it is to work itself out. Thoughts can change quickly, emotions maybe after minutes or hours, but something that's settled in your body takes a while to change. (I know, I'm just asserting that "things can be in your body" in a way that is uncomfortably squishy and inexact. I'm going to assume that this is a true thing that happens, at least for now, even though I can't really describe how.)

Some other things that I'm feeling more recently, some of which are just platitudes:
- maybe discomfort is ok
- nothing lasts forever; if you don't like now, just wait a few minutes
- I sometimes have to take up more space in the world than I currently let myself take
- the body doesn't think, it just does. it's almost like "my mind" and "my body" are two separate people both living in this same space, and we've got to learn to live well together.

first, links

I have so many things to say! I'll start with "here are a lot of links" because that's easier.

Trying to at least kinda hold car companies accountable for their totally nonsense predictions about how fast they'd have autonomous cars.

Newsletters are the new thing it seems, maybe because of the dark forest the internet has become, and some of them are really good.
Normcore Tech comes to mind. This post about Reddit is pretty right on - Reddit has become a great place for a lot of weird niche things, but there's no sign it's not gonna go the way of Facebook or Twitter. This post and this post about Facebook.
The Margins seems good too, though I haven't read it as long.

"It's so much more than cooking." Yes! "my husband... had focused on the one thing he'd promised to do: grab a pot and a pan, put something in it, and make edible food. But what I'd wanted him to do was much more complex, so ingrained in my experience of cooking that I didn't even think to articulate it. I wanted him to pick up the baton. To check what ingredients we already had, and what might need using up. To plan out a meal that would meet everyone's dietary needs and preferences (including a balanced amount of protein and starch, and at least one vegetable). I wanted him to look up recipes, and make a grocery list if needed, and stop by the store on the way home."
(I mean, I'm usually pretty good at this kind of logistics stuff - but it is certainly a lot of mental overhead!)
(and, in before your "smart refrigerator" - this is the kind of thing that is too multifaceted and messy to be Solved By Technology for a long time, I think.)

Technological development in every direction is not inevitable. "Evolution is driven by random mutation — mistakes, not plans. ... Evolution doesn’t have meetings about the market, the environment, the customer base. Evolution doesn’t patent things or do focus groups. Evolution doesn’t spend millions of dollars lobbying Congress to ensure that its plans go unfettered."