*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.

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"