embwbam

Amazing! Sorry I meant if the boats turned more slowly I think it would encourage more planning (and the enemies wouldn’t turn on a dime either)

In that mac game, there was a tradeoff between speed and the number of cannons / health too

This brings back some memories! I used to play the Ancient Art of War at Sea on my dad's Mac Plus as a kid. Having never sailed, it was fun to learn about tacking while trying to broadside spanish galleons. Years later, I lied about my experience to convince a resort to let me check out a tiny catamaran. I made it back to shore!

One recommendation: make the boats not turn quite so fast. It allows you to outmaneuver other vessels by planning ahead or gaining speed ahead of time.

I still don't know much about sailing, but I have a lot of kitesurfing experience. Do boats really travel that slowly downwind? I assume that crosswind is faster, but downwind should still move at the speed of the wind.

I don’t play much, but some people who play the “commander” format build decks that are carefully balanced against each other. My buddy and I had a blast collecting most of the Lord of the Rings set and playing games of Hobbits vs Sauron, Gandalf vs Galadriel, etc.

That’s how I first played it when I was 14 too. My friend hand a deck of each color and we just took turns playing them.

You might be able to find someone who has built 4 balanced commander decks and you can just play

There are other RPGs with light rules that are WAY more fun than D&D. I've been playing "Blades in the Dark" recently, where the players run heists in a victorian ghost industrial city. It's an absolute delight.

D&D is better as a video game. Try Baldur's gate. It has the side benefit of teaching you the rules if you ever want to jump in to a local game

You’ll never be blown too high. Rocks can be dangerous, but only in certain places and only if you make bad decisions: there are many safe locations around the world. It’s probably about as safe as skiing overall?

Quite weather dependent, but there are places around the world that have very reliable wind during certain seasons. My home area in BC is good almost every day in the summer. Brazil is fantastic all fall, etc

One can take many good ideas from less wrong, yudkowsky et al without adopting a rationalist identity. Sure, it attracted wackos and they made a cult or two. But that could happen to anyone!

I work remotely, and my schedule is flexible. I live in Squamish BC all summer which is great for wind. In the winter we are in UT but my friends take lots of kiting destination vacations.

I’m fairly late in my career though (44yo), so I’ve opted for a lower salary, low stress and flexible job.

Not sure if you were looking only for indoor hobbies, but I picked up Kiteboarding recently, and it is the most outrageously fun thing I've ever done.

It's like being a kid and jumping off the house with a bedsheet, except it works. Most mistakes are laughed off by splashing in the water. I'm 3 years in and I can jump 7-10m then fly like a bird for 5-10 seconds without consequences.

Even as a beginner, sailing around or just feeling a kite pull you around is such a blast. Keep in mind it's really difficult and pretty much requires 10-20 hours of private lessons.

I have heard that phrase a million times and never understood it until your example. Thank you

A lot! Maybe it's obvious, but I've long thought that religion's primary function is to help people process death (and other suffering). Now that life isn't constant suffering, many of us have discarded religion, but then we are blindsided by death.

I was very religious for 30 years, and have a very religious family. I've been athiest for more than a decade now, and it's sad to me that to leave religion behind I had to give up all my family traditions to process death. Those traditions are still there, but I can't relate to them since they are based on a belief I no longer agree with

I’ve been athletic most of my life. At 42 I feel much older than at 32. Chronic injuries add up! Be careful out there everybody

The adaptive optics system for the DKIST solar telescope actually deforms each point of the mirror at 60Hz or something to do wavefront correction!

Evolution doesn't care at all if we get to the top of the food chain. I think that we, as the dominant species on the earth, mistakenly assume that we are the most evolved since we are in charge. Which is more evolutionarily successful, the human or the wheat plant?

If another mass extinction occurs, we are toast (See "The Ends of the Earth"). Relatively minor ecological changes may even destroy us. Sapience has not yet proven to grant any long-term advantage.

For anyone else who discovers they are a fast metabolizer of coffee: try eating a big breakfast before drinking coffee to slow absorption.

I wanted to be a coffee drinker for YEARS, but it made me really high, and I felt super tired later in the day. I don't know why I didn't connect the dots until I searched my genome, but once you know whether you are a fast or slow metabolizer you can play all sorts of games. I can now drink coffee before dinner, and the crash hits right at bedtime.

What about the book made the difference? I'm 100% convinced that it's better to do as you say, and forget about the accounts, and also unable to resist the temptation to check them every day. I'm constantly tempted to make changes.

I work for the National Solar Observatory, creating Level 2 data for the DKIST Telescope’s observations of the sun. (For example, an image of the Temperature that lines up with the observation)

Just the other day, the solar physicist I work with said “yeah, that code that runs on the supercomputer needs to be rewritten in Fortran” (from C, I think.

He’s nearing retirement, but it’s not that he’s behind the times. He knows his stuff, and has a lot of software experience in addition to physics

The plastic straw thing makes me sad. We spent our societal outrage on those instead of single-use plastic bottles. Sigh. I think they're a distraction.

#2 is true of everyone. I'm not arguing against the kind of empathy you're describing, I just think we should extend it to all sorts of criminals. The murderer and rapist in the cell was screwed the moment they were born to dysfunctional, probably abusive parents. They have to fight hard to break the generational cycle.

All this means is that crime and violence are a systemic problem. Thinking about free will as the cause of crime isn't useful compared to thinking about how we might support and treat abused children and help them take a different path.

Any modern trumpet players you love?

People process caffeine super differently. I’m pretty sure caffeine makes me crash 4-6h later which is great for falling asleep

Time crystals are neat! A normal crystal is one that has a definite repeating pattern in space. A time crystal is similar, but instead of repeating in space, it repeats in time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_crystal

Here's a gratutious example thanks to ChatGPT:

"Imagine a line of atoms that flip their spins periodically, creating a pattern that repeats not only in space (like the atoms are arranged in a regular grid) but also in time (like the atoms flip their spins at regular intervals). This repeating pattern in time, which occurs without continuously adding energy, is what makes time crystals so intriguing and different from other states of matter."

Woah, that's a very cynical take! He made them obtuse on purpose? You're not wrong that I found the Sequences extremely challenging, and didn't get through all of them. But I thought he wrote HPMOR to make the lessons more accessible, and I found that much easier to read.

Isn't it simpler to explain the situation by assuming he just got better at writing over time, and that stories teach lessons better than essays? It doesn't require a conspiracy to explain what you see.

I don’t identify with the religious zeal around bayes theorem, but can you elaborate on your criticisms of Yudkowsky? I’ve loved Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and read some of his essays, and Less Wrong’s coverage of cognitive bias helped me escape religion. I don’t agree with everything I’ve read of his, but I’m very curious at what point he becomes a crackpot.

My girlfriend had a poorly aimed egg thrown at her late at night in Marseille on a kebab run for wearing a short skirt in a Muslim neighborhood. Seems pretty rough to me!

How much are you missing out by buying bond funds? Why would there be much of a difference?

They do that on purpose. The API gives you a setting you can change to 0 or 1 for maximum creativity or maximum reproducibility

Great, thanks!

She wants to work as a first priority, but staying in the US longer than 6 months would be convenient.

My girlfriend is Canadian, and an AMGA Rock Guide (American Mountain Guide Association: the US certifying body). She would like to be able to work for gyms and guiding companies in the US. What's the best way to make that happen? (short of marriage... fool me once!)

Should we hire an immigration attorney?

Do you know if it would be easier for her to get permission to work in Europe?

I see what you’re saying. I agree that abstract metaphors confuse people. But clearly, the way we are teaching monads right now isn’t very effective for most people.

Haskell comes from a population that loves to understand things from the ground up, and most people learn by doing.

So, what if, instead of an abstract burrito metaphor, we taught people 4 monads: List, Maybe, State, and IO. We explain how do syntax does “something different” for each of them, and how IO is very similar to promises, but the others aren’t. Then we let them play with those for a few weeks, submit some PRs, let the panic of not understanding subside, and then teach them the theory?

Think about how JavaScript developers learn promises. They don’t understand how they work under the hood at all when they first start using them. Then, when they need to go deeper and look under the hood, that theory is connected to their practice, and makes much more sense to them.

You don’t need to explain the monad laws to a beginner. They don’t need to know what bind does. All they need to know is how to use do syntax, and enough of how it works to use IO, Maybe, State, and a few others.

After they’ve been working for a month or so, they’ll “get” monads on a gut level, and the details won’t be so confusing to them.