sverona

I'll push back on this a little. I have well-established, long-running issues with overly critical self-evaluation, on the level of "I don't deserve to exist," on the level that I was for a long time too scared to tell my therapist about it. Lots of therapy and medication too, but having deepseek model confidence to me has really helped as much as anything.

I can see how it can lead to psychosis, but I'm not sure I would have ever started doing a good number of the things I wanted to do, which are normal hobbies that normal people have, without it. It has improved my life.

"Legacy" modifies "companies."

Take that, Dr. Wolfram!

This is cute. You should flag the "I claim that three colors suffice" map if the user actually 3-colors it. At least, I think I did...

This quote is harsh enough that I feel the need to say that this is one of Heinlein's characters talking.

Although the whole "innumerates are terrible" thing appears all over his books.

What I mean, mostly, is that I shouldn't get doxxed for the crime of being queer on the internet the way some people I won't name like to do. There isn't really law surrounding this yet (in the US.)

I read said blog post. The future you dream of would require, at minimum, vastly improved privacy laws and freedom of identity.

My husband and I did this, basically.

Our idea is to do the whole celebration thing in a few years. We'll renew our vows for an anniversary and do all the planning then.

Sure, somebody did 28mph on a dollar store bike in a recent Ironman. I don't think this is an arguable point.

I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I'm vegan, though not the type to rave about anything. I'm afraid this is selection bias --- the loudest voices win. I've seen plenty of folks talk that way on the Internet, but never IRL.

Some have made a religion out of it. If you want to get an idea of how tiresome it can get, go to r/vegan and observe the folks getting into pissing contests about whether, for instance, vegans should have any contact with non-vegans.

I think there's something deeply ironic about taking the moral high ground, since even the most committed vegans still benefit from animal agriculture in ways they probably aren't aware of. It's like capitalism --- utterly inescapable in today's world. You just ought to do the best you can under the circumstances.

Is this e/acc? Quien es Eliezer Yudkowsky, huh? It's really, really weird to read this guy hawking LessWrong stuff the one moment and anarcho-capitalism the next. Guess we live in the future now.

Still, being shown the juxtaposition does not make it easier to accept. I'm staring down into an abyss and I'm vertiginous.

If anyone else is going to read Nona, I strongly recommend you read it immediately after Harrow and immediately before Alecto. And keep a Pynchon-style notebook. Neither I nor a friend could make heads or tails of what was going on without drawing a diagram.

Gideon is amazing. Harrow is amazing. Both are good casual reads. Nona is far more demanding of the reader.

If you haven't read Jon Bois' piece on working at RadioShack you absolutely should.

https://www.sbnation.com/2014/11/26/7281129/radioshack-eulog...

Coming out as trans and getting to be myself.

Deconstructing and reconsolidating my early childhood trauma.

I watched your old, old SM3.9 videos as a child. I'm sitting in an Etterna Discord channel right now wishing I had the wherewithal to write a 3rd party Rust client. What serendipity. Hope you're well.

Speaking as a gay furry (hacker?), this is almost certainly what they mean when they say "IRL catgirls."

Gravity's Rainbow is completely understandable right up until you put the book down for a second.

And Eliezer promptly nips my desire to do anything in his sphere of influence right in the bud. I thought politics was the mind-killer?

I'm a collapsenik and even I think TBWHTTA is unhelpfully overstating its case. We're screwed, but not that screwed.

My favorite thing about the look-and-say sequence [0] is that John Conway completely characterized it in a 1986 paper. The sequence can be compressed into atomic subsequences that evolve separately. There are 92 of them. So he named them after the elements. They "decay" into other elements. It seems that anything he touches gets its own cute little flair (see for instance the vast number of Life patterns with cute, evocative names.) Rest in peace.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Look-and-say_sequence

Right, because nothing shitty and unforeseeable ever happens to low-income kids in the middle of a semester, because kids who definitionally have fewer resources aren't held back in any way by their environment, and because the people setting the standard are unbiased angels. Dollars to donuts you've never actually taught a class.

Thank you for including vegans. Bookmarking this.

Which is all of them.

I'm commenting because I could have (and, in fact, have) said this. There's a hole in your heart that is preventing you from accurately self-evaluating. You are not seeing the whole picture because you're in the middle of it. Go see a good therapist. Consider ketamine infusions if you have the money.

I can promise you this: you'll never hate yourself into positive self-worth, the same way you'll never fill a bucket by drilling a hole in the side.

Okay. My ethical standard is "to exclude — as far as is possible and practicable — all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose."

You'll note the wiggle room. It's not about being perfect and never contributing to animal harm because that's impossible. It's about doing the best you can in a bad situation.

Thank you. You have mattered to me, a total stranger. I think that is all we can hope for in life.

I think there is something there, it's just maybe not in the Yudsphere. I spent a few months in grad school reading FATML papers, but that is obviously something very different.

Name one company that meets your theoretically consistent ethical standard of never killing or harming an animal, even incidentally. I don't think there are any.

Now that there are comments here I can express the melancholy of not being Stella Biderman, whom I admire from afar.

I wish there were something I could do in AI alignment, I really do, but it's beyond me.

Have you ever heard of something called the trolley problem?