☀️ Sunday Stopwatch ⏱️

dd can be used for bypassing character restrictions

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A cool little trick I learned for the CPTS, but in general for bash (or shells in general? not sure).

If a web app filters specific characters, a usual escape is ${IFS} for whitespace, %0a for newlines or in place of ;, ${PATH:0:1} for / and so on.

However, some characters are difficult to get reliably, like | or &.

If you have access to the place which defines the blocklist, then you can use dd to grab the exact byte from that file where it is defined as illegal.

It’s useless on the following oneliner example because you might as well use cut then, but if you have a multiline file, the character you need is defined on L77, and you don’t have access to grep or any way to parse lines, you can just use dd!

Simplified example with file called text.txt:

asdf&

You access the last character using:

dd status=none if=text.txt bs=1 skip=4 count=1

status=none is optional, this is for Macs only, Linux doesn’t need that.

The only issue is that & is parsed as a command by the shell, so if you just do this:

somecommand $(dd ...) ...

…it won’t work.

You need to eval it, like so:

eval "cat text.txt $(dd status=none if=text.txt bs=1 skip=4 count=1)$(dd status=none if=text.txt bs=1 skip=4 count=1) echo yeah"

And that is functionally equivalent to:

cat text.txt && echo yeah

The mosquito bucket of doom works

Tue, 07 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The mosquito bucket of doom is a population control mechanism where you dissolve some Bti (Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis) into a bucket and allow the mosquitoes to lay eggs in these buckets. The larvae then feed on Bti and die.

I tried this method, and it has been unexpectedly effective.

Background

I live in a really wooded area. It’s not swampy, but we have a lot of mosquitoes.

I didn’t take the baseline measurements in the previous years, but on hot months like June, July, August, and partially September, it would be quite literally impossible to spend any time out in the yard – in the morning, while the sun is not super strong yet, you get bitten by dozens upon dozens of mosquitoes. Then the sun is super strong and it’s impossible to be outside. Then, in the afternoon or, god forbid, evening, there are swarms and swarms of mosquitoes, which make it impossible to be out and about.

According to my own guess, I would, at all times, be surrounded by at least 20 or 30 mosquitoes. Killing 30 mosquitoes per hour was not uncommon. That’s one mosquito every two minutes!

Nesting and proximity

Mosquitoes lay eggs in open water, and the tricky thing is that the Aedes albopictus (so called “tiger mosquitoes”) lay eggs in very small bodies of water (like a bottle cap, or the inside of a tire), so even if you treat large bodies of water (like swamps), you still get the same issue.

Mosquitoes also don’t travel very far. Estimates differ, but e.g. Ae. aegypti frequently fly for less than 100 m, with the average distance being 106 m.

Moore & Brown, in their meta-analysis of mosquito flight distances, observe:

We provide an overall estimate of 106 m as the Ae. aegypti average travel distance that can be essential for risk assessment and intervention development.

I don’t think I have Ae. aegypti here, but Ae. albopictus, but I can’t find as many studies on them as for aegypti.

According to this study, the numbers are a bit larger, but not by a lot:

In 2008, we carried out 3 MRR experiments within a highly urbanised area in the city of Rome (central Italy) to analyse dispersal of florescent dusted Ae. albopictus females released after blood-meal and recaptured by sticky traps (STs), and obtained flight ranges of 90% of the released females ranging between 168 and 236 m17.

But according to this study, the numbers are a bit larger.

We found that 77.5% of the recaptured Ae. albopictus individuals flew further than 250 m

In any case, we know that mosquitoes definitely don’t fly for miles and miles before biting you. In fact, if you’re under a constant attack, the mosquitoes biting you were probably born close by, and the first thing you should do is check your entire yard for stagnant water.

I once moved a tire that had a bit of water sloshing around, and saw maybe 50, if not more, mosquitoes fly out of that thing. So step 0 is always: remove any stagnant pools of water. Common culprits are clogged drains, buckets, tires, or random concave objects that allow water to pool in.

I know I’m repeating myself, but I’ve said this to numerous people and it doesn’t really register until you say it a couple of times: the mosquitoes that are biting you were likely born within 100 meters from the place that they bit you. ¹

Bucket of doom: pro tips

I watched this video:

This is another example of a video in the “software engineer talks about a non-software topic and does a much better job than others” genre.

In short:

Big bucket filled with water.
Place it somewhere relatively out of the way.
Add some leaves to make it more like a swamp.
Add a stick that protrudes out so that any unfortunate rodents can climb out.
Add a rain cover of some kind (to prevent dilution in case of heavy rain).
Add a teaspoon of Bti every month.

Usually people fail one or more of these things, and that’s what makes the bucket less than effective.

My setup

I didn’t build in my rain cover but placed the buckets themselves under a covered patch of the yard, which had the same effect. Here’s the bucket in action, ready to sink the population:

This was the first month, but I put in too much greenery, which started decomposing and smelling bad. You don’t need that much, you can add a couple of leaves and that will be quite enough.

I set up a total of five buckets, three surrounding the house, and two covering the farther sections of the yard, closer to the forest.

I thought about setting the five buckets around the house to form a pentagram, and also considered a salt circle in addition, to simultaneously protect against pests from the supernatural realm, but ultimately practicality won over the very fun notion of having enclosed my house in a demon trap.

Safety concerns

I haven’t done more research than reading some Wikipedia articles and a couple of Youtube videos, but apparently, Bti is completely non-toxic to most² other lifeforms. I.e. birds can drink the same spicy water, and they’ll feel exactly nothing. Dogs and cats can do the same, and they won’t have any harmful effects.

I didn’t test this with my dogs, and I have placed these buckets on slightly elevated positions so that my dogs don’t, in fact, drink the swamp water, but I wouldn’t worry even if they did.

I have observed birds bathe in and drink this water, and I haven’t observed any dead birds around my property, so for what it’s worth, I can corroborate that Bti indeed is not harmful to other animals.

Buying Bti

Depending on your region, you may or may not have access to Bti, or you may need special licensing, or it may even be wholly unregulated. In Croatia, it seems that nobody has even heard of this, because as far as I can tell, there’s just no regulation that says either “this is ok for general use” or “you need a special license for this” or anything.

Also, don’t buy other strains of BT. There’s other strains that attack other insects, like Btk. I don’t know what this is used for in practice, but it’s not the thing you want. You want the Israeli bacteria.

I bought mine from the French webshop “Ma Lutte Bio”, and here’s the exact link (I got the 500 g package).

I just have to comment on the following facts:

The most effective method of killing pests is a bacteria that has “Israeli” in its name.
It is being sold by a French web shop that is literally called “My Struggle”.

I feel like there’s a lot of political innuendo here, but maybe I’m just too online.

Results

It’s been two months now, the weather is quite hot, and the mosquitoes are… largely absent.

I can go out in the evening, and there’ll be one or two mosquitoes here and there. In the last two months, I’ve killed maybe 20 mosquitoes in total. I used to average that in an hour.

I also thought: maybe it’s an accident, I know that sometimes the City will spray against mosquitoes in the beginning of the summer, so maybe I’m observing the results of their effort, not mine. A quick stroll 100 meters down into the woods convinced me otherwise. Instantly I was attacked by dozens upon dozens of mosquitoes. So it’s not the region-wide spraying, it is actually my buckets that are doing the work.

The bucket of doom absolutely works, and I will maintain it every summer from now on.

Song unrelated:

The studies deal with releasing and recapturing mosquitoes, not with mosquitoes being born and then being captured. But I don’t think we have any knowledge of mosquitoes developing from their larvae, then flying a much larger distance than this observed average, and only then settling for the average of 106 m. So for practical purposes, the 106 m distance applies also to the distance flown from the breeding ground to the point of biting. ↩︎
Apparently it’s toxic to black flies too. In my book, that’s good. ↩︎

Charter cities make sense in Europe

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Charter cities are a great idea. You take a poor country, create a special zone in it where the country won’t exert its usual harmful influence, and allow that special zone to grow to a self-managed city. The idea is that if you just change governance, you can create real economic growth with mostly the same resources that the host country already has.

The Charter Cities Institute lists several examples of this on their website: Shenzhen, which was a village and is now a futuristic city; Singapore, which was a swamp and is now a futuristic city; Dubai, which was a desert, and is now a futuristic city; Hong Kong, which was a less than futuristic city, and is now – a futuristic city.

The main issue with new charter cities, at least according to the very sparse Wikipedia article and what little info I could scrape from Claude, is not the idea or even the execution of charter cities themselves, but the country where they are founded.

Próspera, one of Honduras’s ZEDEs, is apparently facing problems with the Honduran government. One government decides it’s constitutional and good for Honduras; the second one overturns the decision. It seems that the founders of Próspera were ready for this because they managed to set up international agreements and penalties, so that it isn’t trivial for an unfriendly government to just hit the undo button.

But the story of charter cities having trouble getting off the ground is not exclusive to Honduras, and in fact Próspera seems to be closer to success than to failure.

The main problem is, and will likely continue to be the host country. Charter cities can self-govern in many areas: immigration, economic policy, building and zoning code, civil courts, even policing. But they are not countries, and they (usually) don’t have authority in criminal law, nor a standing army. And if they happen to be situated in unstably governed countries, then all this autonomy is exactly as stable as the weakest chain in the link – the host country’s government.

What charter cities need are, therefore, not poor and undeveloped countries (which are often paired with unstable governments). They need stable, reliable, boring governments, in countries with stagnant economies.

Could we think of a place with a boring, stable government, but slow economy? Hmmm…? Probably Europe in general, and European Union specifically, and certain countries inside the Union even more specifically.

The European Commission should create a charter cities program, where member states can apply and form special economic zones that are excluded from the tax code of the host member state (and from most other legislation). Maybe existing villages or cities could apply, and be converted; or literal empty patches of land could be marked for future development.

The point is: Europe needs to grow its economy, and needs to run experiments which would combat the overall stagnancy.

I imagine a future where there are numerous cities operating as European Free Cities, or European City-States, exempt from the taxation of the host member state, and from most of its legislation. Tens of small European Singapores, scattered around the map, attracting investors, builders, workers, families, both from within and without.

Some of these Free Cities would fail, no doubt. But that is the point of an experiment, to try something “crazy” out without rolling it out to an entire population at once.

The European 28th regime is the perfect context for this, Europe’s supposed equivalent of the Delaware S-corporation. These Free Cities could use that as their incorporation scheme, or could run their own scheme.

Europe is known for stability, and experiments need stable environments to be run. Moreover, Free Cities are lindy, as throughout Europe’s history there have been many charters given to such cities. Not to mention the foundation of Western civilization: the city-states.

Abandon modernity, return to the Hanseatic League!

AI harms your reputation

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

People who use AI to outsource their thinking and communication are silently losing respect from a subset of their colleagues, potential business partners, clients, readers - and they don’t know it.

When someone sends me a text that was clearly AI-generated, or even worse, when they send me “here’s what Claude told me about X”, in my mind, I just downgrade future expectations related to that person.

If I want to speak with an LLM, I can speak with an LLM myself. I don’t need a human-shaped proxy. I know at least one case where a business project didn’t go through because one party decided that speaking indirectly with an LLM wouldn’t go well when the project actually got complicated. If you cannot think through things when they are simple, and you cannot signal this ability to others, then it is unlikely that you will get this ability in the future, once things start requiring even more human attention and engagement.

In another business, I know of a case where someone who was paid for their insight and decision-making decided to start mass-producing AI slop, thinking themself “AI-enhanced”. This resulted in shipping broken features, which cost the business trust from a big client. And that person already had quite a damaged reputation within the company among their colleagues, because of all the slop that the colleagues had to fix.

In both these cases, there’s an actual financial cost to the misuse of AI-generated text. And of course, there’s the reputational cost both for the business and for the person, which might outweigh the financial cost. Once you get the reputation for being “the guy who just copy-pastes everything to/from chatGPT”, it’s hard to get rid of that reputation. People won’t tell you that, but they will absolutely take that into account in every interaction they have with you.

You might also live in a bubble where this type of communication is not seen as too bad, and so you might temporarily experience positive effects from fully outsourcing your thinking to OpenAI’s servers. But it’s temporary, and there will come a time when you will come to know the true price.

I myself have probably sometimes done the same mistake, but I don’t think I’ve ever been as egregious as some examples that I’ve seen around me. In any case, it’s not a mistake worth making. The productivity gains in using AI do not come from copy-pasting responses from chatGPT when you’re communicating with another human being. The productivity gains come from quickly writing automations for repetitive work; from taking quick stabs at things that would have taken many months in the pre-LLM era. You have a bunch of unstructured data, no real skills for data cleanup, but you would like to extract at least some insight from the data. Use an agent! You’ll get something, and it’ll probably be more useful than not having anything.

But if you’re trying to strike a deal with a business partner, and you’re just passing on what chatGPT tells you, you’re not getting a productivity gain. You’re potentially (probably, even) just losing their respect.

This post is published by just typing into Obsidian

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As the title says!

I used to run a WordPress blog. Then I switched to using a static site generator (Hugo). This blog is deployed from a Git repo which runs on Hugo.

And it’s fine! For the last however many posts you can see underneath this one on the homepage, I’d just go to the repo, cd to content/posts, nvim name-of-new-post.md, and start writing there.

With time, I started remembering with some nostalgia the time when there was even less friction, when I would just log in somewhere, write my words, and hit “Publish”.

And also, I like keeping everything in one place. So I asked myself: “How hard would it be to build some system where I can just write to Obsidian, and automatically deploy my Hugo site?”

So I built my own little publishing pipeline, which is essentially just a single post-commit hook in the Git repo where I keep my Obsidian vault.

Here’s the hook, just 30ish lines of bash:

#!/bin/bash

export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/opt/homebrew/bin:$PATH"
set -e

extract_image_name() {
 stripped_prefix=${1##*\[}
 stripped_suffix=${stripped_prefix%%]]*}
 echo $stripped_suffix
}

HUGO_BLOG="$HOME/repos/sunday-stopwatch"
CHANGED_FILES=$(git diff-tree --no-commit-id -r --name-only HEAD)

while IFS= read -r file; do

 if [[ "$file" == blog/* ]]; then

 cp $file $HUGO_BLOG/content/posts/

 if grep -q "\!\[\[" $file; then
 IMAGE_LINES=$(grep "\!\[\[" $file)
 while IFS= read -r image_line; do
 image_name=$(extract_image_name "$image_line")
 encoded_name=$(echo "$image_name" | sed 's/ /-/g')
 cp blog/"$image_name" $HUGO_BLOG/static/"$encoded_name"
 perl -i -pe "s/!\\[\\[${image_name}\\]\\]/![](\/${encoded_name})/g" $HUGO_BLOG/content/posts/$(basename "$file")
 done <<< "$IMAGE_LINES"
 fi

 if [[ $(yq --front-matter=extract .draft $file) == "false" ]]; then
 git -C $HUGO_BLOG add content/ static/
 git -C $HUGO_BLOG commit -m "Autopublish from vault"
 git -C $HUGO_BLOG push
 fi
 fi
done <<< "$CHANGED_FILES"

To translate:

Whenever there is a commit in the Obsidian vault (and there is always one relatively often because I use the Obsidian Git plugin), this script is run.
It checks all the files that have been changed.
If any of the files start with “blog/”, that means that a file in the blog directory has changed, which means that there is a new post (or a changed post).
This means that it’s copied to the Hugo repo.
If there are any embedded image wikilinks, they are translated into embedded Markdown images, and copied into the static directory in the Hugo repo.
Finally, if the frontmatter of the file has draft set to false, this also triggers the publishing action in the Hugo repo.

Really simple, really silly, but works fine.

Also, proof that screenshots work:

This is just a screenshot directly pasted into the Obsidian file.

Anyway, not the slickest, not the cleanest, not the most engineered approach, but it works nicely for me and that’s all I need.

Oh, and, of course, the CI/CD on the origin for the Hugo blog actually then builds and deploys the site.

Scott Alexander gentrified my meetup

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On 10 April 2026, I organized an ACX/LW/rationality meetup.

Initially, I intended for it to be just our regular meetup, and “regular” for Zagreb is between 3 and 10 people having a couple of beers.

Skyler of Rationality Meetups contacted me saying that Scott would be in Zagreb in April, and we coordinated so that the meetup could accommodate Scott’s schedule.

At first, I thought, man, this is serious now. I’ll have to actually reserve a table.

Once the “Going” RSVPs started coming in, I was like: shit, this is even more serious now. I’m going to have to reserve two tables.

Soon after, when I first started receiving emails from people announcing that they would be travelling from the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, and probably other countries which I forgot, I started to panic a little bit.

Luckily, I managed to somehow reserve a big event space from the company where I work. Not sure what would have happened if we stuck to the original venue, but I imagine it would probably be a massive fail. At one point, I think I counted 54 individuals, but could have miscounted.

People mingled, ate food, and had a nice time. Scott gave a nice Q&A session, answering mostly AI-safety-related questions. I’m sorry I couldn’t get the microphone working, but it was a last-minute event space so… Count yourselves lucky to have had somewhere to sit!

Thank you, Scott, for giving sensible directions and imposing some structure on the chaos.

Special thanks to Dorian for helping with logistics and everything in general, and to everyone who helped clean up afterwards!

See some of you on the next meetup.

PS: here’s the invite link to the LessWrong Croatia group. If you’re interested in attending future meetups, this is the easiest way to be informed about them. Otherwise, feel free to email me.

Everything I hate about the Mac

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The premise of the Mac is that everything “just works ™️ “. It doesn’t.

In my experience, a Dell XPS 13 with Fedora GNOME is closer to “just working” than my Mac (M3 Air).

Workspaces have an animation that you can’t turn off. I have to watch the “sliding” animation, and there’s no way for me to speed it up, or remove entirely.
“Restart” doesn’t work. I press restart, some apps close, or prompt for closing. Then nothing happens. Then I press restart again. Then the computer restarts.
Dark/light mode doesn’t work. If I set it manually, many websites just don’t register it, and I have to set dark/light per website as well.
Dark/light mode automatic setting also doesn’t work. It’s now 19:32. It’s getting dark. I have “automatic” set for light/dark theme, system-wide. It is still at light mode, and I can’t set a schedule.
Mission control doesn’t allow me to start an app. In GNOME, I can go to the equivalent of “mission control”, start typing the name of an app, and it’s right there. In Mac, mission control and spotlight search are different entities.
I can’t close a workspace because there is no X for the first 2 seconds. I create a workspace. I go to mission control, put my cursor on the workspace I want to close. Nothing. A couple of seconds pass, and only then can I close the workspace.
Creating a workspace takes 1-2 seconds. Why not instant? Why do I have to wait?
I can’t click on the clock and get a calendar immediately. Instead, I have to add widgets. If I just want a small calendar widget, it’s not fully right aligned in that notification center thing that opens when you click the clock. It’s stuck outside, towards the left. There’s no way to align it.
Notifications don’t work. I have to manually allow/disallow notifications. I’ve missed more than one meeting because I assumed that I would get a notification, from any of the installed apps. There was no prompt like “allow notifications?”
The function key doesn’t exist on any external keyboard. Therefore, I must have different keyboard workflows for when I want to use the laptop, and when I’m connected to an external keyboard.
I cannot have two external monitors plus the built-in monitor at the same time. Capped at two monitors total.
Every system upgrade forces me to get Siri Intelligence and I always have to refuse it. I cannot refuse it and be done with it. Also, I always get that stupid “Welcome” animation. This isn’t the first time I’m using this computer, why are you welcoming me? Just install the god damned updates and get out of my way.
Keyboard shortcuts are insufficiently customizable.
I cannot freely manipulate windows with the keyboard, move them left, right, up, down, tile them, float them, move them to another workspace. I must use the trackpad for most manipulation.
Liquid glass.
Liquid glass.
Liquid glass.
The dock, when hidden, takes several seconds to appear when I slide the cursor down.
The dock switches screens by default. I leave it at screen 1, but if I randomly go with my cursor down on screen 2, now it’s on screen 2. This of course moves my windows.
What is the dock even? It has my open apps, and also apps that I closed, and also apps that I minimized? It makes no sense to me.
What’s the difference between closing and minimizing? I expect that, when I close an app, that it’ll get closed, and disappear. But it just gets minimized. So I have to go to the dock, right click, and “Quit” it for real. Except for some apps which actually do close! What!
Finder doesn’t show recent files. It just doesn’t.
I wanna take a screenshot of a section of my screen. I have to press the most un-ergonomic combination of keys known to man.
I wanna take a screenshot of a section of my screen. The “screenshot” app behaves completely differently from the behavior I get when taking a screenshot using the shortcut.
Where’s “forward delete” (the Del key)? Does it even exist? The behavior exists when an external keyboard is connected.
Bluetooth mouse and keyboard lag very very much.
Why do I have to set different settings for my keyboard based on which keyboard is connected?
When I turn on that thing where you can only have one app in focus, and the rest goes to the sidebar on the left, I can Cmd+Tab through apps that don’t even appear in focus. The app is closed? But I can go through it with Cmd+Tab. And it’s in focus in the sense that the top bar changes the name. But nothing opens! Visually I’m still on the app I was just at right before!
“Reduce motion” in accessibility reduces only some motion, but other motion remains exactly the same, for example dock animations.
Liquid glass.

Thoughts on Practical Ethics

Sun, 05 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Disclaimers

This essay is me trying to figure out the “edges” of Singer’s argument in Practical Ethics.

I’ve written and rewritten it several times, and it bothers me that I don’t reach a particular conclusion. The essay itself remains at the level of “musings” instead of “worked out, internally consistent philosophical refutation”.

Nevertheless, I want to share my thoughts, so publishing it anyway.

Some specific disclaimers:

I agree with many Singer’s conclusions.
This essay is based on my extension of Singer’s argument. Even though he, to my knowledge, hasn’t explicitly put forth these specific arguments, I believe that they logically follow from those ideas that he has put forth. Nevertheless, I may have misunderstood something and may be arguing against a straw man. If so, please flag it.
My criticism is directed mostly against the “idealized” moral agent which, as far as I understand, Singer accepts as not a real expectation from anyone. That is, there are situations where according to Singer, the right thing to do is to do X, and what people do is not X, and what is reasonable to expect of them is simply to strive for X. I don’t necessarily argue against striving, but I do argue against what is or isn’t right for an agent that doesn’t only strive, but actually does X.

Intro to Practical Ethics

If you’ve read the book, or are otherwise familiar with its arguments, feel free to skip to the next chapter.

Singer claims that you must make ethical decisions based on an equal consideration of interests, and not any other property.

It does not matter what age, race, religion, sex, or species one is – the only thing that matters is one’s capacity to suffer, and one’s capacity to view oneself as a distinct entity, with a past and a future.

Take, for example, eating meat.

It is the human’s interest to feel pleasure from eating a tasty steak. It is the cow’s interest to not be killed.

According to the principle of equal consideration of interests, the cow’s interest to not be killed (nor exposed to factory farming practices) clearly outweighs the human’s interest in eating tasty meat.

There is also a moral ranking here that is based on how refined one’s capacity to suffer is. For example, humans are both sentient and capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities existing over time. Cows are merely sentient.

But if there are some humans who are not sentient nor capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities existing over time (for example, patients in a permanent vegetative state), then they have a lower moral footprint than a sentient cow. The cow still cannot conceive of itself as existing over time (probably), but it can experience suffering, which is more than such a human can.

Therefore, in that case, a cow has a higher moral status, and it would be more wrong to kill that cow than that human.

(Singer explores some edge cases, implications on others and on societal norms; I’m shortening the argument here.)

General moral argument against proximity

Singer claims that proximity is not adequate for moral judgment. If we generalize his argument beyond species, race, religion, nationality, to all markers of proximity, we must come to the conclusion that family is equally excluded from moral protection.

My family members are proximate to me in the sense that we have similar genes, and in the sense that we are one tightly-knit group, irrespective of genes (for example, families with adopted children).

Singer claims that genetic proximity is not a relevant moral factor – he rejects preferential treatment based on species, or race. Therefore, if I extend that line of argument, I cannot provide preferential moral treatment to my family based on their genes.

He also claims that other proximity which is not genetic – such as similarity of religion, or nationality – is equally not a relevant moral factor. Therefore, if I extend that line of argument, I also cannot provide preferential moral treatment to my family based on us being the same group.

Therefore, we must either:

Accept the conclusion that family members should not get any preferential moral treatment from us, or
Make an exception for families, and allow that equal consideration of interests applies in other cases, but not in the case of family.

Thought experiment: burning building

Singer also claims that infants do not have the same moral status as adults. They have no conception of themselves as “a distinct entity existing over time”. They have potential personhood, but Singer claims that potential personhood is not as strong of a moral claim as real personhood.

Here’s a thought experiment:

You apartment building is on fire. You rush in. There’s time to save exactly one person: your 6-month-old baby, or an adult stranger.

If we must not give preferential moral treatment based on proximity, and if infants do not yet possess morally relevant characteristics, then the moral thing to do would be to let your child die in the fire, and save the stranger.

I believe that every moral framework that would have you let your child die so that you can save a stranger’s life is wrong. It must have gotten lost along the way somehow, and it is our task now to find where exactly this framework has gotten lost.

I do not believe that infants actually have the morally relevant characteristics that adults have. And I similarly agree with the premise that future personhood is not as strong a claim to moral status as current personhood.

No, the reason why you should save you child, is that it’s your child, which means that I reject the argument against proximity.

Addressing “roles and expectations”-based counterarguments

A counterargument might be: “you have chosen to have this child and therefore you have a moral obligation to it; it’s different from arbitrary things like nationality or religion.”

We can change the thought experiment to not have your own child in the fire, but your baby brother.

In that case, there is no choice that was made, and you have entered no “contract” that forms a moral obligation of care towards this being; it’s a genetic accident that you had no influence on.

Yet, I argue, it would entail the same effect: if you rush into the building, you should most definitely save your baby brother, and not an adult stranger.

Addressing “favoring family leads to better overall outcomes”

Singer claims that, in aggregate, a society where one is more favorably disposed to one’s family (such as parents being invested in their children) is overall a better society to live in.

This is not because children are more morally valuable than adults, but because the side-effects of behaving that way create a society that is better.

This should mean that parents will invest a lot of time and effort into their children.

But this is a general disposition. It does not mean, in a specific life-or-death situation, that we should ignore the fact that there’s a big difference in infants and adults. If we are to accept “capacity to see oneself as a distinct entity with a past and future” as a moral characteristic that should override proximity-based characteristics, then it seems internally consistent to favor one’s own child in such a situation.

Favoring family even in life or death

We might say: “Favoring family even in life-or-death situations leads to better overall outcomes”.

I personally agree, but then that seems inconsistent, or, at least, selective.

We want equal consideration of interests, but then there’s a particular place that we carve out where equal consideration of interests doesn’t apply as the relevant framework.

Moreover, if we favor family in life and death, family being just one – though very strong – marker of proximity, then that would justify favoring along any other dimension: race, nationality, gender – all things explicitly rejected by Singer as irrelevant moral characteristics.

Where is the boundary between:

“If everyone saves a member of their own family from a fire, even though there’s someone else who deserves help more, that leads to a better overall outcome for society.”

and

“If everyone saves a member of their own race from a fire, even though there’s someone else who deserves help more, that leads to a better overall outcome for society.”

One we favor as proper and good; the other is racism.

You could say that family is a “real” relationship; there’s direct care, you have obligations because your child depends on you, and unlike race or religion, it’s not an arbitrary category. But what if the burning building has your cousin that you know nothing about, don’t have any relationship with, and who is effectively a stranger to you?

Even in that case, most people’s moral intuition is to save the cousin, because he is blood.

If we would admit that saving a cousin you know nothing about purely because of genetic proximity is legitimate, than saving based on race is a matter of degree and not category. And saving based on other proximity factors (for example, belonging to the same tribe, or religion) then becomes acceptable too.

Questioning Singer’s theory on its own grounds

Let us assume that to satisfy (the extension of) Singer’s moral framework, we must sacrifice our own child (or baby brother) to save a stranger. Singer’s other argument is that you should keep giving until you reach a point where you start impoverishing yourself.

In that case, Singer’s argument for giving until you go just above poverty falls apart, because why stop at poverty?

Your child is proximate to you: that itself gives it no stronger claim to life. You yourself are even more proximate to yourself.

Therefore, by the same utilitarian calculus by which I should let my child perish in the fire, I should always sacrifice my own life if at least two lives are saved by my sacrifice.

Giving financially saves lives. The difference between giving money and sacrificing your life is a difference of degree: in both cases you are giving something of yourself, your accumulated capacity for change, your “life-force”.

Therefore, whenever I can give money such that I can save at least two lives, I should give that money even if I go into poverty or die.

The argument is that much stronger insomuch as the fact that my giving will almost definitely save more than two lives – cancelling out any objections that I might be killing myself for producing roughly an equal moral outcome.

Therefore, Singer’s argument that we should stop giving someplace where we start entering into poverty picks an arbitrary point. Internally, it favors the survival of the person giving the money.

But if we should be ready to discard the familial obligation to save the life of our not-yet-person child, then we should equally be ready to discard any “familial” obligation to save our own life.

Addressing potential utility generation

You could argue that by continuing living, you could produce more utility overall, and therefore killing yourself to save more people is net harmful, given the fact that you could save much more people in the long run.

But there are two issues here.

One, if we are to keep the internal consistency of the argument, then we should not treat potential utility generation any more favorably than treating potential personhood.

Since Singer claims that potential personhood is not as morally relevant as real personhood, we cannot justify a different treatment for potential utility generation vs. real utility generation.

If we should be ready to sacrifice our potential-person child, then we should be ready to sacrifice our potential future giving.

Two, if we argue for our continued survival on the grounds that we might generate more utility by living longer, that line of argument can extend arbitrarily and we can by the same token argue that we should not so much that it brings us just above the line of poverty, because keeping more money will allow us to live better, potentially generate more money, and therefore generate more utility.

In other words, it proves too much.

Burning building 2

I want to shortly reflect on the burning building thought experiment I introduced.

I would argue that if you rush into the burning building, and see either an infant or adult, both strangers to you, most people’s moral intuition would be to save the infant.

It certainly feels morally correct to me to save a stranger’s baby.

If the choice is between “adult person I know or love” and “stranger’s baby”, that choice is perhaps the most difficult of all. And I am not entirely sure I would pick the adult.

It seems that my moral intuitions are primarily shaped by the maxim of “the strong should protect the weak”. There’s a European moral lineage of chivalry – the notion that you should help those who are helpless, save those who are oppressed, and otherwise seek to be a hero.

Intuitively, morally, I sense that as the right thing to do.

And I would argue that, even on purely consequentialist grounds, being of that particular moral disposition produces overall better outcomes for society.

Vibecoders can't build for longevity

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Theory building

Programming is theory building¹.

There’s a mental process in which a programmer understands the problem, the context in which the problem happens, as well as the solution to it, codified by – code.

In this framework, the code is just a byproduct of the understanding. Whenever understanding is more refined – either by better understanding the domain or by better modelling the solution as a formal system – code gets changed. But code changes are just instantiations of changes in understanding, in the underlying theory of what is happening, and why certain things are done this way, and why certain things are done that way.

Vibecoding

Vibecoding, understood as shipping code one hasn’t even read, is the exact opposite.

There’s perhaps an argument to be made that generating code and then understanding it, modifying it, and only then shipping it, is compatible with theory building.

But vibecoding as such, where you ship an entire app or multiple apps without reviewing how they were built, and why certain choices were made, is not compatible with this view, unless you significantly dilute what a theory is.

Since you don’t know how the problem was solved, why certain architectural choices were made, why this function was used and not that function, why this library, and not that one, and so on – you don’t have an underlying theory, and therefore a formalization of the solution for the problem that was solved.

You just know that it was solved, or wasn’t solved.

Proliferation of code

GPTs, or generative pre-trained transformers generate text, and in the case of coding agents, they generate code.

It is exceedingly rare for a coding agent to delete code, but it is very frequent for them to generate code.

This may change in the future, but the overall trend with coding agents is more code, not less.

If you don’t use a coding agent, but instead have a theory of the problem and a theory of the solution in your head, with time, your codebase is also expected to grow.

As you encounter new edge cases, new aspects of the problem, it is expected that you will express your theory with more words, because you will add more detail, this detail reflecting your more detailed understanding.

Coding agents will add much more code, and with much greater frequency than humans will. Coding agents will also train human operators (of the vibecoding variety) to expect code generation as normal, which will mean that this code generation is not a once type of deal. Code generation will thus beget more code generation, increasing the size of the codebase significantly.

This increase is, of course, not followed with a deeper understanding and a more developed theory. The theory was never there – except maybe represented in the weight activations of an LLM, but that is also doubtful – so there’s no depth to be added.

Therefore:

Much more code.
Still no theory.

Context windows

I said before that LLMs are very additive creatures, and that they rarely delete code. They are also creatures with limited context windows.

I want to be clear that this is only the current state of how they are. It is entirely imaginable that later generation LLMs will end up generating fewer tokens net (meaning that they will more frequently remove code and rewrite things to fit an underlying theory better). But it doesn’t seem the case today.

Likewise, context windows grow. We may see extremely large context windows in the future.

With those two epistemic disclaimers out of the way, I claim that this proliferation of code will lead to slower progress on any given vibecoded project once it reaches a certain level of complexity, measured in the number of tokens representing the codebase.

So, if an underlying “theory” (if there ever was such a thing when vibecoding) used by an LLM has created a codebase, after a sufficient number of iterations, it will be very difficult for a new instantiation of an LLM to accurately grasp what the theory of that codebase is.

It simply will not fit the context window, and README files are of limited use.

The larger the codebase, and more self-contained, the more expressed this problem will be.

Presumably contract-based codebases could be different, where there are encapsulated units of meaning and you can make changes to each service or module without having to understand the entirety of it.

However, it seems that the overall understanding of the problem-space and how it has been solved (formalized as code) will not be available, even if modularity partially solves the problem.

Therefore, the older and bigger and more vibecoded a codebase gets, the more difficult will it be to add new functionality or change existing functionality without breakages.

Vibecoding will therefore almost immediately create legacy projects, legacy projects meaning projects where there’s little theory to rely on and you risk breakages by making changes.

Longevity

Business relationships are usually built with longevity in mind.

When a business buys a service, whether this is API access or a SaaS product, or anything else, there’s an implicit understanding that this product will be maintained.

Often, there’s an explicit understanding as well.

Maintenance and improvement of a product are in fact the cornerstone of business relationships.

It’s not enough to deliver something that works at a given point in time, it is expected that you will also grow that thing, that you will shape it to cover specific problem areas of different customers, and that you will ensure it is free from vulnerabilities, and more.

Vibecoded solutions, built with modern LLM, work almost immediately, at least for certain use cases.

You can in fact not even look at code and just ship it, and it’s probably going to work out fine.

If you pair it with some tests, and some documentation, you could very well have a product that someone will buy.

But the question is: what happens in, say, five years?

If you keep vibe-adding features, and somehow keep getting customers to pay for this thing, what happens once the codebase becomes so complex that an LLM cannot fit it inside its “brain”?

And this isn’t just about context windows – even if context windows were to grow at a rate sufficient for ingesting extremely large codebases, there’s still the issue of a lack of theory underlying the problem.

The gambit for vibecoders, at least those that don’t intend to pull out after a year or two in business, is that AI tools will grow in a) context window sizes and b) general intelligence capable of theory building at least as fast as they grow their codebases.

This may happen, or may not happen, but it’s definitely a gambit.

Predictions

My prediction is that LLMs won’t follow with context windows and complete understanding capable of sufficient theory building as fast as they will generate code.

This in practice means that I predict that companies employing the vibecoding paradigm will hit a wall in growth, sales, relationship building, and longevity.

A vibecoding company is therefore a company I would short. The more vibey it is, the shorter the position I would take.

I need to figure out how I should best formalize this as a formal prediction that can be judged true or false, but this is how I am thinking about it at this moment.

https://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf ↩︎

Mantras for the modern mind

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are other things more important than speed. Speed is important only once you work on the right thing. Work on the right thing.
It’s not so over, we’re not so back. It’s never been over. We’ve never had to be back from anything. Everything is ok.
You have time. You don’t need to rush. There’s nothing to escape. There’s no looming “permanent underclass”. You’re fine. You have time.
You can relax. You can enjoy things. You don’t need to squeeze productivity out of every hour.
A purchase often won’t allay your disquiet. But a purchase will often become a burden. To not be governed by your things, and to be a master of them, be mindful of how many things you purchase.
You can take time to read. You can do things by hand. You can study things deeply. You can afford full understanding. You don’t need to move so quickly that you forget to think.
You can still abide by your principles. You don’t need to put out things of low quality. If others do it, you can just not do it. You’re not getting left behind. You’re doing your thing with due care.

My paperless setup

Sun, 15 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s just too much paper in my life.

Papers from the doctor appointments from five years ago. Old receipts. Warranties.

And none of it searchable, and my folders just keep growing in size.

And I don’t want to put all this data into Google Drive or some other non-encrypted provider. And I also ideally don’t want to pay.

Luckily, it’s possible to do just that. Here’s my setup.

0. Hardware

Machine running paperless: a Thinkpad X220 running Arch.
An HP OfficeJet Pro 8022e printer/scanner.
All connectivity is on the local area network, no scanned data goes out.

1. Paperless

The docs for paperless-ngx are well written and easy to read. I basically just followed their setup tutorial.

I run Paperless as a Docker container. I use the most generic Docker Compose file, basically directly from the docs.

My local directory /home/dt/paperless-ngx/consume is used to get scans into Paperless. Whatever is dropped there is consumed and added to the Paperless database.

2. Scanning script

I couldn’t figure out an easy way to set up the “scan-to-shared-folder” function. Even in HP’s web UI, they say that it cannot be enabled. Given that it’s HP, I’m guessing it’s intentional and I should probably pay them $500 a month just to be able to connect via Samba.

No matter, there are other tools.

I basically just installed hplip and sane, ran the hp-setup command.

After some negotiations with the scanner around the flags, I managed to get scans going with this command:

hp-scan --device="hpaio:/net/HP_OfficeJet_Pro_8020_series?ip=192.168.8.175" --mode=gray --res=300 --size=a4 --output=/tmp/test-scan.png

This works for single-page scans. I also added a duplex and multi-page scan option, where there’s some post-processing by img2pdf so that I can paste a couple of pages together into a single file.

Click to open the full script

#!/bin/bash

DEVICE="hpaio:/net/HP_OfficeJet_Pro_8020_series?ip=192.168.8.175"
CONSUME="/home/dt/paperless-ngx/consume"

usage() {
 echo "Usage: scan <mode>"
 echo ""
 echo "Modes:"
 echo " single Scan one side, save to Paperless consume"
 echo " duplex Scan two sides, merge to PDF, save to Paperless consume"
 echo " multi Scan arbitrary pages one by one, merge to PDF when done"
 echo ""
 echo "Examples:"
 echo " scan single"
 echo " scan duplex"
 echo " scan multi"
}

scan_page() {
 local output="$1"
 hp-scan --device="$DEVICE" --mode=gray --res=300 --size=a4 --output="$output"
}

case "$1" in
 single)
 OUTPUT="$CONSUME/scan-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).png"
 scan_page "$OUTPUT"
 echo "Saved: $OUTPUT"
 ;;
 duplex)
 BASENAME="/tmp/scan-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"
 OUTPUT="$CONSUME/scan-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).pdf"
 echo "Place pages in ADF or on flatbed. Press enter to scan side 1..."
 read
 scan_page "${BASENAME}-p1.png"
 echo "Flip the stack. Press enter to scan side 2..."
 read
 scan_page "${BASENAME}-p2.png"
 img2pdf "${BASENAME}-p1.png" "${BASENAME}-p2.png" -o "$OUTPUT"
 rm "${BASENAME}-p1.png" "${BASENAME}-p2.png"
 echo "Saved: $OUTPUT"
 ;;
 multi)
 BASENAME="/tmp/scan-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S)"
 OUTPUT="$CONSUME/scan-$(date +%Y%m%d-%H%M%S).pdf"
 PAGES=()
 PAGE=1
 while true; do
 echo "Page $PAGE: place on scanner, press enter to scan (or type 'done' to finish)..."
 read INPUT
 if [[ "$INPUT" == "done" ]]; then
 break
 fi
 PAGEFILE="${BASENAME}-p${PAGE}.png"
 scan_page "$PAGEFILE"
 PAGES+=("$PAGEFILE")
 echo "Page $PAGE scanned."
 ((PAGE++))
 done
 if [[ ${#PAGES[@]} -eq 0 ]]; then
 echo "No pages scanned, aborting."
 exit 1
 fi
 img2pdf "${PAGES[@]}" -o "$OUTPUT"
 rm "${PAGES[@]}"
 echo "Saved: $OUTPUT (${#PAGES[@]} pages)"
 ;;
 *)
 usage
 ;;
esac

This script is saved to my $PATH so I can just type scan and it’ll always be available.

3. Final workflow

If it’s a single sided scan:
1. I go to the scanner and place the page to scan
2. On my computer, I type scan single
3. The scanner scans and the image is saved to the consume directory
4. Paperless grabs that image and adds it
If it’s a duplex or multi-side scan:
1. I go to the scanner and place the page to scan
2. On my computer, I type scan duplex or scan multi, and press Enter
3. When the scanning is done, I am prompted to turn it to the next side and press Enter
4. When I am done (in the case of multi), instead of pressing Enter, I type done and press Enter
5. The scanned images are transformed into a single PDF file and saved in the Paperless consume directory

4. Next?

This is all cool and good and sufficient. But I am annoyed that I cannot simply go to the scanner and press the button on the scanner to achieve the same goal.

So I’ll look into that.

But for now, it works great!

Some notes on "The Road"

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The Road by Cormac McCarthy was a difficult read.

It’s one of the more bleak books that I’ve read. It’s really, really heavy.

Some scenes I will never get out of my head, unfortunately.

The sadness and rage that I was made to feel from the very start were… difficult, to say the least.

It’s interesting how I can be shocked and terrorized to such an extent that at one point I just go numb and don’t register things anymore. The beginning struck me harder than the ending.

Also, if it’s not an allegorical reading, then the ecology of that world doesn’t make sense. What devilry can produce such a waste, and yet keep humans around? But it’s not a hard sci-fi, so I won’t hold it against it.

New domain

Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This blog has moved from sundaystopwatch.eu to blog.d11r.eu.

The old domain will expire in April 2026.

The reason is I don’t feel like paying for two domains.

That’s it.

🫡

Notes on "Heart of Darkness"

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

First of, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad is a good book. I like it.

It was a bit difficult to read because of Conrad’s style, but I don’t hold it against him, or the book. It’s better for it.

I will skip the summary, and just share some of my observations, and notes.

Also, obviously – spoilers ahead.

What ideas??

Marlow keeps saying how everyone else talked about Kurtz’s ideas, how Kurtz himself talked about his ideas, his ideas, his ideas… ideas…

What bloody ideas? I get it that we are maybe not supposed to know the full extent of his ideas, that it’s intentional that way, but honestly I think it’s not even that.

Times have changed.

Today is much different than, say, one hundred years ago.

We get a couple of glimpses of these fabled ideas of Kurtz, and they’re… what? That a white man, with his might, and ships, and guns, and technology, must appear as a supernatural being to those men there living as if in the First Age, in the primeval forests.

I get that it’s kind of stupid to be annoyed by the differences between two times, and to judge people of one time by the standard of another time. I get that it’s sort of silly to say that ancient Greeks were a morally corrupt society because they kept slaves, or that the medieval kingdoms were morally corrupt because they did not use democracy (it wasn’t invented yet!), and many of today’s moral goods we take for granted.

But man, today, every bozo with a blog has I D E A S.

Go on Substack and you’ll read numerous accounts from bloggers left and right, extreme and moderate, earnest and shitposting, that are of the caliber of Kurtz’s ideas, or even more… that.

I’m one such bozo! Everyone has ideas!

I don’t know if we’re living in genuinely different times or what, but that constant dick-glazing from everyone, including partially from Marlow, towards Kurtz is totally bizarre.

Ok but Kurtz wasn’t really a person

OK, maybe he was an allegory, not an actual person but an embodiment – a personification – of colonialism.

I’m ok with this interpretation, it’s not like there’s anything correct here, l’auteur est mort, but still, even as a figure, I can’t help but see the stark difference between the irreverent times of today and the glazing of yore. If Kurtz wrote his little memo intended for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, and posted it today, he’d get fifty counter-essays of roughly the same caliber within a week.

The Great Man theory probably has some value

It’s the spirit of that time I think.

Today it’s more cynical, more averaged, more collectivist, more liberal.

There’s a sense of recognition of the masses, of the immense small steps that make up the large strides that a society makes, versus the idea of one man pushing society by himself.

I think it’s probably roughly correct!

But again, the disappearance of classical arts and classical education and classical norms and classical thought may have been a bit… too much. Everything is by committee today. Most of all, the skills taught to young men and women are, well, ok, and I guess appropriate for the times, but I cannot help but feel that we have lost something that was expressed by the admiration of others towards Kurtz.

Oratory.

Speaking, and being heard, and moving people with one’s speech, is not really that valued.

Again, everything is by the committee and of the committee, everything is ritualized.

It’s a great checks-and-balances system that prevents you from being led into a holy war, but sometimes society could use a bit of Muad’Dib; sometimes you should speak over the rituals imposed by the elders and make your voice heard to all the sietches, and to hell the customs.

Well I don’t know. I think it’s valuable. And I think we’ve lost it a bit.

Marlow’s ramblings

Marlow speaks and thinks – that is, Conrad writes – in such a weird and convoluted way.

It’s difficult to pinpoint what he actually means. Like, what are you trying to say my man?

But it’s not completely schizophrenic, it has structure, it has thought, and it’s really… poetic. Musical. Rhythmic.

If Marlow were an LLM, he’d have a pretty high temperature setting. It’s very difficult to predict the next sequence of tokens.

And given how much I am forced to read slop these days, it was a welcome rest (and exercise) for my mind, to read something of a more human, if slightly mad, mind-process.

Civilization is a thin veneer

Ultimately to the meat of the book: you come to the Congo, and all your ideas and idealism are stripped away almost immediately; immediately you start raiding and pillaging and killing and so on.

Today this is not news; we are very aware of how societies of south have suffered at the hands of the societies of north.

I guess they were really surprised by this at that time? Though I don’t know how.

It’s roughly the same period when von Clausewitz published his ruminations On War, where he pretty openly says that there’s no such thing as international law, and it’s just force and overpowering and submitting your enemy.

But anyway, civilization is a thin veneer, easily stripped away by the slightest of circumstances. It’s why zombie fiction is so popular these days. We no longer have “uncivilized” places on this Earth, or at least it is not popular to call them that, but you can have these things in fiction, and see how men and women transform in societies where the state has crumbled.

Civilization is a thin veneer and it’s probably why I have these prepper-like tendencies of mine; that and maybe some poverty-induced trauma.

Overall

…it’s a good book! I enjoyed it a lot.

I have this desire to visit Africa. I don’t know why.

Maybe if you’re a white European in your thirties, some gene activates inside you if you haven’t yet made your fortune, and forces you to migrate south to… I don’t know, build a railroad from South Africa to Egypt, or to start driving a truck and try to deliver some machinery to sanctioned Sudan while repairing your truck by shoving bananas in the axle. Or at least to cross the Congo jungle on bicycle.

I finally fixed my footwear

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been wearing footwear of the wrong size, material, and shape for as long as I can remember, certainly at least 20 years.

Only recently have I fixed this, and I come with great tidings: if you, too, hate wearing shoes, and the industrial revolution and its consequences, it is possible to be cured of at least one of these ailments.

The problem is three-shaped, and is named as follows: wrong size, wrong material, and wrong shape.

1. Wrong size

My algorithm for buying shoes was roughly this:

Be somewhere where there’s a shoe store nearby, like a mall, for an unrelated reason.
Remember that I should probably get new shoes.
Go inside.
First filter: find the maximum size the store sells.
That size is EU 46, maybe 46 and 2/3, if I’m lucky 47.
Second filter: find a decently good-looking shoe that’s of the maximum size.
Buy those shoes.
Be in pain for a year or two.

I would just get the largest shoe, which wasn’t large enough, and call it a day.

Dear reader, it is at this point that you might be asking yourself: “is this person completely retarded?”

That is indeed a fair question, and I have oft asked myself that. Indeed, my own wife has asked me that exact question when I divulged this information to her.

We shall set aside the questions of how mentally undeveloped I am for now, and temporarily conclude that it is possible to be a high-functioning adult (with all of the apparent markers of success: a good job, good relations with friends and family, hobbies, aspirations, hopes); and yet – to spend years wearing shoes that don’t fit.

2. Wrong material

Wowsers! It seems that you have developed an anoxic bacteria-forming colony wrapped around your feet! Impressive!

I would inevitably just get black Adidas (Sambas, or a similar model), because I’m Slavic and this is my idea of a good looking shoe:

I don’t know if it’s just me, or if everyone has very very sweaty feet but they just hide it better, but my feet sweat, a lot, and if I walk a lot, which I do, this sweat permeates the inside of this sneaker, and settles there, and it just starts smelling bad.

I’ve tried washing the shoes, machine washing the shoes, putting foot powder on my feet, putting foot powder inside the shoes, drying out the shoes immediately after wearing them, placing little bags of coffee to absorb the smell inside, using foot deodorant, and so on, and so forth. I’m not going to say I tried it all, but I tried many things. And yet, the stench perseveres.

Then, I asked Claude, and was enlightened.

He very politely suggested just getting a shoe that has that net-like breathable material, instead of the watertight encapsulation I placed around my feet.

Who would’ve thunk that air go in foot dry out?!

3. Wrong shape

Finally, the biggest of the three: the SHAPE.

Feet are not uniformly narrow for most people, or aren’t narrow at all.

Some manufacturers provide a “wide” fit for their models, but that also addresses only the second aspect: being narrow at all. What if your feet are, well, foot-shaped?

Feet are usually narrow at the heel, widening towards the toes, and the toes, are wide. Very wide, in fact! So the wide models are just… uniformly wide, which is not what we need. Read more about the difference here.

Enter: wide-toebox shoes, rightly-called foot-shaped shoes.

These are shoes that follow the natural shape of your foot, and don’t try to cram it into a narrowing, symmetric, unnatural, albeit good-looking, shape.

If your toes cannot spread out fully inside your shoe, your shoe is too narrow at the top, and Big Shoe is robbing you of your superior hominid biomechanics.

Do yourself a favor, go buy a pair of cheap (~40 euros or so) wide toebox shoes, and try them on. It is, and I cannot emphasize this enough, liberating. I feel like I am wearing something comfortable for the first time in many, many years. I don’t know if everyone else just accepts suffering, or people are actually comfortable in their shoes, but I know that I always had a pain, or discomfort, that I would push into the background mentally, and forget about it. It’s good not to have to do this anymore.

Addendum: why is it possible to be in pain and forget about it?

All of this leads me to the next logical question: if I spent twenty years or so in constant mild-to-severe discomfort, what other discomfort am I accepting as a given?

And is everyone else in the same constant discomfort, and they just haven’t escaped the Matrix yet?

There are many questions that my wide, smelly feet have brought before my eyes, but I do not have all the answers yet.

Comparing yourself to other people

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There’s a thought that I sometimes hear, and it goes something like this: “We live in the best X of all possible Xs”.

For example:

Whatever criticism one might have towards modern society, we’re still living in the safest and richest time of human history.
However poor one may be, if you’re living in the West, you’re still richer than 99.99% of all humans in history.

One variant (or rather, conclusion) that I have heard is:

It is not for material reasons that people are not having kids; a family can easily achieve a 90s-level standard even today, and people in the 90s did have kids.

In these examples, one is supposed to calibrate for the “normal” or “default” circumstances, and therefore see oneself as incredibly privileged.

My objection is that, while it’s technically correct, this argument misses the point of comparison itself.

Comparison is a local activity.

People compare things that are close together in some way. You compare yourself to your neighbors or family, or to your colleagues at work, or to people that do similar work as you do in other companies.

People compare like categories because local comparisons incite action. The point of comparison is not to calibrate for defaults, it is to improve something in one’s life.

Therefore, saying some variant of “compare yourself with someone much poorer who lived 300 years ago” will do nothing because people form their reference class not by learning history and economy, but by looking around and observing what’s there.

Alice and Bob want to have kids. They live in a tiny apartment and they don’t earn much – enough not to be called poor, but below the median. This is every working-class couple from the 90s, at least to my remembrance, and they all had kids (I’m one of those kids).

But Alice and Bob see that their friends who have kids all have at least a two or three-bedroom apartment, or an even larger house; they see that they take their kids on summer vacations, whereas they know they couldn’t swing vacations with their salaries.

And so, a 30-year-old living standard perfectly suited to bringing up a family, or at least starting up one, now has them thinking that they should wait a bit more.

I think that:

This is a mistake.
Telling them that this is a mistake will fail, more likely than not.

There’s something inside us that just doesn’t care about objective standards, and the only thing that is important is a local comparison.

And so, I believe that the way to make the Alices and Bobs have kids must in some way take into account that local comparison. I don’t know yet how that would work.

Maybe we should start popularizing TV shows and movies showing modern working class people who have kids? (I feel like a lot of media presents a “struggling mother” kind of dynamic; where working class parenthood is shown as something challenging, almost like an affliction.)

And that’s only for the problem of Alice and Bob! Local comparisons are everywhere else, not only in the choice of having kids.

Again, I don’t have a solution, but I think that this argument (compare yourself to someone outside your reference class) isn’t particularly effective.

Society needs to allow people to do more easily what was completely normal a generation or two ago, and this needs to be done by influencing the current reference class that people compare themselves to.

On rationality skills

Thu, 08 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

If you have a developed system for finding the difference between truth and falsehood, and constantly think about rationality skills, and are always improving them, learning new techniques, and keep thinking about meta-level things: congratulations, your skills are useless.

Well, they’re not entirely useless. There’s a theoretical world in which, were you to apply them, they would suddenly become useful.

There’s the notion that by doing meta-level work, you’re sort of recursively improving your ability to reason; by not pursuing to know the truth for an object-level problem, but instead by pursuing to know how to know truth, you’re making yourself more truth-seekingly powerful, you’re turning yourself into a Bene Gesserit, you’re becoming an instrument of divine truth-finding, a being capable of discerning truth among a thousand lies… Only that never happens.

You keep writing stupid little essays like this that are about the meta-level, about “being a rationalist”, and what a rationalist should do, instead of writing essays about things that have happened, or are happening, or will happen. (Or should happen.)

Does practicing chess make you smarter? Which books should you read if you want to become a successful warlord? What do telomeres actually do? What are the variables that determine if an immigration program is successful? What’s the moral case for eating shellfish? How likely is it that random ARM instructions cause a NOP sled? How to decentralize overcrowded cities and create smaller regional urban centers? Etc, etc, etc.

Yes, this whole essay in fact suffers from the very problem I’m trying to convey; that it’s close to useless to meta meta meta everything if you never do the actual thing. This is a letter to myself: learn the thing, do the thing, write about thing.

Advice to a solo techwriter

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

About half a year ago I started as a solo technical writer for my current employer, and I feel that my experience is different from working on a team. I want to write down some observations and advice that I would have given myself.

Your job is now to decide, not write

If a company has hired you as their sole technical writer, chances are they not only need someone to write, they also need someone to figure out what needs to be written, and then write it.

So, you’re not getting paid to receive a Jira ticket and solve it; you most likely need to create the tickets, or even the board for the tickets.

If there is no team, then there is no team infrastructure, and your job is to create this infrastructure, along with everything else that relates to the documentation.

Communicating about your job is also your job

You need to make it clear to other people what is being done.

You might need to set up your Slack channel, your Confluence space, your whatever-your-company-uses area. You need to stake out your little piece of land and plant the techwriting banner.

And then you need to know to whom you are presenting, and what the level of detail is. Generally speaking, a small update once or twice a week in your Slack channel is pretty good so that other people who might be interested can have a feeling for what you’re working on.

Also, it’s a good idea to have a public issue tracker in whatever tool your company uses.

You want to make it really easy for people to open new issues for you. Having a big backlog is a good sign, having nothing in the backlog isn’t. (This doesn’t mean that you need to artificially inflate the backlog; if the company has a technical product, and you’re the sole writer, you’ll have plenty real issues to track.)

People want roadmaps, some people want presentations

This kind of thing depends on the culture of the company, and who you’re reporting to, and at which level you’re presenting your work. You may need to create a roadmap; to treat the documentation as a product and to serve as its product manager. This means having a high-level plan of what’s going to be done, broken down by quarters and themes.

Like:

Q1:
- migrate build to pnpm, merge old & new repo (infrastructure)
- document BlaBla v1.2, FooBar v18.4 (releases)
- open public issue tracker (community)
- move articles from support portal to the docs repo (information architecture)
Q2:
- add vale to CI/CD (infrastructure)
- changelog for v2 API release, document BlaBla v1.3 (releases)
- add feedback mechanism to docs (community)
- rewrite FooBar docs to follow use cases rather than UI layout (information architecture)
Q3:
- …

When communicating about what you’re doing, it should be either completely clear or at least imaginable how these things affect the company bottom line, i.e. how the company is either getting more revenue, or losing fewer opportunities.

Documentation is a big part of developer experience, which in turn is a big part of how likely your product is to sell, so it does play a big role. And it also plays a big role in the cost of support tickets and so on. Your communication may need to reflect what the impact is, not just what you’re doing.

Make friends

Product & Engineering

You should get on good terms with the developers and engineering managers working on the products that you’re in charge of documenting. They are the SMEs, the subject-matter experts, and they will know how the system actually works, and will likely have good ideas on what is not documented enough or what is misleading, what is presented as X but is actually Y, and so on. More to the point, these are the people who can teach you, and since one of the goals is to become an expert (explained below), you’ll find that it is through their knowledge that you can build up your own.

Get on especially good terms with the QA team because they are the ones who know how the system (API, website, SDK, whatever) is supposed to operate for an end user, and since you’re documenting for end users, you’re sharing the same common ground.

Also get on good terms with the product owner or product manager, because they’re supposed to know the why behind a feature, an API endpoint, a web page, etc. They know the industry, they know its challenges, they can give you context.

Solutions, Customer Success and Customer Support

Become friendly with Solutions, Customer Success, and Customer Support, because they usually have to be a) sufficiently good at using your product (API, SDK, whatever); and b) in tune with what customers want and where they are struggling.

A struggling user is sometimes an opportunity to improve the docs, and the bigger the user and the bigger the struggle, the more of a priority it is.

DevOps

Depending on how the company is set up, it pays to have a good relationship with DevOps teams, especially if you’re doing docs-as-code. Ideally you want to be able to go to them and get help in building and deploying things (you will inevitably run into build and/or deployment problems).

Which leads me to…

Ask for help

Asking for help is an underrated skill for many roles, including roles that do have a team, but it’s particularly important when you don’t have a team.

I’ve frequently spent way too many hours trying to do something myself, trying to read outdated Confluence documentation, and trying to piece together things, while all the while, I simply should have asked in a public Slack channel.

My reasoning has always been that I don’t want to waste people’s time & first want to do my own reading. This is valid reasoning, but if after 15 or so minutes you still can’t figure something out, give yourself the benefit of the doubt, and go ask in the damn channel.

Automate things as much as possible

Maybe you have some old system that involves copy-pasting things from another repo to your repo (for example, the changelog). You wouldn’t have done this way but that’s what you inherited with the role.

Invest effort in automating things like this.

You want to use LLMs to the maximum to help you build scripts and stuff around your workflows. You should never do repetitive things manually if you can help it.

Request tooling and access

Always ask for access to things, even things you’re not sure you’re going to use.

Ask for access to the customer support portal so that you have the option to investigate customer tickets. You may not have the time, but when you do, it’s much better to already have access than not.

Ask for access to developer repos so that when the time comes, you can read the source code, and not rely on Slack hearsay.

Ask for access to QA servers, dev servers, K8s cluster management servers, just pretty much anything you can think of.

Sometimes you’ll get a “no”, and that’s ok.

Plug up holes before starting big work

Chances are that you’ll land on some documentation when you start your role.

You may have arrived with great ideas on all the things that you’ll do. Maybe you want to integrate really new cool things, like automated documentation testing by using AI agents.

It’s tempting to go all in on new cool (and useful!) stuff, but in all likelihood you’ll have a lot of gaps to fill, and it makes sense to fill the gaps first before building something super cool.

Some examples of things that should be done first:

Add API/SDK references for your products.
Add versioning for your products, if it’s versioned.
Add changelogs for your products.
Add guides for key workflows that a user will go through.

The above, depending on how big the company/product is, can take a lot of time so don’t feel frustrated for not getting to the supercool fancy AI automation tooling projects you wanted to do.

Learn to say no

You’ll sometimes simply have to decline some things; this is nothing special to the solo technical writing role, but it’s perhaps more important because if you say yes, you’re saying no to something else that may be more important.

So you need to be able to say “no”, as well as its corpo-friendly variant: “I don’t have the bandwidth right now”.

This also applies to meetings. Meetings, in particular recurring meetings, will eat up so much of your time. So it’s really important for you to say “no” to meetings that you know will take away the time that you’d otherwise spend working on something that’s a priority right now.

Simply say “no” on the invite and don’t explain yourself, unless someone asks specifically.

Again, this kind of depends on the company culture, so you might have a different type of environment, and you might have to fight some more, but generally speaking you should be able to freely decline any meetings that clash with your current priorities.

This obviously doesn’t apply when you’re starting and the meetings are supposed to paint you a picture of how the team operates.

When “no” isn’t an option, you’ll have to say “yes”, in which case say “yes, but…” – and let it be conditional on something, usually time being freed up.

Become an expert

This is likely the most important piece of advice.

You should, with time, grow your expertise around the product. Perhaps not the internal implementation details, but you should know it really, really well.

As Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti puts it:

the basic contract of docs: that someone who understands the system has taken responsibility for explaining it truthfully.

It all starts with understanding! You must know the system, and so a lot of your time should be spent learning it, using it, trying it out, etc. A good indicator is random QA-ish things: do you, on occasion, find a bug in the product and report it? If so, that’s good because you’re getting your hands dirty with it.

Energy, a Beginner's Guide (notes)

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This is a good book because it gives you numbers.

It’s important to understand the quantities of things around you. I think that there’s a sort of deep understanding that you can have when you know the exact figures (or ranges) for many physical phenomena. This is something I hint at in being good at the basics. Smil’s book is a good introduction to such thinking.

Energy in the biosphere

On celestial matters:

If the Earth didn’t have a “buffering” mechanism for absorbing solar radiation, and it re-radiated all the solar radiation back immediately (black body radiator), the planet would stay at -18°C. So, all water would be permanently frozen. The mean surface temperature is 15°C, which is all caused by greenhouse gases buffering the radiation. Buffers = life!
The power of the sun is 3.9x10^26 W. So, each second that the sun shines, it sends 13 orders of magnitude more energy than all fuels and all primary electricity on Earth in a given year.
Solar flow on topmost atmosphere is 1376W/m^2, or a little more than 1 kW per meter squared. However, due to the Earth being round, in any given second, some parts have more light, some fewer (towards the poles), and some none (nighttime); the average is 342W/m^2. Then the light goes through a bunch of filtering mechanisms, such as the ozone layer, different cloud layers, and so on. So, roughly half of the radiation that hit the uppermost atmosphere hits the surface; averaging it out over the entire surface of the earth, that’s around 170W/m^2.
- This adds up to 2.7x10^24 J every year, around 5000 thousand times more than the world spends each year.
About two thirds of global albedo is due to cloud tops.
Many equatorial places are poorly insolated due to large amounts of clouds preventing the sun from accessing the earth. So, “tropical” doesn’t necessarily mean “good for placement of pV systems”.
All the inbound radiation is eventually re-radiated back to space, but taking into account the “buffering” effects mentioned above. For example, 95% percent of surface level re-radiation doesn’t end up in space directly, but rather gets buffered by the atmosphere. The most dominant greenhouse gas is by far water vapor. The Earth is essentially wrapped in a water cocoon, which protects it from getting how too fast, and getting cold too fast.
Planetary water cycles moves around 585,000 km^3 of water every year. Around 46 PW of power is required to vaporize this water; this is half of total insolation.
Geothermal power is comparatively small; about 44TW (~90mW/m^2 on average).

On plants:

External biodiversity obscures the fact that there are very few metabolic pathways in organisms. That is, energy comes into the biome only through autotrophs: either phototrophs converting solar energy into mass, or chemotrophs converting inorganic compounds into mass. Literally everything else which is alive is downstream of these two producers.
Photosynthesis reminder:
```
6CO2 + 6H2O = C6H12O6 + 6O2
```
Energy efficiency of photosynthesis is quite low.
Chlorophylls have narrow absorption bands: 420-450 nm and 630-690 nm. Meaning that all the light outside of these bands is useless for photosynthesis. For reference, the human eye can see from 380 to 750 nm. So, around 370 nm worth of radiation. Plants can convert around 60 nm worth, so around 6 times less than what the human eye can see (and much much less if we count in the other radiation except visible light).
Maximum theoretical efficiency is around 4% of insolation, but in practice, the global continental average is 0.33%; the average for the entire biosphere is 0.2%. In other words, if 500 photons hit the surface, only one of those photons gets converted into plant mass.
Despite the inefficiency, continents produce around 120 billion tonnes of plant mass a year; oceans around 110 billion tonnes. Different forests produce different amounts, but e.g. continental forests produce around 0.5 kg to 2.5 kg per m^2 every year. These rates are roughly equal for grown crops.

Energy in human history

Human caloric needs are roughly around 2-3 thousand kcal a day. There are differences across age, gender, size, as well as level of activity. The basal metabolic rate: 50-80 W for females, 60-90 W for males (again, given average sizes).
Energy in food: pure fat gives 39 MJ/kg, protein 23 MJ/kg, carbs 17 MJ/kg. However, the body processes carbohydrates primarily, and the protein comes last (at least for energy needs).
Total amount of energy available at higher trophic levels is reduced. For example, all the prey in the world combined has less energy than all the plant food of that prey. This explains historical dominance of vegetarianism in foraging societies (besides, meat is difficult to get, in addition to not being as abundant as plants). The energy return for foraging (the amount of joules from foraged food vs. the amount of joules expended for foraging) is around 10x. So for each joule of energy expended foraging, you’d, historically, get around 10x more, sometimes 30x more.
Agricultural efficiency in ancient Egypt was 1 person per hectare (the cultivation of one hectare of land would energetically meet the needs of one person). That number grew very slow; some areas reached up to 5 persons per hectare. Europe (pre-industrial) never went above 2 persons per hectare.
- There are two reasons for this: growing non-improved crops (where the conversion of energy is inefficient, and relatively little is converted into usable food, and the rest is converted into inedible phytomass) and lack of nitrogen.
- And an additional reason: it’s energetically very costly to perform agricultural manual labor (tilling a hectare of land takes up much much more than foraging a hectare of forest).
Humans can work at around 60-80W; draft animals yield 300-500W (and also don’t need specialized feed, as they can eat grass).
Dry wood has around 16 MJ/kg. That’s pretty low energy density. Compare:
- Coal: 24 MJ/kg
- Diesel: 45 MJ/kg
- Gasoline: 46 MJ/kg
- Natural gas: 55 MJ/kg
The low energy density of wood is not a problem if the source is dense (and you can harvest a lot from a small acreage), but that’s not the case: there’s usually no more than 200t per hectare (20 kg/m^2), the yield is 300 MJ/m^2. Since it takes 50-100 years to return to pre-harvest state, you need to divide the harvested energy by the time to regenerate. For example, dividing by 50 years, you get 0.2 W/m^2 (of sustainable wood energy).
Traditional charcoaling gives 0.04 W/m^2 (again, by taking sustainable harvesting figures). Pretty wasteful.
Energy needs in pre-industrial cities: 10-30 watts per m2 (that’s for heating, cooking, metallurgy, and so on). This means that if they relied solely on wood, cities would need forests 50-150 times their size nearby (for sustainable harvesting).

Energy in the modern world

Every civilization is fundamentally solar: fossil fuels are essentially batteries for solar energy. The difference between pre-industrial and industrial civilizations is whether they’re locally solar (recent phytomass) or remotely solar (old phytomass=fossil fuels).
Coals are basically just plants in swamps, subjected to high temperatures and pressures for up to 350 million years. Many of these plants are still around, in smaller form. For example, mosses up to 30 meters in height vs. today’s moss.
“Peak oil” is unjustifiably pessimistic; there is little chance of hitting a supermassive oil field like Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar field, but the total oil reserves are still pretty large.
A third of the world’s electricity is not generated by the combustion of fossil fuels.

Energy in everyday life

The Mediterranean diet has switched to much more meat, fish, butter, and cheese; originally it was much more heavy on bread, fruit, potatoes, and olive oil. The true (original) Mediterranean diet now survives only among the rural elderly population.
American walls (wood frame, drywall, insulation) provide around 4x more insulation than sturdier European brick walls.
Dark roofs get up to 50°C hotter than the air temperature in summer; white or light roofs are just 10°C hotter.
One lumen of US electric light is three orders of magnitude more affordable in 2015 than in 1900.
“Phantom loads” (vampire power; use of electricity even when everything is turned off) is around 50 W per household in the US; combined, that’s more electricity than Singapore’s use in a year.
Energy costs of various items, in GJ/t (for reference, one tonne of crude oil is 42 GJ/t):
- excavating sand: 0.1 GJ/t
- quarrying stone: 1 GJ/t
- extracting construction wood: 1.5-3 GJ/t
- cement: 3.5 GJ/t
- adding steel to concrete makes it 3x more expensive
- insulation: 10 GJ/t
- a three-bedroom house costs around 500 GJ (around 12 tonnes of crude oil)
- wheat, corn, fruits: 4 GJ/t
- rice: 10 GJ/t
- peppers, tomatoes, greenhouse veggies: 40 GJ/t
- wheat contains four times as much energy as was used to produce it; greenhouse tomatoes can have up to 50x less energy than what was used to produce them
  - however, food’s total energy cost is dominated by packaging & transport

Try the goddamned thing out

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Try the goddamned thing out

OR,

some Thoughts

on Technical Writing,

having to do with

software writing

Technical writing is a truth-seeking process.

To say true things, you need to know the subject that you’re writing about.

A technical writer is therefore more of an engineer who focuses on explaining things instead of building them. The writing is a secondary activity.

As a technical writer, you test each instruction that you write:

In software, that means that you try that API call that you described. Or rather, you first try it, and then describe it.¹
In motorcycles, that means that you work on a bike following your own instructions.
In appliances, that means that you assemble the appliance yourself, before allowing it to be shipped off with nonsensical instructions.

(Or at least this is how it should be.)

In project management, there’s a belief that you can manage anything by simply applying universal tenets of project management. There’s an idea that you can be a project-agnostic project manager.

Technical writing, as a profession, suffers from the same problem that project managers have: there’s a belief that there’s a skill of “technical writing” which can be applied to many different things, regardless of what the thing itself is.

There is in fact a common, universal, set of skills a technical writer needs to have. This belief is not entirely false. But there’s also subject-matter expertise which is at least as important, if not more important, than universal technical writing skills.

This is why, sometimes, even badly formatted, grammatically incorrect and haphazardly written instructions from a developer are more useful than beautifully structured, diataxis-approved, vale-linted, Docusaurus-built docs from a technical writer.

The key thing is: is it useful? Does it help me, the intended user, to achieve my goal?

After you get to a certain level of proficiency in written communication, the only way that you improve as a technical writer is by focusing on the technical, and not on the writer part of your role.

The manuals written by professionals in previous decades were also very different than today’s. They were written by engineers who were generally also mechanics and craftsmen, and it shows. […] The writers of modern manuals are neither mechanics nor engineers but rather technical writers. This is a profession that is institutionalized on the assumption that it has its own principles that can be mastered without the writer being immersed in any particular problem; it is universal rather than situated. Technical writers know that, but they don’t know how.

Shop Class as Soulcraft, M. B. Crawford

In the context of software technical writing, this means that you should be a developer who integrates the SDK, who calls the API, or an end user who clicks in the UI, or… whoever your target audience is, you need to be that person, at least for a little while, at your own job.

You need to be coding², and building, and testing, and integrating, and making small apps, and trying to push to registries, and trying to apply configs, and just… doing all the things that your (technical) users are doing. If you’re not doing it with them, or much better, before them, then you’re not going to be helpful, your instructions are not going to be helpful, you won’t have that kind of situated knowledge that is useful and necessary. You’ll be divorced from your end user, and they’ll be left trying to piece together something based on your instructions. So you owe it both to yourself, as a professional, and to the end users you’re serving, to try the goddamned thing out.

Or rather, you test it, then you figure out it doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to, then you ask the developer in charge of that ticket, then they say “oh yeah, that ticket doesn’t even cover it anymore, it’s this ticket now” and you open it and WOAH why is there a whole new feature being delivered through this ticket, I thought this sprint was just a patch release for that tiny bug they found that that customer complained about; ohh, it is going to be a SemVer patch release, they’re not going to bump up the version number because the customer isn’t ready to make a large upgrade, but they’re going to deliver three new API endpoints in this one and break three existing services, but that doesn’t matter because it’s only this customer who uses that thing anyway, and they’ll get their own custom config so there won’t be any problem. Anyway, then you describe it. ↩︎
This is why I believe that vibecoding is a useful tool for technical writers: potentially more useful than for software engineers. Software engineers have certain exigencies that LLMs may not help them with. The code may need to meet certain algorithmic requirements, or it may need to implement a particular architecture to be a good addition to the code base. LLMs are limited when helping here, but they’re really good at throwaway code: things you build once just to try something out. ↩︎

Why is it so hard to export Markdown from Gemini?

Wed, 23 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Markdown is supposed to be easy. Sure, there’s a ton of standards and interpretations, but we mostly converge on the same set of plain text ideals.

Why, then, is it next to impossible to produce a Markdown document when, for example, working with Google Gemini?

Prompt: write a short article (around 300 words) about fusion reactors

So far so good.

You can’t just copy paste it, because you don’t get the headings, the formatting, and so on:

The Promise of Starlight: A Look at Fusion Reactors
Fusion reactors represent a monumental leap in our quest for clean, virtually limitless energy. Often described as creating a "star in a jar," these devices aim to replicate the very process that powers our sun: nuclear fusion. By fusing light atomic nuclei, such as the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, fusion reactors release immense amounts of energy. This process stands in stark contrast to nuclear fission, the technology behind current nuclear power plants, which splits heavy atoms like uranium.

Let’s ask it to give us Markdown.

Ok, same problem. When I copy paste that, I don’t get the Markdown symbols. I guess the LLM is producing Markdown, but it’s not getting through Google’s formatting front end?

Let’s try asking for a downloadable artifact.

…but… there is no link anywhere?

Ok, maybe I misspoke, it should use Canvas, not an artifact. It claims not to know what “Canvas” is, but maybe they designed it so that you don’t call the tool from inside the interaction with the LLM, but instead you have to click the “Canvas” icon. My bad. Let’s redo the article with Canvas.

Predictably, this also cannot be copied as Markdown. We’re running into the same problem as before, just now it’s in Canvas mode.

Let’s ask it again to return the article in Markdown.

Finally!

Well, maybe I’d want to make edits, but I want to be able to see the Markdown in the Canvas. If you ask it to display the Markdown using the canvas, it’ll happily report that it displays raw Markdown, but it still renders it.

Let’s suggest a hack.

Well, it still doesn’t work. How about going even more hacky, and asking it for 6 backticks instead of 3? Nope, it doesn’t work.

Ok, let’s try another approach; let’s specify that the code block is not Markdown, so as to prevent the front end rendering it.

Ok, I give up. No, one last thing before I quit. Let’s export it to Google Docs. I know that Google Docs recently added support for Markdown, so we’ll go around this.

Yeah that’s laggy. But eventually, it did work. Really easy, 1/10!

Parenting philosophy

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This isn't completely thought out, but I wanted to get it on paper.

My parenting philosophy is aimed at these goals:

Create a good person.
Create a smart person.
Create a capable person.
Create a resilient person.

…roughly in that order of importance.

1. Morals

I’m most uncertain about the intervention potential for this one. I’m sure you can impart some moral and ethical lessons to your kid, but I wonder how much of it is inborn empathy formalized into a system of ethics, and how much you’re actually imparting.

If it is possible to significantly affect the future moral feelings of my children, then I want to nudge them towards these moral-aesthetic ideals:

Compassion is good.
Suffering is bad, and inflicting suffering is very bad.
Be protective of the weak. Particularly protect those who truly are powerless; small children, animals, and so on.
Be brave and stand up to injustice.
Never cave in to group pressure. Never cave in to authority. Always do the right thing, even if inconvenient to you.

Generally I want my kids to be good, in the classic Western conception of what “good” means, and to an extent, how Abrahamic religions conceptualize good. I’m not going all-out Jesus Christ, because I do think that there should be limits to self-sacrifice, but like 80% there. Obviously, minus the entire cosmology and threats of burning in hell if you don’t do what I say. Remember, one of my ideals is anti-authority!

2. Intelligence

After my children have grown up, I will feel like a failure if they do not have a good way to reason about the world, good epistemology, and developed thinking.

I’m not saying that they need to agree with all my opinions; I am saying that I want them to be able to reason.

In short, I want to enable my child, as soon as cognitively possible, to discern lies from truths, to be able to model the world, to be able to make predictions and amend them when they encounter new evidence, and so on.

One way of doing this is by doing a lot of specialized maths and philosophy, and to frequently discuss things with them.

I want my kids to use practical probability theory. I want them to be skeptical when skepticism is warranted, and to avoid the cognitive biases and pitfalls that humans fall in by default, if they have no training.

The primary goal here is truth, and ways of building up their brains so that they can get to truth.

3. Skills

Being good and being right are great. But to truly prepare them for life, they also need to be skilled. One of the main skills is knowing how to talk and how to convince others.

I want to provide for my children what I feel was missing in my childhood, and that is practical education on the topic of “how things really are”. You know when you read something, you think you understand it, and then someone comes along and shows you “OK, you think you know how X works, but let me show you how it actually works”—I want to provide that for my child.

This includes educating them on human psychology and politics. This means explaining to them what humans want, and how they behave in order to get them. It means uncovering to them the secretive nature of social interactions; showing them the underlying game people sometimes play. The deals, the handshakes, the glances, all of that has an interpretation.

I want to enable my kid to understand social dynamics, to be able to swim social situations adeptly, and also to come out on top: never to be taken advantage of because of naivete.

4. Toughness

Finally, an important cornerstone of parental philosophy for me is to give them the skills to withstand adversity. This includes psychological and physical toughness. I don’t want my kids to be brittle. I don’t want to raise them under a glass dome, so that, when pushed into the real world, they cannot get their bearings. They should be a little wild, a little untamed. They should be able to thrive in difficult situations, and that means not spoiling them. It doesn’t mean to deprive them of comforts in general, but generally to expose them to non-ideal situations.

One way to do it is insist on physical activity, especially outdoors. I plan to take my kids camping starting with a very early age so that they don’t even get time to develop a penchant for comfort. Being out on adventures, doing chores at home, pursuing difficult athletic achievements: the purpose of all that is for them not to break down when life throws something difficult at them when they’re older.

My life improvement aspirations

Fri, 23 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Some things I would like to improve in my life:

The speed at which I do things.
My management of projects, activities, and life in general.
My memory of important and useful things.

1. Speed

I recently re-read this very good blog post: Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems.

The prescription must be that if there’s something you want to do a lot of and get good at—like write, or fix bugs—you should try to do it faster.

The message really resonates with me. Speed really is important. That got me thinking about why I am not fast.

I literally googled “everything takes me too long”, and got this Reddit thread as a result.

I don’t think this is just routine perfectionism (though that’s probably a component), because I don’t feel like doing things more quickly would result in a worse product. Instead, my feeling is that fundamentally, I just have a poor sense for time/durations, and also a poor feel for when enough is enough. It’s just a bunch of very minor inefficiencies that add up to major inefficiency overall.

Relatable! I am slow, and would like to be faster!

Of course, surprising absolutely nobody, the OP later discloses that he has ADHD - he was diagnosed as a child. I may have ADHD - it remains to be seen. I’ve been planning to get an appointment with a psychiatrist for, oh, last five years or so? Sometimes I almost do get an appointment - as in, I managed to inquire and they told me to get back to them in a couple of months. (Narrator: “He didn’t get back to them.”)

Setting that matter aside, here are some of my thoughts and plans for the future:

Being good is the goal.
In order to be good, you must try being prolific.
If you want to be prolific, you, almost by definition, need to be fast. That means - ship fast, deliver fast, publish fast, and so on.

There are two ways in which you could be not fast:

The context prevents you. You want to be fast in activity X, but activity X is surrounded by other activities which eat up all your time.
The way you do the activity is slow.

You could have the most optimized system in the world for doing X, but if you are doing a million other things, it could be the case that you won’t be fast, therefore you won’t be prolific, and therefore you won’t be good - because you have no time.

The other way you could be slow is that you’re doing something the slow way. I cannot speak around any generalities in case 1, but in this case - doing something the slow way - is something that I’ve struggled with. For example, in videography, an aspirational hobby of mine, I’ve taken weeks to produce videos lasting three or so minutes. I’ve taken several months once for a single video that lasted a couple of minutes.

This is because I’ve decided to adopt an aesthetic that simply takes more than just speaking to the camera. I’ve put too much thought into various stylistic and editorial choices, to the extent that the overall production takes a long time. And while this may be a worthwhile endeavor were videography my “thing”, videography is just my hobby. I should not obsess over things. And funnily enough, the results are frequently not that… good. So I might as well skip obsessing over things.

Other ways of increasing speed, using the example of home improvement & DIY projects.

First, determine whether you need to do this project.

I’ve taken weeks and weeks to start a project, only to abandon it, and months later, hire someone to do it for me.

I’ve lost countless hours on things like mowing the lawn - easily outsourceable.

You don’t need to do every single thing, and in fact, it’s better if you don’t try to do every single thing.
Use the proper tool for the job. This one is pretty obvious, but you’ll go really slow if you don’t use the proper tool for whatever you’re trying to do.
Organize your work sensibly. There’s a good video from Essential Craftsman on how to be more productive. In it, he details several strategies, one of which is organizing your work in such a way that you don’t jump from activity to activity, but rather set up your materials and tools in such a way that you do a single thing once. Like if you’re nailing boards and cutting posts, don’t intersperse the two. You’re much faster if you nail all the boards, and then cut all the posts.

(These points may or may not apply to things outside of DIY/home projects.)

2. Management

I sometimes stumble across an old project of mine which I’ve never given up on formally, but in which I never made any progress since starting it. It could be a home improvement thing (for example, I need to pour a new floor in my garage), or it could be a coding thing (like my progress on Exercism), or it could be a blog series that I started and never continued (like PIBU1).

I forget about them!

I don’t want to forget about them!

Maybe I need to postpone them, but I’d at least like them to be relevant somewhere, in some file, so that I can consciously continue postponing them, and not just forget about them, then randomly remember them and feel guilty for not having done them.

Here, the problem is simpler, if not easy to solve. I have a management system in place for my life. I’ve tried a bunch of stuff, but finally settled on todo.txt, plus some daily todos, plus some specialized project pages, plus Google Calendar. It actually works… pretty great!

The real problem I have is: I don’t use it.

I have a system, I just don’t… do anything with it. So a decision that I am making is this: spend a couple of hours a week just - managing. I should likely create a recurring calendar event for this. But yeah, I literally just need to spend a bit more time - a couple of hours here and there - just writing things down in this extremely simple management system, and then, here and there, review it.

3. Memory

Finally, memory. I am of the school of thought that memory is underrated, more so the more LLMs become pervasive in our lives. It’s counter-intuitive, but here’s why I think it’s true: because more and more people will offload this mental weight to LLMs, it will become rarer and rarer among people, and therefore more valuable, not less.

Stonemasons today cost much more, as do carpenters, as do many other trades that didn’t completely disappear. If whatever it is that you’re memorizing isn’t going to disappear, your memory - and subsequent expertise - will make it more valuable.

Ultimately it’s also intrinsic. You want not just to achieve things with the help of search engines and LLMs, you actually want to be good at things.

I believe memory is a key component here. For some reason, many Western school systems have adopted the “understanding rather than repetition” as a philosophical maxim, but I think there may have been an overcorrection.

You need to train the “muscle” that is your memory. Certain mental activities, like math, only become ingrained when you repeat them enough times. You cannot understand whole fields unless you’re deeply familiar with the terminology, key numbers, key concepts, and so on. In short, you need to memorize things.

My answer to this is the usage of Anki. I need to either find decks relevant to knowledge that I have/want, or create them. And then, just revisit them. Spaced repetition is the most time-optimized way to build a great memory. It’s basically hacking whichever mechanism is responsible for “usage = recall”. You don’t actually have to use it in any context, just reviewing random cards will produce the equivalent powerful effect.

Who's leaving the company?

Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by this post, I wanted to see if I could do the same thing. LDAP is cool.

I started from zero knowledge, so here are the steps that will probably be obvious to experienced users.

First, type realm list to get general information about your domain.

The output will contain your realm-name, which we’ll set as example.lan for the purposes of this tutorial.
Next:
```
nslookup -type=SRV _ldap_tcp.example.lan
```
This command will display full hostnames for your Domain Controllers (there will be several, as replicas).

You should now be able to run ldapwhoami:

ldapwhoami -H ldap://<URL of the DC> -Y GSSAPI -v

Generic search for users:

ldapsearch -H ldap://<URL of the DC> -Y GSSAPI -v -b "DC=example,DC=lan" "(&(objectClass=user)(!(objectClass=computer)))" sAMAccountName givenName sn mail

Depending on how your administrator has set up the records, you may have people disappearing from the records when they quit / are fired, or they may get assigned a flag, or added to an organizational unit (maybe it’s called “terminated” or something similar).

So you’ll have to filter according to the logic implemented at your place.

In addition, maybe you’ll not have any use for some of these fields above (like givenName, or sn), but in that case, run it without filters:

ldapsearch -H ldap://<URL of the DC> -Y GSSAPI -v -b "DC=example,DC=lan" "(objectClass=user)"

Implementing an epitaph service is left as an exercise to the reader.

Casey Neistat is a hypernormie

Thu, 23 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Maybe this title is a little bit insulting, but I don’t mean it this way. I’ve watched a lot of YouTube videographers focused on videography itself. Casey Neistat is the most famous example, but there are many, many others. I’m talking about cinematic videos, with lots of editing, with lots of different angles, with a beautiful color grading. I’m talking about the type of YouTuber who calls themself a “film maker”, not a “YouTuber”. (There’s a distinct difference between that and someone speaking to a camera about what they ate, or what they bought - those are typical YouTubers.)

“Making movies” or “filmmaking” or “cinematic YouTube” is, at this point, its own genre. What I have noticed in all of these videos is that they are pretty devoid of substance. They’re really fun to watch, and their videography is absolutely amazing and impressive. But they have the effect of “wowing” you into thinking that they said something, when in fact they said almost nothing.

Casey Neistat is a good example of that¹, something which I would only call “hypernormie”. It’s just being normal, but it’s not normal normal, but cinematic normal. If you take a look at his videos that focus on a topic - videos that present themselves as a treatise - they are all extremely shallow in that regard. Again, that doesn’t mean I’m not thoroughly impressed with the storytelling, or overall videography. But if you take all of that, and just write down the point, you don’t get a thorough analysis of any subject matter. It might as well have been a typical podcast, and the substance would remain the same.

So normie thoughts, plus beautiful videography: hypernormie-ism.

This, in turn, leads me to preemptively distrust every beautifully edited video. Of course, some don’t purport to say something deep or insightful, or treat a topic, but just show a vibe. Those are fine. What I distrust is those that treat a subject, speak about something, make a documentary of sorts - and then you’re just left without any deeper insight, but with a vibe. It’s peak edutainment, and edutainment is almost always a waste of time.

Practical Doomsday (notes)

Mon, 20 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Notes to myself, not always with the full reasoning explained (read the book for that!):

Dominant thing to be prepping against is the “boring emergency”: things that happen to everyone, but aren’t in the news (accidents, falls, job loss, health issues.)
How to prioritize action: probability of event x impact of event / cost of action. So, at the top are things of high probability, with high impact, and a low cost to prepare against.
Getting your finances in order is far more impactful than buying guns or growing vegetables, and is probably the most impactful thing you can do overall.
- In this context, “getting finances in order” means also being resilient against economic downturns or inflation.
The order of things to prep against:
1. “Boring” emergencies that would never make the news (loss of job, car accident, fall from a ladder, etc.)
2. Small-scale emergencies that might make the news: storms, flooding, earthquakes, or small-scale industrial disasters. Basically extreme weather events.
3. Large-scale emergencies that are rare but not unseen: an economic recession, a catastrophic nuclear reactor disaster, a large-scale storm, a war.
4. Anything beyond (asteroid impact, alien invasion etc.) likely doesn’t require specific preparation. It’s extremely low on probability, and you essentially can’t do anything beyond of what you would do otherwise.
Above all else, the absolute most important thing is a rainy-day fund. For that, the most practical tip is: save money. Standard advice (don’t shop luxury, shop in bulk, etc.) applies.
Keeping money:
- Keep ~1 month’s worth of physical cash for essential expenses (=a couple of hundred euros).
- Keep 6 months to one year’s worth of “runway” money (~5-10k eur) in a bank account - this can be reduced/increased depending on:
  - inflation rate (the stronger the inflation, the less money should you have sitting in a bank account)
  - your probability of finding another job within that time-span
  - any dependents you have to take care of
- Anything beyond I consider to be investment, not a rainy day fund, and is therefore not following loss minimization principles, but is focused on maximizing returns (with some loss minimization included):
  - index funds
  - Bitcoin/Ethereum
Getting money:
- By far one of the biggest doomsday risks is losing your supply of money (in most case this is a job).
- Increase your marketability within your career of choice: learn more, know more, have certifications, get better paying jobs.
- Develop a secondary monetizable skill (as a hobby). It should be different from your primary work (if the tech industry experiences a downturn, your backup shouldn’t be affected). For me this is electrical installations.
Staying alive:
- Take a defensive driving course. Drive less. Drive slower. Never drink and drive. Never use your phone and drive.
- Never stand on wobbly items when working on heights.
- Always use safety equipment for power tools.
- Perform a comprehensive safety check of your house (outlets, wiring, construction elements, etc.)
Create plans:
- “What if X happened” - and then step by step things that you’d go through. TODO!
Essentials:
- Water:
  - Buy and store around 100 L of potable water (that’s around 25 big water containers from the store).
  - Your domestic hot water tank keeps more potable water.
  - You have a lot of rainwater already collected, enable the rainwater pump.
  - Rotate water containers every couple of years.
- Food:
  - Calories > nutrition. Don’t worry about freshness, vitamins, or minerals, only calories.
  - Formula to use: 2000 kcal x person x day. For a month, 180k kcal.
  - Keep canned goods, oils, grains, coffee, salt, sugar, and so on.
    - Store in proper containers, sealed off.
    - Oxygen is the enemy.
  - Keep “snacks” - granola bars etc. (easy to take on the road if necessary)
  - Backyard gardens don’t make (caloric) sense in the context of doomsday prepping.
  - Don’t rotate batches, use FIFO (first in, first out).
- Hygiene, health:
  - Also stockpile soap, detergents and wipes. Also other necessities.
  - Get more of your prescription meds so you have a longer buffer.
  - Stockpile specific medicines:
    - meclizine (vomiting, vertigo)
    - loperamide (diarrhea)
    - cetirizine (allergies)
    - ibuprofen (fever, headaches)
    - dextromethorphan (cough)
    - miconazole nitrate cream (antifungal)
    - hydrocortisone cream (anti-itch)
    - amoxicillin (antibiotic)
  - Stockpile general first aid: bandages, thermometer, saline, etc.
  - Take first aid training
- Energy:
  - Buy batteries and camping lights.
  - Keep powerbanks charged.
  - Get a UPS for electronic devices.
  - Backup generator or battery array don’t make sense financially for keeping appliances on; different for the case of heating.
  - Temporary (up to 1 week) loss of heating in the winter is not that problematic (staying warm is easy by huddling and putting on layers).
    - However, get a secondary heating arrangement (incl. for cooking).
    - However, long-term heating loss is problematic if there’s a long power outage. –> invest in solar + batteries + backup generator (not a priority - low probability of >1wk)
  - Always keep car tank at least half full.
- Tools:
  - Get tire chains for car.
  - Keep a tool bag in the car (incl. battery-powered angle grinder).
  - Refresh your memory on how to jump start a car.
- Bugging out:
  - Cash, a change of clothing, and some snack bars.
  - Good camping gear selection in case civilization won’t be an option (but it should be).
  - Middle-class lifestyle (hobbies with vehicles, bicycles, boating etc.) are all conducive to good bug out options.
- Emergency comms:
  - Low-tech: pen and paper.
  - Prepared list of locations where you’ll meet; leave notes on paper for other party to find.
  - The instructions for this should be printed, laminated, and placed in each family member’s wallet, to always be available.
- Entertainment: goes a long way; keep some books, board games and cards near by.
- Self-defense: get a gun, most likely a 9mm semi-auto, learn to use it (weekly visits to the range for a couple of months, then every couple of months to refresh memory.)

Exercise routines

Tue, 14 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

A friend from work recently got into 75HARD, which I’ve written about here before.

This inspired me to create a couple of new ones. I love those trashy infographics, like “Exercise Routines for Body Types” and then you’ll have shit like “BEAR”, “TIGER”, “WOLF” and it’s all just push-ups and squats with minimum variations, but they charge you like $20 a month for… I guess a program created by chatGPT.

Anyway, I already created 100EASY, but let’s go a couple of steps further:

90DADMODE

I asked my life coach:

How long after a birth of a child does it usually take for things to “get normal”, meaning that you can stop being in panic/emergency mode, sleep relatively normally, and so on?

And he said:

Sleep and basic routines typically start to stabilize around 60-90 days (2-3 months).

So let’s go with the upper bound: 90DADMODE, the 90-day program for new dads that will keep them mentally and physically fit and healthy.

Baby stroller rucking: get out with your child, put a heavy backpack (15 kg is a good weight), and aim for a 5k every day. (Obviously adapt to the age of your child, weather conditions and so on.)
Naptrap meditation: you put your baby to sleep, but you cannot move because the baby will now wake up. Is this not the perfect time to brush up on your breathwork? Zen, baby!
Napmaxxing: you won’t get a lot of sleep, whichever way you look at it. Use downtime during the day to take naps. There’s an enormous difference between no sleep and a 20 minute nap taken a couple of hours back - use it.
Extremely Efficient Workout Session Everything All At Once. I think I made it clear you don’t have a lot of free time - certainly not for driving to the gym, taking 15 minutes to warm up, stretch, listen to some of your favorite music, progressive overload, hitting PRs, chatting to your buddies. I mean maybe you do, but you most likely don’t. Your exercise routine is basic movements: squats, pull-ups, push-ups, and variations thereof. Your rep count is max. You just max out on your push ups on the kitchen floor, inbetween putting the dishes in the washer, because that’s what you just do.

Repeat for however long it takes for life to get back to normal. This program has no resets.

50BASED

Family life not quite your thing? Don’t believe in expanding circles of influence? Well boy I got the right thing for you.

Repeat for 50 days:

50 pages of an extremist book every day. Pick the whatever political philosophy suits you, extreme left, extreme right, we don’t discriminate here.
One conflict with a stranger every day.
Carry a heavy log or sandbag through a forest for 5 km every day.
Eat only food that you’ve either grown, hunted, or stolen. Do you even agoge, bro?
At the end of 50 days, you must have at least one follower who will continue with your program. If not, reset to zero.

I’m too lazy to make PDF infographics for these but I will at some point.

For now you can imagine that these links lead to PDFs:

Note: all of the programs above are strictly a joke, except for portions where they are not. These portions are left as an exercise to the reader. The author does not endorse any political extremism unless this political extremism is considered normal by the author’s local state apparatus (e.g. taxation). The author does not think any wrong thoughts, only correct and proper thoughts.

Self-esteem or skill issue?

Mon, 04 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been thinking about whether or not I have low self-esteem. Sometimes I feel like a complete failure and am very, very unsatisfied with myself.

Initially, you would think this is obviously a self-esteem issue. In my view, a self-esteem issue persists despite concrete accomplishments. In other words, whatever you do, you still keep thinking poorly of yourself.

That implies that there’s a competing hypothesis as well: maybe you don’t have a self-esteem issue, but you just haven’t accomplished things up to your standard.

I think this makes much more sense. You have certain standards that you haven’t reached, which makes you feel unsatisfied. If you reach these standards, you’ll change your mind about yourself (or maybe you’ll create new standards at some later time).

So you ask yourself: are there things that I am proud of, where I don’t feel like a failure? For me, there are many such things, which leads me to believe that maybe I do not have self-esteem issues.

I took the Rosenberg self-esteem questionnaire which aims to take a total, global score of your self-esteem.

Taking it, I got the score of 18.

The scale ranges from 0-30. Scores between 15 and 25 are within normal range; scores below 15 suggest low self-esteem.

This is another nail in the coffin of the self-esteem issue hypothesis. I don’t have a poor self-esteem issue. It just seems I have a skill issue.

Political ideology from the bottom up, part 1

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I would like to figure out my political worldview. I feel like I have a patchwork of various ideas and opinions, but no coherent worldview. I’ll read something and be like “huh, that makes sense”, and then I’ll read something else and also be like “huh, that also makes sense”. I’m sufficiently high openness that I can integrate various different ideas (or I have just read enough of LessWrong), but it feels like I just don’t know enough and don’t have formed opinions on things.

I guess there’s an upside to this - not having an opinion about things is better than having a strong opinion without knowing about the subject. But realistically, both are different flavors of bad. You do actually want to have opinions. You need to have an idea of what things are good and what things are bad. That way, you can: a) predict the future a little bit better, and b) steer your society towards a better future.

Policy and ideology

Ideologies are high-level (low-resolution) descriptions of your policies. When someone says that they are authoritarian right, I translate that into: “ok, this person would like to ban abortions and build walls around the country” (same for other quadrants). These are specific policies that they would like to implement, and when you look at all of it together, they roughly belong to a quadrant on the political compass.

What happens if your policy opinions are all over the place? I sometimes joke that I am a radical centrist: various radical political opinions on all parts of the political compass, which averages to the center. This is, of course, different than a “regular” centrist, someone who doesn’t have particularly strong opinions one way or the other, and still ends up, on average, at the same place on the compass.

I think that this joke will turn out to be quite true as I inspect and form my political views. I was once asked, quite bluntly, what I was politically. How do I lean, left or right, authoritarian or libertarian? I didn’t know how to answer. There are so many individual questions that I have half-baked opinions on (meaning: I am not sure how much to trust my own opinion; it’s more like a feeling than an opinion) that I find it extremely difficult to call myself one thing over the other. As soon as I call myself “left-wing” I can think of several right-wing stances that I would endorse, and that goes the other way around.

The following series of posts is an inquiry into values, and specifically, policies. To an extent, I don’t need to know what ideology I belong to, I need to know what’s the best policy for a specific question. Then, the ideology question answers itself.

Philosophy and ideology

But it is pretty obvious that different people have different ideas on what “good” looks like, socially and politically. They think differently when asked “imagine an ideal society” - they see different economic systems, different aesthetics, different things that a society does.

To answer a policy question, maybe you don’t yet have a political ideology, but you must have some sort of vision of what good is, and for that you need some sort of philosophy, or aesthetics, or vision.

Here are some bits of the aesthetic-political vision that I have for humanity, and which will ultimately guide me in answering policy questions:

Humanity should reach for the stars. We should, at some point, expand into space, and have more and more scientific and technological discoveries that help us answer fundamental questions about existence.
Humanity should put an end to suffering, or at least strike a significant blow to suffering. This is just technologically enabled compassion. This compassion should extend to all beings, both future and present, both human and non-human, and possibly non-organic as well.
Humanity should maximize liberty and happiness.

Philosophically, I would call myself a transhumanist. I do have sympathy for some of the concerns of my diametrical opponents - anarcho-primitivists - but even taking these concerns into account, I still side with transhumanism on many questions.

Methodology

I will write a series of posts which will essentially just ask popular policy questions, with the intent of arriving at a specific policy that I endorse. Popular, because there’s a million possible policy questions, and I don’t expect to be able to answer every single one of them.

I believe it is important to write down my thought process because I want people to be able to look up how I arrived at a political stance and then give me info that I didn’t have when I was forming the opinion. I want to hear opposing arguments!

Essentially, what I am doing is just answering the political compass test in a long-winded way.

There, they explicitly say the following:

Please note that this isn’t a survey, and these aren’t questions. They’re propositions.

Propositions are a very different proposition!

To question the logic of individual ones that irritate you is to miss the point.

Some propositions are extreme, and some are moderate.

That’s how we can show you whether you lean towards extremism or moderation on the Compass.

Your responses should not be overthought. Some of them are intentionally vague.

Their purpose is to trigger reactions in the mind, measuring feelings and prejudices rather than detailed opinions on policy.

All of them are necessarily biased, but we have a careful balance of biases!

This is something that most of our critics simply don’t understand.

Well, I want to do the exact opposite. I want detailed opinions on policy, and I don’t want feelings and prejudices. Their premise is that it’s worth measuring one’s political ideology even in the absence of specific knowledge (=detailed opinion on policy). I reject that premise, at least for my own purpose. Ideology is a description of policy, and if you have no policy to begin with, you can end up anywhere on the compass and it won’t matter much. I don’t particularly care about measuring vibes.

Having a kid is one of the best things that have happened to me

Thu, 15 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

A little more than five months ago, I became a father. I was pretty apprehensive about the whole thing at first because I didn’t know if I’d do well. In fact, I had had doubts about my capabilities as a parent for years before, but I am glad to report that having a kid is awesome and fulfilling and you should have kids as soon as possible.

Doubts

Here’s a semi-chronological list of my doubts, both personal and more philosophical, related to having children:

Is it moral to bring children into this world (because the world is evil and life is suffering etc. etc. etc.). Answer: Yes.
Is it okay to have kids if we’re facing {insert global civilizational issue here}? Shouldn’t we, for example, not have kids if the world is overpopulated? Answer: You should have kids.
Would I even be a good father if I became one? Look at all my character flaws. Answer: yes (at least so far, and I don’t expect to see anything changed any time soon).
But I have poor genetics like {insert random stupid thing like imperfect eyesight}. Answer: yes, and… so what? You don’t have anything that would make it immoral to have kids.
But I don’t have money. Answer: this is actually legitimate and I did wait until I had a stable job and a house. But if I had a stronger support network, I would have advised myself to take the risk.
But muh interests and hobbies hurr durr. Answer: it’s literally ok, you can do all the things you like to do, and really, you will find out that you don’t really like to do some things you thought you liked.

More on doubts

I feel like I want to go into slightly more detail about this.

Life is not just suffering

The moral calculus depends on your starting assumptions, but generally speaking, human life in the present doesn’t have negative utility (if it ever had that). You could convince me that some (semi-)sentient beings have negative utility and that it would be better for them if they were never born, but I don’t think that applies to humans in general.

Overpopulation

The issue du jour is demographic collapse now, so this is a pretty old one. Nevertheless, regressive progressives still stick to the idea that fewer humans is a good idea, and that we should somehow reduce the human population. This is academic at best, and genocidal at worst, and doesn’t generally fit with what I want humanity to do. I don’t want us to live sustainably as hunter-gatherers until the Sun becomes a red dwarf and eats our planet. I want us to reach for the stars and get to at least Kardashev 2, and ideally 3. Focusing on overpopulation doesn’t fit with my transhumanist ideology anyway so it’s a no-go from the start.

Would I even be a good father?

If there was a “Good Father” index which tracked the most important aspects of fatherhood, I think I would be at least above the median, and I hope I’d at least be in the top 25%.

By any sane metric, I’m doing just fine, so my criticism, while justified in some aspects, should not prevent me from parenthood.

Poor genetics

I’m just average, and that’s totally fine. While I do have some sympathy for mild eugenics (not compulsory… anything really), I really don’t think that I have anything to worry about. What, flat feet and eyesight that’s not even bad but just not perfect for a fighter jet pilot? What are we doing here, building a supersoldier? What kind of stupid reasoning would “I have poor genetics” even be in my case?

And in addition, I’m smart and a large portion of that is presumably genetic, and my partner is too, so it is a good thing for the world to propagate that trait.

Money

Actually legitimate. But good support networks allow - and should allow - people to have kids at a young age. I didn’t have that, so this was a legitimate concern at a certain point. You may be thinking that the concern was overblown - I insist that it was not. It’s not like I was middle class and wanted to be upper class before having kids. I was lower class, way lower. Now I’m middle class, so now it’s a solved problem.

Hobbies and interests

Sure you have to cut some things out, or just postpone them. This is fine. There was a time when I was anxious about not doing things right - as in, if you don’t put in X amount of hours each week, you’re wasting time. This is kinda adolescent thinking. It’s thinking informed by watching too much anime and thinking that you’re not embodying protagonist energy if you don’t train for {crazy number of hours} each day.

I haven’t made a video in months, maybe a full year, maybe more. That’s… ok. It’s just a hobby. I’ll come back to it. I’ll make time for creative pursuits somehow, at a later point. Kids teach you patience - not just because you have to be patient with them, you also have to be patient with yourself.

Random things that are great

Here’s a collection of unexpected good things (in addition to the general goodness of having kids):

You put baby to sleep. You can now also take a nap! In fact, this is encouraged. Weirdly, having a baby can enhance your sleep habits.
You put baby to sleep. You’re not sleepy so you don’t take a nap. Guess what, you can just chill alongside your sleeping baby and… think. There’s no pressure to do anything, in fact, you’re encouraged not to lest you wake the baby. So you can just think, or meditate, or both. I’ve put in more meditation hours since I’ve had the baby than in the years before that.
You can walk around - in fact, you’re encouraged to. Walking with your kid is really good for the kid. Maybe in a sling, or maybe in a stroller.
Also, if you’re trying to lose weight, maybe you can put on a heavy backpack. I’ve been consistently doing 20 kg 5k rucks over hilly terrain. This is very very good. I have also lost almost 9 kg since 1 Jan this year, so something must be going right.
Perfect excuse for literally anything. Oh sorry, I can’t come - I have to take care of the baby.

Things nobody tells you about

Nobody knows what they’re doing.
The amount of poor thinking and misinformation related to parenting and childcare is astounding.
No seriously, it’s really really bad. I’m used to being sensitive to people’s claims because I have some rationalist training (= I’ve read The Sequences) but holy shit does the parenting “community” have some bad epistemology.
You always have guests. This can be a good or bad thing, but people are always coming and going.
Dogs are really fun, but their barking habits really do clash with the baby’s sleeping habits.
Puking yellow doesn’t mean you need to go to emergency services, despite what the NHS tells you. (Sometimes there’s just a bit of bile. It doesn’t mean that there’s a blockage.)
Owlet oxygen monitors (and presumably oxygen monitors in general) just cause more anxiety, instead of less.

(I’ll try to update this list when I think of more examples)

People respect power

Fri, 19 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

People frequently hate Meadow Soprano more than Tony Soprano, and Skyler White more than Walter White. Yet these two are by all metrics much better people than Tony or Walter. Whatever failings they have, these must be lesser than the character failings of Tony Soprano or Walter White. What’s worse, being a hypocrite or a murderer?

A popular explanation is societal misogyny, i.e. our common internalized hate towards women. This also includes women hating other women.

There may be a gender component but I think it’s not that big of a part here. If everything else remained the same, and Meadow Soprano was Tony’s son, I think (s)he’d still get roughly the same amount of hate relative to Tony.

No, the common thread joining Meadow Soprano, Skyler White and every single instance of a person screeching on the street on camera is power, or lack thereof.

In today’s world it’s not popular to say this, but our ancestors wouldn’t find anything weird about it: people respect power.

In other words, you can get away with many, many things if you are powerful. You can quite literally be the worst person in the room - you can kill, torture, be sadistic, be mentally unbalanced, you name it - any single negative thing is tolerated the more power you have. Sticking to the world of TV fiction, this explains why Claire Underwood in House of Cards is not “annoying” the same way Skyler White is. She’s ruthless, she’s powerful. Sure, her husband is even more so, but we don’t hate her more than her husband in the show. Or at least, I don’t feel like she gets the same disproportional level of hate.

So it’s not that people hate female characters because they are female, they hate them because they are loud or obnoxious or hypocritical, but without power. Them being female has nothing (or very little) with it. And sometimes female characters aren’t even loud or obnoxious. Maybe they’re just vocal and adhere to a moral code. Those are obviously good things. Yet, even in that case, we will find ways to hate them if they have no power to accompany their voice and their moral code. This is pretty weird if you think about it - we respect power so much that we will literally ignore good traits (and even actively hate them) if they aren’t accompanied by power.

I signed up for cryonics

Mon, 15 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I have successfully signed up for cryonics. I have chosen Tomorrow Bio as my provider because they’re in Germany, and that’s close by.

I have what’s called a “term life insurance”, which will expire in 2054. Basically I pay a premium every month to cover the costs of cryopreservation in case I die. If I’m still alive in 30 years, then I have to figure out how to pay for my cryopreservation once I die. Essentially the deal is “here’s coverage for if you die one of these days, but you really need to figure out how to earn more money and how to invest it”.

So now I’m officially racing against the clock to figure out investments which will net me whatever the cost of preservation is in the future (hundreds of thousands of euros). I mean, I’ve always been racing against time, but it’s just official right now.

With that being said, I feel like I am not fulfilling my earnings potential. It’s above average for the region, but I don’t know if regional comparisons are a good reference class. I think that “people in the Western world with remote-first jobs that have a similar level of mental capability as I do” is a much better reference class than “people in Croatia”, and in that reference class, I’m significantly below average, which directly affects how long I am going to live. So it’s not vanity or greed, it’s quite literally a question of life and death.

So yeah, that’s something to fix.

Using AI is disrespectful

Thu, 27 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I just got sent a link to an AI platform that can be used to generate videos. Their selling point is that you can make instructional videos by simply typing up a prompt, and they’ll generate a human-looking avatar who’ll say all the right things.

People complain for a bunch of reasons around the use of AI, for example whether it’s ethical for companies to profit off scraping the public domain and training their AI models on that.

That (and others) are good questions, but I think there’s another, more banal aspect to complain about, and that is that using AI is disrespectful.

If you make me watch your grotesque video about avoiding phishing, and I know that you didn’t even bother to present yourself, that’s somehow even worse than if you’re making me watch your own abominable video where you did present.

Your email reads like ChatGPT? Oh, thank you my lord, for responding to this humble peasant; I know you don’t have time and can’t be bothered to stoop so low as to type up the words yourself, so your aide was the one to write, yet I appreciate you responding.

Where have we collectively gone astray? How did we go from “hey, can you see if this email is clear enough” to “can you write a response to this email?”.

AND THEN how the hell did we decide to put that into overdrive and reach for new levels of abomination, making goddamn AI VIDEO?

Jesus Christ, at least I can skim through your dumbass email and get to the point, I can’t do that with your video.

On taste

Thu, 02 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Taste is an excellent proxy for quality. If someone has good taste, their decisions are of higher quality. This applies to all domains, both artistic and non-artistic. In fact, you could argue that they apply more to domains outside of art because art decision making is taste, so it’s redundant to even mention it.

Within domains such as engineering or finance, taste applies a lot. If you create a software monstrosity (on an architectural level), you should respond to it with a measure of disgust. If the thing really is a monstrosity, you should feel as if it were in bad taste.

For example, the same way you might look at a really ugly building, and say that it doesn’t have any taste, or look at a poorly dressed man, and say that he has no taste - that same way of thinking extends (and should extend) into your professional domain.

I am not proposing that every engineering decision be made according to the “taste” of the engineer, but I am saying that this is a neglected component, and one you should be on the lookout for when collaborating with other people.

The reason is simple: if you have good taste, it is very difficult to co-create a living space with someone that doesn’t have good taste. By that same token, it is very difficult to architect a software solution or create a financial plan or draft a document with someone who lacks taste.

Taste is industry-dependent. Some thing that are in good taste in one industry may be in poor taste in another. Take for example marketing text. Most tasteful marketing is very distasteful technical writing. This applies both to content and the presentation.

How to know if you have taste? I don’t know. I guess you “just know”. Maybe some things just look ugly to you and you struggle to find arguments. Or - you can find arguments, but it just seems absurd that you should - because look at how ugly the thing is!

Some Thoughts in Traffic

Wed, 06 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

(these are literally thoughts I had sitting in traffic and that relate to traffic, but you’re free to extract generalized life lessons from them if you want)

When someone cuts you off in traffic, you might get angry, but their behavior, their cutting-off-other-people-in-traffic personality guarantees that you will never be stuck behind them, unable to go faster.
The way to minimize killing animals on the road is to drive in the middle of the road, straddling two lanes (if the oncoming lane is empty). That way, you are maximizing the space (and therefore reaction time) between the road and whatever it is on the side of the road. This predisposes that both sides of the road are equally likely to contain crossing animals - if there’s a literal wall on one side, then it’s less killing per kilometer (kpk - nice measure eh?) to drive near that wall.
Google Maps, on the surface, appears to be an Earth element (Fire, Water, Earth, Air, Void), but it’s actually a Water element because when it detects congestion ahead, it reroutes you to the same destination, just like water finds another path. (I can’t decide if this thought is high, pseudo-deep or plain schizo.)
There are defensive drivers and offensive drivers. Defensive drivers worry about bad things happening, and imagine them happening before they do. So the difference isn’t “one speeds, the other one doesn’t”. In fact, defensive drivers also speed. The difference is what you’re thinking about. If you’re feeling really optimistic on your every drive, you’re likely an offensive driver. If you are imagining all the ways something could go wrong as you drive, you’re defensive. Thinking about the direction of oncoming animals is an example of pessimistic thinking, and therefore defensive driving.
Defensive driving is the obvious right choice.
Defensive driving has a bad effect though. Bad actors (offensive drivers) can do their thing unchallenged, such as cutting people off in traffic, because defensive drivers will have predicted their actions and already have adapted their maneuvers. Therefore the only thing that curtails offensive driving is offensivemaxxing, where an offensive driver is so offensive that nothing could be done to help them (e.g. driving at 100 km/h into a narrow corner and going offroad) OR other offensive drivers, which will cause crashes. It’s a sort of predator-prey dynamic, but offensive drivers are both the predator and prey, and defensive drivers are the background foliage.
I’ve changed my mind about driving cars with manual shifting. I no longer think that makes any sense, unless you’re racing or a hobbyist with retro cars. For everyday driving, automatic shifting is good, more relaxed, less cognitive overhead, and if traffic is safe enough, you can take a sip of water without worrying that you won’t be able to downshift in time for a corner or something.
Despite my strong occasional bouts of hate towards automobile traffic and optimization for automobile infrastructure, overall I still think that cars did a whole lot of good, despite all the CO2 emissions, lead poisoning, community disruption - both on the level of making streets unsafe for children to play on, and disrupting public transport as a joining force of the community. If we can choose between a world where people have their own robocarriage, and a world where you can’t go anywhere except on foot or by horse, even if all else isn’t equal (!), you’ll still probably choose to live in the robocarriage world… because people want to go places!
Computer networking and traffic engineering are essentially the same discipline, with differences in the protocol specifications (e.g. TCP vs. right-hand-side rule) and packet formats (e.g. datagrams vs. cars). Yet all the guys that I know that studied traffic engineering in college know nothing about protocols, or even that kind of thinking. You would expect that you’ll learn about e.g. Dijkstra’s pathfinding algorithm in computer science and in traffic engineering, but (from my experience with people in both disciplines), you only learn about it in CS.
The European version of the pickup truck is the cargo van with the pickup bed. It’s almost the same thing, actually it literally is the same thing. Yet there’s a sense in which a pickup truck is a car (a personal vehicle), and a pickup van is a van (a work vehicle), even when a pickup truck is used for work.

Self-hate is okay sometimes

Tue, 20 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

I think that self-love and self-compassion are generally good, but there’s a right tool for the right job, and those are not right tools when the job involves a short-term endeavor that includes sacrifice and discipline.

In other words, you should live a life of self-love, but you should not expect self-love to give you any results when you’re trying to force a change. Being a little bit angry with yourself, having a negative self-talk, these things have a bad reputation, and rightly so if you live like that. But if you spend some months like that, maybe a year, and this kind of anger shapes you into a better version of yourself, then it worked and it was fine.

Self-acceptance is good if the thing you’re accepting is good, but what if it’s not? What if you are objectively not good on any given metric? What if you’re morbidly obese? Should you practice self-love and acceptance? Maybe. Maybe you should try it and see what this mindset does when you falter and miss your diet goals. “Oh, you had a rough day, you’re ill, it’s fine if you eat these five hamburgers. After all, look at all the progress you made!” What kind of behavior will this reaction support in the future?

Self-hate or self-criticism or self-anger have a bad reputation purely on the basis that they are negative, which somehow by default means that they are not good in any way, shape or form. Since when does “negative” mean “bad”? I can give you a ton of examples of bad things that are “positive” in their mindset/vibe. By extension, just because something or someone is negative, does not automatically presuppose that it’s the wrong mindset to be in.

Right tool for the right job. Sometimes you owe it to yourself and to others to display appropriate amounts of hostility towards some aspect of you. Ultimately it does come from self-love, I guess, because the opposite of love is not hate but indifference. If you hate some aspect of yourself, that means that you care, and anger is, if anything, a high-powered tool that can be turned against anything. Self-acceptance is soft and gentle, and self-anger is hard and fuming. Guess which of the two tools is better to apply in short bursts to shape something?

Being good at the basics

Sat, 04 Nov 2023 00:00:00 +0000

In Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, there’s a notion of being “good at the basics”, as opposed to “being good by knowing advanced techniques”. How you want to be good is a question of personal preference, but the idea is that these are the two ways, and most people do one or the other.

I think this is a concept that applies outside of BJJ, and one that’s useful if you’re trying to learn a field, but you’re not sure how to approach it.

I’ll take physics as an example, because that is a field where I would like to be good at the basics. The “basics” of physics would be things that you learn in high school, while “advanced” stuff would be what you would learn in university, maybe at a graduate level. (There’s probably other ways of separating the basics from the advanced topics.)

You may roughly remember some of the simple formulas that you have learned in class during high school, you may orient yourself through a textbook problem, you may perform some basic calculations. You sorta know the basics. But how does it look like when you’re good at the basics?

It might mean that you know the equations by heart, that you’ve really internalized their meaning.

It might also mean that you know the quantities or values for things around you. You can correctly approximate how much things weigh, how fast they move, or what their kinetic and potential energy is.

You can approximate how much joules of energy an apple contains, or how much energy hits a m2 of the Earth’s surface on a sunny day. You have a good feeling for how much compressive stress a piece of concrete can withstand, and you can quickly and accurately calculate what the kinetic energy is of a car that you’re driving in. You can also quickly convert between different units, and compare the quantities of different things.

Being really good at the basics of physics in this way requires a sort of embodied understanding. It requires a level of “closeness” to the subject matter that allows you to apply this knowledge to the world around you, to the extent that you start seeing the world around you in terms of that subject. You take a walk outside and you can’t help but notice the physics of it all.

You’ll notice that being “good at the basics” is actually a linguistic misdirection. This type of understanding is drastically different from the level of understanding you have after high school, yet both refer to the “basics”. If you are really good at the basics, you are in fact an expert - an expert in the basics. The word “basics” here hides a huge amount of complexity, or time and effort.

Why be good at the basics (as opposed to the advanced stuff)? These things sometimes depend on the field, but mostly because being good at the advanced stuff will be required for a career in that particular field, but useless for other goals. I, for example, have no ambition to become a physicist but I do have an ambition to closely understand the world around me, and to make accurate estimates and good decisions. For me, being really good at the basics of physics is much more important than being good at some advanced thing within physics.

There are other fields where you can notice the two ways of being good at them. Writing is one of those fields. “Being really good at the basics” in writing looks like really plain and simple language that’s easy to understand. By being good at the basics, you’re actually hiding complexity. It’s not like there is no complexity involved, it’s just hidden from the reader. The reader is served a simple and clear text, but the complexity was in the process, from developing clear thinking about a topic, to the editing process that tries to simplify the resulting text. Compare this to being good at writing, but not in this basic sense: writers using interesting and innovative metaphors, or having a really rich vocabulary.

In cooking, there’s a notion of being good at the basics as well. For example, compare a cook who has perfected the bowl of rice vs. a cook who uses espuma or sous vide cooking.

In drumming, there’s that notion as well. For example, compare a drummer who has perfected a “simple” 4/4 funk groove using just the bass drum, snare and hi-hat vs. a drummer who uses a full set to play some super advanced polyrhythm.

Ultimately, choosing the strategy for how to be good at something is a matter of personal preference, and you may have different preferences depending on the field. As time passes, I find myself more interested in developing expertise in the basics in whatever I do. It often seems much more applicable outside of the narrow domain it belongs to, and it always seems to require fewer prerequisites. So my advice, if you need it, would be: “if you want to learn X, and you’re not sure what exactly to learn, try learning the basics really well”.

Technological solutions to the climate crisis

Wed, 19 Jul 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Climate and environmental activists frequently complain how the technocentric approach to solving the climate crisis isn’t enough or isn’t good in some other way than “enough”. I agree that it is not enough. Policy probably plays an equally, if not more important role. Policy interventions are things you can do right away, while technological breakthroughs are not guaranteed. And while policy interventions may have unintended consequences, they are at least guaranteed in some way, while technology may - or may not - be developed.

Of course, the two are not mutually exclusive, and shouldn’t be seen this way. However asks you to stop developing seeds that can withstand a wider spectrum of temperatures, or cheap anti-frost systems, or glasshouses that can withstand hail, and instead join their banner-holding protest in front of a regulator or a megacorp is probably uninformed, and likely stupid. (If they ask you to go join the protest in addition to your technological work, then I don’t hold any judgment.) And naturally, the inverse is also true, but there’s something to say about the historical effectiveness of technological interventions. Namely: they have the capacity to start, while regulation only has the capacity to stop. Ok, if you pass sensible laws, you could in theory also incite but you can never start something through a law, only stop it. Therefore, technology is inherently proactive, while regulation is inherently reactive (and often regressive, as shown by multiple outdated regulations). Therefore I place much more weight on technocentric solutions of physical problems (such as the climate crisis) - it’s something that looks forwards. It’s long term, while regulation is often a short term patch.

So to say it in the simplest terms:

Technology:

not guaranteed
takes a long time to create and adopt
could also be very harmful
solves the problem in a proactive, long-term way

Policy:

almost guaranteed
quick to implement on a local scale
ineffective when there’s a coordination problem
can become outdated, but very difficult to get rid of at that point
serves at best as a quick patch

With those two out of the way, I want to make an additional case for technology in the context of “solving” the climate crisis.

The climate crisis is a set of physical problems: droughts, extreme weather, very high and very low temperatures, and more. These events then have second-order consequences, for example famine, or political consequences. My take is that, wherever we are currently in the process of being crushed by hostile climate events, the time to work on technological solutions was always yesterday. And evidently the second best time is now.

If we are just at the start of the climate crisis, the time to figure out technological solutions to the myriad problems posed by climate change is - now. We still have time, we could still do something, we can still adapt.
If we are somewhere in the middle of the crisis, and the time for policy to verifiably stop it has passed, and we can only patch up damage (implying that things won’t ever return to “normal”), then the time for technological solutions is also… now. It’s evident: the optimal time window for regulatory action has passed, we missed the train, and the only thing that’s left before us is creating better tools, making better types of shelter, using better materials to build, growing more resilient seeds for food, and so on.
If we’re at the end of the climate crisis (nobody actually believes it because civilization is still very much alive and well), then regulatory action is a long gone glimmer of hope. The only hope - however small it may be - is that someone will figure out a solution of a technological nature.

So whatever you think we should do - even if you think it’s all very early and we should focus on policy - you can at least appreciate that technological solutions are applicable, essentially, in every stage of the problem.

I want to say one final thing: “solving” the climate crisis is a muddled way to think about it. The “climate crisis” is a set of hundreds, if not thousands, of individual problems, that sometimes have a connection to one another. Here are some:

food security
water availability
sufficient energy
migratory crisis
biodiversity loss (this might actually be a good thing if you’re a negative utilitarian)
blistering heat
extreme weather events

There are more, and even these few can be separated into many sub-problems, of which some will have sub-problems of their own. “Solving the climate crisis” doesn’t exist - there exists only the solving of individual problems, which are often engineering (and sometimes policy) endeavors.

You could argue that it would be great if we had a magic wand that we could simply wave and reduce our carbon emissions some 15 years ago (whether or not that would be a good thing from the perspective of economic and social development is another case entirely). You could argue that the next best thing to a magic wand is regulation. In that particular case, you would be right, regulation does work as a magic wand, but a very bad one. You can in fact just wave it around and make wide-affecting changes, but it’s particularly prone to backfiring and it also doesn’t work when other polities have wands of their own. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t regulate. In some cases, it’s absolutely certain that you should - that you must regulate.

But the whole point of my writing here is this: whether or not you have a magic wand that can locally stop/redirect economic development shouldn’t affect your decisions to invest in long-term, engineering solutions.

Productivity

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 14:41:56 +0100

I have some thoughts on productivity. The number one is: productivity is important. I get that there’s a toxic way to do productivity, and that there’s even “productivity porn”, but these are all detractors from a general idea which is - good. It’s good to be productive.

If you’re trying to achieve something, it’s better to achieve it by spending less time, less money, and less energy. If you’re building a fence, there’s no benefit in building it in five months if you could do it in five weeks (all else being equal). There’s a sneering type of view of productivity where it’s like “oh well if you’re more productive, then you’ll just get more work piled on top”. That may be true, but it depends entirely on the context.

If you work for a company, and your manager sees that you are productive, you might end up with more work. In an ideal world, you would get a better compensation as well, but compensation changes have their own schedule, while workload follows another schedule. That’s how people end up in situations where they’re waiting for a pay bump month after month, despite having significantly higher productivity than they might have had before. So in a corporate environment, productivity - at least overt productivity - may be punished, instead of rewarded.

But if you’re working for yourself or doing work on some personal project, then productivity is awesome and you should pursue it. It isn’t all about the destination, but it isn’t all about the journey either. Why not enjoy the journey, but also make it optimized? Besides, not all journeys are meant to be enjoyed.

Criticism of this type of productivity is still: well, you’ll just add more work if you increase your productivity. That may be the case, but there are two different dimensions to work. There’s rate of completion, and then there’s time allocated. These two are independent, but productivity improves them both. You could be more productive, and allocate less time (which means that you have more free time that you explicitly don’t allocate to more work). Or you could be more productive, and increase the rate of completion (you work the same amount of time, but you get more work done in that time).

In other words, if you’re productive, you have a chance of having more free time or completing your project sooner. But if you’re not productive, you don’t have that chance. In the first case, you can explicitly increase your working hours by taking on bigger projects, but in the second case, you’re already working at your maximum by default. Productivity doesn’t guarantee slack, but it at least offers a way to it. Non-productivity guarantees that you won’t have slack.

Increasing productivity is important, and there are many ways to do so. One of them is using better tools. If you have a hammer and nails, you work at some rate. But if you have a nail gun, this rate of work is significantly increased. Other people can also be considered “tools” in this sense. A carpenter doing work for you might increase the speed of building something (or speed and quality). Depending on your situation, it may or may not be a good idea to use that type of tool (sometimes the investment is too much, and the returns are too small).

But looking to optimize work is valuable. There’s also a sense in which you need to decide which specific thing you could do best - or, more specifically, which thing will give you the greatest returns on your investments. Let’s say that you have tasks A and B, and you can do both better than somebody you could hire. But you can do A much better than B, so you hire someone to do B, despite them being worse at B than you are. You have work around A, and the returns on that work are greater than if you did B, or split your time between A and B. And these returns also include the costs of hiring someone else to do B.

There’s one final thing. Using a tool or a system to improve productivity has two layers. One is the surface layer - the promise. The promise is: this tool (or system, or person) will improve your productivity by 2x. Maybe they do it in half the time, or for half the cost. But then there’s is the realistic layer, which is that using tools also costs resources. On the surface, it might seem a good idea that renting a power tool will give you 2x the productivity, but when you include the cost of driving to the place that rents tools, the organizational efforts around that, the coordination with external factors (e.g. appropriate weather for the use of such a tool) and so on, the actual level of productivity gains drops, maybe to 1.5x. That’s still 1.5x better than you would have otherwise done!

In practice, I’ve seen this with contractors doing work on my house. At first, it seems that you just specify the task, and then the task is done. But what usually happens is that you specify a task, but then need to coordinate with that person, and that person doesn’t fix the issue right away. Then you start researching, learning about electrical systems, or plumbing, or tiling, or whatever. You gain some level of proficiency in that, you start to understand the field. You start thinking - maybe I should just do it myself if I’m already forced to go so deep into this topic. That’s a mistake! It’s cool to learn new things, but just because your productivity multiplier isn’t as big as you want, it doesn’t mean it isn’t bigger in absolute terms. That is, maybe the contractor won’t do good work without supervision, additional coordination, negotiations about pay, you learning about their field, etc. But they might still do better work than if you yourself took to doing the task!

Naturally this all depends but it’s often a mistake to say “I’ll just do it myself”. The “just” part is wrong - it’s never “just”. There’s a lot of issues that crop up, and even if the tool, system, or person that you’re relying on as a productivity multiplier isn’t a 10xer, they might still be a 2xer, while you’re probably a 1xer.

Real life maximalist manifesto

Mon, 19 Dec 2022 11:59:45 +0100

IRL > online

Real life is better than online. A simple proof: Real life is better online. People watch videos of other people doing things - in real life!

Everyone uses the Internet to some extent, but being “terminally online” is bad for your health. It’s also bad for other things as well, such as:

being socially adapted
knowing how to do things
normal human things

Being “terminally online” isn’t a badge of pride to be worn. It’s pretty shameful. When you’re in the terminal stage of cancer, you can’t really do much about it, but everyone recognizes it’s bad. Being in the terminal stage of being online (i.e. being always online and being warped by the onlineness) actually is something you can change, so it’s shameful if you don’t!

Technology has been warped

Technology was supposed to liberate us, which it has successfully done, but then we took technology and we put ourselves into a dystopian future. Some companies contributed more than others, but really, the “online communities” are made and maintained by the users themselves, not the service providers. It’s not Discord’s or TikTok’s fault (well, not entirely), but of the “content creators”, of the “influencers”, of those people who took the technology and made it into something worse.

Everyone on the Internet is a loser

“Internet people” are generally losers. Competing in the attention economy isn’t a noble or good thing. “Influencing” as a career is vapid and empty. Who are you influencing? What for? To influence someone used to imply an underlying purpose. Now you have influencers for hire, just like corporate lobbyists for government. These people direct flows of attention of consumers, of the Internet lower class, and live of the taxes on that attention. Give them not your attention! Instead, turn to more important things!

It’s not like the Matrix, but it kinda is

Things happen in the real world.

In the Internet world, many more things happen, of which almost none have any importance. It’s an overlay that you are willingly projecting on your own eyes by opening your phone or your computer. Sometimes it’s OK to step into that Matrix, but don’t think that the latest scam coin or the latest Youtuber drama or the latest Twitch boob flash are what’s actually happening in the world around you.

The real world is full of important problems

I’ve written about a subset of this before in The world doesn’t need another app.

In the domain of engineering, there’s a subset of software engineering. A lot of software engineering (and maybe even most) is bad. Not just in terms of worse performance, but worse outcomes, worse things to focus on, worse problems selected for solving.

The world really doesn’t need another app! There are big, important things to solve in the physical world! Software will certainly be a part of it. But software engineering in a predatory algorithm churner is just objectively bad, except for the owners of said algorithm churner. Of course the giant spider loves the sticky net it makes. It lives of it!

The real world is full of wonderful discoveries

Outside of solving problems through engineering, there’s just a lot of discoveries, hidden knowledge, precious gems of experience to be had.

From reading arcane books, to breathing in the clean air of the mountain tops or the heavy air of a slum, to spending a morning with your loved one in bed - these are real experiences that can be only made in real life.

From the grand scientific discoveries that you could make, to beautiful little personal Zen moments, the real world is full of these things.

Technology is good, actually

All this being said, the Internet is an excellent invention. Tapping into the enormous extended brain is extremely powerful. It’s like we summoned a god who does our bidding. Technology is good. But what is it good for? For the real world.

Publicly funded higher education

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 13:24:50 +0100

Equal public funding for higher education is a bad idea for several reasons:

Academic institutions are full of inefficiency; public funding is indirectly funding people who sit on a chair and collect a salary, similar to how landlords collect rent on “having” a piece of real estate (while “providing a service” is often a much smaller factor).
Citizens should not be forced to pay for something that is not useful to them. Want to study Sanskrit (or in my case French and Swedish)? Great, of course you can, but why should the rest of society pay for it?
Academic inflation: it is increasingly difficult to find a job without a degree, but the need for that degree is not realistic. A degree is something that HR departments use to cover themselves when hiring (“It’s surprising that X is not doing their job well. But we’re not to blame because they had a degree, we couldn’t have known.”). This creates a dynamics of the tragedy of the commons, where the public good is the time that people would otherwise spend on something more useful, but are now forced to go to college because all their competition is going to college.
Related to 3), publicly funded education is an indirect government subsidy to corporations (the company does not have to train its workers because they come pre-trained, and the company then covers the last X% of necessary education). In other words, taxpayers bear the cost of the company, a cost that the company itself could hypothetically cover.
So corporations generate demand for degrees, taxpayers bear the cost of those degrees, and the end result is (due to the inefficiency of higher education institutions) that the degree itself is not worth as much as it could be, so even corporations do not benefit as much as they could. People throughout society lose time and money.

If society decides to publicly fund higher education, it makes much more sense to define exactly what we want to encourage in the next period and then only subsidize that, and if someone really wants to study something that is not so useful to people, they can, but at their own cost. For example, if we need more metallurgical engineers in the next 5 years, that can be subsidized, but if you really want to study French and Swedish, go ahead, no one is stopping you.

What is problematic is that people often choose a college because they failed elsewhere or they don’t know what else to do with their lives. But that’s not a good reason. There’s an argument for publicly funded “self searching”, but there’s gotta be a better way than studying something random and wasting three to seven years there.

Weight loss

Thu, 08 Dec 2022 09:56:17 +0100

Thinking about weight loss:

I’m currently at around 96 kg of body weight. For the last couple of years, this number has been steadily increasing. After trying out 100EASY, I decided to go back to counting calories as my main method of losing weight. 100EASY is really good for maintaining weight, but it didn’t help me lose it, and I did it for more than 100 days because of the in-built -10 day jumps whenever a day isn’t complete.

I’ve thought about why I am trying to lose weight. There are several reasons:

aesthetics
less pain in knees
more freedom in movement

…but the biggest one is this: I know what the future looks like.

I currently don’t need to lose weight: I look fine, very average. I wouldn’t categorize myself as fat at all. But if I just extrapolate from my current body weight trend, I can see that I’ll be around 110, maybe 120 kg when I am 40 or 50 years old. How hard will it be to lose weight then? Much harder. And at that point, I actually will be fat. And to make things worse, extrapolating another trend - the complexity and difficulty of my life - it seems like it’s not going to get any better when I’m 40. And this is to be expected for anyone - people get children, they change jobs, maybe they change careers, health issues occur. It’s just going to get more difficult in general, and adding an extra 20-30 kg of padding on top of that will just make things worse.

So the greatest reason to lose weight today is to help yourself 10 years from now. Allow that person to be in a position where they need to lose 10 kg, instead of 20 or 30. Or ideally, give them such a gift that they need not lose any weight. Losing weight today means giving the gift of health to your future self.

The world doesn't need another app

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 23:01:24 +0100

The world doesn’t need another app. It needs more heat pump installers, more civil engineers, more biotech innovation, more advanced materials, more nuclear and solar power, better supply lines, and just generally more in the physical realm, layer 0.

Smart people that are good at rotating shapes take the easy route because the incentives make it that way. It’s much easier to scale a digital company than a physical one, because you can copy and paste code, but can’t do the same with a factory. And shape-rotating employees find it more profitable to join such ventures rather than do something else with their time. The absurd steroid growth requirements of Silicon Valley are the cause of this profitability for engineers, and the resulting bubble for the rest of society. Also, the Baumol effect, which is part of why we live in an uglier world that costs more.

But hey - the world doesn’t need another app, or another image sharing site. Whatever it is, it probably isn’t as important as:

improving global supply lines
making agriculture more resilient to climate change
making or installing heat pumps to ensure a more efficient energy future
creating new advanced materials
improving medicine, or even stopping aging

Even literally just being a plumber is more honest than optimizing a predatory algorithm that sucks people’s attention and depletes them of their life force.

Of course, every real innovation will probably include some level of software, but software helping to achieve some important physical goal isn’t the subject of this rant.

The current tech bubble is not only producing unnecessary software, or killing off good software companies because they’re about sustainability over exponential growth, but it’s making humanity pay a high opportunity cost: the people who would otherwise work on more important things now work on less important things. The talent goes where there’s most money.

We could have advanced robotized greenhouses automated to control their microclimate, but instead we have things like this:

We could have a futuristic environment, floating cities, augmented bodies, spaceships, or we could just have non-futuristic things that work well and don’t cost a fortune. Another app doesn’t solve this.

I agree that it’s time to build - but a lot of that building must come from the software that has already eaten enough of the world. And for that, the desire to build doesn’t come by itself. It comes by having the right incentives so that people who can build, don’t go and build something stupid instead.

Not wanting to give advice

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 09:05:19 +0200

I feel like I stopped wanting to give people advice. And not in the fake way either: where you’re the “silent” type, but deep down you really want someone to get into a position where they ask for your advice or where your advice is expected. I’m just pretty indifferent to advice now. I don’t particularly like or dislike receiving advice, and I don’t particularly like or dislike giving it. I think it’s because I recognize now that most advice is bad or inapplicable. But not all - which is why I’m not anti-advice, just indifferent. The nuggets that are good are really good.

I also think this might be a developmental milestone. In the sense that you have to “mature” to be able to do this. Advice-giving is a weird mixture of things, and I’ve often seen status exchanges in advice-giving. If I’m giving you advice, that means that I’m above you, better than you in some way. I’ve seen (and been) that guy, where you have some limited exposure to the world, and, with altogether too much confidence, you go around telling people what they should be doing.

I think that giving advice is better when you’re explicitly asked for it, and receiving advice is better when you explicitly ask for it. Also, the advice should probably within a very narrow or technical domain.

But instead of advice, it’s better to show your work. Show what you do, show the results of what you do, and allow people to learn from you if they want to. I learn a lot from people by simply observing them and making my own conclusions. This way, the conclusions are mine, nobody prepackaged them and gave them to me. It was I who made the conclusions, and that makes me value them more.

Fact post: project-based learning

Thu, 02 Jun 2022 22:05:42 +0200

“But when am I going to use any of this?” - every single kid in school ever.

There’s an idea that project-based learning is more efficient than the traditional school curriculum. It makes sense, but so did the idea that learning styles are important, and that turned out to be false.

Here are a couple of thoughts before I delve into the research:

When I’m learning about something, it stands to reason that, in the long run, I’ll learn more if I’m interested in the material. One way of being interested in the material is to have a specific goal in mind, the achievement of which depends on you learning the material. However, as anyone with any goal whatsoever knows, some things you want to do very much, but you really don’t want to do some of the background work for them.
Having a specific goal (a project) will serve as a wrapper around the exact same thing you would be doing following a traditional curriculum: reading textbooks and solving quizzes. Let’s say you’re trying to build a robot and realize that you need to learn about classical mechanics to achieve that goal. You’ll bust out the textbook, try to figure out the page which will solve your specific problem, you will fail because you have a specific situation which requires a deeper understanding of the entire field of classical mechanics, and then you’ll end up doing what you would have been doing anyway: reading textbooks and doing quizzes.
With that being said, you do provide an answer to the question “why do I need to know this?”, but it’s not clear to me that knowing an application for something really makes a difference in knowledge retention. I know the application of the equations used for electrical circuits, but it doesn’t mean I remember them.
But maybe the act of applying itself is what makes the knowledge stick in the mind. There’s a relatively easy way to test this: set up three groups, two project-based, and one traditional. When one project-based group gets stuck on the project, and they obtain the knowledge needed to “unlock” progress, simply level them up without them actually applying the knowledge. So if they’re e.g. building a robot arm, and they are missing some crucial insight into a particular subfield of physics, when they go and obtain that knowledge using traditional methods, just give them a working robot arm (or whatever the project is) and face them with the next challenge. The other project-based group should actually apply the knowledge - the members themselves should go and build whatever they’re building. Finally, test the knowledge of the three groups and see if the act of applying knowledge had any effect on retention.

I expect that having a project-based approach serves as a minor boost to motivation, but doesn’t really make a difference regarding knowledge retention.

So, what does the research say?

This systematic review says that it’s inconclusive because the studies weren’t done well. And this is only for small kids. I could imagine that different approaches might have different effects depending on age.

This paper describes how biomedical engineers collaborated on some projects and concludes that project-based learning works well. Direct quote: “It is felt that the projects were successful to some extent. They certainly achieved several important learning outcomes of teamwork, ability to apply theoretical principles from multiple disciplines, effective communications, creative problem solving, and awareness of the importance of globalization especially in the biomedical engineering field.” It is felt that I don’t have any new insight after reading the article.

This paper tries to figure out the effects of project-based learning on “on collaborative learning, disciplinary subject learning, iterative learning, and authentic learning”, none of which sound like “we made both the control and experimental group take the same quiz afterwards”. And looking at the methodology - it’s not. They just asked a bunch of teachers some questions. I don’t consider this informative.

There’s “Baran, M., & Maskan, A. (2011). The effect of project-based learning on pre-service physics teachers electrostatic achievements. Cypriot Journal of Educational Sciences, 5(4), 243-257.”, but I can’t access that text, only the cached abstract, which speaks in favor of project-based learning. But they had only 20 people in the treatment group, and I have no idea what the methodology even was, so… this one also fails.

This review also concludes that “a causal link between PBL instruction and positive student outcomes cannot be established with certainty”.

My conclusion: we just don’t know for sure. I think that having a project serves as a motivator and a framework, but if you are the type of person that doesn’t need to immediately know how you’ll apply the thing you’re learning, then it’s more or less the same. For example, if you blindly trust that logarithms will be useful for something later on, then you don’t actually need a project for which logarithms would prove crucial. In both cases, you’ll end up doing the same thing: reading textbooks and doing practice problems.

Wielding civilization

Wed, 01 Jun 2022 09:05:35 +0200

The other day, I was walking home on an empty road and a bus drew past me. It got me thinking about the differences in our speeds. I could never compete with the bus on speed. Not only because the bus has a big engine, but also because of the context it’s embedded in. The bus lives in a world where the roads are made for it, and where fuel is available to it. Each of those two things - roads and fuel - both have their own highly complex supply networks. Roads require asphalt concrete, asphalt concrete requires giant plants for extracting rock and producing bitumen glue, both of these involve giant, planet-spanning networks of people who talk to each other, coordinate on amounts, routes, deadlines, shipments, issues with shipments, quality, quantity, and everything in between. And that’s just for road material! We haven’t even started to talk about the fuel part, nor how the buses themselves are produced! And the most incredible thing is how these networks - these complex, inert behemoths - they actually work, and work pretty well. If you taboo your understanding of what a road is, and instead see this enormous, civilization-spanning spell that has “road” as a byproduct, you really start to get incredulous that the whole thing works at all.

All this from the fact that the bus goes much faster than I walk. I guess I had a spiritual experience: a deep insight and appreciation of the sheer size of the entire thing. And that got me thinking - why have I been ignoring civilization?

Not in the sense of industrial illiteracy even though I could certainly be more industrially literate, but specifically in the sense of making a categorical distinction between being focused on things and being focused on people. These feel like they are different: people focused on things use tools, optimize systems, measure and analyze, think in terms of inputs and outputs, and so on. On the other hand, people focused on people use language, talk to others, understand their motivations, help or prevent them from achieving their goals, and so on.

And they are different, they’re two different clusters of personalities and preferences, but I guess I see the thing side of civilization now. I feel like I missed the forest for the trees with civilization. Civilization is also a tool to be wielded, same as any computer program, angle grinder, surgical knife, or 3D printer. It’s just huge.

All this maybe sounds trivial. More than anything, this is an appreciation post. Recognizing the tool-nature of civilization was similar to learning about x86 assembly: you know that the computer works somehow, you just don’t know how. But then you learn about assembly and you get a lot of appreciation for this entire level of nature. So, same for civilization. Thank you bus!

Oh, and there actually is one practical conclusion. If civilization is a thing to be wielded, a great, slow, powerful spell that binds an entire planet… you should maybe wield it! What I’m saying is that you should do politics.

From Steven Buss, speaking about local politics:

Many of us feel that local politics is too small or too inconsequential to be worth thinking about. But the reality is that local politics impacts your day more than anything else. The high cost of housing, the dirty sidewalks, the broken roads, the unsafe bike lanes, the crippling traffic and pitiful transit system are all due to bad local politics.

100EASY

Tue, 31 May 2022 09:49:39 +0200

There’s a relatively popular workout/diet/self-development program called “75HARD”:

This is the type of program that requires you to develop and use mental toughness. You have to be very intense doing it, and you have to maintain that level of intensity for at least 75 days — probably more because it’s likely you’ll fail at least once.

When I look at transformation pictures, I see that it obviously has results, and my theory is this: there’s a certain type of person that will see results from this precisely because it’s so difficult to maintain. Like, you can’t decide to do 75HARD on a whim, or just as a side thing, or to complement your existing workout routine. You actually have to go all in on it, it has to become the main thing you “do” for at least 75 days, and that’s what gets you results, the commitment.

I’ve spent the better part of my 20s in this “go mode”. My results have been sporadic. Really good when I get the results, but it’s not consistently easy to consistently get them! I have never done 75HARD itself, but I’ve done intense regimes that require commitment and willpower. Works really well when it works, but again, doesn’t work if it’s not the main thing you’re doing.

So I decided to do an experiment. What if I take 75HARD but reverse it? Enter 100EASY:

Two movement sessions per day:
1. Practice: intentional work on a physical skill. Examples: dancing, martial arts, weightlifting, rock climbing.
2. “Passive” movement: non-skill-building movement that raises the baseline of activity. Examples: taking a walk, doing physical labor, housecleaning.
Follow a plant-based diet with 90% success rate.
- Allowed foods: minimally processed plants.
- Alcohol in moderation.
- Meat, highly processed foods - occasionally but rarely (10%).
No cannabis. No smoking in general.

Repeat for 100 days. If you fail at any point, go back 10 days.

It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s cheap, it fits my lifestyle perfectly. Will it bring me results? I don’t know, that’s the point of this experiment. I’m currently on day 13 and it’s been… easy!

Update day 15:

I’m adding another 90%-success-rate rule: Don’t eat before 10 AM and after 19 PM (ideally after 18 PM).

Update day 182:

I’m officially on day 29. I keep resetting back 10 days, the highest I’ve come to was 62 or something like that. The usual culprits are junk food (in excess of the allowed 10%) or missing a second workout.

The results? Nowhere to be found. The biggest metric that I wanted to impact was my weight. For the last year or two, I’ve been hovering around 96 kg, which is about 10 kg too much.

What’s really annoying is the fact that I was expecting that I’d see some results, even with -10 day setbacks and resets. Literally zero results. I’m at the same weight that I started out at. And the program isn’t even that easy, as evidenced by the fact that I’m on day 29 while in reality 182 days have passed.

I don’t know what my conclusion is. Scrapping the program isn’t really an option because what’s the alternative, an even worse diet? The absence of rules would only make things worse, I fear.

I guess I have to Try Harder. I tried to be clever and do something “sustainable” and “easy”, but a) there are no results and b) it wasn’t that easy.

I’m going to think about what my next steps are but explicit caloric restriction is probably the way to go. Here I am, back at counting calories. Sucks but it sucks even worse to carry an excess of 10 kg all the time.

Book review: Industrial society and its future

Thu, 26 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000

★★★★☆

I’m writing this on a fast computer, sitting comfortably on a comfortable couch while drinking my coffee which was imported probably from Brazil, made with purified local water, which was boiled using an electrical stove top that doesn’t emit pollutants into the air in my house. And the coffee mug is a very cheap, high-quality ceramic mug that has “Super Grandma” and a heart on it. The ceramic won’t leach random harmful chemicals into my coffee because there’s a giant body of institutions that sort of take care that this just isn’t a thing that happens.

Continuing that line of thinking, why is my computer fast? There are complex and intentional causal chains that finish with “cheap and fast laptop”, and I could go into an arbitrary amount of detail, but this is all to say that our modern industrial society is pretty good at what it does in comparison to previous societies.

Yet, Industrial Society and Its Future, also known as the Unabomber Manifesto, starts with:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.

In his ~~Twitter thread~~ manifesto, math professor Ted Kaczynski develops his entire philosophy for why everything that I listed in the introduction is unimportant, and why, overall, the modern industrial civilization is net bad. It appears that the seventeen years of bombings preceding his essay were the world’s longest marketing campaign. Seventeen years is a long time to build up an audience. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was published only two years after the Unabomber Manifesto and it has around 120 million copies sold. And J. K. Rowling has not, to my knowledge, been sending bombs for the 17 years before that to raise awareness. Maybe if Ted learned about how the industrial civilization works, he might have also learned a thing or two about marketing and PR.

Ted continues about the consequences of the industrial revolution:

They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.

“Destabilized society” is such a vague term. What does that even mean? We’ll find out more about the specific ways how our lives have become unfulfilling and undignified. Ted finishes his introduction and moves on to…

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN LEFTISM

I have to admit that I was confused by this jump because I didn’t understand what he meant by leftism. In my mind, leftism is roughly “trying to make society kinder, more equitable and more progressive”. But it seems that the Unaboomer has a different type of definition: he is talking about people who suffer from feelings of inferiority and who are oversocialized:

By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strict sense but a whole spectrum of related traits; low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self- hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have some such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.

Ok, here I can sort of see the point. I know a great number of activists (environmental, social justice) who follow roughly the same type. Their general vibe is being frustrated by (perceived) injustice. Ironically, kind of like Teddy here. But I mean, if injustice is actually there, then the feelings of frustration are at least justified, even maybe good. Like, if someone keeps taking your lunch, your feeling of frustration is no guarantee that you will stand up for yourself, but it’s at least something. It’s definitely better than saying “ok, I guess I will keep having my lunch taken”.

The disagreements between such activist types and more centrist (maybe more rationalist?) leaning types are:

Is the injustice intentional and one-sided?
What’s the actual scope of the injustice?
Do we have a way of resolving it?
- Also, will that way accidentally destroy the economy and kill millions of people? Because that would be kind of bad.

Trying to separate the discussion into fine granular threads is good because you can actually figure out your disagreements, but Uncle Ted whizzes right past that into:

When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem.

Sure, there are some people like that. But that’s a strawman. Again, if there actually is injustice, then it is reasonable to be angry about derogatory statements about the victims of injustice, in particular when they come from privileged people who don’t have to experience that injustice. I would definitely be mad if someone told me simply to eat cake if I had no bread. According to Teddy Bear, I have low self-esteem. In reality, I have low calorie intake.

This is my general vibe with his text, and it’s only getting worse throughout the reading: he simply states some diagnosis without any caveats, any explanation of base rates or context, and builds from there. However, he also sometimes does have a point. Like, it’s very clear that rich, privileged leftists sometimes wear “luxury beliefs”. It’s also clear that there is that type of leftist who will gladly criticize some failing in Western society, but will make excuses for it in a non-Western society.

It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftish philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power.

I don’t thing that leftists attack truth and reason, they attack their tribal enemies, and it just so happens that “truth and reason” are disputed ground.

Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they PREFER masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.

…every suicide bomber fits this bill, much more than people who lie in front of vehicles. Does their self-sacrifice mean that they suffer from a feeling of inferiority?

I don’t know why it’s so hard to imagine people actually believing what they say they believe, and then explaining their actions through a combination of their beliefs and cultural norms for what’s an appropriate action. It’s true that people are drawn to tribal conflict. It is also true that people believe things. Discounting underlying beliefs makes it seem like people are fighting automatons who might install whatever as the cause of their conflict-seeking.

But what does any of this have to do with how industrial civilization is bad?

OVERSOCIALIZATION

The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people.

I’m not sure this is a thing even. “We are not supposed to hate anyone”… not really though? I mean, people won’t hold sermons with the message “hate is good”, but not only everyone hates someone, I have a feeling that it’s totally fine and accepted. So I guess he means “you hate person X, but you can’t just hate them for no reason, so you make up a political reason”. Okay, I can sort of see that. I know a lot of people who I really dislike, but it’s hard to express the core of my dislike, so I talk about random things that annoy me, even though I actually just don’t like them because of the way they walk and talk and look at me. If “oversocialization” is a name for “making up legible reasons for your actions/feelings because your feelings are illegible to you”, then yes, I agree that we have oversocialization in our society.

However, I disagree with the implicit attitude that it’s new or somehow worse today. If anything, describing how you feel is more popular than ever. Everyone’s going to therapy, and many people are posting their introspective monologues on social media. But we do have just… more things happening anyway, so you could hide your actual feelings in more layers of politics and ideology. So I’m kinda on the fence here. I guess I think that the problem of oversocialization is not new and not significantly more present than before, but separating feelings from political attitudes has become more complex because political attitudes are more complex.

But oversocialization seems to be not only that - it’s when an entire range of emotions is taken away from you by a society. Like, when you feel guilty for fantasizing about bad things, so you become incapable of fantasizing about them. Again, I don’t think this is anything new. If anything, the popularization of therapy has made it easier to express your true emotions without being ostracized by society. Not only therapy but the entire machinery of industrial society makes it much easier to unleash your Jungian Shadow without suffering devastating consequences. Just visit any anonymous comment section on the internet.

THE POWER PROCESS

These first two chapters gave more context into what’s up with society, but as far as I understand, the actual “meat” of the argument is that industrial society disrupts the “power process”, which is:

You have some goals. (Not having goals = you’re not happy.)
You make an effort to achieve them. (Not having to make an effort = you’re not happy.)
You attain at least some of your goals. (Not having any success = you’re not happy.)
(optional) You were autonomous in how you achieved your goal. (Not being able to decide your approach = you’re not happy.)

The claim is that these precise steps are necessary for people to be happy and satisfied, and that industrial civilization is disruptive to them. Therefore, industrial civilization delenda est.

I have two disagreements:

The “power process” probably doesn’t cover everything required for human happiness. If you can imagine someone following all these steps and still being unhappy and unfulfilled - even if in a primitive society - then it’s obviously not enough. And I think that if you looked at people in a primitive society and observed the power process, you’d still see a desire to do more, be more.
Industrial society doesn’t disrupt the power process. You’re just not ambitious enough.

Let’s say that you are not performing any “surrogate” activities. You’re living in 10,000 BC. Your goal is to get food. You go hunt and expend a lot of effort into killing a deer. You manage to kill it and bring it to your tribe. Success and autonomy, a feast! A couple of days later your child dies from an illness. Sure, your entire tribe has built a lot of psychological coping mechanisms like telling stories about your child now living with the spirits and so on. But if you could push a magical button that makes your child not just randomly die, you’d do it.

Modern industrial civilization is just a series of such button pushes.

All these giant complex inhuman systems we’ve built are here because we are just trying to make our lives better. We’re trying not to die from a random illness, we’re trying to make it easier to build shelter, to get to places.

Does solving these problems make it impossible to be happy because we now don’t need to expend any effort towards actual activities, only surrogate ones? Only if you’re very unambitious. Like, if the ideal of life is to get born, then try to get food for your entire life, and then die, sure, modern civilization sucks because it’s pretty easy to get food. However, if you are trying to build something bigger, if you want to peer into the past, or into the future, or visit distant stars - then things are still very, very hard.

Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the breakdown of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.

These things are somewhat true. Life can be disorienting and it’s true that extended families have lost their role in social life. This is one place where I think it may be beneficial to RETVRN to tradition. Fortunately, the housing market seems to be solving it for us. With skyrocketing prices, people are moving into less dense areas and, also, you can’t easily move out of your family’s home. Extended family again!

a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently […] Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints his cousin, his friend or his co- religionist to a position rather than appointing the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is “nepotism” or “discrimination,” both of which are terrible sins in modern society. […] an advanced industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale communities that are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the system.

This is all true and Good Actually. You want to have a norm where the most qualified person is put to the job, not someone’s cousin. I don’t see how this is a problem. Things work better when qualified people are operating things, therefore put qualified people behind the wheel. One specific thing to note here is that Kaboomski is talking about a general weakening of family/tribal structures. But there is no reason to suppose that you can’t have a society where people have strong familial relations, but the cultural norm is that you can’t be a nepotist with the questions of the state.

We contend that the most important cause of social and psychological problems in modern society is the fact that people have insufficient opportunity to go through the power process in a normal way.

…all of this seems untrue to me, except in two aspects: working “bullshit” jobs and being separated from a natural environment. Bullshit jobs take a particular toll on the psyche because you know you’re doing deeply unimportant work. I don’t know how I’d quantify this, but it has to do something bad to you. And this comes hand in hand with the separation from the natural environment, which includes physical movement and social contact. There definitely is a sense in which we are like rats in a maze, doing pointless tasks for rewards in an artificial, unstimulating environment. But you know… just go out. I mean, you can (you literally can) follow Theodore’s footsteps and go live somewhere remote. Nobody’s going to stop you. Society’s default is that you’re provided with the essentials and that you play a role in the economic machine, but you can just choose to not do that. I’m usually not a big fan of “just do X” type of advice because it’s regularly not that easy - you need to have a different society to be able to do X. But in this specific case, rebelling against the artificial defaults our society sets… is actually easy. You can literally opt out. Or opt out partially. It seems weird to criticize industrial society for its many indignities when everyone has a choice how much modernity they want in their life.

DISRUPTION OF THE POWER PROCESS IN MODERN SOCIETY

the power process is disrupted in our society through a deficiency of real goals and a deficiency of autonomy in the pursuit of goals

I’m just repeating myself, but trying to make humans a multi-planetary immortal species is just as “real” as trying to find some food when you’re hungry. And trying to build a successful startup is also “real”. And trying to build an extension to your house is also “real”. There are just a lot of real goals!

It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no one’s fault, unless it is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon. But threats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They are not the results of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.

It is a little weird that someone who sends bombs to people, and sees these people not as people but as pawns of an inhuman optimizing process, makes a distinction between human and non-human threats to the individual. Some threats carry a human face, some don’t - what difference does it make?

It’s overall also weird to me that our spicy tinkerer finds it preferable to have less security but more illusion of control, than more security and less illusion of control.

People have many transitory drives or impulses that are necessarily frustrated in modern life, hence fall into group 3. One may become angry, but modern society cannot permit fighting. In many situations it does not even permit verbal aggression. When going somewhere one may be in a hurry, or one may be in a mood to travel slowly, but one generally has no choice but to move with the flow of traffic and obey the traffic signals. One may want to do one’s work in a different way, but usually one can work only according to the rules laid down by one’s employer. In many other ways as well, modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations (explicit or implicit) that frustrate many of his impulses and thus interfere with the power process. Most of these regulations cannot be dispensed with, because they are necessary for the functioning of industrial society.

Yes, we have made acceptable ways to do things. E.g. if you want to fight, go to an MMA gym. Also, fighting still happens in the same way as it did throughout history, so it’s unclear if modern society has done anything to reduce fighting. But these acceptable ways are sometimes stupid and fail spectacularly. And these acceptable ways are the cost of running a complex civilization.

Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners.

Most people would give up living in a completely primitive way. In fact, many actually primitive tribes do in fact do that. That’s because industrial civilization is overall preferable!

Overall, I find that Ted Kaczynski makes many good points, but I disagree with the conclusion. Many of the criticisms are actually valid, and it is true that you can’t really reform industrial society so that it works just as well as a pre-industrial society. You kind of have to take the bad parts with the good parts. You can reform some parts, but these parts aren’t the parts that Ted is interested in.

A good point that Bang Bang Teddy makes is about cars:

You have no car and you have freedom to walk everywhere, at whichever speed.
You can get a car, so you get to places faster.
Places get rebuilt to accommodate cars.
Everyone now needs a car to get places.
Cars need to be regulated, which means that both car and non-car movement is also regulated, which means that your freedom has drastically decreased.

All of the above is true. The best places for freedom of movement are still old places where cars can’t easily penetrate, for example very old European towns. And it’s really not that easy to solve that problem. I’m starting to understand his point about technological encroachment on freedom. You can easily live a primitive life if you just go out into the wild. But you can’t keep your friends or family, you can’t keep working as a carpenter in your town etc. That is - you can’t opt out of some things, and have to instead adapt to them (the system definitely won’t adapt to you).

While technological progress AS A WHOLE continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance CONSIDERED BY ITSELF appears to be desirable.

As a whole, it narrows your freedom in the sense that you can’t walk to the store if you’re in a US town that sucks. But you can go visit other places, or move to places which don’t use cars. I think technology, as a whole, narrows your freedom in a very narrow way. And it widens your freedom in a more general way. It’s just always a tradeoff, and I’m not convinced that pre-modern humans were any more “free” than we are today. It’s just different types of oppression, and I find that whether oppression carries a human or inhuman face is… irrelevant.

Few people will resist the introduction of a genetic technique that eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent harm and prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements taken together will make the human being into an engineered product rather than a free creation of chance

Yes.

In general, Primitive Ted would prefer polio to the Borg, and I honestly can’t say for sure which of those sound worse. They both sound pretty bad when you consider the worst possible outcomes. And we sorta know what’s the worst possible outcome for an anarcho-primitivist society: you just die gruesomely and humanity doesn’t reach the stars. The potential upside is: you live a fulfilled life as a hunter or berry collector or fisherman, have children, none of them die before you, you die, and humanity still doesn’t reach the stars. So, overall, very limited upside, pretty limited but definite downside.

On the other hand, a transhumanist society has almost unlimited upside and almost unlimited downside. It could really go really really well, and it could really go catastrophically, S-risk bad. And we just can’t tell which way the distribution (of both probability and possible badness) skews. So the overall ideological question is are we ready to risk it? Will we risk freedom (and much more than whether you can walk without traffic regulations) and trust that we can reform it on-the-go so that people don’t suffer while we’re reaching for the stars?

But it is NOT in the interest of the system to preserve freedom or small-group autonomy. On the contrary, it is in the interest of the system to bring human behavior under control to the greatest possible extent.

Just a short note of disagreement here: this doesn’t follow. It is in the interest of the system to control human behavior to the extent necessary to make the system function. In this sense, “the System” is a satisficer, not a maximizer. Nobody is walking with an implant in their brain that makes it impossible to cross a road on a red light. So that’s one reason to be more optimistic of the prospects of reforming the system.

REVOLUTION IS EASIER THAN REFORM

We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed in such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology.

You have not.

STRATEGY

The technophiles are taking us all on an utterly reckless ride into the unknown.

Utterly reckless? Maybe. Into the unknown? For sure. But it is pretty hard to see electricity or plumbing and conclude that these things have definitely made life worse for people. There’s definitely a danger lurking in the future - e.g. an artificial superintelligence that’s not aligned with human values - but returning back to tribalism is no solution at all.

Ted lists how this anti-tech pro-Nature ideology should be popularized:

We have no illusions about the feasibility of creating a new, ideal form of society. Our goal is only to destroy the existing form of society.

and

On the more sophisticated level the ideology should address itself to people who are intelligent, thoughtful and rational. The object should be to create a core of people who will be opposed to the industrial system on a rational, thought-out basis

and

On a second level, the ideology should be propagated in a simplified form that will enable the unthinking majority to see the conflict of technology vs. nature in unambiguous terms.

This part is interesting and makes me think about how the publication of this manifesto may have actually affected many anti-progress types that post on Twitter:

History is made by active, determined minorities, not by the majority, which seldom has a clear and consistent idea of what it really wants. […] Any kind of social conflict helps to destabilize the system, but one should be careful about what kind of conflict one encourages. The line of conflict should be drawn between the mass of the people and the power-holding elite of industrial society (politicians, scientists, upper-level business executives, government officials, etc.). It should NOT be drawn between the revolutionaries and the mass of the people. For example, it would be bad strategy for the revolutionaries to condemn Americans for their habits of consumption. Instead, the average American should be portrayed as a victim of the advertising and marketing industry, which has suckered him into buying a lot of junk that he doesn’t need and that is very poor compensation for his lost freedom. Either approach is consistent with the facts. It is merely a matter of attitude whether you blame the advertising industry for manipulating the public or blame the public for allowing itself to be manipulated. As a matter of strategy one should generally avoid blaming the public.

Ok, you manage to destroy industrial civilization. What happens then?

So it is clear that if the industrial system were once thoroughly broken down, refrigeration technology would quickly be lost. The same is true of other organization-dependent technology. And once this technology had been lost for a generation or so it would take centuries to rebuild it, just as it took centuries to build it the first time around. Surviving technical books would be few and scattered. An industrial society, if built from scratch without outside help, can only be built in a series of stages: You need tools to make tools to make tools to make tools … . A long process of economic development and progress in social organization is required. And, even in the absence of an ideology opposed to technology, there is no reason to believe that anyone would be interested in rebuilding industrial society. The enthusiasm for “progress” is a phenomenon peculiar to the modern form of society, and it seems not to have existed prior to the 17th century or thereabouts.

This is true, and also false. You would get people in the same state where they were before. This means that they would have the same types of problems they had before. And, depending on their luck, they would resolve these problems again, by using - technology. So the most you can do is postpone technological progress. Things will get rebuilt.

Would society EVENTUALLY develop again toward an industrial-technological form? Maybe, but there is no use in worrying about it, since we can’t predict or control events 500 or 1,000 years in the future. Those problems must be dealt with by the people who will live at that time.

To me, all of this simply shows a lack of ambition and no great vision. Of course you should worry what’s going to happen a thousand years into the future!

The entire manifesto finishes with yet another criticism of leftism and why leftists shouldn’t be allowed into the revolutionary ranks, how rugged individualism + love for Nature should be the prevailing criterion, and some reservations around the professor’s epistemic status. I am generally not a fan of the work, but I’m not a hater either. I think that there are definitely some great points. There is a definite tendency to reduce everyday freedom. We simply accept it as a cost of the benefits.

Depending on how far out you look, technology may increase freedom. For example, right now you don’t have freedom to go to Mars in any sense of that word, but in the future you might. Hell, you might become a space pirate! The Earth could be turned into a primitivist reservation, a planet where no non-local technology may be brought. Of course that is not acceptable to Freedom Club because that sort of freedom is given, not taken, so it’s not actually freedom.

But whatever way you look at it, at a long enough time scale, technology is the stronger force than anything else. Technological progress will happen, so any sort of anti-tech revolution (not reform) will fail in about a couple of hundred of years. Probably sooner because you can’t destroy tech globally, so you’ll get imports from regions that weren’t destroyed. The best you can is try to guide it away from terrible outcomes. So it’s good to look at examples where we have managed to do that:

In the Netherlands, cars dominated the streets in the 70s. But now bicycles dominate the streets.
There seem to be no terrible consequences of having electricity and plumbing in buildings.
We have banned pesticides like DDT or refrigerants like R-22, and have in fact banned many harmful things. And instead of coming back, non-harmful or less harmful alternatives appear.

There are much more, these three are just off the top of my head. Technology will keep advancing by leaps and bounds, simultaneously encroaching on our freedom and expanding the freedom in the future. It is up to us to tame the tech, and to cut out the most harmful parts. It’s not just that we can do this, we must do this. We don’t really have a choice. But - and this is important - we can do this.

Mistakes

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 16:00:25 +0100

I feel like it’s a good idea to list the mistakes I’ve made. Not because I dwell on them and can’t get over them, but because it’s intellectually honest to admit that not every choice was a great one, even if I managed to find its upside. Also, it might make other people think about their own situation from another perspective. I don’t think it will be very helpful though, as everyone really has a unique situation. But maybe!

Here are some mistakes I made, in no particular order of importance:

Studying languages

After secondary school, I didn’t really know what to do, but I knew that I had a natural inclination for accents. This was the major cause why I chose to study French language and literature, and Swedish language and culture.

I had some other stories I told people, e.g. “Swedish is exactly sufficiently important to be studied, but sufficiently obscure that not many people know it” or “I’m doing really good with French and I don’t want to lose it” but the honest reason was that I knew that I could imitate accents really well.

Suffice to say that this isn’t the best possible reason for why you’d want to start a three-year university program, much less a five-year one, and much less a five-year one with a two-year extension.

Why I think this was a bad choice

I never worked with French or Swedish, even when I worked as a translator. I never in my life visited Sweden. The job opportunities were scarce to non-existent, and job opportunities that did present themselves actually had much higher requirements than what I had after university.

I would expect to know a language really well after seven years of studying it, but the sad fact is that I have a very intermediate level, and very frequently can’t remember the right words. I can occasionally understand what someone is talking about.

You could say that this isn’t because of the program itself, but because I didn’t apply myself enough, and you’d be partially correct. I didn’t. That’s the part of the reason why this was a bad choice - it’s not something I wanted to apply myself for.

However, there are other aspects that were outside my responsibility:

ensuring that students actually speak the language at a native level was never the object of the program
there was a lot of stuff that didn’t have any reason being included in the program
there were insane amounts of procedures and processes with no good reason; e.g. one semester I had to listen to a course where I was the sole participant, and the course was about some notes that Roland Barthes took before he died (literally a couple of pages of random notes)

Conclusion

In hindsight, everything seems super easy, so I don’t really blame younger me for selecting French and Swedish as the university program. But I think I had plenty of opportunities for quitting during the seven years I spent studying, and never did. I have a Master’s degree in French and Swedish, but probably also in sunk cost fallacy.

Lesson

When every fiber of your being is screaming at you “this isn’t for you and you shouldn’t be here at all” and it’s not like a one-time thing, but all the time, you should… you know, listen to that voice.

Participating in a cross-company initiative

Someone in my company had an idea that we’re missing a central place for onboarding new hires. Some sort of internal learning portal, where managers can build courses for their reports, or where you can take a new hire and make sure that they’re up to speed with what they need to do.

Sounds good on paper, but isn’t really that good in practice. The reason is that teams have been forced to use our solution, at their own detriment. They maybe had an organic solution, something that they were used to and that didn’t scale, but didn’t need to scale. Now, they must use our big, clunky learning management solution (LMS).

This is actually a great example of how humans can produce bad outcomes for themselves with best intentions and no pressing need. I was aware of the best intentions part, but didn’t have any idea about the “no pressing need” part. Nobody told me or the team for this initiative that we had to do this. We just sort of… decided that we had to do this. And every step of the way seemed like a sensible decision, or a sensible compromise at least.

Maybe I’m being a bit too cynical - it’s not the end of the world, nobody will suffer if they don’t use the software we created, and there actually are benefits to it. It’s really not all bad. Maybe the good even outweighs the bad, who knows. Still, the fact remains - it doesn’t seem necessary or important. And it did seem necessary when I joined.

Lesson

Maybe be a bit more grumpy? A little less enthusiastic? I think that I could have saved myself quite a lot of energy if I wasn’t in enthusiastic go-getter mode when they asked me if I wanted to join. Yeah, the general lesson is that the default answer is no, unless there’s a very good reason for yes.

Rescuing a dog

I’m kinda reluctant to write this because it sounds bad, but I think that taking in a dog was a mistake. I did make the most of it, and there were and still are very good moments and memories, and I love my dog. But regardless of all the upside that I managed to find, if I look at what I knew seven years ago, with my state of knowledge and experience and resources and so on, taking that dog was not the wisest thing.

I’m not talking about taking any dog - there’s a good chance that if I took another one, things would work out fine. But my dog is a very destructive, very energetic, sometimes aggressive, hunting dog. It’s just a difficult dog to handle.

“Actually, you should…”

“But you should go out and tire the dog out” - yes, I do. I’d spend three to four hours a day outside. Still high energy.
“If the dog is aggressive, you should find a trainer” - we found several, and worked with several. Its aggression was mitigated, but not resolved. It’s just not an easy problem to solve.
“You should {insert your preferred training methodology}” - I’ve tried a bunch of stuff and a bunch of dog psychology. It’s not that it doesn’t work, but it’s not easy.

It’s generally very easy to say what someone should or shouldn’t do when you have experience only with particular dog personalities. I’m not saying that the problems I find with my dog are unsolvable, only that they are actually difficult.

What went wrong

My girlfriend and I took in our dog when we were living in a rented 30m2 apartment. It would regularly destroy our furniture, clothes, sheets, pillows, devices, device cables, etc. This means you can’t leave it alone, even for a little bit. That’s already a big psychological toll, because you’re going from taking care for yourself and your job/university obligations to taking care for a being that has the best intentions, but just doesn’t understand stuff. This means that you can’t be spontaneous, ever. You just close a bunch of doors to yourself.

But at least you can live a healthy, sporty, outdoorsy lifestyle now, right? Sure, if you’re a fan of separating dog fights or of pulling cats out of dogs’ jaws, that’s very healthy. If you like being hypervigilant, even when your dog is on a leash, because it might lunge at strangers, then that’s great.

Why this was a mistake

Somebody else would have taken the dog. Maybe someone with a big ranch. And the dog would have probably had a better life than with us. And we wouldn’t have been psychologically on edge all the time.

Lesson

Don’t downplay the difficulty in having a pet. Some dogs are so easy to handle, but some really are not. And also, and I know this is an unpopular take: if you make a mistake, revert it as soon as possible. There’s nothing wrong with a couple of weeks of trying to see if you and your new pet can work well together.

(Obviously, don’t be an asshole, take the pet for a year or two and then decide that you don’t want that baggage anymore - the tryout shouldn’t last longer than a month or two)

Epilogue

The dog is still with us. We bought a house with a big yard and a piece of forest. It’s living its best life. She has a buddy now. I love her very much. But you judge a choice not based on its consequences, but on the consequences you would have predicted when you made the choice. All’s well that ends well - well, not really. But in this case, yeah.

Training Wing Chun

When I started with my university studies, I had to do some physical exercise stuff as well as part of the curriculum. One of the choices was “self defense”. I wanted to learn how to defend myself, so I came to class. The course was based on Wing Chun - a form of kung fu. I learned and trained and trained, but my intention was always to start training Brazilian jiu jitsu.

The self defense trainer told me “well, that’s cool, but why don’t you come by and just try Wing Chun out?”

And I was like, sure. And then seven years passed, and I got really good at something really stupid.

Why this was a mistake

Wing Chun is a very bad choice if you want to learn how to fight. It’s just so bad on many levels. It doesn’t teach you anything usefull really, it perpetuates untested ideas on how combat looks like, it ensnares you in a cult-like structure, and you end up with a really bad sense of how you’d fare in a fight.

I know this because I decided one day to test my Wing Chun in an MMA tournament. I lost the two fights, both on the floor, because I had no grappling, I had no boxing, I had no distance control, and I had no sense of the raw aggression in a fight.

The week after the fights, I started training Brazilian jiu jitsu, just like I wanted to seven years ago.

Lesson

I don’t know if I have one. It’s probably be more skeptical. Everything I trained seemed reasonable at the time. But if I was more focused on exploring instead of exploiting - if I just visited a couple of boxing gyms, wrestling gyms, Muay Thai gyms, MMA gyms - if I had just expanded my horizon a bit, I would have gotten out much sooner. And also, when you feel like you’re trapped in a cult, you’re probably trapped in a cult.

Managers, email and productivity

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 19:51:58 +0100

One of the key skills I learned is various forms of discipline. A key discipline is the discipline not to look at my work chat when I’m not at work. The dangers are obvious: there are rarely any emergencies, so you’re always looking at stuff that can wait until tomorrow. But now you’ve looked, and now it’s in your head, and now you can’t stop thinking about it, and you don’t rest. Thinks go downhill from there.

Another key discipline is not looking at my work chat even when I’m at work. There is very little reason to have it on all the time. You’re available, you can “quickly” resolve other people’s questions, but the effect on your own productivity is generally bad. How do you focus on deep work if there’s a constant pinging sound from new messages? And let’s be honest, most messages in the work chat aren’t instrumental for accomplishing work, and indeed are often not even related to work.

“But I’m a manager or a CTO, so I have to be available to answer other people’s questions. Email and meetings are where I spend my days.” There are a couple of objections I have here. If you’re in a managing position, say a CTO, you might think to yourself “my job is to unblock other people; to allow other people to do their job”. And that’s actually pretty good and noble, in particular when compared to the default evil management: making up work that nobody needs to do. And it is true that your role seems uniquely suited for unblocking other people and allowing them to do their work. And that’s why you need to be quick to respond to emails and chat messages - if a developer or a development manager are unclear about something important, the sooner you clarify that something for them, or the sooner you make an important decision, the sooner they are able to produce their own value. So far, so good.

The problem is that your role is not exclusively unblocking. The question what should I be doing (at work) is a logical followup to the question what am I uniquely suited for in my current position. And unblocking, yeah, sure, but a CTO or a manager can afford to do more than unblocking. For example, you can try to think about strategy. You can try to figure out what are the customer pain points that no process has managed to catch yet. Indeed, you and you only are in a unique position where you can see the blind spots left after methodologies, frameworks, and overlapping departments. So if you spend all day answering email - thinking you’ll speed up the process - you’re not spending all day doing something more important. And it’s often the case that questions answer themselves - or someone else answers them. Perhaps someone with good email discipline.

Good email discipline is not having your chat and email open all the time just because everyone else does that. Good email discipline means checking your messages 1-3 times a day and that’s it. The rest can wait until tomorrow. This might seem like sabotage, but far from it. In the long run it’s good for the company because, guess what: everyone can take time to focus now. When you don’t respond straight away but in a couple of hours or days, you train people not to expect very fast answers. Or at least, not to expect them immediately. So they maybe do their own digging and search your internal wiki. And maybe they find the information they need straight away - without interrupting you, or your flow. With time, everyone benefits because everyone can focus.

Life is hard

Sun, 06 Feb 2022 20:40:11 +0100

Today I had a dog die on my hands. It was the neighbor’s dog. She ran it over. She drove very, very slowly, but the dog was old and got tangled up under the wheels of her old, slow car. Something broke and she ultimately suffocated because breathing organs couldn’t work.

We rushed to the vet straight away, she was sort of shocked and didn’t know where to go or what to do, so I jumped in her car immediately and gave her directions to the nearest vet. But only a couple of minutes into the drive, the dog was gone. Her eyes went blurry. I liked that dog. Old granny of a dog. 14 years old. She was always walking so slowly around on our little slow street.

This is the second time in a couple of months that I had an animal die on my hands. A couple of months ago, it was a cat that I managed to pull out of my own dog’s jaws, but too late. My dog is a hunting dog, which was supposed to get executed because it was a bad hunting dog. So we rescued her, took her in. Unfortunately, hunting instincts can’t leave her. So she’s obsessed with cats and tries to kill them - always.

Having an animal die on your hands is very defeating. In particular if you’re trying to help it, if you really don’t want it to die. It’s just nature, telling you - nope. I came to the realization that most deaths are just suffocation. That’s what death is - brain no longer being supplied with oxygen. That’s IT. Isn’t that crazy? You can cause that with tons of different methods, but that is what death is - the lack of oxygen in the brain. There’s more - you could cut some key neurons and that would also be death. But most deaths - including mechanical ones, such as bleeding out or being crushed by something - are just the brain no longer receiving blood with oxygen inside.

Sort of frustrating really. Very bad design. MVP, but with glaring issues that any engineer would be panicked to resolve ASAP. Who doesn’t install a redundancy that takes over the oxygenation of the brain?? Absolutely mental, you’d need to be.

I also got shot at the other day. I heard gunshots in the distance, and then a sizzling, whizzing sound above my head. Apparently hunters have a licence to hunt in the middle of the city, because that area where I was at is classified as a hunting ground.

Nothing more to add, really. Life’s just been weirdly stressful. Not even stressful, but dangerous, and frustrating. I’m not stressed by it. I’m just increasingly frustrated with my inability to make significant change. I’m butting up against the boundaries of the real world - and the real world is difficult. There are some easy hacks here and there - piles of money sitting untouched - but in general, life’s hard.

Our understanding of the world is limited, and our engineering is primitive. In particular biological and medical engineering. Where are exoskeletons? Why can’t I fly yet? Why is it possible that I can easily bleed out if I get shot? Most gunshot deaths aren’t caused by catastrophic organ failure, but by literally bleeding out. Imagine how stupid of a death that is. You’re just leaking fluid. So dumb. How are we not solving this problem? Why is it so hard? Why are we still stuck with the same dumb systems that we’ve been running on for the last hundred thousand years? Am I crazy here for expecting more?

You could spend a lifetime learning a topic, and even if you successfully navigate the intricacies that we create ourselves - the random social labyrinths that we produce - even if you learn random diplomatic skills in addition to the skills that are needed to produce actual change - you’d still be stuck! You’d still need luck to do more than hope for some lasting change. It’s frustrating. We have very bright minds, hundreds of thousands of them, working on pressing issues, and sure we’re improving more and more, but it just feels slow, and hard. We’re surrounded by hard problems.

We’ve come so far. We need to go further. I don’t know if there’s some hidden pool of talent lying around untapped - some hidden source of genius that would solve our problems. Maybe it’s AI, if it doesn’t kill us before it helps us. Maybe it’s the randos on the internet that do bullshit jobs and spend all day tweeting. I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t any easy solution, no magical fountain of problem-solving liquid, and we just need to keep grinding, keep doing what our civilization has been doing for a long time. I suspect that’s the case. I understand then that the skill of “facing immense challenges but still pushing through” is the main skill that I need to respect more and practice more. But today I’m weak, so I admit: I’m frustrated. Life is hard.

Predictions for 2050

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Inspired by Slime Mold Time Mold’s predictions, I want to list a couple of predictions of my own, following the same methodology:

extrapolate current trends 30 years into the future
if current trends are directed to a historical standard, predict a regression to the (historical) mean

I am a little hesitant to call these predictions because I’m not (yet) registering them on any prediction market, but I try to list falsifiable figures. Also, all these predictions take for granted that there won’t be some catastrophic black swan or great filter in the following 28 years.

Here’s my take:

A vegetarian/vegan diet becomes more popular in the West; e.g. I expect at least 20% of Americans to consider themselves vegetarian in 2050 (according to some poll, e.g. Gallup).
Blockchain technology becomes a cornerstone of finance. I expect a merge of crypto companies and financial institutions, with banks maybe running their own blockchains, or at least officially running nodes / mining crypto. We already have Visa cards offered by crypto companies, so the distinction is already getting lost.
Electric vehicles become the new standard, e.g. at least 75% of German cars are classified as EVs in 2050.
Even more remote work. (I don’t know how to quantify this.)
I expect fusion power! ITER is building a tokamak which is scheduled to start hydrogen fusion experiments in 2035. I expect that in 2050, we’ll have at least one operating tokamak with net energy gain.

That’s more or less it. I also have some thoughts around malware and cybersecurity, but haven’t yet sorted them out. I’ll update this post when I update my mental model.

A counterargument that isn't

Sun, 09 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Let’s say that you’re in a discussion, and it goes something like this:

We should do institute regulatory measures, like taxes, to inhibit the growth of the economy so that we can slow down or stop climate change.
That makes sense if you think that climate change is the bigger of the possible threats, but it probably isn’t. Growing our economy is the fastest way to get us over a certain technological capability threshold, which means that we’re that much more equipped to work on even more pressing issues than climate change (like aging, or S-risks).
That makes sense if you think that economic growth is what’s necessary, but just because there’s a strong historical correlation, that doesn’t guarantee that more economic growth will lead to more revolutionary discoveries. You could very well imagine a world where you have diminishing incremental improvements on the new iPhone, or some such. All the while, you’re ignoring possible other avenues of governance that would get us over that same technological threshold (e.g. certain forms of technocracy).
That makes sense if you think that there’s any way that something that is not modern-day capitalism can produce the same level of output as modern-day capitalism. And even ignoring the practicalities of such an endeavor (you’d essentially have to make the entire world switch over to a new paradigm, which is in practical terms extremely difficult), a) the game theory doesn’t seem to be there, and b) the tail risks seem to be there. Meaning, it’s uncertain that there actually is some arrangement in which parties, as they exist today, would transact among each other and raise the overall net value/profit/whatever for society in general - and that such an arrangement isn’t regulated market capitalism that we’re running on today. Moreover, if you do in fact find some game-theoretical arrangement that would work better than what we have today, there’s still the question of unknown unknowns, of tail risks. This is the problem of things sounding good “on paper”, but then you miss something important and/or tacit, something that you didn’t think about, and that fundamentally changes everything. Returning to the original claim, if we try to inhibit the economy, sure we might improve our environment in the short term, but look at what you’re doing in the long term: you’re preventing the unlocking of potential, going directly against incentives (smart people seeing the chance that they’ll become insanely rich if they provide value at scale). You’re putting the entire planet to neutral and hoping that somehow you’ll get out of the other threats that aren’t climate change.
That makes sense if you think that…

This back-and-forth is good and welcome, and the people in this discussion are pretty respectful and are trying to learn, but one thing that jumps out to me in this discussion, and in discussions in general, is that the counterarguments aren’t actually counterarguments.

What you actually have is a counterargument for a certain part of an argument, and that counterargument isn’t something that you can tally, and whoever has more arguments/counterarguments, wins. So it’s not like, I say “A”, you say “B”, and we come to a state of “B over A; B is right, A is wrong”. It’s more like, I say “A”, you say “actually B, because certain problems with A”, I say “actually C, because certain problems with B” and so on. The counter-arguments get more and more informative that way because in a discussion, you’re imparting large amounts of information on edge cases. You can see it in the physical size of the text.

I first had the idea that counterarguments aren’t actually counterarguments when I read Bostrom’s crucial considerations talk. In it, he talks about whether it makes sense to vote, and goes back and forth: yes because A, but not because actually B, but actually yes because actually C, but actually no because actually D, and so on.

Each of the counterarguments isn’t actually a full-blown takedown of its argument. Removing the decision from the discussion altogether (what we should do with our conclusion), counterarguments are actually just angles, other ways of seeing, filters, positions that allow new information to come to light. That’s why their name is so wrong - it implies that they negate the original argument, and they mostly don’t. At the very best, you can negate a portion of the original argument, but they hardly ever negate the appropriateness of the decision based on the original argument.

A mathematical analogy: decision-making doesn’t actually look like a series of arguments and counterarguments that cross each other out, and whatever remains, wins. The argument-counterargument dynamic produces a set of parameters. Then you assign certain weights to the parameters, depending on how important they are, they affect the final decision more or less. This math can be made explicit, but with good-faith decision-makers, the math is already there, implicitly. Meaning, if someone actually considers your argument, even if they provide a counterargument which seems to “negate” your original claim, they will have integrated your claim, and will assign some weight to it.

“Counterargument” is soldier language instead of scout language, and it obscures the non-negating reality of counterarguments.

Book review: Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking

Sat, 25 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

★★☆☆☆

The only interesting part of this book was the stories from SE engagements, and even these became boring.

I don’t like the overly enthusiastic style, the random jokes, the “useless fact” sections. It’s like I’m listening to a hybrid of a bad stand-up routine and a sales pitch. I also genuinely dislike the formatting and the presentation, e.g. a bunch of random hyperlinks on a paper page.

But I mostly don’t like the content. I want this book to be either a collection of stories from engagements with lessons learned, or I want a training manual. This feels like a book that could have been a blog post that could have been a series of tweets.

I didn’t keep detailed notes on everything I disliked, but here’s some stuff of the top of my head:

Academic research. I don’t need to have an overview of a barely-related study that may or may not have been replicated. I don’t get the obsession with trying to appear “scientific” and citing off studies that don’t really add to the point.
DISC. I guess any framework is useful when you’re totally lost but this just feels like a horoscope, or like MBTI. Again, it could be useful because you start thinking, but I dislike the implication that it describes people or that it has any predictive power.
Recycled pop psychology. It’s just a bunch of stuff I’ve read before, e.g. from Cialdini. But it’s not what makes or breaks a social engineer! Like yeah, psychology is important, but I want the subject-matter expertise, not pop-psych I and a million other people have already read.

Overall, it all feels so very cartoonish. The style of presentation, the people, their reactions. I don’t know how to say it better but it feels like it has no real depth. I’m sorry because I was really looking forward to reading this book.

2 stars for SE engagement stories.

What I learned after a year of being a cybersecurity techwriter

Sun, 12 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve now worked as a techwriter in a cybersecurity company for a little bit over a year. Coming into the job, my background was basically a couple of years of Python practice, some frontend tutorials, a decent understanding of networking and several pwned boxes on Hack the Box. This was all me learning stuff on the side while working as a translator.

So, what did I learn after a year?

APIs

OpenAPI specification, including tools used to build API documentation. Also more thorough understanding of how APIs work, and how they should work, but don’t necessarily in practice.
More on how HTTP requests work. I came with a solid understanding of computer networking, but I still had a couple of dark spots on my map. Frequently interacting with APIs made me understand stuff much better. For example, what goes in the headers, what query parameters are, etc. I still remember the days when I’d post giant, enormous links on social media. No more.

What a schema is. I wasn’t aware of how important it was to document hierarchical data structures (like a JSON response) and list types of data inside (array, int, string, …).

Programming languages

More Python. I automated repetitive stuff, e.g. inserting text into a reStructuredText table so that it keeps alphabetical order, or combining 60+ YAML files into a single one etc. I think I understand the basics much better now. (Incidentally, this is my general goal: I don’t try to learn a lot of advanced stuff, as there are diminishing returns on time investment, but I try to really, really master the basics.)
Solidity. In my free time I started to dabble with smart contracts on the Ethereum blockchain. This doesn’t have much to do with my job, but it’s something I’ve taken up as an interest.
C. I read a couple of chapters of The C Programming Language and did a couple of exercises. It really made me appreciate how much stuff there is going on behind the scenes when I write some Python script.
More Bash. I’ve learned to make command line tools that display a help message and that accept flags. I’m also regularly replacing text across entire directories using sed.

Technical writing

ReStructuredText. I still prefer Markdown - I find it much easier to read and to write.
Sphinx, for building beautiful documentation out of reStructuredText.
Static site generators. I use Hugo, but I tried Jekyll as well and it was really good.

Cyber

The threat landscape. I didn’t know how prevalent ransomware was. Before this job, I understood ransomware as one part of cyber, but it’s more like 99% of it.

Supply chain security. I don’t know the precise ratio, but my intuition is that most attacks aren’t attacking companies directly, but several levels down in the supply chain:
- If you’re making an app which uses open-source components A, B, and C, and each of those use other components, and so on, the attack is against some random, small component, like a logging tool, which is used in a larger tool (like a search platform), which, finally, is used in your app.
- If you’re e.g. a bookkeeping company, you have some IT infrastructure that’s probably managed by another company. That company doesn’t develop its own tools, but uses software made by a third company. Someone breaches the third company, the third company unknowingly packages ransomware in an update; they send the update to your IT service provider; the IT service provider installs the update on your system; after a couple of hours or days, all your computers are encrypted and you can’t access any of the files. You haven’t been backing up the most recent data, so you lose all the invoices from the last month, as well as all reports, everything. (Or you pay some BTC or XMR to an address, and you can unlock your files.)
Ransomware without encryption. The latest development in the ransomware world is not encrypting systems, but threats of leaking confidential information. I don’t know why exactly this happens, but it does seem possible that ransomware gangs don’t want to poke America too much.

Computer internals

Reverse engineering and how file formats work. Since the company I’m working for is primarily a static analysis company, I learned a lot about:
- files, and how they are recognized (headers vs. extension)
- packing and obfuscation, and how to detect it
- the difference between static and dynamic linking
- the Windows API
- the basics of IDA for reversing binaries
- some x86 assembly, to figure out what’s going on with the registers
CPU, RAM, and computer internals. I previously didn’t have a good mental model for how a CPU works, but I think I understand it much better now. I learned what registers are, what the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit systems is, as well as stuff that I previously never heard about, like the concept of endianness. I also learned about how the operating system interacts with memory, what stacks and heaps are.
YARA rules and how they’re used when looking for threats. I wasn’t even aware of YARA before this job. But it actually makes perfect sense, and is a great, shareable solution: you write down some strings (text, or binary, or regex) and some rules (contains all of these strings, or at least one of these strings etc.), and then you check files. If a file matches your rule - bingo, that’s a threat.

Computer infrastructure

AD, LDAP, and other authentication/authorization systems. I don’t yet know Active Directory - just the basics - but I learned how prevalent it was in IT infrastructure of almost every company (and also how big of a deal it is for cyber attacks).
Logs. Logs are basically the backbone of all IT work. You need a ton of them, and you also need a way to sift through the info, and you need the logs to be well written. I previously didn’t have any idea about the sophistication of log work. I just knew that there are logs, and that I should go to /var/log/ to read them, but that’s it. Two particular things I learned about were syslog and CEF.
SNMP. I learned that this protocol exists, and I also learned that I didn’t like it and that I don’t want to have anything to do with it. This decision didn’t work out for me, as I was forced to learn about MIBs and traps. As it stands, I’ll have to learn even more.
The importance of Windows in security work. I previously thought that Linux was for haXXors and Windows was for non-technical users, but boy was I wrong. Learning Windows pays off immensely. Actually, that’s incorrect, learning Windows is indispensable¹. Stuff like how the registry works, the intricacies around the Windows API, or Powershell. I still have to learn a lot, but I’m slowly going through Practical Malware Analysis and abusing a Windows XP VM.

Becoming a better superuser

Useful Linux commands:
- Ctrl + r in the terminal to start a search of previously executed commands.
- Ctrl + w in the terminal to delete an entire word before (usually Ctrl + Backspace in text editors). This also works for Insert mode in Vim!
- sh + start typing the name of an .sh file, then Tab to autocomplete. I mean, you can also use ./ and then the name of the file, but I prefer sh.
- aliases used in a .bashrc file. Now I type ajde and I change directories, run Docker, run a particular NPM build process, change directory to where the output is, move a couple of files, and open the output in the browser… all with one command.
- xdg-open (ideally aliased to something shorter) to open stuff from the command line in their application. E.g. I type open index.html and the local file index.html opens in Chrome.
- sudo !!: runs the previous command as sudo
Git. Previously I knew only how to git clone a repository, and that was it. I have since learned to fetch, pull, add -u, commit -m (and how to write good commit messages), as well as to rebase, to update submodules, to resolve merge conflicts, and more.
More Vim (❤️). My day-to-day editor. I watched some good videos by Luke Smith, which is where I’ve learned most of what I use. Some nice commands I use daily:
- Ctrl + v to select blocks, followed by Shift + i to insert something in several rows at once
- J to join newlines; g and then j or k to move up and down according to visual (not actual) newlines
- :noh to stop highlighting
- ciw to change an entire word, even if the cursor is in the middle of it
- t or f and then some character, to go to the next instance of that character
- r to replace a single character, x to delete it
- Ctrl + w in insert mode, to delete the previous word without exiting insert mode
- how to exit Vim

Misc

CTF formats. I got acquainted with how CTFs work, and got some experience in playing them.
Taking initiative/ownership. Since I was a freelancer before this job, I was my own boss. This meant that there was no mechanism where I could fit myself in as a cog, which meant that I had to think about what made the most sense to do. Getting employed felt… different. There’s a subtle pull towards waiting to be told what to do. You’re inexperienced, you’re trying to figure things out, so out of insecurity, you kinda… wait to be told what makes sense to do. For some this may be tempting! But I think it’s ultimately a bad choice. Being proactive, thinking about what needs to be done, and then doing it, is much better. Pushing for changes is better. Advocating for how you’d do things is better. Almost everything is better than waiting to be told what to do.

Anyways, there’s probably more that I missed, but I think these are the main ones. Overall, I’m glad. This was a good year for me in terms of learning. I’ve got my hopes up that next year’s gonna be even better.

For certain kinds of security work. ↩︎

My list of questions

Wed, 24 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Here’s a live list of questions that I don’t yet know the answer to. I’ll update it as I find out the answer, or, more likely, as I just add more and more questions.

Physics

How do electromagnetic fields work?
Where does magnetism come from?
Why is nuclear fusion difficult to achieve?
How do wires transmit electricity if electrons aren’t running along through them?
How do we know that subatomic particles exist?
Why is it impossible to surpass the speed of light?
Why does time pass at different speeds depending on gravity?

Chemistry

How do you make explosives out of household chemicals?

Mathematics

What is the P/NP problem and why is it important?
What is Gödel’s incompleteness theorem?

Biology

What’s the mechanism of aging?
How do we know how DNA works?
How do genes function?
What are RNA precursor chemicals?

Cryptography

How does the Diffie-Hellman key exchange work?
What are zkSNARKs?

Computer science

How exactly does Dijkstra’s pathfinding algorithm work?
What even is a Turing machine?

Philosophy

What is sentience?

Engineering

How do RFID readers work?
How do semiconductors work and why are they important?

Master list of reasons why reading fiction is good

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This is a list of reasons why I think that reading fiction is good. I’ll update it as I think of more examples.

When you read fiction, you temporarily “load” a completely different life. This means that you get more diverse experience. You live a couple of other lives in addition to your life.
You get to hang out with really cool people, and you get to meet really annoying people, and you get to learn how not to be like the annoying people. This is particularly important if you’re a kid, because hanging out with people from books is not that different from hanging out with people in real life.
You get to have your mind changed in a way that wouldn’t have happened with non-fiction. Every mindset has its own limitations, and you simply cannot experience the quality and the intention of some thought that comes from a very separate mindset. Explaining love and connection to someone who’s just not into it is impossible, or will seem trivial to them, like why are you telling me all this stuff. But take that person on a ride, and they will get it. Same goes for other vibes, like curiosity for the non-curious or justice for the powerful, and so on.
You can meet and experience very particular types of people with very different architectures of mind. Then, you can recognize their behavior in other (real) people around you, and you’ll have a better understanding of those people. This is obviously good if you’re trying to understand people.
You get to see places that are far away in time, space, or any other dimension. This gives you a fresh view of that specific dimension.

Taking a simplified model

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

This may be trivial but I didn’t see it written down explicitly anywhere, so I’m writing it. There’s a specific trick I’ve noticed that some people do that makes for better conversations, and I don’t know if there’s a name for it, but I think there should be, so I nominate taking a simplified model.

Say that you want to figure out some big societal issue, like how taxes should work, or how much people should be paid, or how much of a company should belong to the founder, and how much to the workers.

The usual way to go about this is to launch into specifics or into generalities. You either talk about the tax situation in, I don’t know, post-war Netherlands and how the price of oil affected the shipping industry which then led to something which led to something else - I’m just fabricating stuff, but you know, a line of reasoning where you extract some lesson from highly specific events.

Or you talk about very general principles - like, we should all be treated equally, or we should reward those with ingenuity and drive, stuff like that.

But the cool trick is taking a simplified model: e.g. imagining a society of only ten people. And then running through the combinations, maybe extracting lessons. For example:

Imagine that in this society, John accidentally discovers oil (or an imaginary resource, doesn’t matter). John works hard and makes life better for the rest of the society. How should he be rewarded (if at all)?
Imagine that John doesn’t work very hard, but is just the first person out of many who might have plausibly discovered this new resource. Does this change anything?
Imagine that John works on this project single-handedly but wants to leave his heritage not to the village but to his two sons. How do we feel about that?

And so on. This works for a broad set of questions, and I’ve found that taking a simplified model always brings clarity. The trick is that it doesn’t work in highly soldier-like debates, where such hypotheticals might be perceived as gotchas. But when trying to figure things out, reducing the number of variables works really good. You answer a simpler question, and only then make the question more like real life.

Why I am no longer driven

Tue, 16 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I used to be very driven. I’m talking “wake up at 4 AM, go run with my dog, take a cold shower, study for two hours, go work, meditate, cook, go to MMA practice, read a book before bed” driven. I was very ready to, you know, get after it. As you might notice from the title, this is no longer true. Why?

The first and obvious explanation is that I’m getting older. I have no way of confirming or denying this - it really could be the case that it’s some mashup of biological processes that works independently of whatever my subjective experience of life is. But I’m 29, which doesn’t seem old at all, so what are the other reasons?

The first reason I can think of is that normal, everyday life is actually difficult. This may be an entirely personal phenomenon, but I find that I semi-consciously categorize my life into two areas: “takes energy” and “doesn’t take energy”. Things that take energy are the big important things, like studying for some important professional certification or completing a big project or whatever. And things that don’t take energy include all the backend admin work: the cooking, the cleaning, the handling of people, the coordinating, the who’s gonna take the dog for a walk, the did you remember that we have a family lunch this weekend, and more.

You don’t have to be particularly attentive to realize that the “doesn’t take energy” category is completely bogus. It’s a scam, one that I’ve willingly enrolled myself into. My general theory for why I’ve done this to myself is the implicit attitude that if you do things “right”, things from this other category shouldn’t take time or energy. Like, these are the basics, right, and the basics shouldn’t be hard. I don’t know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense when I look into it, which is why it’s a total scam. Things that don’t take energy, take energy.

There’s something more that’s sorta related. Sometimes, you do a thing that “takes energy” and that’s it, you’ve done it, done. But projects usually require maintenance after you do the project itself, so now you have to, again, do the backend admin work. If you study something, you have to apply it or at least go through some flash cards because otherwise, you’re losing it. If you train some skill, same thing. If you get promoted, you have a harder baseline job. If you buy a house, congratulations on your second job!

Then there’s also the fact that just a basic, regular day isn’t always equally draining. If you have some issue at work, you might be tempted to wave it off as a minor hindrance, a minor annoyance, not something worth your energy and attention as you come back home. Because, hey, it’s just this silly little thing, I shouldn’t be bothered at all. But you can’t talk yourself out of a problem you didn’t talk yourself into in the first place. So you come home, and sure enough, you have your regular set of things that you’re supposed to do now but which don’t take energy, but in addition, you’ve actually, in reality, had a very, very, very difficult day (and you’re pretending you didn’t because you feel it shouldn’t have affected you that much).

So that’s one type of explanation. The other one is disillusionment, or, at least, a change of mindset. I can see a change in the type of YouTube video that I can stomach these days. I used to watch those “How I Keep Productive, Work on 15000 Side Hustles, Run 3 Marathons a Day, and Earn 3 Million Dollars A Month” videos and then I stopped. I just can’t anymore. And in particular, I can no longer watch stuff that takes inspiration out of fiction. I used to have a small theory that went something like this: you are very affected by the circle of people around you, but it doesn’t make that much of a difference if the people are fictional or real.

But these days, when I see someone use Goku or Naruto or some other anime character to prove a point, I’m outta there. I may even press dislike. “You see, Goku trained at 10x the Earth’s gravity to get himself ready for the confrontation. Inspired by that, I try to push my own boundaries every day.” I just can’t take it anymore. I mean, it’s probably because that was my thing for a couple of years in my early 20s, so I have a too strong reaction right now, but I really think that drawing inspiration from fictional characters is highly, highly overrated.

This is a weird intro to my main point, but I’m talking about a general sense of disillusionment, or, to be more precise, quitting a sprint mindset. Getting inspired by something is very treacherous because you might institute some new rules for yourself, announce to the world the upcoming changes, and then follow through, burning a lot of willpower in the hope that you’re constructing a habit. Sometimes it works. Getting into that “get after it” mode, doing a spiritual-energetic-mental sprint, psyching yourself up for that promise of success, embracing the grind, however sigma it may be, it’s pretty bad for long-term results. I mean, maybe someone can pull it off, but I can’t. After hundreds of such offensives, I don’t trust them anymore.

I’ve sorta went the opposite route, and it’s a weird mixture of individual components that works for me. I don’t think I can write an exhaustive list, but I’ll name a couple of things: coasting in neutral, introducing a Sabbath, saying no to people close to me, following curiosity, writing things down… There’s probably more. If this is interesting, I can write about individual things, but it’s just stuff I’ve stolen from smart people.

Anyway, life is now less intense, but more long-term. It’s not a sprint, not even a marathon, it’s more like a hike. I am no longer driven, in the sense of biting down hard and getting after it all day every day. I rest more, I take walks, I sometimes skip training sessions, and I respect the energy-draining aspects of mundane stuff. I don’t ask myself for superhuman performance anymore because it’s a short-sighted ask. And I think I get an equal amount done. Most of all, I don’t beat myself up anymore for not performing up to some arbitrarily high standard. Life is forgiving, and it’s wise to give yourself the spare energy so that you can actually sprint when life isn’t forgiving.

My social engineering adventure

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I really like hacking. I like breaking into places where I’m not supposed to be, and while digital hacking is extremely fun and rewarding, physical and social hacking are on another level.

This means that whenever I get the chance to practice these skills, I do. Sometimes I’m an urban explorer, and I climb rooftops or investigate abandoned buildings, and sometimes I talk my way into places. Here’s a story from one social engineering training event I attended (some details omitted).

There’s a sugar refinery in a town in a pretty European country. The refinery includes several buildings, of which one is an administrative building, and there are production facilities as well. On this particular training, the task for our group was to get in the refinery, take all the photos that we can, get into all the buildings, and get as much intel as possible - especially the locations of cameras, guard houses etc. If this was a physical pentest, it would probably have included a bag of Raspberry Pis and leaving USBs with malware littered around. However, our task was just to get info.

The usual practice is what’s called a “spiral” approach. Essentially, you don’t barge straight into the front door. Instead, you collect data first from the outside, from social media - basically, OSINT. Then, you slowly close in on the actual physical location, like a spiral. First from a great distance, where you can’t be seen. Then you maybe pass with your car and take some videos. Then you come a bit closer, pretending you’re someone who’s supposed to be there, observing and getting information. As this spiral goes inward, you slowly get more and more info, your picture of the target is clearer, and only in the end do you end up in the center of the spiral - at the target location itself.

That’s how it’s supposed to go. However, we barged straight in.

To be fair, we had a unique opportunity to do so. We did start with collecting OSINT data, but the team lead for our little group took initiative and just called them up. Turns out that they had a tour organized that very day - in fact in two hours they had a group of students coming in. “Well can you squeeze us in as well?” “Sure, no problem, come along.”

So we did. We’re all in our twenties or thirties, so we can pass for students pretty well. We get into the car, drive to the location, get out on the parking lot, and look pretty clueless and semi-bored, exactly how a student group led by a teacher would look like. We go up to the gate, introduce ourselves to the guard, he calls to check and informs us that we’re late - the presentation already started without us. But no worries, he’ll get us in. We get into this big hall - sort of a restaurant - and there’s a bunch of presumably real students sitting, listening to the presentation, and eating cake. Eating cake! “Here’s your cake,” a kind lady shows us. “Would you like some coffee or tea as well?”

At this point, I’m torn between feeling sorry for deceiving these wholesome people and celebrating such an immediate win. We eat the cake, listen to the presentation, receive our hardhats and go on the tour. The other students ask about us, who we are, which university are we studying at, and so on. There’s many signs that expressly prohibit taking pictures, but I play blind and take as many pictures as I can with my phone. Some of the actual students are trying to strike a conversation with me, and I’m really focused on my surroundings and how everything looks, trying to remember where the gates and cameras are. I look at their faces, and they probably have very normal expressions, but I feel found out. Every look they give me looks to me like they figured me out, they know I’m the impostor. It’s… a weird feeling. When you know, you feel like everyone else around you knows as well. And if you’re on a mission like this, nerves play their part, and you see suspicion everywhere. “They don’t actually know,” I remind myself.

So we do the tour. We walk through every single important hallway, pass tons and tons (literally) of machinery, and manage to get pictures and videos. The tour is over, and we’ve been to a good 40% of this entire complex. Great! Are we done? Not yet.

See, we didn’t go near the admin building, and that’s where all the offices are. We are escorted back to the parking lot and talk it out. “I think we can do it,” someone says, “Let’s just go straight in and pretend we’re lost and we’re trying to find the rest of the tour.”

“But isn’t that going to be a little weird? I mean, they know that the tour is over and that we’re the odd ones anyway, and that-”

“No, they don’t necessarily know it. People doing the tours are in the other building. This is office staff who maybe have no clue about when the tours are and who is going on them.”

Three of our 5-person group decide to stay waiting in the car and observe the comings and goings, so that we get a bit of that spiral approach we originally missed. My “teacher” and I, we decide that our story is that I lost my ID during the tour, and we go to the office building, which is just outside of the view of the guard house for the complex, and we just… walk in.

This building has a central staircase, an elevator, and offices arranged along a single long hallway on every floor. I keep taking videos with my phone while we’re walking the staircase, but nobody sees us, nobody knows we’re there. So we decide to risk it even more and we go into one of the long, long hallways.

People have their doors opened, and they look at you, and you feel so exposed. You know, with absolute certainty, that you’ve been found out. And then they look back to their screen and keep working. We walk a couple of these floors, peer into some of the offices, taking good video material of all of it (I’m recording all the time, trying to keep my phone as natural as possible).

“Hey, can I help you?” a lady from one of the offices asks us. My heart sinks. “Hi, so we were just on this tour, and he lost his ID, so we were looking for someone to talk to about that,” my teacher responds. “Oh,” the lady is surprised, “that’s unfortunate. Let me see what I can do.” She leaves us waiting in the hallway, and goes to make a phone call. We briefly consider just getting out through the staircase, but as we’re discussing, the lady’s back: “Unfortunately, nobody of the tour staff saw anything. What did you say your name was?” she asks me. I remember the following seconds in excruciating, slow-mo detail because I totally failed in this part. My teacher looks at me, I look at her, and she responds and says my real full name. My last name is a bit unusual, so two thought threads are going through my mind at the same time - if they look me up, they’ll find me for sure, I have a pretty unique name. If they ever find out that we were social engineering them, they’ll know about me, and this might be a problem in the future. But then I think - hey, we didn’t do anything illegal, we don’t need to hide. All this is happening while the nice lady is asking me to write my name down, and she’s watching me slowly write out my first name as I’m deciding, in real time, if I’m going to write my fairly identifying last name or not. As I’m very slowly writing my last name down, probably looking at least a little illiterate, I decide, mid-name, to change it into something that sounds kinda similar to what my teacher said, but isn’t exactly that. I omit a letter from the middle of the name, hoping that if they do in fact look me up on the internet, they won’t have the exact sequence of characters, and they won’t find me. I give the nice lady the piece of paper, leave a FAKE PHONE NUMBER as a point of contact, and flee the scene of the crime.

The next day, my “teacher” tells me they called her on her phone, saying that they took another look throughout the complex and couldn’t find my ID. They tried to call me on the phone I provided, but couldn’t reach me. So they asked the person my teacher originally contacted, who then gave her number to the nice lady. My teacher told the nice lady that I managed to find the ID, and thanked her for the effort. “Great to hear, it was no problem at all,” the nice lady said.

Feeling like a bit of an asshole because I put them through unnecessary work, I realized the following things:

Just because you know you’re the impostor, it doesn’t mean that people around you know.
You should always know what your name is and what your phone is, and other people on your team should know what name you’re going to use.
Always “close”. By asking around for my ID, we opened a task item for people, and this was an active task that remained open in the background of their minds. Don’t linger in people’s minds. Close their task. Telling the lady that we found my ID was precisely that. Task closed, no need to worry any longer. I doubt she remembers me anymore.

It was a very valuable learning experience for me, and I’m very grateful for being invited to participate in that event. I don’t think we caused them too much trouble in the end, so I don’t feel guilty about it. Mostly thankful. Thank you, sugar refinery. So long, and thanks for all the cake!

Hello

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 14:33:21 +0200