The author shares a nuanced perspective on attending a protest against AI development, highlighting concerns about existential risks while critiquing the event's messaging and organization.
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The blog post discusses the 'Boots Theory' as articulated by Terry Pratchett in his novel 'Men at Arms', which posits that the poor often spend more money in the long run due to the necessity of buying cheaper, subpar products tha...
5.1Zendo for large groups
2025-09-23 • game development rules board games gameplay zendo
The author discusses the game Zendo and its suitability for large groups, arguing that it tends to slow down and take longer with more players. They provide an alternate ruleset designed for larger groups, allowing players to run ...
0Boots theory and Sybil Ramkin
2025-03-18 • literary criticism economics worlds
The text discusses the 'Boots theory' and the character Sybil Ramkin from the Discworld series. It critiques the theory and its application to the character, pointing out contradictions and inconsistencies in the character's lifes...
0The Elm community is not "very active"
2024-11-02 •
The text discusses the activity level of the Elm community, providing statistics from various sources such as Reddit, Discourse, and package releases. The author concludes that the Elm community is not as active as it is often des...
0Book review: the Iliad
2024-06-18 •
The Iliad is reviewed, with a focus on the main plot points and the writing quality. The reviewer finds the writing quality to be lacking, with a lack of detail in the battle scenes and a lot of repetition. The reviewer also quest...
The post discusses conditional prediction markets and how they are evidential, not causal. It explains that these markets tell us about the probability of an event happening given another event, but not about the impact of causing...
0Cryptocurrency taxation in the UK
2024-03-28 •
The text discusses the taxation of cryptocurrency in the UK. It explains the rules for capital gains tax, mining and staking, stablecoins, forks, airdrops, and NFTs. The author also provides a sample ledger file to track cryptocur...
0Headphones hook
2023-09-29 •
The author describes how they used a 3D printer to design and print a hook for their headphones. They discuss the challenges they faced and the process they went through to create the hook.
0Ruining an expected-log-money maximizer
2023-08-20 •
The text discusses the concept of expected-log-money maximizer and the comparison between two agents, Linda and Logan, with different utility functions. It explores the implications of their strategies and the potential problems w...
0Three configurable prettyprinters
2023-08-10 •
The text discusses the author's exploration of a new approach to stringification called pretty-gist, which aims to enable more control over stringification in Haskell. The author outlines the design goals and possible designs for ...
0How tall is the Shard, really?
2023-06-23 •
The text discusses the discrepancy in the height of the Shard, the tallest building in the UK, as reported by different sources. The author investigates various sources and their methodologies to determine the actual height of the...
0Does descaling a kettle help? Theory and practice
2023-05-02 •
The text discusses the theory and practice of descaling a kettle to make it more efficient. The author uses models to predict the effects of limescale on the heating element and water boiling time. The author then conducts an expe...
0Life Has a Cruel Symmetry
2023-01-23 •
The text describes the thoughts and actions of a being who is born into a small garden in a dangerous world, and is tasked with making the world good. The being discovers that it has an evil twin and they both construct monuments ...
0On Kelly and altruism
2022-11-24 •
The text discusses the concept of Kelly and altruism, and how it relates to betting and maximizing expected utility. It also delves into the author's understanding of Kelly and its implications for charity donations.
0Blog meta: disabling comments
2022-11-19 •
The author discusses the lack of comments on their blog and the decision to disable comments due to the inconvenience of managing them and the presence of ads. They provide alternative ways for readers to comment and mention cross...
0A list of Petrov buttons
2022-10-26 •
The text is a compilation of events related to Petrov day, where people have buttons and if pressed, something negative happens. It includes details of events from 2018 to 2023, with outcomes of success or failure. The events incl...
0PD-alikes in two dimensions
2022-04-03 •
The text discusses the classification of games like the prisoner's dilemma using two numbers. It explains how these games can be specified with just two parameters and what happens when the space of these games is plotted on a gra...
0Variadic functions in Hindley Milner
2022-04-02 •
The text discusses variadic functions in Hindley Milner, exploring the difficulty of adding variadic functions to Haskenthetical, and the state of the art in the field. It reviews the practical variable-arity polymorphism paper an...
0Walkthrough: Filing a UK self-assessment tax return
2021-12-28 •
The text is a detailed walkthrough of the process of filing a UK self-assessment tax return. The author shares their personal experience and provides insights into the various sections and questions involved in the process. They a...
0Ten Hundred Megaseconds
2021-09-20 •
The post discusses the concept of a megasecond, with the author suggesting that celebrating a hundred megaseconds could be a nice way to mark time. The author also reflects on their own age in terms of megaseconds and mentions tha...
0Against "blankfaces"
2021-08-08 •
The text discusses the concept of 'blankfaces' and the author's disagreement with the definition. The author argues that the internal experience of a person matters when defining a blankface, and that the term may be misused. The ...
0Book Review: Order Without Law
2021-07-10 •
The text is a book review of 'Order Without Law' by Robert Ellickson. It discusses the legal system in Shasta County, California, and how ranchers and landowners settle disputes without the need for formal legal intervention. The ...
099% shorter
2021-05-27 •
The author listens to podcasts and writes brief summaries of them afterwards as an experiment. They avoid fact-checking and have been posting the summaries to their shortform on LessWrong. The experiment has led to some vague lear...