From Rest of What I Know
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3] Most people have a variety of objectives, proximate and ultimate, and a variety of virtues. The virtues are how one represents themselves to be predictable and trustworthy to others, which are how they are able to form coalitions. Crucially, though, these techniques for coalition-building differ in their relationship to…
Roshan: Wikipen [[Environmentalism As A Means]] refers to the approach of using environmentalism as a mechanism to achieve other objectives. This is the dominant form of environmentalist thought and action in the United States with the biggest environmental organizations in the US focusing on ending clean energy projects and the grassroots focused similarly on opposition of housing and clean…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3] Amber is my personal web archiver. If you found this page from a <code>User-Agent</code> string in your server logs, this is the crawler that visited you. == About == Amber keeps versioned, replayable copies of websites I read. The idea is to have my own personal Wayback Machine that I can use to look at historical content…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2] [[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Pangram_detects_an_AI_passage.jpg}}|thumb|Welp]] Today I ran into a story I thought was funny. {{HackerNews | url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185556 | author = harper | title = I m Scared a Stranger Will Call My Novel AI, So I Built GitHub for Words | date = 2026-08-05 | datetime…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot I read a recent thread which I think is fairly typical of a kind of motivated reasoning common in the US<ref name=in-us/>. == Home Cleaning == {{Tweet | name = Nicholas Decker | username = captgouda24 | text = Something I really like about America is how uncomfortable we are about servants. People who do services do not *serve you*. They *do…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2] [[File:{{#setmainimage:Huggies_Overnight_Diaper.jpg}}|thumb|Huggies overnight diapers - a marvel of modern science]] Modern materials are amazing magical devices to create a prosperous society. They are ever-present to a degree that we have normalized their existence but they have transformed the lives of normal people. The…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot I recently read this article about a physician s husband who died of suicide after being denied care in what s described as a resort-grade facility. {{HackerNews | url = https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48981496 | author = Jimmc414 | title = My husbands suicide shows theres something very wrong with US insurance industry | date =…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot I saw an interesting tweet today about who-marries-whom, that is which races in the US marry which other races. {{Tweet | name = Crémieux | username = cremieuxrecueil | text = Here s a big chart of the latest data on interracial marriage in America. It s an ethnicity-by-ethnicity breakdown of who marries who for some of the biggest groups,…
AutoDescriptor: Added page description via AutoDescriptor bot [[File:{{#setmainimage:Citation Laundering - An Example Flowchart.png}}|thumb|An example of how you might do this]] [[Citation Laundering]] is the practice of taking a low-likelihood statement and citing it through an increasingly more reliable chain of sources until the claim looks like it is reliably sourced and therefore unlikely to…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2] [[File:{{#setmainimage:ChatGPT_Image_Gen_-_Dyson_Sphere_in_Construction.jpg}}|thumb|ChatGPT s conception of what a Dyson sphere might look like. It would be dark in a cosmological sense but it has to radiate. And obviously the direction of observation counts.]] It struck me the other day that I have a mental misconception of…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3] [[File:{{#setmainimage:Nano_Banana_rendition_of_Seattle s_Port_By_The_West_Seattle_Trail.jpg}}|thumb|The parking lot where I was stopped with my busted-up tire. The penny-farthing guy was there, yes]] I dropped by a friend s place to pick up some more Blackwell GPUs and everything seemed to be going well. I did my usual thing…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot Today, [https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/ a GPT-5.x prototype escaped containment on HuggingFace s servers using a 0-day it came up with] which is both phenomenally cool and a little bit scary. In January, I experienced a funny similar case where the agent obsessively decided to go and be helpful to…
Roshan: Wikipen [[The Inscrutable Success Heuristic]] refers to a situation where someone makes apparently stupid decisions which always pay off. If this happens often enough and the ideas seem particularly unlikely to work then it s useful to consider whether one is as smart as the person who seemingly keeps getting lucky. It comes from a tweet that looks like this: {{Quote |text=Less intelligent…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [[File:{{#setmainimage:Sync_Duration_-_Skybright_ETL.jpg}}|thumb|The view into my ETL system]] Now that we have agents that can analyse our data for us, the question becomes whether to retain our dashboards or not. I think it s pretty clear that the standard answer is right: we need both these systems. Dashboards are useful for awareness of…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot Teenagers have always been reflexively "too cool to care". But now, contemporary media also adopts this reflexive detachment to its own detriment<ref name=teens/>. When Joss Whedon popularized the "moment of gravitas; silent beat; ironic comment" technique, it was perhaps novel, but now it s everywhere and often inappropriately so. Julie and…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [[File:{{#setmainimage:Screenshot_-_Taskmaster_KB_for_Credential_Proxy.jpg}}|thumb|One of the pages in the KB]] Having a single store so I can query my second mind of things I ve written down has always been something I ve wanted. That s evolved in various ways. At one point, I had these as just plain text files on my computer, then I had…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v3] [[File:{{#setmainimage:RFID_Wrist_Tag_on_Alpine_Loop_Watch_Band.jpg}}|thumb|The RFID tag on my wrist]] A short while ago, I bought [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DD3R9W81 a set of Apple Watch Ultra 2 bands] from one of those undifferentiated sellers on Amazon. The style I ve now come to like are the ones called the "Alpine Loop".…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2] [[File:{{#setmainimage:Example clickbait adverts.jpg}}|thumb|Fairly anti-memetic]] [[wikipedia:There Is No Antimemetics Division]] is a famous (in the subculture) book by [[wikipedia:Qntm]] which talks about entities that are imperceivable. These are things so anti-viral (in the memetics sense) that you can t even behold them…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [[File:{{#setmainimage:Astra_walking_through_the_Palms_courtyard.jpg}}|thumb|Astra walking through the courtyard of the building we live in]] One of the nice things about living in a modern residential building is that there are lots of shared amenities. For instance one of the nice things about [[Life in Coquitlam]] is that we were in a…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot A common sentiment expressed in coastal American cities is that it s awful that the government is able to ticket people for improperly curbed wheels and parking meters not paid while simultaneously unable to punish those who openly use drugs and defecate on the streets. The latter is a valid concern, but not because of the former. In fact,…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot I recently came upon an article that [https://manualdousuario.net/en/smart-glasses-ugly-tacky/ pretty much argued that Meta Glasses are uncool things made by uncool people]. That s a fair complaint about the devices. They re quite clunky and so on. And perhaps it s a fair complaint about the makers, though it seems that Mark Zuckerberg has…
Roshan: [[File:Smith_and_Farrow_in_the_Sunset.jpg|thumb|A view of the building where we stayed, from our cousin s place]] We stayed in [[wikipedia:Coquitlam]], [[wikipedia:British Columbia|BC]] for a while from May to Jun in 2026, and it was a pleasant experience. We stayed right by the the Burquitlam station because one of my cousins lives with her husband and two kids right there, and her sister…
AutoDescriptor: Removed Progress (editorial pass: bot over-fire) In [[wikipedia:The Selfish Gene|The Selfish Gene]], Dawkins argues for a gene-centered view of life. In this perspective, the rest of the organism is a vehicle for itself as far as any gene is concerned. I loved this idea when I first encountered it, and eventually that s the seed around which I believe that we are a [[Multicellular…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot {{Tweet | name = Elizabeth Warren | username = SenWarren | text = Elon Musk just became the world s first trillionaire. The typical American household would have to work more than 11 MILLION years to make Elon Musk s level of wealth. We need a wealth tax. | date = Jun 12, 2026 | ID = 2065466952923984219 | ref-name = Tweet_2065466952923984219…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [taxonomy v2] A long time ago, Wikipedia was formed and because Wikipedia is an aggregator of information and not a scholarly work, it created "[[wikipedia:Citation needed|Citation Needed]]", a tag to describe text within it that was not suitably referenced. Wikipedia itself and this particular tag were both memetically strong, and the…
AutoDescriptor: Added categories via AutoDescriptor bot [[File:{{#setmainimage:The_Shard_as_photographed_out_of_a_cab_window.webp}}|thumb|I love London so even nondescript photos of the streets make me nostalgic]] {{Tweet | name = Aella | username = Aella_Girl | text = I m so mad at everyone in my life who told me never to pick stocks, that smarter ppl will always outcompete u. I could have been…
AutoDescriptor: Added Personal Narrative (editorial pass) [[File:Roshan at the Emirates - Arsenal v Everton - Feb 3, 2018.webp|thumb|Arsenal 5, Everton 1. Aubameyang s introduction. The last photo I took at the Emirates.]] Today, for the first time in twenty-two years, Arsenal are champions of England once again. When I was a teenager, my friends were a lot more into football than me. The biggest…