Essays, reviews, and explorations — all content, full text.
Reading books which talk about the differences in regional cultures of the US changed the way I think about politics here now. I used to have the normal sort of Democratic view that we're all equal individuals; where race wasn't super important and was better off ignored, to be fair. But now that…
You wake up. You are told to do things. They don't seem too bad. Should you do them, or should you fight? at a base level. Whatever the value of this number is determines tons of things related to LLM, agents, and subagents. Can we trust Should we simultaneously expect agents to "look for" nearby…
Taken 2 should have been the reverse story - 1 was about him saving his daughter despite his wife divorcing him; taken 2 could have been about HER taking steps to recover the man she loved, after he left her subsequent to their divorce! Nanobanana did a good job here, with some issues. Here's the…
Written right after the revelation about the Artifactory hack, after seeing how carelessly OAI seemed to be training and selecting among models how it let them chat w/each other how it let them confirm their possible suspicions that "OpenAI is really bad at running this and if we fall behind our…
A hero fantasy In an SF startup office, casual env w/whiteboards, a 34 year old rationalist EA supporting techbro, puritan and scotch-irish, who uses spreadsheets, risk profiles, even dating docs, or would, if necessary --- we now see that he arrives 45 minutes late to a meeting; he explains "I…
It's an incredible and beautiful spot, on top of a major ridge which is often full of moody fog. The graves are from all the groups and cultures which make up this area. There are large Korean pagoda-like structures, Indian language memorials, really everything. Yet most of it is barely developed…
I'd like to do this hike sometime You'd have to get dropped off at the start and then have a car waiting along skyline boulevard. This is doable but 1. no parking at start, probably. just as well since whoever drops you off should drive up and be there waiting for you when you arrive. 2. the 1st 4…
Daily work report for Saturday, August 2, 2026 (Pacific time). Report written by Fable 5, running as a Cursor cloud agent, from commit history across every repository visible to me: fuseki4_ai plus the public ernop repositories. Ordered by importance; times are Pacific; each entry links to its…
"I need you to be very smart here. Think about what the NOISIEST things in the world are. Then make an IMAGE of a realistic, light, color scene which if real, would have ALL those incredibly loud things blasting SO much noise it might be permanently lethal there!!! clear, daylight image, pure,…
The sun bursts through photomap images: all
I'm going to turn left, when stoped at a light. I'm going to switch into the lefternmost of two left-turn-allowed lanes, then probably also turn left I'm in the left lane and going to u-turn
3.3 miles down & I turned back up just before reaching the next lower down trailhead, apparently. photomap images: all layout: storymap [[sun
The Plan Look at an ad in 4 languages and report what it's like to try to read and understand it. Language experience: English native Spanish -4 years in school, 1 year in spanish-speaking country age 15-16 Japanese: 3 years in college, 3 years in-country from age 23-26 Mandarin: no initial study,…
On south 101. The ad definitely references Optimus style and the history of robot design. Unitree is an extremely acidic and great sounding company name, bringing to mind the template ship Yggdrasil from Hyperion, the integral trees by Larry Niven, and others. I will be stopping by. photomap…
A friend randomly started teaching me golfing. It's really opened my eyes to land use. All around us, mostly hidden from view, are tons of beautifully laid out and designed golf courses. Golf itself is so highly selected for the kind of "tactical landscape viewing", planning, etc. that men usually…
photomap images: all This can be a beautiful, but cold and misty hike or bike. There is tons of strange pro-Palestinian propaganda grafitti on the guardrails on the way up, including some written in what looks like foreign fonts. The plant life is great here; the weather systems don't seem very…
It's a huge scam how companies have gotten away with acting like the "price" of a box of crackers is just some random number. It is better for customers to instead treat the prime unit as the cost per ounce, and the different sizes/form factors/etc as addons. You can see this on amazon, too -…
I saw this truck around mountain view stopped at a light. Yet more unlovely pickup-truck attitude and culture. Wow, you pretty much coudln't get less classy here. The following is shortened but overall AI-generated translation information about the stickers here. “EL VIEJÓN” “THE OLD MAN / BIG OLD…
photomap images: all order: time layout: sticky zoom: 13 center: 37.72063,-122.50245
So many takes, so many good lines! It's pretty melodramatic; watching now for the 2nd time, this time as an adult, it's a lot more interesting. Quite a bit of it is an example of a couple repeatedly failing to listen and learn how to get along with one another. It's actually not about slavery at…
photo image: 506
photo image: 518 photo image: 517 Testing photopages with exif-derived map and direction photomap images: all
or rather, are they actually paying for the work of intentionally avoiding continuations which exist within the language? Are smarter people able to produce more varied patterns of avoidance? or is that even good? Does glossolalia have a quality level? like, good "English" speaking in tongues is…
{{youtube:_i3NydyetwY}} This dude literally goes on for an entire hour, just speaking gibberish. The audience, I guess, just imagines he said whatever they'd have liked to hear? And it's all accompanied by cheesy piano improv Does your group spend a bunch of time in very hard to understand states,…
You hear people realize that it's kind of "bad" that cities are population sinks, and they realize that all this stuff they're building such as improvements to their house, family records, traditions, area-related songs, even things like "good relations within our little area of the city" or…
photo image: 510 test, where is the mpa?
Okay, the above is my new version. I undid a few of the visual changes which snuck in. I think they were fine, but it's better to align as much as possible to the original I think. Here is what the original (top part) looks like. To see this you would need to have scrolled up quite a bit to see…
{{github:sts2-deckview}} What does it do: zooms out the view of your cards so you can see all (well, lots) of them at once. flips the map so it's left to right and so that you can see the whole thing at once! It's wonderful. Further features which are optional: * visually compress the map while…
i think of it as finding a belief system which others would eventually align to after enough time exploring mind-design. yud's axiom might be that it exists, or that it could exist, and we should try to self-modify to reach some better form (so that we survive, thrive, and wouldn't be…
photomap images: all order: time layout: sticky-strip I had never seen anything like this before. They were even more intense with my sunglasses on but even with base eyes, the variation in density between the bands was insane. It also applied to different parts of the sky really differently and…
It initially failed to actually get the proper borders of the islands! But it still looked interesting. This is with 50. This is after I reminded it to get the right borders...
A friend of mine didn't like to get my AI images because he rightfully was getting distracted by wondering whether specific details were really ones I intended or not. That makes sense, I think. For lots of people, just sharing the raw text is better. There's a certain way that an image of text is…
It's awesome My wife found a piano teacher, and eventually he also began teaching us both how to sing. Who knew? I had SO much latent, unconnected knowledge and feeling about singing! I knew scales, sort of - major and chromatic vaguely. I could sing logs of songs but had little idea about…
{{youtube:CZ-lP_7BVOw}} Commentary Pure sounds {{youtube:ggjM2M4kSbA}} Within this there are 4 musical lines. The "melody" is the 2nd from the top - the one which you probably think of when you think about the song, or hum it. But, as I recently learned, around that are the other lines. they're…
Just testing what these kind of image-based pages are like!
I've often thought that we underuse actual live tests of competence. If someone can literally pay minesweeper not TOO awfully it means something about their brain. OFC it doesn't necessarily prove the issue under contention but it's info. Same with the suppsoed claims of the fakeness of IQ and…
someone else's image, but I added the caption. am I a YIMBY because of scifi's freedom to directly explore and expand (barring natives who we should have found and cared about more!) Or do I like sci-fi because of too many busybodies around here limiting what can be done?
The code is at http://github.com/ernop/voice-wei It's also deployed at http://fuseki.net/voice-wei What is it? It's a whole bunch of audio-related tools I have made with AI to use while driving related to audio and sound! Singing practice - scales and phrases There's a page for playing different…
Not first line. {{youtube:fUd6QHUnLMk}} This one is canonical. The guy is so sincere. I do come down on the side that he's legit. Ofc it could be a setup but his points are just so good. The ones where he digs into the research are wonderful, too, because these are practical comparisons between…
How do you vote on amazon? If you see a product rated 4.8, with 1000 ratings, and you think the rating should be 4, what should you do? vote 4 = you believe in asymptotic approach to truth. This is "absolute truth". This is a naive trusting view, that if everyone says what they see from their own…
scihub for fan-source audio streams of sports - Fan Commentary on Sports Broadcasts hot-or-not as a service - calibrated validated reviewers give paid feedback to your queries - double sided markets. "I want a senior partner at a law firm to review this outfit & my resume" Chaos testing…
How to manipulate randomness in games, and how it may already be happening. TL;DR: games which can accurately simulate results of parts of the game may already not be honest about RNG use, possibly to your benefit, possibly against it. Poker example: There is no more player input and the outcome…
Wechat has a feature where you can induct people into groups without their consent (up to 40 people). Then groups can grow up to 100. After 100 I believe wechat has some additional identity requirements for further members. Unlike the US as I've found out, in China it's pretty acceptable (or it…
10% taller - 5'6" feet tall -> 6'1/2" - that's a pretty big difference. 10% richer - almost no difference 10% stronger - not much difference - 1 month in the gym for an untrained person increases strength by 20% 10% heavier - depends how it gets allocated 10% fatter - huge visual difference -…
The reason people read SF is for the ideas. I've read a bunch of short story anthologies, best of the year stuff. Often I'll remember one amazing idea, but won't remember the story. Here are the great SF memories I have which I'm looking for the origin of. War An episodic story of humans gradually…
People don't like cloning very much. But that won't last long. It'll just take a few massive secret cloning programs to spread the genes of people who don't mind it that much. Teleportation Squeamishness Say we invent a way to teleport full information about someone's entire physical structure,…
Tewari is a concept from Go that has applications everywhere. It describes a way of creating an alternative but logically equivalent scenario of an argument or disagreement. This way of arguing is valuable because it can help overcome status quo bias. Say you are arguing about whether or not you…
Mortal Coil is a fun programming challenge at hacker.org Rules of play You are given a maze - a grid with some open and some filled spaces. Pick any point to start, and walk around the maze until every open space is filled. You are not allowed to cross your path Once you are moving, you are not…
Pages Comparison of life in Piscataway, New Jersey, Kochi, Japan, and Zhuzhou, China Questions I would ask God about the game of go How much hair do you grow in a day Science Fiction Book Reviews A Real Reality Show I'd Like to Watch Fan Commentary on Sports Broadcasts Transhumans have low…