Henry Stanley — Director of Technology at Effektiv Spenden, writing from Berlin about software, philosophy and whatever else.
The Slaughtered Ox , Rembrandt (1655) More than once, an otherwise smart person has attempted to untie the Gordian knot that is the way we treat animals, and themselves come undone in the process. Simon Sarris , otherwise a handsome polymath with a hot wife, recently wrote his attempt at why veganism is wrong , and the article he wrote is just bizarrely bad. It makes a lot of meandering points,…
Anyone who s not been living under a rock knows that we re in full peptide mania. For the uninitiated, peptides are drugs which are made of short chains of amino acids, unlike most drugs which are small molecules. The difference is mostly academic except that you can t take peptides orally for the most part, as they re just protein chains, and your stomach is very good at digesting protein and…
Willem van Mieris, Der Apotheker People are surprised that prescription drugs aren t illegal and you can just buy them. This seems to violate some sort of intuition about them surely you re not allowed to have them and thus they are forbidden to buy. This is sort of true; most countries don t just let you buy them over the counter. Medicines are usually split into different categories depending on…
Waterhouse, The Danaides (1903) James Clear talks about changing your identity as a way to change your habits. It s hard to eschew meat every time you go out to eat, but once you label yourself as someone who doesn t eat meat , and start to believe it, then it becomes easy not to order it. Identities let you precompute actions There are two reasons this is useful. One is that adopting an identity…
Joseph Wright of Derby, An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) Dylan Matthews at Vox recently lamented how he d gotten it so very wrong about AI . He d gone to an Effective Altruism conference (EA Global SF) in 2015, so very early-days EA (I came to the movement in 2013 or so, and took the Giving What We Can pledge in 2016). There was lots of talk of how an artificial intelligence could…
Woman at a Window , Caspar David Friedrich (1822) Oh, we know, both of us, that it shouldn t matter, that there s more to life than pairing off, that the media is to blame, blah blah blah. But it s hard to see that, sometimes, on a Sunday morning, when you re maybe ten hours from going down to the pub for a drink and the first conversation of the day. High Fidelity , Nick Hornby Living alone is a…
Prometheus Unbound , Carl Bloch (1864) Fable was released from its government-imposed shackles a couple of days ago. 1 1. For those not deeply online: Fable is Anthropic s most powerful AI model, a safer version of Mythos, which is being used to find oodles of exploits in the software which runs the world. The US Government took a dislike to it after a series of unfortunate misunderstandings and…
Flywheel , Ford Model A, August 1, 1933 Something that surprised me about Inkhaven was: it was easy to write. Really easy. I had assumed this would be the hard part. I sought advice from friends about this, getting them to assure me that I wouldn t get kicked out. When I was there I spoke to another Inkhavenee about what it would be like to be the first person to ever get kicked out; we both…
(Some initial thoughts, pending a deeper exploration) Alcohol is a pretty nasty drug. It causes cancer and birth defects. It has a very small therapeutic index , in that the ratio between an effective dose and a lethal dose is very small, much smaller than e.g. benzodiazepines or most pharmaceuticals. The more you drink, the higher your risk of heart disease, stroke, liver disease, and a variety…
hold me I write about some personal things on here, none of which are particular to me. Most human experiences are at least somewhat common even if the way those experiences are implemented is unique. This uniqueness gives room for beautiful writing and sharing some raw and soft part of you. It comes at a cost, of course. Exposing yourself is hard. You feel vulnerable. It can alienate others. I…