Blogs, podcasts and art from ja3k. This is a personal project with scope and subject matter ill defined and flowing from interest.
Recently Sam Kriss wrote If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you and, despite its very clear title, I left puzzled about what Kriss is really saying.
Progressive income taxes are very normal in the modern world. But they have a number of artifacts that don't make sense. I want to point some of them out and propose a solution. Problems They reward you for starting and ending your career in July. America has a roughly 10% income tax up to 50k and then 20% up to 100k income tax. So a person who makes 100k throughout a 30y career ends up with a 5k…
I came in 29th at RC Portland last weekend with UR elementals. This is the story of qualifying, preparing and playing the event. Qualifying I've been a sort of casual player the last 4 years since becoming a dad. But I've tried to play one RCQ a quarter. This year between work and the birth of my third I only got one in but I won. It was a really exciting week of my life where I also got Twitter…
It's commonly believed that the world is less important if it's a simulation. The arguments are clear: Waste matters less if you have a spare. If we're not the center of the universe the universe is not about us. But consider this: the appearance of the I block in tetris is so much more important for the emotional reaction of the player. When the game ends the activity in the game is no longer…
This is one of those magic sets where you really feel every one of its 30 years. "Enters the battlefield" is now simple "enters". Makes me think about how every zone change actually has its own verb. Cards are "returned" to your hand, "exiled", "die", "shuffled" or "put on top" of your library. But the only place you enter is the battlefield. It was really important to save those two words this…
Intuitively one might think that vim is less useful in the age of LLMs. The logical chain, which I used to believe, is this: 1. vim is mostly about editing text 2. LLMs will write the text for you 3. Therefore, vim is less useful But the actual insertion step, after you've positioned your cursor, entered insert mode if necessary and type the code is essentially the same in vim, vscode or any other…
Downregulating tmux
It's often said that Google has a monopoly on search. And it certainly has incredible market dominance. According to statcounter Google has a 91% market share across desktop and mobile. But Google can't raise prices. If they charged even a penny per search their market share would drop to the single digits overnight [1] . And there are a ton of search competitors, Bing, Yahoo and DuckDuckGo to…
Previously: 2022 2021 Another full year: My son was born in February. He's doing great. He was briefly 95th percentile BMI and is crawling really fast. He and my daughter get along great. I left my job at the Arena Group. I feel a little bad because I was only there two years and took a lot of parental leave but it kind of felt risky to stay. They did a large layoff on my second week of parental…
I came in 15th at Magic Fest Vegas 2023.
I recently got a foldable bluetooth keyboard to work while I traveled and it was more delightful than I could have imagined.
Miscellaneous thoughts on Wilds of Eldraine.
I made a tool to cross post my tweets to X, bluesky, threads, mastodon and farcaster.
I wrote a short plugin to enable you to talk to GPT in vim.
Miscellaneous thoughts on Tales of Middle Earth.
For all human behaviors, ideas and knowledge (memes) it is interesting to consider them not only on their own terms but also the conditions of their spread (memetics). When and how people come into contact with them. Why people repeat them. The degree these processes are correlated with truth and usefulness. [1] [2] In the case of blogs we don't have to wonder how they're spread because the…
I am no longer confident small amounts of drinking are healthy. Maybe we actually can compute the freezing point of water from first principles?
Miscellaneous thoughts on March of the Machines.
I'm on the record as a Substack hater. But there's no denying there's significant demand for newsletters and some people even want to pay. You can do both those things here now. There's a free and premium subscription. In either case you'll get the same newsletters to your inbox when I write them. The pay link is just a stripe checkout link. Please use the email you want to receive the newsletter…
The fundamental disagreement on catastrophized issues is whether we're headed towards a phase transition or trends can continue. For example: Does rising CO2 mean things will get slightly warmer, the sea slightly higher and a slew of things we're adapted to being slightly different? Or once we reach some critical threshold will arctic ice melting, forests burning and droughts intensifying lead to…