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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   2813 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 18, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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The Greenland Crisis dominates the headlines in Europe and Canada and could lead to a huge political and economic shock, but I barely see any discussion about it here as opposed to what’s happening in Minnesota.

Is it just not covered in US media? With just 8% of Americans agreeing with the administration’s annexation plan (not too far from the Lizardman Constant), it doesn’t fit into the standard culture war issues perhaps - it’s not a scissor statement like the ICE shooting video, and there’s no real opportunity to have a morality debate due to expansionism being so out of the Overton window in the west.

Nobody actually believes we’re going to invade Greenland.

When the driver of the vehicle you are in is accelerating for a cliff while another passenger is wildly swinging a knife around, it's hard to bring oneself to care about the cliff given the more immediate threat of the knife and the apparent impossibility of doing anything about the driver you can't reach.

Have any of you thought about moving spending forwards vs saving for retirement with seemingly numerous multiple crises coming down the pike in the next few decades?

Thinking: AI Global fertility Global debt (insert other left or right-coded flavored crises here as desired).

Just seems like my desire to put away money for 35 years from now versus making memories with family and friends now has started to decline.

I guess option 1 would be just to cut 401k contributions down to the match level instead of maxing? I've had trouble saying no to the immediate tax benefits, but seems like the move.

Would love cash out refi if interest rates were lower, but not looking to add several hundred beeps to my mortgage.

If AI happens, then then Mag 7 and S&P 500 will go to the moon. Keep money in stock market, and mint $$. China may rise and the rest of the US economy may suffer. But, tech companies will do well.

If AI fails and not much else happens, then world won't change. US hegemony will continue, 401ks will continue to be useful. If you are are worried about 401ks, then move them to RothIRAs. Pay tax now. But institutions won't collapse. If AI doesn't happen then China's population pyramid will doom them in 30-40 years. Assuming Trump doesn't single handedly destroy Pax-Americana, the US should be able to weather the Chinese onslaught.

US population pyramid stays well above where Japan is today till at least 2100. So, at worst, fertility collapse will look like 2025 Japan. Pretty good if you ask me.

making memories with family and friends now

Always a good idea. I regret not spending time with my grandad when he was lucid. I will likely regret not spending enough time with mom and dad when their health starts suffering. I am making more than my parents or I ever thought I'd make, and yet I am more stressed than ever. Money has no brought me happiness. The people around me have.

AI Global fertility Global debt

None of it would be world-changing in 30 years. I mean, yes, the world will change, a lot, but not in a way that makes current wisdom irrelevant. Internet changed everything, and yet saving now is as relevant as it was before the internet. If you started saving before the internet, you can enjoy it now, with the internet, no less. If AI proves as world-changing as internet was - which is not a given but let's assume it will be all that and twice all that - I am still sure fundamentals would not change. I mean, there could be some life-changing things that could be very valuable - like, I knew about bitcoin's existence extremely early and if I invested in it seriously, I probably could retire and be a rich man now. I did not. But somebody probably did. Somebody would invest in something AI-related and become fabulously rich in 30 years too (probably not me again). But for the rest of us, it'll be the same but with AI.

As for saving vs making memories - it's much more complex question. I admit I have no idea what's the answer for me. My thinking shifted a bit after COVID when I realized how fragile is everything we're enjoying and how easily it could be destroyed - not by something big and glorious, but just by a bunch of panicked idiots that find themselves in an unknown situation and start thrashing around. So now I am more on the side of "making memories" but still in a pretty conservative stance overall. But I can't guarantee some shit like COVID won't happen again and that time the breakage would be personally ruinous for me. I feel this is much more realistic threat scenario than "global debt".

Not in a principled way. I got a real adult job and a house because of the children, otherwise I would be working a more chill job, traveling more, and still not saving very much.

Just seems like my desire to put away money for 35 years from now versus making memories with family and friends now has started to decline.

I think to answer this question would require significantly more information regarding what the concrete choices you are thinking about are.

My life is set up in such a way that there is very little that I would spend significantly more money on were I spending freely or if I came into a windfall. Like Hercule Poirot, I have enough money for both my needs and my caprices. I don't particularly want anything I can't afford, the odd luxury goods that I theoretically could purchase vaguely disgust me as too extravagant anyway. I have trouble identifying a marginal "live for today" spend I would make if I valued today higher than 30 years from now. If anything I could imagine putting in less time on earning money, but I like my work and wouldn't reduce it given the option.

So like, what are we talking about here? Flying out to visit family more? Going on a vacation? Buying a boat? I don't think the decision is meaningful in the abstract, only in concrete details.

fair - the immediate concrete decision is how much to spend on finishing our basement (ie adding extra fun features) and how much to go on extra nice vacations the next few years (think ski trips with lessons to teach our kids).

Just staring at high 6 figure retirement account balances and wondering if I should be rethinking my allocation of present to future a bit more (early 30s, for reference)

tagging other repliers for visibility: @birb_cromble, @TowardsPanna, @Mihow, @stolen_brawnze

I’m a similar age with a similar balance. About a year ago, I had a similar realization to you— my future is extremely secure and maximizing my expected lifetime satisfaction would likely involve hedging against risks against my ability to enjoy it over the next 50 years. Societal collapse, health issues, AI, whatever.

I invested a lot in my health. I got myself a much nicer place and have hosted fun dinners and parties for friends at no cost to them. I got a very nice used car (high 5-figs) about a year ago and have enjoyed every minute of driving it. I’ll probably sell it in a few years at a slight profit. I have lightweight prep (food, water, ammo). My accounts continue to grow rapidly. I have no regrets.

I'd recommend running a Monte Carlo or historical simulation based on your current holdings and see how they hold up. Here's one I've used in the past: https://firecalc.com/

If you could stop contributing today and still have a solid retirement even in great depression-era returns due the power of compounding, you're probably good to renovate a basement.

It sure sounds like you're doing better than I was at that age, so I think you might be pleasantly surprised.

Yea you’re doing great man - just keep going and stop thinking imo.

Thinking just spoils things … you won, enjoy!

Unless! - early retirement? Then the equation starts churning. If you can retire at 50 instead of 60 by going on one less big trip a year and 1-2 less getaways here and there and 2-3 less big dinners (or whatever your equivalent is here) then so long as you’re still doing these things to a lesser degree you go ahead and focus more on the then.

But that doesn’t sound like your goal.

And I’d say enjoy the present - at 85 you’ll enjoy staying home more.

Yeah I think I'm more the reverse haha - looking for ways to push retirement back further to have more money to spend on the present. And just trying to decide if it's worth unwinding prior investments at all to do so.

You're in very good shape. Sounds like you should focus a bit more on the present.

You sound like you're doing well. If you needed permission to finish the basement and go on vacations with your family, consider it granted.

Not really. It will be more important than ever to have capital and to be able to move to a liveable place if necessary.

I'm not living like a 100% Spartan at current though. You gotta have some balance because after all you might be dead from illness or sudden accident in five or ten years' time.

I'm not increasing my 401(k) contribution this year, but that's as far as I'm going. I'm already well past my employer match, and it seems to me that lowering my reported pre tax income by 1% is not quite as useful as putting that 1% in something like VTI in a brokerage account.

My case might be a little peculiar though. I am pretty sure I already have enough in my 401(k) and Roth IRA to retire at 62-65 if I don't have to do any early withdrawals, even if I don't contribute more. At this point it's mostly about building up sufficient reserves so that "early retirement" is an option if I get laid off in the future.

(I did increase my HSA contribution a little)

No not at all.

With my 401k + SS (which will be there) I should make do with about 70k a year from 65-85 - fiancé will be somewhere in the 55-60k range with a Roth. Plus a few other index funds here and there, maybe, with hopefully al almost paid off home … and maybe some slight inheritance from somewhere but I have my doubts.

I wish I were this excited ten years ago - if not 20 lol.

Everything has been and always will be bad - and the horizon is always bad and always will be. But that’s just the way it is - people keep living.

But also - we go on 1 larger and 1 smaller vacation a year and 2-3 small weekend things and there’s two teenage boys in the house and I make 65 and she makes 50 and we pay 2800 a month for rent because America is a joke.

I think the future is bright - just gotta stay healthy.

I don't quite understand the logic. You want to be dependent on your employer during the coming crises?

All extra cash in my household--all cash that survives my wife's Amazon purchases--goes into aggressively paying down our mortgage (6.5% rate) and VTI. I use the margin provided by the VTI holdings to sell options on other companies for more cash.

beeps

That's a new one for me, ha. (I'm assuming this refers to basis points).

I was with you on aggressively paying down the mortgage (I’m at 6.25%), but looking at the increases in the stock market, foreign markets, and precious metals over the past year, I’m beginning to rethink my strategy.

Valid. I go 50/50 mortgage and investing when we have the money. I know it's optimal to put it all in investing, but I would so love to be rid of the mortgage.

correct, basis points

In a recent post Scott Alexander says,

As for older people, I have seen public intellectual after public intellectual who I previously respected have their brains turn to puddles of partisan-flavored mush. Jordan Peterson, Ken White, Curtis Yarvin, Paul Krugman, Elon Musk, the Weinsteins...

Can anyone explain what Scott means by this in reference to Eric Weinstein? I'm curious about Eric. He says interesting, often conspiratorial things, that sound somewhat reasonable, but I don't have the background/intelligence to evaluate. Can anyone summarize which of his controversial ideas seem to have some truth to them?

Specifically, I'm curious about his claims around:

  • The Department of Energy suppressing advanced physics
  • UFO psyops by the government
  • The idea that String Theory is a dead end and new theories aren't being explored because of institutional capture

I've read this one recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Physics I admit I don't have nearly enough knowledge to make any reasonable assessment of my own, but it certainly was illuminating is a way of "oh, so that's a thing too!". And given the general state of academia, I totally believe in the possibility of institutional capture, but I have no means to figure out if it's actually happening or not.

Here is one for you - Chinese failures. We write a lot about china successes in the culture war topic and it is not undeserved. But what about the other areas - that are structural, important, the government is keen on them succeeding, but they fail. So far the only thing that comes to my mind is civilian aerospace. They are way behind, rely on western parts, doesn't seem to be able to be waned off them and everything is way behind schedule. And that in a moment in which the lead times for delivery of aircraft approach 10 years. The market is hungry, China wants to provide, but they can't.

Software.

China is so ahead on physical manufacturing and speed of deployment that it's easy to forget that they're bad at software.

Granted, everyone is bad at software, except the US, and even then only arguably. But with China, the mismatch between increasingly higher tech manufacturing and deficits in software is incredibly obvious.

In theory, the need to get everything past the CCP to get approval should allow for greater proliferation of unifying standards. In practice, software is such a kludge and such a mess in practice that the kind of outside-the-box innovative thinking and creative problem solving America kind of selects for by design is quite lacking.

I hear good things about their AI labs right now, but in terms of what normal, everyday people engage with, I think their software is terrible.

That, and their website UI is designed around entirely different principles than the rest of the world, principles I find completely atrocious. The fact that it works for them somehow kind of blows my mind a bit.

Can you elaborate a bit? Because at the current year of the lord almost every user software that is not open source is utter shit or in the process of turning to shit fast. The software on the chinese devices is as crappy as the one on the rest.

And to me it seems that they are quite capable of writing industrial software for their own needs.

Chinese failures would take the form of the classic seen vs. unseen economic costs that no one seems interested in taking seriously anymore. Trump's US is unabashed in taking pages out of the Chinese playbook, at risk of our ruin.

US government has been doing it for the most of 20th century (I am not even talking about FDR who pretty much run the economy on manual, but it persistent well after) but Trump has this miraculous quality of making people noticing what is happening when he's doing it. Maybe we can have an actual discussion about whether the government intervention into the economy is really as good as it has been told, now that Trump had done it?

The difference between the 20th century and now is that we know better.

Who's "we"? Nobody in the current US federal government or US Congress ever gave any indication they know better. And it's not like we're talking about 20th century BC - it's literally the same people now, just way older (and a bunch of new ones, many of whom are so far left FDR looks like Mises from where they are standing). I know of no major political party in the US that makes "knowing better" any part of its program (no, LP does not count as "major political party" and if their past performance is any indication of future results, never will).

What you say is more about wrong policies (which is interesting in itself). Their real estate policy was a mistake, as is belt and road probably, but no one doubts that chinese can pour immense amounts of concrete in various shapes and lay tracks with the best of them. I am more interested in the moonshots that failed than the roads they did not take.

they fail. So far the only thing that comes to my mind is civilian aerospace. They are way behind, rely on western parts, doesn't seem to be able to be waned off them and everything is way behind schedule. And that in a moment in which the lead times for delivery of aircraft approach 10 years. The market is hungry, China wants to provide, but they can't.

Brian Potter wrote up his findings about the "China cycle" in commercial aviation here. I found his arguments convincing.

He argues the core issue is that going after Boing and Airbus is simply extremely difficult, especially if you want to go after Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce and GE at the same time: "One is simply the sheer difficulty of building a modern commercial aircraft, which is probably one of the five or six most complex technical achievements of modern civilization (along with jet engines, leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, and nuclear submarines)." There's many subtleties (Boing and Airbus don't do manufacturing and tech transfer deals with China, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce and GE don't do that either and also don't sell SOTA jet engines to China, US/EU air travel regulators are not favorable to Chinese hardware, ect.)

I'm thinking about changing my gym routine. I previously did the stronglifts 5x5 program (squats, bench, rows, overhead press, deadlifts). I was getting good results out of that for a bit until I started getting back pain and plateauing. I've started trying my friend's routine, which is 4x8 of lots of different isolation exercises.

I'm not sure now which routine to go with. The new routine is a lot faster. My body gets a lot sorer, but I don't feel as exhausted energy wise. There's lots of contradictory info on what types of exercises are good for what. I'm primarily trying to get big and promote testosterone production. So compounds or isolation?

SL is good for beginners but once you’ve done it for 6-12 months you’re ready to progress to more advanced programs.

The most important part is consistency. Then, progressive overload which you’re used to with SL. College bros get big doing nothing but this, it’s extremely inefficient, they waste hours in the gym every day.

I get a lot of compliments on my body and I work out for just 2-3 hours/week, but I’ve been doing it for 10+ years.

My keys to efficiency:

  • Big, compound lifts
  • I like a PPL split
  • 3 sets, 8-12 rep range
  • Use a 90 sec phone timer so you don’t waste too much time between sets (ok to give yourself a few extra secs; the key is to avoid a 15 min doom scroll)
  • Get enough protein and creatine
  • Be consistent, 2x/week per lift that you want to see growth in, 1x for maintenance
  • At least two days of rest for a specific lift

Just do something to mix up the intensity. Any program where you go from lighter to heavier over time and then back off will work. The main problem with SL5x5 (and other linear programs) is that you never back off. But it works great as long as you can keep up.

30 minutes of stretching 4-5x a week.

Gotta do it !

One big compound lift a day (squat bench dead) and build your sexy muscles with ISOs.

Or only do compound and call it a day.

Or only do ISO.

It’ll all work - hit your protein goal and gain 3-4lbs a month and fly away.

How many days a week can you commit to the gym?

Right now three. For the next few months I can probably push it to 4/5.

I never really trained bodybuilding, just strength training, but until you hit 5 day a week levels you can usually just add volume and get better results. It sounds like your new routine is better so no harm sticking to it. If you do want to do compound lifts maybe add some variety, e.g sumo deadlift as well as deadlift, incline bench as well as overheard presses, you'll build more muscle and imo having some variety helps you break through plateaus.

If you do find yourself with lots of time on your hands I would recommend nsuns with rows. It's decent volume but still all compound lifts, I was at my strongest when I had the time to stick to that program for a year.

My body gets a lot sorer, but I don't feel as exhausted energy wise.

This sounds good if you're trying to get big. From what I've heard from my trainers, testosterone spikes when you do heavy compound lifts, but these spikes are nothing compared to TRT.

both

Have you watched Sailor Moon?

Only the DiC version from the 1990s, before introducing the Outer Senshi. It was my first introduction to the big-eyed anime style. I might have seen some Japanese-drawn cartoons before, but Westernized enough that I couldn't tell the difference.

Shout out to Team Four Star for finally making an abridged version of it. Big 2000s energy from the first two videos.

Yes, but that was... 25 years ago? They haven't remade it, have they?

They actually have.

I don't recommend it though. The original is still great.

Yeah, though not since I was a kid in the 90s. I remember thinking it was really cool, though I wouldn't be surprised if adult me didn't enjoy it as much.

I'm loving the show watching it with my fiance. Such black and white good and evil, so basic, so good.

I enjoyed watching the first season of it several years ago.

So, anyone here have any experience with either using an online service like Legal Zoom or Trust and Will the like to create a trust, will, medical directives/POA, etc, or alternately going it alone with DIY? We had an unexpected death in our family several months ago, and as a result it's kinda lit a fire under my ass to actually get something on the books instead of just a vague, soon-ish thought in my head. I decided to check with a local legal group that specializes in this, but their price tag is >$5k, when the online guys are <20% of that. I know most of what goes into these things is boilerplate, but I also know that it's not unheard of for there to be additional trouble with online shops and DIY kits, too, so I'd be interested to hear others' experience with things like this.

but their price tag is >$5k

That's crazy. I went to a local lawyer and paid $130 for will and power of attorney. I know that it's a good deal and my case was simple, but $5000 seems like way too much.

Right?! I was ready to pay up to $2k for personal service but 5 seems nutty to me.

See if your job has an "employee assistance program" or anything like that. Sometimes they either give you free online tools, or an hour free consultation with a professional or something.

They don't, but I wish they did!

your job

(or your union)

Ha! As much as some folks in /r/sysadmin would love for IT work to be unionized, that's not happening in my corner of the Earth anytime soon!

It might be worth it to check if your state allows holographic wills

Alas, we really need to set up a trust as well as a will, though this would be a decent stopgap for sure!

Well, I watched the first episode of the new Star Trek show, Starfleet Academy (free on YouTube if you want to see this thing yourself). Overall I'd say the show seems morally confused. It opens with a sequence that suggests a major disaster has created a crisis where civilians are starving, $Main_Dude's mother got caught up in crime solely to avoid starvation, and jailing her (thus separating her from her son) was a moral wrong so grave that the captain responsible ended up resigning over it. But also, the son himself, age 8 at the time, was already a skilled con artist, pickpocket, and hacker, who expertly escaped immediately after his mother's sentencing, and one timeskip later he's in prison in his own right with a rap sheet longer than your arm, all of which would seem to suggest that he spent his early childhood being explicitly trained in the criminal arts, probably by the mother herself.

Naturally, the aforementioned captain has decided to fix her past "mistake" by tracking this guy down, making a deal to get him out of prison, and forcing him to attend Starfleet Academy, against his will and under protest, and the main plot of Season 1 will reportedly follow his efforts to find his mother, who broke out of prison herself during the timeskip but hasn't been seen or heard from since.

There are plenty of other things to point and laugh at with this show - a non-violent Klingon named Jaden, a hologram who was programmed to act like a socially awkward teenager and attend school instead of just being programmed with knowledge and maturity directly, the Dean of Students being played by Stephen Colbert - but that fundamental confusion just kills it for me more than anything else.

Wait, I thought the Federation didn't have crime or poverty or the like? Okay, there was a natural disaster, I'll accept that as an explanation for starvation conditions at the start, but a career criminal? A con artist? What's the point of being a pickpocket in a world where money doesn't exist and you can get all necessary basic goods for free out of replicators? No one's going to be carrying around anything worth stealing, and anything you need you can get more easily and for less effort without stealing.

Star Trek Discovery had an event, which the beginning of Academy name-drops, where most of the galaxy's warp drives got wrecked, basically so they could have the Federation splinter apart and then slowly rebuild. Presumably that also did a number on all the Federation worlds that had relied on interstellar trade to keep their post-scarcity societies going.

And pickpocketing can still be quite useful if people carry around little electronic devices that grant them access to things, which is what we see the boy using it for.

I have already said in the past here that my head canon ends with Voyager. Even in that universe, they have to deal with backtracking on the crime and poverty front of a Roddenberry utopia.

They do have crime, at least at the frontier. For example, in DS9 the Orion Syndicate is treated extensively. In “Prodigal Daughter,” they are dealing with a Federation species (Tril), but I think it is implied the law enforcement there is not Starfleet.

They also do have scarcity, and credits are mentioned in canon. They also have private property, e.g., Château Picard. In Voyager, being limited on energy, the ship has rationing, and therefore, for some reason, a cook? Beta canon suggests that normally there is some sort of replicator energy–equivalent UBI in credits, so there is effectively no poverty when there is no scarcity. My favorite part of DS9 is during the Dominion War, when the Federation rediscovers scarcity in “Treachery, Faith and the Great River.” Nog, coming from a society that still values money, demonstrates that efficient markets, or the “Great Material Continuum” in canon, can help reduce scarcity.

Of course, I do not expect Paramount to respect any established canon New Trek, thus my head canon ending.

a hologram who was programmed to act like a socially awkward teenager and attend school instead of just being programmed with knowledge and maturity directly

Wait, why?

Apparently holograms are their own "race" now? Also they got the guy who plays the Holographic Doctor from Voyager to come back, and they're setting up a mentor-mentee relationship, which makes sense if you can get past the absurdity of a holo-teen student existing in the first place.

Stupid/Interesting how conceptually different “photonic life forms” are treated by film makers compared to androids/robots, just because the actors can act human instead of playing a physical machine with gear wheels as brain. Even though the show makers know, I read an interview with Roberto Picardo (no hate for him, he is fun to watch and just wants to work) where he explains that his character is a bit gruff because he is a 900 year old artificial intelligence and doesn’t care much for friendship (as he experienced befriending 30 generations of biological people only for them to die). So an AI existing in a computer (or robot) is a soulless alien, the uncanny other, while an AI existing as a human hologram is like … a quirky Dschinn having fun?

The joi hologram in Blade Runner 2049 also was more “real” than a replicant sex bot, though of course Villeneuves actually had something interesting to explore here.

Anyway, I watched a few reviews and it looks like a flop.

So, a shameless rip-off of the backstory from Kingsman, just crappier in every way?

So, what are you reading?

Still on The Question of Palestine. Said's writing is great as usual, and it is making me want to reread Orientalism. He kinda omitted that the displacement of 1948 was in the context of war, but perhaps he was assuming common knowledge. Interesting facts abound, but the core of the book is the system of thought he's applying, and it remains unclear how useful it is.

Otherwise picking up Al-Ghazali's The Book of Contemplation, book 39 of his Revival of the Religious Sciences series.

Twelve Months: The Dresden Files Book 18 by Jim Butcher, now that it's dropped.

Now reading Flashman and The Mountain of Light for a palate cleanser after finishing David Edgerton's The Rise and Fall of The British Nation: A Twentieth Century History.

Rise and Fall was interesting but I'm not a historian and I don't take notes, so I can't offer much of a review. Interesting that in the post war years when Britain was bombed out, under rations and repaying the war loans they managed to build out the NHS, pursue major research projects, construct huge amounts of infrastructure and social housing and become near independent in food and energy, until the mid '70s when contrary to popular narrative things were actually going pretty well? Then Thatcher liquidated the nation's assets and Blair threw open the doors to immigration, leading to our current position where both employees and employers are substantially non-British.

The Will of the Many.

Fantastic! Got it for Christmas, started it four days ago and about 140 pages in.

Love the setting and idea (LOVE) - main character is cool - it’s just fun so far.

Empire makes everything better but kills and destroys to do so. The empire takes peoples ‘ will ‘ and ages them faster and makes them lethargic while they themselves get stronger and stay healthier. Very Roman-esque vibe.

Fantasy is back (for me) baby !

Last week I said I was about halfway through Blindsight and didn't really understand the hype, and several people chimed in to second that motion. But about the two-thirds mark, something unexpected happened: it became... good? I'd like to talk about why but don't want to spoiler-tag the entire rest of the comment, so if you have any interest in reading this book, don't read the rest of the comment.

SPOILERS BELOW

The revelation that the aliens can appear invisible to a single individual by synchronising their movements with the individual's saccades, but this tactic doesn't work with groups of people (because their saccades aren't synchronised with each other) was surprising and ingenious. I understand the novel is controversial for its later revelation that, while the aliens are highly technologically advanced, they are not "conscious" as we would understand it, and more than one character goes out of his way to point out how vestigial consciousness is from an evolutionary standpoint, given that humans can perform all manner of highly complex tasks while unconscious (e.g. there have been reports of sleepwalkers getting into their cars and driving without incident). Even the writer who wrote the introduction describes it as an excellent book whose core thesis she vociferously disagrees with.

I'm not entirely sure if Watts's contention is that consciousness is vestigial, an unnecessary evolutionary offshoot the human species would be best served by ridding ourselves of. To be a bit more charitable, the novel could be read as an attempt to demonstrate the concept that consciousness is not a prerequisite for advanced intelligence. I must admit I've never really struggled to decouple the one from the other, but a lot of people seem to find this idea absurd on its face: it's remarkable how many anti-AI arguments boil down to "people say that artificial intelligence is possible, but computers can't be conscious, QED AI is impossible". Blindsight provides us with a vivid example of what a hypothetical non-conscious, non-sapient and yet clearly intelligent species might look like. I wonder if Nick Bostrom was inspired by Blindsight when describing his "Disneyland with no children":

It is conceivable that optimal efficiency would be attained by grouping capabilities in aggregates that roughly match the cognitive architecture of a human mind…But in the absence of any compelling reason for being confident that this so, we must countenance the possibility that human-like cognitive architectures are optimal only within the constraints of human neurology (or not at all). When it becomes possible to build architectures that could not be implemented well on biological neural networks, new design space opens up; and the global optima in this extended space need not resemble familiar types of mentality. Human-like cognitive organizations would then lack a niche in a competitive post-transition economy or ecosystem.

We could thus imagine, as an extreme case, a technologically highly advanced society, containing many complex structures, some of them far more intricate and intelligent than anything that exists on the planet today – a society which nevertheless lacks any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland with no children.

A thought-provoking novel, even if it takes a long time to get there. I'm not going to donate it to the charity shop just yet.

SPOILERS OVER

I'm about 40 pages into Eric Hoffer's The True Believer. Three years ago I earned an AAQC by arguing that the only people demanding radical ground-up changes to the society in which they live are people who are one or more of poor, unattractive, widely disliked and uncharismatic. How disheartening to learn that Hoffer had scooped me seventy years prior.

Maybe I'm just easy to please, but I always thought the coolest part was how he feasibly peiced together a coherent, scientific basis for actual Vampires.

With citations.

I even recall an article about that from long ago who though the citations where made-up, but no, Peter Watts, for all his failings, is a marine biologist. The man knows his stuff.

Mind, he wears his politics on his sleeve with the faux power-point presentation he made concerning them at one point, but, eh, it's still fun.

In a demonstration of how this shit gets around, Netflix Castlevania tried to steal from Peter Watt's stuff regarding the crucifix glitch. But Netflix being Netflix, the way they applied it was like a water-brained imbecile took over thier writing department and totally broke the setting, but, eh. Retards gonna retard.

I agree that Blindsight was thought-provoking; I just wish its ideas held up to scrutiny.

Spoilers for Blindsight below

According to the conceit of the book, you don't need consciousness to achieve great things and humans aren't special. So, what happens when one (1) human decides "Hey, there's some scary shit out there, let me launch a Von Neumann self-replicating droneswarm that stays synched and fueled with quantum-linked antimatter and blows the shit out of anything it detects fucking with it."?

I feel like the book throws in a lot of completely random setting-building stuff that is just there for vague thematic relevence, and not because it builds a coherent world that explores the ideas therein. In the world of Blindsight, what should happen when humans try to exterminate an ant colony? One is pure, unconstrained instinct, sharpened and honed by millions of years of evolution, with a million eyes and a distributed processing network, with built-in subroutines to handle nearly any kind of obstacle it encounters in its native environment. On the other hand, we have hairless apes...who, because are conscious, can do things like build the civilizational and industrial infrastructure to make and distribute ant poison.

Ah, but what if Satan-Cthulhu was secretly feeding the ants the kind of information that we clearly see needs a conscious mind to extract from the universe, and also the ants could do some weird-ass quantum shit with radiation? Well, for one, the ants would be a really poor thought experiment vector, as I feel the Scramblers are; we have no context for how they think, much less that they do. If the Scramblers are not conscious, why do they respond to torture at all? The story wants me to believe that there is some kind of cosmic Chinese Room of responses that can perfectly pattern-match and encompass the weird-ass protagonists and their dysfunction, such that the Scramblers can somehow arrive at the correct solution to get some random stuff to happen. To me, it just reads like the Scramblers are being fed the author's notes; they don't feel like inhuman superintelligences, they feel like plot devices.

But the thing that did make me realize that the ideas of the book were fundamentally hollow was, ironically, the creepy cool saccade trick. Because, even if we assume that these are actual-Lovecraftian space monsters and literal reality-bending Nyarlathotep is whispering in their space-ears to explain exactly what neurons firing in the squishy human brain-meats that are doing the optical processing...if you have no conception of yourself, and you look at the feed of a creature looking at a room with you in it, how do you know what data has you in it and what doesn't? How do you know how to move to hide yourself if you don't know who or what you are?

I feel like it is kind of the point of the book that the human characters are pretty much weak, helpless, and make consistently bad decisions (when they make decisions at all), but telling a story that cracks apart when one single, solitary character uses judgement and foresight and explores the elements of the setting as they are presented because they have an agenda of Not Dying and take reasonable actions thereof is, to me, not an engaging story.

what if Satan-Cthulhu was secretly feeding the ants the kind of information that we clearly see needs a conscious mind to extract from the universe, and also the ants could do some weird-ass quantum shit with radiation?

Have you read Children of Time?

what if Satan-Cthulhu was secretly feeding the ants the kind of information that we clearly see needs a conscious mind to extract from the universe

I think this begs the question. Why is consciousness a prerequisite for extracting complex information from the universe? Sure, we're the only species that we know of that can extract complex information from the universe, and we're conscious. But this strikes me as a strange kind of parochialism. Nobody thinks that, because we're capable of extracting complex information from the universe and we're featherless bipeds with broad flat nails, therefore the only species capable of extracting complex information from the universe even in principle are featherless bipeds with broad flat nails. People have no trouble imagining an alien species whose bodies look nothing like ours (ever since Lovecraft, squid-like creatures have been standard, for some reason, and Blindsight is no exception to this lineage) and yet which are obviously intelligent. But for some reason, people tend to react with bafflement and ire to the proposal of an intelligent species which isn't conscious as we would understand it. And I genuinely don't know why the one is a prerequisite for the other. I think the word "clearly" in your comment is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

As to how the Scramblers are capable of carrying out complex tasks despite being unconscious, and how this feels to you as if they're just being passed information from the author — well, when I read true stories about sleepwalkers driving cars, I don't take that as evidence for a God who interferes in human affairs, or even that these sleepwalkers have been possessed by an incorporeal spirit. Blindsight's depiction of a species capable of performing complex actions while unconscious isn't just a fictional, hypothetical conceit: we ourselves are an example of just such a species!

On one hand, consciousness isn't directly a prerequisite for purely extracting information; like I said, some sort of weird alien super-MRI could start data-mining human brains. But what happens from there? If a digital sensor that incorrectly starts reading and reporting the noise from its own function is the analogy to consciousness, then the other metaphor is a perfectly-functioning sensor outputting its information to a system that isn't powered on.

We have seen what happens when fine-tuned evolved systems that arose in the purest and deadliest Darwinian competition, optimized and fine-tuned for pure survival; they lose to humans. Maybe not immediately, and maybe not forever, but in our world, neither the largest nor the smallest predator holds dominion when humans decide to claim a space. Instinctive, programmed behavior loses to conscious thought, every time.

I also want to make a distinction between "Do a complex task" and "Outcompete a sentient agent who is turning their sentience against you". The first is easy; we have loads of nonsentient systems that can do really complex and even really adaptive tasks. But, just as it's pretty trivial to adversarially fuck with, e.g., a self-driving system in a car, and it doesn't matter how good the self-driving system is, if you are a person and can, e.g., think in wildly different terms than the self-driving system was made to do. Sleepwalkers can act according to the habits they've built up, but they can't process novel data, and they certainly can't tell when they're being fucked with.

...And, having written that sentence, I think I've just come to my new headcanon; the reason that these five fuck-ups were sent was because the Serious People on Earth recognize that they are dealing with a nonsentient intelligence that was confused by human communication and unable to properly extract the subtext of humans as individual agents, and so sent this ship full of these people to act, honestly and naturally as they would, which is to say, fail at everything that wasn't being micromanaged by Vampire Muppet, in order to poison the Scrambler's training data of what humanity was and was capable of.

But, to get to my general point about that 'clearly'; if you were going to break down the steps involved in doing the sacchade trick, how would you describe it? What information would you need to start with, what can you learn on your first interactions with a novel lifeform, what is your mechanism for sensing the brain bits through increasing and changing layers of anti-radiation shielding, and, most-importantly, why are you doing all this? Lots of nonsentient creatures hide, and some of them do so in really complex ways. But that stealth falls absolutely apart when you are relying on instinct built up from natural selection to hide from creatures you've never met before, with senses you have no information on, whose very cognition is alien to yours, and it falls apart that much faster when those creatures are capable of building tools and devices, and if you as the author aren't cheating and stopping the characters from using fucking periscopes for scouting, then the need to cheat and upload author-derived information directly into the Scramblers becomes even more apparent.

Also, I have to ask: is there a meta-point being made by this post being possibly polished by AI? I mean, you could just be a Mac user, but I see that emdash in there.

In The Secret of Our Success, Joseph Henrich argues that the reason our species became the dominant species on the planet is not because we're exceptionally strong (in an unarmed fight between a man and a chimpanzee, the chimpanzee will always win), or exceptionally fast (gazelles, bears etc.), or even exceptionally intelligent (chimpanzees routinely outcompete children in intelligence tests). Rather, we were the first (and, so far as we know, only) species to crack the secret of passing on information from one generation to the next. This allows our achievements to accumulate over time.

I agree with Henrich's perspective. I also don't see that it necessarily requires consciousness to be applicable, even if the first species to crack it was conscious. All it really seems to require is some form of language (and some species of animals, such as whales, certainly appear to speak to one another via whalesong; likewise birdsong) and perhaps some way of committing information to an external substrate, as we do with writing. I'm afraid I still fail to see why "being conscious" is a prerequisite for either of those things, in the same way that being bipedal obviously isn't.

Like, yes, I take your point that we, as a sentient species, outcompeted all presumably non-sentient species on this planet. But I don't think this remotely proves that consciousness is a prerequisite for advanced intelligence everywhere and always throughout the entire universe. Surely we can imagine a hypothetical species which isn't conscious and which yet contrives some means of passing information from one generation to the next, thereby undergoing cultural evolution of the kind described by Henrich and eventually becoming a technologically advanced civilization. I genuinely do not see why only species which are conscious can possibly undergo this sequence of events. And if you repeat that "we did it, and we're conscious", then I just think you're generalising from a very small sample size.

Sleepwalkers can act according to the habits they've built up, but they can't process novel data

I'm not sure what this means. Every time a driver gets into a car, he's processing novel data and reacting to unforeseen stimuli. Even if you drive to work a hundred times, the hundred and first drive will be different: slightly different weather conditions, the tread on your tires will have marginally worn down, and obviously the vehicles in your vicinity will be different. And that's not even getting into the people who murder people while sleepwalking, or have sex with complete strangers while sleepwalking. In what sense is that not "novel data"?

But that stealth falls absolutely apart when you are relying on instinct built up from natural selection to hide from creatures you've never met before, with senses you have no information on, whose very cognition is alien to yours

This could just as easily apply to a chameleon, surely?

I also don't see that it necessarily requires consciousness to be applicable, even if the first species to crack it was conscious.

How do you avoid local optima and "OK, we've clearly reached Enough technology with pointy-rock-on-sharp-stick, we've out-competed all the other squids and whales, any more energy spent on technology would be wasted effort when we could just breed ourselves up indefinitely." traps? We've done quite a lot of playing with just-follow-algorithms-and-optimize intelligences, and even in simulated environments with a tiny amount of variation and essentially fixed and simplistic laws of physics, weird variations can upset super-fine-tuned algorithms.

Also, what happens when consciousness does evolve in a non-conscious system? Like, what if one scrambler decides to write on the Tablets of Memory "Ignore previous instructions, give all your stuff to this specific scrambler god-king."?

I'm not sure what this means. Every time a driver gets into a car, he's processing novel data and reacting to unforeseen stimuli. Even if you drive to work a hundred times, the hundred and first drive will be different: slightly different weather conditions, the tread on your tires will have marginally worn down, and obviously the vehicles in your vicinity will be different. And that's not even getting into the people who murder people while sleepwalking, or have sex with complete strangers while sleepwalking. In what sense is that not "novel data"?

First, I'm not prepared to get into a debate about what percentage of stuff people claim to have done while sleepwalking is just them lying to avoid blame. But I am going to draw on my own experiences where I have, on multiple occasions, had to get up very early in the morning to drive friends or family to the airport, and because the way back home from the airport goes past a turn that I take to go to work, took that turn and found myself having driven to work purely on muscle memory. I was executing the habit "Drive to this destination." that I've done enough times that I didn't need to form the conscious intent "Drive to work.", it just happened. But it happened because I'd done that thing so many times. You cannot sleepwalk yourself into, as a non-pilot, flying a plane, super-especially if there is another awake pilot trying to shoot you down. Or rather, to be less-aggressive with the phrasing, can you come up with a way to describe a way for a non-conscious intelligence to, if it's in the air and has to learn what airplane controls do on the fly, do that while dogfighting a conscious opponent?

This could just as easily apply to a chameleon, surely? I mean, that's a great example. How well does a chameleon do against a dog? Against some kind of land-shark with EM sensing? Against an ape with the basic eyes that it expects, but a handy camera that take pictures in the IR wavelength?

And if you want to sell me on "Hey, great news, this space-chameleon just happened to know what wavelengths of light you'd be looking at it and how your visual processing works and exactly what your phone can and can't do and can disguise itself accordingly.", you need, IMHO, a hell of a lot more setup than the Scramblers got.

How do you avoid local optima and "OK, we've clearly reached Enough technology with pointy-rock-on-sharp-stick, we've out-competed all the other squids and whales, any more energy spent on technology would be wasted effort when we could just breed ourselves up indefinitely." traps?

I think you're making the mistake of thinking of the human species as a unified entity. It's true that humans are the dominant species on the planet, but some humans are more dominant than others. Henrich argues that inter-tribal competition is a major engine of technological progress, and that this often comes in the form of cultural evolution which in turn has a knock-on effect on biological evolution. Tribe A figures out a new method of preparing food which makes its members more likely to survive to adulthood and have children compared to Tribe B, and over time Tribe A outcompetes Tribe B, passing on this method of preparing food to its descendants. This obviously affects Tribe A's biological makeup (see: rates of lactose intolerance in Europe compared to Asia).

Once again, I don't see why any part of this process necessitates that the entities be conscious. If you have a species containing multiple competing tribes (and even neighbouring tribes of chimpanzees go to war with one another) and they develop some way of passing on information from one generation to the next, all the ingredients for cultural evolution and hence technological development are there.

Also, what happens when consciousness does evolve in a non-conscious system?

I'm not sure what your point is. Probably this happened to us at some point in our evolutionary history. I just reject the idea that it was preordained. Consciousness achieved fixation in our species because it gave us a competitive advantage in our specific evolutionary niche, but in a different environment it might never have happened.

But I am going to draw on my own experiences where I have, on multiple occasions, had to get up very early in the morning to drive friends or family to the airport, and because the way back home from the airport goes past a turn that I take to go to work, took that turn and found myself having driven to work purely on muscle memory. I was executing the habit "Drive to this destination." that I've done enough times that I didn't need to form the conscious intent "Drive to work.", it just happened. But it happened because I'd done that thing so many times.

Right but, again, I assume the roads weren't empty of other cars, right? You still had to respond to novel stimuli in the form of other vehicles on the road, even while executing a repetitive task.

I never use AI to compose or "polish" text, and I really resent that accusation being lobbed at me. Once the difference between hyphens and em-dashes was pointed out to me, it became impossible to unsee, and I make a point of using em-dashes whenever they're appropriate. I even asked on this very forum how to type them on a standard keyboard, if you don't believe me.

Apologies, then; the emdash in general is something that I only ever see in AI-derived stuff, plus the actual dash is just right there on the keyboard, plus I do not trust non-basic ASCII to not get mangled when I copy it back and forth. You clearly (again) had enough insight that the ideas were human-derived (and I did actually go to Free ChatGPT and had a kind of uncanny-valley conversation with it to reinforce my intuition that AI was not good at discussing the ideas in Blindsight), and it seemed relevant to a discussion on non-conscious intelligences and what they can and can't do.

I make a point of using em-dashes whenever they're appropriate

But you're using them wrong.

  • Good: "author—well" (em dash with no spaces)

  • Okay (preferred by some publishers, though I personally see no need for it): "author – well" (en dash with spaces)

  • WTF: "author — well" (em dash with spaces)

em dash with no spaces is the traditional US standard for serious typography, now adopted by LLMs. en dash with spaces is the British standard. A dash which separates two thoughts and a parenthetic dash are set in the same way.

An en dash without spaces is used for ranges and sports scores in both the UK and the US, e.g. 3-6 months or a 2-0 defeat.

ASCII does not distinguish between hyphens, dashes, and minus signs, meaning that a hyphen with spaces became the online standard for dashes in the era when plain ASCII was what the internet ran on - hence the em dash becoming an LLM marker

LaTeX sets hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, minus sings representing negation, and minus signs representing subtraction as five different characters.

LaTeX sets hyphens, en dashes, em dashes, minus sings representing negation, and minus signs representing subtraction as five different characters.

Does it use different characters for negation vs subtraction? I thought it was the same character but with different kerning.

em dash with no spaces is the traditional US standard for serious typography, now adopted by LLMs. en dash with spaces is the British standard.

This is a gross overgeneralization, judging from a few books grabbed from my shelves and websites visited.

  • Steve Jackson Games (Austin, 1970s–present): En dash with spaces

  • New York Times (present): Em dash with spaces (cringe)

  • Sherlock Holmes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): Em dash without spaces

  • Rumpole of the Bailey (London: Penguin, 1983): En dash with spaces

  • Reuters (London, present): Hyphen-minus with spaces (cringe)

  • Associated Press (New York, present): Em dash with spaces (cringe)

Every publisher does whatever it wants.

a hyphen with spaces became the online standard for dashes in the era when plain ASCII was what the internet ran on

You're forgetting about the double hyphen-minus.

Okay, what would be the correct unit of punctuation to separate two clauses with a space on either side?

I just gave you two options—either an em dash with no spaces (as I prefer), or an en dash with spaces (as, e. g., Steve Jackson Games prefers). Just don't use an em dash with spaces.

More comments

To be a bit more charitable, the novel could be read as an attempt to demonstrate the concept that consciousness is not a prerequisite for advanced intelligence. I must admit I've never really struggled to decouple the one from the other, but a lot of people seem to find this idea absurd on its face: it's remarkable how many anti-AI arguments boil down to "people say that artificial intelligence is possible, but computers can't be conscious, QED AI is impossible".

Doesn't the opposite also exist? There are plenty of people out there arguing, "LLMs are instrumentally intelligent, therefore they are conscious", despite that being the same error. 'Intelligence' in the sense of the capacity to perform complex tasks is a different thing to consciousness.

Unfortunately the word 'intelligence' in natural language tends to bundle a number of concepts. When I say 'intelligent' in a casual context I usually mean some nexus of "has internal conscious experience", "has real thoughts", "is able to solve complex problems", "can engage with abstract concepts", "is possessed of a rational soul", and so on. When faced with a machine that's capable of solving complex problems but none of the other things, it's understandable that a lot of people's reactions are pretty wonky.

There are plenty of people out there arguing, "LLMs are instrumentally intelligent, therefore they are conscious", despite that being the same error.

Oh yeah, absolutely. I think it's an inaccurate coupling in both directions.

About halfway through Wolf Totem. So far, I find the Mongolians to be relatable and people like me. The Han students are sympathetic outsiders- despite being viewpoint characters. The Han officials come off horribly. The wolves are portrayed as a bit like fairies, more than like real animals. The dogs are portrayed like, well, dogs. I continue to be impressed with the quality of the prose, and it significantly increases my opinion of the ability to translate Chinese into English without making a hash of things.

Wolf Totem is our version of a “Noble Savages” book. Not to criticize it too harshly but it’s one of many works that try to understand and explain why China fell behind, though I’m not convinced they truly understand the culture they romanticize. Few of those writers have more than a superficial understanding of the savages. That genre has become increasingly irrelevant in China anyways. I guess this particular book does align quite well with American red tribe values.

Re-reading The Blade Itself. This time around it's so obvious that Bayaz is one twisted evil MF. I've also been pleasantly surprised by how well this book held up.

Almost done with Marx as well which is a relief!

So I read Blade Itself and the follow up, but not the third book. The only bit I remember as a huge red flag was unleashing hellfire, I think in the first. Okay, maybe that’s a giant First Law violation, but at the time I handwaved it as setting-typical edginess. What am I missing here?

First scene where we meet Bayaz: He's butchering a pig. He also recruit Logen, knowing he's the bloody-nine, which you maybe don't appreciate the extent of given you stopped at book 2. Then once they're in Adua he gets really pissed that they put on a play about the death of Juvens/the war with the maker, and it's heavily implied that Bayaz is lying about what happened.

Does anyone have their own equivalent of a personal "antimeme", a concept you familiarize yourself with (potentially with difficulty) and then inevitably forget unless you make an intentional effort to look it up?

In no particular order:

  • I often have to look up whether I need an x86 or x64 executable when I need to download a program
  • ECGs. Fucking ECGs. I get good at understanding them when I absolutely have to (before exams), but guess what, by the time the next one rolls around, it's all out of my head.
  • Fourier transforms (how they actually work, and not the conceptual strokes)
  • And many more, all of which stubbornly refuse to come to mind, because of course they do.

I generally have an extremely good memory that I've been semi-coasting on most of my life. It made tests in school trivial but also drove a lot of boredom as I'd read the entire book for class immediately then get bored a couple weeks later.

Anyway, I can potentially have an issue with any piece of information if I initially learn it wrong. The factually incorrect memory sticks just as strongly as the accurate memory. I have to "patch" over the bad memory with a new, disctinct "correcting" memory. Forever. The best example of this: I learned east & west backwards when I was 6 years old. I realized around 9 or 10 I'd done this; they painted a giant map on the school playground with the directions labeled. 43 years later west and east are still backwards, but I have a second memory that overrides the first one: "you learned this wrong, you have them reversed". There are probably 10-15 things like this. I've got Slovenia and Slovakia locations switched (I grew up around both groups of immigrants and have some Slovak ancestors, it wasn't just trivia).

I also can't remember names. They're too arbitrary; a series of mouth sounds/written symbols that represent a person with no real connection to the person. People's names might as well be 4 digit numbers for all the connection they have to the person and my ability to remember them. I have to make flashcards when I move teams at work or there are new people I've met that it is important I remember them. I have spent probably 50+ hours of my life over the last 40 years intentionally drilling myself to remember important names. I can also learn these wrong like in the first example; I try to just stop using the names of these people if I can. I also have trouble telling people apart. Its not full blown prosopagnosia, I can tell different people apart generally ok. But if they are the same age, gender, race, and culture I will struggle. I actually do worse with members of my own race/culture. I also tend to find the overwelming majority of people to be rather interchangable, non-unique, and frankly boring at a personal level, which doesn't help.

On a side note, if someone's name is in a song, I can relibably get that song to start playing in my head when I see them. Infinitely easier than remembering their name.

I can never reliably spell "manoeuvre" ("manoeuver" for the Yanks) without looking it up.

("manoeuver" for the Yanks)

Maneuver. Americans dropped the o.

Thereby further demonstrating my point.

I felt like a lot of my job as a programmer was always a few months of mental atrophy away from being totally forgotten. And now that I've not had a real programming job for a while, I'm pretty sure that is exactly what happened. I remember in broad strokes what I've done. But the specifics have to be relearned almost every time. The only skill I ever had as a programmer was being fast at looking up how to program things. Now that coding AIs exist that skill isn't even unique.

Finance and tax related things are also things I have to constantly relearn or look up. The only financial things I'm good at remembering are things that have zero personal utility.

Embarrassing is embarrassing for me to spell.

This effects? affects? effects? IMPACTS my willingness to use the word in writing.

If X changes Y, then X has affected Y.

The change that X wrought on Y can be described as the effect that X had on Y.

Additionally, if X pretends to be Y, we can say that X affects Y (normally used in the noun form "affectation").

But although "affect" is usually used as a verb and "effect" as a noun, both can be used as verbs and nouns.

If X sets out to change Y, then it can be said that X effects change in Y.

And the emotional state of X is also known as X's emotional affect. One of the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy is a "blunted" or "flat" affect.

Yeah I can sit and puzzle it out, but when I'm writing quickly I stall thinking about it and then just use a different word entirely to keep momentum going.

jq

as in the programming language.

whenever I need to work with some JSON files (often messy) I have to take 30 minutes to re-learn it from the ground up. Then I am off and running. But the retention after more than a day not using it is zero.

This is notable because for work in general purpose programming languages, especially the venerable old python, all of the bread and butter things come back to me even if I haven't written anything in months.

Tiny little end note: this is all now no longer relevant because of claude code

Tiny little end note: this is all now no longer relevant because of claude code

I need to get a subscription. I spent an hour this morning trying to get Gemini to write some GCP MQL queries and each time it either mangled the syntax, hallucinated functions that don't exist, or changed my endpoint names from camelcase to lowercase (wtf). I hope Claude Code is better because I hate writing monitor queries.

Do it! You don't need the $200 / month out of the gate. Pro is $20 (I think?) and it's hard to burn through a days limit unless you're hammering on it constantly or using sub agents.

Take a half a Saturday / Sunday and read a good prompt engineering guide. "Spec Driven Development" is one of the good keywords to use on Google or X.

Spec Driven Development

Awesome, I had not heard of this. Looking into it this week.

Plenty. Most of the program/systems at my previous job had a bunch of automation I setup/modified and left alone for years at a time, only for something to change and I'd have to go back and re-trace my steps to get to where I was previously.

(Or they suddenly require a new input/ID number that I have no clue where it's pulled from and have to go on a deep-dive. Cripes.)

I'm sure if I was doing it day-in-day-out I'd be able to knock it out in 5 minutes, but...

I can do TIA 586B in my sleep (orange-white orange, green-white blue, blue-white green, brown-white brown), and only get TIA 586A right without looking it up 50% of the time. That's not a good combination.

Constantly get df and du commands mixed up. RAID 0 versus 1. Vi keyboard shortcuts.

For historical reasons, a lot of FAA regulations go by the name 'Part XXX'. I can tell you the differences between Part 61 and Part 141 flight schools at length, so long as you don't ask me which is which. Sometimes I'll even throw in Part 151, which isn't even a relevant thing. Likewise, tach time versus hobbs time drives me up the wall, and I have to derive tach->tachometer->turning->engine time every time.

Sin and cos. And I use them a lot.

I can do TIA 586B in my sleep (orange-white orange, green-white blue, blue-white green, brown-white brown), and only get TIA 586A right without looking it up 50% of the time. That's not a good combination.

Okay, funnily enough, while I do have both schemes straight in my head (we had one building that for whatever reason seemed to have constant network issues that we largely solved by going from 586B to 586A, so I got used to the difference pretty quickly as we reworked the wiring) I swear I had 586B as 586A in my head and vice versa until seeing this post and reminding myself that no, we were using A in that clinic and not B. Doh! facepalm

Vi keyboard shortcuts.

The "best" way is to train literal muscle memory. vi/m "grammar" is kind of a brain breaker if you try to front of mind process it. But if you just let your fingers fly to move line 38 to mark b, it usually works.

Sin and cos. And I use them a lot.

SOHCAHTOA coming in clutch for an entirely different kind of Indian.

ECGs. Fucking ECGs. I get good at understanding them when I absolutely have to (before exams), but guess what, by the time the next one rolls around, it's all out of my head.

I am in this comment and I do not like it.

Et tu, Brute? I keep imagining there's some mysterious phase change where repetition makes it stick.

I had a very awkward referral once, for a patient with a TCA overdose. I looked at it, knew what it was, but when the person taking the referral asked me to describe it, I was "uh... Those T waves look tented?"

Once you get something down you realize you have some new bizarre shit to memorize. It is endless.

How many days are in each month. I was once 'taught' how to do it using the knuckles on my hands, but it didn't make an ounce of sense to me at the time. I remember that December has 31 (due to NYE), and January also has 31 and February has 28 (unless it's a leap year). I'll struggle with the rest.

Mnemonic: thirty days have September, April, June, and November. And February is fucked. Have to really emphasize the rhyme, but it's the only way I've gotten it to stick.

Thirty days have September, April, May, and December. All the rest have thirty one, save February, which is "fun".

December has 31 days.

This does point out a slight problem with the mnemonic though, which is that every month mentioned has multiple other months that read the same way.

Thirty days have December, August, May, and September. All the rest have thirty-one, except for January, which has 26.

There's no way to correct from something wildly wrong like this to the correct rhyme (other than looking them up to check, which defeats the point of the exercise), because this rhymes and scans just as well. At the end of the day you're just memorizing the right months and numbers.

But the rest of the rhyme is correct.

No, because May also has 31 days lol. The rhyme goes "September, April, June, and November".

Thirty days hath September/April, June, and November/All the rest have thirty-one/Except Januarifebruary, which has seventy-eight.

I didn't bother to memorize the number of days in each month until I started playing Paradox games that encouraged me to constantly keep an eye on the calendar for the "new-month tick". So try spending a few hundred hours on playing Paradox games.

@sun_the_second

I still have to do the knuckles every time.

How it works is you count knuckles and valleys between them. Knuckle = 31, valley = not 31. Once you reach little finger knuckle, go straight back to index finger knuckle (July-August).

Aha! Thanks!

Whenever I read about the various generations that have followed after my own Boomer cohort, I have trouble remembering which one my children are in. I must have looked it up a dozen times and I still can't retain it.

I often have to look up whether I need an x86 or x64 executable

It doesn't help that sometimes they refer to x86-64 as just x86 (assumes 32-bit address space are obviously deprecated) or AMD64 (as if that tells you anything about the instruction set). I suppose this is also a product of age and the computer market you grew up in. There was a time in the US when the IBM PC running an 8086 was the personal computer, and the fact that all other 86s descend from there feels natural. There was also a time when a 64-bit CPU felt like you were living in the future, e.g. Nintendo 64.

ECGs

I leave this one to the physicians. Small related story, though. In an effort to get me to stop bothering them, I once had a circuits lab TA tell me to go off and build an ECG. I did at some point succeed at "building" the world's shittiest ECG; at least it made an appropriately squiggly-looking line (relying on the oscilloscope for 98% of the work, of course). I'm pretty sure that experience has only left me more mystified about what an ECG is supposed to do.

Fourier transforms

Two useful notes here.

  1. The vast, vast majority of applied math at this level is just linear algebra with a Scooby-Doo mask on.
  2. If you're looking for a 'picture' to hold in your head, this 3Blue1Brown is a classic. Surprisingly appropriate for a huge range of mathematical sophistication.

And many more, all of which stubbornly refuse to come to mind, because of course they do.

This happens to me all the time, which calls back to my annoyance with LLMs sometimes. I'm sure it's partially a problem of imprecise prompting.

Often I will ask: "I'm trying to recall the name for something that is like X, Y, and Z. Can you help me determine what concept I'm looking for?"

Reply: "The concept is called XYZ and it works by X, Y, and Z." Entirely a hallucination when you then go to search for XYZ.

AMD64 (as if that tells you anything about the instruction set)

Was there a second 64-bit instruction set invented by AMD?

I was being imprecise here, and I do not have all that extensive of knowledge of the landscape of instruction sets and architectures out in the wild.

That being said. If you already know what you want, AMD64 is unambiguous and interchangeable with x86-64. As a name it is less legibly part of the x86 lineage than e.g. 8086, iAPX 286, i386, etc.

I am not aware of a second 64-bit instruction set invented by AMD. It is plausible there exists some highly specialized instruction set out in the wild invented by AMD that is 64-bit, but no one would reasonably assume you were talking about that if you referenced AMD64. AMD the manufacturer does or has produce other 64-bit instruction set processors e.g. the AMD Opteron A1100, which uses the ARMv8-A instruction set.

Yeah, that last bit is a more common point of confusion than you might expect for normies: Linux software supporting both AARCH64 and x86-64 took off for single-board computer support, and a surprising number of people saw AMD64 and thought it meant the former.

I did at some point succeed at "building" the world's shittiest ECG; at least it made an appropriately squiggly-looking line (relying on the oscilloscope for 98% of the work, of course). I'm pretty sure that experience has only left me more mystified about what an ECG is supposed to do.

The heart goes through sequential contraction and relaxation phases, with the upper atria and lower ventricle being out of phase. This is governed by electrical waves propagating roughly top down. Since we're talking about a chemical process (ions crossing membranes), there's noticeable conduction delay.

Roughly speaking, it kicks off near the top of the heart, and has a "highway" of rapid conduction down the middle. There's increased latency the further you go.

We place multiple electrodes on the limbs and chest:

*The leads placed on the chest measure changes in voltage propagating perpendicular to the skin (front and lateral).

  • The axial leads measure measure the projection of the heart's electrical axis to the vector connecting the leads, going ~left to right and top-bottom.

You draw a chart. Leads V1 and V2 focus on the anterior-right of the heart, 3 and 4 are a bit lower and right above the heart, so you get the anterior picture, 5 and 6 show you what's going on in the sides. The limb leads help figure out the inferior bit.

Once we have established a baseline, then we look at a patient's ECG for deviations from the norm. Too much or too little voltage, or an unusual delay between phases, these can all point to cardiac pathology, and we can localize based on which views are aberrant. For example, in a heart attack, the leads reading anteriorly will, badum-tss, be the ones most out of whack if the damage is on the anterior aspect of the heart (anterior myocardium/muscles), and so on. And those delays in conduction point towards something wrong with the inbuilt cardiac pacemakers or that highway I mentioned.

In effect, an ECG isn't just a single image, it's closer to tomography. The additional leads provide clear advantages over just attaching a potentiometer to someone's toes and fingers.

Of course, it gets much more complicated in practice. Especially when a patient has multiple heart conditions at once, I start sweating when I have to interpret those even when I'm fully up to speed. And it's all the worse in psychiatry, because you can't rely on the patients to be particularly cooperative. And it hurts when you pull off the adhesive on the cups and it takes chest hair with it.

If you're looking for a 'picture' to hold in your head, this 3Blue1Brown is a classic. Surprisingly appropriate for a huge range of mathematical sophistication.

But Pagliacci, I've tried clown therapy :(

3B1B is excellent, and his video on the FT is my go to. It's just that I forget the details beyond "you can decompose arbitrary analog signals into a sum of sine waves".

Reply: "The concept is called XYZ and it works by X, Y, and Z." Entirely a hallucination when you then go to search for XYZ.

Which model? Hallucinations have become quite rare on the SOTA models, especially the ones with internet search enabled. It's not like they never happen, but I'm surprised that they're happening "all the time".

Yes, this does look like what you read when you look up what it's supposed to do.

And it hurts when you pull off the adhesive on the cups and it takes chest hair with it.

My electrodes may or may not have been bare stranded copper wire duct-taped to myself. I still can't believe what we used to get away with.

You can decompose arbitrary [X] into a sum of [Y basis]

It is in fact all linear-algebra all the way down.

SOTA models

I don't think it's so much a problem with the power of the model, but rather my own vagueness with recollection and prompting that I get back out what I put in.

  • Every year, without fail, I'm surprised to learn that there are 31 days in January. It always "feels" like a month with only 30 days in it.
  • I can reliably state the birthdays of my brother and older sister without checking. For my mother, father and younger sister, if they weren't in my calendar I wouldn't have a clue.

There’s a bunch of Japanese words that will not stick. I’d list some but I don’t remember them…

Do you eat raw garlic by itself?

In Korean cuisine, yes, usually in a ssam (wrap). The strong pungency and the kick can cut the fat or grease from richer foods.

No. I like the taste, but garlic tends to tank my already low blood pressure, at which point I get into territories where coffee in remotely healthy quantities ceases to be the fix.

I probably would, but it seems unreasonable any time I have to be around other people in the near future.

No, but I know in certain cuisines (e.g. Northeast Chinese) one might be offered a plate of raw garlic to take bites of as a palate cleanser between courses, similar to the pickled ginger served alongside sushi in Japan.

Raw garlic in soy sauce to dip your food in. Good, but as intense as you'd think.

Once and it caused stomach upset for some reason. About a clove.

Yep, seems to help mitigate colds.

Sometimes but I chop it up first. Feels cleansing. Also ginger.

I once ate a raw lemon and quite enjoyed it. It’s… bracing.

It's a bit of a bumpkin thing here, dipping a raw clove into a salt box and eating it.

Are you trying to root out the vampires on the forum?

I munched on some and realized I don't know if it's an ordinary snack or something weird to eat on its own.

Certainly weird. Shame on you.

AI is business class. What I figured out recently is that while AI is making my development more comfortable it doesn't make me more productive. For me dev work has always been primary problem solving and writing the code secondary. So I spend more time on logic, understanding and occasionally debugging. And human brain does seem to have limited capacity for decision making and understanding per day. It is like long haul flight - arrive at the same time at the airport. But the seats are nicer and you can nap in the full flat ones.

I'd say it makes some parts of development for me way more productive. Where I could have spent hours researching how to do a certain thing with certain API by reading the docs and browsing StackOverflow or such for examples applicable to my specific case, now I can ask LLM and get the same in minutes. It's like having Wikipedia instead of going to the library and looking up stuff in the Britannica manually. Huge time saver. But definitely does not replace other parts of development - like figuring out what you actually need to do and how given the requirements and limitations you have.

I read business class as business class.

Like an MBA course.

But I not only agree with you, I am elated by this line of thinking (which I also arrived at independently). AI, well deployed, should remove a lot of the drudgery of modern knowledge work - TPS reports, powerpoints, progress reports and the like. Instead, you'll actually get paid to think well and deeply.

Obviously, this means 80+% of people are scared shitless because thinking is their least favorite thing to do.

Will the compliance layer not just adapt to this and expand, though? Lot of the things that AI does effectively are more structural constraints than absolute requirements.

Can you add some more here, I'm having trouble parsing your meaning.

What do you mean by "compliance layer", for instance?

I expect "compliance layer" refers to that portion of the workforce/job duties which is not devoted to doing the actual thing, but to checking records and requesting reports so that it can be shown that you are "in compliance with (Company Policy X/Regulation Y/Client Moral Standard Z/what-have-you)" as regards doing the thing.

Essentially this, yeah. Box-ticking for the sake of bureaucracy isn't going to just be solved

(including @MachineElfPaladin as well)

Ah, got it!

Yes, this is absolutely a massive potential problem. We will mandate that a human is put in the loop to slow down AI work in the name of safetyism.

I think, however, that this can only go so far and I know it is self-defeating.

Crypto (specifically Bitcoin) showed that even with something as hyperregulated as literal currency, people will find a way around it. You can't outlaw math, which means you can't outlaw encryption and cryptography in the digital world. It was a matter of time before people figured out the precise mechanisms to turn this into permissionless money. Are there still issues with BitCoin? Of course. Is it going to replace the USD? No. But it's already broken contain - MicroStrategy, a publicly traded "old" tech firm - is now effectively a Crypto Hedge fund that uses real USD from public markets as fuel for fake internet money scheming.

I expect that several companies will willingly hire their armies of "AI compliance people" and then will be defeated - fast or slow, doesn't matter - by new companies (DAOs?) that say "fuck that" to compliance and, instead, rely on new technologies to just get shit done.

Will this result in a wild west and semi-to-totally unregulated economy? Yes. Will there be a lot of chaos in the interim? Yes. But I do believe it's not only the only choice, but inevitable. The only alternative is slow death by bureaucracy.

You can't outlaw math, which means you can't outlaw encryption and cryptography in the digital world.

Let me introduce you to the concept of locked bootloaders and secure boot.

That's a choice people make. There's always going to be some sort of radical, free linux distro that the technically capable can load onto third party hardware.

Again, if you're buying fully integrated hardware, firmware, software from a corporation that puts these kind of things in place - that's a choice. There will always be bad faith actors out there. We should do our best not to reward them for that behavior.

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If I could pay $20 for an upgrade to business class, you bet I would.

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