Posts

30. 45 Days and 32,768 Words Later…

At last, the end! Despite having missed a day - Wednesday 2025-08-13 - I think I can declare victory. I managed my 2^15 words over the course of 31 posts, including this one, and didn’t go too far over; I came out with a post a day every weekday but one except the 4th of July and Bastille Day (and would have skipped today as Korean Independence Day); I expressed things I cared about decently clearly. A fair handful of people even approached me over the course of the last month to tell me they’d appreciated something I’d written about, or just that they’d read posts at all and found something worthwhile to chew on in one of them. If you’re one of those people, know that I was deeply grateful and solidly touched; I wasn’t really expecting anyone to care about my writing at all, let alone to like any of it. Not everything went perfectly. I frequently found myself scrambling to come up with post topics, or writing about whatever came to mind. I don’t think my writing was especially polishe...
Post a Comment
Read more

29. My PhD Thesis: Part 0 - Setup and Contents

Image
(Epistemic status: A creased, stained map to what were once my favorite hunting grounds. Accessible to anyone who can support substantial abstraction; prior math knowledge is not necessary. In particular, ignorance of calculus is not an obstruction here, but total ignorance of geometry or like, arithmetic or logic, will be. Extremely dense and probably won’t get you there, but at least you’ll ask better questions. Partially dedicated to DG.) It’s been said that you don’t truly understand what you can’t explain to a lay audience. By that logic, I don’t truly understand my doctoral thesis now, and I probably never have. Five years later, I’ll remedy that wrong. I’ll avoid jargon as much as it’s helpful that I avoid it, and avoid equations almost completely. Here’s the main result of my thesis, stated as accessibly as I can manage: Take any group G that’s finitely generated and whose elements we can separate using appropriate maps to other finite groups, and which has only finitely many m...
Post a Comment
Read more

28. Seven More Ways of Looking at Tools

(Epistemic status: Spitballing and theorizing grounded in lived experience you likely share; pace JSW.) (1.) A good tool is something that generalizes well off-distribution; the purpose of the tool should still be approximately possible if whatever the tool is made to act on is noncentral in some way. l If I have a tool for picking up metal objects, it should not suddenly fail if I try to pick up a wooden object with it, except if I understand in advance that this is a metal-picker-upper. If I can use an instant pot to cook oatmeal, I should reasonably be able to expect it to handle rice and steamed vegetables adequately and not, say, catch fire. This also means that good tools can sometimes be hazardous tools, because humans are made of matter, and many tools are about making sweeping or pivotal alterations to basically arbitrary matter. (2.) Tools are a type of thing that can meaningfully be combined in superadditive ways. If I have a pair of tweezers, I can pick up small objects. If...
Post a Comment
Read more

27. Lorxus Favors Etc. (Extra Bits)

As promised, here are a few short extra bits about Lorxus Favors that I don’t think I’ve shared much elsewhere and certainly have never written down. (What Favors get exchanged for) Here are a few of the things I’ve spent Favors on, or that I’ve heard of others spending Favors on: Laptop repairs, driving for multiple hours to events and bulk grocery stores, help accessing medical care, willingness to make fair-sized (USD) loans, car jumpstarting, ritual work and organization, furniture assembly, purchase of antiques, gambling stakes, temporary housing, small coding projects, specialty silverwork, metalcasting help, and community organization. This is obviously not remotely a complete list, and I probably can’t put a complete list together, but this is the cross-section of Favor economy activity of which word has made it back to me. (4D sculpture) I have this mental image of what the kinetic sculpture comprised of all the silver alloy that has ever been in a Favor coin must look like. I...
Post a Comment
Read more

26. On Spiritual Nutrients

(Epistemic status: Spitballing and stamp-collecting, but like, in a vaguely principled way, and built off preceding work.) Many things go into a life well lived and a soul in good health, and as far as anyone knows, there’s no list of what a healthy agent needs in order to keep their soul in good working order. A functioning vessel and the food and shelter to protect that vessel are clearly not enough. Perhaps more surprisingly, it doesn’t seem like any broad-spectrum or one-size-fits-all approach to the upper half of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - love, belonging, and esteem, however sincere, high-quality, or plentiful - works particularly well, either. Neither is full self-actualization even strictly necessary for nominal healthy functioning of a soul - if “self-actualization” is even useful as a single undifferentiated reference class. And yet something almost tangible remains to be explained about the emotional and psychological needs of a healthy soul, though the relationship among...
Post a Comment
Read more

25. Seven-ish Sayings From My Thought Language

(A follow-on to post 4, “Seven-ish Words From My Thought Language”. Read that first or this will make less sense.) An important part of [Language] is its use of set phrases and proverbs, to the point that there are dictionaries of those as well. To that end, here’s seven entries in a sayings-dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. We may note that just as [Language]’s words are fairly freely modifiable and its word classes are almost always open, [Language]’s sayings often take the form of snow-clones - phrases or sentences that have a natural way to adapt or tailor them to your specific meaning and situation - as well as functioning just as well as phrases incorporated into sentences, to the point that some of them are dependent clauses. “And then the house burned down.” - A general-purpose apotropaic against thinking too hard about counterfactuals, be they beautiful or horrible. After all, you can dream all you like about how your life might have been vastly better i...
Post a Comment
Read more

24. Everyone Has a Startup Idea; Here’s Four of Mine

They say that everyone who’s anyone in the Bay Area has a startup idea. Here’s four of mine. They’re sketchy and incomplete and I’ve left out some important bits, so please contact me if any of these seem sufficiently worth doing that you want to cofound or throw some money at them. Hope springs eternal. These are very loosely ordered from least exciting to most exciting to me personally, both in terms of how much I want to do them and how likely I think they are to see any kind of returns. SURGERY (NOT IN THE MATH SENSE) (BUT ALSO IN THE MATH SENSE): It occurs to me, looking at some schematics for both clothes patterns and for medical surgeries, that a lot of what makes a given stitching pattern work or fail to work comes down to compatibility of metric connections in the appropriate Riemannian manifold, which in both cases isn’t even a fully general one but rather reasonable approximations to the human form. You could thus conceivably found a startup - or at least, have a project for...
Post a Comment
Read more