Tiled With Pentagons

(As requested by EvN on the spur of the moment. This will make much more sense if you've read post 22, "Lorxus Favors: An Experiment in Self-Backed Giftlike Macroeconomics", first.) A Lorxus Favor is a claim to 8 working hours' worth of my time as applied to some task I'd otherwise be mildly averse to and whose fulfillment I'd be indifferent to, which debt is marked by a small silver coin. They look cool and are satisfying to play with and make nice jingling noises, and you probably want one. How might you get one? Usually, it'd be by rendering me or some other coin-bearer some specific good or service, on the spot or reasonably scheduled, or conceivably by paying significantly more money than you really want to. However, I have standing desires that for a long time I've been meaning to put up in print somewhere reasonably public. This is me, finally getting around to doing that. The following is a list of things I want or need, with bounties denominat...

(Epistemic status: Lived experience and a little reconnaissance. For Western AI/ML types attending ICML 2026 in Seoul who'd rather spend their energy on research than figuring out which subway exit leads to their hotel.) So you're going to Seoul for ICML. Congrats! The conference is at the COEX Mall in Gangnam, which means you're in the gleaming, modern, aggressively capitalist heart of the city. There's good news and bad news here. The good news is that it's remarkably easy to navigate once you know the tricks. The bad news is that there are in fact tricks, and if you don't know the tricks, you'll spend your first two days confused and your third day wishing you'd read this post. Also, Korean culture is distinctive and not everyone in Korea speaks English. I've haunted Seoul enough to know where the traps are, and I understand the Korean language and culture well enough to help you avoid putting a foot wrong. Here's everything you actually need....

(Epistemic status: Hard-won practical wisdom and fishing out a few frames from the water supply to weave them into something grander.  Written in under two hours, to prove a point.  For anyone who's had to make powerful things work with sorely limited resources, and who managed it.) What do you do, when your reach exceeds not your grasp but rather your budget? What does it really mean, to half-ass it with everything you've got, if we want to think about it in a more general sense than mere effort? What considerations must you make, what heuristics arise, when you need to actually pay attention to the consumption frontier, when you haven't got the goods to build in a safety factor of 10, or can't paper over your inconveniences with funds, or don't have the luxury of infinite time to think before you must make your move? There's a distinction that people often miss when they talk about frugality. They inappropriately embucket "inexpensive" with "che...

(Epistemic status: Painfully well-tested. For anyone who's ever had to navigate a reality they wished were different.)  "What is true is already so. Owning up to it doesn't make it worse. Not being open about it doesn't make it go away. And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with. Anything untrue isn't there to be lived." Eugene Gendlin said that, and I find myself turning it over and over in my head, especially lately. It's not because I like it - though I do - but because it's one of those chewy crystallized chunks of insight you can gnaw on forever and keep getting nourishing juice out, like some kind of  everlasting candied ginger of rationality. It cuts straight to the heart of how to stay oriented when something important about the world is so much worse than you wished it were. The operant phrase there is "interacted with". Not "observed", not "waited out", not "endured", and certa...

(Epistemic status: a slightly weird framing backed up by plenty of personal and professional experience. For IL, SP, and everyone else I've ever taught anything.) The last enemy that shall be defeated is ignorance. Not death, not scarcity, not suffering, not evil - ignorance. The foggy darkness that lives at the edge of the universe is what stops us from knowing what to do and how and why, which after all is most of the battle; the rest is just implementation and mopping up. And everyone is ignorant about almost everything. That's nothing to be ashamed of in itself, and I really do mean "everyone". You, me, everyone you've ever met, everyone I've ever taught anything - both before and after I taught them; everyone knows nothing about almost every topic. This is no moral failing, but rather the prevailing condition of sapient existence. Notice - it is not the ignorant who are an enemy bur rather ignorance itself, the reified not-knowing. The enemy is not the pe...

If only things worked properly.  If only there was a simple straightforward way to tell if something or someone were worth the effort to interact with.  If only people and institutions and shops could be trusted to be honest. They cannot. That is the simple truth, and it is there to be lived. So how do we deal with that painful truth? There's a class of test I sometimes run, and that I recommend that you run, when I want to evaluate an eatery of some kind. For any given class of eatery, there's a fairly standard menu item or three that you can pick to evaluate the quality of the establishment as a whole. For ice cream shops, it's three things: vanilla ice cream, strawberry ice cream, and lemon sorbet. Vanilla ice cream tells you about the quality of their ice cream base and whether they skimp on pricier ingredients, lemon sorbet is simple and clean and hard to hide anything behind, and strawberry is delicate and complex, easy to spot artificiality in. For breakfast-type pla...