Posts

101. Dry Wine is for Snobs

Image
(Epistemic status: A hill I'll happily die on, but also will own as the kind of subjective hot take where my own taste is load-bearing for its validity. For everyone with a sweet tooth I've split a bottle of something nice with, and everyone embarrassed of liking fruity drinks.) How can you tell an eternal aesthetic truth from the vagaries of fashion and signaling? One of them holds up under comparative historical analysis, and the other has a start date. Alcoholic drinks - especially wine - have been getting drier for the last century, and prestige taste has shamed us into calling this progress. It's not: it's fashion masquerading as quality, and the slightest bit of modern archaeology wears that facade away like cheap  gold plating from copper. And just as with such faked gold, to be beholden to modern fashions is to spend more money than you should spend on less enjoyment than you might secure.   In 1916,  a Swedish schooner named  the Jönköping was transporting a...
Post a Comment
Read more

100. Tiled With Pentagons, Vol. 1: A Retrospective

I used to wonder what it was like to have written 100 blog posts. How does anyone come up with all those topics? How can they stand putting that much effort into something that few people will ever appreciate, put quite so much of their own lives and experiences out into the world? Is it true what they say, that everyone who's going anywhere has 100 posts worth writing in them? I can't answer all of those, but 365 days, a little over 2^17 words, and 100 posts later, I can say that Tiled With Pentagons has been well worth the effort. I tried to get a proper word count until I got sick enough of leafing through post after post that I got an LLM to do it for me, and at first I was a little sad that I hadn't quite hit 131,072 words - that's 2^17 - until I realized that actually, Blogspot's API was showing its age, and somehow one of my posts had gone missing in the shuffle. Adding it back in - "66: The Diminishing Returns of Double-Checking: A Phenomenological and ...
Post a Comment
Read more

99. Outstanding Favor Bounties

(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...
Post a Comment
Read more

98. The ICML 2026 Seoul Survival Guide

(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....
Post a Comment
Read more

97. Inexpensive, Not Cheap

(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...
Post a Comment
Read more

96. I Don't Like It But I Think That It's True (And Thus There To Be Lived, To Be Interacted With)

(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...
Post a Comment
Read more

95. The Last Enemy That Shall Be Defeated is Ignorance

(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...
Post a Comment
Read more