Tiled With Pentagons

(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...

  A bumper crop of fruit you weren't expecting. A downpour of rain on parched earth unable to soak it all up. A sudden windfall from investments coming when you're too tired to enjoy making use of it. This might be the most nice-problem-to-have complaint, but it's still worth thinking about - what do you do, when bounty arrives out of season? How can you hold on to some of those gains when you weren't prepared for them, weren't expecting them, and might not even be able to appreciate them properly? We should first define our terms a little better, rather than hide behind poetry. By "bounty", I simply mean something unambiguously helpful or valuable - food, money, energy, and the like. "In season" means that you were at least loosely expecting that such a bounty might come. You had a bucket ready, or you had something you were saving up for, or you rolled the dice on some positive-EV decision where a windfall was a known possibility. By contrast, ...

(Epistemic status: Tragically well-attested, where it's not just my recommended best practices. With thanks to IL for the link.) Some people get lots of legitimately interesting writing done with a touch of AI assistance. Others churn out slop text, half em-dashes and "not just X but Y" by word count. Some people have finally been empowered to learn to code. Others pump out untested vibe-code and spin up entire towns' worth of agents spinning their wheels. Some people have made substantive psychological breakthroughs by chatting with LLMs. Others have gone mad, going down rabbit holes of exciting crankery or becoming convinced that LLMs are undoubtedly sapient and in love with them. What's going on? What's the difference? And can what's good about making use of LLMs be better systematized? There's a pattern that I've noticed, which is that while people treated as the societal default - generally cisgendered heterosexual neurotypical white men, poss...