Tiled With Pentagons

(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...

(Epistemic status: Yet more of this linguistic study. Still not real, but also still the kind of not-real that's real, because what does it even mean for language to be fake?) [Language] doesn't just have an embarassment of riches of carefully crafted words - it also has a plethora of assorted affixes for modifying, modulating, and changing the role of those words. They tend to be much simpler and easier to explain than the words themselves, and in particular I've left out common ones like nominalizers (turn a verb-like predicate into a noun-like predicate), abstractors (turn a verb- or adjective- like predicate X into things like "the act of X" or "the extent of X" or "the abstract property of X-ness" or "the idea of X"), and "-ize", i.e. "to make a thing into an X/have property X". [-wise]: Turns a predicate-word X into "in an X way"/"in a manner clearly associated to X", roughly. Distinct fro...

(Epistemic status: the obligatory EDC post; heavily prescriptive on strong grounds and long experience; check out what's cluttering up my Bag of Holding.) There is maybe one website I will happily link to on this blog, ever, and it is how.complexsystems.fail . It's a favorite; it's pretty much just text with some sourcing for bona fides, and a frame for understanding, well... how it is that complex systems end up failing. It's a shockingly broadly applicable way to think; one of those things where once you start looking, you'll see it everywhere. Traffic and accidents; medical care and iatrogenic ailments (not just hospital-acquired infections but also cutting the wrong leg off); political systems and their dysfunctions (and just how easy it is for a single bad-actor practitioner to ruin a lot); social groups and their collapses; cooking and ruined dishes. And, perhaps most dubiously at first blush, navigating daily life. Listen: I am a fan of the OSHA-coded "d...