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94. Chump Checks

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...
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93. Bounty Out of Season and How to Preserve It (and How to Use Jam to Ease Friction)

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  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, ...
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92. Don't Replace Your Brain (High Actuation and Prosthetic Executive Function in the Age of AI)

(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...
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91. Seven-ish Affixes From My Thought-Language

(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...
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90. The Prepared Practitioner

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(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...
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89. Jangajji (장아찌), in the Northern Style

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  (Epistemic status: what, you thought that this somehow wasn't a recipe blog?)   This is a recipe blog. It always has been, at least in part. I'm not going to give you the recipe until the very end, because that's what recipe blogs do, right? I'm going to tell you a whole bunch of irrelevant-feeling personal context about the food and then finally actually drop the recipe. But unlike most recipe blogs, that personal context is actually really quite relevant. You ever think about lost recipes? They're a tragic microcosm of lost information in greater generality. There's lost plays like Love's Labours Won, lost books like the second volume of the Poetics, lost music like Karelia Music, and lost film like Bulgasari. Each one is a wound in human culture that will never heal. There's entire lost libraries, too - the House of Wisdom during the sack after the Sack of Baghdad, the Library of Alexandria (whose books fell apart - they largely weren't bu...
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88. Two Gods of Trade (A Treatise)

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(Epistemic status: a nonstandard frame for economics that finally crystallized; as usual, descriptive of patterns I've observed in trade, gift economics, and coordination; more prescriptive than my usual about what patterns build what kind of prosperity; and surely incomplete. Built heavily out of the Glowlarion theological-decisiontheoretic frame. For SC, and anyone through whose hands the coins I've made pass or have passed.) Come, sit down. Have a drink and let me tell you a tale... "Long ago, on a dusty road through a desert, there trudged a travelling merchant. The road was unpaved dirt, barely better than the shifting sands around it; the merchant's donkey struggled to pull his cart over potholes and through the occasional dune that had drifted onto the path; the merchant's cart was loaded down with bolts of fine cloth and sturdy pottery jars of preserved fruit. The merchant relaxed as he approached an oasis; he and his steed were parched, and he had been wal...
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