Tiled With Pentagons

(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...

  (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...

(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...

(Epistemic status: project idea that I am reasonably confident is actually achievable. Feedback, independent experimentation with shared results, and especially alpha-testers all decidedly welcome. There's someone who this post would have been for, in a brighter kinder universe, but this is not that possible world and he will never read this. It's not for him and he will never get to eat anything I make. So it's for MEG, IL, and TT instead, and all my other friends who appreciate good experimental desserts. And also the Philly Pies. Go birds; eat your batteries; third championship fornever.)    I can't remember quite when I first came up with this idea. Maybe it was after reading up on the Tree of 40 Fruits pictured above. Maybe it was after reading that passage about kitchen trees producing different kind of snackable fruit year-round in Too Like The Lightning. Maybe the seed of it was planted in me while wandering through a farmer's market one afternoon.  I had a ...