Tiled With Pentagons

At last, the end! Despite having missed a day - Wednesday 2025-08-13 - I think I can declare victory. I managed my 2^15 words over the course of 31 posts, including this one, and didn’t go too far over; I came out with a post a day every weekday but one except the 4th of July and Bastille Day (and would have skipped today as Korean Independence Day); I expressed things I cared about decently clearly. A fair handful of people even approached me over the course of the last month to tell me they’d appreciated something I’d written about, or just that they’d read posts at all and found something worthwhile to chew on in one of them. If you’re one of those people, know that I was deeply grateful and solidly touched; I wasn’t really expecting anyone to care about my writing at all, let alone to like any of it. Not everything went perfectly. I frequently found myself scrambling to come up with post topics, or writing about whatever came to mind. I don’t think my writing was especially polishe...

(Epistemic status: A creased, stained map to what were once my favorite hunting grounds. Accessible to anyone who can support substantial abstraction; prior math knowledge is not necessary. In particular, ignorance of calculus is not an obstruction here, but total ignorance of geometry or like, arithmetic or logic, will be. Extremely dense and probably won’t get you there, but at least you’ll ask better questions. Partially dedicated to DG.) It’s been said that you don’t truly understand what you can’t explain to a lay audience. By that logic, I don’t truly understand my doctoral thesis now, and I probably never have. Five years later, I’ll remedy that wrong. I’ll avoid jargon as much as it’s helpful that I avoid it, and avoid equations almost completely. Here’s the main result of my thesis, stated as accessibly as I can manage: Take any group G that’s finitely generated and whose elements we can separate using appropriate maps to other finite groups, and which has only finitely many m...

(Epistemic status: Spitballing and theorizing grounded in lived experience you likely share; pace JSW.) (1.) A good tool is something that generalizes well off-distribution; the purpose of the tool should still be approximately possible if whatever the tool is made to act on is noncentral in some way. If I have a tool for picking up metal objects, it should not suddenly fail if I try to pick up a wooden object with it, except if I understand in advance that this is a metal-picker-upper. If I can use an instant pot to cook oatmeal, I should reasonably be able to expect it to handle rice and steamed vegetables adequately and not, say, catch fire. This also means that good tools can sometimes be hazardous tools, because humans are made of matter, and many tools are about making sweeping or pivotal alterations to basically arbitrary matter. (2.) Tools are a type of thing that can meaningfully be combined in superadditive ways. If I have a pair of tweezers, I can pick up small objects. If I...

As promised, here are a few short extra bits about Lorxus Favors that I don’t think I’ve shared much elsewhere and certainly have never written down. (What Favors get exchanged for) Here are a few of the things I’ve spent Favors on, or that I’ve heard of others spending Favors on: Laptop repairs, driving for multiple hours to events and bulk grocery stores, help accessing medical care, willingness to make fair-sized (USD) loans, car jumpstarting, ritual work and organization, furniture assembly, purchase of antiques, gambling stakes, temporary housing, small coding projects, specialty silverwork, metalcasting help, and community organization. This is obviously not remotely a complete list, and I probably can’t put a complete list together, but this is the cross-section of Favor economy activity of which word has made it back to me. (4D sculpture) I have this mental image of what the kinetic sculpture comprised of all the silver alloy that has ever been in a Favor coin must look like. I...

(Epistemic status: Spitballing and stamp-collecting, but like, in a vaguely principled way, and built off preceding work.) Many things go into a life well lived and a soul in good health, and as far as anyone knows, there’s no list of what a healthy agent needs in order to keep their soul in good working order. A functioning vessel and the food and shelter to protect that vessel are clearly not enough. Perhaps more surprisingly, it doesn’t seem like any broad-spectrum or one-size-fits-all approach to the upper half of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - love, belonging, and esteem, however sincere, high-quality, or plentiful - works particularly well, either. Neither is full self-actualization even strictly necessary for nominal healthy functioning of a soul - if “self-actualization” is even useful as a single undifferentiated reference class. And yet something almost tangible remains to be explained about the emotional and psychological needs of a healthy soul, though the relationship among...

(A follow-on to post 4, “Seven-ish Words From My Thought Language”. Read that first or this will make less sense.) An important part of [Language] is its use of set phrases and proverbs, to the point that there are dictionaries of those as well. To that end, here’s seven entries in a sayings-dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. We may note that just as [Language]’s words are fairly freely modifiable and its word classes are almost always open, [Language]’s sayings often take the form of snow-clones - phrases or sentences that have a natural way to adapt or tailor them to your specific meaning and situation - as well as functioning just as well as phrases incorporated into sentences, to the point that some of them are dependent clauses. “And then the house burned down.” - A general-purpose apotropaic against thinking too hard about counterfactuals, be they beautiful or horrible. After all, you can dream all you like about how your life might have been vastly better i...

They say that everyone who’s anyone in the Bay Area has a startup idea. Here’s four of mine. They’re sketchy and incomplete and I’ve left out some important bits, so please contact me if any of these seem sufficiently worth doing that you want to cofound or throw some money at them. Hope springs eternal. These are very loosely ordered from least exciting to most exciting to me personally, both in terms of how much I want to do them and how likely I think they are to see any kind of returns. SURGERY (NOT IN THE MATH SENSE) (BUT ALSO IN THE MATH SENSE): It occurs to me, looking at some schematics for both clothes patterns and for medical surgeries, that a lot of what makes a given stitching pattern work or fail to work comes down to compatibility of metric connections in the appropriate Riemannian manifold, which in both cases isn’t even a fully general one but rather reasonable approximations to the human form. You could thus conceivably found a startup - or at least, have a project for...

Y’all like slightly weird life interventions that bring substantial gains on the margin, right? Especially when they’re pretty cheap to try? Right. So I have a few possibilities squarely in that reference class that you might find useful or pleasant. Let me sell you on three of them today. Wait no where are you going come back - SHOWER CRAYONS: Shower crayons are great. You know how you have shower thoughts sometimes? Little stray ideas or thoughts that you want to keep track of while showering, where maybe you wish you could avoid the legitimate minor inconvenience of drying yourself off and going looking for a pad of paper and pencil in order to go record them properly? Those thoughts are real, and they are valuable, and you do yourself a disservice both by dismissing and forgotten them, and also by neglecting to use every practicably writable/erasable surface in your house for offloading working memory. I have a solution for that. For ~$14, you can pick up a pack of 12 crayons, or ~...

It’s been almost exactly seven years since I spent the first Favor - a placeholder copper disk hand-marked with letterform stamps - on laptop repairs, thanks to SN, over six years since the chilly December night when I completed the first investment cast to forge the first silver Favor coins, and roughly five years since I wrote up the draft explanation of the Favor economy that still lives at lorx.us/favor . I think it’s well past time to provide a more succinct explanation, as well as to talk a little bit about my process, what’s gone well, what’s gone badly, and my future plans for the Favor economy. In a future post I’ll discuss the nanoscale reserve banking aspect more, as well as giving a perspective on a strange kind of sculpture I haven’t much shared, and some case studies of Favor use. I’ll start with an explanation of what a Favor coin is, what they represent, and how best to use them. A Favor coin is a small coin as pictured above, made out of a special kind of sterling sil...

Here are a few delicious and mostly scalable recipes that I’ve made repeatedly with great results. Unfortunately, basically none of them are vegan, though the desserts at least are vegetarian. This is a recipe blog now, I guess. (It’s not. Don’t worry. Or do; I’m not your parent.) Healing Surge Stew: A delicious ~beef stew, halfway between boeuf borguignon and an English-style beef stew. I made it for Grandma Rapoport in her convalescence in early 2022 and it perked her up considerably; it remains one of my favorites, as it freezes well. Best eaten with good fresh bread and some ketchup on top as a crema. Notably, almost everything in the dish gets cooked twice. Per kilo of beef/other ungulate red stewing meat: (The meat should be in cubes ~2 inches on a side; beef is what I’ve used so far, but I get a sense that venison would work excellently.) 1/4-1/2# bacon/spam/fatty pork tomato paste (for browning) Fry the bacon in the stockpot briefly. Slather the tomato paste over the beef, then...

You may rightly wonder what else I’m up to, if it’s not just blogging and the occasional adventure. The short answer is that I spend most of my time and mental energy taking part in a summer research fellowship in AI safety called PIBBSS, where my research direction has to do with questions like “how does an agent help a principal, even if the agent doesn’t know what the principal wants?” and “how much harder is it for the principal to teach the agent what they want, and how much worse are the outcomes, if the principal doesn’t know for sure what they want?”. The long(ish) answer is this post. I’ll avoid jargon, mathematical notation, and recommendations to read other long papers, but some amount of that will be unavoidable. Here’s the basic setup - called a “Markov decision process”, sometimes with adjectives like “decentralized” or “partially observable” - which forms the ground assumption for the entire subfield my research direction lies in, called “inverse reinforcement learning”:...

(Read post 3, “Secret Colors, Impossible Colors”, first, or this will probably not make as much sense.) You know how sometimes you set out to do something and you psych yourself up to put a lot of effort in to have to figure out precisely how to achieve some desired goal or effect, and then the very first thing you try approximately works? Yeah, that’s about what happened when I set out to mix my own hyperbolic blue paint. It turned out to be such a straightforward effect to achieve under fairly permissive lighting conditions that I’ve shown it off to easily dozens of people, and easy enough to make that I led a small group in making some in person at a small event in March 2025. For the sake of posterity, I’ll provide a short recipe here. You will need the following: Synthetic ultramarine pigment (~$1/10 g) “Blue Lit” phosphorescent pigment, by Stuart Semple (~$20/50 g) A paint base, like linseed oil or acrylic base (Optional) Kaolin powder A small scale A mixing vessel, anything from...

(Epistemic status: a hastily-written recreation of something I remember reading once and can’t find anymore; if you can find it let me know. The original post had some good images. Probably best read after post 11, “Why the First “High Dimension” is Six or Maybe Five”.) Positive reinforcement is just plain more efficient and effective than negative reinforcement, if both are feasible, and I can pretty straightforwardly present a model that argues strongly for it. Consider the following setup: we’re trying to get some tiny simple agent to navigate to a goal area within some simple space. No overly complex obstacles, no particular hazards, just a tiny simple agent capable of approaching or avoiding marked areas and a goal with a strong but extremely short-range attractiveness. We have negative feedback markers, which the agent will strive to avoid, and positive feedback markers, which the agent will try to approach; we can model these both as having some infinite-range repulsive or attra...

Communities exist. This much we can hopefully agree on. Some communities arise naturally, while others are founded for purpose - anything from a desire for companionship to the need for more than just a few people to participate in some activity to the assembly of a lever to move the world with. One type of community is what I’d term a “flagpole”: a community that can be either intentional or accidental, but is always about something in particular: some cause or trait or practice. It’s generally the only one of its kind in its catchment basin, whatever that basin might be - walking distance, easy driving distance, or even nested within some nebulously defined internet subculture; if it isn’t the only one, there sure aren’t that many of them. It must also make itself prominent, often explicitly advertising to a large potential audience. After all, if a community isn’t growing, it’s shrinking - so goes the aphorism. This makes the flagpole a natural place for people who wave its metaphor...

The world finds itself in peril, on the brink of self-immolating calamity in any of a handful of ways. Bit by bit, geopolitics has been turned into a multipolar tinderbox; drive for profit at all costs and for ruthless corporate growth are an ever-hungry furnace, with the continued impoverishment of billions; the climate warms, and forests burst into flames as the next zoonotic plague looms. And this is to say nothing of the neglected funeral pyres of nuclear nonproliferation, poor distribution of food and medical goods, and any of half a dozen simmering genocides at some or other great power’s behest, to name just a few ongoing failures. With all these cause areas screaming for resources with which to fight the flames, what are we to do, wishing to do the most good as efficiently as possible, if we hope to douse the rising flames our global civilization sleeps fitfully among? The prospect of near-term AGI has only stoked the flames of our perdition, and threatens to flash into a sudde...