Tiled With Pentagons

(cw: Weird, personal, heavy, and high-context. There’s a point to it, I promise.) You were born on April 13, 1940 in the Taeryong River Valley at the northern end of Chōsen - that is, Korea as invaded, colonized, and annexed by Imperial Japan. You were the youngest and last of nine children of a landholding family, the Shims, their estate part of Pakcheon County, bounded - as you’ve told me on a few occasions - by the Taeryong river and “a big road”, the finest and most cleverly placed of the five estates that made up the county. You claim that your episodic memory - the scenes that make up your life - is near-perfect, especially of your earlier life; it is from that memory that you paint me impressionistic pictures of a life alien to my own: a courtyard that it took you 15 minutes to walk across in a straight line; rows on rows of fresh cucumbers and tomatoes and grapes that you loved to eat, all fresh off the vine; a servantry that your family treated with humanity, their children ra...

“Battle-short” is a mental health metaphor conveyed to me by SG some time ago. SG is exceedingly competent and has done lots of very cool projects that for the sake of anonymity I will not detail here (but she, and they, are so so cool y’all), and cares a lot about Getting Shit Done, especially when the Shit is Important or Valuable; frequently, the Shit has a hard deadline of some kind, or some urgency to it. This poses a problem: we are all finite creatures, and even when working towards some genuinely important and desirable goal or attacking some thorny but necessary task, we might run up against constraints of time or energy or willpower. Sometimes, we don’t actually have the time or space we need to take breaks and rest consistently - maybe if we do that we’ll be beaten to the punch, or it’ll mean we take so long that something precious in the world will be lost permanently. A tempting solution would be to buckle down maximally hard, grit your teeth, commit yourself over-fully t...

So you’ve heard about this “microtonal” thing, and you’ve become curious about it. Maybe you even listened to some music, and it sounded weird and kind of… out of key but maybe also simultaneously “locked-in” in the way that a cappella choirs and barbershop quartets are. Or maybe you’re wondering why we would ever want more than 12 notes in an octave at all, or you’re familiar with musical traditions - Arabic, Anatolian, Indian classical, klezmer, and gamelan among many others - that make use of scales and harmonies beyond or totally separate from the modern Western canon. Even the sweetness of old church organs - you know, the ones that sometimes have weird split black keys? - are an example of microtonal music! But why would we ever want to make use of such dissonant intervals as we find crunched beneath the semitone distance of a minor second? Before we can talk about that, we need to think a little more closely about the nature of musical pitches. While pure sine wave tones are com...

Seven entries from a dictionary that will never exist, even though it should. The words in [brackets] show up with some frequency in my thoughts, and I struggle with English’s semantic poverty. Some of them show up in other languages, like Korean or Lojban. Others among them, people I’ve spoken to share in wishing were wider-used words. [untranslatable 1: word-clogged/interference-silent] (adj): Of a person or their state of mind. Descriptive of the phenomenon where a person has multiple different things to say about a specific topic, or multiple different responses or reactions to a remark an interlocutor has made, only one of which can be taken. To be tongue-tied not out of a lack of things to say, but out of an overabundance of mutually exclusive things to say, all of equal priority, especially when each thing to say would result in following importantly different conversational paths. Often used instead in its natural verb form, which means “to be silent as a result of [word-clog]”...

    This is a post about colors I can’t show you, because they don’t quite exist. You might ask, what does it mean for a color to be secret? How can a color not quite exist? The answer, approximately, is that the more you think about color, the less sense it makes. Maybe you want to flee, and keep your nice simple safe elementary school understanding of colors as something inherent to the world. Maybe you want to keep on thinking of color as being some mere function of surface reflectivity of visible light, as being something straightforwardly generated by adding light together - red and green and blue light combining to white - or as being something dual to that, equally simply generated by subtracting away light through absorption - cyan and magenta and yellow pigment combining to… not black, exactly, but close enough. Maybe you’d even be alright thinking of color as something underspecified to do with retinal pigments, or mentally toying with the unknowable nature of indivi...

  Many of you reading this post will already be familiar with Forkable, a catering service commonly used within Effective Altruism and AI safety research spaces to provide for those whose marginal time and convenience are valued enough to purchase at a premium. Many others, I hope, will have been sent here in future after asking how this weird catering app works and why they didn’t get dinner yesterday. Having already blundered my way through understanding its secrets and being an epicurean creature, I hope that I can set down some wisdom in the ways of provision so that others might feast.  First, some background and simple obvious pieces of advice. The way Forkable works is that each day, the system picks two restaurants (rarely three) for everyone in your org to order food from, and these restaurants change twice a day, so that you order from different places for lunch and dinner, and it’s not generally predictable when any given restaurant will recur. Everyone places their...

(cw: Really really brutally heavy in the way that 19th century geopolitics often is. Spicy and overpoetic. Not for the faint of heart.)   Last summer, around July 2024, I was sitting in Lighthaven listening to RK give a talk on the possible near futures of the development of AGI; he was laying out the two major ways that this could go down: either scaling labs - private companies like Anthropic and DeepSeek and OpenAI and Mistral - managing to reach AGI on their own, or the strong prospect of governmental capture of these projects by great powers, most notably the United States and China. To my recollection, he claimed that this latter case was the more likely, and conveyed a plan that was floating around AI safety spaces at the time. He pointed out the vast and durable-seeming lead and competitive advantage that the US had - and to a large extent still has - in the development of AI, and defined the concept of a decisive strategic advantage: a position of strategic superiority suf...