immature techno-geek with moral autism

Story recommendations

2026-02-23T22:29:54Z

I did the book cover for a supervillain web series, The Tragedy of the Titanium Tyrant.

Someone's leading a sci-fi worldbuilding project called the Atmaverse. It is, so far as I understand, intended as hard scifi plus an FTL method. There is a significant focus on alien civilizations.

People who dislike isekais with slavery will perhaps like the John Brown Isekai.

I recommend a lot of Saphroneth's work. It's better-organized on AO3 but more up-to-date on SpaceBattles.

Comprehension Castle (Part 2) is a set of 'screenshots' from a fake game.

If you want to see someone's overpowered OC beat up everyone, Mitraka is fun. I have some complaints but I keep reading it.

The first several Starship's Mage books feel like the author was like "what if we had a bunch of cool stuff all in one setting? wouldn't that be super awesome?" and then committed pretty hard to it. (I haven't finished the series yet.)

1632 sends an entire town into the past. You can read the first book free.

The Wicked + The Divine is a finished comic series.

Chunks of Worm is a set of Worm snippets. (I haven't finished Worm, so take my Worm recommendations with a grain of salt.)

Of the Coming of the Star Warrior is a brief Kirby/Silmarillion crossover.

The Background Noise of Defiance is a cute Star Wars series.

Justice, Justice Shall You Pursue is an HP fic where the non-wizard government gets involved.

The Legend Of Zelda: Speedrun Of The Wild: What happens after speedrunner Link beats up Ganon in his underwear with improvised weapons?

Something to Fear / Someone to Fight: Steven Universe post-movie fic.

Wolf Incident Postmortem is a Boy who Cried Wolf epistolary fic.

Spinning Silver is a fairy tale inspired work in which lots of minor characters all have their own goals and take actions towards those goals. It feels very well-put-together and complete.

Karl K. Gallagher does some decent short stories.

Conditional Release is a fic in which the Valar take a different strategy with Melkor.

Empty Graves, the fic where Martha Kent keeps encountering time travelers.

Sherden Pact is someone's Khornite faction in Warhammer 40K which is focused on Effective Murder Maximization. This sermon may be a decent intro.

Constellations is a Worm/Ōkami crossover where Taylor gets a canine friend.

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On Silksong Wishwalls

2026-02-23T21:27:53Z

Silksong has some “wishwalls” where people post requests. A wish board that is “empty” of requests for Hornet's purposes still seems to have markers on it, just smaller ones.

These could, perhaps, be quests Hornet feels other people can handle.

So maybe someone else is looking at the board and seeing things like this:

Shawl Stitching
"My shawl is falling to pieces and is no longer befitting of a pilgrim. With a bit of thread, it could be good as new."
Repair Pebb’s shawl.
Reward: 5 rosaries.

There's also plausibly wishes specifically asking for other NPCs, the way some of the wishes specifically ask for Hornet.

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Computer game recommendations

2026-02-23T12:26:15Z

Demon Bluff is a turn-based single-player card game derivative of Blood on the Clocktower. It's very compute-intensive but I like it. The itch.io "demo" is in fact a complete game.

Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection is a bunch of little puzzles. There are mobile app versions with no ads or such.

Loop Hero is a paid game where you restore features to a world by playing cards as the hero walks through it, and you also get to improve a camp. I think it's pretty fun, though some optional content could be better implemented.

Timberborn is currently in Early Access but it's pretty fun to see someone else play.

Jazzybee's Stardew Valley Character Creator is a neat dollmaker (are dollmakers games?). With itch-dl, it's easy to poke through the assets for recombination, too.

Also Stardew Valley and Terraria are good too, but I expect people here already knew that.

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Non-game software recommendations

2026-02-23T12:23:59Z

jpegtran is a command-line tool for losslessly cropping jpegs. I think JPEGclub is not a crazy website to link here. Great for making icons.

ImageWorsener has the fancy dither options you wished GIMP had. There are extra dither modes to be had, if you remember that you run a modern computer with the memory for them.

yt-dlp is a YouTube downloader that can automatically add metadata, grab your preferred resolution, download only audio and not video, et cetera.

itch-dl is useful for downloading games from itch.io, though sometimes you have to pre-decompress a brotli file it might produce.

SvgPathEditor is great for getting into the little details of SVG path strings while still seeing what you're doing.

FanFicFare is a useful downloader that can even handle fiction.live and SpaceBattles.

Infinite Mac is neat for running old software.

trash-cli lets you put things in the trash from the command line, instead of immediately deleting them.

Pandoc does format conversion.

poppler-utils extracts images from PDFs.

pngquant does lossy PNG compression, which is pretty different from lossy JPEG compression and suits different sorts of files.

Qalculate! has a decent command line calculator mode. It sure beats opening up Python and then having to import math.

mpv is better than VLC at handling some video formats, and also supports going backwards one frame at a time, not just forwards.

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Good and bad things with celiac

2026-02-23T11:18:43Z

Things I particularly miss while avoiding gluten include:

Bread and bagels. I've been too cowardly to try substitutes – if I don't try any bread substitutes then for me they exist in a superposition of being adequate and being inadequate, but if I try them and they're inadequate then I'm certain.
Refried beans. You would think this would be fine, since they're beans, but I like plain black refried beans with a few spices but no added oil or sugar, and nobody I know of who does gluten free refried beans also makes those. I should arguably try for a batch at home but then it wouldn't be a convenience food.
Mock chicken nuggets. All the vegan nuggets are coated with wheat bread crumbs. There are dead-chicken nuggets that are gluten free but I have been virtuously not buying them, for which I deserve all the points.
- Same goes for vegan hot dogs.
Broth concentrate. Better than Bouillon, I miss you so much. I want something full of yeast extract and garlic and onion, not MSG and sugar.
Chinese-style soy sauce. Yes, it is different from Kikkoman.
My preferred instant ramen. Instant rice noodle soups aren't the saaaame.
Being chill about cross-contamination and sharing dishes.
Restaurant food. Even when a restaurant claims to be gluten-free it's basically a gamble.
Buying cheap store-brand foods. I pay like 1.5x the price for canned chickpeas these days.
Carmex lip balm. My understanding is the company also does products with non-certified-GF oats and I don't know if they do anything about cross-contam.
Using arbitrary brands of soaps. Stop putting barley in things!

Things which are surprisingly fine include:

Desserts
- I can make banana-chocolate muffins at home which are pretty good.
- Same goes for brownies.
- The grocery store has premade cakes which are also good. Expensive, but cakes are for special occasions anyway.
- Chocolate tofu pie is easy to do a gluten free version of, you just need a premade GF crust.
- Most Breyers ice cream flavors are gluten free.
- NuGo does a bunch of gluten free protein bars.
Chips
- Tostitos plain tortilla chips are generally gluten free.
- Kettle Brand chips also are.
Tater Tots
Hot cereal: I personally seem to tolerate certified gluten free oats, possibly, but for people who don't there's Cream of Rice which can be cooked in the microwave.
Any old dry beans, as long as I sort and wash 'em first.

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Mastodon

2022-11-10T21:53:28Z

I do in fact have a Mastodon account! Technically not as part of the new influx, I've had it for a few years, but it's been inactive for a while. I'm viewable at @ilzo@oulipo.social, if anyone's interested.

I wonder if I'll ever feel the need to move off the lipogrammatic instance or not.

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Information request

2022-08-08T18:34:26Z

Does anyone know of a decent non-proprietary function that converts dry-bulb temperature and relative humidity into a combination measure that, assuming constant light/wind/etc, is meaningful about subjective experience of atmospheric conditions? Heat index doesn't handle common indoor conditions.

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You may want to support S.3471 & H.R.6210

2020-09-18T00:24:38Z

I only occasionally pester my congressional representatives. One of the things I have done recently is pester them about the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act (S.3471 and H.R.6210).

If you're a voter in the United States, it may align with your values to pester your congressional representatives about this legislation. The Uyghur Human Rights Project likes this legislation, and so do politicians such as Elizabeth Warren and a bunch of Republicans and AOC, which I hope is a sign that the legislation isn't too bad. And also, like, it's mostly trade sanctions, which seem reasonable.

I am not going to go into detail about the atrocities this legislation is a response to, because most of my social circle has already heard about them, and paying attention to atrocities you don't have the power to prevent is unpleasant. If you haven't read about them, I recommend you think about the amount of evidence you really need to acquire before you go and do research, so you don't accidentally do more research than you have to.

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Feeds I recommend

2020-07-16T08:11:00Z

Below are lists of feeds I recommend. I'm not going to go through general-content blogs of people in my social sphere here. I'm also not going to recommend anything that doesn't currently update.

Blogs

Gaming blogs

A lot of these are OSR blogs. I'm not actually so into the OSR but they write good blogs.

coins_and_scrolls_feed: A high rate of existing/historic institutions for game purposes.
goblin_punch_feed: Very weird worldbuilding.
thealexandrian_feed: Lots of DM advice and module discussion.
retired_adventurer_feed: I don't have a good feel for what this blog is notable for, but I like it.

Food blogs

seriouseats_feat_vid_feed: Actually better characterized as "SeriousEats articles feed". SeriousEats has a test kitchen and often does experimental analysis of food and goes into why things work, I highly recommend.
seriouseats_recipes_feed: The recipes mentioned in the articles, and some others.
smittenkitchen_feed: Not SeriousEats, but I like the author. Skews a bit too much towards the too-elaborate-for-me, though.

Other blogs

bldgblog_2_feed: Architecture, etc.

mathwithbaddrawings_feed: Blog of a math teacher. Often explains math concepts amusingly.

mattlevine_bloomberg_feed: Technically not a blog so much as a published column about finance. Very, very amusing.

qntm_feed: SF short stories, programming content, etc.

superpoweroftheday_feed: Fictional. Consists of interviews with superpowered people about their powers.

truth_is_beauty_feed: A blog about figuring out what clothes are right for you. Pretty decent, not too much woo.

Comics

Low-continuity-required comics

5mwd_feed: A D&D webcomic and blog.
birdandmoon_feed: A bio webcomic.
foxes_in_love_feed: A sappy webcomic.
dorktower_feed: A gaming comic.
foxtrot_comic_feed: A newspaper comic you've probably heard of.
nancy_feed: A newspaper comic you may not have heard of. Plays with the medium a lot.
robot_hugs_feed: A webcomic, often about the author's life. Explores some issues the author encounters, talks about LGBT themes, recently discussed liver donation.
satw_comic_feed: A personified-countries comic.
xkcd_feed: It's XKCD. Currently spending an awful lot of time on plague-related content.

Higher-continuity comics

You probably want to start these at the beginning and only subscribe to the feed once you've caught up, honestly.

alethia_comic_feed: A political webcomic on a robot planet. Probably very good if you like all the politics, I don't but I still think it's decent. Start of Alethia.
drive_comic_feed: Space opera. Multiplanetary empires are messes. Start of Drive.
magicalboy_thekao_feed: A trans boy with magical girl powers. Infrequent updates. Start of Magical Boy.
oots_feed: Order of the Stick. A gaming comic you've probably heard of. Infrequent updates. Start of Order of the Stick.
ps238_feed: Child supers in school. Infrequent updates. Start of PS238.
Schlock Mercenary: Space mercenaries deal with a lot of plot. Start of Schlock Mercenary. I promise, it improves.
Edit: Schlock Mercenary has concluded. While schlockmercenary_feed may still have related content, I can't confidently call it a comic feed right now.
sidekickgirl_feed: Competent superpowered woman is a sidekick. Start of Sidekick Girl.
skin_horse_comic_feed: Lots and lots of plot happens around social workers for nonhumans. Start of Skin Horse.
useswordonmonster_feed: Magic starts leaking to our world. Infrequent updates. Start of Use Sword On Monster.

Also, there's Freefall, which is excellent but to my knowledge lacks an RSS feed.

News

wiki_current_events_feed is the only non-blog news feed I follow here, I think, but it's pretty worthwhile due to having a listing-events-oriented perspective and reporting on events outside the US with higher frequency than a lot of papers do.

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Where are the nontransitioning AFAB biohackers?

2020-06-18T08:43:52Z

Where are the nontransitioning AFAB biohackers?

Why has r/hirsutism seemingly never heard of spironolactone, much less other antiandrogens? They seem interested in spearmint, but that's not that effective.

Why is it that, to my knowledge, the hedonic effects of oral contraceptives treated as a mysterious black box? They’ve got to be at least somewhat downstream of estradiol levels, and serum estradiol can’t be that hard to measure.

Transfeminine biohackers have some innovations which are useful to the nontransitioning AFAB who has hormone balance issues, but trans women face a different problem-space from cis women, so merely borrowing innovations developed by trans women is insufficient to fully address some issues.

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Awkward music misinterpretations, pt 1

2019-07-14T01:31:31Z

Misinterpreting Time's cold wind, wailing down the past/Reminds us that all flesh is grass/And history's lamps blow out as Time's cold wind, wailing down the past/Reminds us that all flesh is grass/And every star winks out.

Makes the song less satisfying both to note that and then to note that the song doesn't note that, at least if you're the type of person who would probably experience equal distress to hear that all human life would be gone in 200 versus 2000 years. (No, fixing my scope insensitivity or time discounting or whatever this is on an emotional level is not a priority for me.)

I mean, I guess the song does note that suns grow cold but it overall seems to fail to account for meteorite impacts, light damage to things, the overall pointless of a never-seen monument, et cetera.

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TIL

2019-06-27T18:47:43Z

100,000 seconds is approximately a day.

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Mozilla thinks they are very cute

2019-05-28T04:23:08Z

Element Description

 The HTML Bring Attention To element () is used to draw the reader's attention to the element's contents, which are not otherwise granted special importance.

 The HTML Unarticulated Annotation Element () represents a span of inline text which should be rendered in a way that indicates that it has a non-textual annotation.

Element	Description
`<b>`	The HTML Bring Attention To element (`<b>`) is used to draw the reader's attention to the element's contents, which are not otherwise granted special importance.
`<u>`	The HTML Unarticulated Annotation Element (`<u>`) represents a span of inline text which should be rendered in a way that indicates that it has a non-textual annotation.

Some people naming things think they are very cute. Mozilla, you know that  stands for “bold” and  stands for “underline”. I know that  stands for “bold” and  stands for “underline”. You, reading this post right now, probably previously knew that  stands for “bold” and  stands for “underline”.

What's next, calling  the “Indicate distinction element”?

To be clear, I'm not actually mad at whoever renamed these things, and I get the reason why, but it does seem rather silly.

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Mozilla Does Not Recommend <multicol>

2019-04-23T01:19:08Z

They really, really, really don't.

Non-standard
This feature is non-standard and is not on a standards track. Do not use it on production sites facing the Web: it will not work for every user. There may also be large incompatibilities between implementations and the behavior may change in the future.

Obsolete
This feature is obsolete. Although it may still work in some browsers, its use is discouraged since it could be removed at any time. Try to avoid using it.

The HTML Multi-Column Layout element (<multicol>) was an experimental element designed to allow multi-column layouts and must not be used. It never got any significant traction and is not implemented in any major browsers. It's covered here only to warn you off in case you stumble on it in any other documentation.

Do not use this! In order to implement a multi-column layout, you should be using the regular HTML elements, like <div> in conjunction with CSS columns.

Specifications 🔗

None.

Then again, if you think this is a strong warning, wait until you see their page on <blink>.

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Rationalists are conflict-prone

2019-04-22T03:16:43Z

The rate at which rationalists end up strongly disliking each other seems really, really high. I don't like this, but I'm not sure how much can be done.

One cause appears to be the tendency to take ideas seriously, which is in many ways good. However, taking detailed interpersonal ethics seriously and doing independent reasoning about it seems to lead to conflicts. I've seen several conflicts of the following form:

Alice has some verbal interaction pattern.
Bob has a theory of morality as applied to verbal interactions in which Alice's behavior, which most non-rationalists might or might not dislike, is evil.
Bob tells Alice this, possibly very bluntly and demandingly.
Alice has her own theory of morality as applied to verbal interactions, in which Alice's interaction pattern is good and Bob's opposition to her interaction pattern is evil, possibly a fundamental evil that must constantly be fought.
Alice tells Bob this, possibly very bluntly and aggressively.
An extremely long, desperate, and increasingly aggressive argument ensues, because both parties not only think they are in the right but also think the other is deeply wrong about some really important thing and must see reason.
At least one of Alice or Bob block each other, and go tell all their friends about how terrible the other is.
- Possibly Bob openly regrets the one time he did a favor for Alice.
- Perhaps Alice publicly declares her intention to not interact with Bob again for a long time because of how evil Bob is.

We obviously also have other kinds of conflicts, but the above kind I haven't seen elsewhere.

We also are generally disagreeable. Not much could have been done to avoid this other than "contain different people", and those alternate-universe rationalists would probably have some failure modes we don't. If some rationalists in our world tried to encourage the community to "be more agreeable", a likely failure mode would involve them forming a "Rationalists who Support Agreeableness" team and initiating aggressive conflicts with rationalists who they saw as disagreeable.

I don't know what the base rate of conflict escalation is, but we might be more prone to it than average. I didn't encounter this many interpersonal hostilities in public school, though, which is notorious for having lots, so I suspect it may be high here.

(Obviously, not all escalation is bad. Being hostile to CFAR over their handling of Brent was pretty reasonable.)

A lot of the conflicts I've seen look like they could have been addressed with less hostility. There ought to be formalized conflict resolution methods, suitable for mild interpersonal disputes, which are neither as irritating as Non-Violent Communication often is, nor as hostile as explicitly discussing game theory often is, nor as interaction-preventing as "the two parties just avoid each other indefinitely" is. I specify "formalized" because "lol, stop being so autistic, git gud at social" doesn't scale.

Also, to be clear, the thing where people go develop Grand Theories of Human Interaction, involving detailed models of status and evolutionary psychology and what have you, is not a functional formalized guide to conflict resolutions, or at least bringing it up sure isn't, because I have seen people bring up these grand theories, and it never actually helps. We are mostly pretty value-aligned, we mostly like the idea of not having to be enemies with each other, a particularly advanced and powerful technique shouldn't be necessary to address things like friendship-ending arguments over whether someone is too argumentative.

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Naming things is hard

2019-04-17T05:47:24Z

TFW you can think of lots of tangentially related naturally occurring objects and phenomena you'd be happy to name your OC after, but it turns out all of those objects and phenomena have pretty modern names which are themselves recognizably derived from things you don't want to name your OC after.

Opal is a pretty cool name. Trying to derive a name from Lechatelierite would just get you something like "Le Chatelier", and Manganvesuvianite is a bit of a clunker.

And in theory you could name a character after an object or phenomenon if it doesn't have an obvious name it comes from, but while humans in real life can sound realistic with names like "Lucy" and "Crystal" and "Hunter" and such, coining names that are this blatantly corresponding-to-things won't work very well.

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Is Pi Day Evil? A Response

2019-03-15T05:05:39Z

Summary: Pi day is pretty good, actually, at least when held to reasonable standards for holidays.

Post status: This is a pretty casual argument which I did not put a tremendous amount of effort into, and which is not intended to be hostile.

Zack M. Davis of An Algorithmic Lucidity has argued that Pi Day as observed on March 14th is an unholy festival of sin that is corrupting our children.

The gist of his argument is that "March 14th", the 73rd day of non-leap years via the Gregorian calendar, and a day that is about a week before the spring equinox in the northern hemisphere, has really rather little to do with "pi", the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter, a constant which is also found in the probability density function of the normal distribution as well as other important contexts seemingly unrelated to circles. Their representations in human notation systems do bear some similarity, but this is due to the fact that Americans write dates as MM/DD/YY for … some reason, and humans tend to write numbers in base 5+5 due to having five fingers per hand and having two hands.

This is a pretty solid argument. However, it seems to be the kind of argument that implicitly assumes that other holidays are better, or at least that not celebrating Pi Day would be an improvement.

In our world, other holiday observances are similarly arbitrary and symbolic.

Students in snowless biomes are encouraged to make paper snowflakes specifically to celebrate winter and specifically in a snowflake-y style.
Christians in snowless biomes in the USA play songs about how only conifers stay green in the winter, and how it's snowy enough that special snow vehicles are required, and how it's snowy enough that they're stuck inside, despite having 0 snow and a wide variety of year-round greenery.
This winter, I was encouraged by my religious beliefs to observe a holiday about planting trees and eating fruit while my region was subject to severe cold preventing regular winter business activities, and making it an obviously terrible time to plant trees.
Many American holidays such as Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and possibly others have timing that may not technically be arbitrary but that nobody ascribes strong intrinsic meaning to.
Yeshua of Nazareth probably wasn't born on December 25th of year 1 BC or 1 AD, IIRC, and yet everyone observes Christmas on December 25th anyway, and there is AFAIK zero push to accurately determine the exact birthdate of Christ and move Christmas to that date.

Additionally, a lot of "fun math stuff" targeted to children discusses decimal-base-specific properties of numbers and non-decimal-specific properties of numbers pretty interchangeably, and children sometimes think this is weird but I've never seen any child get upset by it.

In practice, March 14th ends up being a holiday for "talking about a cool mathematical constant and eating tasty food", which is pretty good as minor holidays go. Adding a "Radian day" to the year on a date when Earth is about what would be a radian through its orbit, pretending the orbit is circular and assuming that the Gregorian calendar start is a good 0 point, would be a fine thing to do (presumably one would celebrate such a day by doing fun things with light?), as would promoting some other mathematics holiday, or even promoting it as better than Pi Day. But Pi Day is probably superior to the absence of Pi Day, because the problems it has are already pervasive.

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Discourse proposal

2019-02-28T20:18:03Z

New proposal for Discourse (do we have Discourse on Dreamwidth?):

Telling internet users to turn off their ad blockers is ableist against people with attention deficit disorders.

I mean, it kind of is, but this is a classic Tumblr failure to generalize, where the way in which people with AD[H]D diagnoses are harmed by ubiquitous ads is not qualitatively different from the way people without AD[H]D are harmed by ubiquitous ads, and treating this as an AD[H]D-specific issue is probably not the right framework.

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Sign errors

2019-02-28T19:47:01Z

What's the worst/most embarrassing place to make a sign error? So far the worst place I can think of is the utility function.

This post brought to you by me trying to enter 9e9 * (-1e-6 * 2e-6)/(2*(3e-3**2)) and instead entering 9e9 * (-1e6 * 2e-6)/(2*(3e-3**2)).

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Syntax in my math notes and homework right now

2019-02-27T06:39:21Z

The * operator represents multiplication: 3*2 = 6

the ** operator represents exponentiation: 3**2 = 9

the / operator represents division: 3/2 = 1.5

the sqrt() function represents the square root: sqrt(9) = 3

<= and ≤ represent 'less than or equal to': 2 <= 3

>= and ≥ represent 'greater than or equal to': 3 >= 2

"Answer:" represents my final answer to a problem.

the # symbol marks the beginning of a comment: #this might be too much documentation

e, ln(), d/dx, trigonometric functions, and so on have their usual meanings. log() is equivalent to ln()

exp() has its usual meaning.

the int() function represents integration. With one argument, it represents the indefinite integral of that function. With three arguments, it represents a definite integral, namely the integral from the first to the second argument of the third argument. Examples: int(x*dx) = 0.5*x**2, int(0, 1, x*dx) = 0.5

Limits will be written in the form lim(x->0, x/x**2)

[F(x)](a, b) represents F(b) - F(a). Note that I don't use brackets as parentheses, nor do I tend to do much implicit multiplication, so this should be unambiguous.

Line breaks are line breaks, not spaces.

Sequences & Series
==================

is a file title, and

Linear/arithmetic sequences
---------------------------

is a section title. Sometimes files and sections don't have their titles underlined or otherwise indicated, though. I'm not attached to this, it just seemed natural.

Right now, nothing divides equations from not-that in the text. If I had to do this in Markdown, I'd make equations be inline code or code blocks (because going from int(a,b,f(x)*dx to \int_a^b f(x)\ dx and so forth sounds difficult), but I'd want comments in equations to be rendered not in monospace and I'd possibly want to put inline code in comments.

Honestly, this stuff doesn't need to be rendered in monospace I guess, but most non-monospace fonts used raised asterisks, which is bad for this use case, and it might be easier on the eyes in monospace.

I can just submit homework as .txt files, which is good enough and means I shouldn't worry too much about this, but also in theory I should ever do a hobby programming project.

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Microblogging

2019-02-27T06:30:43Z

Autism symptoms(?) nobody tells you about: Merging information one has about two different people into one extremely interesting person. I was vaguely disappointed to learn Ezra Klein, Playboy model that Tumblr keeps talking about, and Noah Smith, journalist that rationalists on Twitter keep retweeting, are actually two different people.

That feeling when you value various qualities in humans, so you seek out and associate with other humans with those qualities, and then you go "can I really think of myself as a this-quality-having person when I'm not above average at it for my social group?"

Generalizing from small amounts of data that isn't quite enough for you to be socially entitled to generalize from is fun. It's kind of awkward when you write "The really easy way we can tell that int(1, infinity, f(x)dx) probably diverges is that the hint you gave us tells us about a function that f(x) dominates. If int(1, infinity, f(x)dx) converged, knowing about functions that f(x) dominates wouldn't be useful for proving that" and then don't have the time to follow up and write a better proof, though.

One of the neat parts of being a girl is that everyone will constantly argue that it's prosocial and good for me to try to ask people out more, so that on the rare occasions I actually do it I … don't necessarily have confidence, but I feel good about doing it.

I need to find a good workflow for going from a collection of Markdown files with LaTeX equations embedded \[like this\] or \(like this\), as well as non-ASCII characters, to PDF/web/etc. In theory Pandoc should be able to handle this, but I haven't found the right combination of flags yet. This article on LaTeX seems annoyingly plausible and similar to my experiences, so just manually switching to LaTeX seems unfun.

I also seem to be developing an idiosyncratic markup scheme for my math homework and notes, which would also be neat to turn into a document, if harder because it's really not Markdown. (I'm using a * b for multiplication, a ** b for exponentiation, a_(n+1) for sequences, etc, so I can't really do in-text styling like that.) I need to be able to type math because I get hand pain from extended periods of writing very easily, and also because copy-pasting and being able to easily visually compare lines and stuff is very useful.

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Rationalist views on food

2019-02-15T06:57:35Z

	Uneducated: Food is for people who aren't in the middle of a coding project or too tired to cook or what have you.
	Contrarian: Actually, you should remember to eat about three meals a day, reasonably spaced, so your energy levels don't drop too much.
	Meta-contrarian: Have you heard about the cognitive benefits of fasting?

I'm on team "every time people tell me they are having a productivity problem, I ask them when they've last eaten food and slept and such, and lo and behold, this is often a pretty valuable question for me to have asked".

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Recent Tumblr blogging summary

2019-02-09T23:20:48Z

I am absently making a Tumblr light mode userstyle.

voxette-vk and I are both annoyed that websites won't let you sort by price per ounce, lowest to highest.

Some guys pretended a 4-story building would be a skyscraper, and investors fell for this despite seeing blueprints. Apparently part of the issue is that they were told it would be "480 high", and didn't realize this meant inches, or something? nuclearspaceheater comments with “480 what? Elephants?”, rules court in vindication of technical instructors of all stripes.

Radfem complains about cis girls told to change elsewhere if they dislike having trans girls in locker rooms. nuclearspaceheater asks why we even have shared locker rooms. cromulentenough asks why people aren't also flipping out over lesbians. I respond by stating

Changing clothes at school is a thing because nobody wants to be around teenagers who are wearing their gym clothes all day. The reason they want students to change in front of each other is probably because this requires dramatically less floor space, infrastructure, etc than making there be enough individual stalls for everyone in the same gym period to change at once.
Also maybe it allegedly promotes social bonding or assimilation or something, I don’t know.
Also I’d guess a lot of people do some of the following:

don’t think lesbians really exist

don’t think lesbians exist much in high school

don’t think that lesbians are concerning because female sexuality is inherently unthreatening

don’t think lesbians ogle people because female sexuality skews less visual

do consider lesbians in locker rooms a problem, but don’t think it would be straightforward to solve because lesbians can just be closeted

I don't like it when people I follow reblog posts from what are very obviously pro-anorexia blogs, but this should be less of an issue on Dreamwidth, so whatever.

I like high-contrast themes because if something is too high in contrast, I can just dim my laptop monitor, whereas if everything is low-contrast it’s super annoying to read on low-brightness modes. (I’m specifically thinking of Discord here.) I often want to be on the minimum viable screen brightness for various reasons.

I'm making my own set of expanding brain images for use in HTML tables on Dreamwidth, like I used in this post. Obviously I have basically 0 claim to these images, as I am sure is true of basically everyone else posting expanding brain memes.

Prioritization is hard, especially for people with ADHD, which I may or may not have.

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Anti-tab-proliferation proposal

2019-02-09T23:08:50Z

If it's a good regularly-updating website, subscribe to it on Dreamwidth, unless
- it lacks RSS
- it's the county newspaper or my dad's blog or something.
If it's a good image, save the image file with a meaningful filename.
If it's a good text blog post, save the raw HTML or the text or something.
If it's not good, why am I holding onto this tab? I should probably close it.

This is not yet a complete ruleset.

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Aesthetic images post

2019-02-09T22:46:53Z

juliedillon does some remarkably good work. If you're here from Tumblr, you may be familiar with her due to her illustration about a possible future of human aging.

I like Naoko Ito's trees in jars, like this piece.

Gwern's neural network anime girls are surprisingly good.

I use some Wikimedia featured images of plants as wallpaper. Most people already know that Wikimedia featured images are often really good, so this isn't that useful a link, but I link it anyway, because Pretty.

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