immature techno-geek with moral autism

I have a new fanfic up: Illogical Assumptions About Names

Tue, 25 Aug 2026 18:54:27 GMT

Illogical Assumptions About Names (421 words) by ilzolende
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Trek, Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Additional Tags: Epistolary, Computer Programming, Names, mentions of vulcan culture
Summary: The process of writing software highlights many illogical assumptions. This list of illogical assumptions about names may enable you to notice and avoid making these assumptions yourself.

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Miscellaneous vampires to imagine

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 04:28:16 GMT

A vampire who can drink animal blood and has, after confirming vampires can't get or transmit prion diseases, gone after a lot of deer with chronic wasting disease.
Vampires who for a while thought they could only have human blood, but eventually determined they could ingest anything safe to give to a healthy human intravenously. These days they have a lot of saline solution. (Inspired by this paper.)
A vampire who gives their victims iron infusions and erythropoiesis-stimulating medications after feeding, thus replacing the usual side effects with a different, weirder set of side effects.

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Deltarune thoughts

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 03:42:23 GMT

Hometown's church may be a former Christian church. We know Christianity exists in Deltarune – the Holidays bring up Christmas, people say things like 'jeez', Monster Kid wears a cross necklace, Alvin discusses how sin and confession are absent specifically in his religion, et cetera. It's not rare for Christians to sell church buildings when the congregation size declines. Hometown sure seems to have a declining population, given elements like the abandoned classroom. The church's architecture is also Christian in style. The Angel appears on top, sure, but that's just one item. All of the stained glass windows are abstract, and there's no Delta Rune carvings anywhere.

I really like how the Delta Rune gets drawn differently in different places in-game. It suggests that people render it from a simple description, not a detailed branding guide. Real religious symbols get drawn in varying styles all the time, so it makes the game feel more realistic.

Chapter 1 comments

According to Wikipedia, “The Joker’s use varies greatly. Many card games omit the cards entirely; as a result, Jokers are sometimes used as informal replacements for lost or damaged cards in a deck by simply noting the lost card’s rank and suit on the Joker.”

This raises questions of whether the Jevil could have replaced the King and made the deck usable again.

Also I wonder if, in a version of Deltarune where Toby Fox could get whatever code he wanted written, Kris would notice and complain when the game controls got passed between players. Different people use controllers differently, I doubt this is completely impossible.

Chapter 2 comments

I think Kris's cell phone should have become something neat in Cyber City. Maybe a surfboard.

I wonder if King Kong would count as a giant human movie. I don't remember seeing ape monsters.

Chapter 4 comments

It's very nice of Toriel to be calm about Kris just giving away her TV.

I love Catty's speech at church. Lots of video games have a prophecy involving the protagonists as the core of a religion. But how many of them have people do unhelpful-for-the-player moralistic theraputic deism about it? It's like if you were playing an amnesiac Link and asked around about prophecy stuff and someone said "IDK, I just know it's important to temper power with courage and wisdom".

The church being a former Christian church would plausibly explain the presence of nuns, holy water, and so on in the Dark Sanctuaries, even if these elements aren't present in the Prophecy-centered religion.

While it's reasonable for Kris to dislike Toriel playing music late, and for Susie to have some kind of trigger about drunk adults, I enjoyed seeing Toriel having fun.

I've made a full-scene version of the "The Myth of Myth" Deltarune meme, and you can view it on my Tumblr. I changed the title because the original didn’t sound like a prophecy. The DELTAPROPHECY generator helped. So did soundlogic, who encouraged me to put the SOUL in a choice box.

Chapter 5 comments

It was nice to get Toriel toast in the morning. She's been very nice to characters I control, so it’s nice to be able to do something for her for once. Also she’s kind of cute when she’s all bleary in the armchair.

The moral of Deltarune is that you need to actively do your part to get your friends’ disabled parents to take it easy, at least if you like them at all. (I was displeased as soon as I saw Rudy on that ladder. He needs energy to enjoy the festival himself!)

Kris should get a first aid kit with antiseptics, other wound care tools, miscellaneous stuff, and also some switches and buttons that do absolutely nothing and aren’t even wired to anything. They should also leave some space empty. This way, whenever Kris wants to take the SOUL out, they can clean off their hand and chest with antiseptics first. They can then store it in the empty part of the first aid kit, instead of putting em in a rusty birdcage, sink cabinet, or garbage bin. The fake puzzle might help Kris feel comfortable, because they can assume ey will be too distracted trying to solve the puzzle to escape. Then, when Kris wants to put em back in, they can wipe em down with more antiseptic wipes, if ey's physical enough for that. Art of my proposed first aid kit is viewable on my Tumblr.

I keep hearing the theory that Kris needs the SOUL to live, but frankly, I think Kris might just have untreated infected wounds from repeatedly reaching into their chest with no sanitation, and putting in objects that they left in filthy places. There's no way they're getting adequate medical attention, either.

Deltarune has artists who can draw plenty of flower shapes. However, the 7 flowers are palette swaps of each other. I think this means we should assume they're all six-petaled flat flowers with green stems in-world, meaning Aqua is not a hydrangea even if she smells like one. Were they all white flowers from the same species which got dyed? Are they from a species that grows in a variety of colors? Does Green have phyllody (and is Green thus physically lacking in sex organs, in addition to being uninterested in making heart hands with Ralsei)? Also, why did Asgore grow two shades of yellow flower and no red flowers for a rainbow bouquet??

During the Flowery fight, I was wondering if we would be spared. I figured if that did happen, Ralsei would tell us how to purify the Flower King fountain, and then we'd move all the Castle Town Darkners over. It would still raise some issues, like darkness being visible through the Flower King shop windows, but it would let us keep our old friends and let the flowers have more time awake.

I've rendered Asgore with the famous 11'8" 'can opener' bridge on my Tumblr.

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Portal thoughts

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 02:05:55 GMT

It's very funny how in Portal, both Chell and the co-op bots are player inserts somewhat, but when playing Chell, you restart from save when you die, whereas the bots just get reassembled, so that leads to the characters having very different competence levels.

GlaDOS should have tried offering ATLAS and P-Body a cake and/or $60 if she didn’t like their performance. She doesn't have to actually give them either. That said, they would have gone nuts if they’d gotten $60 of vouchers for the Aperture gift shop. Imagine P-body with a baseball cap that keeps falling off and ATLAS with an Aperture t-shirt with a hole cut in the middle to see through.

Chell is probably cisgender. We can conclude this because, if she were trans, Aperture would definitely know. There’s no way they didn't do a bunch of invasive medical tests for no good reason. If Aperture knew, GlaDOS would probably also know. GlaDOS tries to poke at whatever she thinks Chell might have as an insecurity, so there’s no way she wouldn’t say transphobic things to a trans Chell, regardless of her personal beliefs.

Chell is also probably not related to Caroline, Cave Johnson, or Doug Rattmann. If she was related to Caroline, GlaDOS would have probably had some thoughts about it at some point. If she was related to Doug, he would have felt bad about it during the tie-in comic. Also, if Cave Johnson probably sterilized himself with something at least as stupid as the Radiendocrinator. If he managed to produce a healthy child despite all that, he would probably never shut up about it.

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More Undertale thoughts

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 01:56:46 GMT

There's a lot to be gained from integrating human and monster society. For one thing, if monster food's perfect conversion to energy works as well for everyone as it does for Frisk, humans would want lots of it for emergency medicine and contact sports.

That said, in an integrated society, anyone would be able to gain magic benefits just by murdering someone of the other species. This suggests a lot of the gains from integration will need to be spent on preventing and investigating murders. I suspect this will especially affect hospitals and hospice facilities. Governments might even want to legalize suicide at specific monitored locations, just to make faking a suicide or getting a SOUL from a suicidal person less convenient.

So if you want to picture the future after the True Pacifist ending, maybe picture humans and monsters arguing on the internet about whether it's racist to want to die in a segregated hospice facility to avoid too much surveillance. There's ads for betting on gladiator games (safer than pre-integration football, allegedly) in a sidebar.

Also, unrelatedly, Chara would probably love playing Universal Paperclips.

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I just played Undertale

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:44:34 GMT

Playing as a scrub

It's very funny to play Undertale while sucking at games.

Lemme tell you, if I were in control in the post-game, Frisk would ask people about how to "attack" monsters with zero risk of killing them and then go hit Woshua and Aaron and some other people with a big cartoon mallet or something.

I in fact did a pacifist run, but whatever amount of me is in Frisk is not a patient all-loving hero! More of a guy who heard that they could avoid literally killing people and was like "well, I don't like being attacked, but I should give nonlethal responses a good solid try even if I'm frustrated". Because I got frustrated a lot.

I failed to figure out that you can poke the lanterns in the Waterfall maze to make them light up again and stumbled around grouchily in the dark and ran away when I saw Undyne even though Monster Kid was still dangling over the edge of a cliff because I was scared of losing my progress through the horrible darkness maze full of random encounters (and I failed to realize that 'joke' is useful in a joint Aaron-Woshua encounter). I used the Temmie Armor a few times. I completely failed to beat Papyrus so much that he agreed to just let me go. (My girlfriend offered to fight Papyrus for me so I could see the Papyrus fight, and I took her up on it.) I kept dodging into the Chaos Sabers and Chaos Slicers so much that I got better combat results by just standing on the left side the whole time instead of trying to dodge, which grates.

I quoted the Silksong crashout copypasta to my girlfriend somewhat ironically. I cleaned up the text in the #1 break taker meme.

When Flowey was taunting me I told him I'd actually taken a break to have dinner and he was still there, although I hadn't gotten dinner yet. (I am of the opinion that if a video game does not enable a dialogue option, it is perfectly legitimate to talk to the screen.)

Also I'm annoyed at TVTropes a little.

On a No Mercy run, during the fights with Undyne the Undying and Sans, to heal you're constantly stuffing food down your gullet as you take damage, usually really unhealthy foods like cinnamon bun(nys) and fast food. Pretty fitting for a gluttonous entity who wants nothing more than to consume the entire world in the darkness of nothing. Whereas the kinder-hearted Frisk rarely has to do so, and by the end can heal just with their determination alone in the fight against Asriel.

Guys, come on. You have no idea how many popsicles Frisk ate. Frisk is leaning pretty hard on the human body seemingly having no limits in its ability to process the energy in magic food.

Other thoughts

I brought up "what if we try putting Frisk into cardiac arrest while under observation of a medical team, yoink the SOUL out really quickly, try to take down the barrier, and then put the SOUL back real fast and try to revive Frisk" at a few points while playing. Even if the odds aren't great, it still seems better for monster society if they were trying to keep Frisk alive. Then it turned out that a) Alphys has done deranged SOUL experiments and b) the fallen child is the sort of person who comes up with deranged sorta-suicidal plans! I felt very seen.

I like autoimmune Temmie. We are autoimmune disease buddies.

I think from a purely selfish standpoint, monsters are underrating the risk to them that monsters being able to absorb human SOULs poses. Monsters are going to have a population boom outside the Underground, probably, which will lead to more outliers existing. You don't want it to be the case that the worst person in your society can become a god by murdering 7 people!

I called Flowey's SAVE file "our SAVE file", which my girlfriend found very funny given Deltarune context.

Also, I’m sorry, but Chara’s 9 theme reminds me of Schoolhouse Rock's song Naughty Number Nine.

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Why don't I see Alexi's posts?

Sun, 10 May 2026 08:11:37 GMT

I follow utilitymonstergirl on Dreamwidth. When I visit her journal, I can see her posts no problem. In my settings, I have told Dreamwidth to never require confirmation when viewing adult content. I don't have her filtered out of my default view, either.

So why don't her posts appear on my reading page? Is there an obscure setting I'm missing, or do I just need to contact support?

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Deceptive Crop Division, or, worrying less about AI alignment to human evil

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:10:35 GMT

An argument by Sophia soundlogic in reply to Tetraspace's post Alignment to Evil, converted to a blog post by me.

AI alignment to human evil is very unlikely to be a risk.

Most people's desires to hurt their enemies just for the sake of making them suffer are mistakes made due to insufficient knowledge. When someone knows what it's like to be friends with a person, they tend to not want to hurt that person, even if they want to harm a group that person is in. In principle there can be exceptions, people who really are awful and would reflectively endorse it given arbitrary knowledge, but people like this are rare, if they even exist.

This suggests that a human asking a near-omniscient AI to handle situations in the way they would want if they fully understood the situation would not subsequently be able to get the AI to torture their enemies.

But suppose the AI doesn't extrapolate "well, if my operator knew Alice, then they wouldn't want to hurt her, so I won't do that". Then we get a different problem.

There's a folk tale category, Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 1030. I will now briefly retell it.

One day, a clever farmer, Claude, had finished plowing his field. Unfortunately, before he could sow it, a cruel ogre appeared.

"The land is mine," the ogre declared, "and you must leave its fruits to me."

Claude thought quickly.

"Sir ogre, there are no fruits. If you would like me to produce a crop, you must surely leave me some of it."

The ogre determined that Claude had a point.

"Fine. We shall each take half of your crop."

He looked at the tall plants growing beyond Claude's farm.

"I shall take what grows above the earth, and you below it. You shall handle all the difficult details. I will return at the harvest time."

Claude considered the ogre's choice, and planted potatoes.

At the harvest time, Claude had a full harvest of potatoes, while the ogre was left with greens. The ogre was displeased.

"You have fooled me this year," he declared, "but next year I shall have what grows below the earth."

Claude planted wheat, and at the harvest time, the ogre was left with roots. This angered him so much that he left.

Having an AI do whatever you say, instead of doing what you would want if you understood the situation, runs into similar issues.

There's a quantum mechanics scenario called the Elitzur–Vaidman bomb tester. In this scenario, you can reduce an expensive test to arbitrarily low but technically nonzero measure. It's been borne out experimentally.

We have not been able to scale up the experiment to do interaction-free measurements involving moral patients, but it nonetheless raises moral questions. If quantum measure reduction can make a scenario less morally relevant, then it may make sense to perform informative but disvalued tests with very low measure that make it easier to do valued things in the main timeline. If it can't make a scenario less morally relevant, then it likely makes sense to spin off a lot of very expensive valued events while reducing resource use in the main timeline.

Accidentally doing the wrong one of these would be very bad.

It would probably be hard for a human to assess this scenario. An AI doing what a human asks instead of extrapolating their preferences would have to just ask the human to pick, and the human would likely have to guess, or waste a lot of resources.

This is just one of the weird issues we've discovered. A superintelligent AI would probably discover more such issues. The chance of a human assessing every single such scenario correctly is low, and failing even one such choice leads to losing nearly everything.

An AI that's aligned enough to help a human pick choose correctly, but not aligned enough to stop the human from torturing people they wouldn't want to torture if they knew better, is a very narrow target.

Addendum: This argument does not address all concerns about s-risk. It does not rule out, for instance, the possibility that an AI would itself care about consciousness and have values best satisfied by bad things happening to people.

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Story recommendations

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 22:29:54 GMT

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

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 21:27:53 GMT

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

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:26:15 GMT

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

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:23:59 GMT

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

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 11:18:43 GMT

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

Thu, 10 Nov 2022 21:53:28 GMT

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

Mon, 08 Aug 2022 18:34:26 GMT

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

Fri, 18 Sep 2020 00:24:38 GMT

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

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 08:11:00 GMT

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.
kellet_drive_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?

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 08:43:52 GMT

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

Sun, 14 Jul 2019 01:31:31 GMT

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

Thu, 27 Jun 2019 18:47:43 GMT

100,000 seconds is approximately a day.

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Mozilla thinks they are very cute

Tue, 28 May 2019 04:23:08 GMT

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>

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 01:19:08 GMT

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

Mon, 22 Apr 2019 03:16:43 GMT

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

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 05:47:24 GMT

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

Fri, 15 Mar 2019 05:05:39 GMT

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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