Naming Rooms

December 26th, 2019
house
Growing up, the bedrooms in the house had clear names: Jeff's room, Rose's room, Alice's room, Rick and Suzie's room, the au pair room, and the guest room. But people have moved around a lot: later occupants of "my" room have included Rose, Stevie, then later me, Julia, and Lily, and then even later Alice, Alex, and their children. Other rooms had a similar range of people rotating through ("the Wyman St home for itinerant folk-dancing youth") and referring to rooms became really difficult.

Around this time last year we decided to give names to the rooms: England, Scotland, Wales, and Italy. We painted the flags on the doors:

I was initially worried that the names wouldn't stick, and we'd be stuck talking about "Alice's—no—Rose's—no—Stevie and Val's old room", but now that's just "Scotland". Some of the names get used more than others—Rick's room is just called Rick's room—but having an unambiguous option for each room is super useful.

Possibly we should preemptively do something similar with our house, but we're probably ~15y off from this sort of room rotation and for now occupant-based naming is clearer.

Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Exercises in benchmarking and evals, part 7: DeepSWE, Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires

This is part of a series of exercises on benchmarking, evals, and experimental design (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)1. We're going to look at three questions, which are presented before the answers to give you time to think about the questions before seeing the a…

via Posts on July 23, 2026

Donation recommendations for effective altruists (July 2026)

My recommendation for donors who are American citizens or permanent residents is that they donate directly to high-value political candidates.

via Thing of Things July 22, 2026

Let's Taboo the V-Word

Read this post on Substack.

via Home July 12, 2026

more     (via openring)