details
Sponcon!
On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig
ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was
the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew
from across the country just to hear Elixir play one last time.
Elixir has been playing for twenty years, and is a very well-known
band among contra dancers. But if you asked soneone who wasn't a
contra dancer or who had been dancing only a few times, they might say
"what on earth is Elixir?&#… When I first came out as trans, resources for trans people were full of advice about body language. Regular announcements: did you know you can hire me for life coaching and general consulting? You can also buy my novella Her Voice Is A Backwards Record wherever fine ebooks are sold (except Google Books). Anthropological methods are bad ethics Recently, as some of my friends are leaving or thinking about leaving Facebook, I’ve had more of them share forms to collect contact information from friends they might otherwise lose touch with. I think this is a great idea – to make our connections robust against the whims of social media platforms – and to that end I will happily fill out as many contact forms as my friends want to send me.
I also don’t want anyone to lose touch with me because they decide not to send out such a form or I fai… Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC. understand + work backwards from the root goal • don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement • make success inevitable • find your angle • think real hard • reflect on your thinking
When I thought about this question it was really hard to figure out
because the way it's phrased it's essentially either a chicken just
pops into existence, or an egg just pops into existence, without any
parent animals involved. I thought about this and decided that because
of evolution it would be the egg that came first.
The reason I think this is because two birds that were a tiny bit like
chickens would probably have had an egg, and then when that bird was
all grown up it was more like…
A couple days ago Ms. Davis assigned a really big math packet. I was
having some chocolate for a snack. Ms. Davis has a thing where when
we take the MCAS, at school, she gives us some Hershey's Kisses and
mints to help us focus, and also for motivation. I thought I could
try using the same system for homework.
Every time, after I finished a math problem, I'd take a bite of
chocolate. I'd tell myself I wasn't allowed to eat more chocolate
until I finished the math problem.
I found … have accurate expectations of yourself • prioritize ruthlessly • unemploy your future self • a five-step “help, I’m overwhelmed” checklist • carve out focused time First off, here are two things that are true and not contradicted by my writing that follows:
The Trump administration is full of people who are incompetent, malicious, and bad at their jobs, whose primary qualifications are sycophancy.
Signal is an excellent secure messaging app for most people, who are not coordinating military operations.
With that out of the way, I’ve seen a Facebook post that’s kind of misinformation shared around in the past few days. I don’t usually make it my job to correc… We’re seeing AI features pop up in every product we use. Slack, Google Drive, etc. focus • maintain a detailed plan for victory • run a fast OODA loop • overcommunicate • break off subprojects • have fun • bonus content: my project management starter kit tl;dr: I recommend West Life unsweetened soymilk over other milks. I cook most of my meals and am pretty frugal. I do a lot of meal prep (cooking in bulk), so I don’t have to cook every day in order to have food. But sometimes I run out of my meal prep or just want something different, and don’t have energy to cook something fresh. In these cases I often go for frozen food which requires very little prep.
Over February break I made breakfast for me and Nora three days in a
row. Normally, my dad makes me, Nora, and Lily breakfast, but my dad
and Lily were on a
trip and my mom wasn't up yet so I was basically the only one in
the house who was awake and could make Nora breakfast. Every morning,
I would go downstairs at about 7am and I would wait for Nora for about
15 minutes until she came downstairs, if she wasn't already
downstairs. Then I would make us breakfast.
The first day I made guacamole… This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, travel, etc) and analyze my life tracking data. Overall this was a pretty good year. Highlights include adjusting to life with two kids, moving out of the group house, lots […] Remembering Max Chiswick, may his memory be a blessing. This post contains javascript content and must be viewed on site. Where I'm donating in 2024, where I donated in 2022/2023, why, and how my approach changed from previous years.
A lot of people play fiddle. Basically nobody starts by learning
chords before learning melodies. But that's actually how I learned.
I started with chords.
One of the nice things about learning to play violin this way is that
you can go busking even when you've only had just a few lessons. When
I go busking I like to go to Davis Square where there are lots of
people who are excited to listen to music. Part of busking is that
when people think you're good at playing, sometimes they&#…
I have some stuffies and I just have a bunny. Bunny is a rabbit.
Woof is a seal. My favorite stuffie is bun bun. I play with my
stuffies. Sometimes I jump up with them and I roll them. I can just
throw them in the air when I want to play bthululubp with them. I
like to quick get my stuffies and throw them in the air.
Selina watches me. When Selina has a different job Justina will watch
me. It's the same.
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything negative to say about Nadella's leadership in this post, this narrative underrates Ballmer's role in Microsoft's success. Not only did Microsoft…
If you're a kid like me, most kids have probably never heard of contra
dancing before. You're probably wondering: contra dance -- what's
that? Contra dancing is in some ways similar to square dancing. It's
a group dance with a caller and a live band. When you think of
dancing you probably think of rock and roll or pop or something, but
no. It's folk music. If you are interested in learning more about
that, whether you're a grown up or a kid, you can try out contra
danci…
About eight years ago, I was playing a game of Codenames where the game state was such that our team would almost certainly lose if we didn't correctly guess all of our remaining words on our turn. From the given clue, we were unable to do this. Although the game is meant to be a word guessing game based on word clues, a teammate suggested that, based on the physical layout of the words that had been selected, most of the possibilities we were considering would result in patterns that were … overall direction • people management • project management • technical leadership • example divisions of labor non-trust is reasonable • trust lets collaboration scale • symptoms of trust deficit • how to proactively build trust
There've been regular viral stories about ML/AI bias with LLMs and generative AI for the past couple years. One thing I find interesting about discussions of bias is how different the reaction is in the LLM and generative AI case when compared to "classical" bugs in cases where there's a clear bug. In particular, if you look at forums or other discussions with lay people, people frequently deny that a model which produces output that's sort of the opposite of what the user a… A clinical trial is a statistical problem multiplied by a logistical problem; some drugs are dramatically easier to study than others. Six things that make poker suboptimal for teaching about decision making under uncertainty, especially relative to Jane Street's card game Figgie.
From 2011-2012, the FTC investigated the possibility of pursuing antitrust action against Google. The FTC decided to close the investigation and not much was publicly known about what happened until Politico released 312 pages of internal FTC memos that from the investigation a decade later. As someone who works in tech, on reading the memos, the most striking thing is how one side, the side that argued to close the investigation, repeatedly displays a lack of basic understanding of tech indust… After 7 years at Deep End (and 4 more years in other group houses before that), Janos and I have moved out to live near a school we like and some lovely parks. The life change is bittersweet – we will miss living with our friends, but also look forward to a logistically simpler life […]
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't usable for people with slow internet, but the exponential increase in bandwidth (Nielsen suggests this is 50% per year for high-end connections) has outpaced web bloat for…
I'm lying in bed, pleasantly sleeping when it's supposed to be 6am.
Then my alarm goes off. Later, at school, I am very tired. Why do
you think this is? This is all the fault of daylight savings time.
Daylight savings time is a thing the government does so that in the
summer we have daylight in the evenings but in the winter it's light
out when kids are walking to school. They think it probably wouldn't
be fun to walk to school in the dark. For the record, I think it
would be ve… I wrote ~2 years ago that it was hard to find concrete ways to help the most important century go well. That’s changing. This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, travel, etc) and draw conclusions from my life tracking data. Overall, this year went pretty well (and definitely better than the previous two). Highlights include a second kid, hiking in […] Last year, a major focus of my research was developing a better understanding of threat models for AI risk. This post is looking back at some posts on threat models I (co)wrote in 2022 (based on my reviews of these posts for the LessWrong 2022 review). I ran a survey on DeepMind alignment team opinions […] This post contains javascript content and must be viewed on site. This post contains javascript content and must be viewed on site. Public discussions about catastrophic risks from general AI systems are often derailed by using the word “intelligence”. People often have different definitions of intelligence, or associate it with concepts like consciousness that are not relevant to AI risks, or dismiss the risks because intelligence is not well-defined. I would advocate for using the term “capabilities” […] “Why can’t a robot be built without the First Law? What’s so sacred about it?”
Dr. Gerrigel looked startled, then tittered, “Oh, Mr. Baley.”... Early signs of catastrophic risk? Yes and no. Governments could be crucial in the long run, but it's probably best to proceed with caution. Major AI companies can increase or reduce global catastrophic risks. People are far better at their jobs than at anything else. Here are the best ways to help the most important century go well.
For Christmas I got a really fun kit about rainbows. It had a rainbow
catcher, a really cool necklace, a streamer thingy, and it also had a
really really cool pinwheel, and it also had a bracelet and a pinata.
Unfortunately the pinata didn't work out that well. I didn't make the
bracelet yet. The pinata just didn't fall apart when we hit it. We
had to take it apart with our hands to get it open.
It even had a really really fun part. Actually, it wasn't really that
fun. It did m…
I went to a farm and at the farm I got to see a corncrib and the corn
that had fell out of the corncrib that no one wanted I got to use my
fingers to take off the corn kernels and once the cobs were empty I
put them in a bag and then once I got back to the house I was staying
in I ate dinner and I got to work with a few pencils some tape and some
paper and some markers and I used some of the markers to make the eyes
and mouth but I didn't want to add a nose so what I did was I made
little pink s…
I really like going in the water and this beach is a great place for
building sand castles and boogie boarding. I also like trying to
float on top of big waves. I'm not very good at it. I only float on
the flat waves.
Review: Prime Roots Deli Meat, And Also The Experience Of Influencing
Elixir's Last Dance
Body Language For Trans People
Linkpost for May
In Defense Of Cultural Relativism
My New Contact Page
Workshop House case study
Impact, agency, and taste
Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?
Chocolate for Homework
Advice for time management as a manager
Signal is not appropriate for military communication, whether you use it well or not
Product in the age of AI
How I've run major projects
Some milk is better than others
Frozen meals are actually great
Breakfast Over February Break
2024-25 New Year review
When each proud fighter brags
Dance Calling By The Numbers, 2024
Donations 2022-2024
Starting With Chords
Stuffies
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
Don't Help Kids With Contra Dancing If They Don't Need Help
How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
Categories of leadership on technical teams
Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly
A discussion of discussions on AI bias
Drug development costs can range over two orders of magnitude
Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.
What the FTC got wrong in the Google antitrust investigation
Moving on from community living
How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
Why We Shouldn't Have Daylight Savings Time
Good job opportunities for helping with the most important century
2023-24 New Year review
Retrospective on my posts on AI threat models
My first brush with covid
11ty and Observable
When discussing AI risks, talk about capabilities, not intelligence
Asimov on building robots without the First Law
What does Bing Chat tell us about AI risk?
How major governments can help with the most important century
What AI companies can do today to help with the most important century
Jobs that can help with the most important century
My Rainbow Kit
Corncob Dolls
On the Beach