"Independent, innovative, and inventive, they can also become preoccupied with their thoughts and imaginary constructs."
Riga, Latvia
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this is what Heidegger meant about the ordinary person living almost unconsciously, unable and unwilling to act outside the structures of normality even in trivial ways, bound to "what one does" like a straightjacket of inauthentic conformity
Walking to party eating bag of popcorn and a man on the street just pointed at me and said “I never even considered that!!”
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simplest way to explain adhd is just like imagine the most boring thing you were ever forced to do and now imagine that like 80% of everything that's absolutely necessary for your survival and social respect is even worse than that
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it's not even that kids need boundaries, people need boundaries and they have the right to tell people, including kids, to stop fucking with their stuff
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guy who has 17 profound insights every day but never seems to actually do anything whatsoever
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this thing seems like such an interesting phenomenon, I wonder if there's any scientific research about it
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the car horn is an interesting semiotics case study because it’s like a language where the only word is “fuck you”
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I was a sniper for 28 years. Unaffiliated, indie marksman, used to work security for people who didn't even know it, random citizens I thought seemed nice. I'd map out their grocery routes and secure a corridor for them, unseen, unheard. To me this thing reeks of incompetence
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once you reach a certain age and maturity you realize that there's really no wealth that can compare to the deep, lasting, ineffable joy of a life full of drawbored chamfered diagonal timber braces
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never seen so many midwit dunks on a guy who's obviously correct, making him the main character but actually embarrassing themselves
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Siddharta Gautama: so I noticed there was this weird ~500ms delay in my experience of reality
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now imagine that as a task becomes more important, your motivation to do it decreases instead of increasing while your shame and guilt also ratchet up in a way that's so internally torturous that life itself begins to feel like a punishment
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crazy how every mainstream programming language lacks a reasonable notion of structural equality of nested terms
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topological thinkers be like "the cave is definitely the outside of the mountain" and get eaten by a grizzly bear
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I have discovered a fundamental harmful error in the temporal ontology presented by systems like "Google Calendar" which I believe is a significant source of suffering and confusion especially for neurodivergent phenotypes like myself or at least an opportunity for improvement
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now imagine having survived like this for more than 20 years causing incredible amounts of internal trauma and a bipolar self-esteem that can only operate on extreme urgency so you have to constantly manufacture anxiety
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btw the Swedish company I ran with my brother was first taxed to oblivion on "unrealized capital gains", i.e., nonexistent profits, then debanked and ultimately liquidated
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imagine having failed at elementary idiotically easy tasks over and over for decades while having no idea why it's so incredibly tediously hard and having a backlog of literally hundreds of ambitious ideas that amounted to absolutely nothing
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sometimes when i'm not the one cooking i just casually walk past the stove and put in some butter secretly like a sneaky grease gnome
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For me as a lifelong programmer, the emergence of language models has this weird urgency to it like it's as if I've been interested in wheels for 30 years and they just now for the first time invented the engine and you know we gotta fucking hook these things up properly
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further imagine wanting to explain and share this sadness with anyone else but knowing that from the first word it'll sound so fucking stupid and moronic that you yourself will roll your eyes and sigh
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imagine waking up every morning with a justified true belief that today also will be a pitiful, embarrassing slog with net negative valence and a constant awareness of time wasting away
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"depression stems from a sense that one is not progressing towards any meaningful goal that can increase our social acceptance"
hmm that's a pretty good formulation
If depression stems from a sense that one is not progressing towards any meaningful goal that can increase our social acceptance, then it would make sense that any placebo which convinces us that we are progressing towards a goal might be all the signal our serotonergic system needs.
If we believe that therapy might improve our life and act on that belief by going, we are progressing towards a goal that we perceive is meaningful, thereby signaling to our serotonergic system that something worth the serotonin is happening.
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I'm so tired of people disrespecting me just because I deliberately and systematically violate the most powerful universal norms and taboos
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it's just absolutely moronic to use a clock metaphor for something that does not move forward, call it the doomsday thermometer or any other fucking analogy which can go up AND DOWN DEPENDING ON WHAT HAPPENS
NOW - Doomsday Clock has been set to 90 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to annihilation.
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Hey, does anyone know a TV series I could watch that has like a blue and black depressing color theme and like every episode is just an exploration of emptiness and sadness
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experts agree that for kids under 12 it's important to have firm boundaries when it comes to language time
if your kid is using symbolic thought and verbal expression for more than three hours per day, their brains become harmfully enmeshed in sophistry and conceptual illusions
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steel cut oats is such a cool branding but like basically anything that's cut is cut with steel unless you're using one of those weird ceramic knives or some stupid gimmick knife made out of spaghetti for some reason
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imagine clearing your throat to say something but immediately saying "nevermind" because your whole existence in this world is embarrassing and cringe
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the simulator’s dashboard for monitoring solar systems and nudging the cosmos intelligently in the direction of biological emergence
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is Fabrice Bellard our era? he's 52 but he wrote qemu, ffmpeg, a compliant C compiler (tcc), a complete JavaScript interpreter (QuickJS), the first booting Linux kernel in the web browser, etc
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The most extroverted guy I met I saw him take a phone call and it was a phone provider saleswoman by the end of the call, he not only had her Facebook, but he was like selling her on the virtues of the phone provider he uses
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I guess PDFs are severely underrepresented in language model training sets compared to HTML? Maybe it was quite a fundamental mistake to lock the vast corpus of academic knowledge into pay-per-view digital rights protected files
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a lot of symptoms are genuinely like "yeah well everyone's kinda like that" but this thing seems in my experience like a definite signal of something but I also know adhd people who definitely don't have it
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going to the barbershop after doing AI art prompts for twelve hours straight and when they ask how I want my beard I say “handsome young bridegroom, baltic wedding, neat, masculine, highly realistic 8K unreal engine”
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I like the Kurt Cobain approach like well yeah technically I'm only attracted to women but spiritually deep down my soul I'm totally gay
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trying noncoercively and fruitlessly to explain to my 2.5 year old that the videos he can’t stop watching are likely made by a malevolent AI
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I find LLMs relatable because I also do all my learning in extremely intense batches every few years by strip mining the global text corpus in a solipsistic trance before I emerge into the world with terrifying new capabilities hidden beneath a polite yet uncanny veneer
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cookie consent forms are harmful because they train people day in and day out to reflexively give “consent” to idiotic bullshit
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I don’t know of any stronger refutation of Enlightenment liberalism than the newly discovered fact that John Locke’s pancake recipe from 1675 says “Frie it without butter. This is the right way.”
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there's only one thing men want and it's to film themselves sitting in bourgeois furniture while discussing some kind of cognitive scientific theory about the relationship between Mythos and Logos in the age of ChatGPT or something
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this feels so obvious to me like of course “sit up straight” is fake pseudo-morality based on the Luther–Kantian psyop that what is comfortable can never be good
Apparently, Science™ backs me up on this one, and all those "sit upright" exhortations are misinformation: news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6187080.…
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I'M SO SORRY I PASTED THAT WHOLE NEWSPAPER ARTICLE GOOGLE IT MUST BE REALLY TOUGH FOR YOU
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programming languages are not good and we should be up front about this for people who are learning
it's not just you
the thing you're trying to learn is fucked up
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Remote working absolutely frees up my social energy for actually enjoyable social interactions as opposed to sitting with headphones on next to some other nerds for 8 hours
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I'm also angry at the fraudulent poseurs who claim to enjoy radishes, grapefruit, kale, lemon, cranberries, wine, sushi, olives, or any other substance that doesn't taste like a Kinder egg
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I played Minecraft multiplayer with my son for a while and we built a little fortress together and then he was going to bed and he came to say it was so fun to play Minecraft together and hugged me and said "I love you"
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you can imagine even inverting that so the "empty" time turns into cellular spaces of creative possibility shielded by temporal boundaries on its edges where leisurely freedom is temporarily interrupted by the ghastly apparition of Marketing Workshop in Meeting Room 4A
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MAYBE YOU CAN TRY AND SEE HOW MUCH YOU WANT TO TRANSLATE IN ONE GO... YOU CAN HAVE A NAP LATER
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a lot of my mutuals have a vibe of “definitely want to have kids, after I attain full enlightenment, resolve all my past trauma, and launch a new socioeconomic paradigm”
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"we can get things that cold with liquid nitrogen"
tfw it's literally that temperature outside right now
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JUST GIVE ME THE FRINKLES
WHAT PART OF "I WANT FRINKLES" IS SO HARD TO UNDERSTAND
I KNOW THERE ARE FRINKLES
GIVE THE FRINKLES TO ME
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o3 is going to be able to create incredibly complex solutions that are incorrect in unprecedentedly confusing ways
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I love Christopher Alexander so much I want to shout from the rooftops, I can't believe he actually lived and did what he did and wrote those books, it seems like a legitimate miracle to me
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I should get the job at Neuralink because I ruthlessly harass people who look past the incompetent problem formulation and use their decades of real experience to make constructive progress on the real task. Also I know what "lossless" means in a narrow and irrelevant sense
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it also turns out to be extremely interesting that the Fourier transform of a wave is a sharp spike (and vice versa) because in quantum theory the momentum and position of a particle are literally each other's Fourier transforms
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abstract philosophizing is superficial compared to the sudden liberating insight of this man having his world reoriented from witnessing something outside his predictive paradigm
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how are you supposed to reach out to Tom at 9:30 AM when your meeting with Janice ends at exactly 9:30 AM?
it's like a blueprint that treats walls as zero-width boundaries without material substance—which then promotes flimsy building techniques and acoustic discomfort
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kid is having extraordinary amounts of fun with a girl he just met in the burger joint play area while me and the girl’s mom are each staring nervously into our phones like reasonable adults traumatized by modernity
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their apps are all GPLv2 open source, they have a C++ client library library that works on basically every platform, premium accounts have unlimited cloud storage for media and files, bots can send invoices to group chats to pay with Stripe, it's just so far ahead it's bizarre
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in this sense Google Calendar is structurally similar to a kind of colonizing mindset that treats unplanned time as a vast expanse of uninhabited, unstructured, unclaimed temporal territory to be staked out with grid lines and civilized
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"no one cares to check" is so funny because if you actually check it you notice it's literally true unless you happen to live in a vacuum
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my adhd time blindness, my autistic need for solitude and recovery, and the general nature of my work—all of these conspire together with the dominant temporal paradigm to make me feel like an outcast in liminal nontime similar to the nonspaces of anthropological geography
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Concepts like dopamine, serotonin, and oxytocin seem to play a similar role in our culture as Olympic gods, these sparkling mischievous agents that envelop us in moods and attune us to bravery, peace, love
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WD40 also has special lubricant versions, I think the white lithium grease one would work well
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I also like how (in Hubert Dreyfus's take) it's also like, well you can't actually escape from doing what one does, or you wouldn't even be a person, but you can open up the space of freedom, you can play within the structures and thereby help expand or change the structures
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uhh
"These words are spoken from a bottomless hole in time, staring upwards to the farthest reaches of infinity. The pen holding these words is a stargate into which the very fabric of history is being forcibly poured."
-- code-davinci-002
greaterwrong.com/posts/c6uTN…
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I do not want to live a life that involves making children do stuff against their will every fucking day and I'm so fucking pissed off that this is the norm and the law
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how fast is the general population gonna go "everything's amazing and nobody's happy" about ubiquitous artificial intelligence like "I can't believe I'm paying $10/month for this tireless cognitive servant and it's taking several hours to finish my PhD thesis"
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I can't do computer programming. I've tried for years to somehow find any goddamn paradigm that doesn't make me want to jump off a cliff but it's just not going to happen. It's over, I give up, it's too tedious and boring and frustrating and sad
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when I was like 15 I got into digital signal processing for a reason I don't remember and just learned on my own enough to write an error-correcting frequency modulating audio modem in C, sending 300 bits per second of data through beep boop noises in our living room
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protip: read ancient texts in black Verdana on a beige background so it feels like reading a contemporary forum thread instead of some venerable old tome
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we owned ETH cuz we got paid in it, then the price went crazy at the end of the fiscal year just to crash in January—and we owned corporate tax on the all time high, which rounded up to 100% of the company's assets
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then our bank called and said they don't like cryptocurrencies so they had to delete our account
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