Maybe you’ve seen that hard drive prices aren’t falling so quickly. Maybe you’ve seen the articles making claims like “tape offers $0.0089/GB!”[1], looked at recent hard drive prices, and seriously thought about finally fulfilling the old backup adage “have at least 3 backups, at least one of which is offsite” with some nice old-school tape[2]. So you’d open up […]

If there’s a theme for my 2017, it seems to be FAILURE. FAILURE at cultivating habits Due to the addition of a morning standup at work, I noticed I was getting in much later than I thought. I could previously pass off some pretty egregious arrival times as “a one time thing” to myself, but not when […]

Epistemic status[1]: preaching, basically. An apology, in both senses[2]. I know my mom reads my blog; hi, mom. Mothers being mothers, I figure I owe her a sit-down answer to why I’m not Christian, and don’t expect to re-become Christian[3]. Now, I don’t expect to convince anyone, but maybe you, dear reader, will simply better understand. Let’s […]

Epistemic Status: timeboxed research, treat as a stepping stone to more comprehensive beliefs. Known uncertainty called out. Live forever, or die trying! Previously: Lifestyle interventions to increase longevity @ LessWrong, 9s of cats. TLDR? Yes, Immortality I wrestled with whether to shoot for a more normal and mundane title, like “In Pursuit of longevity”, but “live a […]

Epistemic status: value judgement. The internet has a lot of cat pictures. Let’s say I upload a cat picture to Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). As of writing, their marketing materials claim that a stored object is 99.999999999% likely to stay securely stored in a year, which translates into a 50% chance of losing a given cat picture […]

Epistemic status: crap armchair theorizing. PutANumOnIt points out that psychology is broken. Having read Robyn Dawes’ House of Cards and Andrew Gelman’s post on the replication crisis, I agree with him, it is kind of crappy that it’s been years since the replication crisis and still nothing seems to have changed. However, I disagree with the shape of his reaction, both online and […]

Epistemic status: opinions and ranting What does the future of football look like? Yes, it is totally about football; it starts out weird, just stick with it and you’ll get to the football[1]. Well, the rest of this post is about that story, so… spoilers ahoy. Didn’t expect your football with a big dollop of […]

Epistemic status: feelings and intuitions. I’m an aspiring rationalist[1], and I count myself as a part of my local rationality interested community. And it’s wonderful that the community is here! I can confidently say that if it weren’t, I would be less the sort of person I want to be[2]. It introduced me in quick […]

Epistemic status: almost certainly did something egregiously wrong, and I would really like to know what it is. I collect papers. Whenever I run across an interesting paper, on the internet or referenced from another paper, I add it to a list for later perusal. Since I’m not discriminating in what I add, I add […]

I’ve been thinking about whether the tools I use to get things done are good enough. Where are the gaps in my toolset? Do I need to make new tools for myself? Do I need to make tools that can make more tools[1]? Before diving too deep, though, I thought it would be helpful to […]