https://thenoviceoof.com/ The latest posts Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2019/04/29/keeping-it-tied-together/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2019/04/29/keeping-it-tied-together/ Mon, 29 Apr 2019 22:13:24 +0000 (Soon, how to make this ridiculous scarf.) One day, I was struck by the absurd idea of a scarf, which looked like a tie. Was it a tie scarf? A scarf tie? A business scarf[1]?[2] It was so absurd that I obviously had to make it. However, these sorts of things usually make it onto the eternal todo list and never come back out. I only work at 1 second per second, I have to do silly things like sleep, you know how it is. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2019/02/27/tiny-quiet-boycott/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2019/02/27/tiny-quiet-boycott/ Wed, 27 Feb 2019 23:49:35 +0000 In 2013, someone I know was trying to fly to California for a break, but didn’t catch a break from the TSA, probably based on his appearance[1]. The TSA deserves much of the blame in the story. However, how does one reform the TSA?[2][3] By doing politics, of course! It’s a good thing that our national politics aren’t deadlocked, dysfunctional, and generally fucked[4]. But I note that JetBlue didn’t help once he was cleared by security. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2019/01/31/probability-theory-by-jaynes-summary-thoughts/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2019/01/31/probability-theory-by-jaynes-summary-thoughts/ Thu, 31 Jan 2019 00:21:41 +0000 This is a overview/review of E.T. Jaynes’ textbook on Bayesian probability theory, appropriately named Probability Theory (GoodReads, Publisher). This post is split into 3 parts: A fast high level overview, to provide background for the next two questions. My answer to the question "should you read this book?" A mildly more detailed breakdown of the book into chunks, paired chapters that share a theme. The intent is to provide a map where certain material is, to help readers just hit the parts they want to. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/11/14/signing-up-for-cryonics-an-incomplete-and-biased-guide/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/11/14/signing-up-for-cryonics-an-incomplete-and-biased-guide/ Wed, 14 Nov 2018 23:31:22 +0000 Status: surprised no one has put this together yet, would have loved to have this 6 months ago. If you don’t know what cryonics is, good luck. What this guide will cover: The different steps necessary for signing up for cryonics. Some choices that will have to be made in the process of signing up for cryonics, and some recommendations. What this guide will not cover: Whether cryonics is generally a good idea. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/09/16/time-levels/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/09/16/time-levels/ Sun, 16 Sep 2018 17:42:19 +0000 Summary: lays out a skill leveling system based on time. I don’t endorse it, but maybe you’ll have fun thinking about it. Back in 201X[1], I was thinking about how to convey mastery of a skill. For example, at some point I was talking to a young kid that also played the violin. The kid was playing through the Suzuki instruction program, and since he knew I also played the violin, they asked me what Suzuki book (1-10) I was working from at the moment. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/07/29/happy-10th-blog-birthday/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/07/29/happy-10th-blog-birthday/ Sun, 29 Jul 2018 23:02:52 +0000 My blog is turning 10 this month[1]. Happy birthday, blog! (It also happens that my High School 10th year reunion was within a year ago, but it is difficult for me to care about it.) Let’s take a look at what I posted in June 2008… Oh no. What is this, using Wordpress as unlimited character Twitter? Stream of consciousness meta-jabbering about how I was setting up the blog I was posting on? https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/05/19/tax-charity-research/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/05/19/tax-charity-research/ Sat, 19 May 2018 17:20:57 +0000 Epistemic status: amateur effort, on the order of half a day of casual investigation. Accidentally failed to do scholarship properly[1]. Possibly accepts bad premises[2]. It’s story time. So tax season rolls around, and you wonder why taxes are so damn complicated, to the point that paying someone or something to help with your taxes is an attractive proposition. You would like to save the money you would spend on tax prep, but slogging through worksheets of impenetrable bureacratese is bad enough that you’ll pay money for accountants or tax software. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/05/01/the-southern-reach-trilogy/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/05/01/the-southern-reach-trilogy/ Tue, 01 May 2018 00:20:32 +0000 Warnings: contains spoilers for Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, The Quantum Thief, The Expanse, The Laundryverse, Dark Matter, and SCP (as much as SCP could be said to have spoilers). Discussion of horror works. Otherwise contains your regularly scheduled science fiction rant. I recently[1] blew through Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation/Authority/Acceptance series, also known as the Southern Reach Trilogy, which I’ll abbreviate to SRT. First things first: overall, it was pretty good. I enjoyed the writing, the clever turns of phrase (“Sheepish smile, offered up to a raging wolf of a narcissist. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/03/17/making-the-most-of-bitcoin/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/03/17/making-the-most-of-bitcoin/ Sat, 17 Mar 2018 12:49:22 +0000 Epistemic status: I believe I’m drawing on common wisdom up to part 5. After that I’m just making shit up, but in a possibly interesting way. Not proper financial advice, see the end of the post. So let’s say you have some Bitcoin. What do you do with it? #1. Cash out everything immediately Lots of people think putting your money in Bitcoin is a bad idea: Jack Bogle (founder of Vanguard), Warren Buffet, Robert Shiller (Yale economic professor), Mr. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/02/07/radical-transparency/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/02/07/radical-transparency/ Wed, 07 Feb 2018 00:27:02 +0000 Nothing that’s been said before, but it didn’t click until I thought about it some more and had an AHA! moment, so I’m doing my own write up. Let’s say that you’re faced with a Newcomb problem[1]. The basic gist is this: Omega shows up, an entity that you know can predict your actions almost perfectly. Concretely, out of the last million times it has played out this scenario, it has been right 99. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/01/25/tape-is-how-expensive/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2018/01/25/tape-is-how-expensive/ Thu, 25 Jan 2018 00:23:43 +0000 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 a browser to start researching, and then close it right afterwards in horror: tape drives prices have HOW many digits? https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/12/31/2017-review/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/12/31/2017-review/ Sun, 31 Dec 2017 17:24:59 +0000 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 a hard deadline made it clear that this was happening multiple times a week. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/12/25/aint-no-calvary-coming/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/12/25/aint-no-calvary-coming/ Mon, 25 Dec 2017 10:20:28 +0000 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 start at the end. Let’s start with the agony of hell, and the bliss of heaven. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/11/10/the-mundane-science-of-living-forever/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/11/10/the-mundane-science-of-living-forever/ Fri, 10 Nov 2017 00:25:34 +0000 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 long time!" just doesn't have the ring that "live forever!" does. Clarification: I don’t have the Fountain of Youth. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/10/17/9s-of-cats/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/10/17/9s-of-cats/ Tue, 17 Oct 2017 23:12:54 +0000 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 once every 70 billion years years[1]. In storage/networking jargon, this is 11 9’s of durability, a sort of fast n’ dirty logarithmic shorthand for stating how reliable a service is found by counting the 9s in a percentage. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/09/18/subdermal-scientific-delivery/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/09/18/subdermal-scientific-delivery/ Mon, 18 Sep 2017 00:44:52 +0000 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 in person (I was in the same room with him and the psychology student). https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/08/06/the-future-of-football-is-too-near/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/08/06/the-future-of-football-is-too-near/ Sun, 06 Aug 2017 14:05:38 +0000 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 science fiction, huh? I generally enjoyed it, which is why I made you read it: the narrative is great at progressively painting[2] an increasingly weird world, using multiple short stories to sketch out the implications of the “what if everyone stopped dying? https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/07/23/thoughts-on-my-tribe/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/07/23/thoughts-on-my-tribe/ Sun, 23 Jul 2017 21:52:50 +0000 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 succession to lots of intelligent people, a series of thoughtful ideas, and immersed me in an infectious self-improvement environment. https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/04/10/sandbox-statistics-methodological-insurgency-edition/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/04/10/sandbox-statistics-methodological-insurgency-edition/ Mon, 10 Apr 2017 00:11:48 +0000 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 more things than I can ever hope to read. However, “What Went Right and What Went Wrong”: An Analysis of 155 Postmortems from Game Development (PDF) caught my eye: an empirical software engineering process paper, doing a postmortem on the process of doing postmortems? https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/03/29/tools-i-use/ https://thenoviceoof.com/blog/2017/03/29/tools-i-use/ Wed, 29 Mar 2017 23:14:36 +0000 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 list out the tools I use today, why I use them, and how I think they could be better.