Understanding through calculation Trying to derust my maths, I keep hitting proofs where I can follow every step but still don't feel like I understand.
Where are your limits? On doing things even when you don't feel like it, and whether 'need' is even real.
Motivation gradients There's the depression where everything feels impossible, and then there's the one where everything just feels... flat.
Speaking from the heart On Focusing, felt sense, and the difficulty of saying what you mean when thinking is faster than feeling.
More ways to work out sums Still calculating the sum of the first n integers, now with generating functions. I'll stop eventually.
Introducing a parameter to work out sums It turns out there is a direct way to calculate the sum of the first n integers, it just requires calculus I didn't want to assume last time.
What is probabilistic programming? A genuine attempt to explain what probabilistic programming actually is, as opposed to what the field claims it is.
Algebra and insight A proof can be correct without being enlightening — here's a case where the insightful proof and the algebraic proof are usefully different.
Resuming habits The solution to resuming a habit after a break is to do it in the lowest-effort way possible. Like this.
Sometimes things are actually important Not everything is just a story you're telling yourself. Some things actually matter, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of problem.
Recovering desire with care Reading Harry Frankfurt on love and desire, written by the guy who also wrote On Bullshit, which is apparently what he's known for now.
Real examples are messy A book about caring has an example so smugly frictionless it almost broke me.
An improvised meal Everyone assumed someone else had sorted dinner. I got home at 7:15. We ate at 8.
Anytime Projects Projects that can be interrupted at any point and still leave things better than before — and why that's worth designing for.
Stable state A piece of short fiction about a village near a City that offers everything, and what something being missing might mean.
The scent of reality Sometimes when I'm alone, I like to smell myself. There are good reasons for this.
When I learned to read Lisa handed me a battered worthless paperback and was not prepared for my reaction.
Asking for purpose disrupts action There's a useful distinction between what an action is *for* and what it *is*, and asking the wrong one tends to break things.
Python has structural pattern matching Python has had structural pattern matching since 3.10 and it turns out it does something quite neat that I didn't know about.
Digital object permanence Digital objects stop existing for you when you stop looking at them. This is more consequential than it sounds.
Good queues and bad queues A follow-up on sources and sinks: queues exist everywhere in your life, and some of them are quietly ruining it.
Sources, Sinks, and Flows A very computer-flavoured way of thinking about the stuff in your life and where it goes.
Why do you do things? A philosophy video and some Harry Frankfurt got me thinking about whether 'why' is always the right question.
Threads of existence I don't have depersonalisation, I'm just... a person... intermittently.
Building a library of stories Someone told me my chicken anecdote was great, and I realised I don't have many great anecdotes. I should probably fix that.
You create rules, rules create you On Beeminder, commitment devices, and what happens when you try to change a rule you made about yourself.
March 2025
Win Streaking and Reliability Trying to win streak in Slay the Spire is revealing some uncomfortable truths about how I actually play it.
Censored solutions There are solutions everybody knows about and nobody mentions — and the insomnia advice the NHS gives you is a good example of why.
Creativity on demand You can't run out of ideas, and here are several reliable procedures for proving it to yourself.
Figuring out what hurts Video calls aren't just bad — specific things about them are bad, and once you know which things, you can fix them.
Particularity AI can write an essay about cleaning its kitchen. It just doesn't have one.
How I clean my kitchen at the end of the day A practical guide to cleaning my kitchen, written primarily for me, though the general principles may apply even if you don't share my kitchen.
There is no sludge The brain fog you feel coming off caffeine might not be withdrawal — it might just be what normal feels like without a shortcut.
You only need shallow justifications A concept I've been trying to articulate for ages finally started making sense when I had a hit tweet about salary negotiation.
How do LLMs work? An explanation of how LLMs work, without metaphors, at the level of 'the engine makes the car go'.
Set operations on SAT problems A neat trick for performing set operations on SAT problems without adding extra variables, offered with the disclaimer that it's undertested and may be buggy.
July 2024
Asymmetric vices and the unity of virtue Aristotle's virtue ethics has a structural asymmetry that nobody talks about, and it turns out that fixing it makes the whole thing cohere better.
March 2024
Finding exercise motivations that work I finally found exercise motivations that actually work for me: specific movements I want to be able to do, including crow pose, which looks really fucking cool.
February 2024
Silently losing critical life infrastructure A bad period revealed which bits of my mental health infrastructure held up under pressure and which had quietly fallen apart before I needed them.
The obligation to be who you are Some philosophy-adjacent notes on moral relativism and realism, and how strong abstract realism can be compatible with practical relativism.
Taking responsibility for failure There's a basic social norm that I find blindingly obvious and that is clearly not widely shared: if you fail at something you were relied on for, you acknowledge it.
Invitations and exclusions The obvious-to-me but apparently backwards way to design Discord channels: as invitations to start a conversation, not as topic cages.
Help is easy to find these days Turns out finding reliable tradespeople is embarrassingly easy, and the answer was Facebook all along.
Learning to walk right I have had flat feet my whole life, and apparently the fix is to just... not walk that way.
Learning from experts in having problems People with serious recurring problems get very good at managing them out of necessity — and that expertise turns out to be useful even if your problems are more occasional.
Computer ghost stories My computer spontaneously opened a web browser to show me an XKCD comic. I have an explanation, and it is not flattering to VS Code.
Adaptive planning and grid systems The fastest route through a city grid isn't the one Google Maps gives you — it's the one that takes advantage of information you only have in the moment.
Visible parts of internal states I write a lot about emotional progress, and I'm genuinely not sure how much of it is real versus very convincing theorising.
Restrictions I walked down sixteen flights of stairs in a hotel fire alarm and have decided not to let this become a policy.
The Candle Exercise An exercise in pure observation from a chemistry class: light a candle, and write down everything you can see. You can probably fill ten thousand words.
Noticing things as life happens Someone nearly poisoned me at a buffet, and I didn't take it seriously enough until I'd already walked away.
Layers of being bad at things I've been bad at standing on one leg my whole life. Turns out I was just not using the right muscles — and now that I am, it's much harder.
I don't wanna On the particular texture of not wanting to do things — stubborn, recursive, and suspiciously childlike.
Landmarks Problems are useful not just for solving, but for giving you something to navigate by when you're in unfamiliar territory.
Drawing on resources Creativity isn't something you generate — it's something you draw on, and the pool runs dry if you're not replenishing it.
Developing new capacities A capacity isn't just whether you can do something — it's how easy it is, and that difference matters more than it looks.
Shared frustrations On the quiet irritation of watching people do things wrong, and what happens when you finally just tell them how the instant pot works.
Something isn’t working A lot of coaching reduces to asking 'have you tried solving the problem?' and the embarrassing answer is usually no.
Cheeseburger Ethics Some bad things are bad like murder, and some are bad like eating a cheeseburger. These require very different ethical frameworks.
Working hours: A report on an anomaly I've long claimed I can only do a couple of hours of real work a day. Recently I've been doing six to eight. I notice I am confused.
Thinking in memes A post about memes — the internet kind, mostly, though a bit of the Dawkins kind too. Cultural context required; non-nerds may wish to bail early.
Showing people the door On running a community and the depressing necessity of occasionally asking people to leave it.
The skill element of (not) working harder Yesterday I said the key to improvement was diligent effort. Then I actually tried it and discovered the real skill is knowing when diligent effort is worth it.
How to be better at everything The bottleneck on getting better at things usually isn't skill — it's whether you can be bothered to do the fiddly bits.
Disingenuous Advice A lot of advice isn't designed to help you — it's designed to discharge someone's sense of obligation while making the problem clearly yours.
Reason as a moral mechanism An overambitious philosophy piece on Kantian ethics and what reason actually does in moral reasoning. Inside baseball, but hopefully worth it by the end.
Honesty is kinder than lying Reassuring someone that their performance is fine when it isn't doesn't help them — it just makes sure that when the truth eventually arrives, they have no time to do anything about it.
Some Philosophy of Mathematics An abandoned attempt to explain mathematical incompleteness, starting with why the standard philosophical presentation of axioms gets in the way.
Is philosophy bad? A draft that didn't work, featuring Chavid Dapman, a fictional approximation of David Chapman's opinions on philosophy, who David Chapman confirms does not reflect his views at all.
January is a daily writing month I haven't written in months, I'm busy and depressed, so naturally I've committed to writing every day in January.
July 2023
Adaptive parallel test-case reduction Writing up the adaptive parallel deletion algorithm I use for test-case reduction, which I think of as standard and keep forgetting nobody else uses.
June 2023
Larger selves Self is not a simple thing. It's large, and fractal, and exists at every scale. You are one scale, an important one, but it's equally important to appreciate how selves scale up and down.
February 2023
My current protocol for energy levels People kept asking about my recent dramatic increase in energy and mood, so here's the full write-up — mostly Inositol, with a bunch of caveats.
December 2022
Action generators Quick, do something. Now notice what made you choose that.
Notes on shaking On following through on physical tension until something releases, and what that's been like.
November 2022
Examples of missing support networks A tweet went popular; people asked for examples. Here are some, though the real answer is that it's pervasive in ways that resist listing.
Notes on the design of a conference scheduler I gave a talk about using integer linear programming to schedule conferences. Several conferences did this. I now think it was a mistake. Here's a better approach.
July 2022
How you should have learned mental arithmetic The way you were taught times tables is not the way you should have learned them. Here's what learning them properly actually looks like.
June 2022
Rules as moral training wheels An unfinished piece about ethics that I absolutely do not want to finish, offered here as found.
Abstraction and concretization Two opposing mental moves: zooming out until you see the pattern, zooming in until you see the thing.
May 2022
Intelligence problems A draft I abandoned because the subject makes me nervous and I expected to get shouted at. I've posted it anyway. Please don't shout at me.
Victims of metonymy Most people who think they're bad at reading books are not bad at reading books. They're just doing it wrong, and the name is lying to them about that.
The costs of being understood When something you write goes unexpectedly viral, the cost of each individual response is small — the problem is there are a hundred of them, and you're the only you.
Leaving shiny things behind My phone is a shiny thing. Not interesting, exactly, just impossible to ignore — and there's a difference.
Promethean work On the strange experience of stealing obvious-in-retrospect ideas from complicated disciplines and handing them to people who have never heard of the discipline.
How to be lucky Draft bankruptcy extracts from a piece on luck — including a distinction between luck, happenstance, and circumstance that I think actually matters.
April 2022
Beef and lentil stew "recipe" A recipe I'd completely forgotten I used to make regularly, rescued from draft purgatory before deletion. It's not a recipe in any strict sense, but it is delicious.
February 2022
You are not expected to understand this An experiment in writing that bypasses understanding and goes straight for feeling. You will not understand it. You may still be changed by it.
Fewer than 100 thoughts on "Jokes" An attempt to write 100 thoughts on a philosophy of humour book. I made it to 22 before deciding this was not the right format.
January 2022
Soul death A tweet about IFS therapy was obviously a joke. The fact that people found it threatening is more interesting than the joke itself.
Ladders between communities On asking someone to leave a community when they haven't technically done anything wrong.
Learning and teaching Most people are shockingly bad at learning from each other. This seems like a problem worth taking seriously.
Irritation and fascination Fascination and irritation feel similar because they might be the same thing — both pulling you towards a problem you need to defeat.
The kindness of strangers After getting lost on the way to hospital, I rented a car and promptly didn't know how to reverse it. Strangers were, once again, very helpful about this.
Seeing clearly I've known for months that not wearing my glasses was giving me headaches. I still didn't put them on until I had to drive a car.
Other people's needs On the Levinas problem: once you start taking responsibility for someone, where does it stop? This is why I don't give money to beggars, and I'm not proud of it.
Holding yourself tightly I express my emotions very well, actually. Just exclusively in words, in a perfectly calm voice, with a completely neutral expression.
Projects that you can't run out of Some projects can absorb as much work as you're willing to put in without becoming pointless. These feel very good to have.
Difficulty finishing things I do 90-99% of the work on things and then stop. I don't know exactly why, but I published this anyway despite the part of me insisting I shouldn't.
Fulfilling work Work can be genuinely fulfilling, but most of what people experience at work is a cruel caricature of that experience.
Curiosity is a team sport I keep picking interests that nobody else shares, and then being surprised when I have nobody to share them with.
Being an ideas guy I'm an ideas guy, that much maligned creature. Here's my complicated relationship with that fact.
Walls of people People who stand around obliviously in tube stations annoy me to an irrational degree. Jung has thoughts on why.
Regrets and interventions I've been thinking about writing a letter to my past self, but first I need to know what model of time travel we're working with.
Coffee as a way of life I broke my caffeine addiction. I then very deliberately got it back. An investigation.
Being fragmented Being human is weird and I don't really get it — particularly the parts of my own mind I don't have direct access to.
Being unreliable One of the worst things about me is that I'm fairly unreliable. An honest account of what that's like and why it's so hard to fix.
Memory and yearning I'm told normal people remember their childhood. I'm not sure I believe them.
Grappling with vastness Drifting might just be a freeze response to having too many choices — specifically, to confronting just how little freedom you actually have.
Writing as yourself The fully general method for doing anything: be the sort of person who can do the thing, then do the thing. This is, as promised, simple.
Drifting away the time Drifting is like evil flow — it absorbs you completely and leaves you feeling entirely unnourished.
Ready for less than you think A trip to the hospital for a knee X-ray that went wrong in every incremental way you'd expect if you hadn't left the house properly in two years.
Being a brain at night On panic attacks, and the particular cruelty of a brain that only misbehaves when you close your eyes.
Relearning curiosity It turns out I'm not actually that curious. Except I might have been wrong about that.
Wanting (to) help I am a very helpful person. This is not entirely straightforward.
Writing from the heart On the difference between bleeding onto the page and actually writing something good.
December 2021
The landscape of What even is misery, as an emotion? An attempt to map out the territory from the inside.
November 2021
Social reality as a game I walked through the streets carrying a ceramic mug of coffee, which is weird in a way that a paper cup or travel mug isn't — and I've been thinking about why ever since.
My conception of parts work What I actually mean by parts work, written out in theses after tabooing the words 'Self' and 'part' for clarity.
I'm not trapped in here with you A dark-but-in-a-productive-way piece about what happens when a part of you has been imprisoned by your own psyche for so long that being freed feels like a betrayal.
Writing is (from the id) On a mode of writing where you find a feeling in your subconscious and just pull on it to see what comes out. Can't recommend it exactly, but it sure is interesting.
October 2021
Probably enough probability for you A working explanation of probability for people who don't already know it, with the philosophical positions stated upfront and the usual academic hedging skipped entirely.
How is laughter social? Kierkegaard thought you had to be 'a little more than queer' to laugh on your own. I laugh harder on my own than in company. I think Kierkegaard needed to read funnier books.
Learning how to tell a joke On the two-stage art of joking, why some jokes don't survive being written down, and why the two stages aren't actually separable.
We must imagine the steelman happy I'm frustrated enough with virtue ethics's account of eudaimonia that I've written my own version of it. It's possible I've just reinvented theirs.
The problem of Susan Julia Annas poses a thought experiment about whether Susan had a happy life. The answer, I think, is that 'happy' is not something a life can be — and the confusion is doing a lot of work.
Scurrying My Alexander Technique teacher caught me scurrying — moving in a way that signals you want to get this over with and get to the important thing. It turns out I do this a lot.
On Julia Annas's conception of happiness Working through Julia Annas's chapter on happiness in Intelligent Virtue, with live commentary that occasionally takes things back.
Revisiting Intelligent Virtue A second pass at Julia Annas's Intelligent Virtue, chapter by chapter, because I keep coming away from it feeling I haven't done it justice.
What's up with the unity of the virtues? A speedrun through the doctrine of the unity of the virtues, which it turns out means thirty different things and none of them are quite right.
What does a good person look like? Being pleasant and harmless is not the same as being good — Socrates was deeply disagreeable and they killed him for it, but he was the one worth admiring.
Notes on moral disorder On the possibility that the reason you feel like a bad person is that you're a bad person — and why that's actually a more tractable problem than it sounds.
On feeling blocked, redux Writer's block, revisited: it's not wanting to write, or wanting not to write, and moving the complexity doesn't make it simpler.
August 2021
how to write like this The way to write like this is to write like this. Let me try to be more helpful than that.
First decide what's good enough Two separate questions: how good does it need to be, and how good would you like it to be. Most people skip the first one.
Learning from the real Complex systems that have been running for a while have the shape they do for a reason, and it's not always a bad one.
The trauma model of talent blocks People who tell you they were bad at maths at school are telling you something real, even if they don't quite know what.
Heading towards the ouch A therapeutic technique that involves deliberately heading toward the thing that hurts. Not entirely safe. Possibly useful.
Studying the mundane Most of what I write about is extremely ordinary, and I think that's actually the point.
Start from amazing When someone says you've probably just never had a good example of the thing you claim not to like, they might actually have a point.
Why do we need new terminology? On why you sometimes need to make up new words — written partly in the upgoer five editor, which only allows the ten hundred most common words.
Basic Reducer Design The natural way to design a test-case reducer, which turns out to be mildly idiosyncratic.
December 2020
Reducing Weird Tests When your interestingness predicate is basically a hash function, test-case reduction is going to have a bad time — and there's not much you can do about it.
August 2020
Ensuring Downward Paths Working through some half-formed ideas about what it means for a test-case reducer to generalise, and how to make sure it has somewhere to go.
From a Certain Point of View All communication is a kind of performance, and we simplify and reshape more than we like to admit — memory sees to that.
July 2020
Standardised Facts States need facts that can be aggregated and compared, which means they need facts that have been stripped of most of what makes them interesting.
Inclusivity and Onboarding Every community for people with a specific shared background is inherently a little exclusionary. You can manage that tension but you can't dissolve it.
Seeing Your Working The finished product hides the work that made it — and that's a problem, especially if you're trying to learn from it.
Thinking Outside Your Head Good tools don't just support mental models, they help distribute the model between your head and the world.
Notes on Reduced Output On why the daily notebook posts have been less daily lately, and what to do about it.
Learning to use the system Both the technician frustrated by incompetent users and the users refusing to learn have a point, and understanding why is instructive.
Precarity and Conformity Conformity promises safety but delivers a particular kind of anxiety — the kind where the threat never fully goes away.
Indexing a DFA in shortlex order Bad news feelings-readers, it's another technical post — this time about how to efficiently index strings in a regular language without enumerating exponentially many of them.
Death of the Reader It is very hard to read a text as it would have been read at the time. We can't un-know what we know.
From Maintaining to Making Maintenance teaches you things about what you're maintaining that the original manufacturer never knew, and that turns out to matter.
Cultivating the Skills of Context The best jokes, analogies, and tools are often ones that only work in a very specific context. That's not a flaw.
June 2020
Free and Open Source Social Technology The techniques of being human are being developed collaboratively, outside the market, and you can't patent them — let's keep it that way.
I'm not actually that curious Correcting a misconception: the reading is mostly driven by stress, not curiosity, and a Christian theology book about capitalism is in fact a perfectly reasonable response to a problem.
Ideas Get You Unstuck Ideas aren't the main ingredient in doing work, but they're what you reach for when you don't know how to proceed.
Find a forking path The fork in the road where both paths are an improvement on standing still is a gift, and most people respond to it by sitting down and crying.
Subsetting Life You're not experiencing all of what you're capable of experiencing. You're running on a subset, and you've built a wrong but mostly functional mental model of that subset.
Books are never finished, only abandoned A book isn't done when you've read it — it's done when you no longer need it as a thinking tool, which is a different and usually later moment.
Speech and Writing Something gets lost when you write things down. Socrates knew it, Plato was suspicious of it, and I'm feeling it right now.
Fake Olds History is mostly records left by people with power and an agenda, which means a lot of what we call history is propaganda that's been aged long enough to seem respectable.
Conversations in a public The culture of suspicion has made genuine public inquiry nearly impossible, and this is depressing even when you expected it.
Chatting with your consciences Your conscience isn't one voice, it's several, and the goal isn't to get them to agree — it's to help them argue better.
Surviving is good Survivor's guilt is understandable, but surviving is good, and you should not feel guilty about it.
Uploading friendships to the cloud It turns out some friendships have an in-person component that was load-bearing in ways that weren't obvious until it was gone.
Help isn't always helpful Jonathan Strange saved a ship using magic, which was great, except that it completely reconfigured the harbour's sandbeds. A meditation on visible help, invisible problems, and who gets to decide which matters.
Morality tests as self-fulfilling prophecies A feedback loop in which correcting someone's bad argument becomes indistinguishable from attacking their politics, and how we got here.
Losing the story for the style Gary Provost thinks any subject can be made fascinating by a good writer. He's wrong, and the fact that he thinks this tells you a lot about what he writes about.
Don't anthropomorphise fate, it hates that The Fates are called cruel because they pay no heed to anyone's wishes — which is, you know, pretty on brand for impersonal forces of nature.
A Book is a Tool for Thinking With A book isn't just a container for information — it's a tool you use to have thoughts you wouldn't otherwise have.
A Meta For Computers A metaphor for how computers work, for people who don't understand software but do understand archives staffed by extremely rule-bound bureaucrats.
Testing Positive For vs Having Testing positive for something and having it are not the same thing, and this matters more than you might think — especially when you're doing the Bayesian maths on your own COVID status.
The Virtue Ethics of Potato Growing On how Andean potato farmers, virtue ethicists, and James C. Scott are all making the same point about rules versus practical wisdom.
Popular Culture Reference, David On not having seen the thing everyone's seen, the running joke this creates, and what our shared cultural objects say about which voices get amplified.
Some Useful Emotion Management Principles A set of working principles for understanding emotions — not necessarily all true, but probably about 90% there, and more useful than most alternatives.
Being friends with your coworkers Being friends with your coworkers makes everything better, and currently we only make it easy for the people who already have it easy.
May 2020
Norms of Excellence What does the opposite of the social obligation to be bad at things look like? Some thoughts on moral norms that actually push toward excellence rather than mediocrity.
Knowing what to look for Knowing a thing—really knowing it—changes what you see when you look at it.
Feeling Good About Being Good Morality is usually experienced as guilt and shame, but there's a case that feeling good about doing well is just as important.
Against the Classification of Books Adler and Van Doren want you to classify books before you read them. I'm not sure this is as useful as they think.
Morality and Emotion Ethical theory tells you what to do. Moral education is about how anyone actually learns to do it.
How I fix anxiety triggers A sketch of the skillset I use to deal with anxiety—with honest caveats about when it doesn't work.
Parts of you are missing Grief isn't just about people. It's about the parts of your distributed self that are no longer there.
Working with the audience A Vorkosigan novel, bug butter, and the underappreciated importance of not naming your product after the disgusting creature it comes from.
Making Success Trivial Set your bar for success so low there's no excuse for missing it. This is not lowering your standards; it's raising your consistency.
Model Monocropping Models are toy worlds, and like any monoculture, relying too heavily on one kind is a bad idea.
Numbers and Feelings I tried to do some maths and ended up mostly processing feelings instead. Fair warning: this one's more for me than for you.
Ritual and Freedom The Nine of Pentacles and I have a complicated relationship.
April 2020
Care Work and Fixing Things A tarot reading during COVID leads somewhere useful: thinking about care work, the people who do it, and what it costs them.
The Casting of Leaders Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, the Magician tarot card, and colonialism walk into a post.
Trust beyond reason On trusting people more than the evidence strictly warrants, and why it tends to work out.
Life as an anytime algorithm An anytime algorithm gives you its best answer whenever you stop it. Life works better when you treat it the same way.
Leaving knowledge in the box Everything is potentially relevant to everything else, which means you can never know enough — and that's fine.
The Inner Game of Celeste The Inner Game of Tennis is surprisingly good, and Celeste is a better illustration of its ideas than tennis is.
On feeling blocked On the specific horror of knowing exactly what you need to do and being completely unable to do it.
Good strategies often fail Stockpiling food for Brexit and not needing it isn't evidence the stockpiling was wrong. Good strategies fail all the time.
Safety as an enabler of growth The rich can afford to make risky investments. The same principle applies far beyond money.
Everybody is looking for permission A surprising amount of social life makes more sense once you realise everyone is waiting for someone to say it's okay.
Berkson's paradox is everywhere Most of the correlations you see in daily life aren't real — they're artifacts of how you're looking at things.
Alief/Belief Coherence Introducing the word 'alief'. You're welcome — you'll see it everywhere now.
How to make decisions Your decision making strategy needs to be demonstrably better than a coin flip. A surprisingly high bar.
All knowledge is connected Reading widely enough eventually makes everything start connecting to everything else, in an extremely Dirk Gently sort of way.
Legibility Privileges Passing privilege is well understood. Less appreciated: the specific disadvantages of marginalisations that are too complicated to explain.
You should try bad things If you only try things you expect to be good, your interests will narrow over time. Try bad things occasionally.
Constraints on skill growth Why practicing a skill often stops helping you get better at it, and what to do instead.
Emotional reactions as legacy code Your emotions are not a clean system. They're a horrible assemblage of kludges bridging incompatible legacy code, and sometimes they need refactoring.
We are surrounded by ghosts On ghost theorems: mathematical results everyone knows are true but that have never actually been written down anywhere.
December 2019
Notes on Conscious Experience My fairly eccentric views on consciousness, including why I hold something like bounded materialist panpsychism, written up because I keep promising to and finally got around to it.
Almost every set is immune Immune sets — infinite sets from which no computer program can print an infinite subset — sound exotic, but it turns out almost every infinite set is one.
Faster SAT model counting A trick for speeding up #SAT model counting that I figured out but haven't deployed, written up with the caveat that this is a notebook post and you should expect nothing polished.
How To Make Good Coleslaw The trick is to lengthen the mayonnaise rather than drown everything in it. Yes, I have opinions about coleslaw.
August 2019
Expected Time To Hit A Score Difference A probability problem that looked hard until I thought about it in the shower, at which point it turned out to be quite easy and to have a surprisingly clean answer.
A Fun Puzzle A maths puzzle from Twitter about two random number game strategies, with the perhaps surprising result that player two wins 5/9 of the time.
July 2019
Two Player TickTalk What happens when your group discussion format is designed for four people and only two show up — turns out it works pretty well with some tweaks.
Separating Sampling and Removal A data structure I'm fairly sure I invented, which does three things in O(1) that you wouldn't expect to be able to do in O(1) simultaneously.
June 2019
Notes on Disagreement Notes from a TickTalk session on disagreement — practical advice on when to be curious, when to be adversarial, and when to just block people.
Notes on the Legibility War Half-formed notes on a thesis I've been mulling for six months: that much of life and politics is a conflict over how we make people intelligible to each other.
Reducing the Reduction Pass Ordering Problem The reduction pass ordering problem might be mostly an illusion caused by passes being too large — make them small enough and the ordering stops mattering much.
Vegan Chartreuse Hot Chocolate A recipe for hot chocolate that is both excellent and entirely vegan, mostly because green Chartreuse and 90% dark chocolate do a lot of heavy lifting.
Recipe Write-Up: Not really Soboro I heard about a Japanese dish, had never tasted it, and then mangled the recipe completely using none of the intended ingredients. The result is good enough that I don't feel too guilty about it.
Book Review: Every Cradle is a Grave by Sarah Perry A book about antinatalism and suicide rights that I would have expected to find persuasive, and didn't — the case it makes is weaker than the subject deserves.
Onion, Bacon, and Potato Pancakes Experimenting with wheat-free pancakes — potato starch turns out to work remarkably well, and adding bacon and onion pulls them toward something more interesting than the bland baseline.
Some female SFF authors to read Someone's bookshelf was too male-dominated and asked for recommendations. Here's the list I gave them.
Reducer Pass Budgeting A solution to the expensive test-case reducer pass problem: give each pass a budget of unsuccessful calls and cut it off when it exceeds that budget.
Brexit Prep My somewhat haphazard Brexit food stockpile, shared because a friend asked and it's better than nothing, even if I've already spotted problems with it.
Flying Lessons On instructions that consist of individually reasonable steps but somehow omit the crucial bit.
Test-case reduction as graph search An underdeveloped idea about test-case reduction, pass ordering, and graph search. Poorly explained, by the author's own admission.
Etymology of property-based testing QuickCheck was invented in Haskell, but 'property-based testing' was invented in Erlang. These are not the same thing.
Another attempt at brownies. The brownies lacked structural integrity and were too sweet, which I'm blaming on forgetting the salt.
Privacy as Friction Reduction Privacy isn't mainly about hiding things. It's about creating conditions in which your own mind will tell you the truth.
Notes on Queer Life as Combat Epistemology Two concepts I've been chewing on: illegibility and marginalisation as combat epistemology. They're both more useful than they sound.
Notes on Lagrangian Duality I've failed to understand Lagrangian duality for years. I think I've finally got it, and the problem was everyone filling their explanations with distracting details.
Vegetarian Lasagne Recipe A vegetarian lasagne with four ingredients, one of which is a very red sauce. Crown Prince Squash only, butternut need not apply.
Book Review: Writing to Learn The recurring theme is writing to learn, but the book mostly advocates for a personal storytelling style I'm not entirely sold on.
Big Capital: Who is London for? by Anna Minton A good book about London's housing crisis that I can't quite bring myself to recommend—not because it's wrong, but because it's very depressing and being sad and angry is most of what you'll get out of it.
Book Review: How to understand your gender A good, compassionate book on gender that I didn't personally get a huge amount out of—mostly because I'd already done a lot of this reading.
Books Some Twitter threads asking for book recommendations, with the results collected here.
Implicit vs Explicit The Zen of Python is a great document that people mostly ignore when it's inconvenient for them.
Beeminder for Enforced Participation I've been using Beeminder to make commitment devices contagious—spreading the 'you can't just quietly give up' property to other parts of my life.
Teaching from worked examples A link-saving note on why minimal guidance during instruction doesn't work, and why worked examples are better than problem-solving for learning.
Beware Threshold Effects There's no magic line you have to cross before it's OK to need help. Everyone needs help.
Communicating Knowledge A Twitter thread saved before it disappeared, about the frustrating gap between tacit knowledge and things that can actually be said.
Stories about Data You can tell whatever story you want about your data. Just be honest about which stories are valid and which ones aren't.
Auto-parallelising test-case reduction On pessimistic parallelism: parallelize by assuming your attempts will fail, then be pleasantly surprised when they don't.
Try not to think about it If you have to make a decision every time, you'll eventually make the wrong one. The fix is to stop having to decide.
Branch and Consolidate An implementation idea for writing code that can be both a randomized algorithm and a dynamic programming solution. Very much a note to self.
Vegetables and diet Notes on a diet that is mostly just 'eat vegetables for five days a month', which turns out to be harder than it sounds.
Questions A link to a comic about questions and answers, saved so I can find it again.
You Can't Trust Lawful Good A YouGov poll found that almost nobody thinks they're evil. Separately, Lawful Good is probably the least trustworthy alignment.
The Duties I'm deeply suspicious of normative ethical theories. So naturally I decided to build one.
On Formal Mathematics Formal logic is a great model of deducibility but a poor model of how mathematicians actually think. Some thoughts on what that means.
Notes on Interviewing Your interview process is probably almost entirely noise rather than signal. The good news is that this is actually freeing.
September 2018
What is a neural network? Notes on explaining neural networks to people who don't want to hear about backpropagation.
Liberating Structures Notes from a meetup I attended, posted before I lose them entirely to the void.
Homo economicus as a user persona Homo economicus is a bad descriptive model of humans, but a surprisingly useful persona for stress-testing system design.
