That’s actually a thing

Listened to me when I made recommendations.

I used to read a lot of them back in the '00s. The only ones I check regularly now are xkcd and SMBC.

It is absolutely difficult and very time consuming

Right after we bought our house, a storm brought a tree through the roof. At the time we were in the living room staying away from windows, but a branch punched through the roof right over my wife’s side of the bed. More than 6 inches away, but still spawned some unnerving "what if?"s.

As a math guy, I hate when people say statistics is math. Like yeah, there are equations, and math plays a role, but the results so often speak more to the selection and interpretation choices made by the statistician than to any kind of mathematical rigor.

I turned on my volume the other night to make sure I heard my alarm, and forgot to turn it off. I learned a lot of notification sounds that day. Or would have if I’d paid attention beyond “Oh, a notification”

Really more of an anti-substance, ain’t it?

Okay? That doesn’t really affect the relationship between philosophy and fact.

I would say no. Philosophy is, loosely speaking, a collection of useful techniques to turn facts into models. Though one could make the argument that “Cogito ergo sum” is a philosophical fact

Occam’s razor isn’t really a fact, it’s just a reasoning strategy. It doesn’t claim that the simplest explanation is true, just that when choosing between competing explanations that make identical predictions, the one that makes the fewest assumptions is preferable. But sometimes those additional assumptions are true, sometimes the simplest explanation is not the correct one, in which case Occam’s razor in fact takes you further from the truth.

Still a very useful principle, but I wouldn’t really call it a fact.

Titan can have a little life, as a treat

Mixture of experts is the future of AI. Breakthroughs won’t come from bigger models, it’ll come from better coordinated conversations between models.

As seems to be the consensus, I still find people in their 20s physically attractive, but the prospect of spending any significant amount of time talking to most people more than 5 or so years separated from my age is pretty exhausting. If we’re talking long term relationships, I’d rather compromise a bit on looks in favor of a roughly contemporary personality than vice versa. And, as I get older, my threshold for “attractive” softens a bit to accommodate that personality.

Book: Illuminatus

Comic: Invisibles

Technically they’re both series, but I read each one bound as a single book so I’m counting it.

My dish soap smells like delicious citrus but I know better than to taste it.

On a scale of total novice to master, 1 to 10, I’d say I average about a 3. Handily capable compared to the layperson, but unremarkable compared to other hobbyists. I do have a lot of hobbies though

You can mostly opt out by bugging out to the woods to homestead. Taking advantage of the many amenities of society is opting in. “The state” is just your neighbors, and their neighbors, etc, extrapolated out to the whole country. Despotic governments don’t just appear from the aether, they are established and staffed by someone’s neighbors.

Think it was a guy in a gorilla suit, but yeah