Don't just not do bad things. Do good things.
Not that I’m remotely as funny as George Carlin, or that this list is funny at all. But he had many complaints and grievances, and today I would also like to complain about some stuff.
This post contains spoilers for a lot of things. I won’t hide spoilers, but I will say the name of the thing before giving the spoiler.
Continue readingThis meme got me thinking:
That feeling when you’re smart enough to know how awkward you are, but not smart enough to know how not to be awkward
The reason it works that way is because not being awkward is NP-hard, and I can prove it.
Continue readingIn the spirit of You Can Just Do Things, here are some things I Just Do. Some of them are weird; others are normal, but frequently overlooked.
Edited 2025-12-03 to add a ninth thing.
Continue readingI played a lot of MTG from age 9 to 14 or so. I picked up the game again recently and I was immediately better at the game than my 14-year old self. I don’t have any direct way to prove this, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.
Continue readingNearly all gaming keyboards use the conventional typewriter-inspired keyboard shape. That is not a good shape for typing or gaming or frankly anything else.
A few years ago, there was some publicity around a Navy fighter pilot who claimed to have seen an unidentified object that couldn’t possibly be explained except as an alien phenomenon. Many people considered this to be indisputable proof of aliens. “The pilot is an expert, there’s no way he could have been wrong.”
I am much more willing to believe that someone can make a mistake, regardless of how good they are at the thing in question.
Sure, fighter pilots have excellent vision, and sure, they’re better than I am at identifying objects in the sky. But they’re still fallible. There is no level of fighter-pilot skill that would make me believe aliens visited earth based solely on one person’s testimony.
For any scientific theory, no matter how well-established, you can always find at least one expert with a PhD who studies the topic for a living and disagrees with the consensus. So either almost all experts are wrong, or that one expert is wrong. Either way, experts can make mistakes.
This post contains spoilers for the first episode of Pluribus.
Continue readingA reborrowed word is a loan word that goes from language A to language B and then back to language A. I think they’re neat.
A classic example is pidgin. A pidgin is a grammatically simple proto-language that emerges when two groups from different places have to learn to communicate. The word pidgin originally described a simplified form of English spoken by Chinese business people, with pidgin being approximately the Chinese pronunciation of the English word “business”. So “business” was borrowed by Chinese, and then borrowed back by English as pidgin.
Continue readingThe ethical principles that most people hold—and hold most strongly—go completely out the window when it comes to war.
Continue readingAI companies want to bootstrap weakly-superhuman AI to align superintelligent AI. I don’t expect them to succeed. I could give various arguments for why alignment bootstrapping is hard and why AI companies are ignoring the hard parts of the problem; but you don’t need to understand any details to know that it’s a bad plan.
When AI companies say they will bootstrap alignment, they are admitting defeat on solving the alignment problem, and saying that instead they will rely on AI to solve it for them. So they’re facing a problem of unknown difficulty, but where the difficulty is high enough that they don’t think they can solve it. And to remediate this, they will use a novel technique never before used in history—i.e., counting on slightly-superhuman AI to do the bulk of the work.
If they mess up and this plan doesn’t work, then superintelligent AI kills everyone.
And they think this is an acceptable plan, and it is acceptable for them to build up to human-level AI or beyond on the basis of this plan.
What?
Continue reading