lesser daemon (Page 18)

16

Jan

In Search Of A Second Brain

For most of the past decade, I have been pretty good about keeping notes. This is maybe the one thing I can consistently take pride in: no matter what else I'm dealing with, I tend to keep a journal and write things down. The format this takes over the years, however, has changed a lot.

A timeline of my private and public note-taking practice.

A brief summary: up until I started grad school in 2018, I kept my journal, to-do lists, writing drafts, and so on in Microsoft OneNote, taking paper notes in the context of classes because I felt

5 min read

15

Jan

AI Inferno: Making A Reverse Roko's Basilisk With AI Agents

For those who weren't in some of the more toxic corners of the tech internet in the late aughts and early teens, Roko's Basilisk is an old thought experiment to the effect that, should a benevolent superintelligence come to exist in the future, it would be incentivized to punish people who were aware of its possibility and did nothing to help it come to exist. This is the type of pretty dumb thought experiment that really hits for a certain type of Online Tech Guy: it originated on LessWrong (more like More Wrong imo), made its way across the Slatestar

11 min read

07

Jan

2024: A Year That (Mostly) Happened To Me

Another chaotic year in the books. I changed jobs, with an unexpected three-month interlude. I dealt with a lot of unexpected twists and turns, especially with family health problems, which are still ongoing. I accomplished quite a bit this year, including some longstanding goals, and (though I'm not good at being proud of myself) I'm proud of that.

As I set out to do last year, and mostly failed at doing for the first part of this year, I finally took some time to step back and try to figure out what I wanted to do rather than felt I

4 min read

20

Dec

LLMs and The Trap of Frictionless Design

A lot of friends who teach have commented on a trend that's accelerated since the pandemic: students don't know what a filesystem is anymore. This is, as you might imagine, a fairly difficult stumbling block when you're trying to teach people to Do Computer. The students entering college over the past few years are, by no coincidence, the first generation to grow up with smartphones. For a lot of them, they cannot remember a time before their smartphone was a part of their daily life.

I got my first iPhone when I was about 17. For better or worse, as

5 min read

15

Sep

context prolapse

(Thank you to my friend jeremy for coming up with the title joke. It's a good one.)

Lately I have often found myself wondering what the fuck anyone is talking about. This is not particularly abnormal for me as a pretty dumb guy all around but recently it seems to be more of an external phenomenon and less of a personal failing. I was reading a blog post by dante douglas yesterday about the death of the mainstream internet, which I generally agree with, but I think it helped solidify some stuff for me about social media and why I

4 min read