Dang, I was gone for a pretty long time. But you’re all still here making me proud of my many-years-ago choices of who to follow and be friends with.

a dream

someone in my target language: hi :)! how are you?

me and Duolingo in haunting unison: the boys have the pears

I was just minding my own business, listening to Andrew Bird, when suddenly

When I was 16 and didn’t know about any of you, I sent Moxie Marlinspike an email asking if he would give me advice on how to get started on basically being him - he never replied.

Keep reading

The Domain Of Arnheim 1962

Rene Magritte

The Guardian

Julia Iredale

website / instagram

Lord of The Rings Map by Andrew DeGraff / Tumblr / Store

Part of the solo art show “Cartography”, opening Saturday March 29th 2014 at Gallery1988 / Tumblr.

[this was sitting in drafts from a time when I wanted to start writing serious things more often; probably around September. I think I meant to add things to it, but I forget what they were]

People confuse humans’ conscious agency (chosen) with our unconscious agency (evolved and conditioned) when talking about signaling.

In fact, we confuse these things when talking about nearly every kind of decision making.

Consider punishment.

It’s a trope among consequentialists that punishment isn’t about people *deserving* punishment - it’s about deterring people from undesirable or antisocial actions. And, in that sense, punishment is a good *strategic* decision.

The problem is, almost no one thinks about it this way. Humans are vengeful. Our legal system is all about culpability. If person A does something bad to person B, we expect person B to want a bad thing to happen to person A, even if person B isn’t helped at all (except maybe psychologically) - Hammurabi probably didn’t ask himself “What is a good strategy to prevent people from poking each other’s eyes out?” He probably asked “What is fair? What does an eye-poker-outer deserve?”

I suspect that this vengefulness is, more or less, yet another of social animals’ evolved strategies for cooperation - I can predict that wronged peers will be vengeful, because I experience vengefulness. And so we’re more likely to find an equilibrium in the game of “don’t do things that are, on balance, harmful to your group”. In this sense, evolution can play game-designer and produce behavior that purely self-interested agents might not exhibit - societies evolve new utility functions for their members. Evolution can give us acausal trade, since our genes are, in some sense, equally agent-y when compared with humans.

This is probably obvious to you already.

What may not be obvious is that it might not be desirable, or even possible, to convince people of the consequentialist view. Vengefulness (and other irrational behavior) may be a kind of Chesterton’s Fence.

Groups that lose or suppress the kind of “irrational” traits that enable acausal trade may end up in “defect-defect” scenarios more than their irrational counterparts: Imagine that we have two political parties: one in which everyone believes in a thing called “civic duty” and one in which everyone thinks they should act solely based on the expected value of their actions. Even if the first group is much smaller than the second group, they will end up controlling the political process.

With the sound off I thought that might be Paul Ryan

I KNOW RIGHT WTF CALIFORNIA WHAT KIND OF TECH BOOM IS THIS

I am disappointed with the state of the world.  I had to fill out my state taxes on PAPER and now I have to MAIL them in just because I was a part-year resident in two different states so I can’t use their fancy ONLINE systems.

Cardinal: Rett Birb

Reason: Birb just birbing, why the pope angred?

Cardinal: Aleph Naught

Reason: Blasphemy; only God is infinite.

the list of excommunicated cardinals is wild: 

pretty good reason to be excommunicated, right??? what about this one:

and yeah, you probably shouldn’t do that if you’re a cardinal:

from Spirited Away

Rust is *hard*, man. Never before met a language that actively discourages splitting things into functions.

I get the impression that no one really has any idea how to write *nice* Rust yet. You can do a bunch of stuff, but it’s guaranteed to be ugly as hell.

"picking a side in an actual ongoing battle" *thousand-yard stare while I have to remember once more that plenty of people actually believe that's literally a thing that's happening, that a literal Satan actually exists and goes around doing things and influencing people and is responsible for everything they don't like* well, thanks for that, I think I'm going to go for a walk now--

if you meet the Devil on the road, kill him.