thinkagainer

@AndyMasley Congrats!!!

After 4 years of running the EA DC city group, I've decided to step down to accept a grant from Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) to independently write full-time on AI and other topics. While EA DC has been amazing and I'm very proud of the network we built, I've been wanting to go deeper on a lot of what I've been writing about now that I've built an audience, and to be able to think a lot more about the big questions in AI. I got a lot of encouragement to try this from friends, colleagues, CG itself, and my audience, and I'm very grateful for the privilege of getting to try this out. I have a lot of freedom to write about what I want. The full description in the grant agreement just reads “To support one year of writing and communications work made publicly available on topics related to AI, public policy, and other topics.” I'm not employed directly by CG in any way and expect to both agree and disagree with CG's takes on a lot of big questions. I'm obviously pretty into a lot of specific EA ideas and expect to write about that more, but also disagree with a lot of what happens in the space (as most people involved in EA do) and I wouldn't have accepted the grant if I thought it'd change the content of what I wrote about at all. Extremely excited to get started soon and very grateful for the EA DC network and the amazing support I've gotten. I'm expecting to start writing a lot more in March.

@stanfordNYC damn he’s good

@thinkagainer "I'll marry the most beautiful woman I can find, just like I did the first time"

my wife, unprompted: if i die, you can marry a woman more beautiful than me. but you have to treat her poorly

@demiurgently snoo skeptics be like

luv adding techno- in front of things to make them sound even more sinister. technocapitalism. technofeudalism. technobedtime

@AndyMasley I remember back when that guy had interesting thoughts. Alas!

Guy with a big bio following seems to get furious at me because he's assuming I'm talking here about an actual lab leak theory and blocks me before I can explain the metaphor

@yourfriendmell like having a weird box of stuff cluttering the bedroom...i develop muscle memory about how to step around it rather than the "wtf i just need to put this away" reaction i'd like

@yourfriendmell I often find myself getting too caught up in the descriptive to be pushy about the normative I develop a kind of complacency with the way things work even when they're really dumb

wonder how much being good at normative thought "things should be like x" interferes with being good at descriptive thought "things are like x" and vice versa both for tech infrastructure and the world more broadly

my wife and i had a baby and it's so good :)

nobody has the courage to set their scifi novels in the past

The Teacher’s Union fought phonics-based instruction bc it was mundanely effective at teaching kids to read and didn’t let the teachers feel like selfless martyrs. This is Munchausen syndrome by proxy and the Union should be nuked from orbit.

@BLUNDERBUSSTED yoooo nyc lfg

For 4 years I've travelled. The longest I've been in a single location for the past decade was about a year and a quarter in Asheville, in a little duplex with my ex. The place was cheap, but still hard for me to afford. It had wood floors and a cherry tree out front. The tree was grafted, half-white, half-pink blooms wreathed it every spring, turning into cherries that the bears would come by and strip from its branches. We had a matter of days after the cherries ripened to get our fill before they were all taken. On days where the bears came, it was impossible to leave the house. The whole cul-de-sac was effectively paralyzed. Our neighbors would turn their car alarms on to no avail. We'd just stare out our windows and watch those bastards break half the branches of this beautiful tree. The duplex was 2 bedroom, and carried a lot of my life. 3 bookcases, all mostly full. Unimaginable wealth at the time. A printer, two desks, the second seldom used as my ex preferred to work from bed. We inherited a Tempur-Pedic toward the end of our life together. I didn't love it, it absorbed too much motion. An uncanny feeling mattress that preferred you have sex elsewhere. A sofa and a fainting couch style chair whose faux-leather started to flake, lightly then aggressively, a pseudo-dandruff that caused some of the biggest fights in the late stage of our relationship. A kitchen that I tear gassed accidentally the first time I cooked with habanero. The place I learned how to combat ants with Borax. To wage chemical warfare on wasps. Where I tried CBD joints and played Red Dead 2, and pressed up glasses against the wall with my ex so we could listen to our duplex neighbor get into another fight with another man while we grinned at each other. The place where we had our final fights, where she convinced me to start drinking again and then resented me for it, the place where she got her new job and decided to go back to school, the place where I moved out of and into my manager's basement. I'd lived in a duplex with her prior to that, some dinky carpeted place up an unpaved road, larger but shittier, darker. Prior to that I'd lived with my parents. After the Asheville duplex I would not spent more than 10 months in a single location. Through this day. 2019. I lived in the aforementioned basement. I lived in a room of a 3 story house in a very nice neighborhood back in Asheville. I've lived in 3 apartments in Montreal. A studio in Madrid that was more like a converted garage. A vacation property in Larnaca, a beautiful little place in Sliema, an old building in Mexico City (whose age reassured me against my always-growing fear of an earthquake), a single room and then an apartment in Lisbon, a single room in Florence, a nice place in Buenos Aires, a place that felt like a converted hallway in Montevideo, another studio in Porto. And now I sit in Montreal, in Mile End, listening to the wind sweep brutally across a lightly snow-dusted outdoors, frozen although it is above freezing, as the landscape sinks into a deep freeze it will not come out of til April, just after the longest night of the year. In a week I fly to Porto again to rave with my Euros over the New Year. A week (?) after I fly to Texas to spend time with my family, about a month I'd guess. And then I fly to New York City to try to stay in a single location for at least a year. That will be a very real accomplishment for me, geographic stability for 12 months. You'll know I've Made It if I have both my 35th and 36th birthdays in the same location. Every single place I've stayed becomes a time capsule for a portion of my life. I have this habit that I keep up with more and less well: when I enter a new space I'll be living in, I like to photograph it prior to my fully moving in, then again at its peak mess, who it looks like when fully broken in, lived-in. Each location is so distinct a container for the memories I constructed there that I recall the rooms of each place when I want to remember what life was like for that time. I can usually remember even the hotel rooms I occupied. The quirks of the showers and toilets. The positions I ate in, worked in. The meals I became autistically devoted to over the course of my stay. That geospatial sense contains the greater part of my memory, the containers within which my life was lived, and how I moved through them. I can remember the shape of my life, and it answers some of the whys, why I was that person for that time, how and who. A little under two months, and the nomading is over. Supposedly. I won't believe it til I get there. And New York doesn't feel like the place where I'm going to settle. Something dramatic will have to convince me. See you soon.

@davidzmorris interested in hearing more here

Accidentally heard Wet Leg for the first time obvious industry plant is obvious

@suspendedreason so here we are

@suspendedreason or $10 on the paperback! but the rhyming preface was delightful!

In 2023, every day for a month, I visited the American Natural History Museum. Each night, I watched Avatar: The Way of Water. The output of this psychedelic period is a rather strange book. With "Fire & Ash" coming out, I thought I'd make it available in print. Link in replies!

Gotta say this is one of the stupidest looking birds there is (Wilson's warbler)

today in birds whose name completes "yer nothing but a ___"

this bird looks like it was drawn by someone who had never seen a bird before...real "two monks draw..." vibes

every subsequent child has to learn to navigate a complex social web faster...the oldest child doesn't learn to navigate a family of 5 until they're like 4 years old, but the youngest does it from 0. wonder how much this explains birth order effects... person vs thing orientation

@demiurgently wow this is better than the citizen app!