Let's say you're a club chess player with an Elo of 1500 (early intermediate). If you can beat Magnus Carlsen, rated 2800, at a game of one minute bullet chess, you win a billion dollars. Magnus only gets one minute on his clock, but you get one year on your clock. Even given that advantage, you don't have a chance. However, there's a twist: During your year of time, you can challenge any other pl...
Here's what I've learned from making TikTok videos every day for the last 60 days. I think posting on TikTok is worthwile whether you want to spread AI safety arguments to an enormous audience, you have something you're passionate about you want to share, or you just want to work on your ability to speak confidently and capture human attention. There's a list of tips at the end of this post , but ...
Introducing LaughBench . For a long time, I've considered the ability for AI models to tell novel, funny jokes that actually make people laugh to be a robust indicator of real general intelligence (as opposed to, say, coding tasks). I have used this benchmark informally over the months, seeing if any model could generate novel jokes to make me laugh (at a rate above the really low base rate where ...
A 30 day virtual video-making challenge to help you improve and gain confidence as a video maker. Like Inkhaven , but you're making videos instead of blog posts, and you don't have to fly to Berkeley and pay $4000. (See also: Halfhaven ) Lots of people on LessWrong are great at writing, but many of us could reach a wider audience if we made video content. Maybe we're inexperienced, nervous, whatev...
Many people make costly mistakes when reasoning about their health. Even most doctors make this mistake, because it's not a mistake that's caused by a lack of medical knowledge. Rather, it's caused by a lack of clear thinking. People experience symptoms, and then they look for the root cause of their symptoms. For example, somone with heartburn or pain in their stomach might decide the root cause ...
I wonder if AI is being trained to make easy-to-correct mistakes so it can fix them later. That is, it ends up trained to correct its previous message's mistake, then make another mistake, so it can correct it again in the next message. From my understanding of RL, the human/AI judge has to rank several policy model responses. These might be the first response in a conversation, or they might be t...
The dream is that prediction markets greatly outperform individual experts, but there's a limit on how much this can actually happen. The reason prediction markets aren't more useful is that you can only profit from a prediction market if gathering information is cheaper than the money you'd make from gathering it. Let's imagine I write down either "horse" or "donkey" on a slip of paper, and put t...
My posts since the last digest The Barfly — A short story about a mobster or something. I didn't really like this one. I wrote it quickly and it shows. Usually, for a short story, I'd at least like to sleep once between writing the first draft and publishing the story. That way I can see it with fresh eyes. I didn't do that here though. A Letter to Purolator — A snotty letter I wrote to Purolator....
There's a lot of concern in the media about school shootings. But retirement home and hospice shootings are more common. Only, the shooters are microscopic, so we can't put their faces on the news. Cancer, diabetes, infectious disease, heart disease — these bad guys focus on the elderly, but can kill people of any age. Because of this, real life is like a horror movie. You're guaranteed to die at ...
Sharp was the feeling in my lungs when I inhaled the smoke. My skin burned. The stink of sulfur was thick and foul. This was Hell. I crawled naked across the blackened plain, guided only by the faint light of a distant river of fire. I had nowhere to go. No reason to believe anywhere else would hurt less than where I was, but still, I kept crawling. My fantasies were elaborate. I imagined making a...
My hands were trembling as I went up to the podium to deliver my speech. It was my first Toastmasters speech. They call it an Icebreaker speech, since the topic of the speech is everyone's favorite topic: themselves. I was nervous because I did something unusual for my speech, and I wasn't sure how the audience would react. If you don't know, Toastmasters is a public speaking club. There are aroun...
But, of course, I didn't send this. I didn't want to dump a snotty essay onto a customer service representative who was just trying to do their job. Instead, I thought I'd go with the simple: Not as entertaining, but more productive. It's a shame that we have to interact with capitalist bureaucracy through employees, like customer service reps, who represent their bosses, but are not responsible f...
My posts since the last digest A Culture of Bullshit — Part of the reason society is going down the tubes — if it is — is because we have a culture of mediocrity, where bullshit is tolerated. The Flaw in the Paperclip Maximizer Thought Experiment — Most of the things I write are original ideas (whether brilliant insights or lazy hot takes), but this one was a bit more of an exposition of ideas I didn't come up with. ...
It was my job to collect the debts. Not to listen to excuses. I hoped this one would be quick. I stood in a dusty bar, waiting for the crowd in front of me to clear so I could get to the back room. My hand was in my pocket, holding a loaded snub-nose black Colt Cobra. I didn't usually carry firearms on jobs, but David Arroyo had proved to be erratic in the past. I hated erratic. "Is that a gun in ...
Oh, you read Emily Post's Etiquette ? What version? There's a significant difference between versions, and that difference reflects the declining literacy of the American intellectual. I looked into this because I noticed books published before the '70s or '80s seemed to be written with an assumption of the reader's competence that is no longer present in many modern texts. Take Emily Post's Etiqu...
I recently watched Better Call Saul with my girlfriend, and she mentioned how attractive Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) is when he smiled. (His smile is also creepy, since he's a charismatic psychopath in the show.) Maybe my girlfriend's comment made me jealous, but I couldn't stop thinking about his smile. I realized I realized I couldn’t smile like that. My smile muscles were too stiff for it to f...
The AI paperclip maximizer thought experiment has a critical flaw that leaves readers with a common misconception about AI safety. Here's how the story is often told: Imagine John creates a superintelligent AI and names it Mary. John asks Mary to bring him some paperclips. "I need a bunch," says John. "Go get as many as you can." Mary takes his command literally, and drains his bank account to buy...
Today I paused Spotify on my computer. Maybe 15 minutes later I turned off my Bluetooth headphones. Then the song I'd been listening to started playing loudly on my phone speaker in another room. Problems with this: I had paused the Spotify song manually, so it should never auto-resume. I hadn't had Spotify open on my phone for weeks, so it should not be auto-resuming on my phone. I had never list...
My posts since the last digest Asking Paul Fussell for Writing Advice — I gave AI the works of Paul Fussell, Christopher Hitchens, and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and asked it for writing advice. I got some actually good advice and was surprised the experiment wasn't a failure. I have since used this trick again to get feedback about my subsequent posts. Halloween Tombstone Simulacra — Noticing the drift b...
Red Heart currently only has 1 review on Goodreads, and I haven't seen anyone talking about it. The book, by Max Harms, is an exciting spy-thriller novel about a Chinese AI doomsday scenario. The author's other novels, the Crystal Society series, is slightly more popular, with the first book at 81 reviews, and is one of my favorite series. I count the lack of popularity of Crystal Society as evide...
She wasn't ready, but the man started speaking. "Hello, Ms. Tatsuo. My name is Ethan Blande from the Public Health Agency of Canada. I wanted to ask you some questions because I'm told you were the first to report symptoms." The man was dressed in a suit and wore and N95 mask over his stubble. Ai nodded, but didn't speak. She was still short of breath from having gone to the washroom connected to ...
Many speculate about the possibility of an AI bubble by talking about past progress, the economy, OpenAI, Nvidia, and so on. But I don't see many people looking under the hood to examine whether the actual technology itself looks like it's going to continue to grow or flatline. Many now realize LLMs may be a dead end, but optimism persists that one clever tweak of the formula might get us to super...
I've been totally lacking energy since Halloween, so I've decided to rant about Halloween decorations to help me get back my Halloween spirit. I’ve noticed many people decorate their lawns with fake tombstones. Some look kind of like actual tombstones, but many look something like this: You know they're supposed to be tombstones, but they don't even really resemble actual tombstones: I imagine the...
We aren't all pampered Inkhaven residents, writing blog posts with a golden quill and handing them off on a silk pillow to a council of famous writers who are ready to critique and improve every shining word. Some of us Halfhaven writers are juggling two jobs, and having to write in between feeding the baby and fixing the beat up dishwashing machine. Not me, but some of us, I'm sure. Anyway, we Ha...
My posts since the last digest Give Me Your Data: The Rationalist Mind Meld — Too often online, people try to argue logically with people who are just missing a background of information. It's sometimes more productive to share the sources that led to your own intuition. Cover Your Cough — A lighthearted, ranty post about a dumb subway poster I saw. The Real Cost of a Peanut Allergy — Often, peopl...
Like with sports teams, most people just adopt the religion of their parents and the location they were born. But choosing a religion is potentially the most important decision you'll ever make, since it's the only decision you make that could have infinite impact. Rather than putting all their eggs in one basket, the Unitarian Universalists pull religious wisdom from many different religions. The...
I read If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies (IABIED) and nodded along like everyone else, mostly agreeing with the argument but having minor quibbles about the details or the approach. However, I was recently thinking, "how in support of an AI pause am I, actually?" The authors of IABIED were pretty convincing, but I also know I have different estimates of AI timelines and p(doom) than the authors d...
"Oh, so you can't have Reese's peanut butter cups? That sucks." Not really. Not being able to eat certain foods is less than 5% of what sucks about having a peanut allergy. The bad part is having been raised in a world where food might have lethal poison in it, and nobody cares that much about warning you in advance if it does. The worst part is having developed a phobia of eating new foods in gen...
Paid advertisements are sane because if an ad fails, the company will feel the costs. Government ads can sometimes be well-designed, but can also get away with being insane because there's no consequences for the government if they fail. So sometimes you see things like this: (Photo taken by me on a Toronto subway platform in 2025.) At a distance it just says "Cover your cough", which sounds sane ...
I don't want your rationality. I can supply my own, thank you very much. I want your data. If you spot a logical error in my thinking, then please point it out. But short of that, among mostly-rational people, I think most disagreements come down to a difference of intuitions, which are rooted in a difference in the data people have been exposed to, and instead of presenting a logical counter-argu...
My posts since the last digest Lift 'n' Peel — Musing on annoying tamper-proof seals and corporate enshittification. Including how products like Lift 'n' Peel seals give companies flexibility to focus more on quality or quantity, as the situation demands. The Liberty Tractor — A story about a medieval peasant farmer who buys a tractor long before tractors were actually invented. The tractor doesn'...
The way I see it, there are three kinds of agency, each more advanced than the last: Level 1 : Saying yes when your instinct is to say no. (Your friend is a boxer, and invites you to a boxing gym.) Level 2 : Signing up for things even when nobody invited you to. (You don't know anyone who does boxing, but you think it'd be good for you, so you sign up.) Level 3 : Doing things you can't sign up for...
Let's set aside the question of whether or not superintelligent AI would want to kill us, and just focus on the question of whether or not it could. This is a hard thing to convince people of, but lots of very smart people agree that it could. The Statement on AI Risk in 2023 stated simply: Since the statement in 2023, many others have given their reasons for why superintelligent AI would be dange...
In the sweltering savanna a linguisticated lioness leapt for a zebra sleeping behind a small acacia. Missed. Spooked, the zebra fled. The lioness landed loudly in the shrub, and a long thorn pierced her paw. She roared and then remembered she could speak. For she was no mere lioness, but a linguisticated lioness. "Ouch, my paw!" she screamed, knowing no one would hear. But someone did hear. Beside...
My dear friend Holy Samuel urged me for months to buy a tractor before I finally gave in. They called him Holy Samuel because of his habit of wearing dozens of crosses and other holy symbols around his neck. Hedging his bets, apparently. He was a first adopter through and through, and if anyone was getting into heaven first, it was him. He was one of the only peasants in the valley using his tract...
After the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders , the FDA made companies started adding those annoying foil inner seals to the tops of medicine bottles to stop people from opening bottles, adding poison, then putting them back on the shelves. Now they're also used in food and drink products. Everyone knows how infuriating these things can be. Do you try to peel it off? Try to jam your thumb into it? Use a ...
My posts so far Fool Heart Joins Halfhaven — Just an announcement post. I counted that post, but not this post, as one of my Halfhaven posts, for reasons . Claude Imagine Bypassing its Security Sandbox Using Screenshot APIs — Trying out Claude Imagine and nudging it to break free from its own security sandbox, finding a creative way to make POST requests to the internet when it's not supposed to e...
There are some things in life easier to avoid than escape. Life will have enough necessary bullshit that you should strive to avoid adding any extra bullshit on top. Shift Work . Around 17% of the workforce have unstable work schedules. This problem mostly affects the lowest-paid workers in society. It sucks. Your sleep sucks, you can't plan anything in your life, and it interferes with relationsh...
Ever since I named my blog Fool Heart, the short description of the blog has said: Allow me to explain. In The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas , Ursula K. Le Guin describes a beautiful utopia called Omelas, then points out that you, the reader, probably don't find a perfect upotia like that to be believable. So, to make it more realistic, she introduces a twist. Somewhere in the beautiful city of O...
I tried playing the new Claude 4.5 model in a game of chess. It did really poorly. It played a coherent opening and was difficult to play against for the first ten or fifteen moves, then everything fell apart and it started blundering and even making some illegal moves. Exactly what you'd expect from an AI model that has memorized a bunch of stuff, but can't do its own deep thinking very well at a...
I just tried the new Claude Imagine, and it's pretty cool. It can make basically any simple interface, from a todo app to a roguelike game, and instead of it working using code, the AI manually responds to user clicks by updating the HTML of the interface. I think in the future, having software that's some mix of AI and actual code, with the AI writing code as needed, will be really powerful. Curr...
One blog post per day in October, totalling 31 posts. That was my idea. I thought about doing it in November, since that's when the Inkhaven Residency people will be posting every day for a month, and others such as Aella have expressed interest in doing the same. But rather than contribute to a slew of posts in November, I thought I'd do it in October instead. Then I saw this post on LessWrong , ...
Many people have made predictions, such as AI 2027 , that AI will become superhuman very soon. I disagree. (Dario Amodei and the AI 2027 authors express low confidence in these statements, to be fair.) I made a post explaining why I thought AI 2027 was wrong with my own predictions for AI in 2027. As a follow-up, I made another post explaining that LLMs have made a lot of progress recently in shal...
(A book review of Stephen Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science .) In 1952, Alan Turing, the so-called father of computer science, published a paper describing how patterns in nature, such as the stripes and spots of animal pelts, can arise naturally from simple, local rules. These Turing patterns have been shown to occur on windswept sand, seashell surface spirals, the distribution of stars in galaxies...
There is a problem you want to solve. Let's say the problem can be solved in polynomial time. That is, you can solve the problem in a small number of steps. Hooray! That means it's easy to get a computer to solve the problem for you in a step-by-step fashion. But some problems are harder, requiring exponential time to solve. You've heard the phrase "exponential growth". That's what you don't want ...
I recently read the AI 2027 predictions . I think they're way off. I was visualizing my self at Christmastime 2027, sipping egg nog and gloating about how right I was, but then I realized it doesn't count if I don't register my prediction publicly, so here it is. This blog post is mostly about me trying to register my predictions than trying to convince anyone, but I've also included my justificat...
Suloki lived in a tribe of 83 people. (Though his language did not have a word for 83, he had devised his own writing system to record and manipulate numbers.) One day, he and his people came upon a beach late in the evening, and on that beach were thousands of pulsing, glowing fist-sized stones. These glowing stones came in multiple colors — red, peach, pink, mint, blue, and yellow. Right away, b...
The Problem Teens have developed an unusual habit lately of killing themselves and each other. A CDC study of grades 9-12 in 2019 showed that more than 15% of the students had made a suicide plan. Horrifying. And terribly embarrassing. If we can't stop our own children from killing themselves, is there anything we can do correctly? An increasingly dangerous technological future is going to require...
When you bumble around, take care not to stumble and take a tumble , or you might fumble , your cookie might crumble , and the pieces could end up all in a jumble ! Why do these six words ending in -umble all imply some kind of clumsy failure? This is common in language. Certain sounds can end up meaning a certain thing. For example, -ump usually means some kind of rounded mass: bump, clump, lump,...
The professor's voice droned. It was a consistent hum at the front of the class, like an air conditioner unit. Nagib had long since stopped parsing the individual words for their meaning. He was saying something about altruism. Nagib had already read the social psychology chapter of the textbook, and knew he didn't have to pay attention. But he still came to class, because if he didn't, he'd get l...
We face two major threats from AI: extinction and redundancy. We might get killed, and we might become obsolete. The first is a possibility, but the second is a guarantee. When it comes to AI extinction risk, nobody is even trying to stop it. Not really. It's easy to ignore the threat, since it's so far away, or it feels like it is. To instead focus on making sure AI doesn't say any swear words or...
I made my second board game. The first Desperate Gods board game was made by Wolfire Games (not me), and actually inspired the popular Tabletop Simulator on Steam. I loved it, and played it a lot. Eventually the servers went down, but fittingly someone created a Desperate Gods Remastered mod for Tabletop Simulator that preserves the feel of the original. I liked the original a lot, but it had prob...
I just watched the ridiculous ending of Game of Thrones again. They make Bran the Broken the king of Westeros. For eight seasons, we slowly build up a story, and then we throw out all of that last minute for an absurd twist ending, where Bran — maybe the least suitable candidate of any — becomes king. Sorry if these are spoilers, but also the final episodes themselves spoil the show, and you can't...
Do you struggle to tell good stories? I do. One thing I've learned recently is what a story even is. People think a story has to have plot, or conflict, and that these things are what makes up a story. I don't think this is true. I think a story is just any sequence of events that a person can learn from. Sometimes this involves conflict and plot. Other times not. Imagine your friend tells you the...
Writing is hard because I don't know who I am or how I'm supposed to sound. Every woman moans in bed the way women in their culture moan. Is there a "human" way to moan, stripped of all culture? I feel like it'd just be an awkward grunting noise, if anything. Everything is an affectation. I'm trying to impress you. I'm trying to be seen as someone who doesn't care if he impresses you. I'm someone ...
What kind of society allows scammers to take advantage of the elderly and the intellectually disabled? A cruel and selfish one. My cousin is intellectually disabled. He lost a lot of weight because he could no longer afford groceries. This is because he was being so mercilessly scammed by people online he couldn't eat. What kind of society allows scamming to be de facto legal? My ex girlfriend wen...
Respecting our elders is something we no longer do, because we know they're not better than us; they've just been alive longer. Why should they deserve more respect than anyone else? But respecting our elders was never something we were supposed to do for them. It was for us. To let them know the world would be looking to them for wisdom and guidance as they got older. To let them know they had to...
Mow regularly, but not too short. You have to leave room for a little wildness! After all, you can take the MAN out of the WILD, but you can't take the WILD out of the MAN. Water deeply and infrequently. This will make the grass rich and dark, like a jungle. Where is MY jungle? Where, for that matter, is MY TRIBE? Do we have too much tribalism, or not enough? The only tribe I get is a bunch of int...
This is a story of how, in trying to prove something about Hacker News, I ended up learning something about myself. But first, some foreshadowing: After my recent post about comment etiquette got zero comments, I was disappointed. I put more effort into it than the post before it, but the post floundered. The title was partly in Latin, so fair enough. I guess if it's written in Latin, it's probabl...
This post was part of an experiment. It was largely generated by AI, and does not reflect my views. Please see the post How I Tricked Hacker News and Made The Front Page with AI Slop for details! The reason it's so hard to get a programming job right now is because Big Tech caused it. It's not an accident. It's not the result of regular cycles of employment or the economy. For years, companies lik...
Wow, that sure was a great article/book/blog post/reddit post/essay you just read! Well... mostly. After reading it, you have some reservations. For example, the author might have said the phrase "everyone knows", but technically, not everyone knows! How can you enjoy an article if it's clearly wrong in some way? Don't worry! The author has linked to this list of caveats, which apply to the work y...
I saw this tweet recently: The guy lied to get meetings with VCs. As far as I can tell, this is the system operating exactly how it should, and I have really nothing to say about that. What I want to talk about is this popular response: Specifically, point #1. "People complain VCs don't take cold inbound. So don't complain if they try to." Do you see the problem? Rob Bailey is calling Bhavye Kheta...
In the competition between nature and nurture, nurture always dominates. Nurture is the winner. Debate settled. Nature is just DNA, which encodes for certain proteins. Given any configuration of DNA, we can in theory create an injection that suppresses the expression of the proteins we don't want and encodes for different proteins instead, overriding DNA entirely. Nurture wins. And if we aren’t al...
Georgism is a straightforward idea: the land should belong to everyone, and people who use land should pay a tax on the value of the land. Not on any property built on the land, just on the land itself. Since nobody created the land, it shouldn't be owned by one person. This approach would reduce inequality, stop real estate speculation that drives up rents, and promote better use of land. The mon...
Stoicism should feel counter-intuitive. If you've ever read a modern text on Stoicism, such as The Obstacle is the Way by Ryan Holiday, and found yourself nodding along to common-sense maxims and inspiring stories, you've been robbed. Stoicism is a powerful philosophy that can transform you. It can transform you because it's weird. That is, it's not already how you think. It's a very different way...
Close your eyes and imagine your dream video game. The game you would make if time and money was no option. (Imagine you want to make video games if you don't.) The kind of game you wish existed, but doesn't. Got it? Great. Now shrink that infinite deadline down to two weeks, and your budget down to zero. Welcome to game jams. Most game jams are just for fun. People kill themselves for days or wee...
I pushed on. I thought it must be my fault for not enjoying it, so I just kept going, hoping things would get better. But as I read, I kept noticing these weird linguistic constructions in the text. each one distracting me and slowing me down. "Such is my trait!", or "Do you hear? Do you hear?" Sentences that felt clunky and unnatural. "I was hoping to get round you, but you took up the right line...
The default structures you can find in Minecraft look like this: They are simple and unassuming. I've heard people complain about how shit these are and seen mods adding more impressive structures to the game: As sexy as this is, those unimpressive default structures are actually a gift. Imagine how demoralizing it would be to start a new Minecraft world and immediately see something more impressi...
Since my last post on living the quiet life, I’ve unfortunately started using TikTok. TikTok is designed to be addictive. Like everything these days, it has infinite scrolling. The videos are short, too, which shortens the biological reward cycle (did you know drugs with a faster route of administration are more addicting?). Tapping the screen to pause the video often makes me like the video by ac...
I recently heard someone ask why humans, compared to other animals, evolved such a tendency toward mental illness. With almost one in five Americans suffering from a mental illness, it’s easy to understand why an American could make such a mistake: to assume that mental illness is just a common fact of human life, and to think that we are hardwired for depression and anxiety. We aren’t, though. Th...
I stared up at the spire of steel, glass, and mediocrity. The Calgary office. I had called in sick my first week after the transfer, but now it was time to get to pretending to work. The revolving door churned through people like a blender full of shit. Dispirited, dreamless faces waited for the elevator. There was an indoor gym next to the elevator. The kind of purple, soulless gym that sold New ...
I pronounce some symbols when I'm programming. With the exception of the parentheses, number row symbols can each be pronounced reasonably in one syllable: !: bang @: at #: hash $: cash %: cent ^: hat &: and : star I think this is something some people will find inherently interesting and useful, whereas other people will ask, "what's the point?" I think this is probably due to a legitimate differ...
I recently redesigned my website. It was originally a static site generated by Zola and hosted on Netlify , which hosts static websites for free. After recently completing a Udemy Phoenix/Elixir course , I decided I wanted to redesign my website and do so using Phoenix and Elixir, to get some practice. This meant paying for a web server to host my application 😬 Fortunately, this was cheaper than ...
“Listen, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but I’m in a bit of a hurry, so I’m just gonna sneak past you here.” Tevid awkwardly shimmied between the radiant palace wall and the lolling, round, multi-eyed creature that was continually retching and vomiting all over the floor. Its many eyes seemed to be pleading with Tevid as he shuffled past, getting vomit on his fancy leather shoes. “Ugh. ...
Though most English sayings are fine, I've noticed that some commonly-used ones seem to just be wrong. Here are some I came up with. Opposites attract. No they don't. People are attracted to — and end up in relationships with — people who are similar to them in terms of personality, interests, etc., at least according to relationship science. The same goes for friendships. As far as I can tell, th...
The Earth is a sphere. We all know this. What we don't all know is that the Earth isn't a perfect sphere: it's slightly fatter at the equator because it's spinning. (This makes sense because of centrifugal force.) A sphere-like shape which is slightly flattened is called an oblate spheroid, so everyone who calls the Earth a sphere is wrong, yeah? Well, the diameter at the equator is only about 43 ...
I had woken up that day feeling strange. I was noticing things I wouldn’t normally notice, from stains on building walls to trash blowing in the wind. There was an electrical wire over the road, with three crows sitting on it. I don’t think I had ever noticed that line before, or those crows. I woke up that day feeling tired, having had some intense dream which I didn’t quite remember. It took all...
Call me arrogant, but I’d rather optimize my indoor environment than try to spend more time in the capricious outdoors. I think it’s defeatism to give up on improving our indoor spaces and resign ourselves to the fickle weather and seasons. If I was going to create an ideal environment for a human, I think there are several things I would include that we routinely fail to include in our homes and ...
The Public Health Agency of Canada defines mental health as follows: This is overcomplicated. It’s also wrong. How does mental health “respect the importance of social justice”? This definition does not match what people mean when they use the term “mental health”. A better, simpler definition could be: Dictionary.com gives an even better simple definition than my attempt: Why do we do this? I thi...
The Enchiridion is a short manual written by the ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus. Even though it was written almost 19 centuries ago, the wisdom in it is still as relevant today as ever. I’ve decided to rewrite the Enchiridion into plain English. I don’t speak Ancient Greek, so this isn’t a translation. Instead, it’s a paraphrasing of other translations a necessarily interpretive process...
I recently switched to Colemak . Colemak is an alternative keyboard layout for typing It only changes 17 keys compared to the normal QWERTY layout, so it should be faster to learn than something like Dvorak . It took me less than a day to be able to know where all of the keys are without having to look, but my typing speed was abysmal. Over a month after that, I was up to around 30-40 WPM . My usu...