Sam's L33t Journal

I finished reading Watership Down to Erica, reading to her over video call in the evenings while she was on her trip. Great book, I'm very glad that I got around to reading it. It is simultaneously:

• A fantasy story where the main fantastical conceit is "what if rabbits had mythology?"
• A war story centering around the Battle of Arnhem with the twist that the protagonists are rabbits.
• A Tolkein-esque story told in the style of something translated from another language, pieced together and recorded from an oral tradition. (And that in large part as an extremely elaborate setup for a climactic bit where one of the protagonists gets the last-minute "you could give up and join me" speech from the big bad and rejects the offer in a way that otherwise would not be getting past the censors in a book intended for children.)
• A book where prose description of flowers is a surprisingly high percentage by volume.

Definitely understand why it's a classic.

On a possibly-related (but definitely a pretty big jump of a tangent) note, one of the thing that's been bouncing around in my head is some of the discourse around wild-animal welfare, centering around this recent post arguing against beekeeping and responses like this. It's interesting, but personally I think that post has intuitions that are wildly off from mine. Bees' lives seem like they'd be full of stimuli that would be particularly pleasant and non-aversive for bees. They routinely store surpluses, which gives them flexibility about when they gather food. Kept bees lose some of that surplus, but seem to gain quite a lot in exchange for that, and compared to most domesticated animals they're uniquely able to just leave if conditions are bad. There was also some discussion arguing the post was emblematic of the pitfalls of negative utilitarianism. Seems like there are a lot of contexts where it's easy to add (or multiply) up pains and sorrows and decide it would be preferable to succumb to the call of the void. I was also reminded of this good but really odd sci-fi short story, which took me a while to re-find based on my vague recollection and I link to without further context.

Also, it is really pleasant to stop and watch bees harvest. I've definitely spent a lot of time doing that this year.

Sandy Island Camp was nice this year, though Melissa and Simon unfortunately had to punt mid-week after kid got an ear infection and had some spectacularly rough nights. Erica was very independent-minded about getting to activities by herself. I really enjoyed dancing with her at the camp dances. The weather was pretty good. Saw some interesting wildlife, including a pileated woodpecker and some extremely successful spiders.

I didn't get as much reading done as usual. Too much distraction. I did read two books:

Polostan by Neal Stephenson - It was all right, but felt much less substantial than a lot of Stephenson's other books, in part but not just because it's much shorter. It's meant to be the start of a series, so maybe the publishers persuaded him to split up what would've been a much longer book. If so, I think it probably suffers for it.

Connectome by Sebastian Seung - Pretty good popular science introduction to the study of neural connectivity. Though the book might be a bit out of date, as it is from 2012. I wonder if there's a good more recent take on the subject, and I wonder whether any light will be shed on that by analogy from some of the more recent AI neural net stuff (especially the work on AI interpretability).

On a related note to that second book, I also finished the animated TV series Pantheon. Really good, probably one of the best sci-fi shows in recent years (and it's in really good company, even among animated shows specifically). If you have a hard time with time-skips in stories, you'll have to hold onto your butts at the end of this one. But I think it justifies it, it's a story about the singularity and it's fitting that the epilogue feels like taking a gravitational assist past a black hole. The ending is poignant and hopeful and tragic, and the choice that the protagonist, Maddie, considers at the end is fascinating. (Also David is best dad.)

On another related subject, this essay, The Void, contemplating what's really at the center, conceptually, of these new AI chatbot models has been sticking with me. (Also worth reading the follow-up here.)

SGDQ is this week, so that's fun! Erica is heading out for grandparent time with Julie's parents for the next two weeks, starting tomorrow. A lot is going on.

Went home with Julie and Erica for Thanksgiving. Quick trip this time, but was great to see the family. Melissa's family was in town, too.

This year I am thankful that of all the terrors at humanity's doorstep, some of them have been put off so far, and some could continue to.

Best reading from this weekend is Noah Smith's post No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land, a really cogent takedown of (including nominally-"decolonial") ethnonatialism.

The latest political news is Joe Biden's blanket pardon of his son, Hunter Biden. It is sad that we have come to this, and despicable that Biden is reneging on his promises. Unlike Charles Kushner, the father of Trump's son-in-law who he pardoned for witness tampering and then nominated for an ambassadorship, Hunter Biden surely wouldn't have been prosecuted but for his association with the President in question. But say, maybe Biden should just go ahead and pardon the January 6 criminals himself at this point. Surely they are more worthy: After all, not only their prosecutions but also their crimes would not have happened but for Trump.

It was a warm day today, but windy, and it seems all the trees in Cambridge that were late to the party decided to shed all their leaves at once. Pretty, but seemed like enough sharp, swirling edges to be downright perilous.

I had a dentist appointment today, which went all right.

I have so many things to ramp up on at work. Emscripten is confusing. WebGPU is fun but graphics programming is always confusing. Another of my more senior teammates is leaving the team, moving on to another thing at Google that's a great fit for him, but I'll miss working with him. So much churn this year.

Other links:

My brother now has an Etsy store for his wildlife photography.

Bop Spotter (h/t SMTM)

Cargo airships might be a big deal soon. Nifty if it pans out.

This past weekend we took Erica to the Boston MFA. She didn't have as much patience for exploring the galleries as I would have liked, but was very interested in the possibility of art classes. Erica had her birthday party at the climbing gym the previous weekend, which was fun.

Other stuff has been a lot.

So instead of talking about any of that, I'd like to talk about Awesome Games Done Quick, which was a few weeks ago, but was a real highlight then and since. It was full of great stuff: A run of Tunic, a charming game where the speedrun glitches seem like just more of the game's secrets. Super Mario 64 on the drums. An NES game originally controlled with R.O.B. instead controlled with D.O.G. A run of Bluey: The Videogame (hooray!). An even faster Super Metroid TAS. A Mario Maker 2 glitch showcase featuring a favorite streamer. One quarter's worth of Arkanoid. It's a week long marathon so obviously that's not the half of it, there's a lot to enjoy in the full playlist.

Last weekend was warm, but by mid-week trick-or-treating it was getting chilly, to the point that I was getting out my winter jacket and putting on the longjohns (winter coziness tech that's a go-to for me from like November to May). But then this weekend was pretty warm again.

Saturday, I took Erica climbing while Julie went for a bike ride. Played some Mario Wonder in the morning. In the evening, went on a date with Julie to Oak Bistro in Inman while Erica spent some time with Mary at home.

Today, Julie took Erica to see the Frozen stage play, while I had a quiet day.

I tried to write a post for my essay blog, but things didn't really come together. But have some interesting links that have been rattling around my head for a few days:

• An interesting review of the book Going Infinite, about about-to-be-jailed fraudster SBF
• "The Talk: a brief explanation of sexual dimorphism", about why all complex organisms spend so much effort to pass on only half of their genes, which goes beyond the first-take explanation about the downsides of cloning

I'm tired. Tomorrow we're going to Cleveland before Thanksgiving, assuming nothing last-minute derails our plan.

Last weekend I took kid to the ICA, which was fun. They have a youth membership now, where one adult gets in free.

It's been a quiet week at work with many people out. And I took off today because Erica has a half-day before Thanksgiving break.

I've joined the Better Boston Mastodon. Will see if that turns out to be fun. I don't know if more or less of a focus on a specific community-of-interest makes for a better Mastodon server (for me in particular or in general).

Twitter chaos continues. Not that the site will necessarily fall over immediately, but it sounds like the company is very much in trouble revenue-wise and it's hard for me to imagine just how bad the effect of ~75% attrition would be at a company doing large-scale software infrastructure. And this is with the context of just how bad much smaller levels of churn can be for complex software projects. It's possible that Musk is a good front-man (or maybe "con-"), but the sort of rocket-engine-like CEO where there needs to be a layer of middle-management bureaucracy very focused on directing that energy and shielding the rest of the company. And, in some cases, misdirecting the CEO into thinking that's not what's going on. Musk's Twitter doesn't have that, obviously.

Much other news remains terrible. I'm sure I had some coherent thoughts at some point.

The essays in the first edition of Asterisk are very interesting. Scott Alexander of Astral Codex Ten (and formerly Slate Star Codex) fame did one on the science and psychology of wine expertise. But I was most interested by this article on the history of nuclear (de)escalation.

The news this week has me tremendously stressed. Russia is attempting to conquer a country the US (and of course the Russians themselves, not to neglect that aspect) guaranteed security in exchange for giving up possession of Soviet nuclear weapons. This is a humanitarian crisis and a great crime in its immediate consequences, but it's also the end of the current post-Soviet order, maybe post-WWII-order. The paradox of mutually assured destruction seems to be that the more certain the thread of mutual destruction is to deter crossing some specific clear line, the more irrelevant it is to deterring anything before that point. (If it turns out later that the exact location of the line is actually ambiguous, that's even worse.)

Texas is threatening to split up families as part of a monstrous attempt to disappear trans children. Paul Farmer, the founder of Partners in Health who worked tirelessly to help some of the world's poorest people, died suddenly at the age of 62.

The CDC today changed their mask guidelines, moving the emphasis further from containing COVID and limiting the suggestion for indoor mask mandates to the highest of three categories. Cambridge mask mandate is scheduled to end March 12. Somerville's is set to be reconsidered starting March 3 if test positive rate is lower than 1%, but it has not gotten that low yet (and has been moving up a hair).

I wish I had a better idea of the properties of the omicron BA.2 subvariant (given my assumption that we didn't get that one).

It seems like we're heading into the world where lots of people get COVID every year, and it's "only" about twice as bad as the flu in terms of immediate consequences. Except that's really horrifically bad for quite a lot of people, and we don't yet know the long-term consequences of COVID infection in general and repeated reinfection in particular, given that COVID seems to sometimes cause long-term neurological and cardiovascular damage.

I keep meaning to write, I keep meaning to write, I keep meaning to write...

So here comes a flood of unrelated things.

Thanksgiving came and went. I made ~seven meals worth of food for the occasion. Bought gravy, green bean casserole, a stuffed turkey breast roast (to cook at home), small pies (pumpkin, apple, and pecan from Mariposa), and ice cream (cinnamon and maple walnut from Gracie's). My parents sent some cranberry chutney (my Thanksgiving fave). I made mashed potatoes (with buttermilk and celeriac puree), sweet potato casserole (with chopped dates and pecans and cultured butter and egg, topped with brown sugar and more pecans and marshmallows), buttermilk biscuits, honey-butter, cranberry sauce, and maple whipped cream. I did most of the food prep in advance so that the day of was just cooking the turkey and making sure things were ready at approximately the same time. Start cooking after breakfast, have a relaxing midday dinner, put off dessert until the late afternoon to the point where you're basically having a full dinner's worth of pie, that's the way to go! Then 3-5 days of leftovers, adding items as necessary to round things out (no soup this year, but I did make leftovers sandwiches and a sort of turkey stroganoff).

I spent some time this week watching various bits of testimony and the prosecution's closing statements from the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial, and the thing that struck me was what a relatively straightforward application of the law to the facts the verdict seemed to be. The felony assault statute in question didn't require intent or injury, just action that would reasonably cause someone to fear serious injury. The self-defense law and jurisprudence in question didn't allow someone to claim self-defensive in the midst of committing a felony. And the citizen's arrest statute that was in place at the time required "immediate knowledge" of someone committing a crime (not just vague suspicion that they'd maybe done something at some point) to justify detaining them by force (and even then only reasonable force).

Striking to compare that to what a convoluted process it was to actually get the law to be applied. (The first of three prosecutors to look at the case has now been criminally indicted for obstructing it, which is really unusual!)

And then in the news this week there's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the case that's going to overturn Roe, catapulting the country into a new political era that's going to be weirder than people expect (even given the expectation that it's going to be weirder etc.). I guess I can't rule out the whole range of outcomes, but I don't think "approximately uphold the central etc. of Roe/Casey etc." has the votes. "Zygotes have the same suite of constitutional rights as human adults" probably doesn't either (maybe three). But I think there's a really broad set of plausible outcomes in between. History in the making. :-/

Kid got her second COVID vaccine. Was much more crowded at the vaccine center than for the first one, we had to wait in line for about 90 minutes. The new variant will surely be here soon. We're looking forward to traveling for the holidays for the first time in a long time. We'll see we'll see we'll see.

On my mind today: This video essay about MrBeast's latest large-scale YouTube production. The guy is an entertainer of note for sure, a bit of a marketing genius.

Eristic improvements: Recognizing more words by sight, improved arithmetic skills, sounding out words some (in both directions).

Pretty dead this week. Eris has apparently been under more stress than usual for reasons I don't fully understand, but it's meant a lot of late nights in the past week and a few nights where I didn't get a four-hour block and was consequently wrecked. She's been extra particular and tempestuous. My parents, having heard of my plight, are sending me parenting books, which I expected I'd read a lot of before I became a parent.

I'm worried about the COVID numbers. Estimated infection rate is rising, and hasn't been this high on the way up since March 2020. It could be that vaccination means that speed of outbreak is not a crisis any more, but I'm worried that delta variant won't be the worst that we see. Would be nice if there isn't a high prevalence when Eris starts kindergarten in the fall. Pediatric vaccines this fall seem unlikely. The Tokyo Olympics look like they'll be interesting.

Europe is dealing with historic floods.

I enjoyed watching some of the end of SGDQ last weekend. The best part, I thought, was this blindfolded run of Mario 64. This one was a 70-star run, that is, a normal completion of the game as opposed to finding tricky ways of circumventing barriers to allow skipping huge chunks. Eris was also fascinated.

My friend kihou has launched a Kickstarter for their surreal-art-card TTRPG, Dreampunk. Check it out if you like improv storytelling, visually-inspired narrative games like Dixit, indie TTRPGS, and surrealism. Looks sweet!