Adventures in Claude
I added Bob Monsour’s blog to the Adventures in Claude community yesterday. The community runs on Discourse - a self-hosted forum on a DigitalOcean droplet - and I set up RSS syndication a few weeks ago so that members’ blog posts automatically appear as topics in a “Member Blogs” category. I...
Adventures in Claude
I’ve been writing Adventures in Claude as a solo dev diary — documenting what it’s like to build real software with Claude Code as your primary collaborator. But the most interesting conversations about this stuff have been happening in DMs, email threads, and random encounters with other people...
Zack M. Davis
In a busy, busy world, there's so much to read that no one could possibly keep up with it all. You can't not prioritize what you pay attention to and (even more so) what you respond to. Everyone and her dog tells herself a story that she wants to pay …
Zack M. Davis
In "Truth or Dare", Duncan Sabien articulates a phenomenon in which expectations of good or bad behavior can become self-fulfilling: people who expect to be exploited and feel the need to put up defenses both elicit and get sorted into a Dark World where exploitation is likely and defenses are …
Zack M. Davis
Scott Garrabrant gives a number of examples to illustrate that "Yes Requires the Possibility of No". We can understand the principle in terms of information theory. Consider the answer to a yes-or-no question as a binary random variable. The "amount of information" associated with a random...
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) One of the most underrated essays in the post-Sequences era of Eliezer Yudkowsky's corpus is "Four Layers of Intellectual Conversation". The degree to which this piece of wisdom has fallen into tragic neglect in these dark ages of the 2020s may be related to...
philipjkerr
Much of the language we use is metaphorical. These metaphors both shape and reflect the way we think. Often, as in the preceding sentence, they give agency (a human attribute) to non-human entities, they give architectural form to abstractions and make them appear visible. We struggle to function...
philipjkerr
If you were watching the 2024 Qatar World Cup, you may have noticed the brand Byju’s, among the list of official corporate sponsors alongside Visa, Adidas, Coca Cola and McDonald’s. You may have also noticed the pitch-side adverts for Byju’s, which flipped to read ‘The Future of Learning’. You may...
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) Rob Bensinger argues that "ITT-passing and civility are good; 'charity' is bad; steelmanning is niche". The ITT—Ideological Turing Test—is an exercise in which one attempts to present one's interlocutor's views as persuasively as the interlocutor themselves...
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) I've been trying to avoid the terms "good faith" and "bad faith". I'm suspicious that most people who have picked up the phrase "bad faith" from hearing it used, don't actually know what it means—and maybe, that the thing it does mean doesn't carve …
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) Someone once told me that they thought I acted like refusing to employ the bare minimum of social grace was a virtue, and that this was bad. (I'm paraphrasing; they actually used a different word that starts with b.) I definitely don't want to say …
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) Selfishness and altruism are positively correlated within individuals, for the obvious reason. —@InstanceOfClass I. An unfortunate obstacle to appreciating the work of Ayn Rand (as someone who adores the "sense of life" portrayed in Rand's fiction, while...
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) Sometimes, when someone is arguing for some proposition, their interlocutor will reply that the speaker's choice of arguments or tone wouldn't be effective at persuading some third party. This would seem to be an odd change of topic. If I was arguing for...
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) Imagine being a student of physics, and coming across a blog post proposing a list of guidelines for "physicist motors"—motor designs informed by the knowledge of physicists, unlike ordinary motors. Even if most of the things on the list seemed like sensible...
Zack M. Davis
(originally published at Less Wrong) Honest rational agents should never agree to disagree. This idea is formalized in Aumann's agreement theorem and its various extensions (we can't foresee to disagree, uncommon priors require origin disputes, complexity bounds, &c.), but even without the...
Logan
Discourse is a new generation discussion forum. I found that Discourse is very suitable for personal note taking. One notable feature of Discourse is that the users can focus on conversations. Besides, it supports Markdown as the message markup language. This is the reason why I like it very...
David Stark
This is one of those maybe-stating-the-obvious things, but I've noticed that people are using the word "racism" to mean two different things. Some use it in the narrow sense of "racial prejudice". A person is racist, or is a racist, because they believe that one race (usually theirs) is better or...
David Stark
I've been thinking about a useful categorization of what online forums are for: discussion, support or action. In a discussion forum, you try to figure out things about the world: ideas, problems, etc. For example, you might discuss whether squirrels are stealing everyone's TV remotes. In a...