faun @faun@merveilles.town

Forgot #PodcastRec

Really good discussion of tech/economy timelines connected to climate change https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2019/09/16/64-ramez-naam-on-renewable-energy-and-an-optimistic-future/

If you want to know where to stick the lever that might really move things, there's a lot of relevant information here.

https://www.wnycstudios.org/story/whats-left-when-youre-right
#PodcastRec

Sue reminds me of me. A compulsion to dig at peoples' incongruities, an unshakeable faith- often misplaced- that all can be fixed. But what if we're right?

I thought I knew how to `iterate the last variables over every combination of distinct points` but irl it took all day and I had to break it down into probably inefficient abstract pieces to understand what I was doing and I hate when programming is like this
https://gist.github.com/makoConstruct/d558eb773683042f668212013bebeefa

The runtime of these queries is going to scale at like pow(sq(dimensions.x*dimensions.y), number_of_variables) so I hope I never decide the game needs to have grids bigger than 4x4
#TheWorkshop

For example: Voting is generally anonymous. If it weren't, we could then be targeted by intimidation/sell our votes, we wouldn't vote in our political interest as much; the incentives would be messed with by external factors, the design would fail

He seems to be right about everything, even if he did wound my civic ideals twice. The primary injury: 🗡️ against radical transparency: It's easier to design civic systems when you can isolate the meaning of an action. If all actions are publicly recorded, you basically can't know much about what they're going to mean any more because they're now (if weakly) causally entangled with everything else

Extremely good interview with vitalik buterin (ethereum creator) https://80000hours.org/podcast/episodes/vitalik-buterin-new-ways-to-fund-public-goods/
His civic reasoning seem consistently extremely lucid. I'd like to hear his explanation of why he's so vehemently dismissive of bitcoin boosters' opposition to inflation. I bet it'll be good.

Perhaps young people have The Good Politics™ because young people are behind a moral veil. They do not know who they are going to be, so the powerful to be may still be inclined to choose policies that work for the disempowered.

Very inspired by this
https://research.swtch.com/help.pdf
Minimalist unifying of code and UI

The depiction of William of Occam that people pass around is so fucking aesthetic.

Maybe we should just call solomonoff's razor "true form of occam's razor" to continue honouring him

the "mystery forest databank" is a device that a member of the flightcult syndicate found in an abandoned hobo shelter in a forest. It doesn't use any interface protocols that anyone within the circle has ever seen. Not one word of it will be spoken to any outsiders until flightcult's secret keepers decrypted its contents and figured out where it came from.

There is a very real chance it belonged to a spy from one of the other continents.

Haha wow I wrote "ahell" instead of "shell"

I'll just pretend that the syndicate's programmers are so overworked and their users are so understanding that it is never going to be fixed, also, everyone thinks it's funny and frequently refers to the computers as "a hell".

It occurred to me that it was important that the player has a sense of space/location, even if I don't want to deal with any of the design or usability constraints physical space imposes.

I was initially planning to have crycog use a normal-ass file tree for the level select/overworld, but last night this popped into my head and refused to leave.

I can't work on it today (or this month), but at least I can draw it out.

I think it'll control like... you'd slide up and down and if you switch over the vertical median of the slide control it activates the thing you're next to/switches path. That might turn out to feel bad though. Really eager to test it.

(The joke is that this is a summary of like a full 30% of my political ideology right now)

If someone surveilles you just surveille them back.

A small design doc for elements of a card-battle rpg about planning journeys and knowing the land
https://reading.supply/@faun/design-document-for-a-card-rpg-about-planning-journeys-and-knowing-the-land-7AgfPs