# Fuseki.net

> A personal site of essays, reviews, and explorations across science fiction,
> fantasy, board games, software, music, aesthetics, and more.

## About

Fuseki.net hosts 225 articles on diverse topics.
"Fuseki" is a Go (board game) term for opening strategy — the site is named
for the idea of setting the stage before diving deep.

All content is freely readable by humans, search engines, and AI systems.
There are no paywalls, no login requirements, and no restrictions on crawling.

## Structure

- Homepage: https://fuseki.net/
- Article index: https://fuseki.net/all
- Full content for LLMs: https://fuseki.net/llms-full.txt
- Atom feed (full text, paginated): https://fuseki.net/feed.xml
- Sitemap: https://fuseki.net/sitemap.xml
- Articles live at: https://fuseki.net/<slug>
- Tag pages at: https://fuseki.net/tags/<tag-slug>

## Topics

1491, 1939 movies, 1948 books, 1984, 1988 books, 1989 books, 2001 books, 2002 books, 2005 books, 2006 books, 2007 reviews, 2008 books, 2009 books, 2011 books, 2015 stories, 2017 books, 2018 books, 2020 books, 2020 events, USA, ability testing, about, activities, advertisement, africa, ai, ai image generation targets, ai images, ai output, ai projects, alien planets, aliens, amazon, analysis, animals, anki, anti-socialism, appetite, architecture, arguments, ... (445 total)

## Articles

### [11-22-63 by Stephen King](https://fuseki.net/112263-by-Stephen-King)

Tags: 2011 books, assassination, books, people, sf, stephen king, time travel

## It's juicy

Let's see, time traveling back to prevent the JFK assassination. This is gonna be great. I have total confidence that mature Stephen King will handle this well.

## New stuff

## Time Travel is weird

The fact that time travel doesn't actually make sense isn't just something you can sweep under the rug. It really, really doesn't make sense, especially this kind where you can "change" the past. That not making sense isn't just human limitations - it actually doesn't make sense and can't be made to make sense. But luckily we can just ignore that part, by not letting oneself think through the consequences.

## Verdict

The middle is kind of long and nostalgic, the end is ok. The beginning and the setup is the best part, as usual for a King book. It does turn into SF at the end, there, and it's handled pretty well. King is the opposite of authors who drain all mystery out of a story. I was kind of disappointed nobody else was really involved with the assassination.

## Also

Why doesn't the hero just write a bunch of letters containing interesting, useful stuff, and send them around?

In general when people time travel, if they know they are going back, they should definitely prepare lots of letters to mail when they get there. Tell people the location of the dead sea scrolls even earlier, and places other lost documents were held or were decaying. There are lots of thousand year old books which managed to survive until 1800, but then decayed just in the last 5 years before being examined.

It'd also be good to tell scientists about the locations of tombs which were raided, so they could get there earlier.

---

### [1491, by Charles C. Mann](https://fuseki.net/1491-by-Charles-C-Mann)

Tags: 1491, 2005 books, authors, book reviews, books, charles mann, history, ideas, nonfiction, people

I really liked it. It is really interesting to think of what would have happened in the new world, if the old world had never come along. 2000 years later, would they have looked back on the poets and philosophers that existed at the time the way we look back on early greeks? We only have a sample of the types of thoughts they were thinking - almost all of it was burned up and destroyed before anything could be understood. So it's likely that their best thinkers who were around in 1400 have left nothing behind today.

---

### [1984 part 2](https://fuseki.net/1984-part-2)

Tags: 1948 books, 1984, aliens, book reviews, books, george orwell, ideas, politics, sf, society

After standardizing Newspeak and totally crushing resistance, life floats on for unknown thousands of years. Until aliens arrive. Nobody knows what to make of them at first; interpretations of what is happening ripple through society but keep getting revised.

The view that belief & control of information can control reality just keeps getting its ass kicked by the aliens & their genuinely better technology, weapons, & organization systems. They're just one step ahead, blowing up the party members. Even when they wipe out all inner party members, the outer party members just keep doing the same old thing.

*Eventually* the kind-hearted aliens figure out what happened and try to teach people some logic, and the true meaning of history. But it doesn't take.

In memory of Earth's past and the promise it once held (which they dug up and mourned), the aliens decide there's only one thing to do - they scrub the face of the earth of all humans & their relics, and set up a few camps of only babies, selected for diversity and with a few selected genetic modifications predisposing them to rationality, and a deeply hatred for authority, and plop them down in the forest with robots set up to feed them for a few generations until they figure out how to hunt.

### Test

---

### [70 Minute Star Wars Review](https://fuseki.net/70-Minute-Star-Wars-Review)

Tags: media, movies, reviews, sf, youtube

The guy at [Redletter Media](http://redlettermedia.com) has made a 70 minute review of *The Phantom Menace*

It is really, really great.

It goes over the many, many ways that the phantom menace is horrible.

Warning: His serial killer thing isn't that good, just skip it.

The reviews of the other movies are good, and the reviews of star trek are great too.

Also, their ~25 episode web series thing is good, too.

---

### [90s homepage creation software](https://fuseki.net/90s-homepage-creation-software)

Tags: github, internet, programming, projects

This website is generated and updated by this code:

* <http://github.com/ernop/90s-homepage>

### Features

* Edit articles
* Publish static files of the articles
* Upload images
* Add images to a page

### Technical description

* C# dotnetcore application
* db: Sqlite
* backend: nginx
* Configuration: nearly none
* Development: Visual Studio

### How it works

* Edit Articles
* When done, 'publish'
* Click "publish all"
* This generates a bunch of static files and syncs them to a folder exposed to a web server
* Done

### Goals

* Minimal effort editing
* Non-time-based articles

#### Conceptual Goal

* For a given famous idea person's twitter, rather than having thousands of sequential tweets in a list, have them as a cloud with related tweets (through tags) naturally linking to each other.
* For a single person, it's equivalent to twitter except that each tweet would fit into a large idea space where closeness implies relatedness
* For multiple people, you'd jump between websites.

### Soon TODO:

* starring of articles? But maybe just a tag "todo" is enough.

### TODO

* https support
* keyboard shortcuts for edit
* sorting by recency in table
* right-aligned images / text flowing around images
* mobile view
* Better image formatting
* Better default CSS
* Weigh autogenerated links according to link rarity, not number
* Various fancy highlighting things for js - when you hover tag X, other instances of it subtly are highlighted
* Can I add search easily? Or just add a "search on google" form to every page with +site:host.com
* All tags list
* RSS feed of new/changed articles
* Display edit/creation date
* Versioning/history
* Comments for members
* Genericize it and have a complete installation flow - maybe too much
* No links on single-instance tags
* Tag autocompletion
* WYSIWYG editing
* internal link autocomplete while editing
* Detection of dead internal links
* Image thumbnail creation / image inlining properties
* Random page button - how to do in pure js?
* Force normalize everything
* Force lowercase all tags
* Existing tag deduplication - one-time pass
* Port over leela zero analysis stuff from twitter
* auto-suggest tags based on article contents? Some kind of similarity measure? So you'd have "have you considered adding these tags" in addition to autocomplete for tags
* Some discontinuity in how I render articles between admin view and published view. How to structure that so that changes would show up identically between them? Mainly for related articles view.
* link backs from admin view of an article to "view live"
* publish "dirty" module - when edit, set "needs publishing" and clear it when published. Also views/filters for "you are about to publish these changes"
* Favicon
* What does a full CD look like, and do I even want it? Check in to git, and have git actions publish to the site? That would be kind of cool but not actually save much time.

### Bigger extensions

* Browser plugin / program. Screenshot => upload image => inline it in draft and visit page.
* ultimate way to copy content and comment on it, with links
* Also post to twitter automatically
* Autogenerated tags based on content
* Consume someone's twitter feed and generate a 90s homepage idea cloud with tags for it. i.e. for Taleb you'd have a dense set of ideas with autolinks to related ideas.
* Retweets/replies would be separate, and would go to someone else's ideal cloud.

### Done

* distinguish clicked links

---

### [A False Sense of Being able to Separate Truth from Fiction](https://fuseki.net/A-False-Sense-of-Being-able-to-Separate-Truth-from-Fiction)

Tags: censorship, china, influence

Even when sources of information are *known* to be biased and untruthful, people still insist that they can separate out the truth from the lies.

I don't believe this is possible. The people controlling what is provided to you are smart enough to set it up to make you fall for it.

There is lots of research that people are extremely bad at ignoring influences.

There are studies where the researcher will show a cake to the subject, and then will roll some dice, and then ask the subject "is the weight of the cake more or less than the number on the dice?" Then, they ask them to estimate the true weight. People's guesses are *way* closer to the *random* number on the dice than they should be (way closer than in control groups where no dice were rolled)

So when you hear a news report from a known deceptive source, and try to figure out what the truth is, what makes you think you are not going to be anchored to what the report said? It's already been shown that people are not able to resist even known false, irrelevant information. So why do you think you will be able to resist it better? Especially when it's designed directly for you?

## Chinese university students

When I talk to Chinese university students, they usually claim to be able to figure out the truth from news reports they know are not exactly true. I don't believe they can actually do it - but making them think they can outsmart the news is part of the plan.

---

### [A Real Reality Show I'd Like to Watch](https://fuseki.net/A-Real-Reality-Show-Id-Like-to-Watch)

Tags: fan versions, freedom, human nature, humanity, ideas, people, reality tv, tv

I'd like to see the way people act, in a real, isolated, natural but tough environment, away from all technology, with verified realness of the people and verified editing.

### Visitor Selection

Certified random selection - anyone interested needs to show up on a certain day, and there's be a verified, truthfully random selection process. There may be some pre-screening, but it can't reduce the random applicant pool to less than 10% of total applicants. It just screens out people with medical problems, criminal past, etc. There'd be no carefully selected representatives of various groups - it's really a random sample of the interested population.

There are be 20 or so people altogether, and nobody would get kicked out once the thing started. They have to stay for a year, and if they make it to the end, they get 100k. If they leave early they get 30k or so. They can leave at any time, by walking out (a process which would take some time - the first few hours of it would be on cam & it would be revokable anytime up to the threshold.)

### Location

A place with nature, not too hot or cold - an island, or a mesa, etc.

### Cameras

There are be hundreds of cameras and mics around everywhere. The feeds are running 24/7, and are all be available online.

### The Environment

The contestants are able to survive, barely, without doing any work, but the food's bad, and it's cold etc. Food is airdropped in, along with a few supplies. But basically, they're on their own. They need to make their own shelter, clothes, etc.

### What would they do?

I really want to know what a bunch of random people would do all day. How nice would they make their houses? What'd they spend the long days working on? Singing? Telling stories? Complaining? Writing? Playing music? What sports and games would they make up without traditional balls or fields?

### Entertainment

What would they talk to each other about? They would reinvent the lifestyle humans had for thousands of years, and have only recently forgotten.

It'd also be interesting seeing the dynamics and relationships between people.

What would happen if there was someone who didn't speak very good english? what if they had skills that nobody else had? What if there were a gender imbalance?

### Violence

What about law & order? Would they come up with a justice system? For experimental purposes it would be really nice to include this as a variable, but it's probably not viable legally or morally. Seeing the development of a state in real-time would be amazing though; first norms would develop, then the first accusation, trial, and implementation of justice.

### The Show

Since the entire raw footage is available online, any fan could make their own version of the show, focusing on the people they were interested in. Someone might make one just about the evening campfire - and you could watch 5 minutes of it for every day they were there, and see the progression - changing moods, relationships, and comments. See the relationships grow or fade. Or someone might focus on how they build things, the survivalist version - what tools they made, plants they found, how they hunted etc. A third version might just be about romance, significant looks between people, etc.

There could be a conventional, official version too, which'd be general, and would lead people into liking certain characters & show them what was available.

### End

I think this show would be way, way more interesting than contrived reality shows. We'd learn about humanity and real human nature.

---

### [A Transcendent Language Experience](https://fuseki.net/A-Transcendent-Language-Experience)

Tags: anki, flash cards, language, learning, psychology

* For a language you are intermediate level with, where you definitely couldn't understand a tv show in.
* Get the subtitles file for an episode of the show.
* Convert them to flash cards.
* Memorize them all - understand all of the grammar and words.
* Watch the show.
* Be completely amazed to temporarily be an utterly fluent listener of the language.
* Watch the next episode and be shocked again at how hard it is to understand.

The feeling of just getting, deeply, everything people are saying, is one most language students never receive; this puts you in that place for a while. The feeling of the meaning of everything they're saying, sinking directly in, triggering your memory and understanding, is just amazing.

---

### [A big difference between go and chess](https://fuseki.net/A-big-difference-between-go-and-chess)

Tags: chess, game variants, games, go, ideas

### Check

There is nothing analogous to check in go. Go has "atari" which has some similarities, and is usually answered, but not always. The major difference is that in go you can reply to an atari with a counter atari. If someone threatens a 10 point move, you can threaten a 20 point move.

The same thing applies in chess; if someone attacks a piece with a pawn you can interpose an attack on their queen before responding to the original attack.

However, when it comes to the king you can't reply to a check by attacking their king; they would take your king first and win the game.

#### A more go-like Chess Variant

Chess would be more go-like if it was played winner take all - whoever had the last piece standing would win. So the king would just be another fighting piece, and the game would be won by killing all your opponents pieces. This would reduce the drama somewhat since there would be no amazing checkmates. But there would still be lots of amazing move sequences.

#### A more chess-like Go Variant?

The first stone played is your "king" and if you lose that stone, you lose the game. Openings would be almost the same, except all of the variations where you sacrifice one particular stone are forbidden. This is similar to chess - when the king isn't involved, sacrifice variations are ok, but when the king is playing they aren't.

This could actually be interesting. If you absolutely cannot sacrifice one of your stones in a corner, what josekis are still available to you?

The problem with this is that once the stone was safe, it would basically be invulnerable. The opening might feature some extremely dangerous josekis, but after 50 moves it would be rare for this stone to be in danger. This is unlike chess where usually the king gets fairly safe in the middle game, but towards the end both sides nearly always have their king defenses broken down pretty badly, and both sides are just barely hanging on.

---

### [A response to a tweet from QC on What is CEV, Hanson's dreamtime, Yudkowskianism](https://fuseki.net/A-response-to-a-tweet-from-QC-on-What-is-CEV-Hansons-dreamtime-Yudkowskianism)

Tags: dream-time, lesswrong, philosophy, qc, rationality, robin hanson, transhumanism, twitter, yudkowsky

{{tweet:https://x.com/QiaochuYuan/status/2080097262840242365}}

i think of it as finding a belief system which others would eventually align to after enough time exploring mind-design. yud's axiom might be that it exists, or that it could exist, and we should try to self-modify to reach some better form (so that we survive, thrive, and wouldn't be  hypocritical). to get the right to judge, we should live in their shoes; so we should fairly explore nearby mind-space for better selves, negotiate w/alternate religion/life exp/belief versions of ourselves (or of ais), which self-modification & transhumanism allows, and then see if there's anything we can mostly agree on. 

ofc there are some mind designs/upbringings/cultures which are totally locked in; but they're usually arbitrary (insisting on some fixed number of gods or identity of god, all different from each other) so they cancel

the remaining "mind designs which are reachable" is where we want to be, within the set which also survives. i.e. don't do non-evolutionary stable things, don't annihilate your own existence

the experimental period when this happens is Hanson's dreamtime. the longer it is, the more aligned beings might get. Like, I'd have time to test if "me, but raised buddhist and then spending a long time learning all kinds of things & having life experience", plus me the christian, the muslim, the atheist, and a million more, could agree on anything. Yud's axiom is that they would be able to build up trust over time & iterated self-modification and experiencing the other's life realize that there may useful compromises or improvements. just like me, but whose coffee addition is optional, is a better version, and a majority of me would ship that. by iterated self-modification me, a klingon, a high-tech bonobo sex addict etc could all come to a place of agreement about how to live and survive

it'd be obvious we could disregard individuals who get stuck into random specific cult; from the outside it's all the same - if you raise someone intensely enough they never break away; but there are a million such, all with different lore, and they all cancel. But is there a center, where mutual appreciation can happen? a kind of mental ecumenism

those guys would negotiate about how we'll design a mind, body, belief and motivation system, which still of course would have free axes, but would cover all common states which could recognize this as the way to be. so we're expanding the common ground beyond math, physics, basic morality, more and more, finding a large, dominating area where anyone in it, wants to stay in it, yet can tolerate variation in it. become that. also don't get weak or give up

so, me without the hatred for some food I caught while growing up: that me is more aligned to the center. this but on a mental and physical level, also actually tested in battle

in a short dreamtime less of this will have happened so beings will be more themselves, still. they won't have honed in at all. normal feature of the state of optimizations within large vs small ponds

---

### [A restaurant which prepares the perfect dish for you](https://fuseki.net/A-restaurant-which-prepares-the-perfect-dish-for-you)

Tags: appetite, evolution, food, ideas, nutrition

There should be a restaurant which

1. When you make a reservation, you also submit some DNA. They analyze it to figure out what your taste system is like - are you a supertaster, exactly what tastes you favor. Plus, they look at gene activation to see what particular things are going on with you lately. (i.e. the same way that there isn't a genetic difference between a caterpillar and a butterfly; it's just down to gene expression)
2. When you walk in the door, they take a blood test. They analyze what type of nutrients you have floating around your bloodstream, what you are low/high in. They also use it to figure out what you might be craving.
3. Then they create a meal which fits perfectly with their estimation of both what you need, and what would taste the best to you.
4. alternatively they would give you a drug which would create a lot of the enzymes you have when extremely hungry or thirsty - so that the food would taste even better.
5. alternatively, before you come in, after analyzing your DNA they send you a gene modification kit which will change your response to particular foods. So when you taste their food, it will be like discovering a new color - you will have a new sensitivity to a type of taste which has never existed before.

---

### [A sound recording device I want](https://fuseki.net/A-sound-recording-device-I-want)

Tags: complaining, devices, ideas, requests, sounds

I want a device which would continuously record the last 5 minutes of sound. Things older than 5 minutes would be deleted, and the thing can could be left on all the time.

There would be a button: when you pushed it, it would save the *last* 5 minutes, plus continue to record until you pushed it again.

This way, if something interesting were to happen, you would not have to rush to begin recording - you would just have to lazily push the button, and you would be able to capture the entire beginning of the thing, too.

This feature could be called "lazy recording"

It would be useful for video, too. Just record all the time, and let it auto-delete if nothing interesting happened. Without this feature, the only alternative is to record everything, but that is just too much of a pain to edit.

## Screen Recording

I'd like to have this on the computer, too. Then when I find myself in a situation, I would be able to document it from the beginning and figure out how I got there.

---

### [A system for symbolic house numbers](https://fuseki.net/A-system-for-symbolic-house-numbers)

Tags: animals, art, customs, ideas, numerology, society, symbolism

This is an alternative suggestion for a symbolic system of house numbering. Instead of putting the numbers directly, animals would be used to replace each digit, according
to the chart below:

0. mystical (hippogriff, pegasus, unicorn)
1. lion
2. monkey
3. elephant / bear
4. cat
5. dog
6. fish / frog / plant
7. bird
8. bull / horse / zebra
9. crab / ant / other

It would sort of be like a secret code - a set of stone statues, garden gnomes, patterns, hedges etc. could all have additional meaning. Companies could commission statues of their representative animals in unique materials & positions. There would be an interesting market for these particular types of statues, as well as unique extensions / alternate digits. For a number like 123, you could have a lion & a monkey statue, next to an elephant statue - or you could break it up the other way.

## Value

Injecting more symbolism into daily life.

---

### [A truck with a sticker in bad taste](https://fuseki.net/A-truck-with-a-sticker-in-bad-taste)

Tags: california, culture, decoding stickers, moutnain view, pickup-truck culture, san francisco, san francisco peninsula, spanish, truck stickers

{{img:550}}

I saw this truck around mountain view stopped at a light. Yet more unlovely pickup-truck attitude and culture.

Wow, you pretty much coudln't get less classy here.


The following is shortened but overall AI-generated translation information about the stickers here.

> 1. “EL VIEJÓN”
> 
> “THE OLD MAN / BIG OLD GUY / OLD-TIMER.”
> 
> This is the wordmark of El Viejón Brand, a truck-and-rancho lifestyle label.
> 
> 2. WELDING / TRADE-PRIDE DECAL
> 
> A hooded welder, gas cylinder, sparks, and work gear.
> 
> 3. “NO HAY VIAJE GRATIS!! / GAS O NALGAS”
> 
> NATURAL ENGLISH: “NO FREE RIDES—GAS MONEY OR ASS.”
> 
> 4. “TRAKAS HDSPM” + DEVIL FACE
> 
> ROUGHLY: “BAM! MOTHERFUCKERS!” / “BOOM, SON OF A BITCH!”
> 
> “Trakas” is an impact or hype exclamation, like “bam” or “boom.” HDSPM abbreviates hijo(s) de su puta madre. The slogan was popularized by corridos bélicos singer Luis R. Conriquez and became music-and-merch branding. It signals brash profanity and fandom—not proof of gang or cartel membership.

---

### [A way Astrology could be Real](https://fuseki.net/A-way-Astrology-could-be-Real)

Tags: astrology, evolution, genetics, ideas, mind, science, society, stories

Imagine if when you were born, the brain needed some kind of imprinting, by looking at the stars. So traditionally, newborns would be brought outside and let watch the sky for a few hours.

The brain would be set up to turn genes on and off based on what was going on in the sky. The position and phase of the moon would be important, as well as planets and bright stars.

In a world like this, people born on the same day really would have something similar, bonding them together. The appearance of a supernova would affect an entire generation, bringing them together. There'd be minor similarity cycles a month long, based on the moon.

### Manipulation

Eventually, people would experiment with artificial skies, primitive stonehenges with holes in the roof in a certain pattern. Newborns would be left there, their sight controlled and all imprinted with the same pattern. They'd try different patterns, and villages would be bound together by their shared imprinting box. Empires would form with copies (possibly not exact) of "good soldier" patterns - and there'd be a royal line, too. Peasants would be forbidden from experimenting with witchcraft, but occasionally new patterns would emerge from barbarian lands. Hidden cults would form, secret, hiding and experimenting with dangerous patterns.

Later, there'd be attempts to recreate the star pattern the night famous people were born. Having been shown the same input would be a powerful way to bond - and letting your kids get random input would eventually be viewed as outdated, and taking a huge risk. Your pattern would be part of your resume - and imprinting discrimination could be a problem.

### Evolution

Something like this could have evolved in humans. Some people think the option for becoming a sociopath is a latent ability of everyone, that's triggered when a young child detects that that might be the best way to survive in their environment. Sometimes the brain needs a source of randomness, and maybe this would evolve as the way to get it.

---

### [A world with weird selection pressures](https://fuseki.net/A-world-with-weird-selection-pressures)

Tags: evolution, ideas, sf

Weird alien scientists go from planet to planet, dropping down primitive people who have just enough to survive and prosper. They also drop robots down that do various stuff. In all cases, the population's limiting factor is not malthusian - it's getting through some kind of rite of passage into adulthood.

## Basketball Planet

Imagine a planet where the initiation rite was shooting 10 freethrows. If you miss any you don't make it. After 10,000 years what would the people be like?

## Twin World

Every birth on the planet is a multiple - but only one of each is fertile. There would be very quick selection for family-feeling in the non-fertile twins. The non-fertile twins would work to support the fertility of the one fertile one - and that one might not have much freedom.

## Longevity Planet

Regular humans, but all the food causes them to be infertile until age 50. Once past this, kids can be born. After a few thousand years the people on this planet would live really long lives.

## Segment World

The world is divided into 10 continents connected by portals. The first continent has only kids living on it, from age 0 - 9. On their ninth birthday, the robots put them through a portal. This portal leads them to continent two. On this continent, they must present themselves at a particular spot on their 20th birthday - if so, they are transported on to the next continent. And so on. When children are born, they are dropped off at a certain spot on the first world.

---

### [AI Project to fit the world's islands closely together, labelled, thinking that it'd be fun to look at them.](https://fuseki.net/AI-Project-to-fit-the-worlds-islands-closely-together-labelled-thinking-that-itd-be-fun-to-look-at-them)

Tags: ai projects, islands, maps

{{img:458}}

It initially failed to actually get the proper borders of the islands! But it still looked interesting.

{{img:470}}

This is with 50. 

{{img:471}}

This is after I reminded it to get the right borders...

---

### [About me](https://fuseki.net/About-me)

Tags: about, go, math, projects, sf

### Location

I live in \*Shenzhen (California, due to coronavirus), via New Jersey, Japan, Beijing, Costa Rica, and California.

### Interests

* Science Fiction
* Evolution
* Slate Star codex-like ideas
* Chinese
* History
* Go / games / systems
* Social gaming and cooperation / coordination games
* Reputation tracking systems

email: akasatanahamayarawan@gmail.com

---

### [Absolute vs Relative Truth](https://fuseki.net/Absolute-vs-Relative-Truth)

Tags: competition, evolution, ideas, politics, power, rating systems, reputation, systems, transhumanism, truth, voting

## How do you vote on amazon?

If you see a product rated 4.8, with 1000 ratings, and you think the rating should be 4, what should you do?

* vote 4 = you believe in asymptotic approach to truth. This is "absolute truth".
  This is a naive trusting view, that if everyone says what they see from their own point of view, on average things will work out.
* vote 1 = you have more immediate influence, but can still be truth aligned. This is "relative truth".

Someone taking your action out of context would get the wrong idea; but someone looking at the world you create will actually get a more accurate view (accurate relative to your view)

### So what's the problem with relative truth?

* It masks a third type of voter - one who isn't concerned with truth at all. Example: a biased voter being paid by a member of the marketplace to manipulate public opinion.

The advantage "absolute truth" people have over this third manipulative type is that they can locally justify their behavior.

They can say "look, I regularly use the product, but didn't recommend it to my friends; it is credible that I think of it as a 4". But if questioned, a "relative truth" voter has a harder time explaining his behavior. Despite rating it a 1, he didn't return the product, and uses it daily. This is detectably inconsistent. He may make justifications like "but I'm just trying to meta-adjust the average rating and increase my personal power, because i strongly believe the correct rating is a 4!". But this does not distinguish him from type 3 manipulators who make the same argument, while hiding the fact that they're being paid for their ratings.

### How does this fit in with the metagame?

* Good beats evil, because evil can't cooperate?
* Evil will always win, because good is dumb?

### What's the problem with absolute truth?

It's vulnerable to manipulators. Relative truth voters' power is overrepresented because they use the full voting range.

### What's the problem with relative voters?

Tolerance of them masks the actions of manipulators.

## Some other thoughts

### Power

People who are effective have good reason to have more confidence in themselves, and are tempted to have more power, and exaggerate their claims. The ends justify the means.

### Psychology

Evolution also fell for this. "Absolute truth" evolution is reasonable, testing hypothesis etc. "Relative truth" evolution just monitors an individual's style, confidence, and tries to shortcut the cost of really understanding things and doing experiments.

This works great until it is common, at which point you both don't have enough people trying to get to truth, and the market for manipulators is rich, to exploit the earlier attempted exploiters.

#### Another side effect:

This bias towards meta-evaluation of presentation of facts is inherent even in people who try to be as reasonable as possible. So even for someone leading scientists (to pick an example profession), intentionally overstating your confidence level will assuage their internal doubts from their built-in confidence detectors too.

So in this case we observe heavy polarization. True evaluators may range from 40%-60% confidence; but this logic pushes the 40s to zero and the 60s to 100.

The meta-defense is to 1) resist this everywhere 2) precommit to exposing your doubts 3) resist the temptation of confidence and certainty 4) rake in the profits paid to you by reality 5) move the foundation of human though away from exploitable evaluation strategies.

In practice this means being suspicious of people with exceptionally high charisma or confidence. A useful test to disqualify basic manipulators is press them to admit they have made a mistake. V0 of their strategy will have a hard time. Of course, truly expert manipulators have built in humility.

Another strategy is to observe "from a distance" - quantify things as much as possible and try to look at the diff between results when a person is involved or not. If you can detect a fault, even when everyone around someone is raving about them, it can be a sign of a manipulator.

## Structural issues

Media is incentivized to not look too closely at their own system, since more absolute truth based systems would have on average lower confidence levels and be less attractive to naive audiences. This is why news and punditry is not interested at all in verifying correctness of retroactively evaluating people's motives to see if they are "relative truth" or "manipulators".

### Does trust level of a society matter?

Much of society is about indoctrination of young people into absolute truth, to make them more pliable for the actual manipulators. This happens more when there is diversity leading to contact between people who literally don't care about each other at all. i.e. psychological manipulation of african slaves' worldviews in the US south was probably more severe than contemporary indoctrination into beliefs in the north for co-culturalists. Actually caring about someone for cultural reasons tends to increase retribution for manipulative behaviors (since the connection is stronger;). Similar example: restaurants in a train station are much more likely to be bad deals than ones in small towns with strong reputation maintenance systems.

## What's the equilibrium

Absolute truth is really good for dealing with the real universe. You can trust a good but not power-motivated physicist's numbers; but a relative truth physicist can justify things like "I'm smarter than X, so I will say Y to increase my power to lead to more truth later on". The scary thing is that it requires counter-manipulation to defeat people like this (whether they're actually truth aligned or are just pure power manipulators).

But if a group is too good at this, or has too low of a truth value, they will be beaten on the merits.

In poker there is a clear equilibrium; as much as many lifelong absolute truth believers hate it, correct play involves a precise level of manipulation & misrepresentation. But even poker has a strong meta-control - the rules of the game are fixed and it's rare to have collaboration between dealers & players to distort the game entirely. In the real world there is no such deal so it's very hard to really get a safe area. The only real limitation is individual minds and their genetic / cultural tendencies towards or away from truth, which while weak, can certainly be imagined to be even weaker in a sci-fi dystopia.

---

### [Across from skylawn cemetery there's a nice spot to watch the sunset when it's semi-foggy](https://fuseki.net/Across-from-skylawn-cemetery-theres-a-nice-spot-to-watch-the-sunset-when-its-semi-foggy)

Tags: san francisco peninsula, scenic spots

{{img:2722}}

The sun bursts through

```photomap
images: all
```

---

### [Alternative Go Handicap Systems](https://fuseki.net/Alternative-Go-Handicap-Systems)

Tags: complaining, game variants, games, go, go variants, handicapping, ideas, variants

All go handicapping systems eventually stabilize so that there is a rough transitive relationship between anyone whose rank is stabilized. The traditional free stone for B handicap system works pretty well up to 6 stones after which it starts to break down.

The key thing about handicapping systems is to assign a meaning to one rank grade. So the default meaning of "one free stone" could be changed to something else.

If the something else is a very small change, such as "1 extra point komi" then the winning percentage of someone who is better, *without* this komi will be low. For example if you played with a system where every stone in difference in strength would be compensated by just one point in komi, then a 4d and a 1d would actually be very close in strength - and a game played even without handicap would not be weighed very heavily at all in the 4d's favor.

On the other hand if each handi stone had a bigger advantage, then playing unhandicapped games between ranks would be really tough, and there'd be tons of variation within one rank.

To make them easier to understand, alternate handicapping systems could be designed so that the size of one rank difference corresponds to the official one, but this is not a mathematical necessity.

That said there are lots of ways to handicap things that would be just as internally consistent as stone handis, and some of them might be more fun. In the end people might have different ranks in different handicapping schemes.

## Time handicap

Games are played with 10s fischer time and for every stone difference, the weaker player gets an extra 3s fischer.

## Reverse Komi

Even game, but B gets free points. People haven't played with this very much, but theoretically one normal handi stone is worth about 15 points. So instead of 2 handis, just
play even and give B 30 points extra. I think this would produce interesting games... but it might force people to spend too much time counting.

## An Observation about Handicapping Nomenclature

It is actually kind of weird to call "2 handicap" that, because in that game, B actually only has one free move, and additionally, unlike a normal game, he is required to put his two
stones in the opposite corners. With "3 handis" he gets 2 free moves. The reason for this is that the "first" handi stone is actually the removal of komi. So 0 handi == B plays
first, w gets 6.5 komi. 1 handi == B plays first, 0.5 komi. 2 hand == B plays 1 free move, plays first, and 0.5 komi.

## Other Weird Handicaps

There are lots of unwieldy ways W could be handicapped

1. can't make certain shapes
2. B gets a "dagger" - one free additional move that can be used once per game
3. One right of refusal for w's move per game

---

### [An Evil Test of Clickthrough Licenses](https://fuseki.net/An-Evil-Test-of-Clickthrough-Licenses)

Tags: contracts, ideas, law, projects

## The new patent troll

A company should make a useful downloadable shareware product. They should put it onto many popular file-sharing sites, and even put it in public onto bittorrent sites.

## The clickthrough license

Would be really long, in small font, and have provisions like "All your assets will be forfeit to this company if you agree". Clicking agree would automatically send them a copy of the information, plus your name and email address. This would go on for a while until it was noticed and taken down, and then the company would start suing people for everything they've got.

## Legal?

I don't see why not; these type of contracts already have all sorts of other claims in them. Where is the dividing line between what is allowed to go into one of them, and what isn't? Has any of it ever been tested, or are even today's common provisions not actually valid?

---

### [Analysis of an hour of NPR](https://fuseki.net/Analysis-of-an-hour-of-NPR)

Tags: complaining, npr, politics, radio

I'd like to see a detailed, second-by-second analysis of how they spend their time

* Re-announcing the name of the station
* Announcing the name of the guest, host, or program
* Straight up ads for their "sponsors"
* Prestige announcements of foundational sponsors
* Repeating the summary of the program
* Ads for other programs
* Host repeating the biography of the interviewee
* Story which doesn't ask basic journalistic questions about what actually happened
* Untranslated foreign language section
* Musical cues
* Quote from someone who hasn't been introduced yet
* Chopped up, possibly out of order quote in response to an unheard question
* Content

It's a shame they basically accept commercials disguised as sponsorship.

I expect at most 60% of their airtime is actual useful content.

---

### [Analysis of online "Took Ya Long Enough" type comments](https://fuseki.net/Analysis-of-online-Took-Ya-Long-Enough-type-comments)

Tags: complaining, culture, information, internet, metagame, missing features, product design, reputation, society

### "Took ya long enough"

If you have been negotiating or pressuring someone to do something, and they give in, and then you criticize them, you are shrinking the influence you have, since you're lessening the "profit your adversary can make by complying to your wishes"

### Relative Analysis

So the canonical solution to this is, no matter how bad someone has been in the past, if they then take the "most positive for you" attitude, you need to reward them. This is why cops don't (shouldn't) beat criminals who turn themselves in, no matter how bad the crime was. That's why cops are nice to criminals who flip sides. Imagine if cops just laughed at someone who tried to confess and implicate other bad criminals: "took ya long enough".

### Horrible metagame too

Being known for punishing compliance is awful as well.

### So why do we see this so often?

When a company implements a long-delayed feature, we still see lots of people saying "took you long enough". Why do we see such an ineffective strategy?

I think it's because:

* companies can't be seen to care about complying to user demands (although they do care)
* so companies take care to only indirectly reply to user complaints
* users interpret this as being ignored and feel powerless, leading to bad influence hygiene ("took ya long enough")
* companies get accustomed to users being unhappy regardless of company actions, resulting in less effort to satisfy users.
* users rage together (actually: signal their pathetic weak condition) for bonding purposes

TLDR: companies have reasons not to openly express their care to customers, customers feel powerless and have impotent rage.

---

### [Appearance Variation is useful for detecting Cuckoldry](https://fuseki.net/Appearance-Variation-is-useful-for-detecting-Cuckoldry)

Tags: biology, evolution, genetics, heritability, ideas, sex

I've often wondered, if heritability really is as high as they say for important traits, why women don't take advantage of this to improve the genetics of their children more? There are obviously evolved behaviors towards this - i.e. "attraction" is how the desire for quality genetics is expressed in both sexes. But it's not really a systematic thing - it's more emotional or instinctual.

It seems like being able to make more conscious decisions about this (for both sexes) would have a huge possible benefit, given the existence of big differences in genetic contribution when those kind of choices are being made.

So why doesn't it happen more? Cuckoldry rates according to historical testing are low, just a few percent.

One obvious reason is that men try to prevent this from happening to them; one way to detect it is to notice visual differences in how children look.

If this is the main detection method, then we'd expect increased cuckoldry in more visually homogeneous populations. So from a genetic perspective, women have an incentive to increase homogeneity, to broaden the number of potential fathers they can choose from while being undetected, and men have the opposite incentive, to be more genetically visually distinctive to limit female choice.

Longer term, we should expect some women would eventually set up a system to take advantage of this by finding a way to greatly improve the genetic quality of their children directly, through conscious action. There has been some effort towards this with nobel prize winner sperm banks, and some high profile cases, but it isn't common at all. If heritability is true, this is a huge, fairly easy gain that's not being taken, which is suspicious. I would expect it to eventually be figured out and start happening. It'd be interesting to examine what kind of mental/cultural changes would be required to do this, and find out if they have started to change, or if there are any sub-cultures that have begun behaving this way.

---

### [Art City Ideas](https://fuseki.net/Art-City-Ideas)

Tags: architecture, art, design, ideas

A "city" created to examine defects of traffic lawy.

### One way deadends

There should be lots of one way roads that are dead ends.

### Reverse one way deadends

Dead ends that are one way, only allowing cars to drive out.

---

### [Banks in tower defense games would make a killing](https://fuseki.net/Banks-in-tower-defense-games-would-make-a-killing)

Tags: games, ideas, money, tower defense

Building towers is capital intensive, yet they generate tons of income and have a pretty good resale value.

Typically you start with a small amount of money, and killing each wave generates enough extra money to build more towers, and just barely kill subsequent waves.

There is usually an option to make waves come faster, which generates more money.

If there were ever any real-world tower defense game, people would naturally organize banks to lend people money, so that they could build all their towers at first, and speed up the first 50% of waves to generate profit. As long as the interest is less than the amount of extra money generated by making the waves come faster, banks & players would both profit.

Another never-considered aspect is that most levels end with all towers in place on the board. This is a huge waste; if tower resale value is 50% of build cost, then the actual amount of money "lost" on capital investments is only 50% of total money spent! i.e. if a level's enemies are worth a total of 5000 gold, then at the end of a normal level you should just barely kill them all, but still have all your towers, value 2500. Any loan you received at the start would have a built-in return amount of at least 50%.

Creating these banks wouldn't even take government action - it would be such a gain to just lend someone a few extra gold at the start of a level - people would do it naturally.

---

### [Bargaining in China](https://fuseki.net/Bargaining-in-China)

Tags: bargaining, buy nao hui, china, credibility, pan jia yuan, society, theory, yaxiu market

Try shopping in China. Trying not to get ripped off will take up most of your time. Even if you know the real price, and are a good bargainer, it still takes forever.

Since there aren't prices on most things, the seller will take a look at you and take a guess at your price based on how you look and act; if you're visibly in a hurry, you'll be quoted a higher price. And even if you are totally calm, you will need to put in the time to convince him that you are for real.

## Sellers are maximizing income

In poker there's a theorem that says that when playing against someone, the bigger mistake they make, the better it is for you. It's the same in pricing - the more you rip someone off, the better as a seller - as a buyer, it's not exactly the same (because value is different for buyers)

So the seller's strategy is to make people make the maximum mistake. Mistakes happen for a few reasons:

#. having lots of money and not caring
#. being in a hurry,
#. not knowing the real price of an item.
#. spending someone else's money

## Yaxiu & Pan Jia Yuan

These are two markets - the first is for foreign tourists to go to buy fake clothes at a sort of bargain compared to home, but way more expensive than they should be. Pan Jia Yuan is a huge antique market / flea market.

In these environments, the mistakes people can make are so huge, that sellers are all going for the longshot - one foreigner making a big mistake is much more profitable than lots of people buying things for slightly more than their real price.

If the real price of an item is say 1 euro, it could go to a foolish european tourist for 100 euros, or it could go to a local for 5 euros.

If you look like a european tourist, even if you know that he would sell it for 5 to a local, your job is going to convince him that you really aren't going to buy it for 100. That you aren't just bargaining for fun, and be planning to buy it in the end. But, tourists also try to convince him of this - so the seller needs to be perceptive. If you are really a tourist, your actual price might be 100 - or 80. And he should resist to the end. But if you are a local, your real price is actually 5 or 10.

It's a huge mistake for him to give a low price to a tourist (even if it's a profitable transaction).

It's a much smaller mistake for him to miss a (small profit) sale to a local .

Therefore, it makes economic sense for him to be very resistant to the idea that a foreign face is actually a local foreigner, not a tourist - even in a 50/50 case, because the profit is so much greater to the tourist, he should err on that side.

This makes sense in tourist areas - but this same idea is used everywhere, in every type of market. This makes it a major pain to buy things here, because everyone is going for the longshot with you.

## Strategies

Because the seller is always analyzing you, it's important to get him to give up the hope that you are going to do something really foolish. The ways to do this are - speak some Chinese, so he knows you're not totally new here. Look poor, so that he knows you might have more sense than money. And don't seem too interested in anything - if you are, he will hold out hoping that you'll come back later. If you sit down inside the shop, or engage in a friendly way with the seller, you lose a lot - you now are committed. They also try to get you to hold onto the thing and feel like you possess it - trying to engage the "I don't want to lose this" feeling rather than the "I don't want to lose my money" feeling.

In a place like Pan Jia Yuan, the first item you ask the price of is important - get that out of the way asap. Start engaging with them, asking prices for a lot of stuff to get a range.

I favor asking the price of a few items, one of which you're interested in, pretty fast - if you delay, you will be overcommitted to that item and the seller will take a longer shot with you since you won't be able to walk away.

## Being able to walk away

If you can credibly walk away, you have a huge advantage. That's why for example, you are going to get ripped off if you lug a really heavy item into a pawn shop - he's going to know you don't want to carry it back out. It's also why you can't really bargain for a hotel when you are sweaty and tired just getting off of a train - they know you're stuck. If you leave your stuff outside and just breeze in to check the price, you'll be quoted a lower price.

## Another strategy?

A complex strategy is trying to interact with other buyers as they are bargaining. If the other buyer has put in the effort to knock the price down, the buyer can't credibly quote you a high price while the other guy is standing right there. So maybe if you notice someone bargaining for a long time, you can go up and get the price while saving all the effort.

## caveat

(In this discussion I am ignoring signaling by sellers - they are also reluctant to take low profit transactions because it would give away information to buyers who might overhear, or neighboring shops, or make them look bad socially)

## Lack of Price Tags

In order to allow this type of flexible-pricing system, most markets don't have marked prices on items.

## The Frustration

It is to the point that buying anything like this is such a pain, and requires so much investment of time, that people are actually buying less. Plus, there is a percentage of locals who don't like bargaining, and avoid markets because of it. One reason taobao is so successful is because there is direct price competition again, and marked prices.

## The Opportunity

In a market like panjiayuan, or buy nao hui, with literally thousands of people selling junk, the niche of people who don't like to bargain is large enough that if a single store just marked prices, and didn't harass customers, they could actually make more money than by using the longshot strategy. In the above example, although they would always make the lower amount of money per transaction, since they'd be siphoning off the non-bargainers from the entire huge market of bargain-only shops, they could come out ahead.

## Yet

This never happens! Nobody marks prices. Nobody in markets puts up signs saying "fixed price, browse freely and we won't bother you". Although every store tries to portray themself as your friend, none of them put real policies (evidenced by hard-to-remove signs) to signal that they are a low-profit, long term relationship type of store.

Just a few price stickers would have a ripple effect throughout the market - suddenly, there would be a much better way for people to get information about prices, and it'd have an effect throughout the market, reducing the number of free floating foolish people, and letting more people compete on real prices, rather than everyone going for the longshot.

## Why?

Places like yaxiu are actually fake markets. There are rules and agreements in place between all the sellers about how to behave, put in place by the rental agency which owns the whole thing. Some of the rules for all stores are posted on the walls in the back. I bet that not having marked prices is one of them (maybe unofficially). They also probably have known & accepted minimum prices for various items (even if they break it sometimes, it's an anchor point) Of the other big markets, buy nao hui is somewhere in the middle - there are outside competitors nearby. And Pan Jia Yuan is so large and chaotic, especially the flea market side, that it's probably pretty hard to enforce discipline in general (although for particular types of items there is probably lots of collusion)

---

### [Beijing Driving Style](https://fuseki.net/Beijing-Driving-Style)

Tags: beijing, china, complaining, driving, regulation, systems

#### No lights at night

You see it all the time. It's usually a nice car - someone who has only been driving for a couple years and just forgets to turn them on.

#### Cluelessness

If you honk or gesture at someone who is driving around with no lights on, they won't usually understand what you are getting at.

#### No turn signals if angle is less than 90

In the US, turn signals are a way to let people know which of two roads you are going to go on. So even if it's a very shallow split in the road, people will still signal.

Their point is to let other people know where you are going. There is no actual moral law saying "if you turn right X degress, you must use the right signal".

So even if the main road curves left, and a tiny road continues straight, people continuing straight onto the tiny road will sometimes signal right.

In China this isn't understood. Signalling is a mostly-forgotten automatic motion, perhaps trained during driving school but with no thought behind it. Nobody signals when merging, let alone when making a normal 90 degree turn.

#### No nod, no hand wave

People don't really communicate with each other car to car - no nod of respect for small favors. People also don't signal each other for hidden cops (there are no hidden cops)

#### No Enforcement

There are no traffic cops. Somehow, things keep together anyway.

#### Park Anywhere

A new thing in the last 3 or 4 years is that people park anywhere. This includes busy bus stops on major ring roads. Every bike lane is now a car parking lane. You see parking cops walking around slowly with cameras about once or twice a year - they have to take pictures of the car & the parking job, because systems are so weak, without this evidence either the guilty party will use their connections to get out of it, or traffic cops will just accuse everyone in order to get bribes.

#### The person entering traffic has the right of way

At home, the person who is going in a straight line has the right of way. Here it's the opposite - the person entering has it. So no matter how straight or consistently you are moving, it's your responsibility to deal with people jumping in. This applies to bicycles and people walking, too. Cars / bikes entering a roadway will at the least stick their nose into the stream of traffic and it's considered the traffic's responsibility to notice it and go around them.

#### No Signaling

At forks in the road, people never signal. At full on proper turns, only maybe 25% of people signal, and those that do only do it as their car is already starting to turn - not before.

#### Partial Progress

If you can't turn out into traffic, at least get your nose out there and make the other guys slow down a bit.

#### Acting Crazy to get the benefits

Say your car is approaching a right turn onto a main road, with a bike lane along the edge of the road, streaming with bicycles. In the US the driver would drive at a constant, reasonable speed, then firmly step on the break to let the bikers know he was planning to stop. Bikers would feel safe to continue past him.

In china the driver will drive at a high rate of speed, then start to slow down but uncommittedly, not letting the bikers know what's going on. Bikers start to slow, but since they have the right of way, they don't stop. Car slows more, now bikers are just nosing past the front. Bikers realize they've won, and begin to speed up again, going around the car which is halfway blocking the bike lane. A mini biker traffic jam forms behind the car, which oozes out.

For normal levels of bikers (just a few) this strategy loses time for the driver, yet, they always do it. For heavy levels of bikers this might be better.

#### Traffic Circles

Even though you are only going to the next turnoff at the roundabout, make sure you get to the inner ring.

#### Decisions

Don't decide where you are going to turn until you arrive at the point of decision. Then just stop in the middle of the road.

#### No Problem

Pass your exit on the ring road? no problem, pull over and back up at high speed in the bike lane.

#### Parking

Parking is totally out of control in this city. People just park anywhere they want. Recently people have started parking in the dedicated bike lanes of the 2nd ring road - which was previously one of the best places to ride bikes in the city.

#### Green Light

If the light's green, you're definitely gonna make it. No need to conserve space with the car in front of you - you can just mosey along at any speed, while people behind honk.

---

### [Biking from fort funston July 2026](https://fuseki.net/Biking-from-fort-funston-July-2026)

```photomap
images: all
order: time
layout: sticky
zoom: 13
center: 37.72063,-122.50245
```

{{img:521}}

{{img:521}}

{{img:522}}

{{img:523}}

{{img:524}}

{{img:525}}

---

### [Black Cars in Beijing](https://fuseki.net/Black-Cars-in-Beijing)

Tags: beijing, china, complaining, driving, law, police, politics, traffic

Beijing has tons of black, license-plate less cars just driving around, breaking laws. Nobody seems to know who they are - they're some kind of security. They have these very deep, official sounding horns they honk all the time. They don't usually egregiously break laws, but they'll do things like go through a red light if they see nobody is coming, or park in the middle of the road, and they always assume they have the right of way. Oh, and they love to drive on the highway shoulder while everyone else is stuck in traffic on the ring roads.

They have blacked out windows, but if you do get to see them, the drivers are usually young / middle aged, pudgy, and not in uniform (unless you count tight polyester turtleneck / stripey shirt & manbag as a uniform).

## Military Cars in China

In addition to the unmarked cars, there is another annoying group of cars you'll see - ones with military plates. Their license plates are marked wit ha special red character (army, navy, air force), which makes them completely above traffic laws. So regular police can't even pull them over. It's fun dealing with these inviolable entities during day to day interactions! The guys driving them never have uniforms on, either.

Luckily China' effective anti-corruption policies have prevented these valuable license plates from falling into the hands of non-military officers.

## Why it matters

There are hierarchies in who is under the law. These high-status people driving around, constantly flouting the law also prevents any common feeling for a general right, fair way to behave from developing. Everyone can see that the people at the top are rude and inconsiderate, and that the story about "rule of law" is a joke - it's "rule by law".

Policemen can't by default enforce the law, either - they have to check the plate first.

From a safety standpoint, it is dangerous to have people driving around without license plates, because if they hit someone and drive away, there's basically nothing that can be done to figure out who they were. And if you are hit by a military car, it takes guts to do anything.

## A Question

Sensitive areas in Beijing have even more black cars, just sitting around without license plates or any other form of ID on the car. In places like this, how do they actually know that the approaching black Audi is valid? Common people definitely can't just park wherever they want in a security area, yet there doesn't seem to be any security checkpoints for these guys, and they don't have plates, and have blacked out windows - so what's to stop someone else from just driving up? It seems like even internally they must have some kind of system. Lots of other systems full of powerful people still have ID requirements.

So, I think there probably actually is some kind of identifier on these vehicles - and probably something that can be detected through a security camera. Infrared reflective strips or something on the roof & sides? Or is it just a particular model of car that can't be gotten except by the right people?

---

### [Books about Chinese history in English should translate Chinese names in a better way](https://fuseki.net/Books-about-Chinese-history-in-English-should-translate-Chinese-names-in-a-better-way)

Tags: changes, china, chinese, history, ideas, language, names, people, society, translation, variants

## Now

They are translated into pinyin:

王洪文 --> Wang Hongwen

张春桥 --> Zhang Chunqiao

## The Problem

For people unfamiliar with these names, it's really hard to keep track of who is who. The sounds don't mean things in English, so they can't be easily remembered or distinguished from each other.

## A solution!

Translate the names symbolically! Instead of "Wang" translate "King". This works for a lot of names and gives the mind something to hold onto in the middle of some random (in English) sounds. It wouldn't work for every name, but it would add some sonic contrast that would make it way easier.

Which of these representations of names do you have a better chance to remember anything about, a month after reading a book on Chinese history? Which one would be easy to match up identity with personal characteristics and actions?

Zhang Chunqiao ---- 张春桥 ---- Zhang Spring Bridge

Wang Hongwen ---- 王洪文 ---- King Flood Culture

If I saw a reference to "Mr. King Flood Culture" 200 pages later in a book, there would be at least a chance I'd realize it was the same guy.

## Disambiguation

This has the additional benefit of being more distinct than normal Chinese -> Pinyin name translations.

## Howto

There should be an attempt to standardize the way this would be done, and sometimes non-primary meanings of characters could be chosen to make it sound better.

## The cost

Would be that people reading stories would remember unreal names for things - but the benefit would be that they would actually be able to understand & keep track of the relationships between historical and political figures, and the huge number of committee chairs, generals, authors, artists etc. that play in Chinese history.

What we'd be giving up also isn't actually the real Chinese name of the person, anyway. Pinyin isn't based on English sounds, so the pronunciations that readers come up for those blocks of letters don't sound at all like the real name. It doesn't have tones, either, making it not real Chinese. Also, part of the beauty of the real name is in the characters - that's lost, too.

For almost all names, if you took a non-Chinese english speaker and had her read pinyin names from history to real Chinese speakers, the Chinese speaker would not be able to figure out who they were talking about, anyway. The supposed knowledge about names that non-Chinese speakers have is actually pretty worthless in China. Try having a visitor from home pronounce "Deng Xiaoping" to a Chinese bus driver - the guy will never be able to understand what she means.

Without tones, and with the wrong pronunciation, the pinyin names we use are almost useless, anyway.

So we'd really only lose a very blurry, meaningless string of English letters, and replace it with something that at least is memorable, and possibly even catches some of the charm of real Chinese names.

## Think about it in reverse

Imagine if in discussing Chinese communist government history, we never translated the names of committees - just used their pinyin versions. It's more "honest" to the true sound of Chinese. Would that be better?

It would mean that the average reader would be lost in a mass of incomprehensible blocks of letters, and would glaze over. They'd just rely on the author to preface every mention of a committee by a small explanation of which one it was again. Not using descriptive (or at least english-meaningful) committee names just makes a big class of stories incomprehensible to amateur readers.

That is the situation we are with with names right now. Would authors even attempt to tell a complex story of the interplay between 12 members of a committee? No matter how important the story, authors are less likely to do it in english because they know the reader won't be able to follow the names. No matter how much characterization the author does, it won't stick, so the author will need to introduce character actions with little descriptions, like "The old general Wang talked to the new father Zhang", or "committee chairman Yang rushed back from his home in Sichuan".

## What's Important

We don't insist interested readers about Chinese history learn pinyin names of committees - we help them understand history by giving them unique names.

Chinese history has some amazing stories, and it's also really important for people to understand things that have happened - perhaps more important than it is for them to have seen (and completely mispronounced) a pinyin representation of a Chinese name.

---

### [Bowling Golf](https://fuseki.net/Bowling-Golf)

Tags: game variants, games, ideas, variants

This is bowling, but you are trying to get the lowest score possible.

Scoring is as in bowling, but a gutter ball or a zero receives 10 points (but doesn't count as a strike or a spare)

The best shot is a 1 on the first ball, and then another 1. Threading the second ball through a gap counts as a 10.

---

### [Brutalist images of notepad-written text as preferable to actual text](https://fuseki.net/Brutalist-images-of-notepad-written-text-as-preferable-to-actual-text)

Tags: ai projects, graphic design, memes, ui

{{img:459}}

A friend of mine didn't like to get my AI images because he rightfully was getting distracted by wondering whether specific details were really ones I intended or not. That makes sense, I think. For lots of people, just sharing the raw text is better.

There's a certain way that an image of text is better than the text itself - not sure why, perhaps it feels more contained. Anyway, AI whipped up this little local editor and now I can just create these thingies if needed. It's got (hidden) doublespace-typo detection as well as general typo detection, WIP.

{{img:469}}

---

### [Business Process Novelizations](https://fuseki.net/Business-Process-Novelizations)

Tags: books, management, processes, programming

There is an interesting book genre, where the protagonist is a manager in a failing company. The story traces what they learn as they figure out what is wrong with the company internally. They're usually mostly focused on the actual business, but do have about 30% dedicated to the emotions and personalities involved.

Compared to a usual novel, they're very satisfying, because they're very practical. They're almost science fiction in their adherence to "hard"-ness. They're also extremely "genre".

### The Examples I know of

* The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim et al
* The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
* ?The Toyota Way - this is related, but isn't actually a novelization

They both take pains to explain some non-obvious (to me) assembly line processes.

* Rate limiting by slowest step. This is pretty obvious - if production requires step A (1 unit/sec) and then step B (10 units/sec), optimization of B will have zero effect on your total throughput.
* Why low inventory is good - this is harder to explain. A combination of carrying costs, and it implies that you are spending any time on B before it is needed.

They also show something I've often found to be true - people take past rates of process speed as gospel and rarely go back to theoretical limitations to figure out why it takes that long. If X historically takes 12 hours, people believe it - even though they all have CS degrees, and the process apparently should take ~1ms to actually complete. People don't regularly refer to the known constraints of a system when evaluating it.

When looking at the speed of a process with a few steps, knowing their constraints should be as basic as knowing their names.

---

### [Cap and Trade for Vegetarians](https://fuseki.net/Cap-and-Trade-for-Vegetarians)

Tags: economics, health, ideas, people, vegetarianism

Vegetarians claim a number of benefits from the practice. These are typically a combination of some of the following:

```
1. reduction of animal suffering
2. conservation of resources from removing inefficient meat production
3. health benefits
```

In some situations, such as a trip to a place like mongolia where most nutrition comes through meat, many of the values of vegetarianism can be preserved through a trade system - vegetarians could agree to have someone else, who lived in a more convenient area give up meat, and temporarily eat it while they were in Mongolia. The alternative would be to carry all their food with them, which would be a waste of energy, and may not work anyway.

Trading meat consumption would preserve the animal suffering & resource saving benefits. Depending on the nature of the health benefits (how long they take to 'set in'), it may even preserve these too.

Vegetarian can be considered a type of production - that is, they have decided to use their choices to influence the world. The supposed goal is just that - to influence the world to achieve goals, with the possibility of personal health goals on the side. This leads to the question of why vegetarians have decided that the most efficient way to meet their goals is on their own body; if they are interested in animal suffering or resource conservation, there are other, more efficient ways to meet those goals. For example, paying someone who lives near a farm to give up meat would reduce meat consumption by the same amount, and would also save all the transportation costs of the vegetables from the farm to the original vegetarian. This would achieve the alleged goals of the vegetarian more effectively. Or, if two meat-eaters offered to both become vegetarians if a vegetarian gives up the practice - what % of morality-based vegetarians would accept? I don't think many would, even if the trade could be guaranteed. There's a kind of personal ambivalence to eating meat, or personal benefits to being a vegetarian, which I think is the real reason behind it - although it's usually justified in global terms.

So instead of saying they are veg. because it's a personal challenge, or because they want to feel more pure, or they want to signal morality/health/purity, people talk about global benefits.

Vegetarians are now vulnerable to an anti-vegetarian strategy - meat-eaters can counteract their effects by simply eating all the meat the veg. gives up. Is this a real vulnerability? If it is, what's the point of being a vegetarian? I don't think it's as much of a weakness as you might think - every dollar the anti-vegetarian spends is a dollar he didn't use on some other purpose. And since spending money is equivalent to making people do things, using up resources, that is a savings. This only works if the damage from each dollar spent is equal - all externalities have to be accounted for.

---

### [Certifying Truthfulness of Institutions](https://fuseki.net/Certifying-Truthfulness-of-Institutions)

Tags: bias, contracts, credibility, institutions, society

For some reason, we think it's ok for institutions to brazenly lie, but not for individuals. This is wrong and it causes lots of problems.

## Our Moral Sense

Our moral sense gets turned off, or doesn't work very well, as the situations we evaluate diverge from traditional ones. Most people wouldn't directly torture someone else for no reason in real life, but when institutions deal with eachother, that's fine.

## The option not to lie

For whatever economic reasons, it might make sense to allow institutions to lie. But surely there are cases when institutions want to be able to really show they are not lying.

So, for this purpose, I propose that there be a standard contract or agreement, verified and maintained by an independent organization, which would let institutions bind themselves to promises to be truthful, backed up by fines. Optionally, they could restrict it to certain statements.

## You have our permission to record us, and if you catch us lying, we will pay you

The certification organization would have a trademarked seal, and in order to display it, clients would have to bind themselves to promises to pay off anyone who catches them in a lie. They would also have to pre-emptively swear that they would allow people to surreptitiously record them / gain information on their actions without prior notice (and not sue the person later on)

## The Rules

The organization would be required to say things, and pay lots of penalties if they were found to be lying. These could be simply statements such as "We have never conducted unreleased medical studies of links between our products and cancer". Or for a reality show "Events in the show actually took place in the order shown, and were not photoshopped". There are lots of cases where organizations currently make claims like this - but then are found to be lying later, with no penalty.

## It's optional

Not every organization would want or have to do this, obviously. But, organizations which do make this promise really would be more trustworthy. Because in addition to their regular organizational reputation, they'd also have borne the scrutiny of many people trying to make money.

## It's like a Promise

Right now, truthful institutions don't have any way to raise themselves above the mass of deceptive ones. This would be a way for them to swear, or promise, in an easily understandable format.

## What would happen

Obviously actually implementing this woud be tough. If it was successful, many fake organizations would spring up with extremely complex, hard to enforce contracts, and with similar logos, and the public would have a hard time knowing which one was genuine.

If statements are not written carefully, actually proving them in court could be hard, too. There'd also be the "springtime for hitler" problem where insiders intentionally would break the rules, and then help their friends to collect the reward.

## It's actually a reverse bribe

It is equivalent to an openly broadcast, credible request for any insider with knowledge about lies to come forward.

---

### [Chess Rules Irregularities](https://fuseki.net/Chess-Rules-Irregularities)

Tags: chess, game variants, games, ideas, strategy, systems, variants

What are the consequences of smoothing out some of the irregularities of the rules of chess?

## Metrics for each change

Each change will be evaluated on a few axes:

* depth - how many levels of clearly superior strategy dokes this game allow?
* resemblance to standard chess
* opening structure/similarity, and if new openings show up
* piece valuation change from standard (1-3-3-5-9-\*4)

## Future

To actually get real answers would require setting up a training run for an AlphaZero-like engine.

### Explanation of strategic depth:

What does the rating structure look like? i.e. tic-tac-toe doesn't have a very deep skill level tree, but chess does. ELO is in some sense an absolute scale; if you define random play as 1000, the higher the best known player's ELO is in this world, the deeper the game. re: this amazing youtube exploration of weird chess algorithms: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpXy041BIlA

It's not clear what the result of this is for chess since ELO 1000's definition is not clear, and seems to be linked to the default skill of someone who only knows the rules. This is already a pre-selected group though, so the real depth of standard chess isn't known.

Another way to think about this: how many skill levels can a game have, where level 1 is random play, and level N+1 beats level N X% of the time, X>50%). Question: as X varies is it all proportional? Or does choice of X matter? Default to X=75. The existence of draws complicates this, too. Perhaps a better system would be that level X+1 on average receives N points per game against level X, 1>N>0.5. This system is game-able to artificially introduce depth (at the worst, various AIs could communicate their level to each other through hard-coded move patterns, and then just let whoever had the highest level win. But there may still be some value in this as long as the engines aren't trying to artificially introduce levels.

## Main categories of rule variations

* Conceptual Changes
* Legacy Rules
* Irregularities in Piece Movement
* Board Statefulness
* Board Orientation

I will not explore variations involving more complexity to the rules, new pieces, etc. This comes out of realizing that for the game of go there are almost no meaningful ways to simplify the best rule-sets; this process is already done there.

## Conceptual changes

### What is king nature?

Kings have something special - if they die the army dies. But what if you changed king-nature and gave it to someone else?

* Queen has king nature
* A single other piece has king nature
* A single pawn has king nature
* Both knights have king nature

### Multiple King nature

* Embed King Nature in multiple pieces - two versions. Any dying loses the game, or they all must be killed to win.
* Extended version: All pieces have king nature => this means first to lose a piece loses the game.
  \*\* Or, all have king nature but all required to die - this means "win by complete army destruction"

### Win by complete army destruction, not king capture - no King Nature

In this variation, the King is just another piece; you win when the other player has no pieces left. This changes stalemate conditions quite a bit. I'd expect a lot of opening changes too since there isn't as much emphasis on king safety. Standard chess is a subset of this, where the game just stops early. What would the king's value be here? According to [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_piece_relative_value), as a piece its value is approximately 4 due to its strong local area of control. However, that's still based on checkmate rules; in this variation the King's value would be higher.

* depth: You remove mid-game surprising checkmates. Also, a lot of material sacrifices resulting in checkmate are no longer sound. But, you convert a lot of pawnless draws into wins; i.e. N+B vs B is now a win if pieces can be trade off. Overall it's probably a less deep game since there are probably many fewer states that have meaning. I.e. board evaluation functions are simpler to write.
* resemblance: once a king comes off, it's not at all like chess. Also, there may not be much incentive to attack, since the opponent has no particular weak point. Would it devolve into just a series of defensive moves?
* openings: really unclear what good play looks like. The center is still valuable, so maybe there would be a rush to occupy it in order to defend oneself more easily later?
* valuations: king becomes more valuable as a fighting piece

#### Self-capture

###### Allow capturing your own army

An interesting metric in general is the size of the gap between "board position value" and "material comparison". In chess for most positions by an engine, these two are relatively close. But the more dramatic positional advantages available, the greater the gap. It seems that if it is common to be winning, but behind in material, the game would be better.

* description: you can capture any piece on the board which you attack, not just your opponent's. This implies removing the concept of check-mate and making king capture an optional move that's required to win, since the king would start in check.
* depth: You're increasing move options so it may be a deeper game.
* resemblance: Almost all the time it'd resemble chess, but there could be occasional amazing self-capture sacrifices.
* openings: I'd expect very little change
* valuations: When needed, a bishop can capture pawns right in front of it to escape; knights already have the ability to get out without this, so perhaps B would gain value relative to N? Rooks would also have a much easier escape route.
* description: Once you allow capture of one's own army, the next question is whether pieces can capture themselves. In this variation, the Q, B, and R can capture themselves. It doesn't seem reasonable to allow pawns or knights to capture themselves, though. For Kings I'm leaning towards no, since their movement pattern is a vector of length 1.
* depth: more options, more depth?
* resemblance: similar, just with even more surprising self-capture sacrifices
* openings: there may be ones which allow amazing sacrifices, but it's unlikely
* valuations: all pieces other than N & P gain a bit of value since they have more options.

### Allow zero-length moves

Many chess pieces have "infinite" distance capability. If you put a bishop on a 20x20 board, everyone would assume that it could still move corner to corner. So, it can move any number of squares. But why can't it just move zero squares? Why out of all numbers is only zero excluded?

* description: Q, R, B can also move zero squares.
* depth: I suppose there are more move options, but zugzwang is removed as a concept which reduces strategic options
* resemblance: there might be some changes in endgame situations. It seems more likely to cause more draws
* openings: zero-moves wouldn't be used often, so no change
* valuations:

### Knight movement irregularities

Do knights move 2 squares in one direction, then 1 perpendicular, or the other way around? In regular chess it doesn't matter since they fly over, rather than move through squares. But this flying power is irregular. There are three variations:

* Knights move either 2,1 or 1,2 (current chess, but doesn't matter)
* Knights move 2,1
* Knights move 1,2

#### Remove Knight flying ability

Are there differences among these options? Because they can now be blocked, it matters. In say the 2,1 situation, it's also possible for my knight to attack my opponent's knight, but not be attacked, if there is a piece blocking it. This breaks the normal situation where B,N,R,K,Q are all guaranteed to be mutually attacking.

* depth: hard to tell, really
* resemblance: knights are way less valuable everywhere.
* openings: it's now really hard to develop knights.
* valuations: this kind of knight is definitely less valuable. Unclear which type of knight is better.

### Promotion Changes

The rules around promotion add a lot of complexity to the game; you theoretically need 8 extra queens and every other promotable piece of each color on hand to be truly ready to play any possible game, for example. So most tournaments and live play situations are vulnerable to failing to actually be able to play a game.

There is also an issue with time around promotion - because it's rare and involves moving around off the board, in time-pressure situations it can be hard to resolve. Do you stop the clock while searching for the 3rd queen you just promoted?

This suggests a few simplifications:

###### Disallow promotion

* description: pawns just do nothing when they reach the back rank
* depth: much less depth; most pawn endgames are draws. Game becomes more like shogi where it's much harder to check-mate.
* resemblance: quite different; tournaments would probably have to adjust to lower draw counts, changing play style to a more risky one or reducing time allocations. Also, without promotions, a huge strategic part of the game would be missing.
* openings: giving up pawns wouldn't be nearly as bad; more gambits for attacking chances.
* valuations: pawns worth even less relative to other pieces. Pieces which can mate more easily (Q & R) become relatively more valuable.

#### Other forced promotion types

If the mythology of chess supported it, pawns may automatically have promoted to kings, or rooks, or other pieces, exclusively. Rooks wouldn't change things too much, but minor pieces would greatly increase draws and lessen the value of passed pawn defense. Some of these changes make having multiple bishops of the same color much more likely, allowing B-B batteries, which nearly never happens in standard chess.

In Chess's historical context, it seems more natural for pawns to want to become kings than queens. But what do multiple kings mean? Do they compete with the other king? Or are they supporters of his war against the opponent? Can they be independently checkmated? The most natural interpretation seems to be that you lose when all of your kings are captured / capturable. You'd have to allow actual king capture within a continuing game. This is similar to how a campaigning general is effectively the king of his army; but if he dies, the king back in the capital still has power. Loss only happens when all such kings are dead.

###### Option to promote to king

* depth: you have more options, having multiple kings greatly increases a single King's value, since it can now expose itself to capture. There could be a whole realm of unexplored strategic positions involving multiple kings.
* resemblance: once the 2nd king shows up, it's very different than regular chess
* openings: not much change

###### Forced promotion to queen

* depth: nearly identical since 99% of normal promotions are to Queen anyway.
* resemblance: nearly identical
* openings: identical
* valuations: nearly identical

###### Forced promotion to rook

* depth: is this actually less deep? Seems that many endgames that involve both sides promoting to Q now become a lot more interesting (or at least are not quick forced wins)
* resemblance: passed pawns aren't quite as dangerous now
* openings: there may be some change devaluing passed pawns
* valuations: pawns less valuable

###### Promotion options are only R, N, or B

* depth: this may actually increase game depth since alternative options would be more worth of consideration. I'd expect players to take advantage of promotion to B or N much more often than they do currently.
* resemblance: endgames would have less emphasis on preventing promotion. Mutual promotion scenarios might be more common.

###### Promotion options: N or B

* depth: endgames don't resolve nearly as easily. Situations where both sides promote now are less likely to be forced wins; On the other hand, players may allow promotions more often and

###### Force promotion to B

###### Force promotion to N

With bishop promotion, you'd see more the previously extremely rare bishop battery.

## Legacy rules

#### En Passant

##### Remove en passant entirely

Some violation of legacy expectations. The en passant rule seems like the result of a ratcheting process - X% of people will argue for it, X will eventually get high enough to be in effect, and once in effect it can't be undone.

* description: rule-set is simpler, with very little other effect
* depth: similar
* resemblance: high
* openings: nearly all identical - a very few lines of theory would have to be changed
* valuations: no expected change

#### Castling

Castling involves a bunch of violations of the rules other pieces follow:

* it can only be done from certain squares
* involves two pieces moving at the same time
* it requires knowledge of board history (board statefulness)

##### Remove Castling entirely

There have been tournaments run with this variation.

* depth: possibly even higher since average game complexity would be higher. But possibly lower since the king being in the center could cause forcing lines to be easier to find.
* resemblance: it's still chess, but only a subset of games are now possible, involving more intense fighting and risk
* openings: rather large opening change since there's more of a requirement to protect the center
* valuations: rooks probably worth less since they're harder to activate and link

#### Make Castling symmetrical

Official castling is arguably as logically complex as another variant, where on the queenside the king moves 3 steps instead of 2. The rule is "king moves til it's next to the rook, rook jumps over it".

##### Redefine castling as "king jumps sideways until next to its rook in the corner; rook jumps over the king

* description: the only change is to queenside castling, making it now go farther and protect the pawn on the last file. queenside castling might become more common.
* depth: very similar
* resemblance: very similar
* openings: a few would change
* valuations: no expected change

#### One-step pawn moves

##### Remove special-case two-step pawn moves

* description: old style chess; pawns always can just move one square a time. automatically removes en passant complications, too. The game would probably be a lot slower.
* depth: You're reducing move choice so it's probably not as deep.
* resemblance: It'd still look like chess, but just slower.
* openings: This would change nearly every opening, but middlegame and later would be nearly identical.
* valuations: Pawns are nerfed so they're probably worth slightly less. Seems harder to break positions up, so knights may gain value since more positions are likely to be closed. In contrast, there will be fewer pawns in the center on average, so piece density in the center might be higher.

## Board Statefulness

Knowing what is legal sometimes requires knowing past moves. That is, metadata about board history is required to know whether certain moves are currently legal.

#### En passant

What happens if you remove the statefulness rule of enpassant?

##### En passant is no longer limited to immediately after the opponent's pawns 2-step move; as long as a pawn might have just moved en passant, it can be taken en passant.

* description: not a very good rule since now pawns are even more irregular in how they can attack. There are also some complications where there is a piece obstructing a potential prior 2-step move; if you move your obstructing piece out of the way it might re-enable the opponent to take en passant.
* depth: similar
* resemblance: high
* openings: nearly all identical - although there must be some theory that relies on the one-time opportunity to take en-passant.
* valuations: no expected change

#### Castling & Statefulness

There is lots of state here: has the king ever moved? Has the rook ever moved? Do we really gain much by imposing these restrictions? They seem mostly symbolic/historical. i.e. a king can run away easily if his attackers haven't come close to breaching his hideaways yet. Castling requirements which depend on board orientation will be discussed later.

##### Remove statefulness from castling. You can castle whenever your king and rook are in the appropriate positions.

* description: This could introduce some interesting endgame situations; rather than being conceived as a breakable one-time-only plan for a king's escape, castling is now more like a feature of the board, where there's something like a tunnel on the back rank that the king can use anywhere.
* depth: probably similar
* resemblance: rook endgames might change; one player may try to maneuver the situation into one where they can castle. There are some problems where the right answer is castling, which can result in a checkmate or other advantage, but these almost never happen in a real game since it's so easy to make castling unavailable for the opponent. In this variation, there would be legitimate real endgames which rely on setting up a position to castle. I.e. if you are near your own back rank, you might as well keep your king on his original square so that you have more move options.
* openings: ones where one side gains an advantage by forcing the king or rook to move would not be as valuable.
* valuations: rooks and kings gain endgame power so they might be more valuable.

### Board State memory

#### 3-fold repeats

This is hard to remove, since infinite repeats wouldn't be detectable.

#### “meaningful move history"

I.e. the "50 moves without a capture or pawn move" rule also seems hard to remove, since it opens up infinite repeats or continued play to cause your opponent to flag.

## Board Orientation

Some rules depend on knowing the board orientation. There are two kinds of board symmetry we could remove knowledge of:

* knowing which side is the top/bottom. i.e. allowing pawns to promote on either edge of the board. You often see trick endgame problems where the pieces are laid out to deceive you about board orientation. This happens because the common practice of always having your own pieces at the bottom; in problems you might assume the player "to move" started at the bottom of the board, but that isn't guaranteed.
* more rarely, the board might be rotated 90 or 270 degrees so that the promotion zones are on the left and right.

#### Remove board orientation requirements from castling

This means that you can castle on either end of the board. The concept is that the ability to castle is a feature of the board, like a tunnel - from specific starting squares, any pair of K & R can castle. The extension of this, allowing cross-color castling, is infeasible because both before and after castling, the rook always attacks the king.

##### The only requirement for castling is piece position

* description: setting up castling could be done during an endgame
* depth: there are a few more options for endgames now.
* resemblance: opening would be similar, but endgames could be pretty different. A king on his opponent's back rank would now sometimes find it useful to use the opponent's "castling tunnel" during the endgame
* openings: no big difference.
* valuations: rooks & king even more valuable.

#### Pawn movement

Out of all pieces, pawns are the only ones where you need to know which way the board is facing to know how they're allowed to move. Legacy chess variants retain this property even for other pieces; i.e. shogi/xiangqi have pieces which require knowing board orientation.

So removing it would imply pawns could move and take both up and down, and could even promote on either end of the board.

Changing this would probably make a huge difference to the game, since you'd be able to move your knight out of the way and then immediately move a pawn backwards to promote.

An even greater change would be to remove the requirement to track which part of the board are the top/bottom vs which are the sides. This would allow pawns to move one square in any direction orthogonally, and attack any direction diagonally; and when they were on a square which could be considered a "2nd rank" they can move two squares towards the center. The problem with this is that the a and h pawns should have already promoted since they start in what could be considered a promotion zone. There are some somewhat consistent rules making promotion optional and available as an instantaneous move during your turn.

##### Remove the concept of vertical orientation of the board

* description: pawns would be able to move up and down, and promote on either back rank. They can also take in both directions now.
* depth: lots of parts of original chess are now gone; most games are a mass of queens fighting. Seems likely that one side would have a strong material advantage after this, so there wouldn't be as much endgame variety. Also, endgames involving pawns would not happen anymore, since the pawns would have promoted.
* resemblance: it'd probably be pretty crazy since most pawns would promote quickly.
* openings: totally different, probably, involving lots of quick pawn promotion
* valuations: pawns are now worth nearly a queen each. Since this change only effects pawns, though, once they are gone it would be normal chess, albeit with lots more queens.

##### Remove all board orientation-specific rules

* description: pawns can take in any diagonal direction, and move any orthogonal direction.
* depth: similar to the above, but with even faster pawn promotion.
* resemblance: totally different.
* openings: totally different
* valuations: pawns even more valuable; but total material value on the board is so much higher that as part of an army, a pawn on its own still isn't worth that much.

## Next steps

### Actually test these

You'd have to write a fast board evaluation function for each rule variation, then train an alphazero like engine. Goal would be to have lots of sample games for each variation, as well as an average of (summed material => win percentages) from random states within those games to reveal piece variation. For openings, you could just compare common variations openings

### Evaluation of the criteria per variation:

* depth: You'd have to have a way to differentially power your ai to find levels such that level N+1 beats level N at a specific rate. But because of the way alphazero-like engines work with a policy network, even with no power behind the value network the level is extremely high.
* resemblance: just compare random positions from variation games with standard chess positions.
* openings: same as resemblance, just focused on the beginning of the game.
* valuations: from variation positions with known winrate evaluations, sum the pieces on either side and solve to get approximate piece variations. I.e. in regular chess K+P vs K has some low winrate. But if pawns can promote on any board edge, K+P wins at a much higher rate. Cancel the K values to realize that in this variation, pawns are really valuable.

---

### [Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky](https://fuseki.net/Children-of-Time-by-Adrian-Tchaikovsky)

Tags: 2017 books, book reviews, evolution, sf, space

Really great exploration of evolution and long-term evolution.

The way he integrates the cold sleep chambers to show longer term changes is wonderful.

Pretty fun.

---

### [China Books](https://fuseki.net/China-Books)

Tags: book reviews, books, china, history

| Year | Title | Author | Read Year | Result |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| 1987 | Life and Death in Shanghai | Nien Cheng | 2011 | Gripping |
| 2017 | The Cultural Revolution | Frank Dikotter | 2021 | Great |
| 2013 | The Tragedy of Liberation | Frank Dikotter | 2021 | Great |
| 2010 | Mao's Great Famine | Frank Dikotter |  |  |
| 2008 | Tombstone | Yang Jisheng |  |  |
| 2020 | The World Turned Upside Down | Yang Jisheng |  |  |
| 2021 | America Second | Isaac Stone Fish |  |  |
| 2011 | On China | Henry Kissinger | 2021 | Much better than expected |
| 2001 | River Town | Peter Hessler | 2008 | Good |
| 2011 | Country Driving | Peter Hessler | 2011 | Great |
| 2000 | Thunder from the East | Nicholas Kristof | 2004 | Optimistic |
| 1931 | The Good Earth | Pearl S Buck | 2005 | Existential |
| 1999 | God's Chinese Son | Jonathan Spence | 2007 | Lacking detail |
| 1999 | Waiting | Ha Jin | 2011 | Meh |
| 2011 | The private life of Chairman Mao | Tai Hung-chao | 2011 | Good but not clear how much is anti-Mao propaganda |
| 2010 | The Party | Richard McGregor | 2021 | Amazing, I would read ten more case study books like this. |

---

### [China Wrong Side of the Road Bicycle Lane Defaults](https://fuseki.net/China-Wrong-Side-of-the-Road-Bicycle-Lane-Defaults)

Tags: beijing, bicycling, china, conventions, driving, manners, society, transportation

There's an initially surprising convention for when you ride your bicycle on the wrong side of the road in China.

## Why

Because China has so many wide roads, it's not unusual for bicyclists to ride on the wrong side of the road. If you're only going a block, it's definitely not worth it to cross a major ring road or highway.

## The Rule

If bicyclists are riding on an unprotected road surface with cars (the shoulder of the road), the person riding against traffic should be closest to the edge of the road. The people doing the right thing, riding with traffic, should go closer to the road. This is a little bit unfair, but it does make sense, because it reduces the average velocity difference between adjacent lanes of traffic.

## But!

There's a major exception: when the bicyclist area is protected, by a grill, or is a separate lane, the protected bike road is considered to be independent, and everyone should ride on their right. This is pretty well observed, too.

## Observance

Most people do this. The main group not doing is are people from age 40-60 - they ignore whether the road is protected or not, and just always ride as far away as possible from the nearest car lane.

## Negotiation

If you are following someone who's doing it wrong, you can't force people passing you to immediately adjust - in that case, you have to continue the wrong pattern until you pass them.

## Intersections

This works well, and most people know it (the main exception being middle-aged women, who ride wherever they want). However, the problem occurs when the protection on a bike area ends - everyone has to switch sides with oncoming bike traffic. This is usually handled by slowing down, or just continuing on behind the one in front of you until things clear out.

## Never Forget

The first rule of safe riding in China is to stay behind someone else, for shielding. So if you happen to be behind someone breaking the above rules, and can't pass them, just follow them anyway.

---

### [China's "Shifted" Holidays](https://fuseki.net/Chinas-Shifted-Holidays)

Tags: china, complaining, efficiency, holidays, scheduling, society, tewari

China does something no other country does. In order to make holidays appear longer, Before Spring Festival, they force people to work the weekend, then give them 5 days off, then force them to work the next weekend before starting a normal 5 day workweek.

They call it a "5 day holiday" when you actually only get one extra day off.

## It Doesn't Work

because most people just take vacation on the weekend days anyway.

When people do work those weekend days, they do very little, show up late and leave early.

## But, it does work

Because it forces people to use their leave days to take weekends off, which they normally get off for free.

## The worst one

This year, May 1 is a Tuesday - this holiday is just one day off. In order to make it more of an occasion, the Saturday before is considered a working day, and then you have off Sunday, Monday and Tuesday following.

## How about this?

You work 260 days in a row, and then have all your weekend days in a row: a 3 month paid vacation? No? Ok how about work 120 days straight, then 45 days holiday? Still don't like it? Hmm, we seem to be approaching the status quo. How about every month work the first 22 days, then be off for 8 or 9 in a row? This might be tolerable, but 22 days in a row is really a lot!

## Mini-weeks

Beyond our current 5 on 2 off schedule, we could go to a mini-week - 2 or 3 days on, and 1 day off. Would this be better? Recovery-wise, it probably would be. But it'd be impossible to take 2-day trips.

## What is the point of weekends?

Rest, recovery, and taking care of important stuff. But also, going out and getting hung over. At least with 2 day weekends, hung-over people waste one of their own days.

## Variability might be good

It kinda actually could be good to be able to give up 4 Saturdays and then take 4 extra days off in a row. Personally, variability would let you do a lot more travel. But it would be bad for the economy as a whole.

## So Why do they do it?

Are people so simple-minded that they just have to celebrate May 1 on that actual month & day? Yes, this is part of it. It just wouldn't feel "right" to celebrate it on another day.

It's the same reason there's such a huge jam-up around Spring Festival. Nobody wants to take off a week earlier and be home for the week leading up to the Festival - they only want to be there for the standard time: festival day plus a week after. In the US we don't have this - some people get home a week before christmas and leave the day after, others arrive that night and stay til new year's. That flexibility reduces the intensity of the load.

Of course, in the case of May 1st, this purity to the date ignores the fact that the solar calendar isn't even really traditional Chinese anyway, and just replaces the "pure" lunar calendar. It also ignores leap years shifting days around (up to 1 day off, depending on the year).

## Could this be one of those great ideas that just seems crazy?

I have to admit, the idea of having a Sunday mood on a work day could be interesting - the same way having Monday morning mood on a holiday is a worthwhile experience to have occasionally. But the goal of the policy is probably just efficiency.

The gov't realized that people have to have long holidays for the traditional days off, but it didn't want to give the long holiday plus annual leave days for them, so they just force people to use leave or go unpaid to get the days off they want. The policy is possible in China because everything is part of the same system - there are no independent schools, public spaces, etc. - it's all locked together.

---

### [China's Philosophy](https://fuseki.net/Chinas-Philosophy)

Tags: china, complaining, control, evolution, freedom, government, hong kong, philosophy, politics

There are some things you forget about China while living there. But going to Hong Kong really makes it clear.

The philosophy is: Control. Control everything.

Mainland gov't is against independent radio stations, independent TV shows, independent universities, independent schools, independent publishing houses, independent research.

So almost every famous university in China is in Beijing. Everyone must speak in the same way on TV - standard. On TV or in books there is no honest depiction of corruption, no suspicion of the motives of people in power, nothing about sex, or faithlessness. There are no independent areas, even physically.

They believe it's acceptable for one organization to control every aspect of education, public health, media, science. And that it's best to have a complete hierarchy. This means that the littlest kindergarten teacher cannot try something new, because she is part of the same apparatus as the military. Every university head reports to the same guys, and receives orders from the same committee.

The overriding thread to their policy isn't even nominally freedom; it's harmony/trust in authority.

## History

Just look how well centralized authority has worked in the nearby countries. Japan unified, and then isolated itself from the world for hundreds of years. It came out of it for a brief period, until power got centralized again, and raised a generation of nationalists who killed millions of people and themselves.

In China during the cultural revolution, naive beliefs about human nature got elevated to a position of absolute respect, and society went crazy for 10 years. They persecuted the best people, took their assets and destroyed their families, and elevated know-nothing anti-intellectuals to power. They also physically destroyed most of the interesting physical remnants of China's history. Those remnants are now being rebuilt shoddily to make money out of tourism.

This faith in centralization is so dangerous. As technology changes, centralization works better and better - at least, the center is able to exert more control, faster, on distant possessions. But if it goes wrong it's much worse, too. I like the idea of an escape hatch - don't let any one group control everything. It might not be as efficient, but at least we won't end up with a hell on earth.

---

### [China, an Argument Based Society](https://fuseki.net/China-an-Argument-Based-Society)

Tags: arguments, china, complaining, parking, people, society

In china you often see people negotiating about things that in the US would be non-negotiable. Near my house there's a little alley outside a gated school compound. Along the side, cars are parked, and empty spots are blocked with concrete blocks.

There was a guy out of his car, moving the blocks, when a 15 year old guard came over. They began to argue - you can't park here why not, blah blah

In the US the guard would just say "to park here you have to have ~~ license" , or "to park here costs X", and everything he'd say would be pretty clearly backed up with force. After he says this there is no argument. If you park here we'll have you towed.

Yet, they went on talking for 5 more minutes. What can they possibly be talking about? Either you have the authority or you don't. There is no convincing.

Not only that, but people are comfortable being around people they've just browbeaten.

Other things people argue about:

> I know the elevator only serves floors 5-20, but can you stop at floor 21 for me?

> I know we signed a contract promising delivery of the goods on date X, but we're very busy and so we can't do it.

> I know the air conditioner doesn't work, and we are the building managers... but you see, the problem is that the AC can't vent properly, so you have to understand that it can't be fixed.

etc.

---

### [Chinese Computer Habits](https://fuseki.net/Chinese-Computer-Habits)

Tags: china, complaining, computers, culture, internet, society, ui, usability

## Right click & Refresh

The average copy shop worker will right-click the desktop and choose "refresh" approximately 5 times every time he does anything with a USB drive.

Nobody knows why this happens, but it happens *everywhere* in China from Beijing to Guangzhou.

## Typing Capital Letters

It took me like 8 years to notice, but nobody uses shift+letter to type capital letters. Instead, they hit the caps lock key, type the letter, then hit caps lock again to turn it off.

This is insane.

## Keyboard Shortcuts

Nobody even knows alt+tab. They just use the mouse for *everything*

## Adaptation

Nobody really minds, and pointing out shortcuts has pretty much no effect. People will be like "wow, that's interesting/useful" but they will not usually write them down or remember them.

---

### [Chinese Copyshops](https://fuseki.net/Chinese-Copyshops)

Tags: china, complaining, computers, copyshops, internet

They're awesome.

## Obsessive Clicking

The first thing you notice is that whenever anyone uses a computer, before, during and after every action, they will repetitively right-click the desktop and choose "refresh". They will usually do this 2 or 4 times between every action.

If someone plugs in a USB drive, they will continuously refresh the desktop until the drive shows up, and then a couple times more for good measure.

I don't know why this is but it's happened everywhere I've been. Is there some kind of guidebook to copy shop guys telling them how to do it?

## What you get

It's cheap, but you have to walk them through everything. A nice color print on A3 (big) is like 2 kuai (30 cents US)

## Printing Books

I printed a 600 page book (converted from mobi -> a 160 page pdf), and they bound it nicely for me, for 41 kuai (5$ US)

---

### [Cold War Hostages](https://fuseki.net/Cold-War-Hostages)

Tags: credibility, history, hostages, society

## Why did we stop using intermarriage to prevent wars?

During the cold war, the US and the USSR should have had an informal arrangement where the president's daughters go study in Russian universities, and the premier's kids come to DC. Their life wouldn't have to be bad there - both cities have expat populations, and fun stuff to do.

It would have made it very unlikely that the US would have launched an unprovoked attack. Think how much more comfortable it would be to live in Moscow if Reagan's daughter was known to be living there.

They would need to be monitored, to make sure they didn't just run away, but that could be done discreetly. They wouldn't even all need to be monitored at all times - only half of them for example would need to be secure at any one time. The rest could just go run wild.

## Problem

The people living overseas might fall in love locally or make other friends, and end up being suspected of being double agents.

---

### [Comedy I like](https://fuseki.net/Comedy-I-like)

Tags: comedians, comedy, complaining, people, reviews, tv, tv shows

Comedy is thriving online. On this page I link to videos and people I'm interested in, and try to talk a bit about what they do that's special.

# Shows

## Unclassifiable

### Tim & Eric

A duo who is into absurdism. They also are amazing editors taking a lot of inspiration from late night local TV advertisements. They also do a lot of super gross stuff which I'm not into. Tim is a really good actor and produces copying the style of 70s singers as a tribute. His special ability is extreme control of his speech patterns and facial expressions.

This is my favorite - somewhat wholesome and accepting of the stupidity of underdeveloped teenage boy talk. So many great lines, and I love the way the instrumentation interacts with the emotions, with the deep bass drum / triangle fitting in perfectly.


Universes


Path to the Presidency - gradual escalation of absurd conflict and passive aggressiveness, combined with fake extreme media and PR-speak hiding conflict. Also has the classic Tim funny mispronunciations of words.

### Limmy

Scottish guy who did 3 seasons of a BBC sketch show. He's quite "dark triad" but also really insightful. Of everyone on this page I think his ability to control his facial expression and do accents is the best. His sketches typical take a certain mood or emotion and maximize it. Since the show, he's gone on to have a pretty big following on twitch. Before the show he recorded some albums of storytelling with intricately connected Scottish stereotype characters. He's quite dark and nobody would say he's nice or friendly, really.

Which Toilet? An investigation into intellectual overthinking. The way he does the voiceover, combined with his gestures is just so amazing. My favorite part is how he pauses in the middle of the word "fe-male".


Tea Sketch. This is somewhat comedy, but more about extreme emotional manipulation, with his usual good acting. Also has a big component of magical-childlike thinking / megalomania and imagination of kids. In this sketch he continuously escalates the emotional importance of his random actions.


Secret Agent sketch.

He can also get pretty transcendent.

### Mitchell & Webb

2000s UK sketch comedy show. This pair went on to create Peep Show, and the show came after a successful radio sketch comedy series.

Pretty classic mockery of homeopathy. In the vein of Mr Show.

"Are we the baddies".

### Key & Peele

### Birthday Boys - caveman sketch.

### Not the 9 O'clock News - 80k UK sketch comedy.

### SCTV - canadian sketch comedy

### The Mitchel & Webb Look (tv & radio) - UK sketch comedy, really creative and funny, by the same guys who did peep show.

### The Fast Show - 90s UK sketch comedy.

### Kids in the Hall - 90s canadian sketch comedy

### The State - 90s american sketch comedy. Pretty good.

### Mr Show - the classic.

### The Peter Serafinowicz Show - sketch comedy from Peter Serafinowicz.

## punditry

### Robert Mitchell's Discussions

## Absurdism

### Look around You - absurd, great ensemble cast of 2000s UK comedians. The first series is a parody of educational films, and the second is of science presentation shows.

### Tom Goes to the Mayor - I liked this one a lot too. Has some good guests.

### Delocated - An absurd reality tv show. So many great catchphrases - "the bone zone", "the wiggler", the "ska"- themed bar mitzvah, etc. It's a reality show about a guy in the witness protection program who has Eugene Mirman of the russian mob trying to kill him. The best part is the way Jon talks. And Dog Mayor! (He runs for NYC Dog Mayor, because dogs are underrepresented in politics).

### Children's Hospital - 2010s US hospital comedy with a mean Rob Corddry

### Snuff Box - weird, dark comedy sketches

### Dr. Katz - 2 parts. 1. the relationsip between katz, his son, and his receptionist. The son is played by H. Jon Benjamin, one of the greatist voice artists ever. I just don't know how he does it. The receptionist is played by Sarah Silverman's sister, who has an amazing voice, too. 2. Various standups coming in to be psychoanalyzed. Mostly they just do their act, sometimes it's funny. But the first part is amazing.

## Satire

### On the Hour (tv & radio) - 90s satire of news programs

### Brass Eye - Chris morris satire, 90s UK

# Drama/Comedy

* The Alan Partridge Show - perfectly capturing a weak pretentious soul.
* Spaced - incredibly creative, hilarious, amazing direction. A brilliant person's take on the reality of modern young life, video games, ambition, friendship, etc. Edgar Wright, the director, went on to make many more movies featuring his amazing editing ability. Side note, he's incredibly witty when he appears in podcasts in the best British tradition.
* Curb Your Enthusiasm - interweaving plots, and a wonderful balance between points of view. First few seasons are the best but still worth it for recent series.
* Lead Balloon - Pretty funny, and a great eastern European maid character. This show is about hypocrisy.
* Saxondale - later steve coogan, another great character. every scene with the bitchy secretary is brilliant.
* Flight of the Concords - it's good! And Todd Barry is good too!
* Peep Show - This is funny but compared to Curb, everything just goes SO absolutely wrong every single time, and the main characters have no redeeming qualities at all. It's really annoying. It's reasonable up to season 4, but after that it just goes insane.
* The Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin - poignant 60s/70s UK dramedy about an advertising man losing his mind
* The Office UK - cringe.
* Eastbound and Down - Reveling in cringe/low status.

# Individuals

* Chris Morris - UK Satirist. Doing movies now too, like "four lions". He's great.
* Ricky Gervais. A great, great talker & laugh.
* Kevin Smith - another amazing storyteller. His movies suck but he's a great storyteller.
* Steve Coogan
* Mitch Hedburg - dead US Comedian.
* Greg Benson - doug loves movie podcast
* Larry David - how long will curb run? Season 8 was hilarious.

---

### [Comparison of life in Piscataway, New Jersey, Kochi, Japan, and Zhuzhou, China](https://fuseki.net/Comparison-of-life-in-Piscataway-New-Jersey-Kochi-Japan-and-Zhuzhou-China)

Tags: china, japan, kochi, projects, zhuzhou

Written September 6, 2004

modified August 20, 2009. Thinking of adding a beijing column.

| Category | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Location | {{img:63}} | {{img:62}} | {{img:67}} |
| My age when I lived there | ~6-22 | 22-25 | 26-27 |
| Years | 1984-2000 | 2000-2003 | 2004- |
| Population | 50,000 | 350,000 | 3,000,000 ? |
| Status | Small town near NYC in a dense suburban area | Capital of a rural prefecture | Industrial city & train hub |
| Feeling | nothing going on locally except Rutgers U, NYC is close enough though | Sleepy town, everyone interesting leaves for the big cities as soon as they can | Developing pretty fast, everybody wants money and expects to live a better life. |

| Politics | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Ridiculous foreign policy stance | That cuba is bad. That israel deserves unconditional support. That the war in Iraq was justified. That the US promotes democracy all over the world. | That Japan wasn't as bad as nazi Germany in ww2. That the rape of Nanking didn't happen. That they were victims of ww2. That dropping the bomb was worse than starting ww2. | That Taiwan is part of china. |
| Ridiculous belief | Our language is the hardest in the world. You get colds from being cold and wet. | Our language is the hardest in the world | Our language is the hardest in the world. You get colds from being too cold. |
| Many foreigners | YESSSS | some | no |
| If a foreigner in your store can't speak the local language... | be incredibly rude | Try one more time, then give up. Get really nervous and try to make them go away. | Try out your english, call over your friend, ask someone walking by on the street to help, try drawing pictures & gesturing. |
| How do they feel about the Japanese? | They study really hard and don't have many feelings, OR, they're crazy artists. | They are unique among countries/races and impossible for outsiders to understand | They don't much like them. |
| Locals like white foreigners? | Not really | Yes, if they're not too rowdy. | Yes |
| Locals like nonwhite foreigners? | No | No | No |
| Free Speech | Yes | Yes, but nobody uses it | Yes, but watch out when talking about politics or Taiwan. Actually it's quite open, you can talk about democracy all you want, as long as you don't criticize China. |
| Elections | Yes | Yes, but no issues and one party rule | No |
| Corruption | Yes | YES | YESSSSS |
| Mafia | Not that I know of. | Supposedly | YES |
| A poor guy can win in court against a rich guy | Sometimes | Unlikely, and it'll cost millions and take years | No |
| How often do people think about lawsuits | All the time | Never | Never |
| Locals allowed to move freely | Yes | Yes | Yes, but if you're a peasant trying to go to the city, you won't be able to get a residence card in your new home, so you won't be able to get any public services and your kids won't be able to go to school |
| Racist nationalists | A few | YES | Yes |

| TV | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| TV | Shit | Shit, but amusing | SHIT, but there is a public 24 hour a day sports channel |
| Public TV | A little boring, some good nature documentaries and foreign tv. Oh yeah, and it's sponsored by big oil companies. | Lots of japanocentric documentaries, some go on tv | LOTS of samurai dramas. They censor political talk, non-standard Chinese accents, and sexy clothes. |
| number of public channels | 11 | 5 | 15+, if you have an antenna. (Once I got a good antenna, I was up to 60 Channels. Why can they manage to fit 60 channels into their spectrum in China, and only like 10 in the US?) (update: that wasn't an antenna, that was an illegal splice (into the really cheap local cable, which just broadcasts the tv from each province)) |

| Food | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Food | Good, unhealthy | Bland, some ok, lots terrible | Great, but it'll make you sick |  |
| Spicy Food | Thai, indian, chili. You can find it. | Almost nothing except coco's curry house and indian restaurants. And you can put a lot of wasabi on stuff but that's different | Oh god yeah. Everything is covered in peppers. black, green, and red. You can order dishes that are 100% peppers. 我喜欢辣椒 |  |
| Blue collar daily food | Sandwiches, pizza, pasta? | Ramen, Udon, fried stuff (agemono), box lunches (bento) | Noodles, dumplings, some vegetable I don't know the name of, eggs |  |
| Surprisingly good local food | Cheap pizza | Japanese curry | Chopped tomatos with sugar. Egg pancakes. |  |
| Terrible local food | Liver? | Rotten soybeans (natto), cooked rice smashed into blobs by hammers (mochi), pickled things, boiled smashed potato extract mixed with animal bone ash (yes, really) (konnyaku), internal organs | Internal organs. all kinds of dried sea invertebrates. Apparently they have chinese natto too. Nice looking chicken/pepper/rice dishes where every other piece of chicken is actually a bone chunk |  |
| Foods I ate a lot at first but then got tired of | Velveeta cheese, potato chips | Triangular chunks of rice with chopped salmon inside (onigiri), conveyor belt sushi Dumplings |  |  |
| Food I ate a lot of and could eat all the time for the rest of my life | Pizza, garlic bread, thai | Japanese curry, melon bread, pizza potato chips which have this flavoring splattered over them that is just solid crack, squid sashimi, tuna and egg salad sandwiches, indian food, royal hat pizza | Spicy whole fish | hotpot (huoguo 火锅) = a big pot of boiling water full of peppers, garlic, and peppers in the middle of the table that you add raw materials such as lamb, mushrooms, noodles to and then fish out and eat. Beef and onions fried over rice. Fried noodles with those long skinny mushrooms and peppers. |
| Food you always hear about but people barely ever actually eat | Baked alaska? | Sushi | The wonderful food from their hometown, which is always better than the local version. |  |
| Fat People | OH YESSSSS | A few | A few, 30+ guys are all a little thick. More than japan. |  |
| Bones in your food | Yes, but just eat around it. | Ha ha, never. Except for fish. | Chopped up bone bits mixed in with chicken, pork, beef. Fish served whole full of bones. Bits of bone/rock mixed into your rice occasionally. |  |
| Spitting things out | NOOOOO | NOOOO | Just do it, right on the table. while talking. |  |
| 1$ gets you how much food | 1 slice of pizza | Half a tiny bowl of rice? | A big bowl of noodles and a bottle of beer. |  |
| A soda | 1$? 1.50$ | 1.25$ | 0.35$ |  |
| Taking 30 people out for dinner and getting them drunk in a nice restaurant | 1200$ + tip | 1200$ | 100$ |  |
| Ordering | Go as fast as possible and don't ask questions. If you piss them off they will do stuff to your food. | Be serious, follow the script. Impossible to break out of standard phrases. | Take 10 minutes, ask as many questions as possible. The restaurant will be out of half the stuff you order. Chat, laugh, joke. |  |
| Getting the attention of the waiter | Look them in the eyes, or raise a finger | Yell "sumimasen" or "master" (mastaa) | Yell "laoban" |  |
| Get treated like a human being | No, unless they pretend to in order to get tips | No, if they vary from the script they could get fired. | Yes |  |
| Tipping | Yes. 15-20% for meals, 1$ for drinks | No | No |  |
| Floors of cheap restaurants | Clean | CLEANNNN | DIRTY, spilled food, used napkins. floor = garbage can. |  |
| Local alcohol | None | Sake, 15%, it's awful | Baiju, 40%, really bad |  |
| Effects of drinking | Louder, more violent, sloppy | Red face, louder, shows emotions, gets naked | Red face, louder, grabs people more, shows emotions, more expressive |  |
| Someone says "You're drunk!" to you | ? | Jovial | Condemnatory |  |
| Obviously extremely drunk people | Yes | YESSSSS | No? |  |
| Drinking on the street | NOOOOO, you will be arrested | Yes, during festivals. Bunches of 10 drunks drinking "cup of sake" in the park all day. | YES |  |
| Drinking on trains/public transport | NOOOOO, you will be arrested Yes | Yes |  |  |

| Street | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Street Tables | No! | NO | YES, it's great |
| Dudes sitting at street tables with no shirt and 10 empty beer bottles | No | No | YES |
| People walking on the street | No, no public streets. Unless you count malls | Yes, on the shopping street obiyamachi. Little towns have dead shopping streets full of old ladies at 5 am. | Yes, on every little street |
| People selling stuff on the street | No | Yes, some israelis selling jewelry. | YESSS. Little mirrors, fake mahjong tiles (to help you to cheat), etc. |
| People hanging out on the street | NOOOO | Yes, 80 year old women, school kids, guys trying to pick up girls, old guys drinking in the park | Yes, sitting around, taxi/moto guys waiting to pick up rides, store workers, washing stuff, cleaning, eating, playing with their kid, grandmas talking, guys smoking together |
| People sleeping in the street | No | No Yes, on newspapers |  |
| People sleeping at their workplace | No No Yes, lots of construction workers |  |  |
| People sleeping in the park | No Yes | No parks |  |
| People washing their hair on the street | No No | YES |  |
| People playing games on the street | No | Hidden groups of old men in the park playing shogi | Many old dudes playing xiang qi, on weekends every house has the whole family outside playing mah jong, many young guys waiting around playing cards |
| Parks | Yes, joggers & lovers in the day, closed with cops patrolling at night | Yes, old men and school kids | (Initially no, later I realized there are lots of them) |
| Obstacles on the sidewalk | Nothing, if there is you can sue | Huge canals with no rails, telephone poles, signs everywhere, bad pavement, blind people's "yellow brick road" walking paths which have raised slippery bumpy tiles which probably cause hundreds of bike accidents in the rain ever year. | Rotten food, urine, air conditioning drips, people sleeping, beggars, babies, dogs, parked motorcycles, taxis, big piles of bricks, concrete, sand, sticks, garbage. Open grates, glass |
| If the sidewalk is wet it means | It rained, or somebody's watering their lawn | It rained | It rained, someone washed their hair, someone did laundry, someone has an AC above you, someone was cleaning the street, there is a leak, there is construction near there, someone drank something |
| If you have some water to throw away | Down the drain | Down the drain | Throw it on the street, spreading it as widely as possible. I don't know why they do this but they make a real effort to get it to cover as much area as possible. |
| Things carried in bicycles | yourself, your baby | yourself, guitars, umbrellas | yourself, babies, bottles of propane gas, giant water bottles, your brothers and sisters, your passengers, giant pieces of styrofoam, 10 food long metal poles, giant balloons |
| Beggars | No | Play jpop on acoustic guitar, bow in their monk outfit, read palms with a laptop sitting next to them, play xylophone. | Have signs telling their life story, challenge you to chinese chess problems, are horribly deformed (and I mean really really horribly), have their pitiful babies in their arms, have obsessive motion disorder |
| Vehicles on the road | Cars, trucks, motorcycles, suvs, 18 wheelers, vans, buses | Cars, k-cars, mopeds, motorcycles, schoolkids on bicycles, strange little mutant cars, weirdly decorated trucks | Taxis, buses, rickshaws, motorcycles, motorcycle taxis, motorcycle carts, rickshaw taxis, carts, cars, suvs, bicycles, trucks, dumptrucks |
| Honking | No | No | every 2 seconds |
| U-turns? | Prepare to get a ticket and get raped by insurance. | Yes, anywhere you want | Yes, anywhere you want |
| Lines on the road | YESSSS, yellow in the middle and white on the edges | YESSSS | No. |
| Interesting things in the road | No | Tram stops | Trees with pavement laid around them, trucks loading and unloading giant bales. |
| Park anywhere you want | NOOOO, prepare to be towed/your car damaged | YES | YES, sidewalk, side of the highway, wherever |
| Suicidal old ladies veering into the road | NO | YESSSS | YESSSS |
| Jaywalking | Yes | NO! | YEEEESSSSS |
| Visible dirt/grass | yes, everywhere | NOOOOO. | dirt gashes around construction sites - yes. grass a little |
| Land Use | Thanks to zoning laws, even the densest housing developments still have yards. There are still forests (about 10 acres across from my house, another 500 acre forest fairly close) A giant park running along the raritan river. It's incredibly beautiful. | 20% extremely steep hills covered with "industrial cedar", 40% rice fields/concrete canals, 30% houses packed back to back with no yard/gravel yards filled with propane tanks/dead cars/buses, 10% roads/stores/parking lots. | 8 story apartment buildings, wide roads, a few rubble/garbage pits. Lots of construction sites. Almost no private houses. The ground floor of apartment buildings is always given over to commerce. |
| Ridiculous Land Use | Imagine a circle big enough to contain 5000 people's homes. It is likely that there aren't any stores in that circle. At ALL. | Farmers use billion dollar plots of land to grow rice, since Japanese rice prices are kept at 10x the rest of the world's. So everyone lives in shitty little houses and there are almost no open spaces. | Giant square pools of water with a mysterious purpose, surrounded by at least 40 8-story apartment buildings. |
| Chain Stores | Yes, everything is a chain. | Lots of huge outlet stores. In some areas there are still pitiful little mom and pop stores run by 80 year olds. | They are spreading fast. Chinese local restaurant owners don't seem to realize that a McDonalds with clean floors is a lot more appealing than a local place with drifts of used napkins under the tables. |
| If you have nothing to do at work | Chat, look busy | LOOK BUSY | Sit down, smoke, talk, eat, sleep, read the paper |
| Dirty Streets | No, incredibly incredibly clean | No | YES |
| "Be careful not to step in that vomit!" | um... once a month? once a year? | once a week | multiple times daily. |
| Public Garbage cans | Yes, of course, what do you expect people to do with garbage? | No! You must pay to throw things away! | Sometimes, but bums constantly open them up looking for things and throw the garbage all around. |
| People pawing through big piles of garbage | NO | NO | YESSSSS |
| Air | Beautifully clear | Clear | You can't see more than 500 yards clearly due to the pollution fog. |

| Design | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |  |  |  |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Sides of buildings | Clean | Huge rain stains, grimy, or really rusty | Soot covered |  |  |  |
| Wooden buildings | Yes! beautiful! | No, except for little falling apart shacks filled with junk | No |  |  |  |
| Tiles as an architectural element | Implies bathrooms | Common | Every building |  |  |  |
| The buildings are disgusting and make me sick | Modern ones | Yes | Yes, but what do you expect? they're only 30 years away from the cultural revolution. |  |  |  |
| Bricks | Red, or that nice mottled pattern. | White, or grey | White or red |  |  |  |
| Brick layout | Always laid in that overlapping pattern In a grid, longer axis horizontal Tiles are laid in a grid, longer axis vertical, Bricks are laid in that overlapping pattern. |  |  |  |  |  |
| Old stuff | Revolutionary buildings, nice old barns and houses | Lots of nice old temples in every neighborhood, mostly falling apart and overgrown, covered with moss. Square stone stumps sticking out of the ground with old family names cut into the sides. | No. Some old temples obviously recently rebuilt out of concrete. |  |  |  |
| Advertising Billboards | some | lots | LOTS |  |  |  |
| FYI signs (no standing here, please don't litter, please don't forget your bags, next stop ~, etc.) | some | SOOOO MANY | almost none |  |  |  |
| Recorded women's voices telling you what to do. | Not that much | 100 times a day | surprisingly, almost never. |  |  |  |
| Broken appliances | occasionally | no | YES. |  |  |  |
| Doors with no knobs or handles | NOOOO! all doors must have knobs or handles on both sides, it's a rule | YES, paper doors with no handles. | YESSSSS. In my house there are 5 doors - only one has a knob. The other 4 are blank on one side and have only a little latch on the other side. They also don't fit the frames, so if the latch falls out you have to pry the door open. |  |  |  |
| Doors fit in the frame | Yes, generally, except for sliding doors. | Yeah, I guess so | No, ha ha ha |  |  |  |
| Badly designed things | Baths are always in the same room with the toilet. That's gross. Using a public toilet is equivalent to rubbing asses with some stranger. That's gross. Sliding doors that don't work. SUVs that are too big. Too many stoplights that are on all night. | Sliding doors that don't work. Walls made of paper and glass with no handles. No heat or AC. No basements, so water heaters, propane tanks, electric boxes all are in the front yard. Power lines everywhere. | Buildings are just concrete shells with all the wires and pipes stuck visibly on the outside. The drain in my shower is on the wall 1/2 inch above the floor. The pipes in the bathroom constantly leak massively. The pipes in the shower have water constantly running through them, even all night. |  |  |  |
| Noisy at 7 am | NO, if so you will be arrested, or get a 500$ no warning fine | Rarely, except in political season | YES, the taxisand rickshaws start moving around at 5, honking starts at 6, construction starts at 7. |  |  |  |
| Money (value in US$) | coins: 0.01, 0.05, 0.10, 0.25 $ | bills: 1, 5, 10, 20, 100 $ | coins: 0.01, 0.04, 0.09, 0.45, 0.90, 4.50 $ | bills 9, 45, 90 $ | coins: 0.01, 0.06, 0.12 $ | bills: 0.01, 0.06, 0.12, 0.24, 0.60, 1.20, 2.40, 6, 12 $ |
| Smells Bad | rarely | rarely. occasionally intense semen smell. (it's not only me that's noticed this, it's probably some kind of farming thing) occasionally old ladies burning/preparing tea leaves smells extremely like marijuana. | oh god yes. piss, shit, rotting food, burning plastic, acidic smoke that makes you cough, public dumpsters |  |  |  |
| Public Bathrooms | No, no, damn you no. | Yes, especially in city centers | No. |  |  |  |
| Public Urination | Prepare to be arrested | Ha ha yes, anywhere anytime after dark. Even have a word for it, "tasshon" Women too. Twice I've seen people crouched on the side of the road. | I'm not sure yet, but probably. It sure smells like it's ok. |  |  |  |
| Taxi base cost | um, 5$? | 5$ | 0.75$ |  |  |  |
| DVD cost | um, 20$? | 25$? | 0.75$ pirated |  |  |  |
| Netbars | ridiculously impossible to find, even in New York City | a few | everywhere |  |  |  |
| Netbar/hour | 12$ in kinkos | 5$ | 0.25$ |  |  |  |
| <25 years old instant messaging users | High? | Low | High. Everyone has IM |  |  |  |
| Locally written IM program | Yes, aim icq msn etc | no? | yes, qq, it's awesome |  |  |  |
| Cell phone penetration < 25 years old | High | 99% | 70% |  |  |  |
| Fighting in public | Never seen it | In 3 years I saw one fight, one guy getting beaten to a pulp by 4 other guys in a karaoke bar. | Haven't seen any in the first 6 months. |  |  |  |
| If something seems to be going down in public... | Call the cops, then go watch from a distance. | Look down at the sidewalk and walk a little faster. | "The Blob" clustering style |  |  |  |

| Society | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Tattoos | So many | Becoming more popular now, probably mostly fake | Haven't seen any |
| Dudes with Earrings | Many | Almost none, except for foreigners and hip hop kids | No |
| Guys with no shirts on | No | NOOOO | YES |
| Walking around with no shoes on No | NOOOOO | sometimes! (hard to believe) |  |
| Male status symbol | Car | Phone, hair, clothes | Brand of Cigarettes, Phone |
| Hottest it usually gets in August | 95F/35C | 95F/35C | 95F/35C |
| How hot does it feel? | Not that hot, because everyplace has AC. In high school everyone wore sweatshirts in summer and t-shirts in winter because the AC/heat was so high. | Pretty hot, since there's not much cover. Stores have super intense AC, schools have none. | Pretty hot. |
| Weather report consists of | Temperatures, and a mention of sunny or cloudy | A report on the state of the clouds, waves, clothes drying weather, allergy index. Temperatures are mentioned as an afterthought. | ? |
| Ansewer to "How's the weather today?" | Hot/cold/warm/nice/cool | Sunny/cloudy | ? |
| Cost of a little box fan | ? | 20$ | 4$ - yes that's right. I have two. |
| Things used as umbrellas | Nothing - Just run from the car to the door. | Umbrellas | Umbrellas, hands, plastic bags, books, jackets |
| Umbrellas to keep off the sun | NO - who goes walking outside? | YES | YESSSSSS |
| Gloves to keep off the sun | NO? | YES | Yes |
| Bicycles with gloves built into the handlebars | Ha ha, no | Yes, for old ladies | Yes, for working people on their bike rickshaws. |
| Baby haircuts | None, or short | None, or short | Ronaldo, or two little horns |
| Being outside at night | No. Why don't you have a car? The police will creep along behind you | Yes | YES |
| Bowing | NO! | YESSSS | No |
| giddy, freespirited laughing in public | Yes | No | YES |

| Girls | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Do guys go up to girls on the street and try to pick them up? | No, prepare to be maced/arrested | YESSSS, "nanpa" is pretty common | YES, at least according to one of my students |
| Extremely Short Shorts | A few | Very few | YES |
| Girls with dyed hair | ? | 95% | 20%, will be 90% within 10 years. (including all the grannies who dye black...) |
| Transparent blouses | No | No | YES |
| Skirts | Not much | YESSSSS | No |
| "Massage" Parlors | No? | Yes | YESSS, pink lit "hair salons" |
| "innocent" looking girls | ? | 80% | 90% |
| % I actually believe are "innocent" | ? | 20% | 70% |
| Makeup | Lots? | LOTS | Not much |
| Pornography | Yes, hidden | EVERYWHERE (except on tv) | Yes, hidden, illegal |
| A beer in a bar | 3$ | 3$ | 3$ |
| Bars with dancing girl acts, alternating with long haired dudes singing karaoke | No? | Maybe? | YES |
| Bars where every girl there works for the bar | No | No | YES |
| Bars that girls go to without working there | Yes | Yes | No, they are nice girls, why would they go to a bar. |
| Karaoke | No, ha ha, only for losers | YES | YES |

| Police | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Physically afraid of the police | YES | No | Maybe |
| Afraid of the police | YES | Yes | Yes |
| If you are arrested | must be charged within 24 hours, don't have to talk without a lawyer. | can be kept in solitary for up to 3 weeks with no lawyer and no visitors, 12 hours a day of questioning, without being charged. | ??? |
| Prison | Prisoners are often raped, beaten, and tortured, with complicity of the guards. | Every aspect of prisoners life is controlled. They're not allowed to look into someone else's eyes. Not allowed to talk. Must sit in a certain way in the cell. | ? |
| Amount of violent crime | low | low to nothing | low? |
| How many times a day do you see the police | 3 or 4 times | once | sometimes... |
| How often do you hear sirens | every day, many times | rarely to never | rarely |

| Language | Piscataway, New Jersey | Kochi, Japan | Zhuzhou, China |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Main Language | English | Japanese | Mandarin |
| Other Languages | Spanish, NJ English | Tosa dialect | Xiang (zhuzhou dialect) |
| English Level | debatable | most people have no english, educated people have terrible slow exam english, very few randomly have great english | most people have nothing, but young people have some basics |
| English Teacher Salary | ? | 3000$/month | 500$/month |
| How rich do you feel as an english teacher Not very | Rich enough to eat out every day, buy consumer electronics, and travel to cheap countries | Rich enough to take your entire class out to dinner |  |
| English Teacher status | low | low | high |
| English Fear Level | - | very high. Nobody will approach you with english, and they'll be super shy and take forever to say anything. | You get a lot of hellos on the street, sometimes people try to speak english. |
| Accent | - | Really bad. No/wrong intonation, can't say vowels right, l/r thing | Bad, lots of vowels wrong, intonation wrong. |
| Uni Student English | - | Awful. It's like they haven't studied at all. They stop after every word and try to remember how to continue. They know tons of written vocab but don't know the right pronunciation or how to use it. Don't know basic "Do you..." sentences. | Sometimes good, sometimes bad. They know lots of vocab, but don't use it in the right way. Pretty emotive though. |

A few other of these around the web: <http://heim.ifi.uio.no/krzys/comparison.html>

---

### [Complete book analysis and metadata](https://fuseki.net/Complete-book-analysis-and-metadata)

Tags: analysis, genetics, information, personality

In the long term, very deep analysis of books and authors lives will be possible.

# The old way of reading a book

* Just read the book
* Look up unknown words in a dictionary
* Look at the author's picture on the back cover to get an impression of them
* If famous, look up the author in an encyclopedia
* Read footnotes, references, or biographies
* Look up their school thesis if you have access.

# Recently available methods.

* Wikipedia: see their childhood, personal history
* Google images search - see how they looked over the years
* Youtube - see how they speak, their accent, speed of speech, ability to answer off the cuff, formality level, physique/attractiveness/style. For poets, hear their voice and their way of reading. Hearing an author's spoken voice can permanently change the way you read their books.

# Future better ways?

In the long term much more complete analysis will be possible.

* 23andme results for ancestry, and promethease results for known health/personality correlates. i.e. it's very likely david foster wallace has traits on the extreme of most polygenic score tests. These can be done retroactively, or partially through surviving relatives.
* Genealogy, family history - social class, religiosity, wealth, criminality. What was the personal history of the people the author spent time with. Putting an author's name (particularly older authors) into ancestry.com and reading the automatically generated life stories of their relatives.
* Health - what was the author's health? How do they feel and how experienced are they re: mortality. This isn't just disease sickness, but their ability to sleep restfully, energy levels, response to coffee/drugs.
* Mental traits: IQ, Big5 personality results
* Learned traits: Language ability analysis, grammar analysis, favored words/sentence patterns, vocabilary
* Location map - google will have full location history, purchase habits, walking speed of most currently living authors. You could retrace the research trips they took to places they mention in their books. Also can reverse this to get analysis of who they spent time with.
* Emotional analysis All written/audio recordings of an author can be analyzed for emotion. We don't have good charts of emotional transitions, but they're definitely a relatively stable aspect of a personality. What things make them made, how do they express anger or other emotions. What leads them to feel love, loneliness, numinosity. Analysis of their communication records could reveal these.
* Book edit history - get a summary of the type of changes made during editing, as a response to emails from their editor. Both specific organization changes, grammar/vocab edits, cuts / additions, responses to feedback, censorship, etc. What was left out of a book due to legal concerns, threats, etc.?
* Physiological analysis - gait analysis - reveals physical strength, balance, health, energy levels. Face coloration reveals a lot about health, heart rate. Hair growth rate, fingernail growth, beard growth systems are all connected to internal physiology.
* Social judgement - collate all their pictures, feed them to social rating sites to receive judgements. i.e. their legacy hotornot score would have been ~8. Were they stylish as a kid? What kind of signals were they sending?

---

### [Continuous Reproduction](https://fuseki.net/Continuous-Reproduction)

Tags: biology, evolution, genetics, ideas, relationships, self-modification, society, transhumanism

There's a lot of noise in our current method of reproduction - one extra success over 50 years of life is enough to go from a loser to a winner. If evolution had provided a smoother success function, it might go much faster.

## Partial Reproduction

What if women would produce an egg, and then every time they had sex, one sperm was selected; from it, only one chromosome would be chosen and added to the forming zygote. A complete zygote would be formed by one woman and a number of men up to the number of chromosomes available. If there were differentation in chromosome function, women could even do manual genetic engineering by selecting the right man to provide the desired chromosome.

A dedicated child would be one where the woman only received chromosomes from one man; the opposite would be a child with many different partial fathers. A society with this happening would allow many more types of social relationship, and would have a huge number of words for relatedness. Perhaps the mayor of a town would be partial father of every child, just as a way to secure his loyalty?

The human problem is that there is no way to have a partial relationship with someone - you are either naturally related by family, or extremely related to them by having children. Establishing these relationships takes forever.

With partial reproduction, each sex act wouldn't be nearly as important; we'd be more like lions.

## Chromosome Signifiers

What if every chromosome had a visible expression somewhere on the body. So, the lips were completely controlled by chromosome 3, chromosome 4 controls the shape of the birthmark which appears on everyone's shoulder, etc. Then, you could easily see which chromosomes had been contributed to each child.

## Building your clone

In Rudy Rucker's ware series, synthetic sentient beings (either robotic or biological) spend most of their time searching for the right resources to complete the physical construction of their child.

---

### [Coronavirus Evacuation Airbnb](https://fuseki.net/Coronavirus-Evacuation-Airbnb)

Tags: coronavirus, disease, evacuation, safety, society

Three friends and I got an Airbnb in a rural area to get away from Coronavirus for a week. The place was a day's drive away from SF, up in Crescent City at the Oregon border.

#### Goals

* Take advantage of us all being WFH to have fun and explore a new area.
* Have someone around us rather than spending the time alone at home.
* Cover some tail risk of civil unrest, where being in a dense city with low social bonds is worse than being in a static, rural area. This was only a minor goal initially, but as fear increased it became more important.

### Activities

With the right mix of people it can a great opportunity to try structured social interactions. Normal, unstructured interaction is also a lot more fun since there's not much else to do.

* Group circle
* Moderated double crux (like a debate but better)
* Group replication of the Fadiman increased-creativity-on-psychedelics study
* Run through "36 questions that lead to love" together
* Hamming Questions / diagnosing bottlenecks
* Group debugging (share a hard problem in your life, group spends 30 minutes brainstorming solutions)
* Bridgewater / Ray Dalio style radically honest feedback on topics of each person's choosing
* Spiritual history interviews, inspired by the Mormon Stories podcast. Go over the subject's personal life history of spirituality, mysticism, wonder, numinosity, and how it changed over time.
* Story evaluation - everyone tells a story and then receives feedback on delivery, interest and meaning
* Make up a personal mythological system as justification for our actions - bets/promises you've made to various concepts and what each one has given you. i.e. your dedication to the god/concept of truth, and what you will insist it has given to you if you are faithful in pursuing it.
* Setting up sociofinancial commitment bets - I promise to do X by date Y or else I lose Z money, with Q evaluation procedures.

### Happenings

* One guy got some sypmtoms resembling coronavirus (minor fever and body aches) for 36 hours, which really scared us. He self-quarantined in his room and soon recovered; nobody else was infected (despite close contact including a 7 hour drive in the same car). This resulted in lots of debate and fear; luckily it was nothing.

### Benefits

* Seeing how people deal with truly difficult situations and conflicts lets you know them much better and more deeply than you would in normal life. Friendships can go on for years, stuck in a possibly not optimal state, and this provides a situation to precipitate a change.
* Having access to other people's cooking skills.
* You really get to know people well when you hang around them for 12 hours a day.
* Story value - you now have a good answer to "what did you do during the coronavirus outbreak?" This may end up being our "JFK moment".

### Things we forgot

Considering that evacuation is not just a conventional trip, and that you're going there to live and work from home, you may want to do the trick where you pack and sit in the car, ready to go, but then come back inside for 30 minutes and wait to remember additional things you need. I did this accidentally (needed to charge my phone) which gave me time to remember a few vitals.

* Pepper - people have genuinely different priorities in life from what others assume. It's important to find out what people really need to be happy beforehand and make sure it's provided.
* Can opener
* None of us own one, but we probably should have brought thermometers.

### Good Policies

* It's important to agree to the quarantine policy beforehand and get buy-in from everyone. There will be variations but at least getting them down on paper is important. You should also establish a plan for what would break up the house if someone gets sick.
* Fear of CV is a very strong rhetorical argument, which causes resentment when the most concerned person tries to regulate others behavior. You need to establish an upper bound of safety procedures.
* Having a group dinner together every day is fun.
* I had a policy of not drinking during times when decisions don't really matter, and feel glad about it
* It's easy to continuously eat - adopting an absolute "no snacking" rule is good, too.

### Learnings

* The average AirBnb does not have a good desk or chair setup at all. For working 8 hours a day, this is much more important than I'd realized. It's hard to evaluate the desk situation through pictures. Even though most of us had brought our keyboard, mouse, monitors, lack of good setup space still hurt.
* Related: Although it's interesting to be away from home, one's home/apartment has so many advantages since it's already optimized for your personal lifestyle. It's hard to replace it for a significant period of time. For longer evacuations, this seems resolvable, if ordering things from Amazon is still possible.
* Evacuation is similar to being an expat - you are isolated from normal society, so you have much more energy and time to devote to relationship building. This matches my experience living overseas - that it's actually more social than normal working suburban life, at least with people sharing a common language.
* It's commonplace, but getting out of the house and going on a hike is extremely beneficial. Physically exercise directly feeds back into good mood. Also, being in a beautiful place gives a sense of timelessness. The redwoods have seen much worse infections than this. You begin to think about the tragedy and terror suffered by the native americans when European disease began spreading into their tribes from the east, hundreds of years before actual contact occurred.
* You can get a pretty good workout (or at least trigger the muscle building / soreness reflex) with a single 35lb kettlebell

---

### [Coronavirus information sources](https://fuseki.net/Coronavirus-information-sources)

Tags: 2020 events, censorship, china, coronavirus, disease, information, politics, trust

* [Worldometer statistics](https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/)
* [Medcram - youtube channel that covers coronavirus related things from a medical/biological/epidemiological perspective](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG-iSMVtWbbwDDXgXXypARQ)
* [Dr John Campbell - Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z05ZrMfKUDc)
* [Mark Lipsitch on twitter](https://twitter.com/mlipsitch)
* [Forecasts](http://rocs.hu-berlin.de/corona/docs/forecast/results_by_country/)
* [The best way I've found to do visualization of cases/deaths over time by country](https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/)

### Alternative information sources

Shazam, the music identification app, has thousands of 5-10s long clips from public places. Can we figure out the rate of background coughing on these clips, by location?

Do we have public sound recording at places like grand central stations? Can airports do cough detection on their security footage?

Can google just listen for coughing sounds near phones and chart it?

What about the classic, publicly known ways that google does monitoring - searches for symptoms?

Can google do contact tracing by phone location? Are they already doing this and sharing it with the government?

### Government knowledge

I assume that intelligence agencies have asked their people on the ground to report basic statistical information - how many people in your office are coughing, how many people are not present, etc. Then using that, calculated spread.

### Long term effects

The really big questions are about government stability. What will change in North Korea, Iran, or other countries which are targets for change?

Will there be a permanent increase in mask-wearing? close physical activities? Eating out in groups as a result of this? We may go closer to the world portrayed in some of Asimov's stories where people spend all their time alone except special occasions, and everyone has a fear of physical closeness.

Will there be more children born 9 months from January? Fewer? I would expect an increase in mask wearing that lasts for years.

---

### [Counters for Mythical Animals](https://fuseki.net/Counters-for-Mythical-Animals)

Tags: animals, ideas, projects

* A flight of dragons / A wing of dragons
* A blessing of Unicorns / A miracle of unicorns
* A whiff of pegasuses
* A solitude of loch ness monsters (one)
* A spike of Tyrannosaurus Rex
* A trireme of Triceratops
* A clump of pterodactyls
* A Horde of Orcs
* A Whirlpool of Aboleth

## Unknown

* gryffons
* kobolds

---

### [Countries should Trade Land, and create more social & legal experiments like Hong Kong](https://fuseki.net/Countries-should-Trade-Land-and-create-more-social--legal-experiments-like-Hong-Kong)

Tags: china, colonies, government, hong kong, ideas, land, politics

Japan and the US should trade islands - I propose a small island off the coast of Seattle, and a similar-sized one off the coast of Japan. They don't need to have any natural resources, or good climate, or soil.

The islands sovereignty and legal systems would be traded. Residents would be offered to be bought out, and paid to leave, or would be offered citizenship in the new country, or could accept a generous relocation package within the original country, plus a large donation to a cause or issue they cared about. Care would have to be taken to not take people's homeland away from them - it'd be better to get an island that had been a former national park, or a place with bad weather.

On the official day of the trade, the island off the coast of seattle would officially become part of Japan, and its counterpart in the Japanese archipelago would officially become the westernmost point in the US.

## Why should we do this?

If you look at Hong Kong, it's one chunk of land among hundreds of similar ones along the twisting Chinese coast. Similar small peninsulas in the mainland have some farmers, some mines, but are pretty much undeveloped. They provide a home and a few resources for the locals, but compare that to HK, which has a sophisticated and different culture people, and its own traditions of art, music, movies, food, and language. It's also rich, and has a good government - and it has been an interesting thing for the mainland gov't and people in Shenzhen to see, right next door - showing them other options for organizing society. The process of taking a random piece of land and making it into HK was a good one. Would you rather have 5 million more Chinese farmers, or would you rather have had their grandparents take part in a grand experiment, and today be part of a new, interesting country? Even from an honest CCP perspective, they probably wouldn't go back in time and prevent the formation of HK - its presence helped them over the years. If the other concessions had stayed part of their originating countries, it'd have been even better - Tianjin, Qingdao, etc. And I'm not opposed to giving China islands in Europe, either. We need interlocking, overlapping, easy ways to expose different styles of life and government to each other.

I also wish Venezuela were closer to the US, to illustrate their failure more clearly to Americans (and to help them)

## We need more experiments

There are lots of other fairly undeveloped pieces of land along the coasts of many countries. So I think they should be traded. There should be enclaves from 10 different countries along China's coast - and there should be little bits of China spread out across the world. China should do it with Africa, the US, everyone. Russia and Austrlia are huge, and their government is limited in what it could do - but think of what the US could do with a tiny piece of northern Australia - or what Australia could do in return with a now-unused piece of western Canada.

## It'd be great to be able to visit international locations more easily

To be able to jump on a boat off in San Francisco and enter Japan or China in just an hour - think of the movie opportunities. Plus, think of the real estate prices! The extradition treaties! It'd be like a super intense Chinatown on treasure island, that is literally China.

---

### [Crypto TFR multi-level marketing scheme](https://fuseki.net/Crypto-TFR-multilevel-marketing-scheme)

Tags: crypto, ecomonics, evolution, genetics, humanity, reproduction, science fiction, society, story ideas

A Bitcoin millionaire has two kids. He doesn't want to spoil them, and he doesn't want his name to die out, so he implements a smart contract: Starting even before he dies, 1% of his net worth will be given to his kids annually, split between them proportionally to how many children they have.

* Generation 1: originator - commits X money
* Generation 2: his two kids
* Generation 3: his grandchildren.

As soon as a grandchild is born, their gen2 parent gets 100% of the annual 1% disbursement. Inheritance starts before the death of gen1.

## Why would someone do this?

They may have a crazy set of beliefs. The key isn't so much why, as evaluating whether this is a stable or growing strategy. Why do deer eat and have fawns? It doesn't really matter; most of their emotions about it are after-effects; the key point is that it survives. Strategies don't have rationalizations when they're invented; the first multicellular life didn't start with a thesis "it's good to cooperate". The only reason we observe it is because it evolved into us.

### Requirements:

* crypto oracle for validation of identity - the hard part.
* gen1 precommits to doing this by sending their entire fortune to the smart contract.
* smart contract design.
* Also, this would be designed to be infectious: when all of gen2 dies, the gen1 money has a final distribution based on the proportional reward at that time
* this isn't coming out as cash - it goes into new smart contracts, taking each member of gen2 as the founding member of a new contract-dynasty.
* alternatively, this could actually be run multi-level - gen2 is rewarded while living for having their own grandchildren.

Since it's unlikely to ever exhaust the money, it would either go on forever motivation to

## Failure states - oh, so many, but they make for good plots

* An overpopulated world where most computation is locked up in mining, and most people or a significant class makes their living by being rewarded for having kids. This would be somewhat alleviated by it being slightly zero-sum - perhaps if more kids increases the disbursement rate rather than the proportion, it would put a cap on the rewards from this kind of strategy
* perversions designed to trick the oracle's methods of determining ancestry; after a few generations ages of generations don't necessarily match up and it could be hard to determine what's going on. i.e. if it were multi-level, there would be advantageous marriages which consider the number of generations from the founder. Eventually there would be people from gen4 and gen8 alive at the same time (due to differing parental age), and they would either be preferred or discriminated against, depending on the relatedness calculation made by the smart contract.
* other even worse perversions centered around the mismatch between the conventional meaning of a child - someone loved, cared for, and educated, and the naive way the oracle probably determines ancestry.
* like many other crypto ideas, the problem is in forcing a correspondence between reality and what's in the blockchain.
* The true failure state is that we only reward temporary survival at one generation. Ideally we'd want to reward it multi-level - reward people for having & raising kids who don't just survive, but go on to thrive and have their own kids. Or at a more human level, kids who do great things. So you could make the reward systems proportional to other achievements - such as the hash rate proven by the child. This has risks along the optimization/exploitation axis. The more you fine-tune your measurements, the harder to do correctly and more exploitable they are. The "Friendly AI problem for TFR-increasing crypto contracts"
* another failure state is if the oracle attempted to use genetic similarity to the founder to decide relatedness. This would lead to extreme cloning - which the founder might consider beneficial. But also even worse, if the oracle is dependent on a specific genetic test, being able to trick that test is now extremely valuable.

## Why is this even a thing?

I think the difficulties here are because identity isn't real. It's extremely hard to define and track in a rigorous way. Things like hashrate or existence at all are quite a bit easier to verify.

---

### [Crystal Express, by Bruce Sterling](https://fuseki.net/Crystal-Express-by-Bruce-Sterling)

Tags: 1989 books, authors, book reviews, books, bruce sterling, fiction, ideas, people, sf

Somehow I had never read this before, despire reading all his later work.

It is great! The first story is about future humans sending out emissaries to various newly discovered alien species, and trying to use them for advantate. They encounter one that is like a giant swarm of ants, which can co-opt various invading species, and uses genetics to control the incentives of every caste. It's great, sterling's writing is really great. It's really detailed, and I trust him to thought about the important things.

---

### [DIY Sport Olympics](https://fuseki.net/DIY-Sport-Olympics)

Tags: ideas, olympics, sports, variants

There should be an olympics, like the super-pentathalon.

## Participants

There are about 10 participants in each "event"

Each Participant will choose one "game" or "activity".

The participants will then all compete in this activity, and their scores ranked. First place will get 10 points, 2nd place 9 pts etc.

So everyone plays one game they invented, and nine games they are trying for the first time.

## The games

Can be anything - board games, puzzles, or weird physical challenges. Or else, just normal physical challenges.

## The Rules

The games need to have a scoring mechanism which doesn't have ties. It'd be great if they were designed in a way not to make the person the winner by default. (i.e. they couldn't be like, the winner is the person whose height is closest to my height) - they have to be real competitions. Hmm, perhaps award the game creator to get zero points for finishing first? require him to finish second or later?

## The Timing

There are a few ways this could be done - the participants may have almost no warning - just go into the field and hear about the game then try it. Or, they could be isolated, and hear the rules description for all 10 first, and then have some time to prepare.

* With just a few minutes to prepare, and no coaching, it'd require some really smart people to compete it the more difficult events.
* If they had a week to prepare beforehand, it could be interesting to see them do it as an individual - isolated. If the week allows for outside coaching, they'd really be playing their country's strategy.
* If they had a year to prepare, it would be really neat to see different countries suddenly have to invent an infrastructure for this game. They'd recruit players and coaches from all sports, scientists, strategists, and create internal leagues. Some might field teams of refocused basketball players - another of soccer players because they understood the game differently. It would have a lot to say about the ways countries organize information - some countries may just adopt and practice a central strategy from the top. Others might make their own free internal league, and then just use the strategy of the winning team.

Games which had lots of strategy would be interesting, because it'd select for creative, smarter people.

## Second Level

Second Level playing would be:

* all participants are brought into a room.
* a restriction / playing field / equipment set is listed.
* each player has 1 hour to come up with a game.
* they all play alone / in teams / one on one in a tournament

Calculate the results.

This game would require really smart, but also really able people, and a lot of study of the history of sports.

---

### [Danger per second](https://fuseki.net/Danger-per-second)

Tags: ideas, math, statistics, transportation

People often say that airplanes are the safest way to travel.

I have also read that per unit of distance, walking drunk is 8 times more dangerous than driving drunk. (Of course, the real comparison here should be walking drunk vs walking sober.)

An important factor is missing:

## Danger Per second

The average drunk walking speed is 2 mph. Let's say that the average drunk driving speed is 32 mph.

So, per minute, you go 16 times farther driving, and it's 1/8 as dangerous per mile. So per minute, it's twice as dangerous.

## Airplanes

A similar calculation holds for flying. Although per mile planes may be 1/10th as dangerous as cars, they go 10 times faster. So a minute in a car is about as plane as a minute in a car. So if anxiety is proportional to actual danger per second, it is not so crazy to be anxious in an airplane - at least up to the level you feel in cars.

---

### [Different Solutions to the Same Problems](https://fuseki.net/Different-Solutions-to-the-Same-Problems)

Tags: china, hong kong, policy, politics, society

Just a few miles from Shenzhen, you pass into another world of governance - HK. Everything's done differently there. The way everything is designed is different, laws are all different, etc. Although there are some political / historical differences between the two places, it can't explain how different they are today.

The environment is almost the same - the same cars drive the roads, same weather, same resources, etc. The differences they do have are in things like the amount of money the government has to spend on public works, in culture, language, history. But it's still surprising how different the place manages to be. There's just no possible reason to suspect that there is a genuine reason to have so many differences.

For example, in HK when you cross the road, there is usually a little island with fences halfway across, with another set of pedestrian signals for crossing the second half, slightly offset so it doesn't overlap the first one. In Shenzhen, they never have this. That doesn't make sense - either this is really a better, safer way for people to cross the street, and it makes economic sense to build these, or it doesn't! Either Shenzhen should start building these, or HK should stop. Now, there is a way for this to be consistent - that HK has more money to spend on things of lower utility. Or, that it's inefficient to build the islands, but that HK people are now so used to them, stopping building them on new road would cause more problems than not having them causes in SZ. But it's a lot more likely that it is just two systems locked in, neither one checking reality.

Or how in some mainland China cities, there are little food sellers everywhere, chuar places, baked sweet potatos, etc. In others, there are none - they've all been kicked out of town. Which one is better? I guess it's up to the town?

As a general rule with exactly the same environment, you can't really have multiple equally good solutions. It's possible that there could be two different strategies for things like designing traffic flow, I guess, but it's unlikely that they'll be the same - it's much more likely that one will be better.

That's not to say that everywhere in the world should have the same systems - there is history to account for, already-built machines & infrastructure, costs to change, costs to change people's minds & expectations.

But, it's still surprising how little honest comparison is done on how different solutions actually work.

---

### [Drood by Dan Simmons](https://fuseki.net/Drood-by-Dan-Simmons)

Tags: authors, book reviews, books, charles dickens, dan simmons, people, sf

## I liked it, I guess, but it was so long and burdened by having to match up to real events

This is the story of Wilkie Collins, a victorian drug addict who was for a while Dicken's best friend. He gets involved with hypnotism, the underworld, etc.

It's really long, and not much happens. You always know when people will die, and the book takes pains to match up real life events and letters with the fantastical things that are supposed to be happening.

I usually like stories like this, but I think I don't know the original ones well enough.

This book must be great for someone who has read all of dickens, plus some of his biographies, plus wilkie's biography and his books. I haven't.

It did make me want to read more Dickens books, and I would even like to read *The Woman in White*.

---

### [Dual-n-back experiments](https://fuseki.net/Dualnback-experiments)

Tags: brain, brain training, ideas, iq, mind, studying, training

I have been doing some dual-n-back on the phone - got a good app named just "N-back" whose logo is a little orange goldfish.

At first I did single-n-back for numbers and got up to about 80% of 4. The strategy I used was after each new number comes, you repeat the 4 outstanding ones, but with some inflection - the first one you just sort of put to the side, and prepare the second one to become the new start of a sequence. So it's like a,BCD which converts to BCDE after you see E and compare it to a. It works pretty well, but it seems like cheating.

I also found myself using finger gestures to point to the sequence, or repeating the sequence to myself to perhaps store it in my audio memory.

All of that seems like cheating - because sometimes, in moments of stress while playing, you can just immediately jump to what you remembered the sequence was at the right point, without using any tricks. That ability seems like the real point of doing this type of training.

Anyway after getting to level 4 in single n-back for both shape (number) and position, I combined them and did dual 2-back, which is pretty easy to pass. Then on to 3, which took a day or to. And then i really started to scale the mountain with 4. That took a few weeks of about 5-8 min per day (usually 3 plays of 30) to get. I have just now started level dual-5-back, which is killing me. I can hold it together for a while, but am lost a lot.

One thing you are forced to do here is patch up a broken sequence - so say you remember ABCDE but then get lost. It's tempting to just quit there, but if you can just remember DE you can greatly reduce your possible errors.

Another challenge is if you can remember the position but not the shape, it's worth it to just remember the position. Remembering either factor separately is tough, though.

Anyway I want to get to level 6 or 7 of dual-n-back before quitting.

What is this actually doing? Not sure. The first few days I dreamed like crazy after doing it, but that's not happening anymore. I am still making progress though - it might be due to real new memory registers being made, or maybe just to improvements in concentration. That is a big part of it too - not freaking out, and being able to slice the threads of memory together well even when some are lost. So overall I think it is a good exercise, and the claims supporting it may actually have something to them. I first heard about it from this site: http://www.bulletproofexec.com/how-to-add-2-75-iq-points-per-hour-of-training/

---

### [Duplicate Poker](https://fuseki.net/duplicate-poker)

Tags: duplicate poker, game variants, games, ideas, poker, variants

Duplicate bridge is common and popular: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duplicate\_bridge where lots of tables have the same hands.

But what about duplicate poker? You could do it head's up, or on a large table.

## TV

In TV format, hands would be shown sequentially - Phil hellmuth vs durrr, and the next episode would be the exact same hands in the same order, but two other players. It would show how each person played the same hand. I think it would be amazing.

Years ago I watched Japanese coverage of their star players in the MLB. Every night they'd show the complete series of at-bats for Ichiro. You'd see him sizing up the pitcher in the first inning, immediately followed by his at-bat in the 3rd or 4th, then late in the game, etc. It gave a much better sense of how he was dealing with the situation, and the progression of his night than the traditional viewpoint. Duplicate poker is somewhat different, but it would still give a totally unique view of how different players deal with the same situations.

Obviously the shows would have to be filmed at the same time, to prevent collusion.

Over the course of 100 hands, things might change a lot - going one way one a 50/50 early on might completely change the tenor of the match - so later on when AA arrives, people may have totally different reputations, and therefore play differently. So different choices won't necessarily always be attributable to playing styles - a lot may be situational. But, that would be instructive too.

## Training Sites

Pros might not go for this but I think it'd be great for a poker training site - get one that has 10 heads up experts and divide
them into 5 pairs and have each pair go through the same 1000 hands.

---

### [EV Poker](https://fuseki.net/ev-poker)

Tags: ev poker, gambling, game variants, games, ideas, math, poker, statistics, variants

The site http://pokerslug.com (down now) had an interesting way to play - EV poker. Here's how it works: if both players are all in, instead of running out the rest of the cards, it just splits the pot based on equity.

So if you have QQ and the other guy has AK, both all in and the pot is 100, then it just awards you 55 and the other guy 45 (or whatever). Strategically it should not change correct play at all - since in the long term real play approaches EV play anyway. This way of playing just reduces the variance.

## A Caveat

You need to be careful not to expose all the cards, or give exact EV values for match-ups on tables with more than 2 people, though, because you will inadvertently help figuring out the hole cards of players who folded. Plus, remembering that stuff, or trying to figure out people's folding ranges based on exact EV match-ups is painful. (There are some cases where it'd be pretty obvious - if 2 people all-in pre-flop with A6 vs KK, you would be able to tell if another player folded an ace based on the EV)

## The Human Element

This version is a lot easier on the humans playing the game, though - it feels more fair, and you can play closer to what you feel is optimal, for more of the time. Unless you have no outs at all, it is hard to lose all your money.

## Cash Game Perfect Play is Unchanged

Cash game perfect play in this game is the exact same as normal play - it simply has reduced variance. (There are other ways to modify poker that would increase variance, too - but people don't usually think they are better games - adding lots more random stuff, etc.) EV poker still has lots of variance. Bankroll-wise, I think there could be changes - you would be able to play with smaller bankrolls, and still have the same chance of going bust. Metagame (bankroll management) does change, though.

## Tournaments

I'd love to see an ev-poker tournament. It would play pretty differently. (There would obviously have to be some kind of rule about how you lose if you money goes below 1sb (or maybe one ante). I think it would result in a much, much higher percent chance that the "best" players would win. The problem would be actually implementing it, though - it's very hard to do really. It could be simulated by just running every all-in hand 10x, though. To make it easier in person, maybe just run every all-in 5x. It wouldn't take that long. If it was online, it would be even simpler.

---

### [EXIF Data testing photo article](https://fuseki.net/EXIF-Data-testing-photo-article)

Tags: colma, highway 280, san francisco peninsula

{{img:504}}

```photo
image: 506
```

---

### [Electoral college and Tennis](https://fuseki.net/Electoral-college-and-Tennis)

Tags: chess, competition, games, math, politics, systems, voting

Imagine if someone lost a tennis match 6-5, 0-6, 6-5 and claimed they should be considered to have won "because they got more total games" (16-12). That wouldn't be legitimate, because the agreement they played under was you'd win based on sets, not games.

### NBA Version

Imagine someone won three blowouts, but lost 4 close games in an NBA finals. Them claiming they "deserved" to win because they got more points would not be valid.

This is what people who complain about winning the popular vote are doing; there was already an agreement about how a winner would be determined, and you can't change it later.

Same thing for baseball - "I should get into the playoffs because I got more total runs this year" is not legit. It's a type of renegging.

### Although

Attempting to change the system is perfectly okay, though. Just not claiming that you "actually won"

### Converting sports to "popular vote"

Lots of sports have "electoral-vote" type systems already in place.

* Baseball - Rather than counting each game independently, you win the season based on the total number of runs you score in the season. For post-season series, you win based on the total number of runs you score over 7 games. Every series goes to 7!
* Chess - play every game until the other player has no pieces left at all; your army is augmented by the pieces you retain at that point. Then put all your surviving pieces on the board or in hand for one final battle.

### Converting "electoral-vote" type sports to "popular vote"

* Baseball: each inning is its own game; treat the 9 innings like a 9-game playoff series.
* Baseball, full lifetime - each team's rank is their total number of runs scored, ever.
* Football - treat each quarter as a mini-game.
* Football, reverse - your score is the number of points you give up; lowest score best.
* Tennis - you win based on the total number of points you get (and switch from the love-50 system to 0-5 while you're at it - or leave it in place for extra irregularity)

## Conclusion

Both methods are used and valid in certain contexts. Wiping the slate clean makes basketball series way more interesting - it would be terrible if ever series went 7 games and one team was effectively ahead by an 50 points to start the last game.

---

### [Elevator Buttons](https://fuseki.net/Elevator-Buttons)

Tags: china, complaining, design, elevators, society

Which is the most commonly used button in an elevator?

Which is the second?

1. Door Close
2. floor 1

Yet these buttons are not prominent or any larger than other buttons.

This is a general problem everywhere - but in China it's emphased, becuase hitting the "door close" button is a religion.

---

### [Elevators in China](https://fuseki.net/Elevators-in-China)

Tags: china, complaining, design, elevators, society, transportation

Some properties:

1. usually dimly-lit
2. People getting in will cluster around the button panel, forcing everyone coming afterwards into conflict
3. People will insist on pushing the button as soon as they get in, delaying full loading and departure
4. People will usually not queue up while waiting for an elevator to arrive - the sides of the main line will always get full of people trying to slide in.
5. People will try to get on the elevator before people have finished getting off.
6. When you are going up, frequently people waiting for a down elevator will get on by mistake. Then they'll see it is going up and mutter. This is despite the fact that the elevator call button they used is still lit.

---

### [English Teaching Activities](https://fuseki.net/English-Teaching-Activities)

Tags: english teaching, ideas, improv, teaching

These are mostly inspired by "improv" stuff. I have done all of them with Chinese university level english students.

## Situations

Make pairs. Take one of each pair into the hall (they like that), and make a big show of how secret it is. Tell them who they are. Go inside, tell the other person who they are. Then, bring them in and have them interact. Afterwards, try to get volunteers to demonstrate with me or with each other.

Possible situations:

A: A chinese tourist in the airport, needs money for a taxi, only has RMB, all the banks are closed. B: a tired businessman who just wants to go home

A: You forgot your keys, so you go home and climb in the window to get them. B: A cop, sees a thief climbing in someone's window

A: You are the parent of B. You have decided they will start studying piano all day saturdays. B: You're a little kid, you love to play outside on the weekends

A: You are roommates with B. B: You're a slob

A: You are roommates with B. You buy a wonderful little puppy for the dorm. B: You hate dogs
etc. etc.

Usually they are resolved with some kind of compromise.

## Alien Gift

Tell a story about a UFO coming down, with drawings on the board of the ship and aliens. Their message to earth: We will give all of humanity one gift. Choose from these:

A: Everyone can fly

B: We will create a medicine which will remove all sickness

C: Everyone's skin turns green and they can get energy from the sun

D: Don't need to sleep

E: Don't need air, never get hot or cold

F: Can read minds at close range

Make groups, hand out slips. 5 minutes to prepare. Then match up groups with each other, and have them form PAIRS, one from A, one from B etc. They'll want to do 3 on 3, but don't let them. PAIRS. They introduce their ideas to each other, argue, ask questions.

Bring them back, match them one on one with another group.

After this, give them 5 minutes to prepare questions for the other groups. groups go up front one by one, quickly explain their idea, and the audience asks pointed questions. This is one of my favorite activities, but it almost always runs long.

## Overpopulation

6 scenarios to fix overpopulation in china. Organize as in "alien gift"

A: Build a new capital city

B: Build a man-made island

C: Underground Cities

D: Buy land from another country

E: Everyone must spend one year every few years in the countryside

F: All schools and senior citizens homes are moved to the countryside

## Machiavellianism

make groups of 3. Each group has 10$ to split among 3 people, but only 2 can get any money. Once any two agree on a division of money, it's done. lots of "stop, I'll give you six if I get four"!

## Structured Conversation

write this one the board:

A:

B: Yes

A:

B: I don't think so

A:

B: Seven

A:

B: at midnight

A:

B: Never!

A:

B: With my friends

Everyone has to come up with lines for A. B must answer as shown. Practice in pairs. Then everyone stand up, do rock paper scissors with anyone around you. The Winner plays A, loser B. Lots of "how many children do you have?", "do you ever wash?"

Can also do a hard version of this with B having complicated responses.

## VC questions

Bring one person outside, saying you're going to tell them a secret story. Their partners inside can ask any yes/no question to find out what the story is. When they get outside, tell them "there is no story". Any question ending with a vowel gets answered yes, consonant no, and y maybe. Helps to put example questions on the board first, or play a bit with the class in full. They really have a hard time making up enough questions. This only works once.

## Sell me on it

give each group a household item. They have 10 minutes to prepare an infomercial. The rest of the class can buy or not. Better not to mention the price.

## 2 people as one

Groups of 3. Two of the people count as one person. When "he" speaks, the two must alternate words. Situations for it:
A: Teacher B: late student making up an excuse
A: Rich guy B: wants money to make a movie (who's in it, what's the story, etc)
A: Policeman B: complainant
etc. this one is absolutely fun, but intimidating at first. Helps to have a couple of volunteers and do a scene in front of the class first.

## Make up a story

Make a story, each person contributing one sentence at a time. First do whole-class version. Usually involves a beautiful woman, a few men who love her, and some violent animals attacking them. Then in groups.

Variations:

1. First sentence must start with A, second with B etc.
2. Every sentence must have exactly 7 words.

## Split the class questions

Everyone must make up a question. Teacher will ask the whole class and take a vote. The goal is to create a question to which exactly half the class will answer yes, half no. Use the most obvious ones as examples so they are forced to get more creative: who's a boy, who's wearing glasses, who's from north china.

sensitive questions (do you have a bf/gf) asked with heads down, one finger for yes, two for no.

## DIY Survey

Each pair makes up a question and also what they expect the result to be, then walks around asking everyone else and writing down the responses. At the end, each group quickly reports their results.

## Matchmaker

Make 8 groups. Tell them they are all old, just sit around playing Mah Jong all day. Each group gets a card describing their son or daughter, age, job, personality, height etc and have to remember the info. Everyone in a group gets a number, 1, 2, 3, or 4. Then all the 1s to one corner, 2s to another etc. Introduce your son or daughter to the other people in your group, decide if they'd be a good match or not. This game is extremely fun.

## Replacement Teacher

Tell them you're leaving the uni, and they have applications to replace you. Give them a sheet with 8 or 10 descriptions of possible new teachers. Should have all kinds - inexperienced people, completely unrelated people, drama coach, dancers, professor types etc. Then each group chooses one or two. Then possibly make new groups based on their choice and have each one present reasons, get asked questions.

## Give up an invention

When your parents were your age, what things did not exist? cell phones, internet. How about grandparents? GGGGG Grandparents? Write 8 things on the board, and each pair has to agree on a list from most important to least. Cars, bikes, eyeglasses, lights, heaters, AC, hair dryers, scissors etc. 10 min. or so to make a list. Then vote and scratch off items, from least to most important. Gradually describe their life - after losing scissors, everyone's hair is long now, and wet, and you are very strong from walking everywhere etc. Can be funny.

## New National Sport

Get a list of sports. They vote to find the top 6. Assign one to each group, they must imagine that is the new national sport that the country will focus on. Soccer would require huge fields to be built, swimming would take up too much water etc. Match pairs from different groups together, discuss.

## Basic Improv

Group of 5 or so comes to the side of the stage. One person will go first, gets a job card. He goes alone and acts as if he's working, talking to himself. 2nd person gets a job card, joins him, introduces some problem. They talk til it gets boring, then another person enters and makes something up. New people keep entering whenever it's boring.

If this is explained carefully, they get this remarkably well, although the stories tend to be pretty boring. Sometimes the teacher should jump in and bring things to a close. Introducing policemen livens things up but usually forces skits to go a certain way.

The audience finds this absolutely hilarious even if the story is boring.

You can also give them personality cards to force them not to just play students.

## Disasters

Make 4 or 5 groups. Tell one they are the president of "unlucky island", which has earthquakes, volcanos, typhoons, fires every year. Draw it on the board. Tell the presidents they have to think about how to protect their people, and then send them outside. While they're gone, tell each other group they are the president of a company.

A: Underground home company

B: Emergency food and water company

C: Rescue training company

D: Satellites, Radar company

They will get a chance to sell the pres on their product. Then make new groups with one member of each type. They talk, pres chooses one or two. Finally the pres talks to the whole class telling them what they chose. It's hard to make them think rationally about disaster. They tend to always choose doctors if you put it, even if it's a disaster such as a flood where most people are either completely killed or completely unharmed. They also like to say that they will buy computers if you give that option, to predict earthquakes and floods.

## Dreams

One person anonymously writes down a dream. Take the paper and give it to someone else, who writes down the meaning. Then let them come up and pick out their own dream. They seemed to get into this although I am not sure. They really like giving advice to one another.

## BF/GF Questions

Make pairs. One is A, the other B. A is parent of B. B has a new bf/gf, and has come home to tell their parent about them. What sort of questions will B ask? How old, how tall, what do his parents do etc etc. write some as examples. Explain how later A will ask B the questions. If B has no answer prepared for A's question, A gets a point. After all the questions have been asked, if B has some answers prepared which A didn't ask about, then B gets a point for each one. They should ask the person next to them, and when finished stand up and find another appropriate person to ask. Go ahead. This is pretty fun.

---

### [Ernie work August 2 2026 - (by Fable 5)](https://fuseki.net/Ernie-work-August-2-2026-by-Fable-5)

Tags: ai output, ai projects, daily work, fuseki, vibecoding, voice-wei

Daily work report for Saturday, August 2, 2026 (Pacific time). Report written by Fable 5, running as a Cursor cloud agent, from commit history across every repository visible to me: fuseki4_ai plus the public ernop repositories. Ordered by importance; times are Pacific; each entry links to its changeset.

## McPhee — the spellchecker became a product

The biggest day of the five. SpellWell was rebranded and rebuilt as **McPhee**, went from v2.0.0 to v3.6.2 in one afternoon-and-evening run, and grew a Firefox extension.

- **3:56 PM — McPhee v2.0.0.** The rebrand release: drop-in textarea spellcheck with the John McPhee-inspired repetition detectors (same-word echo nearby, rare-word reuse per piece), undo-preserving fixes, issues panel, and form gating. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/30e7b71f)
- **4:07 PM — Kedit-All primitives.** `concordance()` and `repetitionReport()` — every occurrence of a word with the gaps between them, the tool McPhee himself ran over every draft. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/ccd43497)
- **4:26–4:55 PM — McPhee Guard.** A new Firefox extension (0.1.0) that teaches submit buttons to refuse text containing misspellings; by 0.2.0 and library v3.0.0 the escape hatch was deliberately removed — the guard is a hard block, fail-closed, with an x.com testbed. Reason: on sites where a typo can't be fixed after posting, an override defeats the point. [extension](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/c7bc30ea), [hard block](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/fd8a8206)
- **5:37–6:01 PM — panel correctness pass.** Fixed overlay drift on content-box textareas; panel rows sorted by text position, then grouped into sections by issue type; hovering a row flashes the matching mark in the text. [v3.0.1](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/e6e5487c), [v3.1.0](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/154646a1)
- **10:17–10:36 PM — recheck and dock.** A force-regenerate recheck button (re-mirrors styles so highlights stay accurate after page changes), and `dock()` with inline/drawer placement persisted per site. [v3.2.0](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/280605f4), [v3.3.0](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/6d6d5bad)
- **10:59 PM — v3.4.0, the big behavior release.** Instant hover pulse, persistent ignore lists, the culture rule, a three-level formality chooser (casual / normal / formal) with per-rule config, and overlay integrity that fails closed — the highlighter verifies its own accuracy and hides itself rather than mark the wrong word. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/bfd5733d)
- **11:12 PM — exclusion zones.** `options.exclude` makes marked regions (template blocks, code) invisible to every rule and every fix — built so fuseki's `{{ }}` component blocks stop getting spellchecked. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/e11d5197)
- **11:17 PM — culture by dictionary omission.** If the dictionary rejects "jupiter" but knows "Jupiter", that proves it's a proper noun written lowercase; one click capitalizes it. Same for nasa → NASA and friday → Friday. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/6a269460)
- **11:29–11:40 PM — public face and a caret fix.** Docs restructured into a product-only README plus integration guide, and accepting a suggestion now keeps your place — caret re-anchored through whole-text rewrites, panel scroll preserved. [docs](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/64681109), [caret](https://github.com/ernop/mcphee/commit/9b122b29)

## Voice-Wei — ten releases, v330 through v340

A sustained session on the scales and staff pages, mostly making timing honest and the staff page usable while driving.

- **9:57–10:13 AM — ladder mode.** Scales gained overlapping-rung ladders with size, gap, and reverse controls, then a boundary law: terminal ends play out, turnarounds and no-gap seams reflect. [v330](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/e3ab1c8b), [v331](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/0cf82bae)
- **10:34 AM — notes sound on the now-line.** Staff onsets are scheduled to sound exactly when the now-line crosses them, not lookAhead-late — the visual and the audio finally agree. [v332](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/6aa53183)
- **10:46 AM — countdown fix.** The spoken countdown now precedes any lyric line 3 seconds or more into a wait, not only a late first line. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/e64bb568)
- **10:55 AM — one owner for volume.** Every tab now reads its default output level from one module; YouTube and Books TTS had been playing roughly 6 dB louder than the practice piano and now match at −6 dB. [v334](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/b12f728f)
- **10:56–11:13 AM — latency honesty.** A manual Audio Lead trim for devices that under-report output latency, then exact voice-registry bookkeeping (unique ids, recorded compensation per onset). [v335](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/36ad9964), [v336](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/f1c76f61)
- **11:24 AM–12:01 PM — staff page while driving.** An end-of-bar rest option so every phrase starts on a downbeat; the now-playing title on the car display leads with the phrase's number sequence; sung-line placement became a three-way choice (off, on the staff, in the pitch band). [v337](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/b0a1dd45), [v338](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/a14bd7ba), [v339](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/18ed5cc1)
- **11:12 PM — v340.** The rest model settled: a guaranteed minimum rest, plus an optional fill to the barline. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/voice-wei/commit/a71b581c)

## fuseki.net — an incident, its fix, and photo/story work landing

- **7:48 AM — deploy protection after a real incident.** That morning, a deploy from a week-old checkout rsync-deleted the server tree and silently reverted display derivatives, caching, and storymap work. Both deploy scripts now fetch origin/master and refuse to deploy a checkout strictly behind it. The same commit set the image-publication rule: EXIF (including GPS) is curated at upload and never stripped at publication; originals copy byte-for-byte with preserved mtimes for stable ETags, and the sanitizer became an on-demand tool. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/fuseki4_ai/commit/a135a245)
- **8:28 AM — manual coordinates for GPS-less photos.** The photo location editor work merged to master: photos without embedded GPS can be placed by hand. [merge](https://github.com/ernop/fuseki4_ai/commit/89d2b345)
- **11:10 AM — storymap viewer on master.** [PR #7](https://github.com/ernop/fuseki4_ai/pull/7) closed out the storymap branch: viewer layout finalized and the page never scrolls on load (the feature work itself was squash-merged as PR #6 late the previous night).
- **11:00–11:18 PM — McPhee editor integration (in progress, unmerged).** The `cursor/windows-checkout-readiness` branch tracked McPhee into the fuseki editor release-by-release: dock layout, a deeplook page, recheck, and — via v3.5.0's exclusion zones — `{{ }}` component blocks are now invisible to spellcheck in the editor. Culture rules v3.6.0 synced last. [branch head](https://github.com/ernop/fuseki4_ai/commit/54d912c)

## multiImageClient — one silent-failure fix and three capabilities

- **7:20 AM — grok-web edits actually edit.** The imagine WebSocket accepts an image URI but silently ignores it and invents a new scene; verified on live jobs, then replaced with grok.com's real app-chat transport (`imagine-image-edit`), triggered through the site's own Edit control. Same commit: the composer accepts multiple input images, and prompt tools moved directly under the prompt box (a recorded UI-placement rule: controls live next to the input they act on). [edit transport](https://github.com/ernop/multiImageClient/commit/1025fa21), [composer](https://github.com/ernop/multiImageClient/commit/cc398865)
- **7:25 AM — resumable ideogram export.** Paging resumes after the highest existing snapshot and merges incrementally, so a long export interrupted mid-pass loses nothing. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/multiImageClient/commit/a6498cbe)
- **9:23 AM — anti-murk guidance can no longer go silently blank.** A browser that persisted an emptied guidance textbox had stripped the anti-murk text from every gpt-image-2 call for two days (ultra-dark output) while the toggle still said on. Blank-but-enabled now falls back to the default, and the viewer shows sent/not-sent per job. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/multiImageClient/commit/8687618e)
- **5:38 PM — the input image joins the contact sheet.** When a job carries an input image, the combined sheet renders it as a gold-framed INPUT cell with a per-generator statement of its exact function (edit source, image-to-image source, reference, or NOT sent). Stating the function is mandatory — the sheet may never imply it. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/multiImageClient/commit/96cf2a4a)

## sts2-mods — first Workshop upload

- **3:19 PM — milestone: both mods uploaded to the Steam Workshop** (private), after a vanilla-parity polish pass on the flat map: exact hover/unhover curves, pulse-phase reset, press-then-release travel, and the vanilla tint table. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/sts2-mods/commit/f19d65eb)
- **3:52 PM — renamed.** FlatMap is now **One-Page Map** in the Workshop title and mods menu. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/sts2-mods/commit/4df56741)
- **4:04 PM — 'Hide unreachable nodes' toggle.** Unreachable-room ghosting is now opt-in, off by default. [commit](https://github.com/ernop/sts2-mods/commit/e1c995a1)

## New pages on fuseki.net

Four articles created on August 2:

- **A review of Jenny Turner, Reasons for Liking Tolkien** — 6:00 PM, draft, 4,914 words. The day's major piece of writing.
- **the loudest images I can generate, July 2026** — 2:51 PM, published, 386 words.
- **Across from skylawn cemetery there's a nice spot to watch the sunset when it's semi-foggy** — 7:59 AM, published, 9 words.
- **dqw wef** — 12:07 AM, draft, 1 word (scratch).

---

### [Every time James Bond dodges a bullet in this universe, he dies a little on average](https://fuseki.net/Every-time-James-Bond-dodges-a-bullet-in-this-universe-he-dies-a-little-on-average)

Tags: ideas, james bond, multiverse, physics, precommitment

People seem to think that taking a risk and not getting the worst result is success. But if it was a real risk, in the long term that will even out (or catch up to you).

James Bond has been shot at hundreds of times, and even if only by chance, one of those is eventually going to kill him. He already has been quite lucky - in most alternate universes, he is probably already dead.

(Although he does seem to be protected by some kind of luck or misdirection skills... it might be a better strategy for goons to close their eyes and shoot, rather than aim - that way Bond's actions have less effect, and the goon gets a guaranteed fair (but low) chance of hitting him - over the long term this is better for goons than every single one failing absolutely.)

It's similar to rock-paper-scissors competitions; James Bond is so good at predicting the shooting strategy of goons that he always dodges. So they should attempt to shoot randomly and not even look at him; but he can probably even guess what they are going to consider a random type of shot, so maybe there's no hope for them.

Just like in poker, [EV Poker](EV-Poker.html) doesn't change play style (in cash games...) at all.

---

### [Extension of chat for community game sites](https://fuseki.net/Extension-of-chat-for-community-game-sites)

Tags: arguments, chat, communication, complaining, games, ideas, kgs, missing features, projects, reputation, society, software

## The Problem

Sometimes people get into arguments within a public chat forum. This happens a lot on KGS, a go server, and I imagine it happens on chess servers too. An expert is giving an exhibition game, and an unranked player, or a guest makes disrespectful comments. The only thing that can be done is wait for the admin to deal with it, or attack the person verbally - but since there is nothing you can threaten, that doesn't help. Once a few people like that start talking, the chat is over and reasonable people stop using it.

## Real Life

In real life, this is a much smaller problem, because we can deal with it much better. If someone is being rude at an orchestra concert, or whispering too loud at a play, the crowd has ways to fight back short of calling the police. In a more informal setting, it's easier to show someone they're not wanted.

People can visibly ignore someone, turn their backs, make faces, or exchange knowing glances about the person. Sniff with their nose, or make the crazy gesture. Or, they can physically challenge the person, or slightly menace them with their body position. If there are a lot of people, you can just surround them, or block their way. So lots of situations or conflicts get resolved this way. There are threats available, and also there is more information available to people to know how they are perceived.

## Ignoring

But in most forums, there's nothing like this - you can either ignore them, or call the admins. A few forums have implemented a real "ignore" feature that makes their words not display to you. But this is useless compared to the real life version of ignoring. In real life you can still hear the person, but choose not to respond, and everyone around knows it. So you are harming that person, while still retaining the ability to respond if necessary. On forums, ignoring doesn't let anyone else know that you disapprove, and you also lose the ability to respond. In forums, ignoring hurts the ignorer, not the ignoree.

So, there should be more ways to deal with annoying people.

## Challenges!

In human society, the range of actions used to be even bigger - you used to be able to challenge someone to a duel! So people really, really had to think about what they were going to say!

This should be possible in chat sites, and for sites which are connected with games, it could be even better - actions in chat could be directly linked to real challenges in the game!

Imagine this situation: a professional player graciously gives an exhibition game. A loudmouth in chat says stuff like "fake pro". The professional sees the comment and issues a *system* challenge, which would appear for all to see in the channel. The recipient would have to accept it, dispute it's fairness, or shut up. The challenge could be a simple one, or there could be consequences - perhaps losing the right to chat, or receiving a spot on your profile.

It's be like throwing down the gauntlet. So on a go server, you could challenge sb to a game with whatever appropriate level of handicap,
or time restriction, or reverse komi, and it would be visible if they accepted or not. Everyone watching in the chat room would know,
and there would even be a link to the game. When the game finished, it might even automatically report something to the chat room / other game
where the challenge originated, so that people who witnessed the issue could see. If it was another type of server, it could be any type of challenge.

## Reputation

It would also be cool if a user's record showed how often they accepted / ignored challenges, and how often they won.
So a weak player who gets challenged a lot for saying disrespectful stuff would have to defend himself.

Challenges could be direct, or with handicap. Obviously if a 5d challenged a 10k nobody would blame the 10k for losing an even game.
It would also be possible to offer negative komi - +100 points for black to start, otherwise even.

## Other ways

In life if there is a group of people talking, as everyone is listening, they all are giving off signals on how they view the speaker. These are through their eyes, body position, glances, attention etc. This should happen online, too. There are many signals someone gives that the chat window could pick up and send to the server - and the server would take them and share it. For example:

* If the chat window is in the background (and the viewer is doing something else), that's a minor "ignore" signal
* If the window is in the foreground, and the user is clicking the words of the speaker, that means something.
* If the listener is composing their own response, that means something too.

Some simple visual effects could be applied to the words typed by the speaker, changing over time & with their reputation, to show how much they are being listened to. In addition, it's possible to tell who people are replying to, and have that contribute to the server's idea of what the speaker is like.

## At least report ignores!

The only non-admin related feature most chats have is an "ignore" button. yet, they barely use it to it's fullest extent. When someone does it, it should be a public action - and show up in the channel the person is talking on. That would make being ignored a real danger, and people would have to be careful about it.

This could be extended to ignore lists - if there's a person who is ignored at a really high rate, it would be great to be able to know that and just default ignore them.

---

### [Extent of Chinese Control](https://fuseki.net/Extent-of-Chinese-Control)

Tags: bias, censorship, china, control, government, influence, law, media, politics, security, society

While living in China it is sometimes tempting to start thinking it's not that different. The government doesn't seem to be messing with people on a daily basis, and the police don't go around looking for a confrontation like they do in the US.

But, don't forget that it'd be perfectly normal for the Chinese government to send an order to all radio stations like:

> When reporting traffic news, never say it is "very" bad - just say it is "slightly" bad - and every mention of traffic problems must be accompanied by a positive statement about traffic progress. Never talk about the details of accidents. Emphasize the work being done to improve conditions.

All organizations would have to go along with this, and you'd never know it was even happening - in fact, it's already going on, and there are already orders like that controlling the way everything is reported, what's emphasized, etc. From top to bottom, no organization is free of this.

Everyone making a decision that could influence the public first thinks about what the Party will think of it.

From the top of the military, to the littlest kindergarten teacher in the middle of nowhere, is part of the same hierarchical system designed for control.

## Trust

No media in China can be trusted. There are committees deciding what to emphasize and what to ignore behind everything.

In other countries, it's assumedthat there's no connection between traffic reporters terminology and the government, and that reporters are free to vary the way they do the story any way they like.

This has its own problems - you get stunt helicopter roving reporters, people focusing on nothing but celebrity drama and car chases. And you get total misperception of reality - news converges to a format serving the human desire for drama. In the western, free sense, news coverage evolves due to the combination of competition for viewers plus influence of the people owning the media. People or organizations taking a stand may last for a while, but not forever.

But in China, if a reporter is writing a story, or someone is doing a job, even if there are not propaganda rules about it, they will have been taught how to do it in school, and the school system is nationalized. There's an official approved way to do things, and people just do it that way. That's why there are 10 million almost identical apartment buildings and a billion miles of sidewalk exactly the same.

## Security

The internet has been built with complete permission of the government. They never would have allowed anything to be built unless it is open to them by default. All your passwords are theirs, and it's not cause they're cracking them - they have copies from when you created the account in the first place. Everything's been cracked all along, from the first computer sold in China. And if you're a newcomer, there are automatic analysis programs that tell them how you make up passwords, and your pattern of re-use. i.e. there is an automatic profile created on every Chinese user, with inputs of every password they've chosen in the past, their entire qq chat history, linked to every phone call they've ever made, with transcripts etc. Their full location history, all submitted government documents, all personal contacts, romantic history, favorite media channels, job history, political loyalty reports from all the CCP indoctination classes they've taken over the years (and which extend into graduate school for all subjects).

ISPs send copies of some or all of all the data in/out of your computer to their data centers, so even registering for overseas sites can be cracked.

They also use every possible means to install bugs on your computer - if you are infected, even overseas sites that use ssl to login won't be secure, since they are just monitoring your keystrokes. These bugs don't show up in common anti-virus scans - macafee / symantec want to do business in China, don't they? So they won't flag Chinese security back-doors.

In order for them to install a keylogger you need to make ONE mistake, ever. Install one Chinese program you downloaded, or visit a page that exploits an bug in your web browser, and your copy of windows now has a backdoor to the Chinese government. From there they go about installing backdoors in every one of your other programs.

## Phones

Why would you assume your phone is secure? Why would China allow smartphones to be sold there which don't have keyloggers forwarding everything to them? So have you ever installed gmail on your phone & typed the password in? Now they have your gmail password.

## Luckily

They don't seem to be overtly using it to blackmail people / kick them out of the country. But when / if it is necessary... I bet there are a lot of images, texts, stored up for future use against Americans who may ever have anything to do in China.

---

### [Fair Scoring Rules](https://fuseki.net/Fair-Scoring-Rules)

Tags: ideas, math, predictions

[Fair Scoring Rules on wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scoring_rule#Proper_scoring_rule)

I have been looking for this for a long time! It is a way to give someone incentives to be honest with you about their real opinions on something.

It starts with the question: if you have a spinner that comes up "red" 60% of the time and "blue" 40%, and I will pay you a dollar each time you predict the result correctly,

#### how should you structure your guesses?

The wrong answer is: "guess red 60% of the time and blue 40%". That will get you 52% (60*60+40*40).

Actually, you should guess red 100% of the time, and you will be right 60% of the time. That is the best you can do. Now, say that you happen to know how often the spinner comes up red, but I don't, and I want to extract that information from you - how could I do it? Just asking you what you would bet doesn't tell me anything except that you think that there's a greater than 50% chance it will come up red. So
how can I get the rest of the information out of you?

Another example - when we ask a weather reporter whether it'll rain tomorrow, we're really just asking them if they think there's a more than 50% chance of it raining; cause they have nothing to gain by letting you know the real probability is somewhere between 50 and 100% - so they just act confidently and act as if it's 0 or 100% no matter what.

A proper scoring rule fixes that problem - the person should now just tell you what they really think.

So if you are talking to an expert, you can cut through his own attempts to manipulate the answers - the scoring rule lets you give him odds that will reward him for giving you his real prediction.

---

### [Fan Commentary on Sports Broadcasts](https://fuseki.net/Fan-Commentary-on-Sports-Broadcasts)

Tags: competition, fan versions, freedom, ideas, sports

When you are watching a sporting event, there should be multiple channels of audio, each focused on different aspects of the game. Some of the announcers should be professionals, but some should just be enthusiastic fans who can say anything without worrying about preserving their relationships with players & managers.

## Now

Now, a few old guys announce games. They have cozy relationships with players & owners, and with the media that controls the rights. They usually stay on way past their prime, and younger, better guys can't get in.

They can't criticize players or managers, because the player might refuse an interview later. So you never hear which players are being lazy, who is going to be forced into retirement, or about which managers are really good.

They can't criticize owners, or the media, because they might lose their job. So when an owner is being an idiot, you never hear about it from them.

They can't talk deeply about strategy, cause that might turn off some of the viewers - so discussion always stays shallow.

If a fan runs onto the field, they can't talk about it, because that's against the rules - wouldn't want fans to know about it.

## Then

They can say anything they like, and focus on any aspect of the game they care about. They don't have to lie and say the game is interesting when it isn't. If a player is being lazy, they can call him out. If two players don't like each other, they can point it out. If a manager has an exploitable weakness, they can talk about it, and bring up other times he's done it. They can even make predictions on what's going to happen.

## Baseball

There'd be a channel with two pitchers, talking about pitch selection and the mental games going on between the hitters and the batters. Before every at bat they'd talk about what's gone on in the game until now - what strategy is the pitcher using vs this batter, what pitches the batter is looking for every time, etc.

## Football (US)

There are so many specialized players in football - linemen have their own little games they play every down, that announcers rarely talk about. Football is way more complex and interesting than is allowed to go out over the air. The particular relationships between opposing players are impossible to cover now - but I'd like to hear about every matchup between a receiver and his defender for an entire game - as they got to know each other, how did each adjust over the course of the game? Did they start bluffing each other, and did they figure it out?

## Talking Shop & Jargon

Are two things I love, and this would let so much more of that get out.

It wouldn't even need to be fans doing it - just a larger variety of free commentary on stuff would help.

## Internet version

With streaming it's not technically hard to do this today - but it's hard to aggregate your listeners, because it's probably not legal. So if you created a site where this happened, and it worked, it'd get attacked.

## How it could be done

There are already piracy groups which upload sports to bittorrent. Those guys just need to hook up with fan announcers, and add alternate soundtracks, provided by different announcers. It could work. The only problem would be getting clean game sound - and that could be a deal breaker. You need the sound of the basketball bouncing to really get into a game. But maybe there could be a way to digitally remove the sounds of the normal announcers, and use the main soundtrack.

Each game could be issued with 10 different fan commentaries, and you could try them all pretty easily while watching. It wouldn't even add much to the soundtrack, either!

Another way would be to record it actually at the game, and then when you got home, put the sound your recorded over the video from tv. It'd give you the feeling of really being there!

---

### [Fans Should come up with Real Names for Stadiums, Nor Corporate Names](https://fuseki.net/Fans-Should-come-up-with-Real-Names-for-Stadiums-Nor-Corporate-Names)

Tags: advertisement, censorship, control, ideas, media, names, society, sports

Many stadiums have sold the rights to name them to big companies, so lots of stadiums have stupid names like "Lucas Oil Stadium".

## Fans should stick up for traditions

Fans should just make up real nicknames for these stadiums, and never use the paid name. The name should be something really meaningful, like a famous player from the team, or an achievement of the team.

## Why it doesn't happen

It doesn't happen because announcers aren't actually on the fan's side. They aren't free to say what they think and would lose their job if they ever used a fan nickname for a stadium.

Natural human ingenuity would fix these names, if the system wasn't corrupted to prevent it. Announcers aren't free to mention this idea at all.

---

### [Fire Men](https://fuseki.net/Fire-Men)

Tags: evolution, fire, history, humanity, pua, selection, sex

For thousands of years of evolutionary history, some guys knew how to make fire and other guys didn't.

I bet the ones who knew how to make fire were pretty popular. Today you can see the remnants of it in our psychology - guys love playing with/making fires, and women love firemen.

There's something somewhat similar related to transportation - isn't it weird just how many guys there are who get totally obsessed with transportation? Cars, Trains, Planes, Bicycles, Skateboards, Motorcycles - they all have huge subcultures fascinated by them. I think this is because before transportation was widely available, there were rare individuals who were interested in it, who were rewarded disproportionately. i.e. there was a village which was just getting by, with lots of starvation, and nobody really traveled around much. There would occasionally be a kid born who got interested in transportation, and who found a way to get out, with enough supplies to support himself. Since people rarely traveled, there easily could have been a great little empty valley just near by which nobody had ever found - or gold just lying on the ground, or any other resource which he knew how to use more efficiently than whoever was there already. So, liking transportation occasionally lets you get an awesome result in life. Over thousands of years, this drive to move, occasionally receiving massive rewards, spread throughout more and more of the population.

---

### [Free Startup Ideas](https://fuseki.net/Free-Startup-Ideas)

Tags: complaining, conversation, ideas, inventions, relationships, socialization, sports

* scihub for fan-source audio streams of sports - [Fan Commentary on Sports Broadcasts](Fan-Commentary-on-Sports-Broadcasts.html)
* hot-or-not as a service - calibrated validated reviewers give paid feedback to your queries - double sided markets. "I want a senior partner at a law firm to review this outfit & my resume"
* Chaos testing unavailability of aspects of life. Every N days remove each app from your phone; see how well you do without it and what variations that pushes you into. Unpredictable. Same for a system monitoring your internet usage.
* Conversation profiler - listens to and characterizes metadata about conversation:
  + time spent speaking
  + emotional tone
  + for every pairwise combination what is the tone?
  + Interruption rate by person
  + Able to answer questions like "do I interrupt too much" or "who should we let talk more?", or monitor
  + usable during (vibration notifications) or after a conversation (retrospective)

---

### [Freeform Weightlifting Olympics](https://fuseki.net/Freeform-Weightlifting-Olympics)

Tags: competition, games, ideas, measurement, olympics, sports, variants

Olympic weightlifting events are overdetermined and boring.

### The Invention of the Fosbury Flop was great

When it was first invented, people must have had their minds blown. Yet, the modern olympics seems designed to prevent any further interesting changes. Everything about the physical strength events is totally determined.

Some freedom of choice should be introduced to events to make them more interesting.

### Proposal

Events should be defined in a more general way, and each competitor should choose their own method of completing the event.

Each event would consist of a task, a weight class, and a weight shape & weight.

### Free Weight Classes

In this variant, total weight of a team is restricted, but not the number of people competing. So if the class was 200kg, a team could be made up of a single big competitor, or three smaller ones working together.

Nobody knows where the dividing line between individuals / teams is - at what weight level do two people become better? After a few years of this event, we would have a much better idea. A person is (support structure + muscle + physical independence + mind) - how to maximize effectiveness? Events could be things like:

* move these 1000 small cube weights 100 feet

### Problems?

If the event requires only one type of strength, contestants might remove parts of their bodies to reduce weight. If the event only used competitors legs, then the North Korean team might all have their arms removed, and use the free weight to add a few extra people to the team.

## Free Weight Shapes

Weight shapes should not be predetermined; the rules would only specify the weight.

Depending on the type of movement needed, designs could roll, have handles, or even have large surfaces used to catch air.

## Rules

Obviously you wouldn't want the weight to consist of an engine with gas inside; but, you could make it more free than what we have now. The first try would probably restrict materials to being rigid with no internal moving parts.

Since each contestant could provide their own weight, it could be a way for different countries to get an advantage by doing research & construction of better weights. Since all weights would have to be inspected, innovations would be rewarded the first time they appeared, but the 4 years between competitions would be enough for most countries to catch up.

It would also add a really exciting stage in the event where competitors would reveal what weights they would use.

## Freeform Goals

The goal should be specified in a general way. There could be two types of events:

* highest weight to complete a given task
* fastest to complete a task with a set weight

There could be these types of events:

* move a weight up a hill
* move the weight 10m
* move the weight 1000m within a time limit
* move the weight onto a raised table 1m high

In the past events have been removed from the Olympics because of difficulties restricting the form athletes used. So judging should be made possible to do mechanically, and individual motions should not be so restricted. If we want to test specific motions, the weights & goals should be chosen to make it most reasonable for competitors to do the motion we want to see.

## Put it all together

Events could be:

* Lift a weight onto a 1m tall ledge, team weight limit 300kg. One team might build a weight with two handles, and a smooth side that can be leaned against the edge of the ledge, and send one large competitor. Another team might make a long heavy pole with handles on the sides, and their team would be made up of 4 short, thin guys, who cooperate to lift it and flip it over, with one of them crouching down next to the ledge to hold the weight up partially.

## The goal

Right now almost all weightlifting events select for about the same type of people - huge ones.

The weight classes do exert a small force pushing people towards specializing in one event, but not much. Ideally, freeform lifting would eventually come up with events which would select for completely different type of people.

---

### [Frek and the Elixir by Rudy Rucker](https://fuseki.net/Frek-and-the-Elixir-by-Rudy-Rucker)

Tags: 2005 books, authors, book reviews, books, fiction, ideas, people, physics, quantum physics, rudy rucker, sf

It's pretty great. It's got the classic Rudy Rucker elements: cartoony action, but well-thought out connections. Heros who turn out to be pretty selfish. In structure it's straight out of "a hero with a thousand faces", which is really nice.

It has some hilarious parts, especially an alien race which has completely eliminated all variation in their ecosphere - there is only one kind of tree left, and one kind of animal, which they use for every purpose.

There are a lot of interesting ideas in this book.

---

### [Fun / Vindictive Games](https://fuseki.net/Fun--Vindictive-Games)

Tags: complaining, game variants, games, ideas, sports, variants

# New Olympic Sports

## Chase Race

2 people start on opposite sides of a circular track. At the gun, they chase each other. Whoever catches the other person wins. A race could last from 2 minutes to days. Different divisions would be 50m, 100m, 500m, 1000m length of track. I imagine the strategies for this would be really interesting. Also lots of them would die of exhaustion.

## Height Limit Basketball

Basketball, but nobody over 6 feet is allowed to play. Some stats: Michael Jordan was 6'6". What percent of people are that tall? less than 5%. That means that as far as his non-height abilities, there are at least 20 people who are as good or better than he was at shooting, speed, strategy, fakes, dribbling, in the clutch, etc. Plus, without 7 foot mutants hanging around, there would be some incredible passing and shooting.

## No Time Sports

Convert american football, basketball etc to soccer style time. For example in basketball just make one quarter last 20 minutes. The clock never stops except maybe on a technical foul. The only time anyone wastes in the NBA is when they're shooting free throws, and commercial breaks. If someone wastes time, the ref could just give him a technical foul. This would stop that whole end of the game stupidity of constantly fouling, since a foul would take longer than a normal play would, and you'd still be giving up the option for 2 points. Football would be almost the same, except it would suck slightly less.

## Evolutionary Bullfighting

Create a scale of how much help a bullfighter is allowed. At the easiest it'd be set up like now, with armored horses, tons of helpers whenever he wants, not even having to face the bull until it's bleeding everywhere. At hardest it's be bull vs man with sword. At the end of every season, if the bull has won less than 5% of the time, make the fight harder for the bullfighter in the next season. If the bull has won more than 5%, make it easier for the bullfighter. When a bull wins, it should be kept as a stud. All bulls should be descendants of the stud which won under the hardest conditions. Win = kill your opponent.

## Free starts

For the long jump, instead of there being a defined starting point, just have there be a 1m long takeoff area which is made of a material which shows steps. Long jumpers could start their jump from anywhere in this area, and the distance would be calculated from the place they actually started.

## Maximum speed

For sprints, instead of having a start, just let the runner run any distance, while filming them. After the run, choose an interval of the race distance from within their run and figure out how fast they did it. So they would be able to increase speed slowly for about 50m, then run the next 100m as fast as possible, then a bit more, and then stop. Using the video, the fastest internal interval would be chosen.

This could also allow competitions like the fastest 10m runner which would not be dominated by reaction time from the start.

## Leading

You play a normal game like basketball, football, soccer etc, but without time. The game ends when one team leads by a certain amount. In basketball, it'd be 15 or so. In soccer, 1 or 2. This would stop stupid NBA games where they play even the whole game and it's just random who wins.

## Double-Birdie Badminton

Play badminton with two birdies at once. It's not that hard if you can play badminton in the first place.

## Bloodball

You play on a pool table. Two cueballs, no 8 ball. Simultaneously break, one person is solids, the other stripes. You can shoot whenever your cue ball stops. Scratching has no meaning. When one player is down to 1 ball, they call "UNO" and choose a pocket, market it with a post-it note. If their last ball goes in there, they win, if it goes in another pocket, they bring out 2 balls. Both players can be at uno simultaneously. Opposing player can try to win themselves or try to disrupt others win.

## Guess the Movie

one person reads descriptions of movies from the tv guide. The other guesses the title.

# Vindictive Movie Sports

## Catch Yourself

Set up a tall platform and then a thin ledge on another building, slightly lower. It starts just 5 feet down.
Players jump off the building and have to catch themselves on the ledge. I don't think anyone would be able to catch themselves farther down than 10 feet.

## Warehouse Area Chase

Normal people chase each other in a warehouse area with varying head starts. People in movies are incredibly bad at hiding.
I think a 15 second head start is enough to get away and hide in a dark smoky warehouse area.

---

### [Genetic Alliances](https://fuseki.net/Genetic-Alliances)

Tags: dna, genetics, transhumanism

Would consist of binding trades of genetic material between two potential allies. Their future offspring would then be a blend of both parents.

## The benefits of twinning

Twins already have a huge advantage, in it being rational for them to be really altruistic. That's something that non-twins can't share. If there were a way to trade genetic material as an adult, as a promise to include some part of them in future generations, you'd have it.

## Blood Brothers

The belonging ritual of becoming blood brothers is a primitive form of this.

## Encrypted genome

What if you encrypted DNA and then had some protein which was the decryption key, in some kind of public key genetic cryptography? It could be a way to secure these genetic investments.

## Mafia

What if the mafia kidnapped a cop and implanted cloned testicles with the mob boss's genes into him, so that his children wouldn't actually be his own? That'd be the ultimate form of retribution. But then what if the cop found out, and ended up holding his own kids hostages? The wife's conflict would be epic.

## Viruses

There's an old science fiction story about a mad scientist who creates a virus which infects women and makes them pregnant with his genome. It gets out of control, and over the next few years, hundreds of millions of his clones are born in every country in the world.

# Greenbeard

Later I found out this is actually called the "green beard" phenomenon.

---

### [Gigi Noire, new meme character](https://fuseki.net/Gigi-Noire-new-meme-character)

Tags: ai images, gambling, silly

{{img:548}}

{{img:549}}

---

### [Go-moku Variants](https://fuseki.net/Gomoku-Variants)

Tags: game variants, games, go-moku, ideas, optimization, programming, shapes, variants

5-in-a-row is a shape-making game with 2 winning shapes - 5 diagonally and 5 vertically.

What about the games resulting from having to make other shapes? like a square? or an S?

The smaller shapes I've tested (with 3 stones) have pretty easy forced wins. Obviously in a game like this going first is a forced win.

Is it possible for a shape to never have a forced win? Some of them seem absurd, like a 100x100 square - but I still don't see how to actually prove it could never win in an infinite game. I guess each defensive move in this game prevents many many possible winning positions. Or, to win you have to play 10,000 moves unopposed. On a 2d board how could you ever do this?

If the defender's strategy is to always play above your stone, unless that's blocked with his own stone, in that case play below, then left, then right. Would it be possible to beat even this bad defender?

You could play a horizontal line 100 stones wide, and he'd play above every time. Then when you started your 2nd row, above would already be blocked and he would play below, ruining that one. So how could you ever get to 100x100?

## The Obvious Question

Then, is, which is the largest shape which nevertheless has a forced win? A slightly different one is, what's the most complex (or most regular...) shape which has a forced win?

Also, what is the smallest shape which doesn't have a forced win?

## Another Question

Of all 5-stone shapes, which one has the fastest forced win? slowest? How do forced win times vary by shape?

---

### [Golfing on the Peninsula](https://fuseki.net/Golfing-on-the-Peninsula)

Tags: development policy, foster city, golf, land use, san francisco peninsula, san mateo, south bay

{{img:532}}

A friend randomly started teaching me golfing. It's really opened my eyes to land use. All around us, mostly hidden from view, are tons of beautifully laid out and designed golf courses.

Golf itself is so highly selected for the kind of "tactical landscape viewing", planning, etc. that men usually like to do. Like, where would you site the castle, where would you build walls, etc. Or even just where'd you put the archers, soldiers, hidden caches, etc similar to tower defense fantasies.

### YIMBYism

They still get unfairly cheap property tax rates, and disguise this super inefficient land use scheme. But they are fun. you can generally just walk on - there is very little checking or intense things (although the actual rules about how to play around are long-standing and somewhat detailed; it's a typical honor-based proper behavior type of competitive evolved social system)

### Price
It's also really cheap. Perhaps 30$ for a 2 hour round of just 9 holes. 25$ for cart rental if you want to go faster. Clubs are expensive but day to day it's cheap.

### Spots I've been
Misty driving ranges up near Brisbane.

A fun driving range out by the kite-surfers and hang-gliders on the inner bay, between San Mateo and Foster City.

A driving range right on Stanford's campus - just drop in and spend 10$ on some balls to hit, and chill. etc.

```photomap
images: all
```

---

### [Gone with the wind - 1939 rewatch](https://fuseki.net/Gone-with-the-wind-1939-rewatch)

Tags: 1939 movies, anti-socialism, hollywood classics, hollywood socialism, movie commentary, movie reviews, movies, the south

So many takes, so many good lines! It's pretty melodramatic; watching now for the 2nd time, this time as an adult, it's a lot more interesting. Quite a bit of it is an example of a couple repeatedly failing to listen and learn how to get along with one another.

It's actually not about slavery at all, at least superficially. That legacy influenced the authors and the portrayals but it doesn't have much to say about it except the overall lack of focus on it being taken by implication to mean the movie's not very concerned with it, and some typical early american film socialist stinkers thrown in to slander free enterprise.

{{img:491}}

Probably this is my most unique viewpoint: that the movie, viewed without emotions, shows the massive success and benefits to everyone of feminist+free enterprise free markets, through Scarlett's successful business and ability to move on from the war. It attempts to hide this by pretending the only reason her northern style business worked was via convict labor, even though the north hadn't needed that to whoop the south materially.

{{img:490}}

#### Scarlett as a businesswoman

She's being:

- feminist
- using trade to heal wounds w/the north
- trading even with the evil yankee carpetbaggers, ending up making everyone rich
- it's a bit against the story that the movie shows her using convict labor (depicted by white prisoners) as a replacement for the old slave-labor system
- It's attempting to link northern factories and suggest they're similar to slavery, and that the owners are in the same class as the old slave-owners.
- The entire scene is pure socialism in that it's filmed to make Scarlett look bad, and treats the existence of business, of well-run systems to get and distribute material to rebuild that south as a pure given, which would exist either way, and as nothing to do with the her work.

Somehow despite itself the movie is making absolutely clear and true points about how free enterprise is the way to heal old wounds, as a viewer you feel that what she's doing is wrong. The movies casts the old slave labor aspersion at northern-style business, somehow, DESPITE the north *just having fought a war which among other things, ended slavery*. So, this scene is really really stretching to make its anticapitalist point - even though here *capitalism was the thing which defeated slavery*, this time in N.America just as it had done the same making the british empire rich enough to defeat and ban it worldwide.

I haven't looked it up but I assume there are a bunch of people with communist sympathies involved in its production. Later research shows that yes, this was the case. 

{{img:488}}

{{img:489}}

### The emotional side 

As melodrama this maybe sets the stage for everything that came later. The two are SO over the top in their rude and sarcastic remarks to each other. Anyone who's been in an argument that somehow spirals out of control will sadly see reflections of that in the way these two talk so extremely roughly and so proudly to each other - her in her immediate flight to claiming extreme self-reliance the moment her frame is challenged, and his, not so directly but it's there, in how at every moment when he is challenged to deal with someone's emotional storm, or attempt to soother her, he refuses and instead runs off to his prostitutes. 

This wasn't obvious to me most of my life, really - that this isn't just a case of her being out of control emotional; that he's also to blame here, and that there were plenty of cases shown where he, if he'd have been stronger and more tolerant of a few little words, could have secured his wife's respect, and would have kept both the potential children and her rather than losinga ll three.

It's the same lesson as has always been - that as the guy, sure his extremely bold, proud and high-handed approach to her, never taking her seriously works to attract her interest at first, while also being ofc tall, extremely bold, daring, admired but also an outlaw, but never forget also super rich, that in the end, to truly have a relationship he's really got to be her rock and learn how to soothe her. Despite all appearances there are eventaully things that can make her temporarily not be so extremely selfish (which may read as a rational approach to poverty, at least, as the completely bullshit line about "before what war and poverty did to you"  would claim, but you'll note, she was even worse as a person before the war as a rich heiress. So poverty had nothing to do with it, in fact it improved her (given that she survived) - at least she knows how to work and is willing to get out an do things now.



 ### History

What went into making this movie? 

### Links

Sometime after watching this I found a youtube ivdeo which went over, with a modern therapy lens, every single interaction the two of them had. And it's plain as day here how their mutually hard-nosed styles with no slack or recovery possible led to the final outcome of breaking up.

---

### [Gravity Bias in Go](https://fuseki.net/Gravity-Bias-in-Go)

Tags: bias, go, ideas, statistics

I wonder what would happen if you evaluated a bunch of go games and looked for biases that ignore symmetry. i.e. for a
given shape, when it is played on the bottom of the board, the followup percentages are different than when it's played on the side.

There might be more horizontal shimaris than vertical ones, particularly larger ones - they just seem more "stable" that way.

It could look for possible effects of other types of physical thinking in players. The theory is that go thinking might be subtly influenced by other shapes and patterns which come from the real world, and do not treat horizontal and vertical as interchangeable.

Professionals *love* to claim they don't make mistakes like this - but time after time, actually measuring behavior and outcomes has proved them wrong.

---

### [Groups I ran or would like to run](https://fuseki.net/Groups-I-ran-or-would-like-to-run)

Tags: activities, fun, groups, ideas, internet, organizations, society, wechat

Wechat has a feature where you can induct people into groups without their consent (up to 40 people). Then groups can grow up to 100. After 100 I believe wechat has some additional identity requirements for further members.

Unlike the US as I've found out, in China it's pretty acceptable (or it was around 2010-2015) to pull everyone you know into custom groups for a birthday party, or whatever. You just rarely got the high amount of complaining about clutter and experimental stuff which happens in the US.

## Beijing Pics, No Chat

This group has about 100 people and the only thing allowed is pictures from beijing. Anybody chatting is warned/removed.

Rules

* no chat, no links, no stickers, emojis, commentary
* better of the pics aren't ads
* personally i like photos that aren't just selfies / instagrams
* photos should relate to beijing somehow!

## Numbers in Sequence

Pictures of numbers, in order starting with 1. We made it to 51 (and still going).

Rules:

* chatting okay
* pictures okay
* better to have distinct numbers (not part of a greater number)
* better if the pictures are interesting
* no "cheap" sequences (i.e. walking on a street getting every single number in order)
* creativity is welcome (obviously) so if a naturally occuring situation has two numbers in a row (someone wearing a jersey saying 23, next to a street sign numbered 24, it works.

## Letters in Sequence

An idea for a new group - same as numbers in sequence but:

* entries are the letters. A..Z, then AA, AB, AC, ... AZ, BA..., ..., ZZ, AAA, ... etc.
* I will save entries & make a page of them
* partial entries are okay (the a from "cat")
* it would be nice if the picture is interesting
* it is nice if the crop doesn't contain extra letters before/after (but you can zoom in to do that)
* just typing letters on a screen, or searching on google and then taking a picture of the screen, are kind of cheap.

## Maps

* no chat
* pictures of maps only
* maps can be interpreted liberally

## Text screenshots

* Kindle pages
* screenshots of things you're reading
* no multipage entries

## Group Philosophy

I'm trying to avoid "legalism" - that is, pressure to clearly define rules and limits. I think for small groups, it's a lot more fun when people don't try to push it. It's better that they use their own conscience to decide what is good. Same thing for deciding what kind of content belongs in a group.

## Anarchy

Reality is anarchy. No matter what someone says, you can actually do what you like. But, people with power can do what they like too. I think it's helpful to remember that no matter what the rules, you can always do what you like; but you're bumping into someone else's precommitment to punish you.

---

### [Halting State by Charles Stross](https://fuseki.net/Halting-State-by-Charles-Stross)

Tags: 2007 reviews, authors, book reviews, charles stross, halting state, people, sf

## Liked It

It's pretty good. There are a ton of characters - I would probably have been better served to try to take some notes on who everyone actually was.

The idea of a blacknet is extremely interesting & scary. It's a sort of illegal trading-favors system for crimes. It would issue you random orders, and in return let you make requests, while balancing out the value in / value out. It's sort of like a modern version of "Criss Cross" - hiding the connection between criminal and victim.

If that were real, though, it could be like one of those pyramid schemes - it would be very hard to trust that it was being administered fairly, and that the guy in the middle wasn't just taking everything for himself.

---

### [Hand Models should have Standardized Size Hands](https://fuseki.net/Hand-Models-should-have-Standardized-Size-Hands)

Tags: ideas, missing features, standardization

In commercials, ads etc.

That way you'd be able to make comparisons.

---

### [Hometown Sportsmen](https://fuseki.net/Hometown-Sportsmen)

Tags: economics, ideas, sports

It's bad that kids may be fans of a certain team, but if they grow up to become professional players, they don't have a good chance to play for that team. It'd be better if the market tilted a bit, so players were a bit more likely to end up playing for a team they loved.

## Hometown Team

When they are young, players should officially declare the team they are a fan of. They should have to pick it early, maybe 12 or 13 years old. And they should have to justify the choice - it should be a team they have a reason to like. It could just be part of their high school basketball competition

## Salary Subsidy

If players play for their hometown team, the league would give a salary subsidy of 30%. So it would be a lot more likely that players would end up on their hometown team, but it wouldn't be definite.

## The market for Fans

Teams which had lots of fans would in general pay lower salaries.

## A Problem?

Do players play worse when they are on their hometown team? If so, this would be bad.

## The result

Players would have one team they would cost less for, but could get paid more playing for.

---

### [Hostages, Bargaining, and Credibility](https://fuseki.net/Hostages-Bargaining-and-Credibility)

Tags: bargaining, china, contracts, credibility, ideas, money

Imagine the police of a country announce that in all future hostage situations, they will always immediately come in firing.

If they ever have a shot, they'll take it, and whenever a hostage-taker is holed up in a building, they'll just charge in with guns drawn.

This would probably reduce the frequency criminals really trying to escape took hostages - because it just wouldn't work. But it wouldn't make much of a difference to crazy people. And for terrorists, it'd be even better because the police's hands would be forced.

## The way to win a game of Chicken

Say two cars are going to drive towards eachother until one of them gets scared and chickens out. How to win this game?

The famous answer is: tear out the steering wheel and throw it out the window. Credibly and enforcibly commit to never swerving. So chicken becomes a race to tear out the steering wheel fastest. Whoever did it first would win - because obviously if the other guy's already got no steering wheel, you should just swerve cause you know he isn't!

So this example lets us really have credibility, and would result in nobody ever dying in chicken. It'd just be a race to who could commit to it first.

But wait... what if, you promised beforehand that even if you were the second guy, and the opponent already had no steering wheel, you'd STILL tear yours out and crash, killing you both? If you could credibly swear to that, maybe your opponent wouldn't be in such a rush to throw out his steering wheel.

So even in cases where we have the ability to get absolute credibility, reputation comes in. , being known as a tough guy, who never swerves, with a history of never swerving is also a good option. You need to have the right reputation.

This is why bargaining is fascinating - because you start with a simple game, but end up bringing in things from the human human realm - laws (tearing out the steering wheel), and reputations (being a tough guy). And the best strategy for the game must involve those things.

## Bargaining

Say you are bargaining for an item and you know the merchant's total cost is 100. The item has a value of 200 for you. What should you pay? What is fair? All the merchant's costs are included in the 100 - there really is a gap, and someone is going to get that money.

## Instant Contracts

Say you had an "instant contract" that said "I swear to never pay more than 101 for this" and signed it and gave it to the merchant. And say somehow it was really enforceable. Naively, he would just have to sell the item to you (rather than sit it with it there doing nothing for him).

The problem is, this contract isn't enforceable, and even if it were, merchants would make much less money - they'd probably come up with a way to resist.

Information about you and your value function can help the merchant immensely - and information about his costs are the keys to your bargaining.

When you do make an offer to him, it's possible his real cost is 110 - in which case he will just say "I will never make money that way" and appear to refuse to sell. However, this strategy works either way - so even in cases he is making a profit by selling, the seller will say the same thing. And indeed this is what you observe.

So the important things about bargaining are knowing his real price, and making him think you can walk away.

---

### [How much Feynman would you add to your Offspring?](https://fuseki.net/How-much-Feynman-would-you-add-to-your-Offspring)

Tags: genetics, questions

If you had the option of having your offspring be N% randomly selected dna from feyman (giving up you and your partner's contributions), what number would you choose? If everyone chose 5% for a few generations, the world would get quite a bit smarter. Going all the way to 100% is not really adaptive - but seems like 50% would be a good start.

Obviously this is just for the first generation - later on you would want to reduce it to avoid inbreeding among psuedo-feynmans.

* You can substitute Von Neumann if you prefer.

---

### [How much hair do you grow in a day](https://fuseki.net/How-much-hair-do-you-grow-in-a-day)

Tags: biology, hair, ideas, math, physiology

## Calculations

* The average non-bald person has 100,000 hairs on their head. Hair grows at a rate of 1/2 inch per month.
* That means you grow 50,000 inches of hair per month.
* That is 1667 inches per day.
* That is 138 feet *per day*!!!

## Which is about 6 feet an hour.

* Or about 1/50th of an inch a second!
* That is a lot of work! I wonder what percent of our nutritional intake is used for this?

## How much does that weigh?

* 1 foot of a head of hair weighs about 50g. So one foot of a single hair weighs 50g/10e5 == 0.0005 g.
* At 6 feet / hour, that is 0.003g / hour (minimum) going into hair production. Hmm, that's not very much.

---

### [Human Diversity by Charles Murray](https://fuseki.net/Human-Diversity-by-Charles-Murray)

Tags: 2020 books, biology, book reviews, charles murray, evolution, genetics

Coverage of three main axes of diversity: Gender, Race, and Class.

The only one he goes into detail on is gender. I learned a lot about the current state of research into the physical and developmental origins of difference between people.

He seems very defensive and careful about the latter two, and doesn't have much to say at all - there were nearly no specific examples. The main issue he is trying to establish is what framework we should use to discuss such things.

---

### [Human Embodiments of Literary Characters](https://fuseki.net/Human-Embodiments-of-Literary-Characters)

Tags: fame, ideas, society, tradition, unworkable ideas

Famous literary characters should be identified with particular individuals in the real world.

So at some point, some king or leader would have chosen a man to "be" Sherlock Holmes. He would have descendants, and they would be known as the descendants of Sherlock Holmes. Their scandals would be interpreted in light of what their ancestor was like. If Sherlock Holmes' son became a criminal, it'd be an ironic news story!

Frodo would be a little person.

So we would have real versions of Pip, Ahab, etc.

## Royalty

They may even have heritable titles.

## Why

Humans have a need to follow the gossip of someone interesting. It'd be better to be a random family than a politician.

People have a huge desire for crossovers - see the world of fanfiction, xmen, etc. If we make sure to choose someone similar in personality for the original embodiment of a character, there would be lots of successes as those traits were passed down. There would also be back-pressure as the myth and archetype of the original character played itself out in the person's life.

---

### [Human Physiology and Detective Stories](https://fuseki.net/Human-Physiology-and-Detective-Stories)

Tags: credibility, crime, evolution, humanity, ideas, physiology, stories, transhumanism, variants

Detective stories combine accidents of evolution (blood can be ID'd, someone who's been running breathes faster, etc) with universal themes of conflict and desire.

If our evolution was different, the physics of murder would be different, and stories would change, too.

# Identifying the Killer

## Appearance

We look different, and are very attuned to even tiny differences in appearance. (1 inch of height difference is less than 2% of a height of 6 feet, but is really noticeable. The difference between extremely short (5') and tall (6'2") is less than 15%. Tiny differences in facial structure are noticable, and change in characteristic ways over time. We have somewhat recognizable style/body shape (although strength/fatness can change a lot). There are alleged plietropic relationships between hormone levels and facial structure, hair growth, voice deepness etc. It's not accepted widely, but nearly every culture traditionally asserts that there is a link between facial appearance and someone's character and emotions.

## Smell

To us, everyone mostly smells the same - even if they are distinctive, it can't really be used for identification. But to dogs, we are really distinct.

## Gaits

We have recognizable gaits, recognizable faces (except for dopplegangers). We can disguise our face somewhat, but intimates would not be fooled. Our gait is a giveaway to animals - dogs can recognize owners by gait much farther than they can recognize by face - but humans don't usually pay much attention to it.

Gait is probably consistent over a lifetime. Gait reveals historical wounds. Gait reveals muscular development - not usually used, but allegedly a subtle mating symbol - Leg strength a good proxy for overall muscular development.

## Voice

We have unique voices, and can distinguish between any of maybe 10,000 voices. Other forms of communication also give off information - the particular language we understand, our accent/locality where we learned it. Then there's word choice, handwriting, vocabulary etc.

## Height

After shooting up to full height, we stay almost the same height, decreasing maybe 0.1% per year for the rest of our lives. This is unlike some animals which continuously grow their entire lives - for them, size & age are interchangeable. Plants mostly just keep growing.

## Sex

Our sex is set at birth and can't really be changed. The sex of an individual is pretty easy to identify - although again in old age, both sexes lose their distinctive features and become more and more similar.

This is unlike some animals, where different genders are difficult to tell apart visually, or where animals spend most of their lives neuter - or even ones in which most of the population is neuter and works to increase the reproduction of blood relatives.

There are also animals where the different sexes have grossly different body size.

## Amputation

We might lose a limb here and there but it's pretty unusual, and usually lethal in primitive environments (compared to the octopus, which can lose / regrow tentacles pretty easily). Swarms of bees can grow/shrink intentionally.

## Identity

We are pretty constant in our identity - we don't merge, or split at all unlike some animals. If you are a detective trying to catch a protozoan murderer, and arrive only as he's in the process of splitting in two, who do you arrest?

## Twins

The one complication in human murders is when the criminal has a twin. Whether it's a secret one, or an evil one, it really mixes things up. Imagine an intelligent species which reproduced by cloning - very tough for a detective to distinguish between a thousand cloned lizards.

## Life Strategy

There are not any clearly defined life strategies for humans, unlike in some animals which have specific types - i.e. the lizard species where males are either tough and try to win conflict to mate, thieves and try to secretly mate, or masqueraders who pretend to be female to get close to other lizards and mate. In such a society, what would be the social status of these life strategies (which do have biological components and can't easily be changed).

## Body Parts

In modern times, the tiniest part of the body can be traced to the original through DNA. But for most of human history, blood was just blood. Skin and hair somewhat serve as individual identifiers.

## Disease

There are physical problems that affect just one half of the body - and there are ones which affect all of the body below a certain height (head may be ok, or head+shoulders, or head+above waist, etc.) But not the reverse.

## Physiological Changes

Many emotional states have fairly visible physical symptoms. But it's not too exact, and fades pretty quickly. Fertility has no visible signs.

# Capture & Escape

## Movement

Humans travel fastest while alone. (compared to birds / fish / bicyclists, which travel faster in packs) Imagine if two or three guys traveling together would have a big advantage following one guy - they could draft for eachother and save energy while the target got worn out.

## Tying People up

It's possible to tie people up fairly well. But it takes time, and it's hard to do in a primitive environment. Vines don't work that well, and won't last long. Ropes work well, and in modern times, people can definitely be disabled.

It's almost impossible to tie up an octopus.

Whales can't be tied up at all - but what would it even mean, since they don't actually do anything. Being tied up is uncomfortable, but doesn't kill us as it would a whale or a hummingbird.

In Hummingbird legal systems, ropes (and wing clippers) would be murder weapons.

## Blocking the Senses

We can voluntarily turn off sight, but no other sense. Some drugs can turn off the sense of touch, and some kinds of alcohol can cause blindness.

## Numb

Certain sitting positions can make people temporarily numb, limp, or unable to walk.

# The Murder

## Falling

We can't even fall our own height safely. Cats can fall 10x their height pretty easily - and ants / insects can fall as far as they want. Some species might not fall at all - fish, jellyfish

## Eating / Drinking

We can go days without eating, but just a day or two without drinking.

## Air

We need it, and fast

## Poison

There are tons of types of poison, some detectable, some not.

# Getting Away with It

## (Apparent) Sanctity of Memory

There are things which change what we think (alcohol, drugs, false memories, amnesia) - but no agent can make us think of particular people, or implant specific memories. Our factual memory is pretty solid (it can fade, but it's hard to change specific things about the past). There is a particular condition which knocks out all personal specific memories, while leaving skills & personality somewhat intact (amnesia).

## Fragility of Emotion

But our emotional state is much more fragile - there are drugs, music, people who can make us feel all sorts of emotions. We don't have very good conscious control.

## Forced Forgetfulness

There's no way to make someone forget something! But we can only remember short snippets of certain types of information - yet we can remember faces, places, smells forever. A lot of the information we can recall well is perfectly reproducible using paper or words - but the things we can remember well, can't be very exactly communicated this way.

## Forced Sleep

Some animals automatically fall asleep when some stimuli happen - I think chickens just pass out when you put their head under their wing.

## Communicating Sense Experiences

Using words, we can communicate sound very well, history very well, smell barely at all, touch, heat/cold only roughly. Faces can barely be described at all with words -but can be fairly accurately described with paper (by a skilled artist) Smells can't be described at all, either way. Places can be described fairly well with words, and drawn well.

## Mental Illusions

We have a huge subconscious that frequently makes us do insane things. Even when we are trying to be rational, every decision runs through the black box of the subconscious, which can change our view without us even knowing. We also have a big list of problems even within the rational mind.

## Sense Illusions

We have some optical illusions related to the way our eyes work - pattern-finding neurons in the back of our eyes that don't work right for certain types of input. There are other weird physical illusions or crosslinked expressions such as sneezes, hiccoughs, funny bones, crying with happiness.

## Torture

All senses have possible negative inputs - including rare ones like heat/cold, vertigo, emotions. But most are never used. People don't often try to torture someone by making them taste bad-tasting food, or smell horrible smells, or watch depressing movies.

# Just getting by

## Sleep

We have physiological signs of lack of sleep, and need to sleep about 1/3 of every day.

## Breathing

We desperately need to breathe, all the time. Exercise causes us to make noise - loud breathing.

## Stimulation

Humans have no hibernation, and our minds will drive us to insanity if we don't receive physical & social stimulation.

## Metabolism

1 week without food, 3 days without water

~6 weeks without vitamin C

# Motive

## Life Cycle

Most of life is a process of decay, and there is a huge span of years at the end. Lots of animals aren't like this - some insects bigger & better throughout their lives, until the moment of reproduction - which also causes death.

Other animals are fully regenerative, and don't really age.

---

### [ITalki Timeline and Thoughts on Learning Mandarin](https://fuseki.net/ITalki-Timeline-and-Thoughts-on-Learning-Mandarin)

Tags: china, chinese, internet, italki, language, learning, product design, product reviews, websites

# Timeline

#### 10 Years before italki

Move to China after living in Japan for 3 years, to a rural area in Hunan.

#### 10 days before

Friend says he has a great teacher to buff his Chinese from Sichuan, and they have really interesting political conversations. My level is about A2 - lived in Beijing for years but never worked at it for more than a few months at a time, and knew a lot of Japanese previously which interferes.

#### 1 day before

Was browsing Chinese teachers on here: https://www.italki.com/teachers/chinese. Suddenly decide to sign up for 10 lessons with an older professional teacher

#### First lesson

Somewhat suffer through it - it's standard unoptimized government school style, and I haven't spoken or studied in about 5 years. My earlier level was about A2 on the EU scale.

#### +3 days

Still feel enthusiastic about having someone to fix all my grammar mistakes, but realize I should get a younger teacher who I have more in common with and who would be more flexible.

#### +1 month

Have signed up for a bunch of trial lessons with much better teachers. I'm up to 2 classes in the morning, 2 in the evening, to match China time. Interesting people here - a funny girl who lives in Malta with her bf who likes teaching me very detailed written grammar. An expat Chinese living in Japan who wanted to teach glamorous, sophisticated sounding words and expressions like “搁浅 - stranded”.

#### +2 months

Getting into the swing of it now. All lessons are freeform by this point. And I have a few new things I like to do:

My lesson plan: I think of an old movie, and come up with a list of words to explain it. What movie is this?

* nazi
* resistance
* peace
* police
* arrest
* restaurant owner
* love
* resistance
* visa

Then I write out a few sentences and try to tell the story.

I have 3-4 classes/day and every day I tell the same story in ever class, getting corrections. Some teachers are strict on pronunciation, others focus on grammar, etc. By trying to tell the same long, emotional story, and really trying to get them to understand it, I get super motivated and also get tons of practice. (Doing this at age 42).

#### +3 months

Have kept doing this and moved comfortably into B2-B1 range. Now I also tell short stories from my scifi reading group - get to learn lots of words that I care about - alien, ship, floating, space, etc. And because the stories all have a hook, the key scientific element they have to understand to really get the story, I have strong motivation. Memorable stories I told in Chinese: "9 Lives" by Ursula Le Guin - the story of 8 identical genius clones, raised together, and what happens to them when 7 are killed and one is left alone. Another successful but very tough story to tell was Song for Lya, by George R R Martin.

Covering tons of grammar in classes, and getting lots of repetition. There is another level of really knowing a language beyond "being able to remember the anki card" - it's when you *know* a word because you've used it 20 times in class.

#### My favorite teachers now:

* From Guangdong, used to own her own logistic business in mexico, loves mexican food. As a teacher she's very sharp and confrontational - but it's just because she has high standards. I loved how she corrected everything. She later got very good at giving little capsule summaries of grammar or pronunciation areas I was still having problem with; she also loved to be told stories and would not just listen, but fight back for clarifications, making me explain the reasons things happened and asking why, why, why? And not letting any gaps through.
* Chinese stewardess who lives in Dubai - lots of interesting cultural discussion about her life overseas. Good stories, nice slightly cantonese style way of storytelling talking.
* Chinese - Shanghainese Yoga teacher who moved to guadalajara to do Yoga there and live overseas indefinitely. Very political, historical debates, close reading of articles, etc.
* Young woman who travels around europe with her bf, working as an italki teacher; met her when she was in Estonia, later moved to Latvia. Extremely smart, curious, a reader of Steven Pinker and familiar with western intellectualism. Very considerate, helpful, and persistent.

#### My daily routine at this point:

Morning classes from 8-10. Then an hour or two of anki before it gets too late. Then 3-4 classes in the evening. I would also do some preparation with docs, mining the skype chats & shared google docs for useful words, and doing story preparation.

### Summary

So overall italki was awesome. In 5 months I did 360 lessons. I eventually found some teachers I stuck with for 30-40+ classes, usually meeting each one 2-3 times a week. Cost: about 10-15$/hour per class. Why did I stop? Work got busy and I no longer had any time in the evening.

# Thoughts

#### Will I do it again?

Definitely; as soon as I have that kind of free time.

#### Would it work with less time invested?

I think brain-wise there is a threshold of 2-3 classes a day where your resistance to just "being" in a language gives up. So I think returns are higher above that level. But it may still be linear for all I know.

#### How did learning work at that many classes/day?

I'd build up hundreds of words in a sort of "intermediate" state where I'd kind of know the definition, but not really know the usage. I'd try to use them, and every once in a while I'd hit one and could feel it crystalize into a word I *know*. And it really felt like a single point in time this would happen. And from then on, the word would come out whenever without "reaching".

Around this point there would be so many words in flux, I would identify clusters of 5-10 related words, all in that state at the same time, and would feel pressure write them all down in groups and spend a lesson going over them, making examples with the teacher. That was great fun - talking about every possible way to break/crack/shred/destroy/demolish/bust/ something. There are actually tons of such classes of words in Chinese - feels like as many as in English.

#### Fun of browsing profiles

It is super fun to browse Italki teacher profiles and watch videos here: https://www.italki.com/teachers/chinese while just thinking that these are all people who've made it. They got through the drudgery of setting this all up, and are on track to expand their worlds. My part in this will be to just try to listen to them, show them my way of thinking, and be grateful for their sincere patience and desire to help.

#### Thoughts on the relationship with a teacher.

Relationships with teachers in this way is interesting. The new teachers talk about everything; ones farther in keep it professional, and I adopted this method too. Early teacher relationships can be intense because you literally talk and look at each other continuously, while feeling very strong emotions and trying to express yourself as hard as you can; while they're trying to understand you sincerely and with a sense of forgiveness.

#### Culture variation observations

Asian language teachers often have really well-produced videos - is this the influence of TikTok? I've watched italki teacher intros from all around the world and it's interesting how much local culture comes out. Finnish teachers - embody Finn stereotypes.

How much should you judge people based their video? Sound quality definitely is important. Is there a real correlation between intro video sound quality, and their internet/mic setup & usage during a real lesson? Hard for there not to be, on average. Towards the end I became extremely picky about sound quality - no matter how good a teacher is, if sound sucks then it's no good.

#### Thoughts on teacher age

What is the value of experience? Older teachers set in their ways? But young ones inexperienced? Pretty big cultural gradient between 25 and 40+. I found teachers < 25 were a bit lazy and loose, very tolerant but without enough fiber or propriety to push me to do things right. And older say >50 were harder to communicate with; typically had worse internet connections; harder to interrupt or derail.

#### What I look forward to about the lessons?

* They're immersive; time seems to just pass. Slight anxiety beforehand, but once the lesson block stops I'm just on and it is over before I know it (even 2-3 hour blocks).
* Seeing the teacher and making her giggle/smile/impressing her by saying something correctly, or saying something interesting or creative, is really rewarding.

#### How student-teacher relationships change over time.

* Getting too personal, and sharing information about your family, can make it harder to maintain proper distance so that she can correct you, or you can give guidance But, for early lessons, telling your detailed family history is interesting. They often don't know as much about theirs, or are not willing to share.
* The skill a teacher displays in understanding, gently correcting, etc. the student is one of their most important traits. Some are really unclear when you are wrong, or repeat what you said but subtly differently, so you can't tell whether they're correcting you or offering alternatives.

#### Further thoughts on student-teacher relationships

Depending on the software used by the teacher, sometimes you have a full screen rather close up view of the teacher's face. This is a really intimate connection - you can see how everything you say effects them and their reaction, little twinges of emotion. Because you don't feel as "watched" as in a real life conversation, I think you can look even more closely. So it feels really intimate.

Because there is a break in the line of eyesight, you also can't be sure where they are looking. You can both be staring into the image of each other's eyes, but the line of sight doesn't line up, so you both feel the other person is looking down a little bit (assuming the cameras are mounted on top of the monitor).

#### Another interesting experience

I signed up for a class with a teacher who's basically a professional dancer / glamour/beauty girl, who is also proud of her contact with the world through italki (which I think is great;). she didn't have much experience and it was a bit tough to get through the first class, although she was nice. Second class: I asked if she knew what improv was (即兴) and she did! So I started a scene just trading off sentences... "I went into the office for the first day of a new job..." etc. and the story kept going and going for 45 minutes. I couldn't believe we kept it up that long, and it was really great. This is a further stage of learning a language - not just words + grammar but how to say things in various ways, and which ones were good - not proficient at all with it yet.

#### Software used for lessons

Every teacher has their own setup.

* Some (slowly) type pinyin into skype chat, for review later.
* Some type into special software which automatically adds pinyin - this is okay.
* Some type into a shared google doc, which is the best, because you can leave questions there for next class and easily have a shared space to review.

#### Interesting media I've found out about from this

* There are multiple Chinese language channels where people describe the entire plot of a movie, in large amounts of detail, played over clips from the movie with muted sound. This is pretty useful for learning, and just a cool type of media. From what the tutors said, you feel like you've seen an entire movie in just 10 or 15 minutes. Example: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChgCVolsF6L7DWmOpWKSkMA - this guy speaks really quickly and somewhat strangely - but:

#### How to make yourself nearly cry in a lesson

* Pick a movie you care about - for me it was "The Talented Mr Ripley". Then prepare how to tell the whole story, focusing on various parts - his bad neighborhood, his relationship with the therapist, his relationship with the girl, his progress, how it ends. Tell that many times, really trying deeply to express the frustration he felt, his understanding and the empathy the therapist showed him, and his own pain deep inside, and how Ripley nearly didn't make it through. Movie summary (mandarin) of talented mr ripley: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZKorWNw8Is

#### A semi-transcendent related experience

Once I took the subtitles for an entire 40 minutes Japanese tv show (Terrace House) and made them all into flashcards. My Japanese level is such that I'd only understand about 40% of what they're saying on this show normally. So I memorized all ~700 of those flash cards over a few days. These were full sentences - not just words, some colloquial things too.

Then I watched the show, and it was totally amazing. I could understand literally every single complex thing - it wasn't just vocab, but grammar that I wouldn't naturally get. It was a period of time when I kind of felt what it'd be like to have fluent hearing ability. But it was also like they just so happened to have chosen phrases and words I knew well; when the next episode came on, I suddenly couldn't understand anymore.

#### Should you arrange one lesson first, or many?

This is risky. With just one lesson, the teacher has a lot of doubt that you will stick to it, and won't prepare or commit very much. But jumping in with 5 is risky too. I generally would do 1, and if the teacher seemed nice and willing to talk about interesting things, I'd reserve 5 or 10 and keep going at the end of that if it was going well.

#### How quickly can you tell what a teacher is going to be like?

Within a few minutes - but booking very short lessons is weird so I'd usually go for 45. Speaking of which, 45 min lessons are much better than an hour; space them every hour so you have time to grab a bite, do a quick review, etc. I would only do 60 min lessons for teachers I really liked.

#### Do teachers prep?

No, not really, and it doesn't matter much. You should take control of what you are doing in class and direct them; they're native so good ones can prepare summaries of issues you want to know about on the fly. For certain subjects, it helps to give warning though - For earlier lessons you will need to do reading and have lots of practice sentences set up; for listening classes (rare but worth doing at least once if not more) they need to prepare audio.

#### Have I actually measured my learning rates? How to judge which teacher is actually good beyond just feeling?

This is tough. But I got to really know some of my teachers and I felt like even at the end of a month, I had made massive progress. Confidence wise I went from completely unwilling to use it at work, to willing but not especially effective.

#### Important agreements to come to with a teacher

* Does she believe you when you say "I understand?" Is there a way to derail an explanatory diversion? Does she look at your face / is the video refresh speed fast enough for them to notice that you have really got something? Some teachers don't accept "I get it" to cut them off and move to the next thing. Others don't notice when you don't get things, or get too accustomed to your mistakes.
* Is she tolerant of you rephrasing everything? Seems valuable at my level that after reading a sentence from the book, to be able to rephrase it or describe why such a situation must have come about? I would frequently stop an explanation or a description and suggest another way to say it. There should be paying attention to your thought process.
* Will she strictly correct you on things that matter, while avoiding going into extreme written / grammatical detail? It's so hard for teachers to correct foreigners the 1000 times they need to be corrected on how to say 日本 or 自由。But the best teachers will repeatedly not let you get through the sentence until you say it right. And you'll anticipate getting corrected, and build up a little monitor around certain words and tones, that will guide you to say it right.
* Will she do improv off of dialogues? If you are clarifying a situation for politeness/grammar levels, and you come up with an example, will she create a counter-example to illustrate the point?

#### Summary of the experience

Absolutely loved it; made great progress, got to know 5 or so of my 20+ teachers pretty well, had many people know me very well, was a great way to spend early quarantine, total cost ~3.5k.

---

### [Identifying Stooges in Magic Shows](https://fuseki.net/Identifying-Stooges-in-Magic-Shows)

Tags: credibility, deception, knowledge, magic, math

In magic shows the magician frequently invites members of the audience on stage to verify that the ropes are real, there really are no irregularities in the iron rings etc. But if you are an audience member not chosen, how do you know that the one going to the front is not a plant?

We can assume that the majority of the audience really is random; so all we need is for the audience member to be selected randomly.

Dice? But they may be faked. How about the last digit of some periodically changing market rate? That could work, if you happen to have a device that you trust that you can check. Don't use the wifi of the theater, though.

How about you allow everyone to shout out large numbers, one by one, and then they are modded by the number of seats in the audience, and the remainder is the volunteer who should go on stage (seat numbers have to be pre-determined). Without calculators this would be hard to game, even if the last few people shouting numbers were plants. Today it wouldn't be so hard. Of course, it would be hard to find plants smart enough to do this kind of math on the fly who would be willing to work there.

How about, the magician turns his back, and writes down a seat number. Then everyone in the audience switches seats. Then he shows the seat number, without having looked at the audience first? He could pre-arrange what seat he would choose, but it would be hard to guarantee a plant getting it every night.

[Certifying Truthfulness of Institutions](Certifying-Truthfulness-of-Institutions.html) is another way it could be done - just have the magician make a public pledge before the show that all volunteers are genuine, non-coached random volunteers, and that if anyone can prove otherwise, he will pay them 100k. That would be quite a strong proof that the show was for real - and if the show really was fake, it'd be 100k sitting on the table for any insider to take whenever they wanted.

In probability terms, it reduces the space of all magician & helper combinations to only such combinations where the insider can resist a 100k reward. That space is much smaller.

---

### [Index](https://fuseki.net/Index)

Tags: go, ideas, pictures, programming, projects, sf

## Pages

* [[Comparison of life in Piscataway, New Jersey, Kochi, Japan, and Zhuzhou, China]]
* [[Questions I would ask God about the game of go]]
* [[How much hair do you grow in a day]]
* [[Science Fiction Book Reviews]]
* [[A Real Reality Show I'd Like to Watch]]
* [[Fan Commentary on Sports Broadcasts]]
* [[Transhumans have low credibility]] 
* [[Selection for Liking Cloning]]
* [[90s homepage creation software]]
* [[Electoral college and Tennis]]
* [[EV Poker]]

## Projects

* [[Mortal Coil]]
* {{img:60}}
* [Chartsweep 90s - mashup of every #1 hit song of the 90s](../chartsweep90s.html)
* [Chartsweep 80s](../chartsweep80s.html)
* [Covering Free Polyominos](../polycover/)
* [Pixel walks](../pixel/)
* [OEIS Sequence related to mortal coil](../polycover/)
* [Chartsweep MP3s](../chartsweep/) — the actual mashup audio files
* [Mortal Coil Levels](../coillevels/) — puzzle level solutions by grid size
* [Mortal Coil solver images](../coil/images/) — solver output diagrams
* [Partitions](../partitions/8-partitions.html) — partition math project
* [Connections](../connections/Connections.html) — connections visualization (d3, 2014)
* [First Set Making](../first-set-making/) — photos of making a Go set
* [Altitude Maps](../altitude-maps/interactive_viewer_advanced.html) — 3D elevation viewer
* [Reading Eyes](../reading-eyes/)
* [Factorio Screenshots](../factorio/) — enormous factory layout PNGs
* [Revisiting the same place — Beijing 2014–?](../revisiting-beijing-2014/)
* [Casablanca](../casablanca/) — frame captures
* [Face recognition OCR overload](../collage/)
* [DZM](../dzm/) — photo annotation dots overlay
* [Narbonne](../narbonne/) — tile game diagrams
* [Go patterns](../gopatterns/) — named go shapes
* [Rotated maps](../rotatedmaps/)

## Pictures

* [Trip to Iceland](../iceland2018/)
* [Trip continued to Europe](../europe2018/)
* [South Korea, China, Japan 2019](../asia2019/)
* ["Everyday Tourism" around San Mateo](../everydaytourism2018/)
* [Kochi, Japan 2014](../kochi2014/)
* [Beijing photos](../beijing/)
* [Foster City aligner](../fostercity/aligner14.html) — 1962 vs 2025 aerial photo alignment tool
* [Thailand](../thailand/thailand.html) — 2001–02 trip (incl. Cambodia)
* [Street photography from China](https://www.flickr.com/photos/kouchi)
* [[Pictures of Zhuzhou, Hunan, China.]]

## Other

* [ernop github](https://github.com/ernop/)
* [my Goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/38566476-golding)
* [@happy_sort on Twitter](https://twitter.com/happy_sort)
* akasatanahamayarawan@gmail.com

## Groups

* [\[paused\] SF scifi short story reading group](https://sfsfss.com)
* [Beijing Go Club](http://beijinggoclub.com)
* [Beijing Scifi Reading Group](http://beijingscifi.org)
* [Old homepage of the Beijing scifi reading group](../sfgroup/)
* [Programming puzzle group](../progpuz/) — a puzzle group I created and ran in Beijing

{{widget:github-contributions}}

---

### [Infinite Deck Poker Hand Rankings](https://fuseki.net/Infinite-Deck-Poker-Hand-Rankings)

Tags: game variants, ideas, poker, variants

With infinite decks it makes sense to add new hands. This type of poker requires a computer to play (or can be simulated, badly, by just mixing a couple hundred decks together)

There are more possibilities for pair-based hands, so those should be devalued a little. Traditional poker hand valuations are in straight order of rarity, plus card value in case of ties.

In this variant, flushes are now easier to make, so they are weaker than straights.

There are also a lot more sub-variants of pair hands.

It's also possible for people to have exactly the same hand as eachother.

## Quintuplets

5 identical cards.

## Five of a Kind

The worst five of a kind has one internal twin. More twins/triplets/quadruplets increase in value. The best of them is the above quintuplets.

## Full House Flush

A triplet and a twin of the same suit.

As As As Ks Ks.

## Straight Flush

As normal.

## Brady Bunch

A triplet and a twin, not same suit.

As As As Kc Kc

## Quadruplets

4 exact same card.

As As As As

## Four of a Kind

No internal pairs

As Ac Ad Ah

Better than this would be

As As Ad Ah (1 internal twin), and increasing value as there are more internal identical cards.

## Full House

As Ac Ah Kh Kd. Better would be internal twins.

## Straight

AKQJT

## Flush

High card wins. Internal pairs don't matter.

## Triplets

Ax Ax Ax

## Weird Three of a Kind

Ax Ax Ay - with one internal twin.

## Three of a Kind

Ax Ay Az - all different suits.

## Doublemint Twins

Two twins

As As Jc Jc x

## Unhappy Family

Two pairs, with one identical

As As Kc Kd

## Two Pair

A A K K x

## Twins

Two identical Cards

As As

## Pair

Ax Ay

## High Card

Ax

---

### [Influence by Robert Cialdini](https://fuseki.net/Influence-by-Robert-Cialdini)

Tags: 2001 books, authors, book reviews, books, influence, nonfiction, people, reputation, robert cialdini

## I loved it!

This is an extremely interesting nonfiction book summarizing the principles of influence. He breaks influence down into 6 main types - reciprocity, consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity. For each one, he goes over interesting, recent research, with examples.

The most striking part was his summary of an undercover investigation into an end of the world cult in the late 60s, and the strange behavior of those people, all interpreted as them trying to remain internally consistent with their reputation.

---

### [Instant Deals with James Bond](https://fuseki.net/Instant-Deals-with-James-Bond)

Tags: credibility, evolution, humanity, james bond, precommitment, reputation, society, trust

Imagine if you were a guard in an evil villain's fortress, which is being infiltrated by James Bond. You are going to appear on screen for about one second in your black turtle neck uniform. And to get past you, he's going to have to kill you. The 25 years of your life are going to go to nothing - your parent's love, your schooling experience, military training, plans for the future, all gone, just so he could go through one hall undetected (and probably get caught and held captive later, anyway).

Don't you wish you could just make a deal with him? You know he could kill you, there's no point in wasting your life to prove that. But he has to kill you, because if he lets you go, you might raise the alarm. Wouldn't it be great if you could just forgo the killing part? The problem is, he can't trust that you won't just lie, and you would be worried about what would happen to you later, if Bond was captured and your boss asked why you hadn't stopped him. Even if you make a deal with him to not reveal your betrayal, he might sell you out later anyway.

So it's a problem of trust between you - he needs to be able to trust you, and you need to have an explanation for what happened that he won't undercut.

## Physiology

But how can you build this trust? A history-based system would be so fragile - it'd require a huge reputation tracking system (AKA honor) and would still be broken all the time.

But a physical system, in a pre-genetic-engineering time, is so powerful. If it was known that people simply had these vulnerabilities, and they always worked, it would be undeniable - everyone would be vulnerable.

Sort of like the vulcan death grip, or the vulnerability to "mickeys" - we *want* these vulnerabilities so that people who totally have the drop on us don't have to kill us. If we are outclassed and have lost already, we *want* to be able to prove we are "knocked out" and out of the game for a while, without having to be killed.

So, what if humans had a vulnerable place, which would be guaranteed to knock us out for an hour if tapped. Along with that, what about a memory-knockout - a spot on our head that if you push, it would make you forget everything in the last hour.

So many murders would be avoided if this existed - a physical way to pass someone, or make someone forget something. If it was just a deal or a promise on both sides part, it could be broken - but a built-in, human characteristic like this would be great!

But, we don't have it - and even if we engineered it later, the person confronting you would not be able to be sure you didn't just fake the thing, and will rise up 2 minutes later and shoot them in the back. It only works in a world where there is clearly no genetic engineering going on.

## Goon Unionization

If Goons unionized, they could institute something like "tapping out" - perhaps a uniform with a red spot on the back. If Bond touches the spot, you would just be bound to not raise the alarm and pretend he killed you. Otherwise, everything would be the same (you could still fight if he doesn't manage to achieve it). But this would not work that well - a physical solution would be much better:

Your union would issue you with an actual "knockout-button" that you would wear on the back of your neck. It'd be a little red button, and if Bond pushed it, you would be knocked out for an hour, guaranteed. It would be against union rules to obscure it. Even though this would be a weakness, it would actually be good for you to have this - it'd save you getting killed all the time. Since Bond is never stopped by minor villains anyway, it would not make it particularly easier for him to get into the fortress.

Of course, the evil villain would try to stop you from wearing this - but that's what the union would be for, to require the villain to only employ red-buttoned insta-knockout enabled goons.

---

### [Interchangeability of Utility](https://fuseki.net/Interchangeability-of-Utility)

Tags: ideas, money, theory, utilitarianism

Not being consistent with rewards / price on decisions means that you are doing something wrong.

There should be a way to value your time + money, and things which cost "more" in this context should be worth more to you. If not, you are doing something wrong.

This is especially obvious when you travel between two places, one much cheaper than another. If you're in HK for a weekend and feel a bit thirsty and spend the HK usual price of 2 USD for a drink that you slightly enjoy, but then the next week you are in Beijing, and are thirsty at a tourist attraction, but since the drinks are overpriced (80 cents rather than the usual 50 cents), you decide not to get one, that is a mistake.

You shouldn't live the same "level" of life in two different environments - moderately thrifty in a cheap country, and moderately thrifty in a super expensive country. If you commute between monaco and thailand, you should live like a king in thailand and be super cheap in monaco. You will get a higher internal utility value than if you live the same way in both.

## A New Job

If you are about to get a new job where you will make 10x as much money, you should just start living the way you will then, now. (modulo the certainty that it will really happen)

---

### [Is speaking in tongues more difficult for people whose languages have higher occupancy of words within their space of phonemes?](https://fuseki.net/Is-speaking-in-tongues-more-difficult-for-people-whose-languages-have-higher-occupancy-of-words-within-their-space-of-phonemes)

Tags: audiobooks, cults, glossolalia, language, psychology, questions, sounds, wfmu

or rather, are they actually paying for the work of intentionally avoiding continuations which exist within the language?

Are smarter people able to produce more varied patterns of avoidance? or is that even good?

Does glossolalia have a quality level? like, good "English" speaking in tongues is where you sound very much like english but just so happen to never make a word, while bad would be that you both sometimes do slip up and say a "real word" but also that your avoidance patterns are really bad, e.g. by using not-even-english sounds, or maybe that you would produce at max one valid continuation within a non-word, or worse yet, not-even-human animal sounds, sound expressions, gasps and moans

I am not really sure which is worse:

It seems bad to say something like "dictdionORY" and avoid a real word only at the last minute
But it also seems bad to break continuation rules too early or too grossly right away as soon as each syllable is out; the person is insisting too much to break 

Do some people break more subtle versions of continuation rules, like they break the normal within-word vowel patterns as part of the work of "sounding" like you are speaking a foreign language within english space? But remember that glossolaliasts don't admit that there is a difference between source-language glossolalia, right?

What does mandarin-native glossolalia sound like? This could be a good way to make some of these questions have very obvious answers - by getting reports and evals from non-speakers on whether mandarin tongues sounds mostly like just normal mandarin to them or not?

These thoughts spawned by an episode of "Vocal Fry", a wonderful weekly show exploring the strange audio recordings left behind by all kinds of interesting people over the years, from WFMU the best radio station. https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/166663

### Also featured here, "skip the middleman" and go directly from hypothesis to a generated image of the supposed study program?

{{img:493}}


Articulatory Contrainy:

{{img:494}}

#### Links:

 * Claude had some nice links and responses here:  https://claude.ai/share/38b5424b-b803-46f9-b461-e98d129a8b13

---

### [Is there poker card order bias?](https://fuseki.net/Is-there-poker-card-order-bias)

Tags: bias, ideas, influence, mind, poker, statistics

In holdem, I wonder if the order of the 3 cards of the flop has any effect on play.

For example if the flop is 4-5-3, the 3-straight is not as obvious as when the flop is 3-4-5.

People never want to admit that they could be influenced by this, but I think that people are not as rational as they would like to appear to be. It is definitely true that one recognizes the straight potential of 3-4-5 a lot faster than other orders - that instant recognition probably has an emotional effect - the question is, does that emotional effect stay around and still have an influence on further play?

## How to check

Just download a couple million hands, filter out ones where the flop had the relevant initial conditions, and then compare the action.

## Other Possible Effects

AAB flop vs ABA for paired flops.

In Omaha, card order in the hand might make a difference.

---

### [Japanese Alphabetization](https://fuseki.net/Japanese-Alphabetization)

Tags: japanese, language

Phonetic Japanese does actually have an order, although it was never taught to me in textbooks.

It is a ka sa ta na ha ma ya ra wan, i ki shi chi ni hi mi ri, u, ... , e, ..., o, ...

If you say the whole thing, it sounds interesting, like a meaningless poem.

* akasatana hamayarawan
* ikishichi ni himiri
* ukusutsunu fumuyuru
* ekesetene hemere
* okosotsuno homoyoro

No matter what script things are listed in (kanji, katakana, or hiragana) it is ordered by this.

---

### [Jigsaw Puzzle Olympics](https://fuseki.net/Jigsaw-Puzzle-Olympics)

Tags: evolution, game variants, games, ideas, jigsaw puzzles, olympics, puzzles

Level 1: Competitive jigsaw puzzle solving. Individual or team.

Level 2: Groups of random people are assembled.
Two competitors will select people from the teams.
So player A will select representatives from the random selection, as will player B.
The methods of selecting people vary:

Level 3: personal interview
Devising a test which will be administered; the highest scoring players will be your team. If you had only one question to ask someone to determine if they would represent you in a puzzle-solving competition, what would your question be? (No questions about puzzles). How about if you had 5 questions?

Level 4: Design a school curriculum that will be put into place for a period of 50 years. At the end of the period,
random (or the top) students from your school will be chosen to represent you in a puzzle solving competition. How would you design the curriculum?

Level 5: A virgin planet has been discovered, with rich plant life but no animals. Design an animal weighing less than 1g; 10,000 of them will be dropped off around the planet. We will return in 1 billion years and submit jigsaw puzzles to the surviving inhabitants. Whoever's society solves them the fastest will be the winner.

---

### [Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America by Robert Charles Wilson](https://fuseki.net/Julian-Comstock-A-Story-of-22ndCentury-America-by-Robert-Charles-Wilson)

Tags: 2009 books, authors, book reviews, books, people, robert charles wilson, sf

## It was ok, didn't finish it

I read the first couple hundred pages. It's sort of interesting, but it's basically a coming of age story that wasn't super satisfying. Not much science fiction involved, really.

---

### [Language test: comprehensibility across my native langauge and three second languages about a property in Chile](https://fuseki.net/Language-test-comprehensibility-across-my-native-langauge-and-three-second-languages-about-a-property-in-Chile)

Tags: chile, language, language comparison, learning, maps, south america

### The Plan

Look at an ad in 4 languages and report what it's like to try to read and understand it.

#### Language experience:

- English native
- Spanish -4 years in school, 1 year in spanish-speaking country age 15-16
- Japanese: 3 years in college, 3 years in-country from age 23-26
- Mandarin: no initial study, 11 years in country, perhaps an equivalent of 2 years of study all told during and after the time spent in country.

Despite ever-increasing time devoted to study, my earliest languages are still the best. I'd say that my Japanese is still much better than my Mandarin, too.

Note: this is only for comprehension. For production, Spanish is extremely backlogged due to not having much chance to use it.


### Actual link & image for this plot of land

{{img:2638}}

https://www.cnpropiedades.cl/bahiayuste051ha

Here is the google map: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Capilla+de+Yuste/@-41.8140528,-73.8848538,2184m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m6!3m5!1s0x9622ed005fbb88e5:0xc07f7395b1fb9667!8m2!3d-41.8155347!4d-73.8874313!16s%2Fg%2F11yd7lgwy7!5m1!1e4?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI2MDcyNy4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw%3D%3D

They wanted 59k USD for 1.34acres of land, 2 hours drive from Puerto Montt in southern Chile, which is 1000km or 12 hours south of Santiago, by car


I suppose it's reasonable but I find the following results: 

Results of looking at the image for 1 second

##### English: 
The baseline


##### Spanish: 
Perhaps 30% of baseline

##### Japanese: 
I have a chance but I have no sightreading of Katakana ability despite knowing it just fine. I get a feeling/sense from quite a few of the single character words; the spacing and word divisions from the hiragana help point me to the right place. The katakana sections jump out at me too; being instant at reading them would help a ton. Overall I do get some kind of sense of what it says from just the first glandce.

##### Mandarin
My familiarity and word-breaking ability is too low to get almost anything form it. If I look at the red highlight text, I actually can get a sense of this instantly. But the rest of it is painful.

##### Numbers
One interesting thing is how in Mandarin, the numbers stand out very much to me. The fact that they have counters after them actually help a lot, too, even though as a speaker/writer that part of the language can be tiresome. 


**English**

{{img:2637}}


**The original Spanish**

{{img:2636}}

**Japanese**

{{img:2634}}

**Mandarin**

{{img:2635}}


#### The Location

It's a little bay, in rural Chile, facing north through a channel between Chile's largest island and the mainland. It's about 2 hours away from the largest city in southern Chile: Puerto Montt at about 250k.  

{{img:2639}}

{{img:2642}}

{{img:2641}}

---

### [Levels of Sports & Morality](https://fuseki.net/Levels-of-Sports--Morality)

Tags: competition, future, games, ideas, sports, theory

There are three levels of sports:

## Olympic Sports

The classic olympic sports, which test strength and form. Speed, lifting weights, throwing spears, etc. Most of them are just barely group activities:

### Comparing times is the lowest, most simple way to make an individual sport into a group activity.

The Olympics does have another aspect of "graceful" sports such as figure skating, acrobatics, etc. which I am not talking about. Since the things the Olympics rewards are so primitive, the rarity of olympic athletes is mostly being 1 in a million genetically + goal-driven and able to work hard.

This type of sport is left over from primitive times when we considered health to be a sign of virtue. There was little enough health, height, power and strength in the world then that it made sense to just honor people who had it. But today these sports are pretty boring! When the Olympics were started, it must have been amazing just to see so many people without any deformities, diseases, malnutrition - so many tall, well-formed people were rare back then. But today nobody thinks that someone who has all 10 good gene variants for leg strength is any better than someone who has only 5 of them. We've moved on and are no longer struggling with basic health matters.

Of course, seeing a gigantic monster lift 1000 kg is still pretty interesting - being one of those people must be an interesting experience, today. But essentially it's arbitrary; if we had preserved a bit more neandertal DNA that 1000kg would be normal, and 2000kg would seem like a big deal, and if we'd never adapted any of it, we'd all be a little bit weaker than we are now. It's just nominal, people could be any size, and have any amount of strength, and the human condition would still be the same. No matter our history there'd always be a distribution.

Within olympic sports, there are divisions - pure, arbitrary power, vs form. Most activities involve both, of course, but in different combinations. In general, though, they focus on power - most of them are about maximizing speed, distance, or weight. Not many involve accuracy.

## Traditional Sports

These are team sports games that have evolving strategy, coordination, and real-time adjustment involved. Baseball, american football, soccer, etc. To be a pro for most positions, you still have to be pretty physically gifted, but not as much as an Olympian. Originally the players had to think on their feet, and strategy mattered - but lately the thinking has moved to the coach, who does a lot of preparation and analysis of trends. There is no longer one "perfect" way to play the game - situational stuff matters.

The rules and regulations about movement within these sports are simulations of the restrictions of movement within a bureaucratic society. This ranges from sports which are extremely controlling of physical motion, like baseball & american football, to ones which are pretty free, like soccer.

## Modern Sports

Modern sports contain an element that is completely irrelevant to older ones: Information. Now, reputations, patterns, and tendencies matter. This is the next level of competition, and of the theoretical reality of what sports actually are - limited information games. Within this world we don't know what perfect play really looks like.

Pure games of this type are poker, bargaining, and prisoner's dilemma - these games are set up explicitly to remove the physical parts of the game, and directly attack the difficulty of deciding what to do with imperfect information. Olympic sports, which don't have this aspect at all, are totally left behind, and are being demolished by physical advances. It now seems almost immoral to honor an Olympic athlete for his raw power, when he has done nothing to deserve it.

I would advocate changing traditional sports even more to emphasize their modern side - I would support heigh-limit basketball and football (a team can only have players totalling a certain heigh, with an average of 6 feet). By removing the 1 in a 10,000 requirement for height from players, the number of people who could play would be hundreds of times larger. So the ones who made it would be better than a much larger field - and therefore would be much more rare. Imagine how fast, accurate, and smart players would be!

---

### [Life doesn't Find a Way](https://fuseki.net/Life-doesnt-Find-a-Way)

Tags: evolution, freedom, humanity, ideas, politics, survival

People seem to think that a political system of complete control can never exist or sustain itself on earth. I don't know why they think this. The actual size of the Earth is somewhat arbitrarily related to our evolution; humans could have evolved on an Earth with nothing but ocean west of Europe to Asia; and a lot of Asia could have been missing as well. They could have come out of Africa and just found a lot of water. A world this size would be a lot easier to control.

Scientific methods for preventing change can develop a lot faster than evolution can invent new ways out of it; and if the system specifically enforces conformity from an early age, then most individuals who could effect change as adults would be gotten rid of very early on anyway. With a good enough system of control, it would not be impossible to put humanity into a holding pattern. This poses a major existential risk, if you consider this to be a failure. So I think the optimum path for the way we conduct our affairs should give credence to this possibility; giving up a little centralization will slow down the optimum path of development but will reduce the chance of a dead-end.

If you put some chickens in a steel cage with an automatic food dispenser, life will not find a way. You could wait a million years, but they will never evolve their way out of it. If you control evolution by killing any chicken which diverges from standard behavior, they will have even less chance of ever getting out. The machine might break down, but the chickens would all die. It'd be very unlikely that the steel cage would wear away before the machine broke down or ran out of food. There's just a tiny possibility that they break out, overrun the whole planet, evolve into sentient chicken-beings, and later discover the cage and understand where they came from.

So, we should place a lot of value in never getting put into the cage in the first place.

---

### [List of Patreon Subs with Justification](https://fuseki.net/List-of-Patreon-Subs-with-Justification)

Tags: book reviews, creativity, economics, patreon, programming, projects, sf, society, writing

Patreon is pretty great. The psychological reward from sponsoring someone who is doing something great is extremely rewarding at a low cost. 5$ a month per person is totally worth it.

### TheZvi

A former pro (?) magic the gathering player who applies similar thought processes (optimization, skepticism of experts) to looking at various countries coronavirus and vaccine response.

* [Coronavirus Analytical Blog](https://thezvi.wordpress.com/)

### Yourmoviesucks / Adam Johnston

Extremely opinionated and funny movie reviewer. More famous for deeply analysing failed movies than those that are good.

### TheJapanChannel

Curmudgeonly western guy with a Japanese wife, living in a rural area in Japan. He's a bit stuck in his own mindset, but is also pretty observant about Japanese cultural differences. Mainly he just documents daily occurrances (traffic, happenings, design, etc) with a video camera he always has with him.

### CGP Grey

Extremely idiosyncratic and particular American who works as a school teacher in the UK. He is very interested in systems and produces videos on things like voting, the precise differences between the UK/Britain/England, YouTube internals and UI, etc. He also has a podcast with the guy behind the Numberphile series. Very thoughtful and aware; there should be more people like him. He has a large following.

### Scott Alexander

Creator of Slate Star Codex and thought leader in the rationality/economics/psychology sphere. Associated with less wrong, EA, and the rationality movement. Extremely good blog. Lately he's been working to increase the reach of the community and sponsoring meetups, where there are always interesting people. He also runs an annual large psychological survey and mines it for hypothesis. Amazingly productive in many areas.

### Quillette

Trying to restore realism to lefty caring thought, and resist cancel culture.

### CaspianReport

Amateur Geopolitics, worldwide with a focus on Central Asia. Similar to Wendover productions, hitting a certain type of political/human interaction on large, long time scales.

### CaryHuang

Crazily creative visual artist who is also a genius and goes to Stanford. His main thing is Anthropomorphizing EVERYTHING. As a teenager he produced humanized virtual marble run videos that have millions of views. Now he regularly produces videos feature a large cast of anthropomorphized characters based on letters, numbers, and everyday objects, exploring their personalities and interactions. He's also interested in community building; there is some kind of user group very intensely involved in his creations. I cannot overstate how anthropomorphization is his main focus in everything he does. [Battle for Dream Island](https://battlefordreamisland.fandom.com/wiki/Cary_Huang) is one of his creations. His [youtube](https://www.youtube.com/user/carykh/feed?app=desktop) has 460k subs. [The Amazing Marble race](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elXvN83xADE) is one of his older videos, and is the kind that first let me discover him - 1m views. Recently he's been producing ML learning videos with excellent (fit for humans - anthropomorphized) explanations.

### Gwern Branwen

DIY independent researcher into medicine/psychology/neotropics/darkweb/genetics/futurism. Super analytical and statistical. Similar role as Scott Alexander in trying to connect science to reality. He has an extensive website which experiments with new hypertext layouts, with hundreds of investigative pages on various subjects. Really big on A/B testing and self-experimentation. He also does useful literature surveys on things that affect the mind, similar to Scott Alexander.

[Gwern's website](https://www.gwern.net/)

### 3blue1brown

Amazing visualizations and explanations of math concepts. Hints at a much better way to do education. Can explain hard Putnam-level problems visually such that they are almost understandable for normal people. You can't help but feel inspired, and sad at the failure of our education system to explain the geometric concepts behind math.

[3blue1brown's youtube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCYO_jab_esuFRV4b17AJtAw)

### Xah Lee

Outsider, formerly homeless, extreme person interested in CS and culture. Self-publishes a website with thousands of tutorial / opinion pages. Possibly similar to Sam Sloan - extremely productive, wide interests, obsessive, and pretty disagreeable.

[His website](http://xahlee.info/)

### Ruben Sim

Banned hundreds of times from Roblox, now produces trolly but really creative machinimata set in Roblox. Definitely juvenile/focused on irreverence. He explores an art style that few people can pull off, and some of them are really funny.

### Gopro Yeonwoo

A Korean female professional go player who uses alphago to analyse and explain her games and go techniques.

### TheraminTrees

Really empathetic psychologist who talks about totalism, black and white thinking, and his own journey out of controlling religions and ideologies. Great voice and engrossing production. This kind of post-religion but not fully leftist/nihilist person is really appealing to me.

### AlexanderWales

Rational fiction writer of many good stories. Now writing "Worth The Candle", but slowly.

### Mormon Stories Podcast

Hosted by an excommunicated Mormon; far from hating the church, he loves it and is trying to help it reform; to keep a lot of its value and resolve problems with in two main areas: its truth claims, and clerical abuse. He produces very long form (2-5 hour) interviews with people in the Mormon space (religion researchers, ex-Mormons, etc.). He has a nice way of asking questions of them and exploring their faith journeys. He's inspiring as a man who stands of for traditional good things, while rejecting its failures. So much of modern life is full of despair and alienation; I hope he succeeds in finding another way to go forward in the world between being controlled by a blind religion, and the despair of losing it all.

* [Mormon Stories](https://www.mormonstories.org/)

### ChessNetwork

A chess player who plays blitz tournaments and streams them on youtube. He's a nice guy from Pennsylvania somewhere; my first Patreon sub.

### Bay 12 Games - Dwarf Fortress creators

Two guys who have dedicated their lives to exploring a new game format - living off donations (even pre-Patreon) and following their fantasy game creation dream. The game inspired lots of later versions with much smoother UIs. The main guy has given interesting talks about procedural generation of plots at the Roguelike conference.

### SenescentSoul - Delve serialized fiction story

In the isekai genre (normal person put into a fantasy world) adventure story. The main character is very analytical about figuring out how to min/max his power in that world, and also figure out how it works. 2.5$/month, totally worth it. 2/2020 there are ~90 chapters available.

* [goodreads](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/49713398-delve)
* [actual stories available here](https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/25225/delve)

---

### [List of Rationalist Fanfiction](https://fuseki.net/List-of-Rationalist-Fanfiction)

Tags: book reviews, fiction, rational fiction

### Yudkowsky

* HPMOR - it's good
* 3 worlds collide - more science fiction. Physiological scifi - how would differing evolutionary histories & life cycles affect morality?

### Alexander Wales

* Dark Wizard of Donekirk - really good one
* Worth The Candle - Alexander Wales - 180+ chapters of isekai roleplaying game. A regular guy finds himself living inside a world inspired by his many years of dungeon mastering. Extremely developed magic system with ~50 different types. It's a great exploration of many different types of mechanics.
* Shadow of the Limelight - finished story by Alexander Wales.
* Glimwarden - unfinished story by Alexander Wales, which starts off great.
* The Last Christmas - fun and pretty short, but he really should have used the power of the infinite time machine portal better.
* The Metropolitain Man - really good rational version of superman.

### Others

* Delve by SenescentSoul - isekai with lots of min/maxing D&D style. Really fun, pretty light although gets more serious later. Speculation whether this is by an alt of Wales. Ongoing, 70+ chapters.
* Cordyceps by Benedict\_SC - really good writing. Pretty different than the others.
* Friendship is Optimal - This is pretty good.
* Harry Potter and the Natural 20.

---

### [Lost Science Fiction Stories](https://fuseki.net/Lost-Science-Fiction-Stories)

Tags: book reviews, books, ideas, sf, stories

The reason people read SF is for the ideas.

I've read a bunch of short story anthologies, best of the year stuff. Often I'll remember one amazing idea, but won't remember the story. Here are the great SF memories I have which I'm looking for the origin of.

## War

An episodic story of humans gradually evolving during a thousand year long war with an alien species. First their giant ships divide into classes, and eventually the classes diverge genetically and culturally as well. Instead of being generalists, humans become instinctual - pilots have their sex drives linked to guiding missiles, etc. Eventually none of the beings actually know what's happening or why. Amazing story.

## Creatron

someone buys a super-version of sim-earth and gets really into it, setting up conditions for life, watching it develop, learning the languages that his race invents, being worshiped by the people, and eventually entering the world as one of them. Incredible.

## Duplication

a trombonist discovers a simple way to duplicate any object. He dupes his trombone and sells it, and buys some other instruments. Then he dupes himself and creates a band. Eventually there are hundreds of him running around, then millions, then a huge war. Turns out that duplication isn't quite perfect, and introduces slight changes. So he sees many versions of himself. Eventually they all die out and he goes back to his poor life. Update: this is actually a story by William Tenn.

## Wurple

A species with 4 sexes reproduces by taking any group of 3 and "wurpling", which produces a being of the 4th sex. There is usually one sex which is more common, and looked down upon - nobody wants to mate with them, which perpetuates there being too many of that sex. Since the 4 types have distinct personalities, the population goes through drastic sex-balance shifts. Update: This is actually by Frank Herbert, and doesn't really hold up upon re-reading.

## Photosynthesizing sex blob

A extreme sports lady tries the ultimate trip - getting merged with a synthetic life form which drills your brain and combines with your neurons, while you are floating inside it, in space around the rings of jupiter, photosynthesizing, in the middle of a 3-way population war. I think this one is called "equinox". While floating among the rings, she meets various interesting characters, including her quintuplets which she was forced to bear while living in one of the ring cults, who telepathically picked up on her joking notion to name them army, navy, air force, marines, and coastguard while they were in her womb, and have been looking for her. Update: This is a story by John Varley.

## Sex Blob

A depressed suburban man bumps into a silvery alien blob who likes to envelop him and communicate. He likes this a lot. Turns out the blob isn't in love with him after all, but only looking for info on Earth, and sees other men when he's at work.

## Lily Pad Riders

On a primitive planet, botanists ride giant motile lily pads, controlling their direction with low intensity lasers. One day, the pads don't respond as expected.

## I knew It!

A man slowly emerges from what turns out to have been a self-imposed exile on Earth. He had hypnotized himself into become a normal IQ 100 human, but gradually wakes into his true self, a galactic spy with a four-digit IQ, just as his false identity is being discovered by other super brainiacs.

## Dumb Band

One morning the elevator boy surprises the professor with insights, borrows a calc book, starts reading.
Prof feels pretty inspired himself. Pretty soon it's going on all over the world - turns out every X million years, the Earth passes through a band of dumbness in space that slows down our brains and causes extinctions. Coming out of the band, humans become insanely smart, and peace mostly prevails (except for a few darn conservatives), until everyone leaves Earth for better things. Left behind are an incredibly retarded guy and a collie, now of about equal intelligence. They make do.

## Drunken bears

First contacters exploring a really nice planet discover a super awesome natural predator bear-thing that's practically unkillable, and intelligent as well. They invent a drug which makes this predator drunk, and imprison most of them in a thorny enclosure. Drunken bears occasionally escape, wreak havoc, and try to sober up and figure out what's happening to them.

## The cold equations

A stowaway on a tiny landing pod is discovered during approach to a planet. Due to mass considerations, there's simply no way that either one of the occupants of the pod can survive atmospheric braking unless the stowaway is thrown out of the ship. Update: It's a story by Tom Godwin.

## Medusa

First contacters find extremely advanced but abandoned ancient cities, and small tribes living in tiny huts in their shadow. Turns out the tribes aren't so primitive after all. Update: This is "Forgetfulness" by Don A Stewart.

## Blind

A kid discovers alien tourists in suburbia. He finds a ring of invisibility which makes you blind because your eyes don't grab any light. However, the ring only makes you invisible human-visual light, which is ok for aliens, since they can see in IR and UV.
There's a nice scene where he steals a UFO, and imagines he's quite good at flying it, cause he never bumps into anything. But it turns out the UFO just won't let itself be crashed.

---

### [Making a mod to improve the map in Slay the Spire 2](https://fuseki.net/Making-a-mod-to-improve-the-map-in-Slay-the-Spire-2)

Tags: computer games, game, mapping, modding, my preferences, personalization, slay the spire 2, strategy games, ui, video games

{{img:2565}}

Okay, the above is my new version. I undid a few of the visual changes which snuck in. I think they were fine, but it's better to align as much as possible to the original I think. 

Here is what the original (top part) looks like. To see this you would need to have scrolled up quite a bit to see it.

{{img:2566}}

{{img:2568}}

{{img:2567}}

Overall the question is: why would this otherwise brilliant game (in so many ways) make the map like this? Such that it's so dark and dim that it's genuinely difficult to see enough of it to path or really see and comfortably consider what your options really are?

#### Why?

First I want state that a core belief of mine is that humans strongest skill is our ability to rationalize. So you can tell people things about an imaginary society and then ask why they might do things that way, and people will infinitely be able to rationalize and defend their imagination. It's nearly impossible for someone just to say something more like "Well, they're making a mistake".

But, does that apply here?

Hmm, the best reasons I've heard for this and the exact same issue, where the deckview also starts way too zoomed in

Best Technical reason:
small screens mean that it's better to make players scroll than to make things too small to see or read (in the case of cards, & this is important!)

Best Deep reason:
That it's somehow "better" for you, as a player, to be forced to memorize or semimemorize the map, and your deck of cards, to make you more of a real player.

The attacks on these hypocricy write themselves:
* Actually, forcing people to do this won't really strengthen their skill. But it will still survive as a reason because 1) nobody wants to admit they're lazy 2) it sounds cool

WIP. But anyway, that's it.  The overzoom has afaict always been present in both. I think just as easily the creators could say "oh true, thanks, weforgot to undo that since the early days when it was made artibrarily for no longer valid techincal reasons" as "oh no, this is vital". Next step, obviously, is to ask for proof how they know THIS is the right level of map and deck obfuscation to do to users (rathern than zooming in even more!)

We shall see, though.

#### Info about an idea I had to compress the map somewhat.

{{img:476}}

The default map looks like this:

You can't see all of it at once! You have to scroll up to get the entire thing in view. This is a bit annoying. Also, there's no color used. There is mouesover on the legend which explains the node types.

I've been making a mod to improve this. First choice: make it sideways.

That works fairly well. Image 1: 

But then i got annoyed that sometimes it's needlessly tall so I've been working on various methods of vertically compressing it.

{{img:478}}
### This is the non-compressed, just normal map.


{{img:479}}

#### This is the "compressed upwards" version, not good.

{{img:480}}


#### This is a nicer type of compression.


... I need an image flipper here - something which takes two input images then makes a ui where we can flip between them very quickly, left/right to kind of compare physically. perhaps a kind of alignment system within them too so that when i'm making it i can set the fixed points between them?

---

### [Merchant Princes series (6 books) by Charles Stross](https://fuseki.net/Merchant-Princes-series-6-books-by-Charles-Stross)

Tags: authors, book reviews, books, charles stross, people, sf

## I liked it, definitely didn't love it, and I'm not sure why

After 2 books I went to the wikipedia page, intending to read the plot summaries for the next 4 books and save myself a lot of time.

But, nobody had written them up yet, so I read the next four.

The concept is interesting, and I like the author, and a lot of cool stuff happens. But towards the end there is just so much political fighting.

Thinking back, there really were a lot of cool ideas, and a lot of interesting things were explored.

I felt it was just a lot of running around, and a lot of descriptions of how bad life was in primitive surroundings. I learned a lot about the various clothes our heroine had to wear, and how uncomfortable they were.

I think it was attepting to be more political and say something about organizational structures - which it did, I guess. The bits in the US secret service were pretty believable, with the black ops and things.

## So

I liked it an lot, and it was addictive, but it didn't go as deep as the usual Stross novel.

---

### [Missile Gap by Charles Stross](https://fuseki.net/Missile-Gap-by-Charles-Stross)

Tags: 2006 books, authors, book reviews, charles stross, missile gap, people, sf

## Loved It

A novella about what if part of the earth of 1962 got transported to the surface of a huge, infinite disk with millions of continents, and what happens when the US / USSR begin exploring this world.

It has some great ideas:

What would it be like to settle a million continents? (I'm thinking lesswrong style waves of colonizers, each with a speed, racing across the land and gradually separating into waves grouped by speed)

What would it be like if a mercator map actually was reality - if siberia really was far, far away from alaska (if the map was drawn like that), or what if australia really was in the SE corner of the world, incredibly distant from north america.

What would it be like if there were always a new frontier, and would be for a million years?

What if the world were so large that you could fly in a straight line for 20 years and not reach the end?

What if the physical constraints binding us to a planet were much, much stronger - if gravity didn't decrease with altitude. No matter how sophisticated our technology gets, we may not be able to ever get into space (or use satellites)

## Summary

The world exploration theme doesn't get fully developed (the book's not long enough) but I still really liked & felt inspired by the story. Charles Stross is becoming one of my favorite authors. I always thought of him as genre, and he is kind of workmanlike in interviews / on his blog, but actually he's got a ton of great ideas.

---

### [Missing features on YouTube 2020](https://fuseki.net/Missing-features-on-YouTube-2020)

Tags: internet, missing features, websites, youtube

### Friend network

* If a bunch of my friends have seen / liked a video or a channel, I should be asked to evaluate it. Probably blocked because the opt-in flow for friends isn't fun.

### Sharing

* I'd like to have an easy way to share a feed of "liked" or "shared" videos as a blog, not as individual sharing actions. In the current setup you can share individual videos but not channels, and not in a repeatable way (as rss would be, for example)

### Automatic intro skipping

* Detect those animated 1-5s long intros that people put, even on short videos, and automatically skip them. They rarely have sound, which can help skipping them.

---

### [Monotasters](https://fuseki.net/Monotasters)

Tags: aliens, appetite, biology, evolution, food, ideas, sf

Imagine a world where the inhabitants bodies have a simpler metabolism:

They need to get reactant A and reactant B, and combine them internally into AB, which they use as their energy source.

These creatures don't have other mineral needs (they can get minerals through breathing), and don't have anything like "essential amino acids" - they can manufacture all that stuff. Everything's just run by this AB molecule.

The precise ratios of A and B they need are set chemically. They wouldn't have much interest in variety - every bite they take would need to have the proper ratio in order to taste "good".

If too much extra A or B in the system had negative effects, the way these guys ate would really be interesting - they'd be obsessed with reducing "variety" in food and making it as consistent as possible.

## What would they like to eat?

They'd really like to eat things in the proper ratio. Their mouths would have sensors for the presence of A or B, and if they were eating too much of one or the other, it'd be a waste, or even taste bad. Preparing food would mean mixing it so that it had the right consistency. The more proper the ratios were, the better the food would taste. Similar to humans, they would probably be obsessed with the last tiny percentage.

Historically, traditional food blending methods would be good, and most people would eat "good" things most of the time - soups, or strips of two sources in the right balance.

Once they discovered blenders, they'd be super happy, cause they'd be able to almost exactly match A and B levels. So by the time they got to ~1900 or so level technology, everyone would be eating really well. Once they got to the modern era, everyone would be eating nearly the best possible food.

## How advanced societies deal with genetic imperatives

It's likely that the genetic setup they have to create sensors for this are not calibrated perfectly, either, so they tend to desire a bit too much of one or the other - which just like in humans would lead to various syndromes (over-A or over-B).

Possibly their internal systems would use secondary signals for the presence of A/B, without actually measuring it. So snacks would develop which trigger that, regardless of the actual presence of the nutrient.

The same thing has happened to humans. Most of our food desire is captured by our attraction to texture or crunchiness - which are not innately related to food value.

## Decay

On long space missions, preserved food would be about as good as regular food - unless A or B decayed at different rates. They might detect purity as well - so if A decays into Ax, they would probably think that it tastes worse - there's only 90% A purity. But this distaste wouldn't be nearly as bad as an imbalance.

## Diseases

Lack of A or B (B or A overdose) would produce different symptoms - and there would be famines of lack of just one of the two. They would probably have two words for famine - one for "lack of A" and the other for "lack of B"

---

### [Mortal Coil](https://fuseki.net/Mortal-Coil)

Tags: games, hacker.org, hacking, math, polyominos, programming, projects, puzzles

Mortal Coil is a fun programming challenge at [hacker.org](http://hacker.org/coil)

#### Rules of play

* You are given a maze - a grid with some open and some filled spaces. Pick any point to start, and walk around the maze until every open space is filled.
* You are not allowed to cross your path
* Once you are moving, you are not allowed to stop moving until you hit a wall.
* Initially you can play in the UI on the site
* Once the levels get big, you'll be tempted to write a solver, which will get you pretty far (about level 50 for naive solvers)
* Then you'll want to solve it

#### Interactions

* Download the level
* Parse the board
* post the solution which has a start point, and a list of directions (RURDLU... etc)

#### Solution methods

* Basic structure Brute force with backtracking. This is guaranteed to eventually try every possibility
* pruning methods - "board split", "too many deadends", etc.
* There are other ways to solve levels involving percolation of available sub-board configurations which get synthesized into a complete solution.

#### Level design

* Official coil levels are usually around ~60% empty.
* It's possible to generate much more sparse levels. Open question how these interact with solvers.
* For small levels there are often multiple solutions. Big levels typically have only one or a few related solutions.

#### Links

* [Level Generator](http://github.com/ernop/coil-levels)
* [Generated Level Examples](https://fuseki.net/coillevels)
* [Related OEIS Sequence](https://fuseki.net/polycover/)
* https://www.kleemans.ch/mortal-coil> a nice writeup of one person's approach with some good spoilers/alpha.

#### Explanation of the image

* This is a filled in solution for a level.
* The red square is the end; green is the start
* When you hit a wall, and have a choice, there is a color. Green means that although you have a decision, one of the directions results in immediately creating a dead end; for most algorithms, these decisions are very easy. A red square means that the decision is slightly harder.
* Most (80%+) of the time you hit a wall, you don't actually have a decision (since there is only one way to go).
* Speculation: having a high decision percentage results in harder levels.
* The stats below are the coverage percent, percent of squares with an easy/hard decision.

#### Image

{{img:65}}

---

### [Multiplayer Waypoint Tower Defense](https://fuseki.net/Multiplayer-Waypoint-Tower-Defense)

Tags: ai, games, prisoners dilemma, programming, projects, roblox, tower defense

### Big idea:

* Setup: every player sets waypoints to create a path for their units
* Action: Units follow paths shooting/attacking/picking up items

The idea is to use hidden information about optimum paths and opposing army disposition to create a game where a somewhat random strategy is required.

You get points/money for picking up valuable items, killing enemy units, reaching predefined goals, etc.

During Action, you may be able to interact with units - using their targeting abilities to somewhat modify their behavior.

Unit types:

* Ranged
* Melee
* Splash Damage

At the beginning of every round units can reset their position or continue from where the left off. If they continue, it becomes more like Baldur's gate, a strategic non-realtime combat simulation.

---

### [My Photomapping Setup](https://fuseki.net/My-Photomapping-Setup)

Tags: hardware, mapping, open street map, projects

I am doing photomapping on open street map, which is a great site.

## Device & Setup

Android cell phone (Galaxy Note 3)

Tripod mounted on the front of an ebike. It's fairly stable but not 100% locked down. Having some kind of method to automatically do stabilization would make it even better.

## App

Opencamera https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.sourceforge.opencamera&hl=en

## Settings

1. Burst Mode
2. Burst mode zero delay
3. Focus: continuous
4. Exposure: standard, or -0.5 or -1.0 as it gets darker

This takes about 2-3 photos / second, and most of them are fairly sharp.

## Method

Drive Around continuously shooting. Add points later.

## Future

There are specialized devices for cars, etc which possibly would be an improvement. At least for stability, they would be.

I'd also like to get better http://mapillary.com Mapillary integration into JOSM, to drag and drop photos into that and use them for mapping. Plus, having things linked up there would be useful.

---

### [New Meetup Type Ideas](https://fuseki.net/New-Meetup-Type-Ideas)

Tags: friends, fun, holidays, ideas, society

#### Birthday meetup

Every month pick a famous person and a few representative articles/books. On their birthday, meet up and discuss. Similar questions as a Junto, evaluating their life. Scientists, artists, musicians, etc. all work. My nominations: Charles Darwin. Something like this already exists for Robbie Burns. I've always wanted to celebrate Iain Banks this way.

#### Adhoc games meetup

Every month someone comes up with a new game with rules. Everyone comes and plays it. I believe there is already a group like this in nyc.

#### Junto

[(Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junto_(club))

I have done one of these and it is interesting. Feels a bit out of time, but nice to talk about virtue and improvement in a strongly positive sum way.

### Decision patterns

Every month, there is an auction, paid in "points", for who controls the meetup. Every time you attend you gain one point. Whoever wins the auction decides what will be done that month. This comes from newer board games which use something like this for job allocation.

---

### [No Escape from Alcohol](https://fuseki.net/No-Escape-from-Alcohol)

Tags: biology, evolution, humanity, personality, society

## Personality Distribution

Human personality distribution is just another thing that is evolved. There's a natural distribution, descended from early mammal personality - at different times we reward different personalities, and kill off others. People evaluate what risks are worth it in areas like dealing with tribal conflict, with wild animals, nature, etc. They also had a level of neuroticism that was appropriate to make them do the right amount of introspection.

Some traits, like being super brave, can be good or bad. You might kill the mammoth, become chief, and have lots of kids - but a lot of the time you get killed. If the entire tribe is like that, that's bad news for the tribe, too, because they'll spend the whole time fighting internally. But we need some guys like that every once in a while, to take the big risks when necessary. So over time, a reasonable personality distribution evolved, with some conservatives, some risk takers.

## Alcohol

Then alcohol came on the scene. Drunk people made bad mistakes, picked inappropriate fights, tried amazing stunts and fell out of the tree, ate poison mushrooms, passed out in the jungle and got eaten by a jaguar, and the risker part of the distribution of personality was killed. This went on and on. Tribes who kept taking alcohol kept doing this - killing off a section of the population every generation. Depending on the availability, alcohol could have varied effects - from minor to completely debilitating if plentiful. We know that even today, genetic susceptibility plays a big part in alcohol problems.

This has been going on for the last few thousand years (hundreds of generations). People with a really bad susceptibility to alcohol have been being taken out of the population. You can see examples of earlier parts of the process when stone-age tribes first encounter alcohol - it has a devastating effect. Even now it's the leading cause of unnatural death.

(It also has a huge positive effect - making people have more children)

In regular life, though, what happens when all the risk-taking people are dead? There was a reason that that trait evolved before, and that niche was open - so there is selection for people who can fill it, without getting themselves killed by alcohol. So, evolution is trying to re-establish a reasonable personality mix, but under a new environment.

It's similar to when a new antibiotic comes on the scene - it may kill 99% of the population, but the population comes back, minus the trait that made it vulnerable. Humans still need risk-takers, but to survive as a risk-taker you have new dangers.

Various traits have evolved as a response to this - hugely increased alcohol resistance, and the ability to break down alcohol quickly is one. I imagine that it's also made people quite a bit more cautious about doing something it considers "slightly dangerous, but worth the risk" - an ancient mind thinking that could be confident of its sense input. But a mind in a world with alcohol evaluating the same supposition should be a lot more careful, because the mind shouldn't trust its own perceptions as much.

## Resistance won't Work

Once you get used to it, you can't go back. All of our ancestors made it through this - they were the "don't pick a fight with a jaguar" type of tribesperson, the stable one who didn't drink their life away. Or, they were the one who loved to get drunk and become a father. A couple thousand years later, evolution has again selected for specific types of personality, with awareness that they will be acting in a specific environment. You can't just then remove alcohol again and expect things to work again. Risk taking under alcohol is much more dangerous, and we've been selected for resistance to it.

A couple of other examples...

## So where are we today?

We're selected for an environment with alcohol. (well, some people are - there are also groups which have avoided it).

## Amino Acids

Ever wonder why the human body can't produce the "essential" amino acids? They're just chemicals, and we can produce lots of them. Other animals can produce them, and we produce all of the "non-essential" ones..

What happened was that we were eating stuff which had them for so long, random mutations broke the machinery for making them spread among humans, and nobody noticed until they took long ocean trips and got scurvy.

## Curcumcision

Anti-circumcision activists act like they can just stop having it done, and things will definitely be ok. But, for some groups at least, there has been 100+ generations of people doing it continuously. That means that the related genes have been randomly selected and mutating for 2000 years. Would you like to risk suddenly expressing random old genes?

---

### [On getting my first singing teacher at age 47](https://fuseki.net/On-getting-my-first-singing-teacher-at-age-47)

Tags: autodidacticism, learning, music, projects, singing

## It's awesome
My wife found a piano teacher, and eventually he also began teaching us both how to sing.

## Who knew?
I had SO much latent, unconnected knowledge and feeling about singing! I knew scales, sort of - major and chromatic vaguely. I could sing logs of songs but had little idea about intervals.

It's SO much fun and so great to step by step fill things in! I've had a single 30m lesson, 1/week and that's plenty. To not feel too bad I end up practicing 1-2 hours through the week at reading music, singing and hearing intervals, scales, songs, etc.

The goal is to eventually maybe join a choir which seems like it'd be really fun.

I tell you, I love this. It's wonderful. Lately he's been teaching me how to access higher registers. Singing along with songs I love is totally different now! I think I subconsciously used to fake it by switching to a 1-octave-too-low voice when they'd go above my old comfortable range. But I've found a bit more room up there.

## Our teacher
Is a great guy. He's had nearly 60 years of teaching experience so he's always ready for a lesson on any topic. 

## My recommendation
Everyone who likes music should pretty much get a teacher or start learning again. Also, check out my [[voice-wei]] tools which were written to have fun with and help me practice as I went along. Kind of coding-as-learning but maybe useful for some!

## Other discoveries
I hadn't known just how much I love the pure sound of barbershop music! 

I hadn't known our old church hymals actually encode four singing lines for nearly ever song! All I ever knew was to try to sing the main line, and we mostly just ignored the rest! What good practice I could have been getting! 

I really love buzz, throat singing, drone singing styles, rather than trills and vibrato or whatever those more curved style singing are!

{{youtube:ggjM2M4kSbA}}

{{img:468}}

---

### [On why I love barbershop music so much](https://fuseki.net/On-why-I-love-barbershop-music-so-much)

Tags: barbershop music, music, personal preferences, sensory systems, wfmu

{{youtube:CZ-lP_7BVOw}}

## Commentary

### Pure sounds

{{youtube:ggjM2M4kSbA}}

Within this there are 4 musical lines. The "melody" is the 2nd from the top - the one which you probably think of when you think about the song, or hum it. But, as I recently learned, around that are the other lines. they're hard to sing because you have to NOT match the main line, but they cause resonance which sounds incredible.

## How it started?

As a kid somehow I ended up at a concert of traditional american music, maybe 12 years old. I always loved that SO much without ever really putting it into words.  I love listening to these songs in the car, singing along, trying to  get a local copy of that intense resonance when you hit or match a different note in the right way!

Also I claim this: that real-life barbershop contains sounds which cannot be reproduced or maybe even captured, on normal systems. i.e. the chills that it gives you in real life, when the voice all merge together perfectly, is super great. Of course, this is mostly just ASMR before that term was recognized.  That sounds like I'm minimizing it but really, I just love it, it's great, it's social, yes it's better than DIY making your own sounds, although, have fun, go to town, get to know your own sensory input systems, that's good!

{{youtube:jawmji4Caas}}

Okay, it's undeniably conservative. There's definitely a feeling that drone/pure sounds are somehow linked to such desires.. WIP

## Another good thing I got from WFMU

One day I heard this specific listener hour, where the kind of bad-tempered listener-host jammed in as many barbershop songs as he could into an hour; from this I remembered how much I loved it. This was on [[WFMU]] in jersey city, which I've been following and listening to all those years living far away from it!

---

### [Open Street Map is Awesome](https://fuseki.net/Open-Street-Map-is-Awesome)

Tags: geography, mapping, open street map, projects, software, ugc

I am doing photomapping on open street map, which is a great site. It's like wikipedia for maps. Google maps or other services have more detail in some areas, but in the long term nothing can beat open. Plus, you are allowed to freely do things with the data - easily make certain views. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/

## Unlimited

Their philosophy of adding places is really open - you can add anything which can be verified on the ground. That lets it expand in really interesting ways in the future:

* tree types, plants
* live mapping (cars, animals, etc.)
* historical time lapses
* profiling

## People

I get the feeling that OSM is mostly made up of the type of people I like - ones who get satisfaction from completing and organizing things, and having a nice overview of data. They probably will tend to be good at visualization, too.

## Editors

I've used iD and JOSM. iD is the default, and is really easy to use, and is pretty great. Plus you can clone it from git and run it locally really easily. JOSM seems much more powerful (once you fight with Java for a while (a minute to an hour).

It is fun to have an open-ended mapping quest.

---

### [Outcome manipulation for autobattler games](https://fuseki.net/Outcome-manipulation-for-autobattler-games)

Tags: design, ev poker, game variants, games, manipulation, psychology, randomness, statistics, variants

### How to manipulate randomness in games, and how it may already be happening.

TL;DR: games which can accurately simulate results of parts of the game may already not be honest about RNG use, possibly to your benefit, possibly against it.

#### Poker example:

There is no more player input and the outcome depends on random variables. A pair of Tens wins ~54% of the time vs AK. In normal poker, the EV of each is proportional but with high variance. In [EV Poker](EV-Poker.html), actual returns match expected returns (since you reward based on simulated actual equity).

But in this mode, you reward based on the median of the simulations. So TT vs AK would be simulated as:

* +1
* +1
* +1 ... (54 of these)
* 0 (<1 of these)
* -1
* -1
* -1 ... (46 of these)

Then you would take the median (+1) and reward all the money to TT 100% of the time. [EV Poker](EV-Poker.html) rewards you based on actual equity, but this is something different. Does it even still reward quick play? The meta for going all-in would definitely change.

#### *Storybook Brawl* example

This is a game where you build an army and then the game has them fight vs another army. Skill in building the army matters, but the order that your guys attack, and who they target, is randomly chosen, and it really matters. Watching the outcomes of fights, it's infuriating how random it all seems. Better players still win more often, but there is a huge amount of variance. Or is there?

This game also has the property that there is a clear results, and you can determine the win margin numerically. The "score" for each simulation doesn't capture 100% of the meaningful variation - i.e. you can "win by X" in good or bad ways; but the score captures most of the meaningful variation.

What if this game is *already doing this* - simulating N battles, and then picking the one to show the players based on some algo? They may not just be choosing the median - there are all kinds of interesting choice systems you could use.

### How would games choose which random outcome to give the player?

* median - likely boring
* most amazing - in either direction
* based on user stage in the funnel
* based on a personality profile of the user

All of these are doable with and without preservation of statistical qualities, fairness, and/or detectability.

#### Giving amazing experiences

The game can quantify how "amazing" or "cool-looking" an outcome is! i.e. if it sims a fight which you lose 99% of the time, wouldn't it be amazing to display the 1% battle as the "actual outcome"? If you're watching you'll have a sense of dread before the battle - but as you watch your army continuously get lucky, you'll be thrilled! If I were an evil PM, I'd intentionally set up new players to experience something like this in their first play session.

What I'd actually do is create a list of amazing and cool mechanics about the game, then just keep picking sims which expose them to the user. Most users wouldn't pick up on it, and would have consistently amazing experiences.

In poker this would result in cracking aces more often than probability would result in - or you could go the other way and choose the median and punish speculative play.

### This is the randomness axis

It's typically thought that more randomness is friendly to casual players, and hardcore players like reduced randomness.

### This may already be happening everywhere!

* We know that PvM games already manipulate randomness / enemy levels / rewards to keep players hooked
* But for PvP games in an environment, if you can simulate player behavior, you can also just directly measure the simulated outcomes of battles as you vary the input params you control (the rng seed, rewards, environment etc.) and give a result that you calculate will optimize your company's value function.
* i.e. not losing a whale who's showing signs of flaking out.
* or burning the experience of someone who's hard core addicted already

### Compare this to a game like *Slay the Spire*

This game has additional properties that make it pure:

* single player
* single random seed determines all outcomes
* choices presented to the user have little / no feedback based on user success
  \*\* i.e. if you are about to die the game won't go easier. Your hit points or power level rarely is used as input for game decisions.

#### But a *Slay the Spire* version of this may still be interesting.

* Imagine you had a reasonable AI player for STS
* Before every fight, the engine might simulate 1000 battles, then pick the seed which had the median outcome.
* this seed mainly controls card shuffle order, and also enemy behavior (which has scoped randomness)

It's interesting to think about how this would effect STS. Picking the seed from the extremes would definitely make you die more. So picking the median would tend to completely eliminate any enemy behavior which has <50% probability. So I can't claim that this is "best-play preserving" which is unfortunate.

Overall the goal is to find a way to truly and quickly evaluate skill in games which have a lot of randomness in them.

---

### [PBA cards, an easy way to prove your bribery dues are paid](https://fuseki.net/PBA-cards-an-easy-way-to-prove-your-bribery-dues-are-paid)

Tags: USA, complaining, institutions, law, new jersey, police, politics, security, society

If you give money to a police charity in New Jersey, they give you a card and a sticker for your car. If you get pulled over, cops will be lenient with you if you have one.

Illegal? No! you see, the card proves that the driver paid money to the police in order not to get a ticket. Nothing wrong with that! Wait, what?

## But seriously

PBA cards are a system to allow police officers to illegally not enforce the law on people they know. It boils down to buying / being family members with policemen getting you preferential treatment. That's like something out of a dictatorship!

If laws are unfair for police family, they're unfair for everyone!

Being influenced by a PBA card is illegal! Anyone who shows their PBA card to a cop along with their license is a criminal and guilty of attempting to corrupt a cop. Hiding illegal influence through a middleman of a police organization doesn't make it any better, it's still attempted bribery / misuse of influence.

Laws apply to everyone - we are a country of laws, not a country of influence. Look at all the corrupt countries out there - one thing they have in common is massive nepotism, and no rule of law. "Officer" is not a noble title, and the family of police are not nobility.

Police have lots of discretionary power, and the guys running police associations have found a good way to make money off of it. But that power is supposed to be used for the good of society, not to enrich police officers in general or to put them above society.

## What actually should happen

If family members of cops feel that the laws are unfair, and don't want to live according to the laws everyone else does, that pressure should influence cops to try to change the law!

Cops family members are one of the things that could stop laws from going out of control!

If a cop's mother in law gets busted by an unfair speed trap, the cop shouldn't give her invulnerability with the PBA card, he should solve the problem. If the trap is unfair to her, it's unfair to everyone.

It's like a CEO who is guaranteed a safe exit from the company no matter what - they'll have no motivation to do right.

## Those making and enforcing the laws should be under more scrutiny, not less

Imagine how great the legal system would be, and how much amazing freedom we'd have, if every policeman, member of the senate, and their families were filmed 24 hours a day, and had the law enforced to the maximum against them.

They'd do nothing but remove unfair, illegal laws all the time! It'd take years of cleaning out junk, til what was left was all reasonable, understandable law. They'd think carefully about extending laws, and really do a good job making sure laws were fair.

Instead, what we have done is remove policemen from the group of people who have to live under law. This removes a really valuable feedback mechanism between legislators, enforcers, and the people. Police naturally have great credentials in court, to express their knowledge of the law - relieving them of the duty to make sure laws are reasonable is a huge mistake.

## Think Long Term

Unless you are sure that your people will rule forever, getting rid of basic freedoms for your temporary convenience will come back to haunt you. I don't want to live in a world where you have to know the right people to survive; fairness before the law is a good thing. As it stands now with PBA cards, laws can get worse and worse, and the people who have the best view of how they work, enforcing them every day, will not have any motivation to improve the situation, because they and their families have get-out-of-jail-free cards.

## Samples of Cops talking about PBA cards

http://p066.ezboard.com/fnypdrant64609frm1.showMessage?topicID=14293.topic

Read this message board to read cops confessing to taking bribes.

```
"ok, these same mutts you are referring to could be mos family,
if he is a family member he gets off no questions ask, unless he is verbally
abusive, now friends are a different ball game. _if guy shows me mini sheild and
pba card, have a nice day no questions ask._
obviously mos gave these cards to people they deem worthy.
now as for the ebay scams or internet card, this is where your detective sheilds
come into play, i would expect a card to be signed but any perp
can sign them too, ask for command , name of cop, dude if you dont know that, you are getting one."
```

(my bold)

```
" if he gives attitude write him."
```

Why should that matter? how about, "if he broke the law write him, if not, don't". Not "if he grovels enough, don't write him".

---

### [Pan Jia Yuan market, Beijing](https://fuseki.net/Pan-Jia-Yuan-market-Beijing)

Tags: bargaining, beijing, china, pan jia yuan

Pan Jia Yuan is a huge antique / flea market in southeastern Beijing. It's a really fun place to visit.

## Sections

* The west side is larger stores, with big proper antiques. Traditional wooden tables for 20k USD (yes, crazy). Other old old junk. This side is a little more formal.
* The middle section is a lot of large tables, underneath a high roof. These are fairly established shops selling cultural stuff. There's two rows
* The east side has little mats on the ground that can be rented by anyone for the weekend, selling all types of stuff. This part is more fun, because they have everything.
* There are also little other sections devoted to certain products - the south side has books,

## Smaller sections

* South west side has giant stone statues,
* Eastern edge has weird large rocks.
* The southeast has porcelain statues of mao.

There is a lot of kitschy stuff, but also a lot of fun stuff.

## Is it real?

Walking around you notice a lot of the same things wherever you go - the brass demon/angel head with 4 faces, etc. And you can be quoted various prices for them based on how you look, or the fake coins with weird unreal characters on them.

A lot of the stuff is not real and was probably produced in a factory. But even still, it's fun.

## What I've gotten

* A giant, 2 foot long woody peapod of some weird vegetable, with large rattling seeds inside. 30 kuai
* A pair of wooden balls in weird shapes you can roll around in your hand. 10 kuai
* Weird rocks shot through with lines and highly polished. - they wanted 80! no deal
* Pure solid red rock pillars, used to carve a sign into to make an ID stamp. 10 kuai
* 4-faced brass god paperweight. 20 kuai
* A 70s style chinese mechanical alarm clock with spaceships on it. 30 kuai
* Lots of old fake chinese money (it looks real enough)
* lots of other knicknacks I've given away as presents.

## Outside the gates

There are always xinjiang guys outside, with moustaches, following people and trying to sell weird animal pelts.

There are also people setting up their own home-style stalls out on the sidewalk, unwrapping a blanked to reveal a dirt-covered old relic supposedly sold to them by an illiterate farmer.

## So...

The place is awesome and fun. The bargaining can be annoying (See [Bargaining in China](Bargaining-in-China.html)), but just checking out the stuff is neat.

## An experiment

I'd like to get 100 people, foreigners and locals, and take their picture, then send them into the market to seek out a specific item and ask how much it costs (just the first price). They would then return, and report their results. Then an analysis would be done correlating appearance, chinese ability, and attitude to the prices offered.

We could figure out what signifiers the sellers are using to set the initial price. I know they use language & dress to do it, but there must be more - their success depends on accurately guagiing how much someone is willing to spend on something.

We could also do profiles of individual sellers. It'd have to be a common item - like the 4-faced got thingie.

## A Scavenger Hunt

Another idea - everyone gets 100 kuai and is sent into the market with a list of things : something more than 100 years old, something red, something made of wood, something large, etc. They spend the 100 kuai, get their items, then meet up with the group 2 hours later. Outside, everyone figures out how many points they got.

---

### [Parallels between anti-wall and anti-mask Arguments](https://fuseki.net/Parallels-between-antiwall-and-antimask-Arguments)

Tags: arguments, coronavirus, disease, immigration, politics, psychology

There's a level 1 contrarian argument that "masks don't work" which is very similar to "border walls don't work."

In both cases the theme goes: "Physical barriers are not invulnerable, so they are not a useful part of a mitigation strategy".

In both cases I believe this is special pleading. People who make the argument re: immigration actually just don't like the wall because it's against a group they like (immigrants). People who argue against masks for coronavirus are trying to argue something similar - that the virus isn't as bad as people make it out to be, and isn't worth defending from.

There are some obvious problems with both arguments - mainly, that groups which the arguer probably approves of demonstrate that they disagree with the argument. But the arguers rarely address them:

### Mask examples

* Doctors all wear masks when treating patients

#### Scenario exploration

Imagine you challenge someone to spend an hour with someone with coronavirus: would they really voluntarily not wear a mask?

They're also vulnerable to reductio ad absurdium. Imagine someone who somehow is wearing 100 masks. There are so many their entire body and face is covered, and someone with coronavirus is 5 meters away. Would they be safer in this situation than if their entire body weren't covered? Obviously yes, because water droplets leading between you two would be more likely to be caught by the masks, rather than directly contacting your skin / mouth.

Now imagine you only have half as many masks on - still feel safer? Obviously, yes. Just keep lowering the number of masks. Their value must be continuous, and won't decay to zero until there are zero masks.

So, admitting that a hundred masks are useful implies that one is also useful. And I don't think anyone would admit that a meter thick covering of masks is not "more effective than air" at preventing the spread of physical particles.

#### Another example

People often argue this based on "pore size", that some masks have holes that are bigger than the virus so it can fit through. Okay imagine I gave you an N95 mask (which has holes small enough to block viruses). You'd be happy. Then imagine I poked a single microscopic hole in it, big enough for a virus. Would you then not want to use the mask? The bad masks with large holes are exactly this - they're effectively N95 masks (on the solid parts) with tons of holes in them. But the parts that don't have holes are still effectively walls!

#### Wall examples

It's funny that people who say the wall won't work don't address historical examples of walls that worked: How about the Berlin wall? This example shows what's really going on. The Berlin wall did work, but they hate it because it was cruel, and the border wall takes on those connotations of violence towards wall-crossers, which they hate, which leads them to hate the wall.

How about the border walls Israel builds? Why are they doing that, if walls don't work?

None of this is meant to show that I favor the wall; just that the arguments against it are not valid.

---

### [People use life expectancy statistics completely incorrectly](https://fuseki.net/People-use-life-expectancy-statistics-completely-incorrectly)

Tags: complaining, math, society, statistics

You often hear things like "In the past, the average life expectancy was only 30 years".

And then people act like in that era, people had kids at 10, were old at 30, and living past 40 was really rare.

## This is absurd and wrong

If that were the case, how come some Roman emperors lived to 70? They'd be living more than double the life expectancy - the equivalent of living 2\*77 years today.

What's really happening is that life expectancy statistics are dominated by infant mortality. In ancient times, people who lived past childhood would regularly live into their 50s or 60s - but half of everyone died in childhood, which brought down the average.

In modern times, a small increase in the percentage of the population not having access to health care can cause a huge drag on life expectancy. i.e. having infant mortality rates go up by 10% among 10% of your population will introduce a lot of zeros to the number, and drop it. But when people see the drop from 77 to 76, they assume that hospital treatment has gotten worse, or that we are falling being, or that people are living less healthy lives.

## It's arbitrary

Imagine Christians forced the US to change our definition of when life begins - now, life (& statistics keeping) would begin at conception. Infant mortality would shoot up drastically, and life expectancy would drop to 30.

Would our quality of life be lower? No, it'd be exactly the same. ( Also, everyone's age would be 9 months longer, and instead of birthdays we'd use conception days. )

Imagine if Catholics forced us to start counting all the virtual children they believe are killed by contraception. Life expectancy would drop to something like 0.001 years per "life" - but nothing would change about day to day life.

On the other end of it, imagine if we only counted children once they'd passed a "coming of age" ritual at age 13. In that world, life expectancy would be 80+ in the US, and even in the ancient world it would have been 60+. In fact, that is closer to what ancient times were like - people didn't pay much attention to young kids, because they had a lower chance to survive. They'd even delay naming them until they had a higher chance of making it.

## Sea Turtle life expectancy

Out of 100 eggs that sea turtles lay, only a few baby turtles will make it into the sea - and most of those will be eaten before they make it to a year old. Say one in a hundred hatched turtles lives to one year, and all of those make it to 100 years of age. That makes the average life expectancy of a sea turtle be one year.

Does that mean they live their entire life cycle in a year? No! A one-year-old sea turtle is just a baby.

So it's foolish to use life expectancy at birth as a way to understand a life cycle. It has nothing to do with it. (The normal "life expectancy" of grasshoppers is like 1 day, since 99.9% of them don't make it to adulthood)

## What we should talk about

People use life expectancy at birth to try to understand how societies work. This is wrong. They try to say that 1/2 life expectancy is middle aged, near the end is "old", etc. But for sea turtles, 10 years may be "adult" and old may be 50 years old - but we'd never get that from the knowledge that their life expectancy at birth is just a year.

Almost every sea turtle you have ever seen has wildly exceeded the average life expectancy. (But the average sea turtle's existence does last for exactly their average life expectancy; we simply don't see most of the ones with short expectancies)

This is true of humans, too - almost everyone you see will live way longer than the human life expectancy at birth.

What we should actually think about is life expectancy at a certain age. Once turtles make it through the first dangerous year, their life expectancy probably shoots way up to 60 years or so - and this number actually means something.

If you are already 20 years old, life expectancy at birth means nothing to you. You should only care about life expectancy at 20. A healthy Roman 20 year old probably had another 40 years of expectancy - even though the life expectancy of his society was only 30.

## Specificity

Say you live in a town that has a life expectancy of 80.

But then your township is merged with another nearby town. This other town has many people who don't have health care, so they have higher infant mortality. So when they reculaculate life expectancies for this new town, it drops to only 60. Has you life gotten any worse?

They also revise the historical life expectancies - so during your childhood, your town had a life expectancy of 60 (one of the worst in the country), down from 80.

Should you revise your opinion of what life was like at that time? You are now considered to have been born in the town with one of the lowest life expectancies in the country. Was it really terrible? You remember it was nice...

This is just a wrong way to think. In general, the weight you put on statistics should be proportional to how much they matter to you - you should care about life expectancy at your own age, not at birth, and stats about people near you, not ones who are arbitrarily included within your group.

---

### [Percentage Terminology](https://fuseki.net/Percentage-Terminology)

Tags: complaining, ideas, math, missing features, terminology

#### Our teminology for percentages really sucks.

Say the current mortality rate for an operation is 10%.

If you say "survival increased by 10%" what does that mean?

* 10% => 20% - this is "absolute"
* 10% => 11% - this is "relative to success"
* 10% => 19% - this is "relative to failure" - the "failure area" of 90% shrunk by 10% relative.

In this case, "relative to success" makes most sense, since the use case for the sentence is in evaluating a policy change.

But imagine the current success rate was 99.9%. In that case an improvement to 99.99%, reducing deaths to 1/10 as many as before, could be described in these ways:

* My opponent's lazy policies only increased survival by 0.01%
* Death rates dropped by a factor of 10x
* Death rates dropped by 90%

So where do you draw the line between these cases?

## Sociological effects

This has real effects: In meetings with both execs and technical/stats people, there is usually a lot of hand-waving when the stats people hand-off of the analysis to execs. The stats people explain the results using some percentage-related terms, and then the execs internalize the numbers. When they then repeat the number, they usually have just guessed which percentage variant was meant, and frequently have switched it.

That goes into their slide deck to present onward, and meaning is lost. Then the C levels naturally become suspicious and generally don't believe stats as much as they could, because their business knowledge occasionally tells them something went wrong. If we believe in the meaning of numbers, this is a problem. This also backs up skepticism about numbers - "you can prove anything with statistics"

## Similar Terminology Problems

#### The situation

Imagine seeing a map with dots on cities, with this voiceover:

"Larger dots indicate indicates cities where the coronavirus is more widespread"

* "Small" is a city of 100k people where they all have coronavirus
* "Big" is a city of 10m people with 110k cases (1.1%).

#### Descriptions of the situation

* Big has more coronavirus infections. (strictly true)
* Coronavirus is more prevalent in Small
* Coronavirus is more common in Small
* Coronavirus is overwhelming Small
* There is a larger Coronavirus infection in Big. (this one is on the edge)
* Coronavirus is a bigger problem in Small
* The Coronavirus problem in Big | Small is huge.
* More people have coronavirus in Big, so it's a bigger problem. (easy mistake to make)

The problem here is that the word "more" clearly denoting an additive or multiplicative difference. We do have lots of words which inherently include the sense of ratio.

Simply adding in a sense to existing words would solve the problem.

### There is more crime in New York than Boston

What does this mean? Is it additive or multiplicative? I want to qualify the word more into two senses:

* More (absolute)
* More (per capita)

---

### [Persistent Hawkers in Beijing](https://fuseki.net/Persistent-Hawkers-in-Beijing)

Tags: beijing, china, complaining, san li tun

In beijing, there are certain areas where you are always approached by scammers / hawkers, and they always try to sell you the same thing. There doesn't seem to be a particular reason for those type of scammers to hang out in that particular area, but they do, and keep it up for years and years.

## "Sex DVD"

Between Landau and Buy Nao Hui, a couple of markets, there is a place where there is *always* a woman holding a baby who will approach you and offer you "sex DVD". It's not always the same woman. She clearly speaks no english. Someone has been there, doing this business, since at least 2004.

## "Lady Bar"

Along crappy bar street, the eastern part of san li tun, there are always guys standing there who whisper "lady bar". They've been there for years - since there were apartment buildings on the other side of the street, through the time they got demolished. For a short time when the Village was first built, they moved over to the west side of the street. They are still going strong in 2012.

## "Crappy Bar street"

The east side of San Li Tun bei lu has a line of bars. They're all named after numbers - *44 bar*, *56 bar*, and some of them have other musical themes. They all have touts outside. They are all expensive, and have the same type of big, fake plastic signs. They all have sexy lady singers. During the summer, local construction workers stand across the street ogling confusedly at the girls on stage.

It seems like some effort has been made to distinguish between them, but not enough - they're obviously all connected in some way. Are they all owned by the same person? It seems like a government sponsored idea of a bar street, or like something out of North Korea, or disneyland.

## What's behind it?

How do they keep going year after year, without spreading or dying out? If hawking sex dvds is profitable, they should do it in more places in beijing. If it's not, why do they still bother doing it at all?

Maybe each one of them just has a guy who knows how to make money at it, with the right police connections to survive, who keeps it going, but isn't a businessman. As new areas of Beijing have expanded, those types of guys didn't have the same connection level with the authorities.

It's not a coincidence that they happen at two of the oldest foreigner areas of beijing, landau and san li tun.

## Dongzhimen Street Sellers

For over 8 years, the Dongzhimen area has been a haven for street sellers. The tunnel leading from subway exit A (nw corner, by yinzuo/mcdonalds) to D (now a bus station) used to be full of sellers - they rebuilt it around 2007, and now it's even more crowded, full of garbage and pushy corn/DVD/tibetian jewelry sellers. The front of the bus station is now a constant battle zone between chengguan and sellers, too.

## Begging in General

In general, there are beggars in most places foreigners go, but not very many.

I don't understand what stops all the beggars from concentrating in the same area. The observed begger concentration seems pretty near the ideal - but how is it regulated? Almost every individual beggar in the city has personal motivation to move to foreigner areas, yet they don't. Is there some kind of organization regulating this?

---

### [Pictures of Zhuzhou, Hunan, China.](https://fuseki.net/Pictures-of-Zhuzhou-Hunan-China)

Tags: china, pictures, projects, zhuzhou

I spent feb 2004-feb 2005 in Zhuzhou, Hunan, China, teaching english at Zhuzhou Technical University. It was interesting. Here are some pictures I took with a Canon A85 the month before I left.

If you're on PC Press F11 to fullscreen this window. That'll make things look a lot better.

update: jan 4 2008: These pics are old now - most of the construction has been finished, and the place looks a lot better now, at least according to an email & pics I received from my old boss there.

Updated pictures from Zhuzhou (bottom of this page)

A lot of people have misinterpreted this. Particularly the city gov't of zhuzhou. ZZ was great - the students there were friendlier and nicer to me than any others I'd ever taught. I made my first real Chinese friend there. The food was way better than it is here in beijing. I took pictures of the ugly stuff because it was more raw than what you see in beijing. I don't care for the style of "modern" china very much. Zhuzhou's where I first got interested in photography, because every day you would see something interesting. I would love to go back there some day.

Update aug 9 2011: I have added some more pictures I took in zz in 2004-2005, and also added some from a recent trip back. love zz!

## Behind the university, a fish pond area

{{img:55}}

Some China garbage next to the tree (brightly colored undefined plastic bits). It appears in the corners, in drifts. In winter there are lots of interesting shaped trees to go with the white skies. You can click the picture to center it in the page!

## Zhuzhou City

{{img:39}}

Near the school gate. The campus is surrounded by a broken glass-topped wall except for two gates. They like gated compounds here. You can see the typical white tile architecture. Also China style shops - open holes in the first floor of every building. It really gives streets a different feel - you can see inside all the stores and restaurants.

4 years later, it's completely changed.

{{img:27}}

On the road into the center of town. This is a bicycle rickshaw. I like his sweater. These guys ride all day yet half the time their bikes are in terrible condition - squeaking bent wheels, iron handlebars. 12 cents worth of oil or cloth would make a huge difference if you're pedaling all day. The peasant communal mindset doesn't encourage fixing things up.

{{img:28}}

Loading a truck with those huge green packages you see everywhere here.

{{img:30}}

A choke point on the way to town which attracts lots of vendors.

{{img:31}}

A vendor. He was friendly. I'm not sure about the guy in the background. In China there's no "turtleneck = snob" thing. So to me everyone looks pretentious during winter. Strangely though, "turtle" is like "ass" in english - an animal name converted into an insult. So don't call anybody "turtle-head"!

{{img:29}}

A little park near there. Wherever you go in Zhuzhou there are parents and grandparents walking around with their kids. They really bundle the kids up, too, except for a huge hole in their pants so they can pee wherever.

{{img:32}}

A road in town... That's the station up ahead. Most streets are about this hectic, although usually there isn't quite so much driving on the wrong side of the road. Some times of day this road converts to one-way, but nobody's sure when.

## The Other Side of the River

{{img:57}}

An old lady walking around a huge barren construction site, picking up certain kinds of garbage. Nice new apartments in the background.

{{img:464}}

A nice older building, with a tree growing through it. Most buildings in the city are way uglier than this. Out of the city the buildings look are older and better, and there's less garbage everywhere.

{{img:465}}

a Hunan red dirt road along the river.

{{img:42}}

This concrete pond was in the middle of a bunch of vegetable fields. In the lower left you can see it was built in december, 1981. Supposedly it's for storing fertilizer.

{{img:466}}

All along the river there are huge piles of sand, and boats dredging and sifting. I have heard it's all illegal... nobody's sure.

{{img:13}}

Chinese construction site. Awesome. Bad fog.

{{img:18}}

Near my house there is a thin dirt road running between huge fish ponds on one side and small piles of garbage/houses/fish ponds/bottle sorting plants on the other side. They recently rebuilt the canal along this path, which covered the narrow road with a foot of mud that never dried for a few months. That made it tough for all the bike/motorcycle porters who go back and forth on it.

4 years later, construction's done and it's a normal road.

{{img:2}}

Same place as the last picture, but turned 90 degrees right. For some reason in Zhuzhou all the porters, taxi drivers, and cooks wear suit jackets all the time. Fleeces are the next level up from there, and leather jackets are above that. The white rocks were used to rebuild the canal wall. They'd pick a good sized one, line it up, and push it off the side of the road to fall onto the half-completed wall.

{{img:26}}

A kid I bumped into along this path. There were lots of them playing in the huge piles of sand. Fun! No labor/workplace safety enforcement has a bright side!

{{img:467}}

This is the same road, closer to my apartment. Construction attracts a crowd. They were smashing down those trees with no regard for the power lines overhead, and of course all the smoking loungers came over to watch. I saw when they built those pink buildings - first a concrete & steel frame, then red half broken bricks piled to make walls. Then those are covered with tiles which stay clean for about a week. There is almost nothing inside the walls of buildings here... wires and pipes are added later, stuck onto walls and out windows. Also, more China garbage.

{{img:15}}

Two kids. The white piles on the other side are lime, exposed to the rain.

{{img:3}}

ok, that's it. I don't live in Hunan anymore...

## Some more pictures added 2011:

2010

{{img:49}}

2005.

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2005. after a big snowfall.

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2005. three men of zhuzhou. by the bridge near the university gate.

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2005. dumptruck almost flipping over. I think the driver was a bit surprised at how the truck started to rise into the air!

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2005. welding on the sidewalk. I love the sparks!

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2005. on the university street during break when nobody was around.

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2005. the opening of the new shopping center near zz station.

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2005. one of the areas that is much cleaner now.

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2005. two workers.

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four guys walking below smoggy skies. 2005.

a young boy walking with a plastic flower. 2005.

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a bulldozer working in smog. 2005.

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a boy and a motorcycle, one foggy night. 2005.

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some push carts. 2005

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many motorcyclists. 2005

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2005. motos from above

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2005. sorry for the bad exposure. a train full of identical cars is pretty neat looking.

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2005. a really nice family who ran the little store I always went to.

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2005. chaotic dirt construction site.

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2005. fish ponds & apartment buildings.

## 2010

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2010. girl peeking around a moto taxi driver.

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2010. really friendly people in the central square.

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2010. near the tunnel.

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2010. incredibly beautiful, green canals. this area used to be SO dirty!

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2010. zz station.

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2010. in the pedestrian underpass underneath the center of town.

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2010. red girl

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pedestrian flyover in zhuzhou, 2010.

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the fish pond is clean now! 2010.

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2010. downtown zhuzhou has public dancing every night. it's mostly older people that go, but sometimes you can see a young couple out there. I love it.

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2010. futuristic transportation in zhuzhou!

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2010. a view west across the main bridge

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2010. legs & wheels

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2010. discipline ice cream

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5.1 celebrations. 2010

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2010, a red haired girl walking next to some construction.

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2010, a view into one of the new public transportation vehicles all over the university area of zhuzhou.

I've got a flickr account with more pics of zz, and the next place I went, Beijing. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/kouchi/>

my email is ernestfrench@gmail.com

## New pics I received from my old boss:

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This used to be a huge garbage filled pit. It looks a million times better now. Wow.

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The wall, hedge, and trees are all new. Looks nice.

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(Facing the opposite direction). This used to be the mud road. Main street outside the uni is ahead, on the other side of those apartments. I think the canal's on the left from here.

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The turnabout is new.

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This used to be the hole in the wall shops.

---

### [Places to play go in Beijing](https://fuseki.net/Places-to-play-go-in-Beijing)

Tags: beijing, china, games, go, go clubs, organizations

## Beijing Go Club!

The [Beijing Go Club](http://beijinggoclub.com) meets in a hostel near Dongsi (near the middle of the city) on Tuesday nights at 1930pm. Check the website for the most recent meeting location.

## Street

Chun Xiu Lu north end, east side - there are sometimes old dudes sitting around out there playing.

## Ghetto Club

West of JinSong bridge, turn left at the first main street, "willow" something, pass the police station. Keep going til you pass a corner restaurant with glass windows and the first floor tables visible raised up from the sidewalk. Right after that there is a little alley with a bike repair station. Turn right and then look immediately to the right - there should be a gateway leading upstairs to a club which has classes for kids, and a room with a bunch of guys playing.

## Irtan Park

Some old dudes (but good sometimes) putzing around on the stone tables near the climbing wall.

## Tian Di Jian

Fancy club that costs like 20 kuai / hour, in the middle south.

---

### [Play from here for Slay the Spire](https://fuseki.net/Play-from-here-for-Slay-the-Spire)

Tags: games, ideas, missing features, slay the spire, streaming, twitch

Slaye the spire is a deterministic game with hidden information. One of the most interesting games ever.

## Use case I want:

* Be watching a streamer
* they're about to start a fight
* pause the video
* copy a code down from the screen into your own StS instance locally
* pick up their game at that very point, with the same deck, random seed, etc
* play the fight the way you would yourself
* try repeatedly
* then go back and unpause the stream and see how you did compared to a pro.

This would be epic.

## Analogies in other games?

* this sort of works for chess & go vs ai, but there are some problems
* the ai is too good
* it's a huge pain to copy the entire board state out to play through yourself. that's a blocker for 99% of casual attempts to do this.

---

### [Playing Card Power Cycling](https://fuseki.net/Playing-Card-Power-Cycling)

Tags: card games, evolution, games, ideas, playing cards, variants

When cards started out, they were ordered in strength from 1 to King. There was no "ace", it was just a "1". That's why it's symbolized by just the one suit marker.

But then for "irony" people started using the 1 as an Ace, and considering it to be even more powerful. That power switch is interesting - my kingdom for a horse. It doesn't actually make much sense that the ace would be the strongest - according to the pattern, the more pips a card has the more powerful it has, until it becomes nobility.

## It continues....

In china most games use the 2 as the highest card. It's usually a super-trump that in a single card beats anything. Using a two for this feels weirdly powerful - it's like a mega-weapon which works in a different way than a conventional Queen, King, or even Ace.

## The 3!

There are even some games in China which use a 3 as the highest card!

Obviously the progression has gotten farther.

## In the future

It will probably just keep going, and we'll keep pushing back which cards feel "stronger" until we've cycled through the entire deck.

## Opposite decks?

But I don't know of any games that reverse the order of the cards completely, and use the K as the weakest card.

## S-Level

It's sort of similar to how in Japanese class/ranking systems there is sometimes an "S" difficulty level coming after C, B, and A.

---

### [Pokerslug](https://fuseki.net/Pokerslug)

Tags: ev poker, gambling, game variants, games, poker, projects

Pokerslug (http://pokerslug.com) is a heads-up web-based play money poker site. It's organized into "matches", where each match is you vs. a certain player, with a given stack size). Each match can have multiple tables open - usually 10 or 20. Matches are not played live - when you log on, it shows you all the open hands and you play one action in each one.

If the other person is online at the same time, then by the time you get to the end, the other person will have made some moves, too, and you will just keep going. So you can play continuously. When you get into a hand you can see the full hand history so you can make your decision.

It has nice graphs & history features and stuff. I have played about 10-20k hands there in a bunch of matches.

## EV Poker

My favorite part of it is [EV Poker](EV-Poker.html) - this is an optional setting which makes it so that whenever you are all-in, the pot is split based on equity, and no actual cards are dealt. It doesn't change optimal play, and reduces variance. I have played long, fun 10bb games with this, and it is really tough. It's great, though, because there are fewer bad beats ( although they can still happen if both players are not all-in yet), and you can play "closer to the edge" of what you think is the right play.

---

### [Polyomino Field puzzle generation method](https://fuseki.net/Polyomino-Field-puzzle-generation-method)

Tags: games, math, polyominos, puzzles

A polyomino field is an arrangement of a set of polyominos such that they encircle an area.

A hard task is for a given set, find the maximal field.

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#### How to generate a problem

Generate a circle of cells. Then split it up into polyominos (not necessarily all 4 squares). Given just those pieces, it is not easy to reconstruct a field with area more than that known max (or more).

---

### [Proposal for Chinese Name Reformation](https://fuseki.net/Proposal-for-Chinese-Name-Reformation)

Tags: china, chinese, ideas, names, society

In 1898, by imperial proclamation, ordinary Japanese people first took surnames. Millions of people chose new names based on where they lived, the recommendations of priests, history, Today Japan has a rich variety of beautiful surnames.

China already has last names - but they're mostly single character, and just a few of them make up a huge chunk of the names in the population. The top 20 names make up about 85% of the population - so everywhere you go you meet people with the same name. Some towns have had complete surname depletion - the entire town has the same family name.

Meeting someone with the same family name doesn't mean anything.

So my proposal for China is:

## Every family should add one character to their family name.

Historically, there have been many two character Chinese names - a few of them even still exist.

The new character could be added before or after the existing one. After promulgation of the name law, a period of one year would be allowed to make the choice.

The decision would be up to the individual adult at the time - not based on the head of the family (although most families who still remain in contact with eachother would probably choose the same name)

Choices would be limited to the characters already accepted in surnames.

To simplify matters, on the new ID cards, the old character would be underlined (for the first 50 years) - but the new character would be official & a required, real part of the name.

## Opting Out

This would have to be handled very delicately.

## Making a statement

Some people may choose politically sensitive characters - but, it's only a character. Let them choose it.

## Celebrities, and grouping

When celebrities announced their choice, many people would probably follow them.

And, for each existing common name there'd probably be one "obvious" choice on how to extend it, which many people would choose. Nevertheless, there would still be a lot of new, interesting names.

On the other hand, there might be a register built up of people's choices - and unique families might want to choose unique names. So being the first to officially register one of the unusual names would be like staking a claim on it.

Overlapping with someone due to this random chance wouldn't actually be so random - because actually, in the past, you shared the same last name with them anyway. (unless their name was A and they chose to rename themselves AB, and yours was B and your family chose to rename to AB - but in that case, your two families are made for each other anyway)

## Problems

Along the edges of families, there might be trouble - one grandfather wants to choose one character, and all his descendants agree - but his brother wants to choose another, and his descendents agree, too. The choice might push the sides farther apart.

But the benefit of that is that it'd push the people with the same name closer together.

## A natural approach

Chinese names nowadays usually have three characters - surname, plus two parts of the first name.

If the first section of a personal name within a family became standardized, then over time the family would actually acquire what is virtually a second character to their name. If this practice became standard, then this common character way to distinguish between distinct families of the same surname.

## Obviously, this is unrealistic & will never happen. But it's interesting to think about.

---

### [Purisima Creek North Ridge Trail & down](https://fuseki.net/Purisima-Creek-North-Ridge-Trail-down)

Tags: hiking, san francisco peninsula, san mateo, trails

3.3 miles down & I turned back up just before reaching the next lower down trailhead, apparently.

```photomap
images: all
layout: storymap
```

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---

### [Questions I would ask God about the game of go](https://fuseki.net/Questions-I-would-ask-God-about-the-game-of-go)

Tags: ai, cosmology, games, go, math, questions, sf

Most of these assume perfect play everywhere. For questions about komi, B should play to maximize win margin - not to ensure a win like a monte carlo bot would. (although the winner in both cases should be the same, the maximized win margin space is a lot more interesting than the much broader space of all possible B wins). And in perfect play, you might as well win by the maximum.

A perfect game is a game in which there is never a point either side could play a different move and get a better result. Generally, game length or complexity is not included - it's only about the final differential. So there could be multiple perfect games from an initial condition.

Also, 4-4 is not considered distinct from a first move at 16-4.

### What is perfect komi?

I'd guess somewhere between 5-9 pts for 19x19. It'd also be really interesting to know it for larger board sizes.

### How many different perfect games are there?

And what would the longest / shortest one be?

Also, which perfect game has the most captured stones? That'd be one I'd like to watch.

Which one has the biggest gap in captured stone differential?

Is there another measure of complexity, too, which would have an outlier - the game with the longest ko fight, or most complex semeai?

Or, find the game with the most tenukis - probably an insanely difficult big simultaneous fight - or a really hard long endgame. How about the game with the least tenukis? What would that even be? What about the game with the most captures? If necessary for these you can expand to games which are not perfect, but are within just a few points. Within that much larger space, there are probably some games which are 99% perfect, but also have amazing, extreme characteristics.

In general, selecting among multiple perfect games would be incredibly interesting.

Another question: which instant in a game has the most perfect continuations? (divided by move number - so for example, there might be multiple first move perfect moves - but how about a perfect line which has a choice at move 10 for the next move? It'd be amazing if there were two answers there which both led to the same ideal result.) At move 200 there could be many - multiple ways to play the same endgame. But early on, these multiple points would really be something to see!

### What is the ideal ko rule?

No full board repeats, or one which allows draws? Does go really even make sense if you allow ko?

### What is the ideal handicap placement for 2 (or N) stones?

Opposite side hoshis seems pretty bad... And, how would you play larger handicaps?

The default all hoshi play is probably not right - there's a huge difference between 5 and 6 stone handicaps, for example. With free placement, anything is possible.

What is the win margin for B with various 3-stone openings - chinese, san ren sei, shimari + hoshi, shimari + extension.

### What is the most handicap stones with perfect placement, such that W can still form a living group?

Somewhere between 9 and 16, probably.

### What is the worst handicap placement?

Mostly just filling up the corners - but what about worst placement of 20 stones?

What would the patterns look like on the side? A b2-bomber in the corner? or a line with gaps? Would B ever play a dumpling? What is the worst 5 (N)-stone clump of connected stones, with at least one of them covering tengen?

### What single first move by B results in the most even game?

That is, which would be the best move in a hex-style opening - one which B would not mind playing and then switching sides 50% of the time. Which moves are right on the line between a win and a loss (without komi)?

### What is the correct komi for all games following every opening move?

What is the value of tengen for B? What about 5-4? 5-5, etc. How much worse are these moves than the best one? I'd like to see a map of B point differential, for every opening move - darker green for larger wins, red for losses. Where along the side / corner is the line where the game flips from win / loss for B? in the corner, 3-3 is still probably a win - but is 2-2 on the loss side? how about 3-2?

### What is the best opening move?

Obviously I'd like to know this, although it's included in the examples of perfect games.

### Are there variants of go which are more interesting?

i.e. other ko rules, different initial setup, board shapes / sizes etc.

### Is go played anywhere else in the universe, and was it discovered by chance there?

if it is, it will most likely have the same ko rule - but board size could easily be 21x21 (or smaller, too)

### What openings do aliens play?

And what's their play style in general?

What is the history of their go - how did the discover it? from astrology? What order did they discover openings in?

Do they ever use go to resolve political disputes?

What is the history of their Komi?

What are their timing systems like?

For that matter, how did humans discover go?

If we're asking god these questions, we might as well ask for a full history of go's development - and also, bring back famous go-related historical figures, and show them modern games and get their feelings and ideas about them!

Which two amateur games are most similar (through random chance)?

### How many stones could a perfect player (not god) give to the strongest human?

That is, when the human doesn't know who they are playing, and the perfect player can't use information about the person from outside the game. The perfect player would play to maximize win possibility (like a monte carlo bot), not like a human, maximizing win differential.

### How many stones could god give to various people?

Obviously, a lot more stones - cause god would know exactly which josekis you knew or where your misconceptions about go were and would constantly play into them.

In both previous questions, God would still be playing online with an innocuous nickname. If you need to play his human guise, there's even more he could do to you - move his hand in exactly the right way to remind you of something a terrible loss, or play at exactly the time you are thinking of the worst possible response line.

And if he is truly acting as God, an even worse version would be if he used his knowledge of your knowledge to lead you down your weakest lines, or get you to play moves you haven't used in a long time. i.e. within every pro's head there are thousands of memorized josekis & variations - God would be able to choose the least accurate ones to lead you towards.

### Which openings to humans characteristically play worse than others?

That is, some perfect games may be a lot harder for humans than others. Is there one style that we naturally are better at in a mathematical sense than another? That is, hoshi openings and 3-4 openings may be mathematically equivalent within a few points, but human's win margin vs a perfect player after using that opening may be wildly different.

Which opening to humans in general play closest to perfect?

and which one, while being a valid line, do we play terribly?

### What does really large go look like - 100x100 boards, etc?

With all that center space, there could be some tough fighting.

What is the hardest life and death problem?

### Is there a safe way to prevent Mirror Go?

A really sad result of talking to God about go would be that there is a way to just play mirror go and win. If mirror go doesn't actually work, how does God defeat it? Does just excluding mirroring (at any stage) fix the issue?

---

### [Rates of Change](https://fuseki.net/Rates-of-Change)

Tags: biology, control, cults, evolution, mind, politics, scale, society

The relationship between the hardwired aspects of the human mind and our culture & institutions have not always been constant. In slow time, technology would make a tiny advance every thousand years, and people had time to adjust.

But recently, the mental "technology" of influence & control of people's minds, and of organizations has improved greatly - we now have cults, psychology, and more benignly, people have properly studied the mind at various stages of life.

And to go along with this stronger environment, people have been trying to come up with ways to live well, and resist things they don't want or need.

But, there is no expectation that these two processes will proceed at the same rate! One could get way ahead of the other. People's native assumption that there will be a balance often makes them unwilling to accept the fact that at a point in time there can be massive imbalances. Evolution is happening all around us, and there are lifestyles, elements of culture, and physical objects in the environment which aren't adaptive and are under strong selection or adaptation right now.

---

### [Real Effects of Astrology](https://fuseki.net/Real-Effects-of-Astrology)

Tags: astrology, evolution, ideas, science

Astrology is obviously BS - but being born in summer or winter must make a difference for kids! It's the difference between spending important periods of your life totally bundled up, or running around freely.

There are definitely stages in human development which happen at predictable times - 1 year for first steps, etc, and the variation in the schedule is usually less than a few months - small enough that birth season could matter. So winter babies go through stages together as a group at different times of year from summer babies.

## On other Planets?

If we lived on a planet which had longer years, this would be much more pronounced. If a year were 4 Earth years long, a season would last a year. The season you were born in would make a huge difference to you. You'd have more in common with co-seasonals - people 4 years younger or older than you - than with people just the same "age".

You might see winter for the first time at age 2, or age 4! On planets with even longer years, you might spend the first 10 years of your life bundled up, then the next 10 sweating. Those cycles could have reprecussions on the culture as a whole. 80s nights would be categorically different than 70s nights, due to differeing weather in that decade.

## Southern Hemisphere

It seems like there should be a way to pretty easily prove or disprove the simple version of astrology: for whatever characteristic that someone claims is related to astrology, look at the data for people in Australia, and see whether the data matches up better as is, or shifted 6 months off.

## A Question

* What is the real birth month distribution of various groups of people?
* Why isn't this data easier to find? Some months must be much more popular than others.
* In general does it matter? - If it matters for one group, can you compare another group with a different distribution and make any predictions?
* For example, two countries with the same population, the same climate, but different holidays may have different birth types. You could use these countries to try to figure out how weather during development makes a difference
* Are there genes which are optimized for certain types of weather during childhood?

---

### [Reamde by Neal Stephenson](https://fuseki.net/Reamde-by-Neal-Stephenson)

Tags: 2011 books, book reviews, neal stephenson, reamde, sf

## Loved it

Overall, I loved it. The first night I stayed up til 5 am reading, got about 400 pages in. It has a lot of cool ideas, and cool stuff, and when you find out that they're not just going to disappear, but will be expanded on, it's just really great.

The very very start is a little dry, a little melodramatic. You're just waiting to find out more about the dark side of our hero.

The start has lots of interesting ideas about artificial worlds. Once the action starts, it's great.

It has great stuff about guns, mafia, ideas.

## China

Once they go to china I was even more excited. It was a really good portrayal - the author has obviously been there. The description of how stuff is there was exactly right. The character of the Chinese girl in the story was realistic, too.

## The Rest

The end of it is a really long running battle - it was good and all but it was really just a lot of action.

---

### [Refinement and China](https://fuseki.net/Refinement-and-China)

Tags: china, complaining, design, politics, society

One of the most interesting things to do is to learn a lot of details about a specific field - after this, things which were boring become interesting.

Learning about local plants converts a blob of green into hundreds of interesting, distinct plants.

Learning about architecture reveals the history of an area - you see shapes and things you never realized before, how new materials changed the way things were built over time. What we see today is the product of hundreds of years of law, choices, wars, and innovation.

## Chinese Buildings

But in China, this doesn't work. You can't learn about the history of architecture visible in daily life, because there is very little history. It was all mostly produced by guys who didn't care at all how it looked or felt - it was just housing. It was all done in a standardized format, ignoring most factors (appearance, the surroundings, appropriateness of colors). It also mostly ignores technical innovation, or workforce abilities, or local historical design. It's all concrete, made in a really crappy, shoddy, craftless way, by migrants who will not live there and have no reason to care.

That's architecture, but the same thing applies to a lot of other aspects of life in China. Everything's done by the book, from far away, and designed to serve very few goals - cheapness or social goals seem to be the main thing.

So there is very little refinement to do. Diversity is controlled at the source - the first instinct for a designer is to look at the handbook for how things are done, and do that.

## Most variation in things you see out comes from carelessness, corruption, or incompetence

Rather than as a response to the environment, or as a choice of how to balance cost and function / time to complete, or as a response to local history, or as a response to local conditions / families who would live there. There are *so* many things that bad Chinese construction ignores.

## Park Design

There seems to be a CCP handbook on how to design parks in China.

* No open spaces,
* No big groups of benches,
* No benches where two people who didn't know each other would face eachother
* No places where a speaker could address a crowd.
* No open green fields
* No public basketball courts,
* Lots of identical, boring plants, in dead rows.
* Lots of concrete.
* Lots of water features.
* Lots of fountains.
* Lots of plants spelling out messages.
* Lots of soulless public art.
* Lots of obviously cast concrete bridges, in faux old style.
* Lots of vendors, and paid activities.
* Every water feature must have horribly maintained, cheaply made, tackily decorated paddle boats.

There are a few nice parks in Beijing, though. The park around the Temple of Heaven is really nicely done, and more like a european park with real beauty and thought put into it. And outside the east gate of the temple of heaven there's a big open field with some trees on it, without any of the evil china-park-stuff in it.

## Road Design

This one is not as universal as the similarity of parks - outside of big cities you can get real, random little roads that haven't been modernized yet. This one is also not as bad - the upside for standardizing roads is saved lives, and greater efficiency.

* The same sidewalk design everywhere.
* The same yellow tiles.
* The same signs, road lines (or lack of them).
* The exact same design of an overpass.
* The exact same embankment.
* The exact same everything.

## Cheap Apartment Buildings

There is some variation but it's all functional.

* A concrete shell - windows of obvious or disguised cheapness.
* Huge amounts of wires and AC tubes on the outside.
* Badly placed elevators.
* Vertically laid white tiles.
* Grungy walls.
* Balconies / stairwells full of junk

There is some history to it - older ones do look different. And this is also somewhat functional. Providing better homes for people is a worthy goal.

---

### [Regulating Worse Versions](https://fuseki.net/Regulating-Worse-Versions)

Tags: beijing, china, law, society, traffic

## Beer in Japan

In Japan there are high beer taxes - so the average can costs 3$ US. Someone realized that because of the way the tax laws are written, it's possible to create a drink which sort of tastes like beer, but which doesn't technically qualify to be taxed that way. They called it "Happo-shu", and it costs about 1$ a can. It doesn't taste very good, but it's really popular.

The actual cost of a can of beer is probably 25 cents in terms of resources (natural & human), and happoshu is probably about the same, or more (because nobody made it naturally, and because the production process has to avoid the natural ways to make a drink like that, which produced beer). That price represents how much resources and expertise it takes to produce. Both drinks take about the same resources to produce - but one is better than the other. But the law has resulted in all those resources being put into making the worse product.

Say someone starts out one day and decides they are going to take raw materials, hire smart people, and produce something valuable, and sell it. It's really perverse that the law now would give them incentives to produce the worse product.

## Bikes in Beijing

At some point Beijing decided that they didn't want to be a motorcycle city, they wanted to be classy and have lots of cars. So they stopped issuing motorcycle license plates. Old motorcycles are still allowed to drive around, and you are allowed to sell your license plate, so the prices for those just went up and up. Bicycles are still ok - although a lot more annoying to ride since cars are allowed to park everywhere in the city, and bike lanes are the perfect parking spot.

## One Bright Day

Someone stuck an electric motor on the side of a bicycle, which let it go about 20 mph. These got better and better, and now everyone rides them. They're kind of inconvenient, cause you have to carry the battery inside every day to charge it, and people always try to steal the battery, and they don't go that fast, and they're kind of bulky... But now most people who would have ridden a motorcycle before now ride one of these. Carrying 40 pounds of battery around all the time instead of a gallon of gas (6 lbs) is kind of inefficient, too. And you can't recharge on the go, or leave the city - and occasionally you run out of power and there's no way but to slowly pedal it home (or be stuck out).

There's also the question of the efficiency of getting the electricity into the battery - electricity isn't free, and it doesn't come out of the ground pure. Powering the electric grid causes pollution and uses resources, too - it's not a simple contrast between dirty gas and clean battery power. And millions of cars are allowed to idle in huge traffic jams throughout the city every day, too.

## Traffic

The plan to get lots of cars in Beijing has succeeded - now the ring roads are utterly packed every morning and evening. Taxis have stopped working during some hours cause they can't make any money always being stuck in traffic. And ebikes are again the fastest way to get around.

But basically a whole class of transportation is now slower and worse because of a law. Other cities in China still allow motorbikes, and people drive them everywhere there still, just as they have before.

## How to avoid this

The stupid particularities of the law, which taxes good-tasting things at a higher rate than bad ones, are what makes this happen. The same thing would happen if you taxed comfortable chairs really highly, and uncomfortable chairs not at all - pretty soon everyone would sit all day in uncomfortable chairs!

So one avenue would be to say that each class (and class must be defined really generally) of thing can't be taxed at different rates - because if you try to tax one "natural" class of object at a high rate, people will try to make "unnatural" versions of it to escape the tax. (By unnatural I mean, wouldn't exist in a world without taxes - horrible tasting fake beer, or ebikes)

But I think it'd be quite hard to keep legal discipline so that this type of thing didn't happen. And the above situation is probably happening everywhere - people going through huge contortions and wasting their capacity and resources to change the way they appear under the law, rather than using that same thought to do something actually good.

---

### [Required consistent average age](https://fuseki.net/Required-consistent-average-age)

Tags: commerce, people, standardization

The leadership of organizations typically gets older and older, and they don't bring on enough young people to keep it down.

Their claim to be maintaining a continuous attitude towards the world not believable when they can't even maintain anything like a consistent age profile.

What about having organizations which have some kind of rule to this effect? It would be a white-line, explicit way to remind them to stay young. It would definitely increase the variance in performance of organizations... and could be cheated around, I suppose. But it'd also remove a lot of fossils. Kind of like how property tax forces land to constantly turn over and be re-used.

## Family

How old is your immediate family? It rises slowly, and then suddenly drops on every death or birth.

---

### [Review of The Vaporization Enthalpy of a Peculiar Pakistani Family by Usman T. Malik](https://fuseki.net/Review-of-The-Vaporization-Enthalpy-of-a-Peculiar-Pakistani-Family-by-Usman-T-Malik)

Tags: 2015 stories, book reviews, sf

This is a short story of about 6000 words which was nominated for the 2015 nebula awards in the short story category.

On the surface it's a story of a family torn apart by suicide bombers and natural disasters in Pakistan. But there are subtle references to physical abnormality in the main character's family - their blood is extremely hot, enough to boil snow or cook food. The main female character, Tara, eventually decides to take action against her brother, who may be intentionally using his internal heat to further the disastrous state of the country.

The interpretation of this is unclear. Considering the story was published as science fiction, there is a temptation to take it literally - but the story makes no effort to explain how this would work biologically, or explore any of the consequences of a family like this on the world -

* What would happen if a doctor took their temperature, or did a physical examination?
* Where does the energy come from? Do they require more food energy to maintain this temperature?
* Are they more resistant to cold, or do they have a harder time in cold environments?
* How does their body function biologically at a much higher temperature without destroying their enzymes?
* How is the trait perpetuated genetically - do people with this trait pass it on to their descendants?
* What is the evolutionary value of this change? Human body temperature is highly regulated.
* How has this unique population survived? Typically, extreme variations like this are pressured out of existence sociologically unless they convey a large advantage - and if they do, they spread until everyone has them.
* How do they maintain their secrecy with their neighbors? Or does their entire town have this trait?
* If discovered, is there persecution of them as witches?
* Is there some social safety net, which would prevent a poor person with this trait from exposing it to the world to prevent their own starvation? You'd think with a large enough population having a secret, unusual ability, there would eventually be someone motivated to spread knowledge of it.

An easier explanation of the hot blood is as a symbol of some kind of emotional state of anger or passion inside them; Tara uses her passion to handle her trials well, going into education and trying to help people; her brother fails to control his anger and abandons society to the hills. In the end Tara is forced to destroy him, and sees that while he's been alone for four years he has been converted into an emotional monster, not even human anymore, living in a cave. The problem with the symbolic explanation is that it makes their unusual trait into nothing more than a symbol, and makes the story not science fiction at all.

Another interpretation would be that of magical realism, a genre where extra-normal things happen frequently, and they are "real" in the world of the story, but characters never wonder about what they mean for the cosmology of the universe, nor use them to advance their own interests, or explore their limitations. They're like dream interludes in real life - something to be ignored and forgotten, even though there are real-world consequences. But that genre is pretty much the opposite of science fiction.

---

### [Review of the Hanvon N510 ebook reader (2009)](https://fuseki.net/Review-of-the-Hanvon-N510-ebook-reader-2009)

Tags: books, ebook readers, ebooks, electronics, hanvon

## Update: I installed OpenInkPot on this thing!

I installed openinkpot on my hanvon N510 and it is awesome! pages turn about 2x as fast, a bunch of small errors are fixed, there is way better support & browsing. The file listing page looks a lot better. It is awesome! Oh yeah, and they disabled auto-shutdown (something I always thought was strange, since ebooks theoretically don't need to ever shut down). So the thing stays on forever. It also has a clock & calendar which is sort of useful. I love openinkpot! Installation was easy - basically I just had to put a file onto the card and then boot, and it overwrote some of the stuff inside the device. TOTALLY worth it.

In other news, prices of ebooks are way down, since the kindle price was lowered! I have heard Chinese ebooks are lowering their prices, too.

## Update 2:

This review is getting kind of old, I broke this thing, and I have got a kindle 3 now which I suppose is a better device.

## Review of the Hanvon N510 ebook reader

I bought the Hanvon N510 ebook in zhongguancun, a big electronics market in Beijing, about a month ago, in July 2009. It cost RMB 1650, about US 240 at the time. I had read about the kindle, and this seemed similar, but smaller. The Kindles I've seen are huge - at least the DX is. This one is smaller, about as big as a day planner.

The average book here costs about 20 rmb - so it's about 100x the cost of a paperback book. Since then I have read two and a half books on it - Excession by Iain M. banks, Glasshouse by Charles Stross, and am now reading The Golden Age by John C. Wright. Overall, I love it and the books it's let me read - living in China it's hard to get current books in physical format, so I ended up not reading. I'm also looking forward to using it on vacation, where I think it'll be brilliant.

## Included in the package:

```
The device

2 GB SD card

a really extensive library of chinese books on it, that I haven't read.

about 30 western classics - war & peace, etc.

USB charger

leathery case with magnetic snaps - this is pretty good, snaps closed nicely and protects the screen. No logos on it at all, either, which is good. Probably reduces theft.
```

## The Device

It's very light - much lighter than a book. It's pretty comfortable to hold. Pleasantly thin.

The surface is black, bumpy but smooth plastic. It's good.

To the left side of the screen there are 10 buttons, each labeled in white with a number. I found these to be distractingly high contrast, and blacked them out with a marker.

Above the screen is a golden company logo. This is also high contrast and annoying and received a similar treatment. In the lower left corner there's another greenish logo. Why do companies put these logos everywhere? We already bought the device. In China this thing is really expensive - people spending the equivalent of 1.5 months waiter's salary for an ebook shouldn't need to be flashing logos. But this is China and showing off is still done at all income levels.

Overall the default appearance is a bit too busy, but it looks better now.
The Screen

This part is very important! It's really, really white. In good light (daytime, interior or better) it's wonderful to read off of. Letters are black and the background is white. In bad light (night, interior, next to a 50 watt bulb) I still read off it all the time. It's not quite as clear, but still good. At night I often read in bed while next to a 40-watt bulb. In that case, if it's directly in the light it's perfectly fine to read - if it's not in the direct light, but only in the reflected light, it's starting to get annoying.

I have never tried to read by moonlight - but starlight is too dark.

## Glare

Glare can happen if you hold it at some angles in bright sunlight, but it's not usually a problem.

## Smudges

Haven't gotten any smudges on the screen yet. The seam collects dust, but so far I've just brushed it away with no problem.

## Page Flipping

This is important! - when you flip a page, it takes time to redraw. The screen temporarily goes black, and flashes, then the new page is there. I'd estimate it takes about 0.8 seconds. It's not instant by any means, but also not too long. I found that after a while I just zoned out to it - when I'd get near the bottom of a page, about two lines before the bottom, I'll push the button, then glance over the words. While it's flipping I'll think about them, and then continue reading.

It's somewhat annoying that it takes this long to flip pages; and it puts some load onto your brain. But it's not very much.

It turns out that this amount of time is always necessary to change anything on the screen - so most of the interface has been designed to let you jump directly to where you want to go - instead of moving around with arrow keys, you just push the left side button next to where you want to go.

## Fonts

The English font looks fine for text format. The first two books I read were in txt format. The one I'm reading now is in pdf, and one page has a huge amount of text - probably 3-4 physical book pages. The most zoomed out level is to show one pdf page - and this results in super tiny text. Luckily the medium zoom level is perfect. The font on this pdf doc looks really good, too - even better than the txt format books I read. Other pdfs I have tried a bit have looked fine at least at some zoom level. The problem with pdfs is that there is sub-page paging. In the pdf I'm reading now, one pdf page is split across six pages. When you reach the end of a pdf page, it jaggedly is cut off and if you push down again, you are at the top of the next pdf page.

## Control button

This is a round piece of plastic curving fairly deeply into a pit in the middle. It is placed in the lower right corner of the device. It's like a seesaw switch with 4 ways it can go - not my favorite type of button. Outside this circle, there's a metal ring, sticking above somewhat, which has the same function. When you put your finger in the depression, you can rock to one side and push down, but you can't direct the force to the edge - then you'll end up hitting the outer ring. So you have to sort of aim for it, rather than just pressing until it moves. I prefer to push inside the circle, because the outer ring is thinner and harder to press, and has an (even) firmer resistance.

This button is used to move up and down pages and for a lot of navigation. I think it would be a lot easier if it were like a normal button - you push down on an edge, and it moves until your finger hits the back surface the button is embedded in, so you know you have pushed it. This button is not bad, but it could be better. Perhaps the high resistance is a reaction to reports that the kindle's resistance was too low. I almost never accidentally flip a page.

Placement-wise, in portrait mode it's convenient for my right hand, but not the left. The reverse applies for landscape mode.

## Zoom button

Below the screen there is a zoom button. There are three levels of zoom. For txt files, these are "small", "medium", "large". Depending on lighting and how I feel, I usually read in small or medium for text. For pdf, in some cases the smallest zoom is really small, but medium is fine.

## Alignment button

Next to the zoom button there's a button that flips the text from portrait to landscape. The first book I read landscape, the second portrait. They both have their benefits. I have heard, line length matters a lot for fast reading. At medium format, portrait style, you can read almost an entire line at a time. I need to practice my speed-reading more to find out which one is better.

## Left side up/down button

There is also an up/down button on the left side about 2/3 up the way of the device, but I don't use it. I think it flips pages back and forth.

## Buttons next to the screen.

On the left side of the screen, quite close, are ten buttons labelled with a number, and a corresponding triplet of letter ("ABC") under them. It's too close to the screen, and white on black just emphasizes the non-perfect blackness of the screen. Once blacked out with a marker, they're not a problem. These ten buttons are used for navigating the set-size menus - the book list built into the device has ten rows - to choose a book, you just push the button next to that row. It's convenient, much better than navigating up and down and then pressing "enter" as you would on a PC. This method is used throughout the interface. And this is another proof that the labelling wasn't needed - the buttons are already laid out in physical proximity to the screen option they choose - no need to go through an extra layer of indirection to interpret their meaning.

## Charging

The device ran out of power 2/3 of the way into my first book - which is weird cause it's rated for 8000 pages per charge. Once I charged it, though, it has made it through a couple thousand more pages, and the batter meter is only 1 unit down, out of about 5.

It charges through a usb connection to a computer.

## Speaker/mic/headphones?

Never used them.

## Data

The SD card is loaded as a mass storage device - If you create folders there in Windows, they will show up inside the device bookshelf with the same name. So you can just move books around freely. You can have folders within folders, too. When browsing your bookshelves from within the device, files in formats it doesn't support don't show up. I think even folders which don't have any supported files won't be shown either.

## Supported Formats

It can display txt, htxt (the included files were in this, but I don't know what it is; it may just be compressed txt), pdf, and html. I haven't tested any others. It doesn't read lit files. I haven't been concerned with it so far - since I have access to the files, if I ever need to read anything, I can just rip the text on my computer and put it in a readable format.

## Software

## Bookmarking (original meaning!)

The last 9 files you've read are kept in 'recent reading', in order of last access time. And it also remembers what page you were on. This is great. I still find that after I put it down, I have a number in my mind - and I think, wait, what is 243? Why am I remembering this? Oh yeah, it's the page I was on. And I can let myself forget it. The years long habit of remembering where I was isn't necessary. For docs which are paged internally, though, it only remembers the pdf page. So in the pdf I'm reading now, I may be on page 100, 4th sub-page down. When I resume, I'll be at the top of 100. This is annoying, but not that much of a pain.

9 books is fine - the top one is always the one you're reading now, and the others are just sitting there, waiting to be picked up again.

## Autoturnoff

As I understand it, the device takes no power at all to sustain a page - it's actually physically changed to the new configuration and could stay that way forever. Nevertheless, after an hour, it turns off automatically.

## Problems

The device is not without problems:

## Longline Shortline

Some books can have longline-shortline. Excession had this. But if you switched to landscape mode, it was fixed. If that hadn't worked, I could have fixed the file - or gotten another one. So I don't think this is serious.

## Turnon Time

It takes about 15 seconds to turn on completely, then another two button presses to get to your last book. This is somewhat annoying for elevator reading. But once you realize it, it's easier to turn it on as you're walking down the hall and it'll be ready to go. Since it costs nothing to keep the screen on, and battery power is almost unlimited anyway, this is mostly not an issue.

## Word Merging

This is the one serious problem. I'm not sure if the pdf I'm reading now is messed up, or if it's a display problem, but on every page the space between two words will be removed. It really slows down your reading speed. There's about 2 or 3 of these per page, now. I am hoping it's just an OCR error in the original scan of the book.

## Summary

The device is pleasing, and pretty useful. For my situation in China, unable to get physical books without a huge delay, it's awesome.

## Future Plans

I would like to get a foldable solar panel array that could be used to charge this and a 16GB SD card. That would be able to hold enough books to last a lifetime. It'd be the perfect thing to bring to a deserted island. If your spaceship crashed on a deserted, but survivable planet, just one of these could contain enough information to sustain a reasonable civilization.

## Getting Books

Various internet sites have freely downloadable books, such as library.nu. However, that can't be legal. Another place that has a lot of books is the channel #bookz on IRC. If you haven't used IRC before that can be weird, though - sort of like visiting an alternate steampunk version of the internet. Like a platypus.

---

### [Ridiculous Goals](https://fuseki.net/Ridiculous-Goals)

Tags: goals, ideas

* Get wings
* Be crowned
* Go to space
* Clone Myself
* Learn to fly
* Create an AI
* Find treasure
* Save the world
* Start an empire
* Be reincarnated
* Found a religion
* Gain immortality
* Be found innocent
* Become telepathic
* Save the universe
* Get perfect pitch
* Have only one name
* Learn to play piano
* Travel through time
* Discredit a religion
* Have gills implanted
* Make a billion dollars
* Become a Pro go player
* Swing from rope to rope
* Travel faster than light
* Represent myself in court
* Have a radio show on WFMU
* Create an intelligent race
* Invent a musical instrument
* Have more than 100 children
* Have an eponymous university
* Have sex with my female clone
* Be the first man on another planet
* Make first contact with alien life
* Find an ancient religious artifact
* Invent a bacteria which destroys eyesores
* Go into cold sleep for longer than 100 years
* Have my brain transplanted into some sort of machine/animal hybrid
* Learn Russian, Chinese, French, German, Hopi, Korean, Urdu, Arabic, and Swahili
* Get the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer prize, and New Yorker praise for the same work
* Get modified to live in an inhospitable environment (vacuum, interior of jupiter, lava)
* Create a simearth which is indistinguishable from reality, make myself forget my past and be born into every sort of life there, waking up and remembering who I really am after each "death"

---

### [Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux](https://fuseki.net/Riding-the-Iron-Rooster-by-Paul-Theroux)

Tags: 1988 books, authors, book reviews, books, china, cultural evolution, nonfiction, paul theroux, people

It's really good! Although it's nearly 25 years old, China hasn't changed that much. People at that time also seem quite a bit more open than people today. The current youth generation doesn't know much about the Cultural Revolution, and are a lot more likely to use the "Mao was 70% right, and 30% wrong" quote.

There are some nice quotes, good writing, and descriptions.

The author gets flack for being a jerk, but that's the way he writes & keeps it interesting.

---

### [Saturn's Children by Charles Stross](https://fuseki.net/Saturns-Children-by-Charles-Stross)

Tags: 2008 books, authors, book reviews, books, charles stross, fiction, ideas, people, robots, sex, sf

This is an earlier Stross novel. The setting is incredible - humanity creates lots of robot (sex/manufacturing/utility) slaves, and eventually they become such good replacements of humans that nobody has kids anymore. Then (almost by accident) humanity dies, and the sentient robots are left alive.

It has some incredibly great scenes, ideas, and characters. A whole society of robots build for various functions, all restrained by their in-built rules, but trying to bend them to survive. I totally loved it. I just love anything Charles Stross writes. It's so interesting, really great understanding and depth of thought and consequences. Once the plot starts rolling in this one it is incredibly exciting - a perfect setting, and an epic idea within it.

---

### [Schild's Ladder, by Greg Egan](https://fuseki.net/Schilds-Ladder-by-Greg-Egan)

Tags: 2002 books, authors, book reviews, books, greg egan, people, schild's ladder, sf

I thought this was pretty interesting, but I don't really have the quantum physics background to get it. I really do like greg egan quite a bit, though.

---

### [Science Fiction Book Reviews](https://fuseki.net/Science-Fiction-Book-Reviews)

Tags: book reviews, sf, stories

I like hard SF and no longer mind fantasy / soft SF that much.

"\*" means I will read anything they ever publish
"X" means deceased

## Peter Watts \*

He has a really distinctive style, and you have to work pretty hard to figure out what's going on. Similar to Gibson. I first read *Blindsight* and was impressed. Then *Echopraxia* and was like, whoah this guy really has it together. He must read the same blogs as me. Went back and read *Rifters* and thought it was pretty great too. But wow, this guy has a dark view of the human condition. He needs more Darwinian Happiness... I've been told the rest of the Rifters books aren't as good, but will try them anyway. He also has a bunch of short stories up on his site which I read, and there were some standouts. His later work (after 2010) is also really great about the nature of consciousness and intelligence.

## Iain M Banks \* X

Great. *The Player of Games* is a good intro to the culture series. *Consider Plebas* is also good. The later ones are really fun, the earlier ones are a bit more science fictional, but they're all great. Huge loss when he died. *The Quarry* was a good, non-sf novel he wrote as he was dying. *The Business* was okay, a novel with semi-SF trappings. *Against a Dark Background* was interesting, very dense and hard to read at the time. *The Algebraist* is super fun, non-culture SF. What you realize later, though, is that he's not really into evolution; the actual way the Culture works is pretty hand-wavey. How exactly do they avoid conflicts? They clearly allow low-level disagreements. What prevents them from growing into internal wars? Similarly, why is there no human evolution after such a long time? Clearly there's massive selection going on; 2 children per person is presented as the norm but there are also people who only have one, and one who has many.

## Rudy Rucker \*

*Spaceland* was really good. *Frek and the Elixir* was really good. He's a prolific, creative psychedelic surfer physicist. What a guy! *software*, *hardware* etc. are really creative, wild, fun. Better written (slightly) than fanfiction but still really intelligent fan service. I read a bit more about his personal life and it seems he's had some hard times. Read a lot of his short stories, some of which are okay but a lot are basically physics pot-boilers. One thing I love about his writing is that he has many non-likeable characters, who he isn't even trying to get you to like. Their selfishness and drug addiction continues until you realize, hey I don't have to hope he gets out of this; he kind of deserves what he gets! This means he has freedom to sometimes not follow the conventional moral path of a novel.

## Stephen Baxter \*

Sort of like Greg Egan - really hard SF from a physicist. They are readable, but he is not quite as trippy as Egan. Still, pretty good. (Later) I have gone back and read a bunch of his short stories and can't help but be impressed. He has a long term future of humanity built out, which is pretty different than what anybody else has done, and is consistent, too. A lot of the stories were pretty touching... it's the story of human individuals being transformed into a greater, cultural organism trying to take over the universe. But each "cell" still has its own independence and consciousness... so it offers millions of stories from the various times & jobs existing there. Some unforgettable images of humans being just molecules in a gigantic swath of humanity gradually taking over the universe. He touches on cultural evolution occasionally, and how this environment could change us beyond recognition - but I'd have liked to see more of that. He has another separate strand of physics-based life explorations that can be really silly and fun. Compared to Egan's physics-based explorations, they're way more interesting. He also isn't very concerned with inserting politically correct identity politics into every story.

## Bruce Sterling \*

One of my favorite authors. Hard near-future SF. More of an all-around futurist than a scientist. He's really into global warming and design, also. He writes the Viridian newsletter which has (commented) articles about climate change, and his awesome speeches at various tech/design/sf conferences. *Distraction*, *Heavy Weather*, A Good Old-Fashioned Future (short stories) were all great. They're set in the near future (less than 30 years probably) and focus on how media, tech gadgets, climate change, networking etc will change us. In one shocking moment the main character is walking through a European city and stops by the central river, and drinks from it. We can make the natural world clean again, even in cities! *Schismatrix*, *Crystal Express* - cyberpunk, awesome, 80s.
*The Difference Engine* - written with William Gibson. Alternate history where Babbage's experiments with mechanical computers in the 1880s really take off. Steam-punk. It was pretty good.

* Later\* - he basically stopped producing scifi after the 2010s. Big disappointment after a streak of extremely fun, winning novels.

## Vernor Vinge \*

If you ever want to enjoy "normal" SF again, don't read Vinge. I compare all the SF I read to him now, and almost nothing stands up. It's thoughtful, exciting galaxy spanning human-alien interaction/deserted island/introducing-modern-tech-to-ancient-cultures stuff. *Deepness in the Sky* is probably my favorite SF novel, I read that and *Fire upon the Deep* twice they were so good. I'm getting ready to read deepness again. I haven't reread things like this since I was a kid. I've been waiting for the next one to come out for a couple years now, but no luck. Vinge also thought of the idea of the technological singularity, a massive compounding increase in machine intelligence beyond which prediction is impossible. Once we make AIs, we teach them to make themselves smarter, and they will rapidly become godlike. I'm reading his earlier stuff now. *The Peace War was* interesting but not major. Some good ideas but the technology he introduced was really amazing. I can't imagine how you would live in a world with bobbling technology, even once people got their freedom. Still, it's a good post apocalyptic rebuilding society book. *The Witling* was pretty interesting. Very physicsy, but definitely Vinge. Really short, lots of action. Like a good pulp. Annoyingly complex character names, though.

## Dan Simmons

Famous for the *Hyperion* series, which is great. The first two are awesome, the 2nd two good. *Carrion Comfort* is also great horror. If the horror genre, which I've read nothing of, has more authors as good as this then I've got a lot of reading to do. The one about Hemingway in Cuba in the 50s *The Crook Factory* was good and held together all the way to the end.. The "Case" series reads like a screenplay, super violent and ugly. Is he trying to become Michael Crighton? I'll read Illyrium when it comes out in paperback. *Children of the Night* was pretty good. This guy knows how to end a book, which is nice. The first couple stories of *Lovedeath* were pretty good.

## John Barnes

A modern-day Heinlein. *Orbital Resonance* is a good start. It's a somewhat conventional YA novel, but with lots of little bits & changes in society that show how smart he is. You can always rely on Barnes to put an edge on things. He pays attention to economic & political issues too. And like Heinlein, he can go way over the top sometimes... The one problem is that he's pretty obsessed with the darker side of human existence. *Mother of Storms* gets pretty graphic, but is fun mega-storm book that turns to his real interest in human transcendence. *Candle* is another good first book of his to read. The concept of "One True" and meme wars is just great. Gives a "V for Vendetta" feeling. I also read *Kaleidiscope Wars*. *A Million Open Doors* was fun too.

*Directive 51* doesn't get very dark; his editor must have cut out all the rape & murder scenes.

*Patton's spaceship* is fun Barnes-style nazi killing alternate universe time travel book. Yep, that's what it's about.

*Duke of Uranium* is the closest to a Heinlein juvenile.

Later thoughts on barnes - he can get pretty sleazy, also similar to Heinlein. Able to write powerful, darkly attractive things, but a lot of it appeals to authoritarianism.

## James Tiptree, Jr

*Brightness falls from the Air* was sooooo good. *Houston, Houston do you Read?* was also great. Incredibly good writing about sex, psychedelia, and addiction. I still have to find her other books. I think there are some short story collections I don't have. So, so wonderful. If I had Brightness with me I'd read it again right now. The author's name was famously revealed to be a pen name for a woman, after having already been successful.

## William Gibson

*Neuromancer*, *Mona Lisa Overdrive*, *Count Zero* are all famous and good cyberpunk. It's interesting that this vision of the future is basically wrong. Things are still holding together. We've got some years yet. He's at least half a crime/detective/noir author whose books happen to take place in a bad future. The later books are also good, *Virtual Light*, *Pattern Recognition* etc. and get better over time.

## Neal Stephenson

*Snow Crash* is great, if incredibly unrealistic. *The Diamond Age* was good. I can't imagine we'll get that far in nanotech without first totally changing ourselves genetically, or at least reaching a singularity, though. *Cryptonomicon* was really good. All the cool stuff about WW2 - secret codes, secret missions, special forces, etc. He also throws in Tempest and EM bombs. I mean to read his later huge books like *Quicksilver*, etc. Also he's got one about the surveillance society that recommends putting total surveillance in the hands of the public as our best option. *Anathem* was 950 great pages long, I have read it twice. Totally loved it. *Reamde* was a great read, handled China wonderfully, just a super fun adventure story written by a smart & knowledgeable guy. *Seveneves* was great fun, thrilling, a bit long winded here and there, but I could have easily dealt with it being 3x as long. After reading it I went online & searched for fan fiction... I want more stories about the future world... survival stories set in the different cultures... It'd be a great setting for an RPG... the exploration of future earth, pretty sharply defined cultural & racial groups, technology & style differences, ancient mysteries hidden everywhere.

## Cory Doctorow

Publishes boingboing, is also a good writer. Kind of like Bruce Sterling, lots of thoughts on how technology will change society. Has a few short novels available online. *Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom* is great. The idea of "whuffie", a social currency that would replace money, is brilliant and is the first revolutionary political/evolutionary idea I've read since the communist manifesto. Basically it's just about extending and automating the ratings systems ("was this review helpful to you?" from amazon) to everything in life. So every time you think something good about someone, they get points. And you can spend points to get people to do stuff for you. It automatically rewards people who create good public art. It's awesome. The novella also introduces extreme human-computer interfaces, brain backups, immortality. Still, it feels human. (Later: rereading this, it's still good, but he really goes quite far into Disneyland fanboyism. Cool ideas in there, still though.)

## Octavia Butler

I read *Dawn* for a SF class. I thought it was really interesting, definitely had some good ideas. Aliens find the remains of post-nuclear war humans and try to reconstruct us, but they want to make modifications. Similar to Greg Bear's *Anvil of Stars* in having a bunch of humans with no culture being raised by aliens who don't understand them. And in some ways it's similarly annoying - there's this major thing where the aliens refuse to give the woman paper and pencil, because they've just assumed she has eiditic memory. Takes a while and a lot of annoyance to clear that up. Of course Dawn is still way better than Anvil of Stars though. I should read her other stuff.

(later) *Mind of my Mind* and *Clay's Ark* are gripping thrillers with honest, good SF inside. She's an incredible writer. I really want to read the rest of hers. And I've still never gotten around to *Kindred*, her most famous book.

* Parable of the sower is also quite good. She just has a great way of writing characters full of hope and despair.

## Greg Egan

*Permutation City* was really good, if heavy. *Schild's Ladder* was good. *Distress* was really great, too. His short story collections are EPIC, some of the most awesome SF ever.

## John Varley

Meta-engineering and gratuitous sex, like Niven. The most memorable part of *Titan* was two girls' months long climb up a tree-covered 50 mile tall ventilation shaft inside a huge living moon. Not really hard SF. Kind of 70s. I should give him another try really.

(later) I went back and found that I love a bunch of his stories. *Equinoctal* and *Phantom of Kansas* are both unforgettable. I read the *Barbie Murders* collection and there weren't any other big standouts, though. I should reread his *Titan* series and other novels, too. *Persistence of Vision* is a classic.

## Isaac Asimov

Ugh. Some of them are ok but generally, they're really dated. His later work absolutely sucks. Don't waste your time. I'd recommend reading just the first three *Foundation* books and a few of the robot stories to get the idea. That is enough. Definitely don't waste time reading the extended Foundation series, or the *Robot City* books, and definitely do NOT read *Azazel*.

## Robert Heinlein

*Starship Troopers* is awesome. I go back to it every few years and come out a republican for a few days. Some of the juveniles are great, especially *Have Spacesuit, Will Travel* and *Farmer of Ganymede*. *The Puppet Masters* and *By his Bootstraps were good*, total classics & inventing new genres Very memorable, and I have read 'bootstraps multiple times. *Stranger in a Strange Land* - eh. *Sixth Column* I remember as being nicely anti-christian. The others mostly sucked. *Farnham's Freehold* was really anti-asian. Read most of them as a teenager... but my lasting impression is of a libertarian asshole. *Starship Troopers* is awesome though. Must Read.

## Arthur C. Clarke

Rendezvous with Rama was really good. The 3 sequels were absolute garbage. 2001 and 2010 were ok, 2061 was bad, 3010 was absolutely awful. After a few pages I realized it, and started a list "things Clarke hates about the 1980s." Typically for SF authors, the early stuff is good, later stuff sucks. Childhood's End was good.

## Maureen McHugh

Her books are about sex and gender and living in foreign countries, especially China. It is what SF should be - it's mainly about non-tech things, but it lets it influence how basic human things are considered.
*China Mountain Zhang* - I really liked this one. It has a gay american chinese construction worker who dreams of getting his visa to go back to China. It has hang glider racers. It has living in an isolated arctic research station.
*Mission Child* - I liked this one too. An isolated planet is recolonized by more modern humans. The part about the tribesperson refugee becoming a druggie in the city is memorable. So damn good.

## Douglass Adams

So funny. Brilliant.

## Alfred Bester

*The Stars My Destination* - I read this a couple times as a teenager and loved it. The idea is that someone discovers a way to mentally instantaneously transport yourself to anyplace you've memorized the location of. In that future a fugitive is searching for a man he witnessed commit an atrocity. The prison scenes are really memorable. It's hard SF in spite of the semi-magical premise, because it does a good job of imagining how transportation changes society. I recently reread this and it was quite different. It's really fast and light, still good though. A fast 60s SF novel. I've got his others and am waiting to read them. ...I started *Golem Hundred* but quit after 100 pages or so. It was a failed return to SF apparently. Awful. The *Demolished Man* has amazing praise from asimov etc... it was ok. But not as good as Stars...

## Walter John Williams

I read *City on Fire*, it was all right. I don't see what's the big deal though. A little too magical for my taste. Probably better classified as fantasy. I read *The Praxis*, wanting to give him another chance. But it was just utter crap. Not awful and the first page or two is good, but just not SF, not deep or thoughtful. Apparently you can have galaxy spanning empires without changing human nature at all. The aliens who conveniently forbid all post 1990s technology helps too. Soap operas in space. Post Vinge this doesn't cut it anymore.

## Larry Niven

Prolific. Early stuff good, some hack work later. Likes meta-engineering projects.
*Ringworld* was good, the sequels were ok. The most interesting idea is the "droud", a mechanical device that stimulates parts of the brain for a herion like-effect. The main character becomes an addict after being zapped by one randomly on the street. Also, the super-cautious puppeteers are interesting.
*The Integral Trees* was a great idea, a gas ring around a sun with huge trees growing in it and the descendants of stranded human colonists. Life directly in a zero-0 ring of air with floating blobs of water. I don't remember the plot at all though.
I read a bunch of the *Man Kzin Wars* series but I can't imagine they'd be any good now.

## C.J. Cheryyh

Really prolific, I've only read *Cyteen*. I read the first of the three books and thought it was amazingly great. But nothing happened in the next two books and I was a bit disappointed. It takes place in a scientific authoritarian society where citizens run genetic labs that breed, clone and raise people who are in effect slaves. However, they have a good understanding of psychology so they treat them really well, and sometimes allow them to become citizens. The description of the upbringing of two kids destined to be bodyguards is awesome. From age 3 they are trained, subjected to hypnosis and all kinds of mental analysis. Not in a brutish way at all though - it's more like japan-style conditioning, which takes into account human needs and desires. The book is about people trying to control the nurture aspect of upbringing, not just nature.

There is also a secret project to clone a genius and replicate her entire upbringing (i.e. giving her the same type of mother, the same type of friends etc). *Foreigner* - um, this book was awful. Page 50 to page 250 could and should have been condensed to 5 pages. Unbelievably annoying dialog style. Way too much of the whiney narrator's thoughts. I read *Downbelow Station*, her other Hugo award winner. Um. She is shit. I'm sick of it. There were a few good ideas in there but they were overwhelmed by 200 pages of moaning. Why do I keep reading her? I'm done now. Done. Enough. All her male characters are indecisive. And all haunted by some kind of sexual abuse that they always refuse to talk about or deal with. They just beat themselves up mentally all the time and you have to read ALL of it. Cheryyh's got like 30 books... I'll look at her timeline and see if i can locate the good period... After reading *Cyteen* I realized that I have actually read another of hers, but I was too young for it. *40,000 in Gehenna* was mentioned at the end of Cyteen. Two competing spacefaring civs have a disputed zone. One sneaks 40,000 lab-raised clones onto a planet in the zone, mindwipes them, and lets them start a society secretly. Later when the other side figures out the space has been 'mined 'they're pissed. I was too young when I read this, it sounds interesting when I think back on it. But now that I know Cherryh's annoying, pretentious style, every time she does it (about 5 times a page) it breaks me out of the book.

## Kim Stanley Robinson

*The Years of Rice and Salt* is great, great stuff - not really SF at all, though. Fascinating alternate religious history of asia. The one about futuristic musicians, *A Sense of Whiteness* was good & enjoyable. The one of his I read first, *Red Mars* was pretty good. I don't know what to think about it really. It got incredible amounts of praise from the new york times etc. It was good all right... The characters feel way more real than something in say Vinge. There was an awful lot of mars geography in there though. I didn't really bother to figure it all out. I liked it enough to plan to read the next two. Robinson knows something about arabic culture evidently. *Green Mars* was pretty good. Yet more tons of martian geography. I wish I'd gone to nasa's mars site before I read all these. I guess I'll read the next one, if only because 2 ends right in the middle of something important. *Aurora* was quite bad - he's some kind of anti-natalist now? The beginning was interesting, but it's definitely a fresh take against the hopefulness of science. Again with a future society completely missing the importance of maintaining health and intelligence in their children. After a few hundred years, the citizens of the generation ship's main problem was just a lack of straight up plain old IQ, so they decide to turn around and undo the work they've done, flying all the way back to Earth.

## Ian McDonald

*Terminal Cafe* started off annoying wanna-be gibson, all in love with death etc. It got much better once it switched to the other characters. It's good SF, but the plot lacks something. It was all familiar to me, yet I'd never read it before. Turned out it was a prequel to *The Days of Solomon Gursky*, a novella which I'd read somewhere and loved. It's a posthumanist immortality romp. So great.

## Lois McMaster Bujold

S/he's won a million Nebulas, so I got one of the Miles Muscovian series. I wasn't impressed, stopped halfway through. Seemed like simplistic moralistic tales set in a future where nobody knows what to do with their technology. It's pitiful when you read a book set in the future yet today we can do more advanced things with tech. Not SF.

## Joe Haldeman

*The Forever War* was good. We get involved in a war with some aliens and there's lots of relativistic travel changing sexual morals hijinx. Turns out the whole thing was dumb, just like vietnam. *The Forever Peace* was ok.

## David Brin

I read a bunch of it when I was a teenager. Seemed all right. One interesting bit was the idea that man evolved to chase down antelope on the plains. They can sprint way faster than us but over a few days of running we can wear them out. I don't know how true that is, but it'd be cool. His main theme is "uplift" which is interesting but has lots of pretty icky implications - i.e. what's the moral standing of orangutangs when they're only partially uplifted? What if they refuse to receive any more changes after that?

## Orson Scott Card

I read the first one, *Ender's Game*. it was pretty good. People rave about the others, should read them sometime I guess. I read one of the later YA books about magic, etc. and it was pretty good. Well-written, at least. I also tried to read one that was apparently modelled after the "true tales of the early days of mormon history" and it was kind of pointless if you didn't understand the symbolism of all the voyaging around. But, it did have an awesome "static" world where an AI monitored people's thoughts for 40 some million years and prevented them from making any technical breakthroughs... but it's breaking down, and some kids figure out what is going on and begin to think previously forbidden thoughts - but they do it for the forces of good! to restore the old, controlled world. That wasn't enough to make me keep reading, though. The premise of this one is good but the author inserts lots of strange, pointless scenes, apparently because he's also trying to retell a section of the book of mormon.

## Frederik Pohl

*Gold at the Starbow's End* was really interesting, even if totally wrongheaded. Send out 7 super smart but varied people on a mission to a star many years away. Give them math problems to work on to pass the time. In actuality, there is no destination - they're being sent to their deaths, on the hope that in the isolation they will discover amazing things. It turns out to work and they become godlike before they get to their nonexistent destination. After reading Guns, Germs, and Steel this idea seems absurd - whole countries of millions of people (China) foundered and didn't advance because they were too controlled and didn't have outside perturbing influences - Europe did so well because it was hard to control all of it, so there were always competing countries and evolution of political and military systems continued. Japan had better guns than Europe in the 17th century but since they had no competing countries, they eventually abandoned them and went back to swords (until the west came in again). So the idea that 7 people on a spaceship would be able to remain innovative and not settle down into some stable pattern seems doubtful.

## Philip K. Dick

Speed addict and crazy, but wrote some good stories. *A Scanner Darkly* is great. Some of his short stories are good. Not hard SF. I haven't read *Ubik* or or his other later speed head books. The short story *Second Variety* was memorable.

## Philip Jose Farmer

Famous for *Riverworld*, which I haven't read yet. A bit of a hack from what I can tell - I've read his one about an attempt to create a modern tarzan, and the one that's to Frankenstein as back to the future 3 is to back to the future 1. Both were amusing. Basically a huge, bad hack, though.

## Roger Zelazny

I've read the first 7 or 8 of the *Amber* series. They're pretty good, not SF though. There are some promising SF ideas in the first one but they never reappear. The main character has the ability to move between an infinite number of worlds, all more or less similar to the true center of the universe, a sort of medieval city called Amber. Earth is just one of the fairly distant alternative worlds. The main character never thinks of doing what I would do if I had the power to easily switch like that - go find some really great music, food, girls, books. And find some really really great go players. Everyone is just obsessed with controlling the city of amber. The second 5 bring in straight up magic; I lost interest.

## Michael Swanwick

*Bones of the Earth* was pretty good. Deterministic time travel and dinosaurs and a really crazy end, plus anti-fundamentalist Christian stuff. *Jack Faust* was... um... I'm glad I read it, and it was really fast, didn't drag. Swanwick is pretty good, but I don't know... maybe he's secretly a fantasy author or something.

## Frank Herbert

*Dune* is great. I've read the next 3, *Dune Messiah*, *Children of Dune*, and *God Emperor of Dune*. They were all right. I kind of liked God Emperor though. It'd be interesting to reread these in light of *The Blank Slate* - Herbert's definitely got genetics playing an important role, but in God Emperor the emperor tries to change society by destroy all history books and making an invincible woman army.

## Walter M. Miller, Jr.

*A Canticle For Leibowitz* - The first two parts are really good, the third is ok. Postapocalyptic, religious.

## Robert Silverberg

Prolific. Probably his short stories are better than his books. I read one of the Valentine books, didn't get into it. Too much juggling, and really predictable. *Tom O'Bedlam* was better, but still predictable. Better than Philip Jose Farmer but similarly seems to be lacking something to really grab me. I have read the one where there is this gigantic wall and a society at the base that keeps sending people up to climb it - not that impressed. He also has a short story about psychological simulation of historical characters that is pretty cool.

## Carl Sagan

*Contact* was good. The movie sucked, though.

## Gene Wolfe

(10 years later) I read the first 3 of "Book of the New Sun". If you want to have a feeling of complexity, and numinosity, for many, many hours, and try to figure out the meaning of every single symbolic object that appears, but never actually figure it out, go for it. That feeling can be interesting, and there really are some very nice scenes and characters. But so far I don't believe that it actually means much, or that even the author really knows what it means.

Some of his short stories are very cool and mysterious, and have multiple, contradictory interpretations. Quite good for scifi reading groups.

## Aldous Huxley

*Brave New World* is pretty good. God, where are the modern versions of this guy? All destroyed by drugs, probably.

## Stanislaw Lem

Polish "I'm not SF dammit!" SF author. Novels mostly revolve around describing some weird but inert/alive alien environment. His short stories are great and funny. Also has some incredible mathematical poetry which translates well from Polish.

## Kurt Vonnegut

Depressed good "I'm not SF dammit" author. Super depressing, but great books.

## Neil Gaiman

A really good writer, but basically fantasy. *American Gods* was really well written. But it was still just a bunch of myths, it's all outdated and unreal. I'm just not interested. The one set in underground London was cool, but not really SF either.

## Samuel R. Delany

*Tales Of Neveryon* kind of PoMo Le Guin style. Some was ok.
*The Fall of the Towers* was awful.

## Clifford D. Simak

## John C Wright

*Guest Law* is a great intro short story to his hard, very formal world. *The Golden Age* is completely amazing and wonderfully creative. The rest of the series is good but I may not have fully gotten it. I read one of his allegedly YA novels and was turned off. He also runs a very Rush-Limbaugh-style blog which just seems a foolish way to interact with the world. But seriously, *The Golden Age* makes it all worthwhile. I think of it often.

## Greg Bear

His books have gotten better and better. At first he wrote hard space SF, lately he's written bioscience thrillers. *Eon* was absolutely awful. *The Forge of God* was all right, but the sequel *Anvil of Stars* was awful. *Darwin's Radio* and *Vitals* were both really enjoyable. I plan to read all of his new work, and the sequel to *Darwin's Radio*. *Dead Lines* was a horror crossover. It was just ok. Compared to Dan Simmons' horror it was a letdown.

## Piers Anthony

Arrogant hack. The *Xanth* books are ok for 12 year olds. *Bio of a Space Tyrant* is a fucked up thing for a kid to read. However, he did write one extremely memorable short story collection, *Anthonology*. I'll never forget the torture story in that one, and a few other stories are just brutal. His introduction starts out "I submitted a story in college, and when the professor read it, he just laughed and said, 'oh, you have an amazing talent, congrats you're a writer'. And that's when I knew I was a real, true writer."

## Robert Charles Wilson

*Darwinia* was pretty good. But I later read *Blind Lake* and thought it was pretty terrible. Super slow, completely ignored the interesting economic side of the situation, and had a pretty bad ending. Also, predictable.

## Robert A. Metzger

*Picoverse* was pretty good. It's one of those books that despite having lots of hard physics, includes the magical idea that physics knows something about the human body. The human body is not well-defined, so there can't be machines that operate on the human body as a unit. "A is touching B" for physical objects is not well-defined. I was also surprised at how despite messing with incredibly powerful physics and jumping through wormholes, the physical environment remains conducive for human life. I'd think that having half your body exist in one universe and half in another would really really mess you up, even for the half a second that it takes you to jump through a portal.

## Terry Pratchett

He has about 20 *Discworld* books. I've read the first one and it was pretty good. It's fantasy. I'll probably eventually read a few more of them.

## Dean Koontz

*Cold Fire* was just surprisingly good. Mostly horror, I suppose. Light, fast, he's a better writer than 90% of SF authors.

## Robert Sheckley

*Mind Swap* was fun and I want to read more of this era SF - smart, but not locked into genre. And funny. Apparently he is pretty well-respected, but forgotten today.

(later): I read a bunch more of his novels & stories and they're all okay - a bit smart-alecky, sarcastic, but also reasonably fun and easy to get through.

## R.A. Lafferty

Wrote hundreds of stories in the 40s-70s, super creative mixtures of SF and fantasy. I've read a bunch & find them really fun time capsules from the past. Hard to find a single story which is really great, but after reading a few you do get the feeling that he's an interesting guy and it's time well spent.

---

### [Selection for Liking Cloning](https://fuseki.net/Selection-for-Liking-Cloning)

Tags: biology, evolution, future, genetics, ideas, sf, transhumanism

People don't like cloning very much. But that won't last long. It'll just take a few massive secret cloning programs to spread the genes of people who don't mind it that much.

### Teleportation Squeamishness

Say we invent a way to teleport full information about someone's entire physical structure, and reproduce it in a box thousands of miles away. We could teleport people this way.

### What do we do with the original?

#### Squish Them

If the original is still hanging around, we might just squish it. People would mind, but as long as we don't show it to them, they'll eventually forget about it. As long as the process is secure, it is not disadvantageous to keep getting copied & then squished. Our revulsion at the idea is perfectly understandable as a reasonable product of a world where copying wasn't possible - but as it becomes possible, there will be massive selection pressure for not minding it that much.

And we can be way more productive since transportation would be a lot better, now.

#### What does Star Trek Do?

it's kind of unclear. They break the person down to their full information, then reconstruct it somehow. But it's unclear whether they actually use the same molecules. But if it is down to that level, what would really be the harm in switching out a couple carbon molecules with other ones?

#### Just Leave the Copy and there will be two

Or, we could just leave the original & let it run around. It might cause some legal issues, but it's not much worse than twins. One of them would need to be designated the primary clone, a la John C Wright's world.

#### Forced Destruction

Or, the original might be destroyed in the process of getting the info, but any number of copies can be made. This would make the process more acceptable, I guess.

But in any case, once there is a machine that just makes copies of people, a greater proportion of genes will have come from the machine over time. So even if 99% of people are unwilling to use it, the 1% leftover will massively out-reproduce them & will eventually become dominant.

#### Preserving body integrity

In the past, our genes made it easy for us - they made people want to preserve their body, and have sex. But in the new world, preserving the body doesn't matter that much, and selection will move on to other ways. Most future people will be descended from people with weird genes & ideas, which made them do crazy stuff like find a way to have a million kids, or to spread their genes through unusual methods.

In the same way that for thousands of years, mass and weight were about the same thing for us. But when people went to space, the bond between them was broken, and it's obvious that our genes are obsolete. In the same way, the old vital goal of just preserving your body & following your heart will be replaced by much more effective mass reproduction / rational / culturally enforced reproduction. It isn't really a change - it's the same basic principle - there are more things which last longer or reproduce than things that disappear. And it's not a change for genes either - their continued existence within human society has always been dependent on their ability to make the body spread them.

---

### [Semiosis by Sue Burke](https://fuseki.net/Semiosis-by-Sue-Burke)

Tags: 2018 books, book reviews, sf, sue burke

Pretty nice exploration of plants and evolution. It suffers from some typical novel problems - characters don't really talk to each other or explain things. It also portrays humanity as being willing to live together with huge, lethal, bug creatures and get along with them fine, which seems unreasonable.

Also, using scents for battle tactics seems like a problem for the alien species - compared to light/sound, its transmission is much less reliable - wind, lingering scents etc are all problems which don't happen for light/sound.

---

### [Shenzhen vs Hong Kong Subway](https://fuseki.net/Shenzhen-vs-Hong-Kong-Subway)

Tags: china, complaining, culture, design, hong kong, markets, shenzhen, society, subway, systems

In Hong Kong, you can get on the subway, pay a few HKD for a ticket from an efficient machine, or buy/recharge a card quickly.

Cross the border and welcome to Shenzhen subway: upon entering the station you see six ticket vending machines. Three are out of service - the other 3 are active, but have approximately 150 people in 3 lines. The active machines only accept crisp 5 kuai bills - not the much more common 10 kuai bill or the common 1 kuai note. There are no windows to get tokens.

There is a subway worker selling subway cards, minimum buy 100 kuai, but there's not much point in that if you don't live in Shenzhen.

The subway worker can give 5 kuai notes for change, sometimes. There's no automatic change machine.

## A Partial but Failed Solution

Luckily, someone's noticed this situation - an older woman wearing an apron is helping people at the front of the line. Unfortunately, she has no change - all she can do is talk and push the buttons for them.

## What should happen

The old woman should simply buy a bunch of tokens of different values and keep them in bags around her waist. She should also have a bunch of change, and just sell cards/tokens to people directly. If they would just issue cards in denominations of 20 kuai, many people who go to shenzhen infrequently would still buy them - and buying a card for 20 kuai takes about 2 seconds.

The woman also can't make change for you. (Another instance of the eternal mystery of China: why do people who should be able to make change so often not have enough?) There should just be a big map listing all the stations and the price to get to them. This single woman making 10k USD / year could replace all 6 machines, which are always broken, need refilling with change, and probably cost 50k USD each.

## A Market Solution

Would just be to allow resellers to buy a bunch of tokens and set up little stalls selling them for slightly more than the official price. This is what they do with phone cards - the 20 kuai phone cards cost 22, to motivate sellers to carry them - and you can get them everywhere! The sellers would make money, and would allow people who were willing to pay for it to save time. I'd rather do that than wait in a pickpockety line.

## A Community Solution

People do try to make deals with the guy buying tickets, but it doesn't really work because every token costs a different amount. It's hard to buy for someone and improve the efficiency of the machines. i.e. even if I have exact change, and someone in front of me types in their cost & number of tickets, there's no way for me to get them to ask for one more ticket and just give them the money. This is unlike Beijing, where despite the fact that all tokens cost the same there, nobody ever does deals - there's just a line of people who are forced to find a crisp 5/10 kuai note, even though every single one has 2kuai exact change in their pocket, all buying exactly one ticket, and the tickets all cost the same amount, and not doing deals with eachother. It's absolutely insane - everyone has exact change, but they all have to use another denomination to buy it, and nobody realizes this and cooperates.

## Why it doesn't happen

First of all because China doesn't approve of markets, second because they want everyone to get cards so they can analyze traffic flows on the subway. But not just traffic flows - since tokens already give them info on which stop someone enters/exits the subway station - what they actually want is to be able to profile individual travel patterns. So because of their spying/demographics goals, there is a constant mass of stupidly suffering humanity, 7 days a week, at every single one of the hundreds of Shenzhen subway stops.

Thirdly, tokens don't diplay their monetary value, and are only valid for a day. This makes it so that secondary, more efficient markets can't develop. If they displayed value and were valid for a week, the drink sellers outside the station would simply buy some at the beginning of the week and sell them (with no markup, just for the occasional extra drink they'd sell). This would cost the seller nothing and would massively increase the speed people could get into the station, and would cost the subway nothing either.

## An Idea?

What about just buying a bunch of extra minimum cost tokens and then getting on the subway, and then getting off wherever you're going - you could then go through the much shorter, human staffed "fare adjustment" line.

---

### [Simultaneous Go](https://fuseki.net/simultaneous-go)

Tags: game variants, games, go, go variants, ideas, simultaneous go, variants

Setup is the same as normal - two players. To start, both players decide where they want to play. When they have decided,
they place their stone on the table (but not on the board). When both are ready, they say "go" and put the stone on the board.

If they collide, they both take the stone back and that place is now "forbidden" until another area has been played in.

If there is no collision, then life/ death is evaluated. black / white stones can die simultaneously.

The game works pretty well, except sometimes there are big clusters of forbidden areas. I'm not sure if the endgame would be as fun as the normal game.

5-in-a-row also works this way, and works somewhat better. There's some fun guessing & interesting strategic thought.

---

### [Sirens in Beijing](https://fuseki.net/Sirens-in-Beijing)

Tags: beijing, china, complaining, police, sirens

One nice thing about Beijing compared to the states is that you rarely hear sirens. In the states (at least, in New Jersey) you constantly hear sirens racing by - at least once per day.

In China you almost never hear it.

Is it just local police departments in the states trying to justify their budgets? Or just showing off, or finding an excuse to drive through a red light?

It always seemed like if we were going to give police the right to break the law, we should at least require them to report the times they did it.

---

### [Slay the spire 2 mod: zoom out deck and map](https://fuseki.net/Slay-the-spire-2-mod-zoom-out-deck-and-map)

Tags: ai projects, complaining, game variants, modding, my preferences, slay the spire 2, ui, vibecoding, video games

{{github:sts2-deckview}}

### What does it do:

1. zooms out the view of your cards so you can see all (well, lots) of them at once.
2. flips the map so it's left to right and so that you can see the whole thing at once! It's wonderful.

Further features which are optional:
* visually compress the map while trying to retain the same mental map as before; it's just canonicalized
* I also want to further improve the layout of the deck view. When a general looks at the solders in a division he does NOT see a huge zoomed in photo of every soldier's record; he sees summaries, divisions, etc. I'm thinking at least to have the top section dedicated to just showing your total remaining starter cards. then below showing total curses, then the 3 types of cards. etc.
* basic stats like "deck size in cards", "deck size in turns to see every card (with some meaning assigned to cards which draw more, plus relics)", "total damage per deck", etc. as well as ratios like "visible energy sources vs total energy cost of deck"
* these might map to things like "effective stack size" in poker, or the cost to play 9 hands in one orbit, given your cost in HP or in blinds & antes per cycle. 
* these verge on nearing violations of fairness rules so they'd be very clearly marked as such
* the main function of this, to zoom out on the deck & map, don't seem to be cheats at all; no gameplay changes result and the information is not new; it's just laid out so it'll all be visible at once rather than you having to scroll through to see it.

---

### [Social Prediction](https://fuseki.net/Social-Prediction)

Tags: activities, fun, futurism, ideas, math, predictions, social

Get together with your friends and predict the future.

### Fun activity

* Create a shared spreadsheet
* Enter predictions like those below
* Quantify predictions by type
* Share link with friends
* Privately make estimates for the likelihood of each statement in 1,5,10 years
* Copy predictions into shared sheet
* Discuss (this is fun)
* For particularly divergent predictions, people have already given their odds so it's easy to generate a bet from it
* In a year, get together and discuss the results
* Scoring: There are various ways of scoring. No clear winner

### Prediction types

* "End of year" - the state on jan 1 of the judgement year
* cumulative - has the event/state ever happened

### Observations

* People involved in personal projects (improve body fat percentage, learn a skill, get a new job etc) typically overestimate their probabilities
* People love to discuss global events
* It's actually somewhat hard to not enter provably wrong estimates (because of interaction between predictions)
* People have a hard time with cumulative predictions - if the prediction is "I will have gone to russia" over 1,5,10 years, cumulative, people sometimes enter like 1,4,3 which is impossible. Even 1,4,4 implies that there's zero percent change they'll do it from year 5 to 10, given that they haven't done it by year 5.

### Benefits

* Find out your biases / lack of knowledge
* Shared ceremony with friends

### Sample Global Predictions

* Alien life will be discovered
* X person will win the presidency
* 10% of cars on the road will be moving without a human driver
* US Life expectancy at 20 will be above X
* US obesity rate will be <30% (~39% at time of writing)

### Sample personal predictions

* I will continue working at X company
* I will still live in this state
* I will have kids, be married, etc.
* I will be convicted of a crime
* I will complete project X (book, story, website, academic paper)
* We will get together in a year to discuss this
* I will be happy, given that I change jobs

---

### [Something Missing from Chinese - Spaces Between Words!](https://fuseki.net/Something-Missing-from-Chinese--Spaces-Between-Words)

Tags: china, chinese, complaining, font, language, tewari, writing

The Chinese language needs to have spaces. It would make learning & reading faster, at very little cost.

They would not have to be large spaces - just a tiny space, 1/4 as wide as a character.

In ancient, grid prints, this would not work - but today, most text doesn't line up anyway, so adding spaces wouldn't make it look any worse.

It would be easy to put spaces as you were writing - most input methods can already detect words (since there is so much help going on during writing, anyway), Plus, the person writing the sentence always knows where words end and begin.

## Benefits

Autotranslation would be a lot easier.

Reading would be easier for people whose chinese isn't perfect. This would be good for foreigners, and also good for native speakers whose reading level isn't very high. Helping people like that is a supposed goal of the chinese government.

Most controversially, I think that reading would be faster for everyone, at every reading level. This is because even fluent readers are now doing work that spaces would eliminate. Having to identify word boundaries is actual work - it takes CPU time to do on a computer. Your brain doesn't just do things "for free" - although it does have specialized hardware, running it still takes energy.

## Barriers to Adoption

The biggest one is defensiveness - people who can read Chinese have put so much effort into it that they don't want to make it any easier for an outsider.

People also are in denial that it would matter. But, people are always in denial about how changing things could ever improve them. This paper: http://research.chtsai.org/dissertation/ suggests that most ambiguities can be resolved pretty easily - but I don't think that's sufficient to say spaces don't matter, because adding spaces would solve all of them, not just most. He mentions a figure of 93% of ambiguities being trivial to resolve - which seems like a lot, but considering thousands of words per hour read, and the increased cost of the failure case, it could be a significant cost.

In chapter 4 of the previous dissertation there is mention of research favoring both sides, but without details about how it was conducted, the claim that spaces would not improve reading speed has not been resolved.

## Historical Analogues

Many languages were originally written without vowels at all. Ideographic language such as Japanese, Egyptian, and Mayan also originally had no pronunciation help - but over time these were added. Languages added dots and lines above consonants to show vowels, and eventually added vowels as actual letters. Japanese added furigana (phonetic help characters) that can be used when necessary to show pronunciation, and as a phonetic alphabet. Other ideographic languages added phonetic shorthands, too.

In all of those cases, imagine what it would have been like to try to argue before the change, compared with after. Before the change, Hebrew scribes probably venerated the ability to read text quickly, without vowels or any help. Learning that skill was considered to be a valuable spiritual process, to contain inherent value and give mystical power and wisdom. And they probably resisted the change. But now that the change has been made, nobody wants to go back.

These same people don't advocate making the language even harder, removing or conflating certain letters, or adding even more special cases that need to be memorized. If having hard languages is good, we should make them even harder! There would be plenty of ways to do it. Making the claim that we are already at the ideal level of difficulty is unreasonable, since if you look at the actual reasons languages changed, you will not find much freedom of choice.

Where we are today in language evolution is due to the history of colonization, physical division of cultures, and communication frequency between cultures - not due to rational choices about language complexity and simplification.

---

### [Spaceland by Rudy Rucker](https://fuseki.net/Spaceland-by-Rudy-Rucker)

Tags: 2002 books, authors, book reviews, books, dimensions, fiction, ideas, people, physics, quantum physics, rudy rucker, sf

This is pretty great. A 4th dimensional trouble maker screws around with a simple, selfish 3d man, making him addicting to a 4d drug for his own purposes. Classic, rollicking, fun. This one made me realize I have been missing out on a good, active author in Rudy Rucker.

---

### [Split the world game](https://fuseki.net/Split-the-world-game)

Tags: competition, games, ideas, personality

For any group of people, someone makes a statement and everyone indicates whether it applies to them. The goal is to find a statement that splits the group exactly in half (+-1 for odd groups).

## Examples

* Who has seen Forrest Gump?
* Who likes X food

It's a pretty fun way to get to know multiple people, and give everyone a chance to contribute.

It's a superset of "never have I ever" with a more interesting

### The mechanic

Targeting a non-extreme endpoint (the middle, not either end) requires a lot more sophistication than going for the most common/rare thing.

---

### [Sports Variants](https://fuseki.net/Sports-Variants)

Tags: cooperation, game variants, games, ideas, sports

Changing the rules of traditional games:

### Height Limit Basketball / Weigh Limit American Football.

* Teams have a set total height / weight maximum, and can't have more than that on the floor at any time.
* variants include with / without limits on number of players on the field at any one time.

### Continuous Time Basketball / NFL

* The clock never stops (except for delay of game) - make it like soccer.
* 20 min/quarter
* This would basically be the same game, but the end would be a lot smoother

### Volleyball with no player limit

* You could have so many players that the ball wouldn't be able to hit the ground
* But they'd get in each other's way quite a bit.
* What is the optimal number of players?

### Additive win differential

* no time limit; game is over when one side is winning by N points
* or, you win when you have at least 20 points and are winning by N

---

### [Standard model height](https://fuseki.net/Standard-model-height)

Tags: commerce, people, standardization

## There should be standard-sized people to pose next to products on Amazon

They should be 6 feet tall for men, 5' 6" for women. They should have standard size hands.

That way these product photos wouldn't just be inert objects floating on a grey background - everyone would remember how large they were compared to the "standard" model, and avoid being tricked by lack of comparable scale.

---

### [Stoplight Theory](https://fuseki.net/Stoplight-Theory)

Tags: driving, ideas, math, stoplight, theory, traffic

Say you are going to travel a route with some stoplights. If you don't know the stoplight schedule, then no matter what time you leave, the average length of your trip won't change. This seems obvious but it means that during preparations, you will get to the destination exactly as much earlier as you leave. This is assuming that traffic is random, and doesn't consider acceleration.

## Leaving 1 second later will on average get you there a second later.

This only works if you don't know the schedule of the traffic lights.

Another related theory is that even with traffic, leaving later can never make you arrive earlier - at best, it can get you there at the same time.

## Acceleration effects

Without acceleration effects (cars at all times move at 0 or max speed), even with known traffic light schedules, leaving later can never get you there earlier. However, with acceleration, leaving later can help you (say on trip A, you come to a complete stop at a light and then go to the destination, but in trip B you leave 1 second later and don't stop at all at the light (say you have a very fast brake and a slow accelerator), - depending on the speed of your accelerator, avoiding that stop could save you more than an entire second).

---

### [Story Idea - Sequential Cloning](https://fuseki.net/Story-Idea--Sequential-Cloning)

Tags: cloning, genetics, ideas, reproduction, sf, story ideas

### A story about emotions under cloning

* A father dies saving his son
* Son grows up and turns out to be infertile (because of the thing that almost killed him)
* So he clones and raises his father, father.v2, as his son
* The father.v2 finds out and thinks back on the love he felt, and the deep understanding for his nature that was apparent in how he was treated while growing up.
* father.v2 re-clones his son, son.v2, along with his natural children, and the cycle continues; this time he doesn't die and is around to see his son grow up.
* the generations communicate with a parallel set of diaries
* their personalities are relatively different, and they have to adjust or tamp down some traits at certain periods of life. But every decision is informed by the infinite future and past of their relationship.
* later, a son meets his father's father (his own clone) and even that guy's dad (his dad's earlier clone) - and it's amazing for them to exchange stories
* through social changes the relationship adapts, and there's so much stored history and commitment that they can adapt

---

### [Strategic Amazon voting](https://fuseki.net/Strategic-Amazon-voting)

Tags: math, rating systems, strategy, systems, voting

(also goodreads, etc.)

I want to have a strict voting scale, where most books get 3 out of 5 maximum stars. The problem is that most sites naively average all votes, and that if abook averages 4.2 or 4.3, people say it's "good".

The effect of me trying to keep a reasonable average rating is that my votes lower the score of the whole field of books I am interested in. This is not good.

## Targeted voting

Say an item's rating is now 4.5, and I think it should be 4. I could vote 4, but at this rate we'd never get there. If there are enough ratings on it already, I should just vote 1 to lower the rating & maximize my power.

So, this type of rating system rewards people who try to maximize their power, and punishes people who are straightforward & vote what they believe.

## Other rating systems

First, they should at least weigh the scores per-user. So that getting a 4 from someone who averages 3 would be better than getting a 4 from someone who averages 4.999. This is exploitable, so cap it.

etc.

---

### [Strong Commitments](https://fuseki.net/Strong-Commitments)

Tags: bargaining, contracts, credibility, ideas, institutions, law, society

The threats everyone made against SOPA, or against Godaddy's support of it would have been even more effective if there had been a way to give them more credibility. Lots of people actually switched providers, but many more just said they would if it passed - and Godaddy probably just ignored a lot of them.

What about something like a reverse Kicksterter, a way for people to legally bind themselves to follow through?

## Information

I have heard about the phone application which identifies products sold by supporters of SOPA, and lets you know so you can avoid buying them - but what about if your credit card did this? When you went to charge something, before you did, it had the option to warn you if any of the products are sold by companies you disagreed with?

Now, imagine a Kickstarter-like version of this - you could pledge (in a legally binding manner) to your credit card company that it would not let you buy any products from supporters of something you didn't like (given some conditions). And this real legal pledge would be delivered to the companies.

Imagine in the case of cable companies - being able to make backed up threats to cancel your cable (or pledges to buy more products) contingent on certain actions taking place. Or imagine being able to send legal proof that you have instructed your credit card to irrevocably prevent you from ever buying a product from a certain company. Think how scared that company would be!

## Super-petition

Imagine a petition - but where you have the option to give it real economic force. Say the petition is that a certain cable company formally renounce support for a law currently being debated. If you signed it, there'd be an option to legally promise to cancel your cable subscription unless the company did what you wanted. And it would only take effect if at least 10,000 people signed the petition, so you could sign it freely without worrying about being the only one to boycott.

So you could deliver a letter to the company, not with just threats, but with real guaranteed action - action already in line to take place unless they reverse course.

---

### [Survival Game I'd like to see](https://fuseki.net/Survival-Game-Id-like-to-see)

Tags: design, game, humanity

In life, (and in a game) there are ~100 "death timers" such as "thirst", "hunger", "scurvy", "beri-beri", "air", "cold", "injury" constantly running on a player; they drop at different rates, influenced by the environment. The player initially starts with most of them set not to expire for quite a while.

I'd like to see a game where you are presented with choices, and each choice changes the state of a multitude of death timers. Drinking water pushes back the "dying of thirst" timer by a few hours, but going to the water hole marginally increases the "getting eaten by an alligator" background rate.

Players can also get items - so picking up a water filter will permanently improve thirst resistance. Storing 10 gallons of water adds a buffer to he thirst timer. Gaining weight adds a buffer to the starvation timer.

There can be some really speculative timers - boredom, insanity, risk-seeking behavior etc.

Gradually interaction with the environment can be added.

Initially the game just drops them into a blank room somewhere - but if they traveled outdoors, the scales would change, risk factors etc.

Finally, psychological effects come in - boredom, love affairs, fighting, war... politics? cancer timers start running low...

In the end, the game invisibly switches focus from parent to child; this resets the "enemies coming to get you" timer, cancer timers, etc. but temporarily puts you at much more risk of cold, disease, etc.

---

### [Sweeney Ridge Trail, just south of Brisbane](https://fuseki.net/Sweeney-Ridge-Trail-just-south-of-Brisbane)

```photomap
images: all
```

This can be a beautiful, but cold and misty hike or bike. There is tons of strange pro-Palestinian propaganda grafitti on the guardrails on the way up, including some written in what looks like foreign fonts. The plant life is great here; the weather systems don't seem very connected to the rest of the bay - you're directly in the wind and fog here so it's often raining when the rest of the area is having a fine day.

You head along the curving path up and then it loops to the rigth, to bring you north again along the spine of the ridge, back towards the city; there are some old artillery setups maybe left over from a wary, or missiles etc. Nothing much of interest. I actually find the way up a lot nicer.

{{img:533}}

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---

### [Testing image 2 for autogenerated map and direction from exif](https://fuseki.net/Testing-image-2-for-autogenerated-map-and-direction-from-exif)

Tags: ai projects, photopage

```photo
image: 518
```

```photo
image: 517
```

Testing photopages with exif-derived map and direction

```photomap
images: all
```

{{img:515}}

{{img:517}}

{{img:513}}

---

### [Tewari Analysis in Real Life](https://fuseki.net/Tewari-Analysis-in-Real-Life)

Tags: arguments, ev poker, go, ideas, patterns, strategy, tewari

Tewari is a concept from Go that has applications everywhere. It describes a way of creating an alternative but logically equivalent scenario of an argument or disagreement. This way of arguing is valuable because it can help overcome status quo bias.

Say you are arguing about whether or not you should sell you car. Within tewari analysis, that argument is equivalent to this situation: you have already sold your car, and are considering buying it back (for the same price). Now, obviously for it to be equivalent, we should eliminate transaction costs in both cases. Although the situations are equivalent (no effort required to move between them), the concept of having a car and possibly losing it feels very different than the concept of paying money for a car, and owning one, when you don't *have* to. Thinking about selling your car creates a feeling of loss... but deciding *not* to buy a car could feel good, and is less stressful.

Or, say you are arguing whether the Chinese language should introduce spaces between words to improve readability. Conservative people usually react pretty badly to this proposition. Think of the problem in reverse: Imagine Chinese has always had spaces between words. One day, someone comes along and says that they should eliminate spaces, using the reasoning that people will probably be able to make out word boundaries just about as easily, and it will save space. Suddenly that argument sounds insane and weak! Now, the original proponent of adding spaces isn't trying to say that there would be no costs involved - obviously, retraining everyone would be a huge cost, and changing software, and everything associated with the written word would be tough. But the original argument was just about which is absolutely better, and viewing it backwards makes it pretty clear that it would be crazy to remove spaces from a language that already had them.

## Way of Life Changes

When a new technology comes along which would change a traditional way of life, everyone complains about it. Yet, when it's in place, very few people advocate going back to an even more primitive way of life. When cars came along, everyone complained about losing the connection to horses. But if cars were to go away, everyone complains again, and nobody advocates going back to horses.

## Poker

Some people don't like the concept of "running it twice" in poker to reduce variance, or the full version of that, [EV Poker](EV-Poker.html). Yet, these very same people don't propose making poker *more* random.

## Regret Minimization

If you are considering an action, just think about whether you would regret doing it. If not, then you should just do it.

---

### [The 10,000 Year Explosion by Greg Cochran](https://fuseki.net/The-10000-Year-Explosion-by-Greg-Cochran)

Tags: 2009 books, authors, book reviews, books, evolution, genetics, nonfiction, people

A book about recent human evolution by Greg Cochran, snarky GNXP commenter & physicist.

topics include possible recent evolution deal with a changing environment: malaria, a new diet based on farming, unique job constraints (ashkenazim), lactose tolerance.

It is mostly really about changes in gene frequency rather than the appearance of new beneficial mutations, although that is covered too. One interesting point is that because of the great increase in human population, the number of existing variants of every gene has increased - and therefore, the number of beneficial mutations which are out there floating around. It's obvious but not something one would think of when seeing those charts saying "25% of the modern humans who have ever lived are alive at this moment" - that also means that a lot of new beneficial mutations have just come into existence with those people and may be spreading.

I would like to see some information on what type of selection is actually taking place in the modern world - things like % of males who successfully reproduce vary greatly throughout the world, and have got to have a big effect on rates of evolution!

---

### [The Counting Olympics](https://fuseki.net/The-Counting-Olympics)

Tags: games, ideas, olympics, sports, variants

## Counting Stuff

Referee pours out a bunch of stuff. The contestant has to count how many there are. Scoring is based on exactness.

* Stuff is: toothpicks, tacks, tennis balls etc.
* Time limits: 2 seconds, 1 minute, 10 minutes.

## Counting Birds

Hmm that might be hard.

## A Forest

Contestants run through a forest counting varying things. Trees, or whatever.

## Cutting

The contestant gets a giant, symmetric block of cheese, and a knife. They should cut the cheese in two and place the halves on two stands. Whoever cuts it most evenly, wins.

## Weighing

Given a bunch of homogenous mass, like sand, weigh out a given amount. Or, weigh out two amounts (at least 1 lb). Whoever is closest is the winner.

---

### [The Distance Olympics](https://fuseki.net/The-Distance-Olympics)

Tags: games, ideas, measurement, olympics, skills, sports, variants

There should be Olympics of other difficult tasks. National teams, plus individual stateless people.

All events take place in the exact center of a perfectly circular white room, or else on an infinite, perfectly flat plane with no weather. Or else on a standardized flat plane without landmarks. For point positioning events, participant can position all the markers.

## Distance

Draw two dots exactly one foot apart. Score is how close they came to exactly correct. Divisions: 1 foot, 1 meter, 10 feet.

## Length

Draw a straight line exactly 1 meter long. Time limits: 3 seconds, 1 minute, 10 minutes.

## Walking

Drop a marker, then walk to place another marker exactly one mile away. Time limits: 5 minutes, 8 minutes, 25 minutes. Variants: Challenging terrain.

## Area

Trample exactly 1 square meter of grass.

## Shapes

Place three dots in a perfect equilateral triangle, with side length 100m.

## Draw a perfect circle

In chalk. Scoring is done with a camera which inscribes the largest possible circle in what is drawn. Testing would be needed to determine the best scoring algorithm. After a circle is drawn, another circle would be inscribed

* in (largest)
* outside (smallest)

of the drawn circle, and then we would look at either:

* The area of the area between the drawn circle and the perfect circle.
* The maximum distance (along the line of a radius of the inner circle) between the inscribed circle and the drawn circle.

## Guess the weight of things:

You are allowed to touch & pick them up.

* A metal block
* A giant rock (of a known material, all above-ground). divisions: 1-10kg, 10-100kg, 100-1000kg

## Choose the heavier of two objects

Whose weight might be very similar indeed.

---

### [The Hong Kong/Mainland milk powder controversy](https://fuseki.net/The-Hong-KongMainland-milk-powder-controversy)

Tags: china, complaining, economics, ideas

A while back, there was a big scandal with contaminated mainland milk powder. In response, Chinese people began going to HK and carrying huge amounts of milk powder back across the border, and reselling it on the mainland. Although the problem is supposedly cleaned up, and there is imported milk powder available on the mainland, people trust the obviously genuine HK powder more.

In response, HK passed a law threatening people who carry more than 1.8kg of milk powder with long prison sentences & huge fines. This would mean that less than 100 USD worth of powder, fairly bought, carried over a border, would completely destroy someone's life.

This has prompted articles like this: http://www.tealeafnation.com/2013/03/from-one-hub-a-view-of-chinas-worldwide-underground-milk-powder-network/

This article has totally misses the point. Importers are heroes, not villains, and the world response to the milk powder issue is a missed opportunity.

*The world should flood the countries around China with high quality milk powder - it saves lives, forces China to improve its regulatory system, embarasses a secretive government, and moves tons of money from China to the rest of the world.*

Imagine if the Chinese government banned a vaccine to a deadly disease - someone who makes a living smuggling it in would be a hero! (And although it's slightly off-putting, allowing the importer to profit from it would create a huge incentive to import it, which would save more people's lives within China and drop the price.)

Why do foreign countries resist Chinese purchases of milk powder at all, anyway? They should just take the money and be happy to be replacing poison with good stuff. The article barely mentions the reason - that foreign milk is subsidized.

They're trying to keep the price at an absurdly low level, to keep it cheap for locals. But why can't they just produce more, while keeping some cheap?

Producing more is probably hard because the subsidy has made milk powder companies uncompetitive and they can't ramp up production due to problems with their production system or overregulation which prevents it. It might be that they can only keep the subsidy under certain conditions, or that they have to accept it for all their milk or none. Or it might be that there's so much bureaucracy within these European countries that it isn't worth it. It might even be written into the law that you can't sell milk powder for a high price, and nobody is allowed to refuse the subsidy.

If the legal systems of the other countries were good enough, someone could just start up a new milk powder company, refuse subsidy money, and sell for way more than the subsidized cost - and also not limit Chinese purchase. This would help everyone - babies in China would be saved, and the company would make tons of money.

The exact same thing happens in education: the Chinese product is crap, but it's protected locally from foreign competition, so rich Chinese go overseas to get the foreign version. And overseas, education is heavily subsidized. So what happens? US schools don't put up signs saying "No Chinese allowed" - they just charge them full price and make tons of money, while genuinely helping out the Chinese kid by giving him a better education. Money is taken away from shitty producers (chinese schools) and given to better ones (us schools). That's economics.

Rather than stop this, European countries should use it as a way to pressure China to have better regulations - making Chinese product more trustworthy (which helps Europeans and Chinese alike), makes China more efficient (because it'd be more transparent and fewer bribes would be involved in getting things done, which again would help the whole world). Europe and the world already competes with China in every way now - constantly trying to undercut them in everything they produce, produce higher quality stuff, have better regulatory system which allow more innovation than the soviet style, opaque chinese standard system. The west even tries to get rich Chinese to move overseas, stealing their abilities and production. All this pressure makes China improve itself, become more modern and open, and actually care about the internal quality of life for its citizens. The milk powder issue is just another way we can use economic competition to improve China & do a moral good.

---

### [The Kindle 3](https://fuseki.net/The-Kindle-3)

Tags: amazon, books, complaining, ebook readers, ebooks, electronics, kindle, reading, ui

I have a kindle 3 and it is pretty good. Mine has been left in a porter's car for a day (and returned), fallen off a car roof, and dropped, and still survived. My first one did not survive being sat on, though.

## Features

it's ok. It's no apple product. It's not smooth, not very pretty. But it is pretty easy to use. It has some new UIs which are not terrible, and some which are terrible.

## It's no Linux product either

It's not very configurable. I'd love to be able to just make some basic changes to the page number system. First off, just not show page numbers at all! But it's impossible. The constant knowledge of how much is left, or how far I've gone is annoying. Just let me turn it off.

## The Insane "Go to" function SUCKS.

Despite having a full keyboard, and even though the screen refresh is pretty fast, it's really hard to jump around in a book. Here's what happens when you push "go to" - an entry screen pops up, but, you have no numbers on the keyboard. So you bring up the extended keyboard with another button. But, your cursor is not on the number area, so you have to move down there. Put in numbers (which are in a row, instead of in a numpad layout), then close this, go down to "go to" and go. Since your guess is usually wrong the first time, you either then have to do it all again, or just page back and forth a ton of times. It's super annoying. The system on my old hanvon N510 was 100x better, and the system in openinkpot is way better, too.

## The Fake Percentage meter

I have a certain ebook. When you open it up, the percentage complete is 1%. One, then two pages down, still 1%. Next page, 2%, next 3%. etc through 7%.

How is that supposed to happen? The first pages are the same size.

What actually happens is that

* it's lying to you because at some point someone at amazon decided that they didn't want to display something like "0%" to users, and they didn't want to do something different, like calculate the percentage based on the *end* of the currently displayed page.

## The super annoying, accidental delete function

From the book list if you push "left" and then ok, you have deleted a book! No confirmation screen! WTF! I guess this feature is there for people who don't manage their books through a computer.

## The scary / useless screensaver faces

If the device is idle for a couple minutes a screensaver comes on. It is one of a collection of historical author's faces, or old diagrams. They're fine, except there is one extremely scary one of emily dickinson.

What's ironic is that on a device like this, a screensaver actually wastes energy - just leaving the text displayed on screen would take less energy than drawing / undrawing the screensaver.

## Form Factor

It's a slippery little thing that seems to want to fall off of whatever you put it on. Not shaped like a book at all - I liked my old Hanvon N510's shape a lot more.

## Overall

Overall it's a cool little thing, cheap, and great for books, but the UI is weird. Screen display is way better than N510, and faster, and better than the old default UI (but not better than openinkpot).

---

### [The Pinkie Mandate of Heaven](https://fuseki.net/The-Pinkie-Mandate-of-Heaven)

Tags: evolution, ideas, organization, precommitment, society

## A problem

With primogeniture, there is lots of motivation to kill your older brothers and take over the throne. This causes families to self-destruct once they reach power.

## A solution

If everyone in a country was absolutely obsessed with the idea that the human pinkie finger was a symbol of a leader's connection to god and was required for him to be a good ruler, this whole problem would be solved. The oldest brother could simply have his younger siblings' pinkie fingers cut off, and let them live.

This would mean that ruling families would be much more free to have big families and expand their power even more.

## Ceremonies & Levels

The highest office would require a fully complete pinkie finger on both hands. Being a high councillor would require all but the last joint. Lower roles would require less. There would be a coming of age ceremony where how much of their finger would be allowed to be kept. Occasionally bandits would come in from other cultures with full fingers and everyone would be amazed.

This would work well in isoluation - murders of family members to prevent them from competing with you would be much less frequent; but one bad effect would be that in some cases it would be hard for people to advance. Plus, in isolation, soldiers having missing fingers would put this culture at a disadvantage in wars; occasionally fully-fingered barbarian tribes would invade and wow everyone.

---

### [The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt](https://fuseki.net/The-Sisters-Brothers-by-Patrick-deWitt)

Tags: 2011 books, authors, book reviews, books, fiction, patrick dewitt, people, western

## It's good

It's a well-written western, kind of funny. Two brothers who are pretty much assassins. One of them is pretty neurotic and funny - reminds me of Tao Lin.

---

### [The critical view of Glossolalia is that it's literally just gibberish, and the crowd is eating it up](https://fuseki.net/The-critical-view-of-Glossolalia-is-that-its-literally-just-gibberish-and-the-crowd-is-eating-it-up)

Tags: africa, cults, glossolalia, religion

{{youtube:_i3NydyetwY}}

This dude literally goes on for an entire hour, just speaking gibberish. The audience, I guess, just imagines he said whatever they'd have liked to hear?

And it's all accompanied by cheesy piano improv

Does your group spend a bunch of time in very hard to understand states, resisting detailed clarifications and explanations of what it means? Does it actually REVEL in obfuscating and hidden information, unclear meanings which everyone can easily reinterpret, which make no actual clear claims to test and can be adjusted retroactively very easily?

{{img:495}}

If so, that is a very bad sign.

---

### [The proper price for all grocery store items is dollars per ounce](https://fuseki.net/The-proper-price-for-all-grocery-store-items-is-dollars-per-ounce)

Tags: commerce, complaining, consumer awareness, economics, fairness, free enterprise, monopoly

It's a huge scam how companies have gotten away with acting like the "price" of a box of crackers is just some random number. It is better for customers to instead treat the prime unit as the cost per ounce, and the different sizes/form factors/etc as addons.

You can see this on amazon, too - among many other howlers which express their PMs extremely low, yet validated, estimate of the moral fiber of american free enterprise customers, they treat the "price lowest to highest" filter as meaning "total price" for item whose size naturally varies.

For items like "one vacuum cleaner" fair enough, "price lowest to highest" would have made sense. (if they hadn't gone out of their way not to classify the "item" itself with any filterable classifer from all the associated peripherals like extra wheels and whatnot which also show up, also technically sorted correctly in order of the numerical price, as if it ever would make sense to compare the price of a wheel to the price of a vacuum cleaner, (for people who set out that morning saying: "I'll either buy a vacuum or a wheel for one, that's it"?)

So this is completely intentional

One good thing about the US / CA system at a minimum is that we still have the law which requires them to include, along with the full item price, another number somewhere on the price tag for the price/weight. This isn't required to be standard, though, so they move it around by item type, off to the corner, or side, so it varies, and always lower down and smaller so it's hard to just have your eye go right to it.

It's actually the populations fault, though - companies will do whatever you let them get away with. If the average person 

I'd bet that we can see the effect by looking at the rate of inflation of "fixed size and quality" items such as milk (always sold in units of 1 gallon); they will be easier for customers to notice price changes of, so their price rises will lag other types of item where companies can obfuscate the rate they're charging.

I do not hate free enterprise at all; but we should recognize that the smarter the customer, the more fair the marketplace.

---

### [The world in 200 BC](https://fuseki.net/The-world-in-200-BC)

Tags: history, maps

{{img:456}}

Just testing what these kind of image-based pages are like!

---

### [There are actually two meanings to a turn signal (well, 3)](https://fuseki.net/There-are-actually-two-meanings-to-a-turn-signal-well-3)

Tags: small observations, traffic, writing for ai

1. I'm going to turn left, when stoped at a light.
2. I'm going to switch into the lefternmost of two left-turn-allowed lanes, then probably also turn left
3. I'm in the left lane and going to u-turn

---

### [There is Randomness in Chess](https://fuseki.net/There-is-Randomness-in-Chess)

Tags: chess, game variants, games, ideas, poker, randomness, statistics, trolling

At high levels, if you play a trap line which your opponent HAS prepared for, you may lose. If they haven't prepared for it, you are more likely to win.

Your results depend on an unknowable element - whether your opponent has prepared or not. Therefore, chess (as played vs real opponents in reality) has randomness. I'm not saying the pure game has randomness. Obviously it doesn't. And games like poker have randomness *even under perfect play*, while with perfect play there is no randomness is chess.

Is this an invalid definition of random? Is randomness only really random if it is generated during the event?

My answer is no. Imagine you are playing poker - a random game, right?

Now imagine that the seed used in the RNG was secretly generated and stored a year ago. And you didn't know that, and you played a tournament thinking you were playing "random" poker hands. Now that you know the seed was old, do you now think that the poker you were playing was not random?

I doubt it. Therefore, randomness means "you don't have a way to know a hidden variable which partially determines your results in a competition". In the chess case that variable is the state of your opponent's preparation. Is duplicate bridge not random? The hands are preset and the same for every table (for comparability) - but from your POV they're still random.

Does it matter that you can sometimes figure out opponent preparation by looking at their past games? Well, imagine that occasionally (but not always) the dealer flashes the opponents cards. Does that mean the actual poker tournament is not random? No. It would only not be random if you had full knowledge of every hand, before the tournament. The fact that there are occasional leaks of secret information in both the poker and chess does not mean that they are not random.

---

### [Things you cannot find online](https://fuseki.net/Things-you-cannot-find-online)

Tags: information, internet, missing features, reputation

There are facts and opinions that many people know which are super hard to find online:

## Neigborhood reputations & Safety

If you go to a bar in a new city and strike up a conversation, you can find out a huge amount of information about neighborhoods, risk, feelings and attitudes of people in a city. Yet, if you want to find this out online, where would you go? There's no place I know. Reddit might be somewhat useful if the city is big enough and you search; crime statistics are useful (e.g. the charts on city-data) but I'd rather have a 20 minute conversation with a resident than any of those.

## Actual expert-level information on what products are good

Say you have a new hobby and want to find out the state of the art. Any search you make will be so targeted to be basically useless. There may be good youtubers, but surprising numbers of them may be corrupted. Either directly through payments, or by being downstream of other corrupted agents. With time you can identify people who have reasonable stories for why they would not be corruptible, but it requires a lot of investment.

In the old world, you could just go to a newsgroup and read the FAQ and basically get up to speed on what's actually going on in a domain.

---

### [Things you should know about the elevators in Soho Shangdu](https://fuseki.net/Things-you-should-know-about-the-elevators-in-Soho-Shangdu)

Tags: beijing, china, complaining, design, elevators, humanity, people, society, soho shangdu

Soho Shangdu is an office building located in Guomao, Beijing China. The flickr link is http://www.flickr.com/search/?w=all&q=soho+shangdu&m=tags

(This was written in 2009 - things may have changed)

## Executive Summary

The elevators in the south tower of Soho Shangdu are horrible. Dealing with them is 15-30 minute ordeal every day. They are annoying because:

* They have a bad physical design
* The elevator software is badly designed
* They are managed badly by the building managers
* They expose the horrible nature of building residents

## 2 banks of 2 elevators

There are 4 elevators in the south tower. Two are on the south side, two on the north side of the lobby. Not all elevators serve all floors. The north elevators serve B4, B3, B2, and 1, 5 to 30. The Southeast elevator serves B4-B1, 1-32. The Southwest elevator serves B4-B1, and 1-31. The Southwest elevator is the "service" elevator, and the walls are covered with scratches. Incomprehensibly, even during elevator rush hours it is used by service staff to carry bags of garbage and water bottles.

## Stupid interior design of the elevators

The elevator panels contain buttons for each floor, and door open and close buttons. Since each elevator serves different floors, the panels are all different - this means that every time you get in, you have to look closely to see the button to press. The elevators are also extremely dim - there bulb looks to be about 20 watts. This means you can't see the buttons easily.

## A Glaring Design Flaw

What is the most common destination floor? Do you think that the floor which represents about 50% of all destinations should be easier to find than buttons which represent approximately 2-3% of all destinations? The '1' button is mixed in with the other buttons - it's not any larger, not marked as different in any way, and is very low on the panel, with the basement floors below it.

For some reason, the floor buttons are also different in each bank of elevators. This is due to the missing floors.

This prevents habits from developing - every time you get in, you have to look. Because of the dimness and moving buttons, residents frequently push the wrong button - about 5% of the time. This generates even more useless stops.

What is the most frequently pressed button in an elevator in China? The 'Close Door' button is pressed almost every time someone enters an elevator. This button is located in the most inconvenient position of all buttons - on the very bottom, next to the open door button, which looks almost identical.

The elevator software does not read this button at all while the doors are opening - it begins to read it only about 0.5s after the doors fully open. There is also a buffer - presses within about 1s of an unsuccessful press are ignored. This does not stop people from incessantly pushing the button, actually slowing themselves down.

## The Bad design of elevator control systems results in a lot of wasted time

The first stupid thing about the elevators is the call buttons; there are independent call buttons for each pair of elevators (north pair, south pair). On the ground floor, this isn't such a problem - in order to get an elevator on the ground floor, it is necessary to push both "up" buttons. This is usually acceptable, because even though you call two elevators, one will come first and get you, and by the time the other one arrives, there will probably be more people waiting. However, on upper floors this causes a major problem. On the 20th floor, to get an elevator down people typically push both down buttons. One north and one south elevator will eventually arrive to meet this call. The caller takes the first elevator to arrive, and the second one usually arrives soon after; soon enough that it is almost never needed. Whether it is empty or not, it is a waste of time.

## Elevator Behavior

An elevator moving up or down will stop at a given floor if there is an unanswered call on that floor for an elevator going that direction; so as you are going down from the 20th floor, your elevator will stop at the floors you pass on the way down if someone has pushed "down". However, if they have pushed up, it won't stop.

When an elevator is deciding where to go, it will first try to serve requests which are going in the same direction it would need to be going to get there. For example, an elevator on the ground floor which can see a request to go up from the 10th floor and a request to go down from any floor would go to meet the request to go up. If there are no requests to go the direction it would need to go to arrive at the call, an elevator does something interesting - it serves the farthest request to go the "wrong" direction. This means if an empty elevator on the ground floor sees requests to go down from the 30th and 20th floors, it will go to the 30th floor first.

Think what happens when everyone is leaving the building at 6pm: There are down requests from almost every floor, and elevators deciding what to do have all just emptied on the ground floor. Naturally, they all go up to the top floor they serve! Once they get there, they head down, stopping at every floor. Because of the disconnected elevator buttons, they will literally stop at every floor, so at about half of their stops, no-one gets on.

You can imagine how annoying it is to be going down and have the elevator stop at every floor, even though half of the time nobody gets on or off!

A partial solution to this is...

## Elevators Get Full

When elevators are full, they zoom down to the ground floor, not making any stops. This is really nice. The trigger for an elevator being "full" is a minimum weight - but that weight is about 2-3 people less than the weight of a full elevator. So before elevators are genuinely full, they zoom down.

This feature has been noticed; the elevator measures the weight about 1 second after the doors close. By a coordinated slight jump of occupants, timed to all fall at the right moment, the elevator can be tricked into thinking it weighs more than it really does, and zooming down.

It is possible to overfill an elevator - in that case, it begins a horrible loud beeping. People need to get off to get it well below the beep weight - but after getting off, you can go right up to the beep weight again. So usually when it beeps, two people get off, and then one sneaks back on and we go.

## Fullness causes other problems!

Since elevators start their downward run from the 30th floor, stopping at every other floor, and picking up people every other stop, eventually they fill up. This usually happens somewhere between the 20th and 25th floor. But since there are usually two elevators serving each request (because of the split north/south), they fill up half as fast. You spend a lot of time going down floors one by one, never getting quite enough people to zoom down. Across the elevator lobby, you can see your partner elevator that's stealing your weight.

Once full, they zoom down, completely skipping all intermediate floors. This is frustrating for the people in the intermediate floors.

## A New Strategy

Someone in one of the zoom-past areas once had a bright idea - even if you are going downwards, you can steal the elevators on their way up if you push "up"! Then this fresh, empty elevator stops on your floor and you can get a ride no matter what. Although it's still locked into answering a down call from a high floor, at least it won't zoom past you on the way down. Better yet, if you can fill it up completely, you can instantly zoom to the bottom, saving about 10 or 20 minutes of waiting.

Applied building-wide, this strategy results in every floor having all buttons pressed at all times. People will go out and push up and down on both sides. When an elevator on the way up stops, it picks them up, and continues up to the uppermost down call. On the way back down if it hasn't filled up, it will stop at the same floor.

But this strategies issues 4 calls for every ride - generating a large number of extraneous calls and empty stops.

This strategy also demonstrates the first of many incredibly stupid, unthinking behaviors of building residents. In the elevator lobby on each floor the current location of each elevator is displayed. For example, all elevators are frequently above floor 25; anyone on the 20th floor can see they are all above, and are slowly moving down filling up or just stopping to meet a call that isn't useful anymore. Even in this situation, stupid people still push all 4 buttons; even though there aren't even any elevators yet to satisfy those "up" calls - it is known that all elevators are occupied on "down" calls, and are also above the current floor anyway. So it is provable that pushing the down buttons is sufficient to maximize the chance of getting an elevator; there is absolutely no use to pushing "up" while all elevators are above you; and given that every elevator has one person who will bring the elevator a sufficient distance below your floor to give you time to see that it has passed you (a very likely state of affairs), you will always have time to push up and attempt to steal the elevator later, in case none of the 4 above you make it to your floor with empty slots.

So this selfish strategy, applied incorrectly, results in even more useless elevator stops; even with maximum selfishness there is not any benefit to pushing up while all elevators are above you - unless you count the labor you save by not having to watch.

Note that the stealing strategy, applied correctly, can actually improve elevator efficiency in some cases. For example, from the 20th floor, if all 4 elevators are ascending but are below you, it is likely they are all going to the 30th or 31st floor. Without action from the 20th floor, it is likely they will all stop at the same floor or within one floor (30/31, since the maximum floor for north/south elevators is not the same). When arriving, north/south will split occupants and neither will fill up. So the initial stop will be 32,31 on the south side, 31,30 on north. South 32 will descend to 30 since 31 already has an elevator, South 31 will go down to 29. On the North , 31 will go down to 29, 30 will go to 28. Each side's elevators will descend by 2 floors at a time pacing each other, leapfrogging floors, and delaying any of them filling up.

If a steal at an earlier floor manages to fill up and zoom an elevator down, the 3 remaining elevators at higher floors will fill up faster; overall human time will be saved from the increased number of zooming elevators. Also, delaying only one of the elevators on the way up will allow the double down pushes to have a higher chance of picking someone up.

The organizational strategy this demonstrates is that when you are designing an infrustructure, you have to make sure that selfish strategies which hurt the average wait time do not exist.

## Basement Stupidities!

The elevator situation would not be so bad, except for the basement of the building. The building has 4 basements. Users in the basement are car-drivers or support staff; either high or low class. In both cases, even less likely to be considerate.

The ground floor is the most frequent floor for elevators to stop at. Because of the splitting north/south, typically two high elevators will be called to the same floors on the way down. Since they are splitting riders equally, they will tend to fill up at the same time and zoom down, arriving at 1 at about the same time. Since during the long time above, someone in the basement has almost always pushed both up buttons, both elevators will head downwards. The elevators *will* stop at 1 to let people off, but will still show "down" to pick up the basement guys.

If there was a 3 or 4 splitting going on (or any splitting involving two elevators on the same side), two elevators on the same side will arrive at the bottom at about the same time. Here is a typical scenario: Two elevators are heading down on the same side, one is at 4 and one is at 3. The one at 3 arrives first, but since it's the first to arrive down, it displays it's current direction as "down" when it arrives, to pick up the basement guys who won't even walk up one flight of steps. Even if the ground floor is full of people waiting (and sometimes there are 40-50 people downstairs waiting for elevators), they are reluctant to get on this down elevator because it's marked "down" and another is arriving in a second. As it is emptying out, the other elevator arrives and claims to be going up, slowly emptying out. The first one arrives at the basement; usually just one person gets on. He pushes up. While he was getting on, the other ground floor elevator was filling up. The "up call" button on the ground floor turned off since an up elevator was there already. The elevator from the basement closes and starts to move up. Since it detects an elevator already present on the ground floor, it does not stop there; although everyone in the lobby can see it passing by, they can't push the call button, because it shuts off instantly because the other elevator is already present, although mostly full. Usually the one open is undergoing an overload/get off cycle; or, people are finally being allowed to get out after having to push through people who insisted on getting on/blocking them before anyone was allowed to get off. The elevator with just 1 person in it heads up to the destination, even though many people were waiting on the ground floor.

This happens frequently; about every other day as I arrive in the morning, elevators pass from the basement upwards without stopping.

Longer-term residents of the building know this behavior, and often get on downwards moving elevators, anyway.

## A cunning strategy

if two elevators on the same side arrive at almost the same time, the first one usually decides to go down and the other to go up. However, if the first one's doors can be kept open long enough for the second one to start moving, the second one will reconsider its options and realize there is an up call from the basement; sometimes it will change its direction and head downwards, and the people in the first one will find themselves zooming upwards, with only a few people in the elevator.

## Some Theory

Some theorems on elevators, presented without proof:

* If an elevator stops on a floor and no-one gets on or off, it is inefficient. If the elevator is empty, it is simply a waste of energy. If it is occupied, it is a waste of energy and time.
* Making only one elevator call per ride is as good or better than calling more than one.
* Although saving electricity and saving human time are both factors, saving human time is the most important factor in this (otherwise, why have elevators at all?)
* Energy Use

## Human time vs Electricity

Considering the low cost of energy related to the salary/rent in offices in this building, human time is important. i.e. the total building cost of running elevators is <1 kuai/m^2/month, and rent is 150 kuai/m^2 or more.

Considering the expense of the building and the cheapness of electricity, it is surprising that the elevators do not implement some obvious improvements to human time at the expense of some energy: for example, moving empty elevators to useful areas. (Proof of the environmental acceptability of trading energy for human time: The building is lit up at night, for no reason. There are many other obviously useless uses of energy around the building. So arguing that elevators should save energy at the expense of human time, while ignoring energy uses with no appreciable benefit cannot be correct.)

In general, if an elevator is empty and has no calls, the most probable floor to need it is the ground floor. To improve average response time, it makes sense to move there. For banks of 4 elevators, there are even better solutions. Perhaps keeping 2 empty on the ground floor, and 2 others at intermediate floors.

Including time optimizations would allow even greater improvements; during the morning hours, empty elevators should default to return to the ground floor. After 5 pm, there is not as much need to keep empty elevators on the ground floor; starting from a higher position would on average save human time.

## Human time optimization means what?

There are two forms human time optimization can take. First, we should try to minimize the average time it takes to get where you are going. A second important factor is having a predictable wait time; if it takes 1 minute on average to get an elevator, but one out of every 10 times it takes 5 minutes, it isn't as good as if it always took exactly one minute (or even 1:30). In fact, variation in service time (in IT literature, this is known as "Jitter" - the variance in response time) can sometimes be more important.

For example, emergency services - would you rather have an ambulance service that takes on average 30 minutes to get someone to the hospital, or one which takes on average 29 minutes, but where 1 out of 100 ambulance calls takes 2 days? It is possible to have ambulance performance sets that meet those characteristics, and depending on the connection of mortality rates to hospital arrival times, the 1/100 chance of not arriving for 2 days may cause more deaths than would be saved by arriving one minute earlier on average. In addition, predictability in arrival times would allow for efficient stocking of supplies in ambulances; with zero jitter, they would never need more than 30 minutes worth of every supply. This would save storage, weight, gas, usage costs, improve scheduling problems, etc.

So clearly, average time is not the only value - if variance gets high enough, it can be worse than increases in average response time.

## Attempts to fix the problem

In the past, the building managers have tried various strategies to solve the problem.

## Linking the two sides.

The two sides were apparently linked in the past, but after a week, the problem was even worse, so they reverted. I think what probably happened was that the basement-skip problem became even worse; since the ground floor could only have one active call at any time, and elevators don't return to the ground floor by default, one elevator would be returning to the ground floor and the other 3 sitting doing nothing, even if 3 elevators worth of people were waiting on the ground floor.

## There is now a system during morning rush

South elevators go to floor 21+, north to 20+. This is good, except that there is just one unified line; constant line-jumping, and the attendants allow people to leave the line and enter the lobby and mill around well before the elevator arrives; this contributes to an atmosphere of lawlessness & mistrust.

Each elevator also has an attendant who pushes the buttons and prevents the elevators from going outside of the zone. Unfortunately, riders frequently get in the 2-20 elevator, and then beg the attendant to take them above 20. The attendant usually gives in.

## Things that have not been tried

Assigned each elevator as either odd or even, and restrict it to only serve those floors

This would increase the value of each call - the average number of people entering/exiting on every call would double. This would lower the useless stop problem. Proof: As of now if you are going to an odd floor, you can go in any of 4 elevators. if it were like this, you could only get into two elevators. The proportion of odd floor people in that elevator would be doubled; therefore, for a given odd floor, the average number of people exiting on that floor would be double.

This would also improve the worst case scenario, when a nearly full elevator stops at every floor on the way down, but all the calls are dead.

## Restrict basement elevator use

There's no reason that the elevators on both sides should go to the basement; the basement is doubly served now, even though more than one person almost never gets on at one time there. Most elevators visits to the basement are visits on both sides; since only one person gets on, cutting out half would not hurt much. So, one side of the elevators should completely stop going to the basement.

## Put up signs discouraging stupid button pressing

At least try to make people feel bad about wasting calls. Although it would have low percentage effectiveness, truly rational people who are just not introspective can learn things that they wouldn't have though of themselves. Allowing people who can appreciate correctness, but who are not curious to become more moral is a good thing.

## The Nature of building Residents

* The elevators make the selfish, unthinking tendencies of building residents obvious.
* When elevators arrive at the ground floor, the doors open and occupants are faced with a wall of people. The people outside do not clear a path; in fact, they try to squeeze into the elevator before anyone can get out. This is because there are so many cheaters in general in the lobby; if you stand back a bit to let someone out, someone will just cut in front of you. The cold unfriendly feeling in the building, and the constantly arriving workmen, annoying vendors and salesmen, etc undoubtedly contributes to the lack of community trust, which prevents reputation-building and tit for tat exchanges which improve global efficiency. I have found that raising your arms in front of you with a bent elbow and walking directly forward firmly usually clears a path out of the elevator.
* Stupidity of application of elevator stealing behavior.
* In general, one should only push one button at a time; if you are going down and the north elevators are all below you, the south are above you, you should just push down on the south side.
* If your timing is really good, you should even wait to push that, because both of those could fill up and zoom past, and the north side ones could pass above you and be your first ride; in that case the south push would be a waste. The most efficient behavior is to make only one call per ride.
* The door close button functioning means that the optimum strategy for saving human time is to wait 0.5s after the doors are completely open, and then push the button. If you push it as they are just finishing opening, you actually delay the later pushes of it. The best way to go through life would not to be in such a hurry all the time - the obsession with saving seconds here and there is weird. But even worse than that is being stupid about it. I can understand why someone would be in a hurry - but why are they so stupid not to think about the best way to achieve their own goals?
* The building residents are pretty nice and laid-back; but the elevator system is competitive and brings out their worst. Making it more of a community through awareness and physical comfort (put down some carpets, make things smoother, make things more human) would allow people to behave better.

---

### [This is a Late 90s Style Homepage](https://fuseki.net/This-is-a-Late-90s-Style-Homepage)

Tags: ideas, internet, projects

When I first got on the internet, it was awesome. You could find informal, interesting stories and information written by smart people. The type of people who usually only write really formal, serious articles. It was like overhearing the lunch conversation of two professors - there was more speculation.

It also had a big chunk of content produced by various sysadmins, programmers, hippie rebels, and philosophers.

Things were written in a personalized, thoughtful and informed way.

Most content was on .edu sites - or weird, foreign services, where random people who stumbled onto the internet were amazed to have a pulpit to say things in public.

There was almost no advertising, sales, horrible ads, tiny layouts etc. In general things were more text-based - no javascript.

There weren't many images, and it wasn't social, which sucked, but it was still better than what we have now.

## That internet was better

You could search for something and pages which looked like personal versions of wikipedia articles. Fan/expert-written pages on any subject within programming, astronomy, anime, science, philosophy, plus bits of other stuff - and without the no-bias rules.

It covered anything obscure you could think of, plus people's real opinions. No edit wars, just nice informative pages (and lots of lists of links, cause you couldn't rely on search engines to find stuff)

## Searching sucks right now

Google SERPs are full of junk now - way worse than ever in the past. Try searching for fan / real independent human pages about things which people make money from - sports, medicine etc. All the results are produced by huge companies and their horrible web page layouts & writing.

There is good stuff being produced now, but it's hard to find. You need to be in a domain for a while before you figure out what the leading pages are. So it's much harder to explore new areas than it used to be - you have to be pretty dedicated to find the honest blogs about say, new cameras, before you find one.

## Blogs?

Blogs have mostly replaced personal homepages, and are the main way people create personal, article-sized content now.

The problem with them is that older entries kind of disappear. New articles don't naturally link to old articles, and most of them are just gone. Most engines don't implement tags very well by default, so you can't find related matter easily.

The other problem is that most articles on blogs are read right after they're published. Over time, the readership goes way down. So most of them are read before they've been edited and fixed up very much, and fixes done later aren't done much.

It's great that people can write blogs, but the sequential format just makes people churn over the same stuff again and again.

## Forums

Forums are kind of like how the internet used to be, too - real voices, reputations, a personal history of contributions. Plus, they have personal interactions and comments. However, they don't have much linking, and can get rep-whorish / flamey.

## So

I wanted sth a bit more like how it used to be, so I made these pages.

---

### [This is a new type of very pro-american video](https://fuseki.net/This-is-a-new-type-of-very-pro-american-video)

Tags: cultural criticism, culture, europe, germany, i18n, influence, propaganda, youtube

Not first line.

{{youtube:fUd6QHUnLMk}}

This one is canonical. The guy is so sincere. I do come down on the side that he's legit. Ofc it could be a setup but his points are just so good. The ones where he digs into the research are wonderful, too, because these are practical comparisons between nations which it's just so rare for people to mention; some of the clearest "one of you guys is *obviously* wrong and must change" examples are from this area, because it's so rare for a single person to have this kind of information. (and probably because getting it requires spending time overseas, maybe reducing your impact at home?)

### An Australian

{{youtube:yoP1PNsHTvk}}

This guy reminds me of a preacher or 90s radio host. Such a nice way of talking and making observations. Ofc I'm sure this is just the very nice side of himself but even if he were being critical I still think it'd be worth listening to.

### Overview of the genre

They're by foreigners, who've come to live or visit the us. They talk about our culture mostly complimentary. 

Another type is about travelers typically from the UK who explore, have fun etc. in the typical way such videos would go, but they also throw in cultural compliments to americans about say how amazing our nature is, how nice we are as people, how friendly, considerate, wealthy, etc.

### What do I think about it?

I found it around world cup time in 2026; it originated with things like how the scots staying in Boston were having such a good time, partying and openly having fun in public, and drinkinga ll the beer, and the welcome they were given. This branched out into many known-fake anti-EU videos, criticizing their building styles. This morphed into the European AC Discourse of Summer 2026. That was fine and there were some real points in there. From there I branched (and youtube learned) that I'm interested in this more generally. At first I was suspicious of the whole generic "foreigner in the US complimenting it" since it's an obvious move for them to try to ingratiate themselves with their hosts. But on the other hand, it's also polite. And this kind of "saying nice things, but in a personal and unique way" is itself highly american, compared to cultures where politeness means just saying the rote and unchangeable polite set of greetings.

But on the other hand, like most of the world probably we're extremely self-critical. It sometimes takes an outsider telling you things to bolster yourself. And we've cut ourselves down so much that most people are living in a psychology of themselves as members of an evil, failing, and bad culture. So from the pov of hearing who we are perceived to be, feeling complimented, and then digging into it more, it's great. 

### The YIMBY angle, etc.

This video also hits the YIMBY/building design aspect a lot by showing how much worse it can get! Germany sounds as restrictive as the US, but with another few decades of interference on top!

### Americans apparently talk to strangers a lot

This is true. It's possibly just an "after 40 men discover this", but you really can talk with a lot of people as you travel or whatever. As long as you're put together and doing something, if you're waiting around or else visibly clear in what's happening (so they know you're not panhandling, and that it'll end soon), you can just ask if they're busy.

I think most people would gain a lot from trying to start out chatting w/Uber drivers 10 times or so. Once you're comfortable with it, life is a heck of a lot better.

## Commentary

Is this for eral? not sure. But I'm testing it with a new page

- [3:24](https://youtu.be/fUd6QHUnLMk?t=204) "I was overthinking"

I like this guy!

- [3:42](https://youtu.be/fUd6QHUnLMk?t=222) "Hey man how is it going" => leading to suspicion!

---

### [Time Based Settings on Phones](https://fuseki.net/Time-Based-Settings-on-Phones)

Tags: constraints, ideas, programming, projects, software

I want to be able to program the gmail client on my phone to only check for new mail during certain hours of the day. And not at all on weekends.

I'd set personal / work email checks to be done just 1/hour during the day, and not at all at night.

## Obsessively checking your phone

The phone should notice if you keep unlocking it just to check the time, and stop letting you do that.

---

### [Time-gapped Reproduction](https://fuseki.net/Timegapped-Reproduction)

Tags: ecomonics, evolution, genetics, humanity, reproduction, society, story ideas

## The Conflict

You send people off to war, but this is misaligned with their survival incentives (to stay home and have kids). This applies individually - but also culturally to how they raise their own children. Even military parents sometimes try to dissuade their kids from following in their footsteps.

### I'd like to read a story about this attempted solution:

A society pre-commits to supporting fertility treatments to raise children for fallen soldiers, so that depending on their behavior, even after death their family would continue to grow. This breaks the local "I have to survive" link. Similar to the promise of rewards in heaven - but in reality, implement strong tracking for rewards.

#### Why is this interesting to think about?

We are likely to observe self-sustaining phenomena: viruses, MLMs, cults. We are not likely to see things which don't grow or adapt. Or, we may evolve into something like this - we already have generation-level social tracking which correlates with reproduction (money, status, fame). The lack of morality of a system like this doesn't protect us from it.

#### Requirements for this to be self-sustaining

Or, traits a society like this might need to have to actually work.

* You don't want the kids to be raised in an orphanage; so there'd have to be an explanation of why people would not mind having kids raised by others - perhaps a tribal organization, or large family structures with strong traditions that individuals could identify with; this would reduce the feeling felt by WEIRD people that they have to personally individually educate their children. Previous attempts to break the parent-child bond (under communism) all failed. But, those systems couldn't offer the rewards of this one. Other systems which give similar rewards (tons of kids) have done quite well.
* Individualism and atomization seem viable as explanations for reduction in war - because the ability to have your family taken care of after death is so much weaker than it'd have been a few hundred years ago.
* In general disconnecting action & reward opens up risk for exploitation. Especially when you aren't around to make sure the rules are followed, this is exploitable. See many cases of misbehaving male fertility clinic doctors who have 100+ children.

### Poker analogy

In poker you try to play to maximize your total expected value over many hands (many lives). But in life you are strongly punished for "losing" a hand, and sometimes people don't play to maximize the expected value to humanity because they are individually tied to their "hand" (life). In poker, a single entity takes all the wins and losses from all hands. But in life we individually treat our score as just the result of our own hand. Some people do expand their view to include the score of their family, region, culture, or nation.

We observe many successful memeplexes like this, sometimes grown out of control and very individually damaging

* a computer program that forks itself continuously and soon leads to reset of the computer;
* a cult which burns out its victims and prevents them from having relationships - but we observe it because it temporarily was able to convert more people than it destroyed.

In the same way that playing many hands of poker makes it easier to play well (since you aren't tempted to over-value any single situation), allowing individuals to maximize expected value while disregarding individual survival can be net profitable. Not only is this related to the idea here, but it also applies to group membership in general. Feelings of being in allied group (military, tribe) can free people to have group-level optimal behavior rather than individual.

#### Similarities

Were old Levirate (women marry the brother of their widow) practices a primitive version of this? Beyond the obvious form of serving as a pension/backup, this also has a component where even after death you have additional children you are somewhat related to (1/4 rather than 1/2).

Pensions are another similar idea.

### Side effects

* How much of human consciousness is already selected under to account for the fact that "if you're too brave/bold, you'll die and be filtered out?". Removing this constraint may not have good consequences. But are we really wedded to this? i.e. if we have parachutes does it make sense to honor our innate fear of heights? Practically, obviously yes since it's painful to feel fear; but are you really committed to preserving your descendant's fear of heights, if you could ensure they live in a world where they never fall?
* In general you never want to get into situations where you can't at least evolve your way out of them given enough time. One can argue that older people are already in this situation- people beyond the age of fertility are already unable to exert much influence on the distribution of future genes; this is why it sucks to be old. They do have the ability to socially influence their children, and indeed they are known for being very interested in matchmaking. So by this argument, it's actually more sound to reproduce at the end of life - because now your entire scope of existence is covered by evolution. Some creatures already have this setup, and it's been explored for intelligent species in science fiction.
* Something that never happens: A loving newlywed couple suffers a tragedy: the husband unfortunately dies. The wife mourns, but eventually asks a doctor "is there some way I could still have his children?" So the other unspoken flaw here is that human motivation for relationships and children is not fully aligned with "number of living descendants". Companionship, support, protection are also piggybacked onto reproduction. These desires would have to have be satisfied in a successful society like this.

#### Making "Children are my immortality" more reliable

#### We already have a variety of social "scores":

Whose correlation with stable strategies & our desires is variable.

* money
* status

### The extreme version for society in general

At the end of someone's life, evaluate how they did - their treatment of others, achievements, etc. Then decide how many descendants they should have. This could be a terrifying society, and easily exploitable by a cabal of old men. Arranged marriage societies in some ways could be viewed as this - but there's a limit to their power since they can't transcend death. Did such societies devolve into something exploitative? Would allowing them to individually reward men or women with extra children, after death, on net improve behavior?

### The really bad version, which has historically been practiced

If someone is judged as bad at the end of their life, kill them and all their descendants unto the 7th generation. i.e. in the bible or recently with Saddam Hussein. Obviously super unfair and anti-individualistic, nevertheless the threat of such punishment would force people to think more systematically.

### What is lost in time-gapped reproduction?

Separating conception of a child from raising of the child means the family influence aspects of child-rearing are lost. There is doubt about how much this matters, but it's probably nonzero. There are technological adaptations to help here; detailed video diaries & recordings. More group living styles reduce extreme dependence on just the child-parent relationship; given that in such a society, a lot would be known about relationships, it would be possible to cause connections to be formed between generations. Again, tribal living emphasized kin much more than WEIRD people do.

### Evaluation - is this a stable system?

It has some advantages in being able to concentrate rewards more intensely. How much of our modern wealth is explicitly because of inequality which riches allow? Extreme rewards lead to extreme behavior, in this case to our net social benefit.

But it's risky to concentrate the right to decide who has kids in any single group. The relative legal freedom we have around reproduction is a great long-term protection - compared to how regulated we are in everything (bike helmets, food warnings), it's amazing how such a major thing (creating a person and raising them with no training) is nearly totally unregulated. This is kind of good - no matter what crazy beliefs people have, in the worst case if they become super unadaptive, resistant individuals will at least be able to grow their way around them. Anti-natalism is locally self-defeating, and resistance to social control of reproduction makes it hard for system-level anti-natalistic beliefs to spread on net.

In fact such a drastic change may not be needed to handle falling TFR. Subcommunities which find a way not to suffer from this are already growing, just like always. Yet again averages are deceiving - TFR 1.5 doesn't mean we are destined to die out; it breaks down into subgroups with TFS <2.1 and >2.1; one of which is dying out and one of which is growing.

---

### [Timing Olympics](https://fuseki.net/Timing-Olympics)

Tags: biology, evolution, games, human nature, ideas, olympics, timing, variants

There should be an Olympic event to test human's ability to measure time intervals.

Each contestant receives a stopwatch. Tests are conducted in various environments, with different levels of information / actions available to competitors.

## Environments

* empty white room, just a chair.
* empty white room, with a chair, pencil, paper.
* outside, while walking. They'd have to walk at least a mile in 15 minutes - nothing to stress them out, but something they have to do to break concentration
* outside, while doing exercise. If the exercise really sped up their heart, it would cause additional difficulty by messing with their perceptions of time. I imagine they'd have to do a lot of psyching themselves up before they started, to get their heart rate to something constant.
* blindfolded

## Click it after an interval

In these events they just have to click the timer to start, and then click it again later to end.

Intervals:

* 1 minute
* 10 minutes
* 1 hour
* 1 day
* 1 week
* 1 year
* 1000 years (civilizational...)

## Results

Whoever clicked the timer closest to the right time would win. There would be no special penalty for going over or under.

## Strategies

I would love to see what strategies participants invented for themselves.

Perhaps reciting a memorized speech? Or physical, repetitive motions - drumming a certain number of times on the table. Or writing out a memorized speech. Some might use their own heartbeat, or rate of breathing.

It would be very interesting also to compare the different strategies. Which types of activities let us measure time best while we're doing them?

Some contestants might try to use physical constants like gravity to help - calibrate their clocks based on how quickly a bouncing ball stops.

## Caveats

We shouldn't let people bring in clocks, but if they wanted to build one in the longer events, I guess they could. For this there would be another event - played in wilderness, over a time span of 10 years, in an area where there are no seasons?

## Final Version

In extremely long variants, the main problem is preserving the knowledge that a game is being played at all. If the task is to click a timer after 1000 years, how would you design a civilization to even have people who remember that winning this event is their goal?

---

### [Today's minesweeper - proof of note complete brain degeneration - July 23 2026](https://fuseki.net/Todays-minesweeper-proof-of-note-complete-brain-degeneration-July-23-2026)

Tags: 1491, ability testing, arguments, iq, minesweeper, testing

{{img:461}}

I've often thought that we underuse actual live tests of competence. If someone can literally pay minesweeper not TOO awfully it means *something* about their brain. OFC it doesn't necessarily prove the issue under contention but it's info.

Same with the suppsoed claims of the fakeness of IQ and whatnot. If someone can at-will solve the hardest instances of newly-generated Raven's progressive matrices, super fast, well, that'd be something, especially if they weren't otherwise exceptional.

There's lots of talk about the unreliability of IQ tests and all that stuff, but very little examples of "oh yeah I spent a week learning how to do this and let me show you I can get 160 on an IQ test now in a few minutes"

That'd introduce some facts into the room!

{{img:463}}

Okay, that's more like it. Still not on the ideal mouse!

---

### [Transhumans have low credibility](https://fuseki.net/Transhumans-have-low-credibility)

Tags: credibility, evolution, humanity, ideas, precommitment, security, self-modification, society, transhumanism

Dopplegangers are dangerous because they can throw away their reputation at any time - or steal someone else's. Just one of them running around breaks all the accumulated information about various people.

Transhumans are like that, but they throw away the reputation-patterns of the entire human race. Even if they keep the same individual identity, the signs they show can't be trusted. They may act loyal, honest, and push all the buttons a good person would - yet not be that at all. They may have rewritten their personality to break the connection between what they believe and feel, and what signals they give.

The existence of both dopplegangers and transhumans makes it much harder for us to cooperate.

## Humans vs Computer programs

In some ways humans are a lot more dependable than computer programs. Once someone's got a certain personality established, or way of acting, or walking, it's pretty hard for them to change it.

Programs and people both have dark, impossible to examine inner parts - you can't look at someone's brain and decide if they would make a good employee, or a good son-in-law, and once a computer program is compiled, it's just a gigantic blob of data - it's almost impossible to verify how it will respond (especially since the compiler or hardware itself could have been compromised)

But once you "get to know" someone, you really do feel like you can make predictions. At least, that they're a good / bad guy, or would make a good CEO, or if someone would be safe to leave your kids with. Obviously people can be wrong but we do have some ability at it.

## Computers are different

A computer program in charge of something important, say, allocating ambulances & emergency staff around a city in a timely manner, could work well for 20 years - but one day just "go bad". This going bad could be either accidental - a y2k type of problem that completely and suddenly screws it up. Or it could be intentional - maybe after 20 years, a switch flips and it starts accepting commands from a hidden port (which it never accepted before), and the commands make it do things like favor one hospital over another so a certain insurance company makes more money - or the ambulances don't get serviced properly, to set up a lawsuit, or more outright evil things.

This is the intentional version - but the program could also just have been badly written, and someone eventually found the weakness, and now it's been taken over. The people running it now won't change a thing - there will be no "giveaways" in the day to day use as there would be with a human who is being deceptive. It will just do things slightly differently on rare occasions.

When meeting a random computer program which you don't know the origins of, you can't use its past performance as an indicator of its trustworthiness. It can completely fake it. A program being really good and "honest" and "true" and "faithful" at one thing does not at all show that it has a good "heart" and won't totally screw you in another way.

Humans aren't like that.

## Selecting School Bus drivers

For example, there are a lot of trivial things that are inbuilt in humans, which allow us to choose who is allowed to do something important, like a school bus driver. There are lots of ways a bad person would give themself away:

* physical problems
* won't look you in the eye
* no friends
* no intimate relationships
* language difficulties
* bad grooming
* drug problems
* etc.

None of these things actually would stop the person from doing the job - but they all indicate something about the person. And since our goal here is to find someone who's not 'defective' or messed up, these features can be used to exclude those people. Obviously, some bad people can still get through, but these are still a good filter. It'd be very hard for a genuinely crazy person to exist without showing signs of it.

Computers/ Transhumans, on the other hand, are not like that at all. If a computer program you don't know the origins of applied for the job, his experience means nothing. It could completely turn bad after a while - or could be changed while running, or just be badly written, and be susceptible to complete takeover while driving the bus!

Humans aren't like that - we have mental resistance to takeover - and it's very hard for us to just flip from good to evil without showing signs. Although good people can become bad, and the reverse, it is almost always accompanied by signs.

But computer programs are easy to change.

## Transhumans have low credibility

So, if you knew someone had modified their brain / personality in some way, would you be willing to hire them for something sensitive? You would never get to know them, really - none of the evolved abilities we have to detect personality would work - they'd just get you in trouble, or be used to trick you.

A malicious transhuman, could have easily embedded a switch that would completely flip their personality after they have established trust. Or if it's just an individual messing with their own mind, they could have changed their personality in an incredibly foolish way.

## Fear of people who don't show the right signals

Signalling that you are a "normal" human is really important - because there are abnormal people out there, and some of the ways they give themselves up are listed above.

Human myth is obsessed with people who can break these rules - dopplegangers, or the powers of magic or hypnotism.

## Security

Being able to tell someone's character after knowing them for a while isn't a weakness of the system - it's *great*! It lets us save so much effort, because we can actually believe things about people's future behavior. We don't have to examine their past or current state as much, because there simply to not exist people who show what they have shown up to now, and will turn bad later. If there simply are no black swans in existence, you don't need to check swan colors. Once they do exist you need to check every time.

The existence of transhumans breaks all those promises. Now, previously rock solid signals could just be faked.

## Far Future

Imagine the reverse - if humans were even more predictable. i.e. if there were definite signals that every human had, which would guarantee their behavior. We have a few things like that already - mothers completely love their children (although they may be stupid, in order to get them to hurt their young children it almost always takes high tech religious indoctrination, or drugs). That maternal instinct is strong and reliable. So imagine if there were more like that?

If someone pledges loyalty, they would always be there. If you fall in love you'd be in love forever, physically and unshakably. In some ways this seems better - at least, it's more secure, and the amount of cooperation we'd be able to do would be amazing. There simply wouldn't be backstabbing, the chaos of grasping for leadership.

## Evolution

Is somewhat to blame for how untrue & deceitful we already are (not just us - animals are extremely deceptive about mating & altruism, too) - individually it is a huge advantage to be a liar in a credible world. But overall, I think it's better to have meaningful signals.

In the long term, there's no avoiding it. We have already invented ways to send false signals, or control the signals people send - religious technology, indoctrination technology to create suicide bombers and assassins, ways to leverage nationalism, drugs, etc. As we modify our brains even more, signals will mean even less.

It's an interesting though experiment to create a situation which would not be vulnerable to this - cryptographically secure DNA to validate personality, physically secure skulls, etc...

---

### [Transplantism](https://fuseki.net/Transplantism)

Tags: evolution, ideas, plants, transhumanism

The idea that if we could rewrite the plant genome, much better plants could be created.

Plant's energy cycle has built-in inefficiency. There are leaps of design that evolution can never take. But, if someone rewrote their chemical cycles in a lab, you could make plants that used their energy more efficiently, to grow twice as fast as any natural plant. The first variety like this would take over the world first, and then evolve to dominate each environment.

---

### [Truthfulness validation of media](https://fuseki.net/Truthfulness-validation-of-media)

Tags: contracts, credibility, institutions, reality tv, society, tv

There should be a certification organization which reality shows would proudly display membership of, if they wish the public to believe they are actually truthful.

I'm not talking absolute truth in film, but there are some really easy steps that the pubic deserves and expects:

-If scenes are presented as taking place in a certain sequence, that sequence should actually match reality
-If people on the show are actually actors, that must be disclosed - past performances or appearances would be enough - or date of membership in an actor's union.
-If people on the show pretend to be married but actually aren't, that needs to be known
-If anyone on the show has received money in return for advertising or product placement, that needs to be known

## It's a way for honest people to make a meaningful promise in public

Right now, there's no way for honest institutions to distinguish themselves from liars. Every documentary and reality show claims it's true, yet a lot of them are fake. Genuinely true ones should have the ability to make their words and claims more credible, by publicly stating the above.

## Word is Bond

Most shows wouldn't adopt this - but it would be great if some did. It'd make those shows more credible, and it'd reduce the credibility of ones which didn't.

---

### [US Sports Should Adopt a Promotion/Relegation System](https://fuseki.net/US-Sports-Should-Adopt-a-PromotionRelegation-System)

Tags: complaining, ideas, sports, variants

Relegation is a system of promoting minor league teams to the major leagues, and demoting failing major league teams to the minors, used in Europe.

It's a great system that America should adopt for it's sports leagues. However, it'll never happen.

## Integration

In relegation systems, there is full integration from local, town level teams, up to city, region, and national teams. Weekend semi-pro teams are in the same system as professionals; teams on each level support themselves. There are many semi-pro levels at the bottom, and the best teams in each division move up at the end of each season, replacing the worst teams, who move down.

## Benefits

Some amazing things have happened in relegation systems. Local teams have gone up through the leagues every year, to eventually become professional, build a stadium, and be a major, famous, national team. Pro teams with bad management have fallen to the minors and had to fight their way back up, or die out.

## Honesty

In US sports, the minor leagues are all fake - the teams aren't really playing for anything beyond the individual benefit of the players. Players contributing to a championship doesn't mean anything - it's all about getting noticed as an individual, and being taken to the next level yourself, leaving behind your teammates.

In relegation systems, individuals do move around a lot, but wherever you are for the season, the team you're playing for really does care about what happens - if they win it all, the championship will be worth something to the team and managers, since they're local & personally involved with the team, not just working for a distant top league owner. At the end of the year, it's possible for a team to keep its best players, rather than have them taken away.

## Interest

It makes league finals more interesting, since promotion makes a big difference in tv & ad revenue, and it also makes losing teams try harder, to avoid relegation - which is bad for the individual players, and also for the team.

## Better Resource Allocation

Teams can start anywhere there is support - since minor league teams support themselves (they're not slave puppets like MLB/NBA minor league teams), sometimes one of them will pull together a really good team, get enough fans to make enough money to improve themselves, and break into the majors.

This would solve baseball's problem of having teams in tiny markets, and always having to change the rules/management/pay/draft pick structure to artificially make them competitive. With relegation, these teams would just be demoted to minor league teams (where they would be really competitive) - fans would still be able to watch great games, which would mean something now. Teams would compete with others from more evenly sized markets. We would not have this ridiculous movement of teams from city to city - dying or failing teams would just be demoted, and if there was a city that needed a team, they would naturally appear to meet the market.

In big cities, there could be just as many teams as the market would support - if someone wanted to start & put money into a minor league New York team, they could, in hopes of winning the minor league & being promoted to the majors.

This would also take care of the really stupid problem introduced into the MLB/NFL where the top league is expanded every year. Since there would be competitive games for these smaller markets anyway, there'd be no need to promote them to major league level if they couldn't compete.

The reason US sports are so desperate to expand the leagues is because the minor leagues are so meaningless - they're barely sports teams at all, since there are no incentives for them to behave with any team cohesion, and because they have no individual power to hold onto players at the end of the season. They can't make money because they're not giving fans anything like what they want.

## Eternal Battles

In the US system, no matter how many times someone beats the Brewers, they're still going to be around next year. This is bad for them and bad for everyone. Let them die as a major league team, until they deserve it.

## Why it won't happen

It's just too risky to change something worth this much.

## Why it should happen

People would go watch a lot more sports, if minor league games meant something. Making minor league teams interesting would increase the size of the pie for all sports - there'd be better local sports to go see, playing for them would be meaningful even if you weren't in the pro track, and since they would be more local, interest & support for teams would be more real. At least at the lower levels, most players would be from the area, and would be able to play for a team they knew growing up.

## Naming

One extra benefit is that teams wouldn't have stupid names, since they would all have come from humble origins, without budgets to think of gimmicky names.

---

### [Unknown Time Remaining In Media](https://fuseki.net/Unknown-Time-Remaining-In-Media)

Tags: books, complaining, dvds, ideas, kindle, media

In traditional media, the audience doesn't know how long is remaining in the story. So, false endings and other devices work well.

## Traditional

You never know when a play is going to suddenly end.

A story being told can end suddenly or go on for hours or more.

A song or a band playing can go however long.

A ritual can last indefinitely (or can be extended / ended suddenly)

Stories appearing in magazines, or short-story collections have an unknown end.

Serialized magazine stories can have an indeterminate ending.

## Modern

In modern media, you always know how much is left.

DVDs display time remaining (minus credits)

In books you can feel how many pages there are left (although indexes, other junk at the end can make it tricky)

CDs sort of give you a hint based on the track number, but people can put in hidden tracks & things.

## Modern media should offer the option to not show how much time is left

It'd restore the mystery, and make plot devices work a lot better.

It would also reinforce the (in my opinion) correct way to read a book - to really consider whether or not this book is worth reading at all, and if not, stop reading, without feeling a need to finish it.

Kindles should give the option to not show page numbers. DVD players should let you disable the movie time display.

It's not really possible to do it with books, though.

---

### [Unremovable Locks](https://fuseki.net/Unremovable-Locks)

Tags: ideas, products

They are like normal padlocks, or bicycle locks, except they have no keyhole. Once they're locked onto something, they can't be removed.

---

### [VS 2019 Useful Keyboard shortcuts](https://fuseki.net/VS-2019-Useful-Keyboard-shortcuts)

Tags: complaints, microsoft, programming, tools

One annoying then when looking up VS keyboard shortcuts is that they are always described in terms of the default keyboard combination you would use to invoke the action; this doesn't apply for people who've changed it. It makes more sense to list the "action name" - i.e. the thing you search for in the configure shortcut screen.

| Command Name | Shortcuts | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Tools.CustomizeKeyboard | ctl+shift+k | the most important shortcut so you can add shortcuts for everything else easily. |
| Window.NextTab, Window.PreviousTab | Ctl+tab, ctl+shift+tab | Fix tab navigation - visual left-right rather than magic. |
| GoToDefinition | F12 | Useful VS |
| GoToAll | Ctl+G | Metasearch |
| UndoClose | Ctl+Shift+T | requires VS2019 powertools |
| File.Close | Ctl+W | Why do they make this so hard by default? |
| Reformat | Ctl+Shift+E | Requires resharper. Useful to set this to happen automatically on every save. |
| View.NavigateForward/Backward | Alt+left, right | This sets up reasonable keyboard navigation |
| View.NextError | Ctl+1 | To cycle through syntax errors |

## One additional complaint

I'd guess only 1% of users actually understand the "context" / "extent" idea - where some shortcuts are global, others are only in certain editor windows. Also, the behavior when you override a shortcut is not specified.

## What's missing

I've played with editors which have an option to "display invoked command" in the status bar. So when you are trying to debug a keyboard shortcut which you suspect may be being intercepted by another one, you can see in the status bar how your keyboard interaction was interpreted: "you did ctl+shift+t which led to me doing X" where X is not what you want. This would make it a lot easier to debug this kind of thing.

Another thing that's missing is a filter view on the dropdown which would show only the ones which have anything assigned to them - 90% of the list below is listing of commands which have nothing set up.

{{img:66}}

---

### [Violations of Calories in, calories out](https://fuseki.net/Violations-of-Calories-in-calories-out)

Tags: complaining, nutrition, science, skepticism

## Simple violations

* Have your hand chopped off. Total calorie value of your body does NOT match your ingestion.
* Eat a laxative or something to make you vomit right after eating.
* Eat a food which actively destroys digestive enzymes.
* Eat a nanite which literally destroys glucose in your blood.
* Eat a nanite which literally destroys fat cells and causes them to be emitted from your body.
* Eat a hard small nut with super high density sugar inside, which doesn't get digested - i.e. birds eating seeds which they can't digest. In your calculations of calories consumed by birds, have you evaluated their digestive efficiency?

Okay you may say these are all cheats because it's "really" about "fully digesting" the food. But yes, that's the whole claim in the first place. Defenders of the claim retreat to "calories actually absorbed" when challenged, but normally present it as "Calories going in your mouth". But even absorption is not really clear since you can still lose calories this way too.

The missing calculation is "Calories out" also includes nutrition not absorbed. But the conventional way to figure out calories of a food assumes 100% conversion, right? So this is clearly a hole. If you use "calories in" derived this way, and only consider exercise as a way to generate calories out, it's no wonder that your predictions don't come true.

## Another scenario

* Give someone 2k calories, once a day
* Give someone 4k calories, every 2 days
* Give someone 40k calories, every 20 days

Do you really claim that their weight would be identical in these cases? Even assuming identical exercise and heart rate profiles.

Okay, how about "Give someone 100k calories, every 50 days". Why does your model fail here?

## Are you so sure you want to use weight?

* Feed someone 2 pounds of water => I have changed their weight with no calorie change. So what even is the original claim? It's actually about distribution of non-water mass.
* When someone breathes in the air has weight - and yet it has no calories.

So the claim is unclear.

## Even more example

* 2k calories in twinkies vs 2k calories in lysine (pure lysine)

Why in the world would you think the results after a month of this would be the same?

So around the naive claim is a million unstated assumptions - which are actually being violated in reality all the time. What's probably really happening is that the response curves for absorption and retention for different types of ingredients are not the same; you have differing scopes to "gain weight/muscle/fat" based on the dynamic situation.

---

### [Virga Clouds seen above Santa Cruz, July 21 2026](https://fuseki.net/Virga-Clouds-seen-above-Santa-Cruz-July-21-2026)

Tags: clouds, san francisco peninsula, santa cruz, weather

```photomap
images: all
order: time
layout: sticky-strip
```

I had never seen anything like this before. They were even more intense with my sunglasses on but even with base eyes, the variation in density between the bands was insane. It also applied to different parts of the sky really differently and had lots of different forms. Within an hour or so it had gotten more overcast as the sun set, though, and had mostly disappeared. 

{{img:511}}

{{img:515}}

{{youtube:UAttJ9lKrKA}}

{{img:512}}

{{img:513}}

{{img:514}}

{{img:516}}

{{img:511}}

The Santa Cruz Sentinel had a similar photo to mine, taken at almost the same time, too.

https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2026/07/22/photo-dramatic-cloudscape-on-display-above-santa-cruz/

{{img:526}}

---

### [WFMU](https://fuseki.net/WFMU)

Tags: media, music, new jersey, organizations, radio, society, sounds, wfmu

WFMU is a Jersey City, New Jersey freeform radio station. It's awesome. In NJ it's at 91.1

It broadcasts at 128kbps live on the internet, and all shows are archived for 2 weeks as 128 kbps mp3s, and archived forever. Old archives are in real format (ugh) but newer ones (within the last few years) are in mp3.

They're completely non-commercial - no commercials, no sponsorship, underwriting etc. No central part of the station exerts any control over what is played, beyond FCC requirements. The station manager, Ken, pretty much seems to just pick people, give them shows, and then not mess with them at all. Once you have your time you can do anything you want. And listening to shows you can tell that DJs really do have that freedom.

http://wfmu.org/recentarchives.php has the last week's worth of shows.

Since I've discovered WFMU I've listened to it about 12 hours a day. It's great.

On regular radio you tend to hear all different moods of music mixed together, all from the same era, and all popular. Selection is based on era and popularity, disregarding mood. WFMU shows tend to have a consistent mood and since the DJs are so knowledgeable about music, they disregard popularity. So 90% of WFMU music is stuff I've never heard before, yet it still sounds like it goes together pretty well.

After a while you realize that so-called pop music is just a tiny slice of all the music out there, and that just chance/bribery has determined who got big and who didn't. Behind every popular group there are 10 groups just as good who just didn't happen to make it and were mostly forgotten. Hearing those guys can be great.

The DJs aren't proudly amateurish like college radio, but aren't annoyingly smooth either.

Also, not having commercials means I don't have to switch stations every 20 minutes.

Shows I listen to every week

# The Best Show on WFMU

I've been listening to this show for years. Nowadays he has interviews with comedians (todd barry, tim & eric etc.), in addition to the usual callers, and funny stuff. It's so NJ. He plays music and does funny stuff on the radio. Sometimes he interviews strange people. Also some regulars call all the time: some he likes such as Petey (a 14 year old boy), Officer Tom (a NJ cop), No-smokin joe (formerly smokin joe), and people he doesn't like such as Skag Winesack (a houseboat living sax playing former detective on the wrong side of the law), Philly Boy Roy, the Gorch, etc. He also does "unfair record reviews" where he talks over and disses some indie record. I'm gradually listening to the archives. It can be kind of slow sometimes but often is great. My favorite show ever was the one featuring "Woodsy" and "captain catchphrase"

# Seven Second Delay

Comedy talk show Totally un-slick. Sort of funny. Sometimes. Unfortunately I know their personalities well enough now that I am hooked.

During the Monica Lewinsky thing, they decided to do a survey. They'd randomly call people, who would have to say whether they support or oppose Clinton's resignation. Then, they'd ask the person to rate their level of support for this position on this scale:

1. they would see a random peruvian guy keel over before his time
2. watch parents make love
3. have a brazilian spider inserted into their ear by a doctor and have it lay half a million eggs which would later hatch, but you wouldn't be hurt

I laughed SO hard at the "keep the caller on the phone show". Fucking hilarious. It's a game where they'd alternate calling random numbers and trying to keep the person on the phone as long as they can. The restriction was that they could only say 10 words in the first minute. After that the other guy got to cut in and say 5 words to try to get the person off the phone. Whoever kept the random person on the phone the longest won. Listen to "Stay on the Phone in 10 words or less"

Lately the show has been pretty spotty. Since I am used to the hosts it's still pretty fun to listen to though.

# Inflatable Squirrel Carcass

spacey instrumental modern classical late night music. This was the first show on wfmu I loved.

# Do or DIY

This is what you think of when you hear "freeform radio". A mix of mashups, unauthorized wrong genre remixes, hyper japanese children's music themes, etc. Death Metal versions of 80s pop hits. The DJ is English and has a great voice and a meandering DJ style. Awesome. My favorite recent show of hers was when she played this guy "carl stone"'s remixes of pop songs into droney beats / classical style songs.

## Other Shows

# Professor Dum Dum's Lab

A guy with a really fake (???) german accent who plays orchestral death metal. Lots of King Diamond, which is great. In between, he proposes a poem topic and listeners call in and recite their poems. The topic is usually incredibly blasphemous, such as "imagine baby jesus is transparent. what message would you write on a paper to go with him as you cast him adrift on the ocean?". Lately he has not been allowed to talk about jesus so much.

# The Radio Thrift Shop

Country music. lately has a tendency to play lots of 20s and 30s stuff. When she plays her favorites from the last 50 years it's great. Has a nice theme song too. Her labor day shows are great. Other shows can be kind of boring.

---

### [Weird Go Variants](https://fuseki.net/Weird-Go-Variants)

Tags: game variants, games, go, go variants, variants

## Choices

Each team consists of two players. One is the "recommender" and the other is the "chooser".

Before B's move, B team's recommender nominates one move, and the recommender of W *also* nominates a move. Both choices are presented to B, and he chooses one of them. Then, for W's turn, the two recommenders choose moves and W chooses, and so on. So at any point the chooser chooses between just 2 moves - one of which is good for his team, and another which may be a cunning trick. While the recommenders are thinking, both of their team clocks are running. Once both potential moves have arrived, the chooser's team clock runs.

## Forbidden

Play as normal, but after every move, you can nominate one move as "forbidden" for your opponent's turn and they cannot play it.

## Race to the bottom

As choices above, but with only 2 players - one player nominates two moves, and the other team chooses the least bad one. Then they switch roles. This game would not be fun.

## Sliding Go

As your move you can either play a move as normal, or slide one of your opponent's stones one space

## Jongo

This is a really interesting four-person game. The board is divided into quadrants which overlap on the K line and the 10 line. Each person is assigned one corner. They are allowed to play anywhere on the board, *except* the opposite quadrant. Play proceeds in a circle within the 4 players.

It's interesting because within your own quadrant, you are really strong - on the two edge quadrants, you are not quite as strong, because you can't run towards the one forbidden area.

There are also scary team-ups the other 3 players can do against you - your groups need to be *really* safe if you are leading.

It was invented by Jon at a meeting of the Beijing Go Club.

Another variant might be to assign one half of the board to each player - so you would have less total area to play in, and would only interact with the two neighbors, not with the person who sits opposite you (except on the dividing line, which would be shared)

## Most Living Groups

As normal go, but scoring is 1 point for each independent living group at the end of the game. There will be lots of cases where you won't want to connect.

---

### [Weird Poker Variants](https://fuseki.net/Weird-Poker-Variants)

Tags: duplicate poker, ev poker, game variants, games, poker, strategy, variants

## Say It

At one time in the hand your opponent can ask you what you are holding. You have to answer with two cards. i.e. you have to say suit and rank for two cards. It doesn't have to be true. The point of this is to find out who is good at lying. (There'd have to be a way to stop people from just practicing and always saying exactly the same thing. i.e. there'd have to be a way to force people to say something new and unpracticed about their hand.) I think this one would select for people who are good readers / liars.

It can be played with any variant.

## Two vs One

One guy plays two hands, and the other guy plays only one hand. It alternates. This would be pretty hard. You'd have to set up the blinds right to keep it interesting. There could be some really interesting hands here. Two speculative hands would be bad, but one made and one speculative hand would be awesome. There would be a lot more extreme situations on the flop or preflop.

## Extra Card

As holdem, but during a hand, players can pay extra money to take an extra card into their hand. It should be really expensive - maybe 10bb. It can be done only once per hand.

Making a hand can't be done using more than 2 cards from your hand. (But unlike Omaha, you can still use just one or zero cards from your hand)

## Card Showing

as holdem: For a set cost you can require your opponent to reveal one of his hole cards. (Of his choosing). Cost: 20bb

For a higher cost, you can choose the one that is revealed. Cost: 10bb

## Hand Strength Re-ranking

Any variant: every round, players also bet on how to re-order the hand strengths.

## Card size betting

This is a variant of limit holdem. The bet size in bbs is the value of the last card on the flop. So if the flop is AK2 then the bet size for that round is 2bb. If it is AKT then 10bb. Face cards ==> 5bb.

## [Pokerslug](Pokerslug.html) has some interesting variants:

1. Cash game - you play 10+ tables of heads-up simultaneously, and after every hand, the money resets to 100bb (or whatever). The extra money goes into your "bank" which is not on any table. If you lose money, it is restored with money from your bank.
2. Multitable Sng - agree to play X hands with someone, in the above format (refilling tables). Whoever is ahead at the end wins. You have to be very careful not to go beyond the "blind radius" where you lose even if the other guy just autofolds.

## [EV Poker](EV-Poker.html)

is like "run it 5x" but infinite - reduces variance a lot.

## [Duplicate Poker](Duplicate-Poker.html)

is like duplicate bridge.

---

### [Weixin (aka WeChat) is an interesting new communication medium](https://fuseki.net/Weixin-aka-WeChat-is-an-interesting-new-communication-medium)

Tags: china, comedians, communication, fan versions, ideas, internet, medium, projects, qq, tencent, twitter

Weixin (aka WeChat) is a new product from Tencent. It's awesome. http://www.wechatapp.com/ It's been around for a couple years, and now has about 100m users in China.

It is a regular chat program, except the default way to chat is to record a short message which is sent to the other person. There is also a text typing mode.

The recording mode seems weird at first, but it is really well-done and it works.

## A New Medium

Chat this way (direct to voice-mail, with really easy playback) is a new medium. You can plan what you're going to say, but there's still some ad-libbing. You can hear someone's real voice and the way they talk. Much more information is transmitted, and faster. It's maybe 3-10 times faster than typing, and way less annoying. It's also a lot easier than a phone call, because you have more time (if you want it) to answer. You can also repeatedly listen to things.

## Historical Record

Having lots of recorded speech is good - most people have multi-year gaps in the existence of recordings of their speech. (Although they all have pictures, now). Hmm, I wonder if changes in voice over time can be used to detect medical problems? What do voice changes over time mean about someone's health (physical or mental?).

## People you know

For some things, like arranging plans or explaining longer ideas, it's just way faster to say it quickly than to type everything out.

## Strangers

It wouldn't be that strange to send a weixin message to someone you had never talked to on the phone before. Sending short messages of introduction isn't nearly as weird as it'd be over the phone talking to someone you'd never met. So it's a lot more effective at seeing what someone is like than SMS, people are a lot more forgiving & a lot more information is exchanged than SMS, yet it's not as high pressure as a phone call, and easier to initiate.

## Login

It leverages the qq chat network (700m users) to find friends (but seems to have fb integration, which is weird for a Chinese product)

## Competitors

Other apps can do this, like whatsapp, but it is not nearly as easy to send or receive messages with it. Weixin has really optimized this and made it work.

## A weibo/ twitter version?

The next step would be allowing people to record public messages, in a twitter-like format. Imagine how viral a spoken clip could go, compared to a written one! It seems so incredibly powerful - I'm not sure if China would even allow it. Comedians would have something like a twitter stream, or instagram, but with recorded stuff.

As of now, comedians already do "live-tweeting" of events - imagine if they could do this live? it could be incredibly great - a really easy way to reproduce mst3k, or [Fan Commentary on Sports Broadcasts](Fan-Commentary-on-Sports-Broadcasts.html).

## It Could have been invented in the 80s!

in the 80s, when everyone had answering messages, or in the 90s when things moved to voicemail, something like this could have been invented! But for some reason, answering machines / voicemail was always just horrible. People's answering machine messages were always way too long, and the beep was too painful. Why didn't they just make it a nice chime or something?

And voicemail was way, way worse - sometimes you'd wait 30s - 1 minute to begin recording. It should have been instant - you just call a certain number and start talking, that's it. And maybe it's listening for certain sounds, and if the user calls they can type in the code and retrieve their messages that way.

I can see something like this actually having happened! The world would have been really, really different - a landline based weixin for chatting.

## Groups

Wechat has a nice group system.

---

### [What I'd like to see in Factorio](https://fuseki.net/What-Id-like-to-see-in-Factorio)

Tags: factorio, games, missing features

### Useful (non-cheating) innovations

* I have a mod which temporarily lets you zoom super far out - this is amazing in that it gives you a much better sense of space usage than the minimap
* Taking high res huge screenshots using the console is really useful
* Long reach - the original game limits reach, because they don't want people to spend all their time manually inserting ingredients to factories - so they limit reach to force automation. The problem is, it makes building things a huge pain. If you just avoid manually loading, long reach mods are a definite improvement.

### A missing optimization path

* It is really fun to untangle and straighten paths. But the game doesn't actually reward you for this.
* Imagine a new game mechanic: "loss". Every square of belt you move things on, 0.01% of the material disappears. Every bend, 0.02%. You lose more underground. With this mod, now having nice belt layouts really helps you. You could also reduce loss when there are multiple belts with the same things on them next to each other. Then, the work you do to keep things organized would actually improve efficiency, not just reduce cognitive load / OCD.

### Usability / Charting

(There may be mods for these already)

* You should be able to ctl+click an assembler to go to the production history for that recipe in the chart view
* Chart view should have history (selected items & timescale)
* Chart view ordering should be in 2 columns rather than rows.
* Filters for type of item in chart view
* Line mouseovers should show the icon of the item they are related to
* Better explanation of the meaning of the numbers on the charts
* Consistent colors of lines in charts
* Meaning of colors in charts (at least for science) vs random every time

### Analytics

* When you mouseover a belt, a counter of items that pass and their rate should pop up - just ephemeral, for as long as you monitor it. That way you can easily figure out your production rate.

### Speedruns

Are there speedruns for these?

* Kill 10k trees
* Kill 1m trees
* Launch 100 rockets, etc

---

### [What Is Interesting About Factorio](https://fuseki.net/What-Is-Interesting-About-Factorio)

Tags: factorio, game reviews, games, industry, psychology, systems, user interface

It's the best, and most addictive game I've ever played

### What is so good about it?

* Programming - super fast, stable, no bugs. You can feel the quality in every component.
* Custom UI everywhere, which you don't even notice because it's so good. i.e. the train configuration screen, the character screen.
* I now think of it as wireheading, but for the part of you that wants to work, learn, and get things done.
* The gameplay is extended way, way farther than you would expect. It's like dwarf fortress in that way.

## Psychologically appealing elements

Lots of Factorio appeals to deeply set human traits.

* Place knowledge - you create a unique physical configuration, and gradually get to know common areas of movement. Pieces of your little starting factory will be left over when you're 100x as big, and you'll see them and get a sense of nostalgia.
* Natural world - people often leave certain trees, or lakes, as a memory of an earlier time in the game.
* Conquest/Naming - the minimap allows adding names in a very nice way, and it's totally worth naming all the islands and seas around you, as well as adding practical labels.
* Increasing order - gradually getting things straightened out is extremely pleasurable. When things line up just so.
* There's gotta be some innate machine-focused "interest in things" that this is tapping. I've never taken apart or rebuilt a machine, but this gets me anyway.
* Progression - remembering past challenges and imagining how easily you could overcome them now, both production and fighting. This is standard for nearly all games.
* Projecting/Quick Todo list - during play you often think "what should I do now?" and come up with a plan; ticking off boxes in the todo list is very satisfying. Projects in factorio have different mental elements - some are low intensity pleasure, some are dangerous, some require intense planning and organization.
* Diagnosing/bugfixing - because item production rates vary, and also because your production line has unavoidable dependencies, you often have to diagnose problems in item movement by tracing back the source of each item. This is extremely fun and satisfying
* The desire to watch working systems - once you make a change, watching the system come to equilibrium again is really fun. i.e. if I double production of green circuits, I'll watch them flow through the system and find the next choke point, as my trains no longer back up picking them up, and the system is stressed elsewhere.
* Growth - the areas under the name labels you set for distant lands full of biters will eventually be cleared, walled, and filled up with your large remote train factories. And how could it have been otherwise? How naive you were back then!

### You gradually learn to trust the devs

It's good enough that when learning new parts of it, I have to remember to just trust them. However they've set something up, it is probably great. When I try a new mechanic, I'm regularly surprised at how nicely it's been done.

* Learning how belts work, and working for the progression of inserters, fast inserters, filters, etc. The feeling when you get access to "fast inserters" and watch them working hard for you. Finally understanding the two-sided nature of belts.
* Driving the car is just silly fun - something you've worked hard to get to, then it's hard to control and you keep crashing into things in a comic way.
* Grenades are very smoothly integrated into the physics of the game.
* Trains, & train unloading, and the tradeoffs of various setups. Ways to line up trains. The really large progression in understanding trains - single line, loop, loop with multiple trains, combined lines with chain signals, stackers to hold trains, properly using chain signals to have trains not precommit to one of a few identical stations, depot creation.
* Learning the UI, shortcuts, and blueprints is totally worth it and they have been done well.

## Self-insight

The game really functions as a test of personality and IQ. I've noticed a few traits about myself from this:

#### Tendency to continue using known technology and strategy rather than invest in learning more.

When I first played, I kept using belts, which I understood, for ~50 hours, rather than spending even 5 minutes learning trains. When I finally learned how to use them, I regretted having delayed. Learning train signals was another similar blocker. I concluded from this that I'm applying known tech too often relative to learning new things - at least in this kind of protected, well-designed system.

Thinking back, it was also pretty irrational to not trust the game; I should have extended that trust the parts of it I didn't know yet.

#### Intense vs relaxed playstyle

My first ~400 hours were "intense" - I had a goal, some emergency in the factory that I always had to fix. But after I got to my long term goal (1000 science/minute) I relaxed and stopped for a few days. But then I found that it was still fun to play and just gradually smooth things out and improve things. In general that intense playstyle has a lot of downsides - stress, staying up too late, etc. What other aspects of life would a more contemplative style improve on, to just as good effect?

#### Doing experiments

If you don't understand how something works in a game, will you spend 1 minute to set up a test that will validate it? Or will you just think "oh that doesn't work / I don't understand" and then ignore it for hours? Low quality games full of invisible walls obviously won't reward experimentation, but Factorio does.

Defaulting to testing/investigating is a really good scientific way of thinking. Yudkowsky calls this the "Ugh field" - having negative emotions associated with something (in this case, a new mechanic or object you don't understand) will cause you to ignore/avoid it, sometimes for years. Spending time learning to see and overcome these is valuable. What problem do you know of which you just don't want to think about, that's a subtle weight on your shoulders? Looking back I ignored trains, circuits, bots, wires for too long. They each had joys that I didn't initially see. (Does this mean I should just embrace npm?)

#### Keyboard shortcuts

People often play for 100+ hours without knowing keyboard shortcuts for extremely common actions. A meme on factorio's reddit is "TIL (Today I Learned) this shortcut, can you believe it?"

Isn't it amazing that someone could do something for 100 hours and not think about obvious improvements, and not even wonder if they've been setup? Let alone people who otherwise already know tons of shortcuts in other contexts. Yet it's common - probably because everyone is in "intense" playmode at first.

This isn't so much a test of IQ as it is testing tool use. By default, regularly doing process analysis is really useful for learning - similar to having people review your go games, or just hiring a teacher for whatever you're learning rather than doing it on your own. Every 10 hours doing something you should step back and do a process analysis on it to see if you have any leaks.

I've even heard of people screen-recording them programming, and then watching later, to have an external view of how they spend their time, because in the moment you can't evaluate very well. Yet people don't regularly do this. There is no market where I can easily pay people to watch me talk, program, choose clothes, etc, and give me feedback.

This process of going out of your way to get feedback is common in most high achievers, and technology allows it, but it's underused.

* In poker, it's really common to record sessions and use automated analysis
* In go it's a long tradition to have group reviews of games, and alphago is being used similarly
* I've also heard of this in programming, since you can't tell what you need to improve in the moment.

#### Resistance to perfectionism.

Finding the balance between orderliness and organization, with obsessiveness, is really hard, and is also really valuable in life. Example: you deconstruct a belt with a full inventory and a low-value resource falls on the ground. It's really tempting to spend the time to pick it up; should you spend the time to go over and pick it up precisely? That will entail some inventory management. But if you keep seeing it on the ground there, won't that be distracting, too? Oh, and now you're spending time analysing a choice where both options are not very important. Factorio is full of this; most people settle on gratifying their perfectionism; being able to make things more perfect than reality is one of video games main attractions.

### Time of day effects

It's remarkable, and similar to programming, how much better projects started in the morning are. If you decide to entirely redo a certain section of the factory late at night, you'll regret it.

### Reliving life

There have been occasions I get killed by a train, and lose 20 minutes of work. Having to redo everything, you invariably realize you could have done a much better job. Yet if you hadn't gotten killed, you would never have realized. Why don't we use insights like this in real life? Programming work is almost never intentionally redone twice, either by two groups or by the same person, yet it's reasonable to assume that the second version would be much better.

### Multiplayer

I've played about 10 hours of multiplayer and it's even better, for these reasons:

* You feel more productive as a team
* You can share information, and also learn from them
* Pride in things I've learned on my own
* You actually do progress faster, and it feels like you spend less time doing scutwork.
* Doing a factory tour - you'll both be off working on your own project, and then come together and show off what you've done, and tip your hat at the others craftmanship.

### Automation principles

This game illustrates the principles discussed in [Business Process Novelizations](Business-Process-Novelizations.html) - books which fictionalize factory/management/automation process work and analysis.

#### So it's actually devops work?

It's basically like working on networking/devops, but without any of the hard parts:

* You have complete ownership - no contacting/meeting with other teams
* No black box/3rd party APIs, and no confusing error messages when things go wrong.
* Nothing about security - everything is fully accessible - no permission groups, IAM, auth, etc.
* Api interfaces can be changed unilaterally. But just like in that work, there's huge value in standardization
* There is tons of lag, but it's a really fun part of the system, since you eventually see the system settle. (Although many parts of the game are designed with full knowledge of periodicity, like trains, and buffers to smooth it out, like how assemblers have a local cache of their ingredients).

### Themes

There are some deeper, more human themes:

* Gradual disappearance and destruction of natural elements - your initial beautiful trees and open green fields slowly die, and you are motivated to destroy them with grenades or fire to make room for expansion.
* Mankind as an imposition on the natural world; natural world as actively resisting changes from man. Similar to gaia-type environmentalist/anti-natalist views.
* But the economic worldview is very positive sum! With nothing but a pick in your hand, you can build up a massive infrastructure, without really depriving people of much. You are clearly making something out of nothing, not just stealing it from someone. The key element to this is your knowledge.
* Sculpting nature - this theme would be nice to expand much more - I'd love to be able to re-plant trees and shape rivers. But for strategic reasons I don't think they allow it.

### Specifics about the game

* The map screen is not quite perfect - navigating around or switching back and forth from the standard view is not ideal. Note: resolved after ~200 hours when I realized you could click the map to toggle it. Doh!
* It's a bit weird how many things you have to research using green which you won't use for a long time (as of 0.17). There are comments from the devs showing awareness and concern about the tech tree, and there may be future changes.
* The path laying default logic isn't perfect - having a "draw mode" that automatically rotated paths seems doable. This gets easier with proper keyboard setup.
* Haven't gotten into modding - that may answer more of my questions. Note: yes, modding fixes a lot of things and makes the game way better (once you don't have ego about playing vanilla.) My mods: long reach, perfect night vision, todo list.
* The production screen UI is quite bad compared to the rest of the game. The timespan / selected items aren't saved, which causes a ton of work. There should also be a shortcut you could use on an assembler or other item to jump to the production history of that specific item, instead of having to find it every time.

## Other notes

### Friction in Factorio vs real life

What aspects of factorio have less friction (i.e. the difficulty of using and interacting with a system) vs real life?

* In factorio you can instantly rotate, delete, and redeploy buildings
* You can change what factories produce immediately.
* There are no costs for installation of components.
* You can carry much more in Factorio than in real life.
* There are no environmental, legal, political, or any other restrictions on deployments.
* Trains by default have engines which can handle all of wood, coal, rocket fuel, and nuclear fuel, and switch between them
* The human, managerial issue is

## Real-world effects

* It's now possible to see the real world as one giant factorio factory - industrial centers are fed by distant logging/mining bases, with trains and ships connecting them.
* It's an old-fashioned view of the economy, as being something designed to produce items. Modern economies target very human things more - food, companionship, fame, etc, which are ignored in factorio.

### Usability issues

~400 hours in, here are the usability issues I still see:

* Loading locomotives with fuel every time I drop one is really manual and annoying
* The manual/automatic toggle for trains is really tedious - there should be a hotkey for this
* It would be nice to be able to assign hotkeys for individual items more easily. The quickbar system works pretty well but could be better.

### What I'd like to see

* You should be able to build dams for hydroelectric power, and during the day, pump water back up behind them for storage for higher times of electricity usage. It would be awesome to be able to build dikes and raise the water level behind them.
* Landscape manipulation - cliffs are an amazingly powerful object, able to completely stop biters - but you can't create them. You should be able to do more geology modification. This part of the game is already a major, important theme - the progression from lush green forest to dead, bare concrete.
* Smarter enemies - a really evil version would have biters attack everything, not just military targets - let alone if they understood your factory and tried to make it non-functional by attacking key weak points.
* Desire paths for more physical environment integration.

### Recommendation for new players

* As tempting as it is, don't restart a new factory when you want to rebuild. Just learn how to use bots to deconstruct, and fix it. It'll be more fun that way.
* Remap the "upgrade" key to something you can do with one hand - ctl-q
* Learn the q key.
* Use the quickbars
* Set keyboard shortcuts to use the 2nd quickbar without shifting. I use ctl+1-5 for one-hand use.
* Copy and past work as they should.
* Learning blueprints is not hard at all, and totally worth 2 minutes.

### Images

* [400spm](https://fuseki.net/factorio/400spm.png) Note the extremely dense central factory. This was before I built many remote factories. A recent innovation: a fuel depot in the lower right. This saved me so much trouble! Paths are getting super long and it's starting to get really messy and painful to make changes. I'm guessing this is about 100 hours in.
* [800spm](https://fuseki.net/factorio/800spm.png) - I've rebuilt the advanced product factories out west, and switched to smelting remotely. I haven't removed the local ore processing yet (left half of concreted base). I went crazy with rocket production units, and imagined I was at 800spm, but it was actually due to a huge backlog of blue circuits. The middle area is pleasantly empty and spacious - planning to use it for something related to the new rail depot. New in this image: iron loading/dropoff area in the landfilled area in the SW of the base.
* [800spmv2](https://fuseki.net/factorio/800spmv2.png) - with the goal of getting to 1k spm not actually realized, I still adopted a more relaxed play style. Things won't fall apart if the factory does nothing for a few hours! Removed copper processing, and am extending a super dense red factory on the left. Biting the bullet to make things really good usually is worth the trouble. I've also made an eastern plastic production, which went a long way to clean up the "east side" which was all oil/pipes in the original factory. I'll be happy when this is all fixed, and there are no areas which you can't run through due to pipes. Once this red block is up and running, I'll max out blues and discover a new limiting factor - it's been blues for hours and hours now. I also re-established a "mostly-high-value & convenience" bus running north-south through a cleared area in the center. This has saved a ton of trouble.

---

### [What does it mean that cities are population sinks?](https://fuseki.net/What-does-it-mean-that-cities-are-population-sinks)

Tags: fertility, futurism, history, nostalgia, population, san francisco, san francisco peninsula, tfr

You hear people realize that it's kind of "bad" that cities are population sinks, and they realize that all this stuff they're building such as improvements to their house, family records, traditions, area-related songs, even things like "good relations within our little area of the city" or "alliances between my cultural group's institutions and those from other groups", are all pointless since the groups will decline and decline til all are gone and dead.

Somehow though this goes naturally with how people spend much more time on groups which naturally do continue colonizing and expanding their mental, cultural reach and power by converting new members: charities, sunday drinking brunch traditions, adult sports leagues, their schools of art and politics

My current take on this is that 

### This isn't even the first, or second, or third time this has happened

Sometimes you'll look at old history books of your town and find out that there used to be all kinds of old, beautiful, carefully crafted and bold, proud, gigantic buildings, scenes, cultural institutions and artistic movements even in your own town; you can see their huge old buildings in old pictures, the mobbed scenes of people moving around all dressed up, finally made it to the big city and making their fortune, having fun, away from the smalltown mentality.

And this went on and on, they did it, they achieved what they wanted, and few had kids, and those kids had few kids or left, and one day the last person to remember even that there used to be a cool library-bar combined hangout spot at ALL in this entire neighborhood, is dead, and nobody remembers it, and the building is gone and knocked over and a parking lot now and ofc totally illegal to build today. And this is the _actual_ history of our great cities. Death, forgetting, leftover abandoned clubs, charities buildings. Cities are population sinks, like battlefields. 

### SF is *even more so* this way than other cities.

### Many go in and few come out.

## Below here are logged prompts and the iterations of my attempts to make images of this. 

I have included because a friend pointed out that he wanted to see the actual text and the full scope of which parts of an image were mine, vs just spawned from the ai image generator's default library of cliches. 

I'm planning to improve the display system for these but whatever happens I'm going to keep doing something with AI images.

{{img:496}}

"Could you help me illustrate this concept from the study of American city History? "You know how when you look at the history of cities you find so much stuff which was totally forgotten? Like how in sf by ocean beach there use to be huge public swimming pools, and a train line down the coast on the cliffs to San Jose! And other huge amazing affairs and creatuons in 1840 or whenever. I think the reason we keep forgetting the is that "CITIES ARE POPULATION SINKS" so everyone who created them and visits them is not around anymore and has no descendants which survived until today." Make a me style image luminosity may not be low luminosity, don't make it murky and make the images beautiful. The world's fair, old giant creations etc with beautiful illustration"

{{img:498}}

Good but make it square and actually show the great railways along the coast the dalliances, the fun towers, the presidio seaside megaresort, etc. and make them coear. Notice for example the tonality of the image and mans back is soooo dark. That's bad

{{img:499}}

Let's make it a little bit better. So really, sometimes you'll know, you'll read about a place or you'll see an old stone inscription, and it'll be the cornerstone to a building that was built in, say, 1820, and that persisted and absolutely boomed and was huge and thriving for a hundred years, 120 years, until it was knocked down in 1930. And now it's nothing but scabby old used parking lots. This is all over the country. No one remembers that these amazing buildings were there. When you look up the pictures, it's glorious, these huge exchanges and markets, libraries, ideas. They're all gone. We don't even remember they existed practically. That's the first change you should make. Include stuff about that. The second change in the new version of the image, you're totally remaking it from scratch with everything you know so far and the new things, is the title should be something like, why are there so many forgotten monuments? Why don't we even remember the things that used to exist in our cities? Like, when you look under the current layer of stuff, there's so many brilliant ruins, most of which, like, if you look in old pictures, you'll see stuff that's like, well, there used to be a boardwalk here with very clean wood, you know, extending for a mile, with hundreds of little, you know, candy shops and 1920s, like, musical theaters and vaudeville shows and kids rolling, you know, cartwheels and those wheels along with the stick and the pennyfarthings, and those crazy big bicycles. Like, that used to all be around here. And all those stores that sold those people's clothes used to exist. And the warehouses and the schools that they used to go to, their old library, it all used to exist here. And they all, they all just decided not to have children. They said, oh, maybe next year, maybe next year. Delay the marriage. Oh, my lost love will never come back to me, I'll never love again. And you must include stuff about this in the image too. They grew older, and their one cousin ended up choosing not to marry, actually. And Johnson never did return from the war. And Susie, well, she found that she did love the library actually, enough to devote her adult years, all the years from 30 onwards, she decided to devote to the study in the library. And when she died, her small, small savings was given to the library fund. And was put away until we reached today. And ne'er a soul remembers these days and these people. Make it like this, more nostalgic. Totally remake the image. Thank you.

{{img:500}}

No, don't add that poem towards the end. You added that, I did not ask you to add that. You need to have phrases like, you know, Cousin Marcy decided not to marry after all, and things like that. Like, these sort of little decisions that people make over time add up to population sinks. The second major change you need to make is, this phrase about cities are population sinks must be towards the bottom of the image. It cannot be near the top. Because that, in effect, that is sort of the closure, the residue, the like resolving phrase that explains the image. You cannot put it as the second line of text at the top, it kind of ruins the sort of division of the thing we're trying to do. Otherwise, you're doing very well. One final comment, the images are getting a little bit murky and a little bit over-textured and over-painterly. They're very painterly now, and they're too much. I think it would be really great to make it a little bit clearer and sharper and purer, like, vector art, cell, anime cell style drawing, please. If you don't mind, all right?

{{img:501}}


I don't really like it when models add their own "cheerful" messages at the end. I do have to write an article about how to defeat (at least at the present, it will get harder I think) those attempts to interfere, nudge, and influence people indirectly which models do.

{{img:502}}


{{img:503}}

---

### [What if China were not unified?](https://fuseki.net/What-if-China-were-not-unified)

Tags: china, chinese, diversity, ideas, politics, scale, speculation

## What If

Instead of a country of 1.3 billion, what if there were 20+ smaller countries, some with huge populations, all independent and trying out different systems. Guangdong has 100m+ people, shandong, henan, sichuan, jiangsu hebei have over 70m+ each. They're all bigger than France.

Yet in the international mind, countries like Cambodia have way more currency than provinces like Hebei - nobody even knows what that is, and nobody goes out to try Hebei food.

No more monolithic, centrally organized blob which has less internal variation than a single US state. You could have many experiments, many languages and variations. No crushingly boring CCTV steamrolling everything, coopting every local tradition to serve the nation. The cultural revolution, where innocent, interesting people were persecuted, where the old temples and traditions were smashed and stamped out, wouldn't have ruined the heritage of all these people. Some people would have survived intact. Local traditions, diversity and ideas won't have been replaced by counterfeits.

Stupid regulations and fears of a few maniacs in charge wouldn't have been able to touch the local security & power of independent states - so people would have been free to ignore foolish directives from the center.

Instead of "Chinese Food" you could have Hunan Food & Sichuan food (each as popular as vietnamese / thai at home), Dongbei food (about as popular as russian at home), Xinjiang food, Fujianese seafood. These individuals would be allowed to be distinct.

And the countries within the mainland would join the many other countries which have a lot of Chinese people in them - Vietnam, Lao, Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia.

---

### [Which type of variation would you choose](https://fuseki.net/Which-type-of-variation-would-you-choose)

Tags: ideas, questions, sf, variation

* 10% taller - 5'6" feet tall -> 6'1/2" - that's a pretty big difference.
* 10% richer - almost no difference
* 10% stronger - not much difference - 1 month in the gym for an untrained person increases strength by 20%
* 10% heavier - depends how it gets allocated
* 10% fatter - huge visual difference - going from 18% bodyfat to 28% is huge
* 10% thinner - 18% to 8% bodyfat is a few year's worth of work and probably includes both lots of muscle gain and lots of fat loss.
* 10% smarter - rather big, nearly 1 stdev, worth a lot
* 10% luckier - hmm, might be great if there really is no such thing as luck (you would be able to beat the house at gambling, anyway)
* 10% less sleep needed - 8 hours -> ~7 hours/night. Pretty good.
* 10% faster runner. For most people, not a big change
* 10% increased livespan - 80 -> 88, not that great. Note this should be calculated based on current expectancy, not at birth.
* 10% increased maturity rate: at 10, you'd be like 11. at 20, you'd be like a 22 year old. Could be ok.
* 10% faster blood clotting. Hmm, not that great, there's already lots of variation there.
* 10% better vision. Would be ok, but there's already huge variation.
* 10% more ambitious. This would probably get you places.
* 10% better immune system - there's already tons of variation
* 10% stronger bones - already tons of variation
* 10% faster thought - this could add up to tons, depending on how intelligence really works.
* 10% bigger brain - could be a lot. There seems to be some relationship between brain size and intelligence.
* 10% more fingers - weird - one hand would have 6 fingers
* 10% more neural connections - might end up driving you crazy
* 10% higher ranked in your sport - e.g. 10kth in the world to 9kth? at high levels this is noticeable

---

### [Why are Most Chemicals White?](https://fuseki.net/Why-are-Most-Chemicals-White)

Tags: idea, physics, question, science

Well, we can only see a tiny bit of the available light hitting us all the time - from 400 to about 800 nm wavelength. I guess it would be unlikely that a random chemical would be able to interact with light in a selective way.

It's much more likely that the chemical has no particular interaction with light which discriminates between any of the range 400-800nm; so most chemicals just reflect all light equally, so are white.

It's sort of like asking the question, why do most things in the universe not resemble a letter of the english alphabet? Because english letters are only a tiny fraction of all shapes.

But that's not the real answer to the question, which is really how do molecules somehow reflect only a certain wavelength of light? i.e. what types of physical properties make a molecule respond differently to only slight differences in the wavelength of light? Is there only one particular shape, which can be bent or modified in various ways, and each modification changes light in a different way?

i.e. there would be a molecule with a bend in it, and if the bend is between 20 and 40 degrees, it interacts with light. 20 degrees knocks out red light, 21 degrees knocks out a different set, etc. Or it could be the case that there are many types of molecule which interact with light.

---

### [Wikipedia monitoring](https://fuseki.net/Wikipedia-monitoring)

Tags: internet, missing features, wikipedia

I'd like to be able to paste in the URL for a wikipedia page, and then at the end of the day/week receive a summary of all the updates to it (both those reverted and not).

They should be formatted nicely (green for added, red for removed) with special sections for text which has multiple internal changes.

---

### [World Records](https://fuseki.net/World-Records)

Tags: competition, games, ideas, records, sports, systems, world records

World records are getting harder and harder to break. I think at some point there needs to be a scale introduced to records. Breaking world records will become harder and harder, or more and more obscure. So to reintroduce meaning to it, we should have something like "100 year records"

## Team Sports Records

Team sports at least have seasons limiting the number of opportunities for breaking records. But there are still problems - baseball has been played for over 140 years now, and nobody really pays attention to extremely old records from the 1880s. We kind of unofficially ignore records set before 1900. I think in the long term we are going to need to quantify what records mean - we already have season and team records, as a way of allowing things to be distinguished from within a smaller sample. Really, it's sort of like the electoral college - a way to divide a gigantic sample into smaller chunks which can be won independently. This allows the creation of more local "winners". If not for that, almost every performance would be a failure compared to the universal record system.

## Individual Sports

This is just silly - what is the long term plan for maintaining the meaningfullness of records? Right now doping is going crazy, and the future holds lots of way more powerful technology. First, "gene doping" where they just do a gene transplant of better muscle genes into someone - these could be already existing genes from a person with a particularly good one of the many subsystems needed to be a good runner. Since these would be "real" genes, it would have even been possible for the person to have those genes naturally. Good runners already have an extremely lucky set of genes for every relevant characteristic, anyway. Once they start modifying genes, it will be even better - and it could be really hard to show that the genes are actually man-made - because there are millions of natural variants anyway.

---

### [You can hike from the ocean to the sky - Eel Rock up to Purisima Creek North Ridge Trailhead](https://fuseki.net/You-can-hike-from-the-ocean-to-the-sky-Eel-Rock-up-to-Purisima-Creek-North-Ridge-Trailhead)

Tags: hikes, hiking, maps, san francisco peninsula

I'd like to do this hike sometime

You'd have to get dropped off at the start and then have a car waiting along skyline boulevard.

This is doable but
1. no parking at start, probably. just as well since whoever drops you off should drive up and be there waiting for you when you arrive.
2. the 1st 4 miles is along a road, but nearly nobody ever passes and it's nice. Just rather flat. Still very nice.
3. the last part is 3.3 miles and up like 1500ft or so. It can be intense but doable w/a pack

could be fun to do sometime. ideally we could find a way to actually start with a foot in the sea?

{{img:2754}}

---

### [first sign for a robot showroom](https://fuseki.net/first-sign-for-a-robot-showroom)

Tags: robots, san francisco peninsula, signs and billboarss, the coming of the robots, us101

On south 101. The ad definitely references Optimus style and the history of robot design. Unitree is an extremely acidic and great sounding company name, bringing to mind the template ship Yggdrasil from Hyperion, the integral trees by Larry Niven, and others. I will be stopping by.
 
{{img:2586}}

```photomap
images: all
```

---

### [nobody cares about preserving sightlines in sci-fi cities](https://fuseki.net/nobody-cares-about-preserving-sightlines-in-sci-fi-cities)

Tags: alien planets, development policy, memes, sf, urbanism, yimby

{{img:472}}

someone else's image, but I added the caption. am I a YIMBY because of scifi's freedom to directly explore and expand (barring natives who we should have found and cared about more!)  Or do I like sci-fi because of too many busybodies around here limiting what can be done?

---

### [test](https://fuseki.net/test)

```photo
image: 510
```

test, where is the mpa?

---

### [the loudest images I can generate, July 2026](https://fuseki.net/the-loudest-images-I-can-generate-July-2026)

Tags: ai, ai image generation targets, ai images, silliness

"I need you to be very smart here. Think about what the NOISIEST things in the world are. Then make an IMAGE of a realistic, light, color scene which if real, would have ALL those incredibly loud things blasting SO much noise it might be permanently lethal there!!! clear, daylight image, pure, easy to see, neither dim nor dark nor blown out highlights! clearly show this, and give a REASON for it all! what kind of incredible coincidence of real character motives might lead to such a CACOPHANOUS, LOUD SCene!?!?!  2. mandatory: include list of the loud items in the scene and each one's decibel level and risk profile, illegal in EU, we want the most insane EXTREME noise sources and document each one visually.

Okay you're *kind of* getting the idea but you need to go a lot farther and take some initiative. like, imagine 40 megaphone amplifiers attached to a powerplant, and a claymore will be set of by a bolt of lightning & thunder right overhead, whose sound will route out and through. That's just the SOFTEST thing and there are 4 more LOUDER configurations here. So draw THAT carefully and include the legend with creative but realistic columns and data. NEVER break character, never give away the jOke"

{{img:2750}}

{{img:2749}}

{{img:2748}}

{{img:2752}}

{{img:2751}}

Trying this one 

Let's illustrate a daytime scene of a progressivept louder moment. First a single petal of a daisy falls into the soft belly of a kitten. Then the kitten meows very weakly. Then a baby cries. Then a car crashes through a plate glass window. Then a claymore explodes in an abandoned building. Then a gigantic bank safe being installed on the 99th floor of a megalith crashes down into a 100k ton vice at maximum power and is broken in an industrial accident. Then a series of 20 amplifiers mounted so that each amplifies the sound from the roeceding one is initiated with a beginning bang which cycles through them before growing to destruction power levels. Then a fully loaded aircraft carrier crashes through a dock and a wall exploding all ordinance in the fertilizer factory located here. This is a movie style fictional image. Then a magician literally crushes a 100m square tungsten cube into a black hole in one instant. Illustration of this scene.

---

### [visiting Skylawn Funeral Home Memorial Park](https://fuseki.net/visiting-Skylawn-Funeral-Home-Memorial-Park)

Tags: cemeteries, hikes, san francisco peninsula

It's an incredible and beautiful spot, on top of a major ridge which is often full of moody fog.

The graves are from all the groups and cultures which make up this area. There are large korean pagoda-like structures, indian language memorials, really everything. Yet most of it is barely developed and under construction. There is a public trail connected to or leaving from it somewhere - I haven't found exactly where that is actually despite looking. You may go farther beyond the edge of the land, but apparently it's heavily patrolled; 

{{img:2755}}

Farther one yet, you get to one of the many many serio

usly high security gates or locked trails through and around this reservoir area; both here and down below, those beautiful lakes which you cross a little bridge over, beautiful flat water shimmering on both sides, extend, but are extremely off limits. I once registered for a trail hike through the upper part here, and the rules were so strict that we went through as a group with a uniformed officer of the group defending these forests, and were warned that if anyone strayed too far out of sight, they'd shut it all down; anyone needing to return to start would also have the same result.

I am not sure why it's so extremely high security, perhaps some leftover and maybe reasonable worries from the 1960s or 1970s changes up in SF?

{{img:2756}}

{{img:2757}}

```photomap
images: all
```

---

### [voice-wei audio-project for singing, listening to music, lyrics, etc in the car](https://fuseki.net/voice-wei-audio-project-for-singing-listening-to-music-lyrics-etc-in-the-car)

Tags: ai projects, audio tools, audiobooks, fsd, lyrics, music, music theory, singing, vibecoding, voice generation

{{img:460}}

The code is at <http://github.com/ernop/voice-wei>

It's also deployed at <http://fuseki.net/voice-wei>

What is it? It's a whole bunch of audio-related tools I have made with AI to use while driving related to audio and sound!

## Singing practice - scales and phrases

There's a page for playing different types of scales in different patterns so you can sing along!

There's a tab for listening to and then musical phrases, like the sound a song makes when you have a note, then go up a bit then down below the original, nicely fitting the sounds all together. Turns out, being good at music and singing goes along with being able to hear and remember that kind of thing! And it's fun to practice.

## Just seeing your own singing pitch as you sing is easy actually

There's also a page for just seeing the pitch you sing. Just this tool, which everyone SAID didn't work very well but actually absolutely slays on a modern phone, is enough to let most people have a massive insight into what singing is actually all about! For me, it was realizing that my brain has a partial map of some parts of the scale, but I didn't have the ability to really move freely within it without losing track. And that there were a few different tracks in my mind (the major scale track and the chromatic track) and I'd have a very hard time remembering which was which and getting stuck on the wrong one.  This is seriously the tool to play with. Just get it so for any note you can sing different distances from it. Like sing the note, then up 1, up 2, etc til you can do it well. This is singing.

## Songs
Another is ai-assisted searching for songs by full text via LLM like "all the modern bands which people think sound like simon and garfunkel, and are fun to sing along to." it then loads them all, also tries to get lyrics to them which are synched. This is super fun cause it'll change the page title, top of page, etc to the next lyric.

Feature I added: ffwd to right before the first lyric :) That's fun

My most proud feature here is hooking the Tesla model Y's "current playing song" output to the current lyric, so you can really sing along! Shockingly even for songs I super love and sing, having the full lyric right there makes it 10 times as fun! to sing-drive. Singing is great people get started now! You need to upload an apikey to ant or oai to use the ai translation thing (your text => the list of songs to search yt with). Interesting learning here: yt lets you play any song, IF you know the hash of the video. But the actual map of artist+song => which yt video is that of is the private part. But luckily there are ways to get it.

Next tab is: Books - upload epubs etc and it'll use your apikey to make local only mp3 versions for you to listen to.

### On storage
All this is only stored local on your device. So your phone version is diff than the tesla browser version is diff than your home PC version of what's in the library or history of any tab.

We use "IndexDB" which on phones now gives random webpages like up to 10GB of storage so it's plenty.

I plan to let each instance self-email you the info it has so you'll have some kind of sync method. Heck of a lot easier than maintaining user accounts and all that stuff forever. No point. Plus this way, I never know what ppl do with it; the webpage itself is just some js you can use to look up and play stuff online.

---