Autumn Thoughts

Predicting the inner workings of rational minds.

Hello from LaGuardia Airport!

I finally have some downtime to write this as my upcoming Frontier flight has been delayed three hours (I’m on my way down to Atlanta for ONA 2024)

An announcement: I’m launching a new blog called Aligned Foresight, where I’ll dive into topics around politics and AI. In the short term, I plan to talk about the upcoming 2024 election, but in the long term I plan to explore better ways to predict both where we’re headed as a society, and where we’d all ideally like to be headed. I’m keeping these more in-depth posts separate from Candid Selfie, which I’m reserving for random thoughts like these…

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🎮 7/20

• I first heard about the “Retold” remake of my favorite childhood game (Age of Mythology) back in July. It’s out now.

• I loved the concept from the get-go: create an almost carbon copy of the beloved game, but with modern-day graphics and much-needed improvements to key dynamics. It’s a brilliant idea because, as stated by the law of entropy, there are far more ways to get something wrong than right. This is especially true when it comes to creating a balanced real-time strategy game. So why risk building a new game from scratch when you can simply tweak something tried and true? (And already heavily patched and perfected since its initial release almost twenty-two years ago. Now I feel old.)

• One improvement I’m extra excited about: they’ve improved the game dynamics around water. Previously the areas accessible to ships and land units were mutually exclusive: deep waters for one, land and shallows for the other. Fleets and armies would only ever meet in combat at the shores, and land units required transport ships to cross rivers. Now there’s new logic around shallows, which can be accessed and therefore crossed by land units and boats alike. This makes for far more interesting tactics. For instance, you can now dam off a river by building a wall through shallows. And the towering titans you can summon, which previously would be confined to the land mass they spawned on (according to the old game logic they were far too large to “fit” into a transport ship) can now walk through any body of water, which makes a lot more sense: any water is shallow to a unit of that size.

• They’re also working on new expansions, including new gods to worship for each civilization, starting with Freyr for the Norse. I’m excited to see where they’ll go next; there are plenty still missing from the original game’s pantheon: notably Hestia, Eros, and Demeter for the Greeks, or Amun, Ma’at, and Nut for the Egyptians.

🚀 7/22

• Acausal Trade is a beautiful concept. It enables trade that travels faster than light. The concept involves modeling what alien civilizations, as fellow children of the Universe, are likely to want from us before we even get a chance to detect or communicate with them. The idea reminds me of gift economies, wherein participants predict what others might want from them in the absence of explicit demand or remuneration. To me that sounds a lot more wholesome than capitalism, though it remains to be seen whether it can be made as efficient.

🎭 7/28

• Product management is hard, because it involves guessing what the user actually needs based on what the user says they want. The two never quite correspond, so shots in the dark are inevitable to make progress. One potential workaround is what I’ll call method product management: replicating the life of your target user exactly. If you are selling to farmers, drop all the sprint planning and Jira ticket creation and actually till fields for a few months, in order to feel the user need to your core.

🏃 7/30

• The best plan is one that you stick to. Recently I’ve begun logging my actual daily activities — including all the time wasting and pottering about — and planning my next day to be an exact copy of it, with only slight tweaks and improvements. Seeing the resulting plan almost naturally unfold to fruition has been, if anything, surprisingly motivating.

📡 8/11

• Idea: find the exact location where your data plan has the highest download speed, and leave your phone there for a month to download a massive file at the maximum rate. Make sure the file is large enough that the download still wouldn’t quite complete by the end of the cycle. Sue your phone company for lying to you about unlimited data. Profit.

• The flip side of “fake it until you make it” is “buy it until you rely on it.” In other words, American consumerism in a nutshell.

📰 8/18

• Whenever I apply the logic of backpropagation to society, and examine how its flow diverges from where it ideally should, and then trace the undesirable currents back to all of their contributing rivers, streams, and rivulets (incentives, policy, governance, elected officials, and eventually constituents), I often conclude that the most effective fixes to be made lie in simply repairing our media ecosystem.

😤 8/19

• Words are often written to accompany sensory experiences. In lyrics, they accompany audition. In graphic novels, they accompany vision. In a well-written menu, they accompany taste. However, I can’t think of a common experience wherein words accompany smells. Is writing for the nose an untapped niche?

🍋 8/24

• In one of my distant childhood memories, I recall someone at a pool party earnestly persuading me and a group of other children that putting whipped cream on lemonade was a perfectly normal and delicious thing to do. I remember it being strange but indeed quite good. But I’ve looked into it since, and my sense is that this not at all a common thing to do, although whipped lemonade is something.

• Recently, however, while traveling in Sicily, I may have found the origin of that strange conception. It is quite common for locals there to eat lemon granita — essentially frozen lemonade — with a dollop of panna atop it. Perhaps the person who fed us that strange treat was of Sicilian origin.

🤔 9/4

• Would you rather humanity was wiped out, but with all of our values and histories meticulously upheld and preserved by some alien entity, or have all of our values and history completely wiped out, but have some amnesic humans survive and build their own civilization from scratch?

🔌 9/12

• A far more motivating rallying call than Pause AI to me would be: Resist AI. Put down your phone. Eradicate your news feed. Delete your accounts. Resist the irresistible.

🔢 9/13

• It fascinates me that when you stare deep enough into the kaleidoscope of mathematics, you eventually find artificial minds. You start with simple arithmetic, scale it into matrix multiplications through linear algebra, then use those operations to approximate complex functions and probability distributions. By applying calculus, you then identify optimal modifications to make those distributions more accurate, scaling this process until any sequence of symbols can be predicted by these calculus-driven matrices. Eventually, you are able to feed all the symbology you developed along the way back into itself as a training set, until you get a system that is able to approximate mathematical reasoning. Pretty crazy huh?

And with that, my flight is finally departing. See you all again soon!