Feb 04, 2021 — 22:20 #
hi <3
thoughts now at wesleyac.thoughts.page :)
theater like a play, or theater like a war?
i have three chat apps installed with green icons and that is Too Many
timezones are such a nightmare
two tone sirens are so good
the cafe that’s open to midnight was closed, so i found one that’s open until 4am instead 😮
unreasonably happy today tbh
what’s the opposite of forever?
i think the people next to me in this restaurant are on a date and it’s very cute :)
i’m not hungry but i want to eat
beautiful weather today
can i still talk to normal people? tune in for the exciting conclusion!
a thing can have more than one cause
h y p e r
new life goal:
disappear from the internet
cops if your quick
my sinuses were clogged for like 5 minutes after i woke up from a nap and it’s actually so good, i get to ride the high of the feeling of my sinuses NOT being clogged for hours afterwards
thinking about corduroy bedsheets
the nice part about having a tiny apartment is that it’s super easy to clean
brainfeel
languages are so interesting!
i am easily enticed by dictionaries
the freaky thing about potato chips in taiwan is they taste exactly like the picture on the package
thinking about how i say “new york” when people ask me where i’m from.
golden gate park is the ideal park imo
honestly fucked up the number of people’s voices i recognize
i would like to understand LA
was feeling bad for a while, but i think i’m starting to feel better now. things are good.
honestly unfair that you can’t just take one big shower every week and just keep being clean
oh no mosquito bite on the sole of my foot :(((
making a spreadsheet, hell yeah
dns-blocked a bunch of the bad attention sucking websites on my computer, and disabled the apps on my phone. feels nice, although idk how long i’ll be able to make it last.
bring back http basic auth
all money is free money
i just really love networks
thinking about the metrocard aardvark
v i b i n g
love 2 feel bad
one of the few things i miss from america are the enormous cups
excited to get a new taipei city library card! they have a 24-hour lounge/study area apparently, super excited to check it out!
mao zedong thot
mushrooms are nice because they’re both philosophically pleasing and delicious
really loving how many japanese-style bakeries there are in taiwan. and taiyaki from street stands, yum :)
my new umbrella has a light blue underside, as though i should pretend the skies aren’t grey.
who is supporting who?
til that there isn’t a landmass at the north pole? i thought there was, no idea how that got into my head.
started closing on an apartment wow!
wow it feels so bizzare and good to be in a coffeeshop
a text adventure game but all of the items are described in the style of Amazon product names
currently flirting with someone on a dating app exclusively by sending gifs back and forth and it is StReSsFuL
wow big earthquake tonight. biggest i’ve ever felt, even growing up in cali
about to go outside for the fisrt time in two weeks hooray!
just under 24 hours until i can leave my hotel room ð
thinking about how to build spaces for thinking together
slowly orbiting around something good
i am a dumb
i would really like to go outside
ooof stayin up tooo laaattteee
thinking about whether an indie dating site is possible. i used to think it wasn’t, but i’m leaning the other way now. just gotta shift around what your goals are.
hot take: complaining about art is inherently a category of art
love 2 shave those yaks
i cut my fingernails too short and now typing feels weird :(
it’s weird that the clouds look the same in taipei as they do in san francisco
getting really excited to be working on making a better world
hello, taipei
heading to taipei. feels weird.
clouds are pretty
in the liminal space of moving. i do not like it.
fondly remembering taking the bus up to manchester, NH, having a stranger recognize me by my tshirt, and going to red arrow diner with them
saw a flock of around 100 crows envelop the top of salesforce tower today
my phone screen got cracked and i have no idea how it happened :(
idea for a game: a RPG mimicking real life, where you play as a random person, your starting location/profession/social standing drawn out of a distribution reflecting that of all humans on earth.
i have a new mole on my neck and it is Annoying
i had so much caffeine and i’m still tired -.-
i got caught out in the rain for the first time this season. i love california’s version of cold weather — not cold enough to be really miserable, but just enough to make coming inside after a long walk feel really cozy. it’s nostalgic as well, which makes it doubly cozy.
got some rollerblades. went two miles, only fell on my ass twice, pretty good imo.
i had a bunch of caffeine today and it’s extremely good
interesting that bubble tea has the reverse of a normal heat gradient — the hot boba is at the bottom, while the ice floats to the top.
thinking about the process of commodification
feeling really good; fighting to make sure it stays that way while i have the energy
considering becoming the sort of person who uses my custom spaced repetition system to remind me to shower
i’m always surprised when physically large things aren’t extremely expensive
it’s sorta fun how i made this thoughts page right after covid started happening, like a little diary of my isolation time
thinking about “how do you know if someone is a vegan? they’ll tell you” as one of the most blindingly obvious and annoying examples of sampling bias
do i remember who i am? does anyone? we’re all mirrors, in one way or another.
this covid shit really sucks
gonna start calling cinnamon rolls bread rollups
“are you morally obligated to feel X” is such a bizarre question
hmm i wonder why i feel bad it couldn’t possibly be that i had a bunch of caffeine and barely any food today
thinking about how good the TMBG wiki is
trying to think of a definition of a state that categorizes the united states government as a state, but doesn’t categorize google or the NRA as a state, and also is coherent with typical libertarian arguments about private organizations being more effective than states
kcal/hectare-day is such a strange unit
man it seems like there’s rat drama happening and i sort of want to know what’s going on but also really don’t
i’m pretty sure that the concept of eggs going bad is fake
aw man the usps site is down :(
well today is just the most completely detached from reality day yet, thats cool
managed to put my brain in an extremely weird state
i definitly have a twitter crush and this seems bad but i’m just gonna lean into it
my new and Extremely Good music organization system is just keeping a bunch of bandcamp and youtube tabs that people have sent me in a browser tab and randomly ruffling through it whenever i want to listen to something
cleaning the fridge has a really great effort/reward tradeoff
considering advocating for a new all-ice-cream diet
my perception of time, on a micro scale, is completely fucked up. not sure if this is new or not.
i made a bunch of cornbread but then i ate it all and now i don’t have any more and i’m sad
wow boba guys in hayes valley is just straight up not very good? i miss gong cha :(
thinking about explicitly being vegetarian (sans gelatin, rennet, and maybe some fish-based sauces, probably)
pretty fucked up that san francisco is like… 50 square miles
family-owned businesses are just nepotism with a positive connotation
oh i guess i should update the timezone for thoughts! now in pacific time :)
not having a microwave is really annoying. microwaves must’ve been an absolute gamechanger for leftovers.
thinking about how taking your own advice can often be a bad idea — it’s easy to have advice that’s very useful for most people, but the reason you have that advice is because you implement it too much in an extreme. being extreme about it allows you to see very clearly the effects of the advice, but it can often have negative effects that implementing a less extreme version wouldn’t have.
TIL that “peewee” is an official egg size according to the USDA
spending a bunch of money on cooking supplies and realizing that it comes out to the same as like… 2 weeks of getting delivery every day
i really want my bike to arrive in SF :(
i guess they still do happen? but it seems like they aren’t what they once were.
i wish world fairs were still a thing
2020 is folding my laundry for the month and only finding four pairs of socks
youtube drama channels are tabloids for zoomers and honestly i love it
i want reaction videos to the big tech congressional hearing to be a thing
hyped for the 2020 census results tbh
contemplating the symbolism of cleaning your glasses
fucking love it when i get to use nyquist sampling theorem tbh
a moth just kissed my head
thinking a lot about games that give you a real choice in actions, but manage to invert the moral polarity of the actions that you’ve taken by withholding/showing given bits of information later. can this be done well in a way where there is truly no canonically “true” interpretation, where all information is mistrusted? it seems hard, we have a bias towards believing information that is revealed later in stories over information that is revealed at the beginning. maybe subverting that by having a cliche twist reveal, then having a second reveal that makes the first one clearly false would communicate a similar idea?
not really, though. i want to communicate that any action could be morally correct given the right viewpoint, making all options unsatisfying.
maybe that’s a bit mean, though.
i listened in
yes i’m guilty of this, you should know this
i broke down and wrote you back before you had a chance to
forget forgotten
i am moving past this, giving notice
i have to go
yes i know the feeling, know you’re leaving
honestly amazed at the sheer number of different ways that minecraft villagers manage to be problematic
there is one good scene in Interstellar (2014) like 15 minutes in when they chase the drone in their car and hack it, and the entire movie is downhill from there. but that scene is so good.
hair dryer reviews are funny because the best-case scenario is there are 50 reviews that are like “this is great” and like three that are like “two stars: best hair dryer i’ve ever use, but after two months of use it started an electrical fire and burned down my entire house”
tbh, it’s astonishing to me that kanye is only polling at 2%
making funny noises at someone back and forth is basically like having sex
apparently custom ASMR videos where the person says your name is a thing and i looked one up that has my name and it feels Extremely Weird
i discovered that you can change out the nosepads on glasses for nicer ones and this is absolutely lifechanging
reading a bunch of democratic party bylaws today, it’s fucking committees all the way down
you know you’ve fucked up when you start thinking about writing an open letter…
i came up with a really good tweet but it’s about a thing that happened like 3 years ago so i can’t tweet it :(
thoughts got a glow-up :)
been having so many dreams-within-dreams recently. wonder what’s up with that.
i’ve been running a git checkout for the past 5 hours…
“research” vs “exploration”
different things, easy to confuse.
i’m becoming a person who cares about typography and it’s terrible
tbh it’s pretty unfair that docs only look queer on women
massive spike in “what the hell am i doing with my life everything is a terrible decision” recently. do not recommend.
i’m reading a bunch of studies on tool use in animals and it’s really great when they mention that a particular animal doesn’t appear to take into account some property of a tool when trying to determine which tool to use and then they also just casually mention at the very end that humans also fail the same test
“knowledge worker” but “knowledge criminal” instead
there have been an alarming number of bugs in my house recently
thinking about how the “nyc is digging mass graves because of the number of deaths from coronavirus” news cycle was like two days then everybody stopped talking about it
nothing quite like looking at housing in san francisco to remind you what an absolute nightmare world we live in
a little annoyed at how hard it is to build a singlethreaded web server in rust
we’ve got a long way to go with this whole computer thing
auuuughhh why the hell did i decide to listen to this clubhouse audio
i biked 38 miles today.
upper manhattan is very pretty.
til my daily bike ride is 6 miles. that’s a lot longer than i thought!
i bought 7 tshirts online (all the same shirt from the same store) and they shipped them as one order of one shirt and one order of 6 shirts, scheduled to arrive on the same day.
why.
<3 thunder
i’m gonna see a friend in person for the first time in many months! very exciting.
wow, i just feel really bad. that’s cool.
really got a lot of whiplash from being prepared for a nice chill social hangout and instead getting several hours of stressful work
feeling lonely and running through my list of people to call, each one an even worse idea than the previous
also, SSC is definitely one of those acronyms that has multiple very different meanings :p
i’m really amused by the SSC discourse, but really should not comment on it…
why on earth do i ever answer my phone, it’s never something good
i want to go for a nightime bike ride but my bike lights don’t arrive for another two days :(
face mask selfies are cute, tbh
bikes are so good
something i miss dearly about going to physical grocery stores is being able to select my avocados so that they’ll ripen one after the other, and i’ll always have an avocado that’s just the right amount of ripe.
thinking about the aesthetics of privacy of your image/voice vs data - cameras and microphones are viscerally creepy, other forms of data collection aren’t. does it make sense to weight the things that are visceral as highly as we do? i can see how it would, but it’s hard to think about.
the problem with living in NYC is that any impulse purchase i want to make can be justified with “well, it’s only N weeks of rent”
increasingly looking like NYC had a ""“competent”"" coronavirus response compared to everywhere else in the US which is just fucking horrifying
i really do not get how Matthew Yglesias became a thing
so apparently all of the not feeling anything for the past three months was just saving it all up for today
tbh really not looking forward to anarchism suddenly being in vogue
i am not smart
well it’s nice to remember what working hard is like. been a solid like 3 years since i’ve done this.
ahhh, the “lay around naked until i finally get around to getting an air conditioner” part of the summer
i just wanna make out with my friends again
ramekin is a pretty fucked up word. that’s all.
my beard is long enough that i can stick a comb in it and it just sits there
i love that “zoomer” is unironically a thing now
luv 2 see notifications that my friends are on signal. fuck em up.
took a walk through downtown brooklyn today. surprised at how normal everything feels.
ugh, my bike got stolen :(
i hope whoever took it needs it more, but also just ugh, this means i’m going to need to wait a lot longer before i can bike again :( :(
i don’t know if what i’m doing is helping, but at least it’s something.
feeling hopeful for the first time in a while
well, seems like no more 2am walks for a little while
the way that youtube sponsorships have destroyed the concept of having a conclusion in a lot of video essays is really sad to me
i’m really, really tired, and i don’t know why. have a few hypothesises but really not looking forward to having to go figure out wtf my body is doing.
i found out a very funny thing today but i can’t share it anywhere :(
i think the way to fix twitter is to just immediately and permanently ban anyone with more than 1k followers
i feel like the ""“patronage”"" model is pretty fucked up in a ton of ways, but also it seems reasonable to work in the system that exists? idk
thinking about just paying some writers i like to write things and making a little book/magazine of it? i think that this is not actually very expensive for a tech person to do, i sort of wonder why there isn’t more of this.
my bike shipped! super excited :)
i really wish lobste.rs was better than it is
taking a vitamin d pill at night feels wrong, because vitamin d is sunlight and it’s dark outside and i should be sleeping
when will google let me give them money to just never see the recommended youtube videos
huh, did a double take seeing a “log in with TikTok” button for the first time today
my bag of sour patch kids had a piece of licorice in it by accident, and licorice covered with citric acid is actually pretty tasty
my pile of books is somewhat overwhelming
luckily two decades of toxic masculinity has made burying my feelings instead of talking about them pretty easy, so i’ve got that going for me
so it turns out that all the people who i can call up when i’m sad go to bed at fuckin 8pm
haven’t slept which definitely means it’s time for caffeine
i cleaned my glasses for the first time in months and it was a truly magical experience
https://www.sheldonbrown.com/ is so good
the distinction between knowing what you’re getting yourself into and realizing what you’re getting yourself into is underappreciated
way too tempted to just write my own rust web framework
using comparisons to cars when talking about risks should be banned
everybody complains that lisp has too many parens, but then they freak out when you go full RPN
starting to think that telling people to only pay attention to reputable sources has resulted in people turning their brains off when they are reading things on reputable sources.
reputable sources can be (and in fact, often are) wrong!
i want to socialize more but i’m so tired
ugh i’m so tired
https://hanabi.site is online :)
i used the word “extant” in a sentence that wasn’t contrived and i feel very fancy
starting to think that the web has reached two local maxima during its entire existence: GeoCities, and jQuery.
oops i forgot to sleep :(
i want to make a webring
i’m really glad that i decided to do NGW things
amazed at how long the “a little X, as a treat” meme has stuck around
random 2am thoughts:
the utility that i get from a book is not reduced by a book having factually incorrect information, so when i review a book for other people, factually incorrect information only is bad if it paints a story i don’t like. this seems ok to me.
things in the US seem like they could get very bad very quickly? i think when considering bad outcomes in the US i’ve been overestimating the likelihood of economic collapse (still very likely), and underestimating the likelihood of other bad things, which are less globally correlated than economic collapse.
legibility politics is something that i want to think about a lot more. there seem like there are really fundamental connections here with language and power and other things that i’ve spent a lot of time thinking about.
hmmmmm is it time to retreat from all human contact again?
food should cost a lot more than it does
ok i gueeessss i maybe have a couple crushes on internet people? imo that doesn’t really count though.
it’s international tell your crush day and somehow i don’t think i have any crushes right now? i blame the pandemic :(
disappointed that you technically can’t send an A3 zine through the mail as a postcard (it’s too thick, so it counts as a letter)
TIL that “Mailpiece Design Analyst” is a job
ok it was too weird i changed back
wearing a different pair of clothes than i usually do for the first time in more than two months. feels weird.
weird feeling when someone meets me and my brother (separately) and their first question is “so, uh, what was your upbringing like?”
adding a book to my reading list just because the title has been stuck in my head since it first came out a year ago
fuck i miss climbing
aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhh it’s finally reading outside in the hammock weather
(probably has been for a while, and i just hadn’t noticed since i’m not going out during the daytime)
pretty convinced that “minimalist” software just means software that’s written by an asshole
prediction: in ~50 years, starlink smears and similar formations will be a thing that people appreciate and think looks good - it’ll follow an arc similar to debates about the Eiffel Tower.
(this doesn’t mean that starlink is good btw, it’s bad because centralizing communications infrastructure is bad, and people’s aesthetic concerns are also valid. but aesthetic concerns will change over time, and once people are used to seeing smears like starlink, that will become part of “natural beauty”)
i should maybe think a bit more about how much i optimize to maximize other peoples yearning for me…
Right Round The Clock is the song, i was getting it confused for Mad World, which it references:
> I’m feeling kinda crazy, I’m feeling kinda mad
> The dreams in which we’re famous are the best I’ve ever had
> I’m feeling kinda crazy, I’m feeling kinda mad
> The dreams in which we’re famous are the best I’ve ever had
> You’re the best I’ve ever had
> You’re the best I’ve ever had
ah i found the song! it wasn’t actually a remix it just has lyrics that conflict with a much more famous song
fuck a song that i have stuck in my head from some youtube rabbit hole weeks ago was apparently a remix so i can’t find it by searching the lyrics and now i’ll probably never find it again :(
it’s gonna be funny to go to the climbing gym when this is all over and just watch everybody be complete trash at climbing
i like writing code, but i don’t like having code
thinking about getting really into parsers
hmmm i just emailed a @gmail.com address that i haven’t interacted with before with the word “sex” in the title and a link as part of the body text, what are the chances that they’re ever going to see my message…
huh, i just now realized that the reason that i always mix up it’s and its for possessives is because you use an apostrophe to indicate that a name is possessive, but that’s more of a special case than anything.
remembering when someone found a bug in some code i wrote when i was at google, but was like “i don’t think the bug could be here, this file is copyright google so it’s probably right”
thinking about running a rss-only blog
because of course i need more places to write things…
<3 thunder
you know that programming advice is good when you have to scroll the wayback machine all the way back to 2001 to see it
APIC and ACPI being entirely different things which interact with each other in subtle and annoying ways is some strong chaotic evil energy
the web is bad
wasm is magical
does my version of thoughts support linebreaks?
maybe?
content-addressable types
i figured out how to make my hair be straightthis is a gamechanger
huh, i didn’t realize that Notes on the Synthesis of Form and A Pattern Language were by the same person
i want a “calendar”, but instead of being a calendar it’s a constraint solver/optimizer that i can feed arbitrary constraints into (both binary, like “i need to visit this store, which is open at these times” and scalar, like “i want to assign X weight to getting my quota of exercise in”). then the calendar part is that it also speaks ical so it can know about less flexible events and show everything in one place.
i guess one change in my politics in the past ~4 years is that i think i basically support a californian independence movement at this point (and if it includes cascadia, even better)
i don’t check twitter for one day and my housemate offhandedly mentions the Six State Council coming together to form their own govenrment. i ask if the nation-state of California is part of it, but no, they’re part of the separate “West Coast Pact”reality is a bad sci-fi novel, but hey, at least i’ll get to see the collapse of the american empire within my life ¯_(ツ)_/¯
strongly considering becoming anti-floating-point
starting to think that a lot of liberals really hate the idea of trump, but not like, any specific thing that he’s done
cannot stop thinking about this tweet.
my crappy but convenient earbuds broke, so now i’m using my nice but sort of annoying headphones, and wow does everything sound so much nicer
ugh i got up at 11am for a thing but it turns out it’s at 1pm
starting to get a little annoyed at my sleep schedule - it sucks to wake up and have no idea what time it is.
there’s something special about writing a proxy - at first, it just works and is completely magical, and then you can start dipping your toes into the stream of bits going past, mucking with things here and there and seeing what changes, slowly understanding the structure of the protocol going past you. it’s a good way to understand a system.
fuck how is it 4am already
ok i wrote my own varint parser, that wasn’t that hard
gotta love finding a library that “parses varints,” does not specify what type of varint it parses, and lists as example applications, three different protocols which all use slightly different varint specifications…
slowly coming to terms with the fact that i am bad at writing computer programs
started watching the most recent Well There’s Your Problem, and getting really frustrated at how bad leftists can be at… not being wrong about things. there’s this whole generation of Chapo Trap House/Mike Gravel/Well There’s Your Problem style leftism that seems to be pretty effective drawing people in, but does so by just lying and/or not bothering to research anything and just assuming all facts line up with their worldview, and it’s just really frustrating to me :/you don’t need to make shit up to convince people of leftist ideas, the truth works well enough for that.
having lots of thoughts about how credentialism relates to the current covid-19 situation. i still don’t believe in credentialism, but i do believe that it doesn’t make sense to trust inexperienced people. it’s hard to communicate that distinction, though, especially given the nebulousness of what counts as “experience”i think it’s somehow tied in my mind to the sre org at goog, and how that was so full of people who had taken weird paths to get where they ended up, and were really great at their jobs because of it. i’m sad that that’s not something we see in other fields much, especially given the value that i think there is in applying the sre skillset to other domains.
uh, it’s a little strange that that didn’t prompt for my password, but ok….
if this works, then it means that the integration with my password manager worked :o
i can write thoughts from vim! that’s cool :)
testing writing text in a file!
links and shit maybe work?
