thing recommendations

• software
  • for android
    • FUTO Keyboard an open source keyboard. I like how short you can make it so that it doesn't take up so much of the screen. It also has an on-device voice input model that seems to be more reliable (or more predictable, so more reliable if you're practiced with it) than google's.
    • MacroDroid: Simple but flexible event reaction and automation stuff. Some examples of macros I use every day:
      • An alarm that goes off exactly 7 hours after I turn it on, which also silences notifications and calls during the night. This... actually may have led to me developing more regular sleep patterns.
      • I can pause/play whatever is playing by long-pressing volume up.
    • Smart launcher: More customizable home screen. Specifically, I like it because it lets you make your app icons tiny and cram every app you regularly use onto one screen/the bottom half of the screen where it's easier to reach them.
  • tools for thought
    • roamresearch is still the note-taking/list management app I use. It was the first piece of software to editing and navigating pages of trees and it turned out that's really useful. Workflowy is now at feature parity, and is nicer and smoother, but switching hasn't been worth it for me yet (and dismally it would require me to write a roam dump -> OPML converter, apparently no one else has ever done this??). Without it there are many things I simply wouldn't ever remember to do, many research cases I would never remember to feed until ripe enough to turn into a post, and it's also good for putting all of the things you could be doing into a long list and sorting it to figure out what you really want to prioritize in the moment. Most people recommend obsidian highly, and notion also works. I don't really care about figuring out which one is best since relative to what we could have they are all very bad and none of these projects are likely to evolve into the thing that's coming next. But neither of those are good for the crucial reordering a big list activity.
  • Vivaldi web browser. Vertical tabs, correct ctrl+tab behavior (goes to last selected tab), tab search with ctrl+e, shared sessions between desktop and mobile, and the mobile version allows positioning the url and tab bar at the bottom of the screen where it can easily be reached. Firefox and chrome have many of these features, but neither has all.
  • You should disable mouse acceleration: A human cannot learn to reliably move a mouse cursor to the intended location in one motion when mouse acceleration is enabled, it's like introducing random variation in the speed at which movement of the hand corresponds to movement of the pointer, you'll have to check and adjust at the end of every drag. This isn't obvious because you'll only experience the extent to which no acceleration is better after using it for a while and acclimating.
  • I use linux. I strongly recommend it.
    • But there are pros and cons:
      • some general upsides: Stays fast no matter how old your computer is (especially if your distro is CachyOS). Can be much more stable if you want it to be. Trustworthy open source software utilities are easy to find. If you like computers in any way you'll find it a lot less humiliating to use than windows or mac.
      • cons: Not all hardware supports it well. Many large multiplayer games, though they run, will not allow you to play them on linux, out of fear of cheaters (Valve are currently working on the underlying kernel drm issues to tempt these games over, and at that point all Steam games will work fine on linux).
    • If more people adopted of linux, I believe those conses would just go away, it would be all pros. People would start producing hardware and software for linux, the dam would break, and linux would just keep getting better over time (while windows continues to decline). As of 2025 year end, adoption of linux is trending up fast, it's gone from 2% to 5% in one year. Due to the influence of the Steam Frame and Steam Machine (and its successors), this share may just continue to increase. You should come along with us. We'll get it done. Computing will be liberated in a way that's difficult to imagine today, but it is real, it is right there waiting for us.
    • If you use a mouse, you should get defter scrolling, it improves the way scrolling is done. (disclaimer: I made it)
    • KDE is the best desktop environment yet surviving. I use a wrapping 3x3 desktop grid, with Super + D/X/C/V (like W/A/S/D but more conveniently positioned) to move between them, meaning I can switch between 9 desktops with a single keystroke. No other operating system allows this.
    • For personal data backup, I use duplicacy with backblaze as the storage. It encrypts your data and keeps a version history. It's just okay. The UX is pretty bad and will take a day or two to learn. I'd recommend considering Storj as your storage instead of backblaze, it's cheaper (it's partly decentralized) and probably faster.
    • Disrecommendation: I used to use Nixos. Nixos is a bad choice for most people. There's a practice of trying to do as little as possible for each app, to just barely fulfil its expectations, this is fragile and often misses issues. Most software doesn't work right, and the work of going in and fixing it is intolerably miserable. I've given up on it.
      • The only way a project like nixos could work, imo, is if they normalized the use of a full ordinary linux emulator (the closest thing to this right now is "nix-alien") and if they tried to automate the production of nix packages (so that the process can be improved) (and I think those two facilities should probably be the same software project).
    • Recommendation: CachyOS, it's Arch with the holes filled in and a bunch of settings to make the desktop as fast and responsive as possible. I'm having a much better time here.
• hardware
  • I use a nuphy low-profile keyboard and I think it's pretty great. There are other good low-profile mechanical keyboards though (ie, lofree). I strongly recommend a tactile switch type (eg brown), as this is the only type that's been shown to improve typing speed. Red has a perfectly linear force-feedback graph, which means it's not communicating to your fingers when the key triggers, which means you're gonna produce errors if you try to type fast, which means you're not gonna type fast.
• bodily things
  • for teeth
    • flossing: I use a water flosser. I find it a lot less tedious and unpleasant than physically putting a thing in my mouth that touches the grime, and then inevitably producing a load of plastic waste because the disposable picks are the only approach to handling floss that's convenient. My dentist recommended the 360pro, but this is a weird new zealand exclusive device. So you'll have to find your own on the international market. When you do, tell me what you find, and I'll mention it here.
    • toothpaste: I use Ollie hydroxyapitite AND flouride toothpaste, it's rare to get both of these ingredients in significant amounts, they're both individually sufficient for gradual enamel repair and biome maintinence, so it stands to reason that combining them will exceed replacement level and cause our tooth strength to continually increase at a high rate and without bound. I know not where this journey will take us.
    • toothbrush: My dentist also recommended a cheap Oral-B sensitive-softness electric toothbrush, which is perfectly satisfying, I can't imagine what there is to gain from going more expensive. She was emphatic about the soft brushes being better.
  • deoderant: slo, mild scent, effective. There's a particular scent I like a lot, but that's my scent now, I don't want anyone else to have it, so pick your own. I've been pretty much odorless since I started on this.
  • moisturizer: I use Cetaphil, and I've found it to be a pretty effective treatment for dermatitis, far moreso than salicylic acid.
    • however, for dermatitis/dandruff: I'm also getting positive results from doing a thing where, when I shower, I shampoo extensively (Tresemme), don't apply conditioner, then apply pure C8 MCT oil instead (I'm using a local brand so I wont bother linking it), which the malasezia yeast can't digest, so it doesn't cause a flare up, and instead starves them. This is possibly the best treatment I've found.
  • pants: ten thousand interval pants are very good.
  • mesh underwear (for males): The purpose of underwear is basically just to keep your gonads from being in direct contact with your pants, the purpose is not to keep them warm, if you're male it is not good for you for your gonads to be warm. I got my mesh underwear from temu because there really isn't much need for quality for this function.
  • linen sheets: actual linen, which is more breathable. Important if you run hot at night.
• fonts
  • I think Rubik is cute. I usually go more normal and use Inter UI, and for a serif font I like Averia.
• media
  • for the treatment of cynicism
    • The Road (2009 film)
      • Depicted one of Moloch's more insidious manifestations and turned it over onto its back.
      • The book was good, but the film extracted the main therapeutic effect, refined it, increased the concentration.
  • music
    • It seems like nobody else ever did it like Rei Harakami. It's a kind of semi-smooth, fresh and lush digital ambiance.
    • Mammal Hands, boreal jazz, the cold beauty of old old cycles of striving. It's also worth checking out the other stuff Gondwana is producing.
    • The Fair Rain, McNeill and Heys very nice folk music, the exquisite performance of a deep love of life and history.
    • A strange owl on soundcloud used to bring me nice scraps of music before SC closed up, mostly game OST type atmospheres and themes.
  • TV
    • I have a "pretty good" playlist on youtube where I put the very best things I've encountered there. Warning, it's not to be taken lightly, most of it is just entertaining, but a lot of these videos are very powerful and will change you.
    • Bob Gymlan researches Bigfoot and other rarely encountered megafauna. He will make you a believer. https://www.youtube.com/@BobGymlan But why would you want to come to believe in Bigfoot? Well, if you've ever been interested in lions, or bears, or chimps, or orangutans, or any other big dangerous animal, here's another, and it's a special one.
  • some reading
    • Unifying Bargaining, in which the analytic philosopher, Diffractor, outlines the profound conjecture that all of the robust formalizations of negotiation (all of the known methods by which opposed agencies can agree to peace) arrive at the same plan. Reassuring on a spiritual level if true.
    • Meditations on Moloch. When we find ourselves in self-perpetuating conditions that nobody wants, who is responsible? Moloch is responsible, and we should hate Moloch very much. A way of understanding why the world can be bad in ways that few even in power want it to be.
    • Terra Ignota. A historian's saga about a future society's lurking repressed toothed truths, global taboos, hiding realities of power, and as the bubble starts to pop, it just gets juicier and juicier. Describes many delightful sociotechs and names lots of useful concepts that I think will stay with us for a very long time. Your (cultural) descendants are in it, so you'd better read it.
    • The First Domestication. The beautiful story of our friendship with wolves (and then the story of our tragic falling out with them)
  • podcasts
    • podcasts are good for when you're doing chores or exercising. For a podcast catcher/player, I think the open source antennapod might be the best. I used to use PocketCasts, but I don't think it was better. It didn't allow sharing the episode in a way that links to the podcast's site instead of pocketcast's, which is pretty scummy, and then it randomly lost all of my subscriptions and downloads one day, so that's that.
    • For new zealanders: The Detail. Level headed, fairly deeply researched news stories from Radio New Zealand.
    • 80,000 Hours Podcast, in depth discussions of areas where the world can probably be greatly improved
    • AXRP, AI research with strong analytic philosophy
    • The Inside View, (mostly entry-level) technical ML discussions relevant to safety
  • games
    • Feel free to look at my Steam recommendations/disrecommendations, there are a number of them and it's always up to date.
    • VR stuff
      • Finding a VRChat Avatar that you like is important. This can be a long, intense process, but I'll try to give you some starting points. Here are some avatar worlds, which let you browse some avatars that I think are okay:
        • The Void, various goth avatars. Generally cute, and a bit spooky.
        • The "Avatar Museum"s have some nice stuff. Mostly very japanese, some of it is humorous, some interesting.
        • Tachikoma Garage, You can be one of the extremely extra spider tanks from GITS. Only wear this when you're feeling guilessly and manically inquisitive.
      • Do not play Beat Saber without mods. It's dead boring with the limited selection provided. Playing Moonrider or Skyrider (only compatible with the oculus browser so far) has been... possibly the most joyous gaming experience I've ever had.
        • Decent exercise. Be careful not to strain your tendons. What strains your tendons will only make them weaker.
        • There are some other reasons I like Moonrider:
          • It makes the course bigger, so you have to reach more to hit things, which makes it harder and also a lot more fun.
          • The aesthetics are more minimal/less intrusive.
          • You can see note blocks from further away, so you can practice being less reactive, more flowing, and when you're playing a beatmap that's new to you and in thoery you have enough time to react, but only if you rise to the challenge of getting really good at processing sensory input and quickly converting it into motion. Cool game!
    • The Witness was pretty continuously fun in a way that no puzzle game before it had been, and its most difficult challenges managed to explore a type of reasoning that's currently very rare in puzzle games: scientific reasoning, induction, the generation of hypotheses about the basic rules of reality and then using those theories to create solutions.
      • (my project, Crycog is another game in this genre. I'd also recommend the standard card game Eleusis, and the board game Zendo)
    • There are lots of other great puzzle games compiled by the Thinky Games scene.
    • Portal 2
      • custom levels: If you have Portal 2 (and you should, it's great fun at a low cost), you might not know how great some of the community levels are. Even the bad ones are generally fun to mulch, but there are some really exquisite ones, crucial jewels that could not have been surfaced any other way.
        • Azorae's levels are all extremely demanding genius
        • If you play coop, this one was something really special: The Order of Things 08
        • When you're ready for something diabolical, play my levels
          • Devious Trap Room
          • Lofthall