thing recommendations

• software

  • for android
    • 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.
      • Binding play/pause to long-press of volume up, so that I don't have to unlock the phone to pause.
    • 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.
  • I use linux. I don't know if I'd recommend linux, it's a lot of work, especially nixos, but nixos really is the only non-humiliating operating system ime. It's soundly conceived and it's stable in ways that other OSes cannot be. But if you do use linux:
    • 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.
    • For personal data backup (linux), 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 while to learn. It's not worth it for me to switch now, but I'd recommend using Storj as your storage instead of backblaze, it's cheaper (it's partly decentralized) and probably faster.
    • More on nixos: Nixos is not really a good idea for a developer desktop. We can argue conclusively that it will never save you time because it consists of taking an existing ball of crap (bash and cmake and all that) and then adding more stuff to it (a nix flake). In order to make, or fix, a nix flake, you have to re-do a harder version of what the original author of the build did by figuring out what system libraries are missing and how to get them in nix. It's fucking doomed. A new operating system cannot beat an old one if poeple are still targeting all of their software to the old one. That isn't real. Give up.

• hardware

  • I use a nuphy low-profile keyboard and I think it's pretty great. There are other good low-profile mechanical keyboards though. 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 when the key triggers at all.

• for the treatment of cynicism

  • The Road (2009 film)
    • Depicted Moloch and cracked its mask
    • The book was good, but the film extracted the main therapeutic effect, refined it, increased the concentration, the fire was made bright enough to be understood and the understanding changes your relationship with the world.

• 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

  • 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.

• fonts

  • I think Rubik is cute. I usually go more normal and use Inter UI, and for a serif font I like Averia.

• 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 study of the spirit of coordination problems.
  • The Precipice. An examination of all of the ways the future could be lost
  • 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

  • The Inside View, (mostly entry-level) technical ML discussions relevant to safety

  • Neo Academia: Growth and decay in academia.

  • Skeptoid, discussions of fun stories that aren't true, and their refutations

• 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