thing recommendations

• Good apps

  • For android
    • MacroDroid: Simple but flexible event reaction and automation stuff.
  • Anyone who has time for media needs a personalized recommender system. Consider tastedive.com. I haven't taken many of its recommendations yet but they look pretty good.
  • roamresearch is still the note-taking/list-processing app I use. It would be impossible to remember to do things over time without a system like this, and it would be impossible for me to know that the thing I am doing right now is really the best thing I could be doing without having a big list to put everything into and sort. I use roamresearch (over, say, obsidian or logseq, which are also fine, or notion, which is probably better but not as fun to use) just because it was the first one I picked up, and because it had a multi-user mode, but we never ended up using the multi-user mode, and most of my notes have ended up in a private graph, so perhaps that is not so important. I think multiplayer roamlikes will start to sing later, when they start to get sophisticated permissioning and better linking between different graphs. I think as soon as that is built, it will become the better part of the internet.
  • 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.

• 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. I didn't know his music until after he died, and I miss him a lot. 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.

• 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

  • 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)
  • 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