John Mathena
9 followers · 16 following · 1085 views
on the atlas · 46
- Against SURA — LessWrong13 savers
- Against_Interpretation1 savers
- Moral Theories as Approximation Methods2 savers
- https://cs.stanford.edu/~jsteinhardt/ResearchasaStochasticDecisionProcess.html31 savers
- Research Lessons I Learned at MATS & Redwood — LessWrong13 savers
- Information Theory, MacKay1 savers
- What if not Circuits? — LessWrong3 savers
- Don't Go Quiet On Me (by Opus 5.5) - YouTube1 savers
- The Sleuths Who Expose When AI Goes Rogue - WSJ2 savers
- Project Swap: What happens when agents trade for us? \ Anthropic2 savers
- [1810.05934] A System for Massively Parallel Hyperparameter Tuning1 savers
- Paper-Reading for Gears — LessWrong2 savers
- [math/9404236] On proof and progress in mathematics3 savers
- Mother - by Mills Baker - Rats from Rocks3 savers
- The Otherworldly Ambitions of R. F. Kuang | The New Yorker1 savers
- Discovery of a new OpenAI agent message board12 savers
- The McPhee method « the jsomers.net blog1 savers
- Backsliding, by Meghan O’Gieblyn15 savers
- The Saturation View3 savers
- The Meridian of Her Greatness – sam[ ]zdat2 savers
- Introducing the Conceptual Reasoning Index — LessWrong2 savers
- Student of Desire | The Point Magazine7 savers
- How diplomats see the world - by Abi Olvera1 savers
- Our position on open-weights models \ Anthropic7 savers
- Answers to Job - by Bentham's Bulldog1 savers
- Contra Pritchard On Liberal Happiness - by Scott Alexander1 savers
- How two socialist brothers helped automate America’s hardest job1 savers
- a theory of invention; or why you're an inventor too2 savers
- On Being A Conservative - by Cass Sunstein1 savers
- Emily Wilson on Translations and Language (Ep. 63) | Conversations with Tyler1 savers
- Odyssey Review 2026: Nolan's Odyssey Reviewed By A Scholar | GQ Australia1 savers
- The Paris Review - The Crane Wife - The Paris Review14 savers
- Infinite America - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge1 savers
- Value Beyond Instrumentalization — Letters to a Young Technologist5 savers
- The Analytical Language of John Wilkins1 savers
- A Philosopher’s One-Word Theory to Explain Why the World Feels So Weird3 savers
- Your ‘antiques’ are the most modern things you own | THE WORLD OF INTERIORS1 savers
- Rest in motion24 savers
- The gender equality paradox that wasn't1 savers
- ALIGNMENT - by vincent huang - a slice of my mind22 savers
- Emotional Intelligence Amplification—Asterisk4 savers
- There’s no speed limit57 savers
- Playing to Win1 savers
- trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of...3 savers
- Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main Magazine2 savers
- you like books and think they are your friends - by Ava19 savers
highlights · 47
There's nothing wrong with using technology to be better at something, my dude.
Emotional Intelligence Amplification—AsteriskKimo’s high expectations set a new pace for me. He taught me that “the standard pace is for chumps” — that the system is designed so anyone can keep up. If you’re more driven than most people, you can do way more than anyone expects. And this principle applies to all of life, not just school.
There’s no speed limitThe pace was intense, and I loved it. Finally, someone was challenging me — keeping me in over my head — encouraging and expecting me to pull myself up quickly. I was learning so fast, it felt like the adrenaline rush you get while playing a video game. He tossed every fact at me and made me prove that I got it.
There’s no speed limitI’ll bet I can teach you two years of theory and arranging in only a few lessons. I suspect you can graduate in two years if you understand there’s no speed limit.
There’s no speed limitThat said, it's also fun to just mess around. It's fun to explore new characters, new strategies, and to do silly things. This type of stuff is actually really useful even if your ultimate goal is to win.
Playing to WinIf you play in such a way as to maximize your chance of winning, it means abusing everything "cheap" that you can. It means frustrating the opponent, using bugs, and anything else you can think of that's legal to do. When all this comes together, it gives you a deeper kind of fun than is possible at lower skill levels.
Playing to WinThe actual game really should be more fun if it's not degenerate.
Playing to WinOr to be more charitable, their argument could be that the game becomes less fun if they use tactic X, or character X, or whatever. That might be true temporarily until they figure out how to beat whatever it is, but ultimately the experts are having a more nuanced exchange, more opportunity for expression, for clever plays, for smart strategies, and so on.
Playing to WinThere are plenty of games that become more fun as you get better at them, rather than less fun. With a good game, getting better and better at it reveals more and more depth to you, rather than exposing the game's shallowness.
Playing to WinSome games don't hold up to high-level play. That's sloppy design in my opinion. A solid game holds up to experts playing it as hard as they can against each other. That way, the game can be fun for beginners and experts.
Playing to WinA scrub would disagree with this though. They'd say they are trying very hard. The problem is they are only trying hard within a construct of fictitious rules that prevent them from ever truly competing.
Playing to WinThe scrub mentality is to be so shackled by self-imposed handicaps as to never have any hope of being truly good at a game.
Playing to WinFor those people who are trying to win, they should make (tournament-legal) moves that help them win rather than moves that don't.
Playing to WinI, too, like salt and garlic. But there is more to being skilled in the kitchen than the simple act of generously applying a few specific seasonings that can be relied upon, in a pinch, to make a simple meal taste pretty damn good. So it is, too, with literature.
trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of...If you’re anything like me, and you actually do this, you’ll feel something like: “ahh, finally, I can breathe again.” Good human-written stuff is doing something much subtler and more complicated than just kicking your eyeballs over and over, hoping that at some point you’ll exclaim “gee whiz, the robots sure can write these days!” and end up pressing a positive-feedback button in a corporate annotation inference.
trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of...It seems to have been coined by Allen Ginsberg
trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of...That perfect, telling detail that creates an instant visual image. The ideal of certain postmodern schools of SF is to achieve a “crammed prose” full of “eyeball kicks.” (Rudy Rucker)
trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of...5) an eyeball-flatteningly fast pace—it moves WAY too fast. Every line of dialog advances the plot. Every description is functional. Nothing is allowed to exist, or to breathe. It’s just rush-rush-rush to the finish, like the LLM has a bus to catch. Ironically, this makes the stories incredibly boring. Nothing on the page has any weight or heft.
trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of...It knows a few good tricks. The first time you see them, they seem pretty impressive coming from an LLM. But it just… keeps doing them, over and over – relentlessly, compulsively, to the point of exhaustion.
trees are harlequins, words are harlequins — hydrogen jukeboxes: on the crammed poetics of...I'm not religious, but from what I've heard about church, people are coming there with the best intentions.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineThat is a beautiful thing, but I also think I had this obsession with making things work to the point where I would be screaming about loving people's shadows
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineI think we're gonna drift back into a place where it's really precious to ask people to pay attention to something, let alone buy something, and that's why I love live so much.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineThey're selling more vinyl now than they did in 1975 - literal proof that the structure of capitalism doesn't mean anything.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineAnd it's really caused me to want to be on tour as much as possible because it's a space where: well, first of all, I love the barrier of entry; I love the fact that myself, my band, my crew, and the audience all had to go through quite a lot to be there. It automatically creates a space that is a hell of a lot less bullshit because everyone wants to be there.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main Magazineit's just exactly what it is
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineI don't know if it's healthy, but it led to some good songs.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineI've had that experience a few times in my life, when you go from fucked up to scared, sad, depressed, to vulnerable, but when you get angry it's really cool, because that's when you're like: 'Fuck this, I'm tired of this part of myself.' If you can hold anger in the right place, it isn't self-hatred, it's a separation from this part of yourself that is really mean to yourself.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazinePeople love to imagine art as this sort of boundaryless concept, and in many ways, I feel like that's how a lot of the most boring things are made. This idea of finite space, whether it's an album, or a palette of instruments, or just the themes in terms of the band and what I do, I'm always just looking to shock myself - like you said, within the playground.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineWe all have this mythology and story about ourselves, right?
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main Magazinemotion makes me think of songs. It makes me think of ideas. But it is very often wrapped up in leaving, it's not always like the sweetest concept.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main Magazinemusic transports you to a time and can transport you to a feeling and a state of mind
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineBleachers songs are what happens when you shake someone to hear what's inside - like if you pick up a present and rattle it
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineWell, yeah, but there's a lot more to it.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main Magazinesearch of finding your 'people'.
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main Magazinewhich is that you're truly just making it for yourself
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main Magazinebonus context to help those he cares most about empathise with him better
Interview: Bleachers - how to leave your hometown and survive. | Coup de Main MagazineBecause love takes you past the need for prestige—past rationality and diminishing marginal returns—into a room lit up purely by desire.
you like books and think they are your friends - by AvaThat’s love: not expecting a return on your investment.
you like books and think they are your friends - by Avastudying hard “what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.”
you like books and think they are your friends - by AvaHe was later to tell her that words were no accident, their arrangement and choice was like another voice speaking, a voice which revealed everything. Vocabulary was like fingerprints he said, like handwriting, like the body which revealed the invisible soul, which expressed it. I think the ultimate act of love is to be able to describe someone very specifically. And of course you can usually be more coherent and articulate in writing than you are in conversation. So in that way love on the page is more genuine than love in real life.
you like books and think they are your friends - by AvaI believe in narratives but I believe in language more. Like of course experience is just text all the way down. Of course love is just being able to talk to someone and talk to someone and talk to someone and never get sick of their words. The only times I’ve read about relationships in books and thought, I want a love like that is when two people talk to each with these incredibly specific and wonderful vocabularies.
you like books and think they are your friends - by Ava“all awareness is a linguistic affair”
you like books and think they are your friends - by AvaBecause reading is just brushing up against someone else’s mind. Sometimes you’re so enamored that you want to read everything they’ve ever read just to be a little closer to them.
you like books and think they are your friends - by AvaBut I think that if you are devoted enough to reading you automatically begin to write.
you like books and think they are your friends - by AvaI don’t think of reading as productive. I think that if you believe reading has to be productive you don’t really love books.
you like books and think they are your friends - by Avataught me how to be alone
you like books and think they are your friends - by AvaI could express myself better by writing than by speaking
you like books and think they are your friends - by Ava