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The beautiful art of Edwin Georgi

"unbecoming" is such a great word. bro that shit was so rude you no longer Are

What type of angel are you?

One hobby my friends and I have is making up new genders. Which is to say, making up new ways people can arbitrarily divide themselves.

My latest favorite is based on angels. The Seraphim, Cherubim and Ophanim, three important groups (“choirs”) in the angel hierarchy, are referenced in the Book of Enoch as defenders of God’s Throne. The Book of Enoch has quite a bit to say about angels in general, including the fall of the angels, the archangels and their duties, and so on. I actually don’t know many more details since I haven’t read Enoch, I’m getting my information bootlegged from the wikipedia article, but from what I can tell, these texts, while not canonical in any but the Ethiopian and Coptic Christian traditions, are enormously influential in esoteric and magical thinking through Western Christianity.

Over the years a broader mythology has built up around the angels that seems enormously complex. Individuals report talking to angels, getting information from them, getting visions. They describe complicated symbology and typology of all different sorts of angels. I don’t have the best understanding of the evolution of this mythology. I would probably have to read some John Dee on Enochian magic, since I understand him to be pretty influential in angelology. But it amuses me anyway to come up with a categorization based on the little I do know and waves hands vibes.

So! We first have the Seraphim. They are six-winged, where two wings hold them aloft, two hide their feet in modesty, and two hide their eyes from the glory of God. These beings spend their days singing God’s praises. I associate them with passion, love, exuberance, expression, emotions (especially joy and yearning) and artistic endeavor. I simplify this by calling them Lovers.

Then we have the Ophanim. Those are the many-eyed wheels that see into your soul as God sees into the soul of the Universe. They are omniscient, knowing, but also alien and unknowable. I associate them with almost all senses of the word Nature, but I call them Knowers.

Finally we have the Cherubim, which are unfairly maligned by depictions in Renaissance art as cute babies. (IIRC, those artists were influenced by the Greeks and equivocated between Cherubs and cupid. Tsk!) The true Cherubim are warriors who defend God’s justice. They have four faces – man, eagle, lion, ox – and wield flaming swords. I consider their purview to be morality, including moral facts (we do all agree that moral facts exist in a regime where angels are real, right?) and the righteous anger that might cause a person to defend them, and thereby call them Protectors.

Now we can place Seraphim, Cherubim, and Ophanim at each corner of an equilateral triangle – the Seraphim on the left, the Ophanim on the right, and the Cherubim on top. If you put yourself right in the middle of the triangle, that means you think you’re equally a Seraph, an Ophan, and a Cherub. But if you’re especially one, or especially not one, you can choose to indicate that by placing yourself elsewhere.

T-tag … yourself? ….

An anecdote on sleep

I feel a tentative, fledgling hope that I have hit upon a real, sustainable solution to my sleep schedule – one that gives me a lot of energy, one that allows me to plan in the morning and then proceed with the productive part of my day with no strong discontinuous sleep break, and one that gives me a reasonably energetic evening so long as I nap in the afternoon. I’m especially excited by this solution because it doesn’t require me to use an alarm, it feels natural – I sleep when I want to, mostly – and, I suppose most relevantly to readers, it turns out to be polyphasic.

–

I have five-ish jobs right now. (One of the better decisions of my life.)

For a couple of those jobs, I have to be in SF in the morning – sometimes by 9am. The commute is around an hour and it takes me some additional time to get ready in the morning. These facts all motivated me to try to wake up earlier.

It turned out that the initial, hmm, domino to push, was to arrange my day so that I would be zonked enough to want to sleep at 9:30pm. Initially, I picked this time because I knew I needed a lot of sleep. I thought of myself as ideally getting between 9-10 hours.

If I went to sleep at 9:30pm, I would have two and a half whole hours before midnight. That, plus the six and a half I would hope to get after midnight, would be enough to comfortably have time to get ready for the commute.

To get myself tired enough to want to do this, I would set an alarm (and, frankly, enlist the help of my housemates and roommates) to wake at 6am. This proceeded for a few months. I … I gotta say, I was pretty tired for a lot of this time. I suspect I remember some weeks therein less well than I would had I been sleeping for the number of hours I prefer.

Eventually I actually started regularly getting tired at 9:30pm. But this tiredness coincided with a new fact: I would, pretty consistently, wake up for between one and three hours between the hours of midnight and 4am.

I vaguely recalled advice about sleep such that I was not concerned about this. I’d use this time to journal, or to watch YouTube videos, or to read, or to shower, or sometimes even to have a light snack. Sometimes I would go to the common room and catch someone before they had gotten to bed, and we’d have a nice chat. Then I would feel tired again, and go back to bed for another few hours. Then, at 6am, I would start my day. I’d make my todo lists, check my emails, check my calendar, and so on.

The first few days I had this schedule were pretty exciting. I had been sitting on a couple dozen errands – many little tasky things that needed to get done. Normally it would take me weeks to accomplish them all, because I would devote the “good” part of the day towards doing one of them and then consider myself successful when it was accomplished. On my new sleep schedule, I managed to accomplish my entire todo list.

This was the point at which I started to discuss my sleep excitedly with my friends. Yes, yes, I did sometimes not get enough sleep before midnight or after midnight, and would need a nap in the afternoon. Fortunately, the office I work at in SF has a well-appointed nap room. No, I was probably not just hypomanic – I was getting the same amount of sleep as before, just at different times. What should I call the phases? Oh, why not follow Roger Ekirch, whose research on medieval segmented sleep schedules brought me historical terms like “first sleep,” “second sleep,” and “the watch” (for the interim wakeful period.)

In fact, the medieval court testimony Ekirch drew upon for his monographs about sleep was surprisingly reminiscent of the sleep schedule I had fallen into. The medieval peasants would go to sleep around sundown, wake in the middle of the night to do various activities – sometimes even to commit crimes! – and then descend again into slumber until daybreak. Sometimes, even, with a nap in the early afternoon.

I dunno, I guess I think that’s pretty neat!

I live in an EA group house now. One of the better decisions of my life.

I vibe pretty well with EAs. I like the trust-first culture. I like the focus on plant-based food even if I cheat on this. I dislike the excessive guilt but I think the EAs I have spoken to are very self aware about this and receptive to related criticism, both in general and in specific instances of excessive scrupulosity that I notice and point out.

I feel more comfortable calling myself a rationalist because “rationalists are those who disagree with Eliezer.”

Meanwhile I feel uncomfortable calling myself an EA because “EAs are those who agree with Will MacAskill.”

–

One of my best friends is a committed, ideological, EA, and holds to many specific related tenets:

(1) be vegan, or at least vegetarian, or at the very very least reducitarian and you feel bad about not doing more

(2a) you must donate money or plan to (but donating even a token amount now is better than not donating and planning to later. The latter makes you “less of an EA.”)

(2b) it is permissible to not donate if you have an EA job (but there is a limited supply of those)

(2c) it is permissible to neither donate nor have an EA job if you do EA volunteer work for an existing EA org (but there is limited bandwidth for this)

(2d) it is permissible to do none of these if you start your own EA related venture, either for volunteer or as a startup (but most such projects are net-neutral or net-negative)

(3) You cannot call yourself an EA simply by reading the materials and agreeing with them in principle. You must apply the principles in some way to your life -- they must be “action guiding.” If you do not apply the principles “enough” then you are not an EA.

(4) you must believe fundamentally in cause prioritization and be prepared to endorse tradeoffs across causes. This applies both to your decisions about where to donate and your decisions about what job you should have -- or want to have.

(I have various problems with this, I think the EA gestalt is coming around to my point of view here. Broadly, I think it has caused a lot of harm among young EAs wrt missing possible benefits from taking advantage of “lottery of interest/parables of the talents” style diversity, putting “lots of eggs in one basket.” I have personally fallen prey to this -- I would have done any research, and some of that research would have been good and EA relevant, if I was told to stick to history instead of to do operations work by 80k when I first encountered them. Likewise it caused me to change focus to be told that only AI stuff matters -- but everything is relevant to AI, and domain knowledge can be useful in AI safety work. Being told not to focus on those other personal interests and pursue web development instead meant less, possibly good, research was done.)

(5) It is not necessary to be some sort of utilitarian, but it is better. You must at least be a consequentialist.

(6) You must fundamentally agree with the importance (or scalability), neglectedness, tractability framework for conducting cause prioritization. Eg. You are not an EA if you are very passionate about climate change, even if you plan to do some of the best climate change research, because it is not “neglected.” You might be allowed “in” if you already do some of the best climate change research (surely you see the problems with this one?)

(7) You must believe in an expanding circle of concern

I came up with this list in about 30 minutes. It is definitely not exhaustive.

–

I agree that it’s important to figure out the best way to do good. But I believe that EA is maybe not the best framework for thinking about doing good.

I believe EA may be wrong about certain important things. I agree with what I regard as “the important tenets,” and this means self-described EAs often find me surprisingly values-aligned — certainly it has felt like this has happened several times at my house, when I have had conversations with self-described EAs — but I do not want to defer to the EA hivemind or even any specific EA thinker about anything about my life. I don’t trust them to get it right. I have been burned before by them getting it very wrong. I think highly of my ability and talent to think the world has been burned too.

–

There are other reasons why a person may not want to use the label “EA.” Maybe they feel, or were, personally betrayed by ess-bee-eff. Maybe they think it’s not a politic term any more – associated too much with bad stuff and not enough with good stuff. My reasons are different. I think EA fails, not just by reputation, but by its own values.

I suppose to close, for now: when I was managing an EA community space, I did a lot of explaining EA to people. One line I had in favor of being EA was that EAs are more likely to be able to pivot to the best ethical frameworks, the best focus, than other ideologies that have even more commitments and often carry necessary false beliefs (see: almost every world religion). I ... used to be way more optimistic that this was true, and I basically don’t believe it’s true any more.

hell is waiting all day for a phone call to handle a painful medical issue only to miss it by eleven minutes

eightyonekilograms

Easily my most controversial technology opinion is that people— even most tech people— do not care about decentralization or federation. Lots of starry-eyed enthusiasts keep thinking people do, and they always get proven wrong.

eightyonekilograms

#how is this controversial it's just true

This opinion is still very controversial among "tech people", especially when you go from just idly tossing it out there on social media to actually taking it seriously and incorporating it into real decision-making. Moxie Marlinspike used this opinion as the philosophical starting point for the design of Signal and a decade later still gets reams of intense hatred for it.

collapsedsquid

Make Moldbug cry why don't you

eightyonekilograms

sometimes that’s the only thing getting me out of bed in the morning

argumate

I keep saying that decentralising something makes it strictly worse in almost every way, unfortunately

understatedocelot

The best thing about decentralization is decentralization itself. You have to value it in and of itself. Language about platform lock-in and censorship and rugpulling just doesn't resonate with people who don't already think of those things when they hear the term "decentralization"

eightyonekilograms

But decentralization doesn't actually fix any of the things you mentioned. Take Mastodon for a perfect demonstration of what I'm talking about:

It doesn't fix rugpulling: Mastodon instances regularly vanish when the admin becomes bored/angry/bankrupt

It doesn't fix censorship: Mastodon is (in)famous for its prickly admins who nuke your account and defederate your whole server for wrongthink. Which might be fine if it was actually easy to move to another instance, but:

It doesn't fix platform lock-in: migrating your data from one Mastodon instance to another is a gigantic pain and not even worth it for me as "a tech person"

You can "fix" these by picking a mega-instance like mastodon.social, but then it's not decentralized.

This is the thrust of my problem with "decentralization": the claimed benefits almost never appear in practice, while the drawbacks are incredibly real and burdensome. And in practice, in all ostensibly-decentralized tech systems, most people respond to the problems by migrating to a centralized abstraction layer on top of the platform (Gmail, mastodon.social, cryptocurrency exchanges), at which point decentralization has solved nothing.

the-real-seebs

yeah, so far as i can tell, there's virtually no real examples of working "decentralization" that are actually getting the claimed benefits. like, i can't name a real example that works and isn't either fictitious or basically an oligopoly or something.

trickytalks

open source

nightcore-nasheed

federalism

trickytalks

oh wait, none of those are internet social media platforms so they don't count

eightyonekilograms

Easily my most controversial technology opinion is that people— even most tech people— do not care about decentralization or federation. Lots of starry-eyed enthusiasts keep thinking people do, and they always get proven wrong.

eightyonekilograms

#how is this controversial it's just true

This opinion is still very controversial among "tech people", especially when you go from just idly tossing it out there on social media to actually taking it seriously and incorporating it into real decision-making. Moxie Marlinspike used this opinion as the philosophical starting point for the design of Signal and a decade later still gets reams of intense hatred for it.

collapsedsquid

Make Moldbug cry why don't you

eightyonekilograms

sometimes that’s the only thing getting me out of bed in the morning

argumate

I keep saying that decentralising something makes it strictly worse in almost every way, unfortunately

understatedocelot

The best thing about decentralization is decentralization itself. You have to value it in and of itself. Language about platform lock-in and censorship and rugpulling just doesn't resonate with people who don't already think of those things when they hear the term "decentralization"

eightyonekilograms

But decentralization doesn't actually fix any of the things you mentioned. Take Mastodon for a perfect demonstration of what I'm talking about:

It doesn't fix rugpulling: Mastodon instances regularly vanish when the admin becomes bored/angry/bankrupt

It doesn't fix censorship: Mastodon is (in)famous for its prickly admins who nuke your account and defederate your whole server for wrongthink. Which might be fine if it was actually easy to move to another instance, but:

It doesn't fix platform lock-in: migrating your data from one Mastodon instance to another is a gigantic pain and not even worth it for me as "a tech person"

You can "fix" these by picking a mega-instance like mastodon.social, but then it's not decentralized.

This is the thrust of my problem with "decentralization": the claimed benefits almost never appear in practice, while the drawbacks are incredibly real and burdensome. And in practice, in all ostensibly-decentralized tech systems, most people respond to the problems by migrating to a centralized abstraction layer on top of the platform (Gmail, mastodon.social, cryptocurrency exchanges), at which point decentralization has solved nothing.

the-real-seebs

yeah, so far as i can tell, there's virtually no real examples of working "decentralization" that are actually getting the claimed benefits. like, i can't name a real example that works and isn't either fictitious or basically an oligopoly or something.

trickytalks

open source

months ago for my birthday I got a nice wool short cape used online for $40. turns out capes are great to wear, look cool, feel nice, and cause compliments. why didn't I do this five years ago

in season 3 of arcane mel jinx and lux are going to find some onsen in ionia to paint each others' nails

The idea that Deepseek killed US AI companies is extremely silly. The market is just temporarily overreacting.

nightcore-nasheed

Two ideas that, as the tumblrinas say, "can and should coexist":

(1) Claims to the effect that death is intrinsically good are pathetic cope. (2) It is extremely morally important that euthanasia be available.

anocana

it's commonly believed that we have five physical senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste), five mental senses (recognition, imagination, estimation, memory, and intuition), and five spiritual senses (inspiration, revelation, proprioception, telepathy, and lust). however, phenomenists have recently found that this picture isn't entirely accurate.

according to recent phenomenal models, which resolve several longstanding difficulties in the field, imagination and memory are simply distinct uses of what is in fact a single sense. more perplexingly, these models predict that we should have 17 senses, but so far no direct evidence has been found for any of the "secret three". most proposals for additional senses have turned out, on closer inspection, to be forms of proprioception (equilibrioception, nociception), telepathy (mind reading, interaction with ghosts), or revelation (clairvoyance, precognition).

scientists are currently seeking international funding for a machine to collide two conscious experiences at extremely high energies, to further explore these and other mysteries of phenomeny. they stress that, despite online rumors, there is no risk of these experiments creating unbaptized Boltzmann brains (UBBBs).

sreegs

You're interviewing as a software engineer and you sit down to begin a coding exercise via remote video chat. Your interviewer joins a minute late. You exchange light pleasantries, then intros. They ask you a few questions relevant to your experience and you answer them satisfactorily.

The interviewer says, "Right, lets move on to the coding exercise," and directs you to a collaborative coding website. You select your language of choice and they begin to describe your problem.

"You have an array of souls recently liberated from their mortal shell, represented by this array of signed floats called "theDead". You must design a function that determines which souls go to heaven and which souls go to hell,"

"Heaven and hell are empty. The cumulative value of all the souls in heaven and hell must both be nonzero, and exactly equal to each other. You may leave any number of souls in purgatory,"

"Your function must return a bool indicating whether the balance of heaven and hell can be met given the array of souls. The count of souls will be 0 < n < 1,000,000. Do you have any questions before you begin?"

innominaterifter

I can't decide which photo is more atmospheric, so I'll just post them all.

I always try to make cosplay comfortable and practical if the character's costume is so in the canon. Skitter's suit definitely doesn’t hinder her movements, so mine was made similarly.

I tested its usability today, including several simple parkour elements. Everything works fine, tomorrow I’ll tell you a little more and post more photos/videos.

preservationofnormalcy

I feel confident enough to post these now. A collection of all the existing posters after some edits from the other post that got 13k notes! These are full size/quality. Go nuts.

You may use them for wallpapers, tabletop campaigns, whatever. Consider tipping me or buying a print or sticker on ko-fi here! If you do use them, let me know what for, or send pictures!

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