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Rationalism
So I’ve been reading Astral Codex Ten for a little while. I think that sentence comes with a little bit of baggage, but I also think the people that would want to beat me with that baggage probably don’t read my blog, and the people that do read my blog (all 2 of them, where 1 of them is me (and the other 1 of them is you (unless you are me, in which case there's someone else out there)!)) probably don’t care who Scott Alexander is.
Anyway.
Alexander got his start on the “rationalist web,” which I think means on the website LessWrong.com or whatever it was that came before LessWrong.com. Or maybe in parallel.
So being a reader Astral Codex Ten I decided to give the LessWrong community a go. But lo I find that everyone over there sort of oozes this online-ish sagacity and couches esoteric opinions in interpreted evidence and says things like,
But if you imagine a billion worlds—Everett branches, or Tegmark duplicates—this thought process will not systematically correlate optimists to branches in which no nuclear war occurs.
Which, what? This is from the very first document in the set of foundational texts in the Online Rationalist canon.
I get that their whole shtick is that they’re trying to, like, uncover Truth or something, but all of this feels so alienated from the real problems and questions of life that I can’t help but feel like the “rationalist community” is just a bunch of men cosplaying at the Business of Living rather than actually participating in it.
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Now: 10 February - 16 February 2025
The week started out slow but ramped up in a major way. Tuesday we were at Scouts for the second half of my lesson on space. I was pretty nervous about it but it went well.
Thursday I was down in Leeds for an all-hands at work. I really like going down to the office and seeing folks face to face. I just know that if I lived within cycling distance I’d be down there multiple times per week. I think I’m going to have to come to terms with being an In-Person Work Guy.
On the weekend Sam and I went out to the Pennines: she started walking the Teesdale Way and I did a big loop over Cross Fell.
Spent Sunday recovering; I spent a while on the computer doing Administrative Tasks and then drank three beers and signed up for a 50k in the Lake District in May.
Reading
I liked this article on Dialectics of Decline, I feel it’s probably being shared around left-learning circles with nods and approval but there’s a lot of soul-searching that needs to be done on Our Side as well:
On some level we are all too comfortable. We in the heart of the empire have grown so accustomed to our endless flow of treats that it feels almost impossible to imagine the steadfastness of belief in higher principles, risking life and limb for a greater cause, that led to the American Revolution, to the abolition of slavery, to the militancy of the Black Panthers with their rifles and shotguns.
Still, a perverse voyeurism in “soy right” pictures shared by Max Read on the same topic.
In other widely-shared news, Kevin Kelly’s list of 50 years of travel tips got me wanting to get back on a plane and go somewhere:
Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss.
[...]
Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.
Gina Trapani’s Life in Weeks is a terrific high-level visualisation of life (that doesn’t make you go “oh my god I’m basically dead already”). This, along with the question on the citizenship application about tell us every time you left the country in the past five years, makes me want to build something like this for myself. See also Buster Benson’s Life in Weeks.
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Domain squatting
This. “It me,” or whatever. When I first started doing computer stuff I bought charlesharries.com from a scuzzy site that wouldn’t let me transfer it out, so I let it lapse and bought the (much more aesthetic but also much more difficult to say aloud to another person) charlesharri.es.
I’d intended to re-purchase the domain through a Reputable Domain Retailer but it got squatted immediately.
In the end I did get it back once whoever was squatting it realised that I have nearly zero authority on the web.
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Getting hacked
My father-in-law, M, had his Facebook account hacked recently. I don't know how it happened. My guess is that he reused a password that was leaked in a data breach, somewhere. Anyway the account was taken over by someone in Nigeria and promptly started spamming Bitcoin coaching services.
The posts were surprisingly sophisticated. One included a faked screenshot of the lock screen of his phone, with a bunch of notifications indicating that vast sums of sterling had been deposited into his Barclays account. M doesn't have a Barclays account, but his Facebook friends don't know that. As far as his friends know, he's just purchased a brand-new Audi with the earnings from trading Bitcoin under the tutelage of an Instagram account with an AI-generated avatar.
Getting the account back was surprisingly convoluted, and at no point involved another human from the support team at Facebook, with whom there appears to be basically zero recourse. The email address, phone number, and password on the account had all been changed, but Facebook allowed me to log in with a previous email+password combination and removed the attacker's email+password from the account. This is a great feature, but it doesn't prevent the attacker from using it the exact same way to take control back. The key to holding on to the account after a email+password reset was to quickly enable two-factor authentication. After that, I signed out all other locations and removed the various connected devices—mostly out-of-date iPhones located in Nigeria and Singapore—and accounts (his Instagram account, alas, remains hacked).
We got a bunch of failed login notifications shortly thereafter, presumably as the attacker tried to get the account back—but no new successful logins. It's been a few days now and he remains in control of his Facebook account. This feels like a rare success.
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More cache busting
I wrote a little bit, a while ago, about my cache busting strategy for this website. The basic idea is to generate a unique identifier at the time of deploy, and then use that unique identifier as a query param for requests to static assets. So that if I haven't deployed in a while, and on the off chance that I have a repeat visitor to this website, that visitor gets the cached version of my (admittedly minimal) CSS and JavaScript. When I re-deploy the website, that visitor's browser will determine that something has changed and reload the files.
Previously, when this website was redeployed using GitHub Actions, I used the ID of the action's run as the unique identifier—on the basis of that identifier being incremented on every deploy.
Now that I deploy manually, I no longer have that identifier. So I use a random hexadecimal string instead:
VERSION=$(openssl rand -hex 4) grep -rl '{|{VERSION}|}' ./templates | xargs sed -i "s/{|{VERSION}|}/$VERSION/g"This finds all files in my
templatesdirectory that have the{|{VERSION}|}string in them (just a distinctive string that I likely won't be using anywhere else)—and then usessedto replace that string, inline with my random identifier.I suppose I could be doing something clever like hashing each of the files, so the ID doesn't change unless the file does—but this works, and works well for a website of this scale.
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