DRMacIver's Notebook
Thoughts from David R. MacIver
2024-10
2024-09
2024-07
2024-03
2024-02
- Silently losing critical life infrastructure
- The obligation to be who you are
- Taking responsibility for failure
- Yelling at the problem usually doesn’t work
- Help is easy to find these days
- Invitations and exclusions
- Learning to walk right
- Anomaly report: The David that didn’t cough in the night-time
2024-01
- Learning from experts in having problems
- Computer ghost stories
- Adaptive planning and grid systems
- Visible parts of internal states
- Restrictions
- The Candle Exercise
- Noticing things as life happens
- Layers of being bad at things
- I don’t wanna
- Landmarks
- Drawing on resources
- Developing new capacities
- Shared frustrations
- Something isn’t working
- Cheeseburger Ethics
- Journaling as a foundational practice
- Things I believe about ethics and personal development
- Defining definition
- Writing good programming abstractions
- Working hours: A report on an anomaly
- Thinking in memes
- Showing people the door
- Safety Advice and Judgment in Emergencies
- The skill element of (not) working harder
- How to be better at everything
- Disingenuous Advice
- Reason as a moral mechanism
- Honesty is kinder than lying
- Some Philosophy of Mathematics
- Is philosophy bad?
- January is a daily writing month
2023-07
2023-06
2023-02
2022-12
2022-11
2022-10
2022-08
2022-07
2022-06
- Rules as moral training wheels
- Consensually treating people as things
- You don’t learn in a straight line
- Knowledge and justice
- Getting to know the right people
- How to use philosophy
- Historical contingency
- How can we create healthy geniuses?
- Abstraction and concretization
2022-05
- Intelligence problems
- Victims of metonymy
- What every programming tutorial gets wrong
- The costs of being understood
- Leaving shiny things behind
- Promethean work
- How to be lucky
2022-04
2022-02
2022-01
- Soul death
- Ladders between communities
- Learning and teaching
- Irritation and fascination
- The kindness of strangers
- Failing to resist temptations
- Seeing clearly
- Other people’s needs
- Holding yourself tightly
- Projects that you can’t run out of
- The usefulness of things you don’t use
- Difficulty finishing things
- Fulfilling work
- Curiosity is a team sport
- Being an ideas guy
- Walls of people
- Regrets and interventions
- Coffee as a way of life
- Being fragmented
- Being unreliable
- Memory and yearning
- Grappling with vastness
- Writing as yourself
- Drifting away the time
- Ready for less than you think
- Being a brain at night
- Relearning curiosity
- Wanting (to) help
- Writing from the heart
2021-12
2021-11
- Social reality as a game
- My conception of parts work
- I’m not trapped in here with you
- Writing is (from the id)
2021-10
- Probably enough probability for you
- How is laughter social?
- A simple model of depression and “depressive realism”
- Learning how to tell a joke
- We must imagine the steelman happy
- The problem of Susan
- On Julia Annas’s conception of happiness
- Scurrying
- Revisiting Intelligent Virtue
- What’s up with the unity of the virtues?
- Book Speedrun: Intelligent Virtue by Julia Annas
- What does a good person look like?
- Notes on moral disorder
- Book speedrun: On Humour by Simon Critchley
- On feeling blocked, redux
2021-08
2021-07
- Unlearning
- Can you throw money at the Collatz Conjecture?
- The changing nature of sick days
- You can’t write life down
- You have to do the easy bits first
- The edge of the familiar
- You can solve your problems, but you don’t have to
- First decide what’s good enough
- Learning from the real
- The trauma model of talent blocks
- Making life less irritating
- Would you like some advice?
- Clearing hurdles in learning
- Spiraling outwards
- A lack of shared projects
- Source: The noosphere, impersonal communication
- A library of recurring ideas
- You open one of the 999 boxes on this floor and find…
- What does one do on bad days?
- Heading towards the ouch
- Studying the mundane
- Start from amazing
- Why do we need new terminology?
- The humour test for expertise
- No shortage of things to write about
- People are bad at defining things
2021-06
2021-04
2021-01
- Some Theory of Test-Case Reduction
- Rejection Sampling in Hypothesis
- Representing Steps in Test-Case Reduction
- Basic Reducer Design
2020-12
2020-08
2020-07
- Standardised Facts
- Politics as long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror
- Inclusivity and Onboarding
- Seeing Your Working
- Thinking Outside Your Head
- Notes on Reduced Output
- An Annoyingly Hard Algorithm to Beat
- Questions to Ask When Bored
- Habit Overload
- Nice Problems to Have
- Living Room Rules
- Automatic Boltzmann Sampling for Context Free Grammars
- Learning to use the system
- Precarity and Conformity
- The Possibility and the Actuality of Change
- Indexing a DFA in shortlex order
- Getting Test-Case Reduction Unstuck with Automaton Inference
- Death of the Reader
- From Maintaining to Making
- Cultivating the Skills of Context
2020-06
- Free and Open Source Social Technology
- I’m not actually that curious
- Ideas Get You Unstuck
- Find a forking path
- Trying out this thing called Hypothesis
- Subsetting Life
- Books are never finished, only abandoned
- Speech and Writing
- Non-Experts and Status in Expert Communities
- Fake Olds
- Conversations in a public
- Chatting with your consciences
- Surviving is good
- Uploading friendships to the cloud
- Help isn’t always helpful
- Morality tests as self-fulfilling prophecies
- Losing the story for the style
- Don’t anthropomorphise fate, it hates that
- A Book is a Tool for Thinking With
- A Guide to Starting a Daily Writing Practice
- A Meta For Computers
- Testing Positive For vs Having
- The Virtue Ethics of Potato Growing
- Popular Culture Reference, David
- Some Useful Emotion Management Principles
- Being friends with your coworkers
2020-05
- Norms of Excellence
- Knowing what to look for
- Defects are the responsibility of programmers
- Key Performance Indicators
- Life is neither poker nor tennis
- The Inner Pedestal of Tennis
- Attractive People on Magazine Covers as Hermeneutical Marketing
- Identity and Legitimisation of Knowledge
- Feet as a Foundational Skill
- Feeling Good About Being Good
- Against the Classification of Books
- How I fix anxiety triggers
- Morality and Emotion
- Parts of you are missing
- Working with the audience
- Bug Fixes and Performance Improvements
- Requiem for a pair of trousers
- Notes on Acedia
- Truth and the Ghost Library
- Teach me of your human notions of love
- Joy in Sadness
- How to read a book
- Why are things hard?
- Building and Rebuilding Foundational Skills
- How to be a better person
- Initial Notes Towards a Manifesto
- Separating Impulse from Action
- Easy changes and Uncomfortable Reflections
- Cleaning up the fnords in your environment
- Making Success Trivial
- Model Monocropping
- Numbers and Feelings
- Adoptive Identities
- Strategy, reliability, and impersonality
- On not behaving like other people
- Ritual and Freedom
2020-04
- Care Work and Fixing Things
- The Casting of Leaders
- There is no moral obligation to be exhausted
- Masculinity as a source of sexual hang ups
- Telling each other stories
- 78 Thinking Hats
- Fixed and growth relationships
- The conditional love of a small town
- Democracy isn’t just voting
- Proportionality and identity
- Power, baby, power
- Does a fish have a face?
- The Accelerator/Brake Model
- Notes on becoming a cis man
- Dust Motes and Electric Plugs
- Ubiquitous Incommensurability
- Capabilities can be coerced
- Spock is a Lie
- The memetic domus
- Intuition as search prioritisation
- Trivial irritations as inhibiting factors
- Maybe everyone was right all along
- The rule of three twos
- What’s cooking?
- Being safe for others
- Anxiety vs Worry
- Teleology is fake
- The problem of deduction
2020-03
- Vampire bats as a model for flirting
- Desire as a driver of growth
- Everything is a teachable moment
- On having different thresholds
- Competence is sexy
- Pragmatic Problem Solving (aka Kludges)
- Notes on Running a Mutual Support Group
- Trust beyond reason
- Life as an anytime algorithm
- Leaving knowledge in the box
- The Inner Game of Celeste
- On feeling blocked
- Good strategies often fail
- Safety as an enabler of growth
- Everybody is looking for permission
- Berkson’s paradox is everywhere
- Alief/Belief Coherence
- Communication: Collaboration and Conflict
- Books should be taken seriously but not literally
- Suspension of annoyance
- Homophily and the tyranny of false positives
- The art of not having opinions
- You can’t actually explain everything to laypeople
- Install cut out switches in your mind
- Be the more decisive person
- Touch starvation and group responsibility
- Computer games as therapeutic tools
- Untangling moral concepts
- If a task is impossible, try making it harder
- Stuff just happens and you probably don’t know why
- COULDDO vs TODO
- You can’t actually run out of ideas
- Nerding
- Depression as felt restriction on emotional range
- Seeking out existence proofs in everyday life
- Skirting the edge of disaster
- Your emotions are valid but probably wrong
- Legibility as a relationship
- There are no deterministic voting systems
2020-02
- The social obligation to be bad at things
- Culture is deeply contingent
- Supersaturation of knowledge
- The fastest way to learn something is to do something
- How to make decisions
- All knowledge is connected
- Legibility Privileges
- You should try bad things
- Constraints on skill growth
- Emotional reactions as legacy code
- Books by writers are the worst
- Extracts from “How to talk about books you haven’t read”
- Coevolution and the bad take machine
- We are surrounded by ghosts
2019-12
2019-11
2019-09
2019-08
2019-07
2019-06
2019-05
2019-04
- Improving Binary Search by Guessing
- TIL: Libguides
- Lashon Hara
- Short Reviews
- Book Review: Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, edited by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger
- Book Review: The Descent of Man by Grayson Perry
- Book Review: Illness (Art of Living) by Havi Carel
- Book Review: “Daring Greatly” by Brene Brown
- You’re walking wrong
- A Boltzmann Agent with Very Bad Judgement
2019-03
- Boltzmann Samplers for Consistent Epistemic Actors
- Book Review: The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk
- (Partial) Book Review: Focusing by Eugene T Gendlin
- Unkind / Unfair / Untrue
- Book Review: Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences by Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star
2019-02
- The Core Problem with Democracy
- The Lazy Collection Trick
- Do numbers exist?
- What even is a number?
- Caching interactions with an arbitrary interface
- Talking to your imaginary friends as a writing prompt
- Book Review: Marriage and Morals, by Bertrand Russel
- Easy parallel test-case reduction
- Updating Random Samplers
- TV Show Review: A Series of Unfortunate Events
2019-01
- Reducing the Reduction Pass Ordering Problem
- Vegan Chartreuse Hot Chocolate
- Recipe Write-Up: Not really Soboro
- Book Review: Every Cradle is a Grave by Sarah Perry
- Book Review: A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
- Onion, Bacon, and Potato Pancakes
- Some female SFF authors to read
- Reducer Pass Budgeting
- Brexit Prep
- Recent Fiction Reading
- Book Review: Aphantasia: Experiences, Perceptions, and Insights, by Alan Kendle
- Using unsound A* search to improve a greedy algorithm
2018-12
- Book Review: The Cooking Gene by Michael W. Twitty
- Derivative of a polynomial with real roots
- Flying Lessons
- Test-case reduction as graph search
- Etymology of property-based testing
- Another attempt at brownies.
- When is it OK for a book to be long?
- Privacy as Friction Reduction
- Placeholder
- Levy’s theorem
- Wheat-and-Dairy-Free Brownies
- Book Review: How to Improve Your Foreign Language Immediately Paperback by Boris Shekhtman
- Book Review “The Tao of Pooh and the Te of Piglet” by Benjamin Hoff
- Democracy Can’t Work
- Crispy Spicy Green Beans
- Book Review: Learn to Write Badly by Michael Billig
2018-11
- You Can Do Anything (But You Can’t Do Everything)
- Teach People How To Do Things
- Book list from CUP.
- Building Friendships
- The people that live in your head
- How to build a superintelligence
- Reading a Paper
- Book Review: Rereadings, edited by Anne Fadiman
- Miscellaneous Notes on Vegetarian Cooking
- Book Review: Rewriting the Rules
- Notes on Queer Life as Combat Epistemology
- Testing if nearness is an equivalence.
- Book Review: 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, by Gary Provost
- Not the Box
- Book Review: Trans Like Me
- Notes from TickTalk
- How to write when writing is hard
- Notes on Lagrangian Duality
- Dietary Experimentation
- Book Review: The Knowledge Illusion
- Pork Meatballs with Ground Almonds
- Doing Mathematics to People
- Notes on “Towards a general mathematical theory of experimental science”
- Frequentist Statistics as a Tool of Critique
- Book Review: The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up
2018-10
- Notes from London Liberating Structures 2018-10-30
- Notes on Blocking Sets
- The No Genies Conjecture
- Book Review: “An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth” Chris Hadfield
- Book Review: Thinking in Systems by Donella H. Meadows
- Book Review: A Field Guide To Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit
- Deleting larger intervals in test case reduction
- Vegetarian Lasagne Recipe
- Book Review: All The Lives I Want by Alana Massey
- Book Review: Writing to Learn
- Compare and Contrast: Big Capital vs Radical Markets
- Big Capital: Who is London for? by Anna Minton
- Book Review: We Should All Be Feminists by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
- Book Review: How to understand your gender
- Book Review: How to Talk about Books You Haven’t Read, by Pierre Bayard
- Books
- Teaching from worked examples
- Beware Threshold Effects
- Communicating Knowledge
- Implicit vs Explicit
- Beeminder for Enforced Participation
- Stories about Data
- Auto-parallelising test-case reduction
- Try not to think about it
- Branch and Consolidate
- Maybe these two great flavours go together
- Things you didn’t know you can be bad at
- Vegetables and diet
- Questions
- The Duties
- You Can’t Trust Lawful Good
- On Formal Mathematics
- Notes on Interviewing
2018-09
- What is a neural network?
- Principles of (Social) System Design
- 2018-09-27-09:19
- 2018-09-27-09:10
- Group Decisions on Names
- Lightweight RPG Systems
- 2018-09-24-08:27
- 2018-09-21-08:46
- Some of my favourite PyCon UK talks
- Notes on Tweeting Too Much At Conferences
- Lean Coffee at PyCon UK
- 2018-09-13-13:07
- 2018-09-10-13:14
- What might a continuous rational agent look like?
- Programming vs Mathematics
- Physical and Topological Limitations to Rational Choice
- 2018-09-09-19:26
- 2018-09-08-10:59
- 2018-09-08-10:40
- 2018-09-08-10:39
- 2018-09-08-08:06
- 2018-09-07-15:47
- 2018-09-07-15:27
- When come back bring pie(s)
- 2018-09-06-10:14
- Mechanisms for talk scheduling and voting
- My parents, Ayn Rand and God
- Fiction for Kristian
- 2018-09-02-13:13
- Notation for test-case reducers
- Modes of writing
- Can a machine design?