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"Liberty" Tasks

A "Liberty task" is a small, self-contained task, ready to pick up and just start. No dependencies or blockers. It must be useful rather than make-work, and very often it is one of many similar tasks. It should not require deep thought; it is a thing which can be done, not a thing which surely could be done after figuring out how. In a codebase this might look like a list of tech debt noted over the years, or like the dozen refactorings needed before an unwieldy component can be broken up into three clean components. At home this might look like the ten yearly maintenance jobs needed to avoid early breakage, or like writing out the ingredients needed for each recipe you intend to try soon so that a legitimate shopping list can be created.  Some years ago one of the cofounders of the company to which I sell my labor found out he had a brain tumor. He took a step back from being the CTO while he dealt with the immediate mental and physical issues, including brain surgery, but d
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Will It Bayes?

I'm trying out a new catchphrase. "Will It Bayes?" is meant to remind me to check whether a point estimate can be turned into an expectation over a distribution, whether a base rate has been considered, whether there is prior information that didn't make its way into a "data driven" discussion, whether I have  multiple hypotheses, etc. I haven't tried it often yet! But I think it should work pretty well. The phrase piggybacks off of "Will It Blend", a silly series of videos where someone checks whether a possibly nonsensical object will blend, if added to a blender, like an iPhone, miniature blender, etc. I already randomly think "Will It Blend", hopefully bootstrapping the noticing. Examples after only a few days where it's come up already and the answer was yes, it will Bayes: [REDACTED] for work Guessing which member of a partnership carved which pumpkin [REDACTED] for being raw Among Us when observing some behavior which impli
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How Well Am I Coping?

CW: Suicide I have a metric I use to track how well I'm coping with, y'know, life. I haven't seen anyone else use it, and I think it's probably very particular to me. What I do is any time I find myself thinking about death - my own death, not others' - I briefly reflect, and ask myself how long it's been since I last remember thinking similar thoughts. Then I have a scale on which I place myself. How long would it have to be before I'm surprised  it's been so long? For example, two days ago I thought about how none of [this] would be a problem for me if I didn't exist. Then I reflected and realized I had no similar thoughts the previous day, and was briefly pretty happy, because I'm currently on the 1-day part of the scale, and I hadn't  had any such thoughts for 1 day. The scale: a few hours - things are bad . Tell someone, get help, etc. eight waking hours - things are not good. Look for interventions. one day - problematic. If you know wh
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Estimating Now What We'll Later Know The Rate Will Be

Here's the setup: a stream of events comes in over time, most from working sources, and some from broken sources. We're trying to discriminate between them in real time, accepting only the legitimate events. When we accept an event from a broken source, we only learn that it was broken sometime in the future. Nevertheless, we'd like to estimate the fraction of our accepted events which are from broken sources as near real-time as possible. We have lots of historical data, so overall, we have a very good idea of our past broken rates, and also of the distribution of delays before we learn about which events were broken. Unfortunately sometimes we'd like to know the broken rate within a relatively small segment, so we might not have lots of historical data for that specific segment. Let's discuss some ways of performing the estimation and their pros and cons. Past Performance Perfectly Predicts Pfuture Bucket delay times. Find the overall distribution of delay buckets
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Creating an extra character

For Halloween, I'm running a light horror-ish RPG for some friends. We play other RPGs regularly. I had a great little game in mind called ViewScream, designed for online play. Everyone plays a character isolated on a spaceship that has Problems (TM). Each character has two life-threatening emergencies which must be solved lest they die in the end. Each character also has three technobabble solutions to help solve others' emergencies. These may or may not work; the player knows, but the other players don't know. Everyone takes turns dialoguing, telling about their emergencies, offering up solutions, seeing how they worked (or didn't). But there are 6 of us, and I didn't have a prebuilt scenario that went past 5. Characters are pretty minimal. They have a tiny personality description and a little bit of relationship info, a couple of barebones sentences explaining how they feel or think about another character. In addition they have one secret or twist or scripted mi
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Pumpkins!

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Today we carved pumpkins. No, wait. Today we carved pumpkins! We've wanted to carve pumpkins for several years. Each year, we think and say at home "we should carve pumpkins!" This year, instead, at the store, Samantha asked "should we buy pumpkins?" and I said "yep" and she bought pumpkins. Then we realized her hands would almost certainly not let here carve a pumpkin and became sad but thought okay, she can draw, I will carve. And then  a friend emailed, a friend I'd been meaning to invite over for [something] for months and just hadn't, so I said okay, serendipitous. Replied with a pumpkin carving invite. Turns out she really enjoys carving pumpkins and hadn't for some years. The moral of this story is that "just do it and adapt" is usually better than "wait for a situation and time that you are confident is best and only then do it".
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Intentionality Aesthetic

 "Appearing intentional" covers a multitude of sins. This is not the aesthetic I generally aim for. It's the aesthetic that I aim for as a fallback, when I don't know what I'm doing. It's the aesthetic I aim for when something's already gone wrong. When you've got yourself a jazz solo and you play a wrong note, the plan is to fit that exact same note into something good , maybe 4-5 seconds later. If you have no idea how to set the table, make sure everything's symmetrical. If you don't know what a good way to arrange your bookshelf might be, pick any quality and sort by it - if you aim to please yourself, pick a quality that tickles you; if you aim to please others, pick a quality that is easily discernible at a glance. I know this approach works well. I've used it a lot, I've seen the results. But I don't know its long-term effects on me . Naively, optimizing a bunch of things to lie to the world and say "attention! I definite
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