Ask HN: What are some high signal blogs?
Hello HN.
I am looking to expand my information sphere and would like to hear of any interesting, high-signal blogs you follow.
I can begin by recommending Astral Codex.
Thanks!
I am looking to expand my information sphere and would like to hear of any interesting, high-signal blogs you follow.
I can begin by recommending Astral Codex.
Thanks!
For people who want to understand "how to successfully promote a blog" my favorite is
which I think is captivating to people even if favors nostalgia vs timeliness (never news) and few people would find it useful (for my electronics hobby I expect to build increasing powerful illusion projectors and I find some of his talk on electronics inspirational and educational but I never expect to decap a chip or make discrete versions of things like current mirrors and op amps that are impractical to make on an artisan scale.)
>> once i threw a party for the bay area rationalists, and the rules to attend were you had to be wearing a full-face coverage mask, and be naked. Many came; they all bravely stripped, donned weird masks... and then proceeded to sit in a polite circle and debate global trade.
Ah, OK. It's clear why this blog is recommended so frequently here now.
[1]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/about
[2]: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/theres-a-time-for-ever...
For a brief time I was intimidated by her combination of pretty and smart, except that the more I looked the more I saw that being born female can really be a chance to live life on tutorial island.
For the life of me I can't see how she thinks that Eliezer Yudkowsky is an evil genius frame controller, still thinks he is the greatest thinker of the 21st century, but the main talent I think he has is that he can always see the Emperor's Clothes even if he goes to a naked people party.
I don’t know Aella, so I cannot speak to the comfortability of her existence, but I’d assume her attractiveness and circumstances and her public persona bring fairly unique challenges (eg. stalkers) that I cannot fathom.
My own hunch is that I probably lead a far more comfortable existence than her, but I’m only supposing.
She also, rather famously, created a 'Date Me' survey in which thousands (yes, thousands) of men wrote responses about why they'd be a good enough partner/provider for her. I don't know anyone else, even other beautiful women, who get to experience dating in a way that puts them on a pedestal.
Finally, she has a series about how she was able to trip acid, provided to her for free, multiple times a week, for over a year. To me, this sounds like a pretty comfortable existence. I don't doubt she gets her fair share of unsavory messages, or even the odd in-person encounter, but I would trade my life for hers in a heartbeat.
I never read the post "Aella takes LSD" because the title is cringeworthy enough. People have been taking LSD since 1943 but every day somebody from the bay area writes something obnoxious that is more an exercise in personal branding than an earnest addition to a large literature.
Also the acid doesn't seem like particularly outrageous simping. Ordinary people can get acid for $5 a hit or so in most places in the U.S. and that seems like an extraordinary value. In the 1990s I knew people who'd gotten $35 sheets (100 doses, albeit weak in that time frame) in the bay area which has long been a distribution center for the stuff.
"I grew up in an isolated, homeschooled environment. I’d moved up to northern Idaho in an attempt to go to college, but my parents were very “use your bootstraps” people and wouldn’t help me financially or cosign on any loans. They also made too much money for me to qualify for financial aid, so I was screwed; a few months into college I got an ominous letter and had to drop out shortly afterwards.
I’d been brought up with the expectation of being a submissive housewife – but here I was, 19 years old, no support system, education, or future, and with an unsettling cultural disconnect from everyone around me. Everyone used words I didn’t know, references to movies I hadn’t seen, attitudes drawn from music I hadn’t heard.
So I worked whatever I could. I occasionally went hungry, unable to afford food. I slept on a mattress on the floor in a large group house. I ended up working very long hours at a factory with no windows where I wore a uniform and stood on my feet all day and saw the sun only on weekends."
https://knowingless.com/2020/05/25/readjusting-to-porn/
Luckily, her intellect allowed her to figure a way out of what would usually be a tough upbringing to bounce back from. But "absurdly comfortable"??
But she openly encourages conversations that seem extremely fascistic to me. One good example I have is this tweet:
https://twitter.com/Aella_Girl/status/1229230411760324609
Her Twitter is a gold mine of well-written, but ultimately half-baked ideas that lend themselves to seriously considering Nazi ideals. And I find that many of the rationalist crowd secretly encourage or at least allow discussions about Neo-Nazi ideas. This is not cool at all.
It's amazing to me to see Aella as perhaps who I could have been, had I not wholly challenged my beliefs.
Along with HN, it is the only other place I can find altruistic and intellectual discussion. Blind has some intellectual people but a dearth of morals ($ and status obsession). HN even can be a bit too cynical and sneer-like sometimes.
Scott is one of the smartest people I've encountered and has a very good way with words. I find myself laughing out loud sometimes with the special way he phrases things. I related to how curious he is about many different topics and you can tell he deeply means well. He constantly brings up things I've had hunches about but puts it so eloquently.
I think saying "some of their circles would drive people out if they expressed disbelief in quasireligious concepts such as superhuman a.i., cryonics" is inaccurate. I've seen plenty of debated skepticism. Ffs there's a guy making 20 low quality comments about Marxism every other thread.
Interested? Start with https://slatestarcodex.com/about/
On preferred pronouns: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
On Tragedy of the Commons / coordination problems: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
On government: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic...
On finding uncomfortable truths in the pursuit of it: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-...
Description:
> Lines and Colors is a blog about painting, drawing, sketching, illustration, comics, cartoons, webcomics, art history, concept art, gallery art, digital art, artist tools and techniques, motion graphics, animation, sci-fi and fantasy illustration, paleo art, storyboards, matte painting, 3d graphics and anything else I find visually interesting. If it has lines and/or colors, it's fair game.
For example:
Impulse Manufacturing Laboratory at Ohio State
TBH I just check my favourite blogs manually from time to time.
I know there are lots of RSS applications such as Netnewswire & Co, but after Google Reader I gave up on RSS. (And frankly I don’t miss it that much.)
Capital Spectator : https://www.capitalspectator.com/
CSS Tricks[1] is also full of handy snippets of code you can use when developing a website. I've noted many handy (somewhat overlooked) pieces of code on there. Feel free to skip some 'noisy' articles that have code you will never use. I tend to focus on stuff that will work everywhere, regardless of browser.
Mr Money Mustache - https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/ (unusual approach to minimalism and FIRE)