Wilsoniumite

I've faced this problem for almost every task in my life, from the creative stuff already mentioned too less obvious things, like socializing (Seeing what you said wrong without knowing how you could have said it better). Because of this, the only things I have been able to bear "practicing" are ones that are outside of any public view. Ones were my taste was nonexistent. Code is one of them. We don't see much code (good or bad) in public, and so it's one of few areas where my taste could only improve after I saw the failures in my own work after I had produced it, rather than during.

I think it's the case that both these systems can, should, and do coexist. When doing research or development, precision is more important than immediate grasp-ability. With people in general conversation, we operate on rules of thumb and appearances really do sometimes matter more than rigor. Colloquial speech then takes precedence, even if it is imprecise.

This article is nice because it is both interesting in the purely rigorous sense (phylogenetically), and it highlights this divide between precise definitions and the words we find useful (most of all in that catchy title!).

Yes and no. People also exhibit these biases, but because degree matters, and because we have no other choice, we still trust them most of the time. That's to say; bias isn't always completely invalidating. I wrote a slightly satirical piece "People are just as bad as my LLMs" here: https://wilsoniumite.com/2025/03/10/people-are-just-as-bad-a...

Some new ish maths has been discovered. It's up to you if this is valid or impressive enough, but I think it's significant for things to come: https://youtu.be/sGCmu7YKgPA?si=EG9i0xGHhDu1Tb0O

> [...] as something that happened to Facebook/Meta rather than something driven by Facebook/Meta to satisfy Wall Street. Social media did not naturally evolve into what it is today:

As soon as you have any platform which says "hey you there with an email address, you can put content on here that can be seen by anyone in the world." you will slowly end up with a scene that looks like all these sites we have now. Advertiser's and influencers will be there, at your behest or otherwise. There's only two options to avoid this. 1. Aggressively tune your algorithm against pure engagement and toward proximity. 2. Explicitly dissallow broad reach of content. And when I say aggressively I really mean it. If people can "follow" others unilaterally, even only showing "followed content" will still lead to most people seeing mostly high engagement posts, rather than their friends. At what point (degree of intervention) does something go from "natural" to "driven"? It's a hard question, but one things for sure, a Facebook that didn't allow high engagement content would already be dead.

I wrote about this a bit on my blog [1] but to add to this idea,

> Maybe prostitution to the owners will be the only available job.

Pre industrial revolution, labor was in a sense cheaper than it was during the industrial revolution, and one genuinely interesting set of professions that existed then was house servants. Butlers, maids, cooks, under butlers and so on. It would not be inconceivable to see the return of these kinds of jobs? Ones where the value of human labor is so low that working for someone with wealth in their own home is common?

[1] https://wilsoniumite.com/2024/09/09/how-do-we-fix-it/

I feel like there is a big risk here, which others have already mentioned, but in fact this risk has already been realized w.r.t npm packages.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41178258

I think it depends a bit on how you count but I've heard it is an 8 holed donut

That first page graph has a very interesting choice of x-axis.