Woot!
...well, mostly woot. Finances might torpedo my plans to go. But I do plan to go if at all possible.
Error
Karma: 3,464
Something I’d really like to know about colds is how fast infectiousness drops off. Most sources describe peak contagion as a few days after symptoms start, and note that you’re still infectious until the last cough—but I can’t find anything about how infectious. After, say, seven days, is the secondary attack rate fifty percent of peak or one percent of peak? If one percent, I’m probably happy to interact with the person normally; if thirty percent, I’m probably not. But I have no idea of the actual number.
(This comes up mostly with my partner; she starts “feeling better” after a cold well before the symptoms are actually gone, whereas I’m almost completely debilitated for the entire length. So when she gets sick, I’m stuck choosing between “maintain a depressing degree of interpersonal paranoia long after she’s able to interact again” and “run a completely unknown risk of losing two weeks of my life to misery.” I hate it.)
This sort of thing is (part of) why I don’t post anything under my full legal name except professionally-tuned profiles (e.g. github and linkedin). And my handle is googleproof on top of that...I think.
How long does this run for? I’ve never tuned in, and would like to, but my partner has a maybe-conflicting event tonight too.
[edit]: Well, we did tune in after all, and I’m glad of it. I’ve been wanting to go to one of these for several years and haven’t been able to. The livestream is appreciated, and that was beautiful.
IABIED and Memetic Engineering
I found the trailer/intro a bit off-putting too. It didn’t bother me, exactly, but it seemed over the top, and makes me hesitant to share the interview with others.
That said, I think JTM makes a good point above, about the expectations of the general public. I rarely watch talk shows; I don’t know what’s normal. I could understand a tradeoff where the optimal tone for the public also provides ammo for certain kinds of criticism.
This isn’t about the content, but: Thank you for publishing the transcript. It’s really, really aggravating when useful and/or interesting material is trapped in a form that can’t be ctrl-F’d.
LW@Dragoncon Meetup
Ahh, thanks for the context. I’m not on Twitter so I wouldn’t have known. LO2025 was my first encounter with the phrase.
(I suppose that also answers the mystery of what This Part of Taldor was spoofing in Planecrash, which I’ve wondered about since I first read it)
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like that. My first guess was concerns about doxxing of well-known writers. My second was participants who might face professional or social costs IRL for associating with Weird Nerds; I met at least one person who didn’t want to be known-to-be-there for approximately that reason. Which is sad because they were one of the more interesting people I ran into but I had to cut/vagueify them in the writeup.
I didn’t cite either possibility because I don’t actually know the organizers’ reasoning. For all I know there could be California-specific privacy laws about photos at events, or something.
Fooey. Nothing I can do, but I’ll leave the link just in case someone who can changes that.
That’s bizarre, I have no such option. From either the playlist or the individual songs, my “share” menu has “copy link”, “copy link at current time”, and “share to...”, and none of the sub-options under the latter are for downloading.
(edit: and I’m logged in as far as I can tell, so it’s not a logged-in-only thing)
Why does nobody ever ask about the Project Lawful / Planecrash epilogue? I still have to finish that one too!
Datum: I want to see a Planecrash epilogue, but after the second case of missing-epilogue I began to suspect that the “missing” part was purposeful—some combination of trolling the reader and encouraging meta-fanfiction to continue the story—and that I should treat both stories as completed.
I have no idea if others have the same impression. I didn’t read HPMOR until long after it and its discussions were done, and all Planecrash discussion happened on platforms I don’t use.
Recursions on LessOnline 2025
The hard problem is, how do you differentially get the screen time you want?
With grave difficulty. :-(
My partner has tried to break her phone addiction more than once, and always runs into the same issue: necessary inputs arrive through the same channel as the dopamine drip. It’s hard to define notification filters that only pass items that matter. It’s hard to find a device that can be efficiently used for travel directions, job coordination, emergency phone calls, and e-books, but not for Instagram, Youtube, et al.
I’m grateful to be mostly immune to that particular siren (on account of finding the screen-poking modality of phones utterly intolerable), but an open web browser hits me in a similar way. Tools exist to block timewasting sites, but my problem isn’t specific timewasting sites, it’s tabsplosions that might go anywhere. Blacklisting is useless; whitelisting makes it impossible to use the browser in ways that I actually need (e.g. troubleshooting searches).
I find phones distracting when doing non-internet activities even when there are zero notifications. Merely having the option to look is a tax on my attention.
People in the room are like this for me. Or pets. Distracting even if they aren’t trying to get my attention, because they might do so at any moment. Also, chores. Undone chores are a pebble in the shoe of my mind.
Memento Errata
I love this phrase. It could practically be a LW motto, or a title for some adjacent project, or something like that. It’s even self-referencing—or at least, Claude tells me it’s grammatically incorrect, and that feels appropriate.
I suspect this varies by event, and also what you think of as “value”. At LessOnline I got a large fraction of the value out of side conversations, but that value mostly wasn’t in the form of practical benefits; the kinds of conversations on offer were simply extremely scarce in the rest of my personal life.
OTOH, at Dragoncon I get most of the value from structured events and the general sense of being-among-one’s-tribe. It’s crowded and anonymous, making private conversations difficult, and I know plenty of other fans in my everyday life, so there’s not that sense of “suddenly having a badly-needed outlet”. Two decades ago, when fandom conventions were smaller and local geeks were (for me) rare-to-nonexistent, that was less true.
I enjoyed the hell out of LessOnline and would love to go to this too. I’m not sure yet if I can make the budget work; is anyone I met at LO looking for roommates?
Every year I have run the Rationalist Megameetup [...], we’ve run out of space and I’ve had people ask if they can come anyway. We could limit the size by taking applications and turning people away.
I thought about this after LO—overcrowding is an attractor state for conventions—and wondered if overcrowding could be managed by dynamic pricing. If you know the size of the space, it feels like you could fill it nearly exactly by making the price some function of
(time-before-event, number-of-remaining-slots). This is one of the few crowds where that sort of mathematical jiggery might not alienate people.(on the other hand, I expect it would make budgeting the event much harder, so I dunno).
Not sure of the title. The tagline was “almost no one is evil; almost everything is broken.” The address was http://blog.jaibot.com. Some specific essays originating there were “500 million, but not a single one more,” “Foes Without Faces”, and “The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics”.
I’ve expected something like this ever since LLMs grew web search limbs. I’m surprised the success rate is only 9⁄125, though if I understand things correctly that’s a lower bound.
I avoid using my legal name outside professional contexts, and I prefer un-googleable handles, because I don’t want HR departments digging through the personal side of my life and I don’t want randos doxxing me. I’m pretty sure a normie can’t connect my persona to my person. I think even a motivated techie would have at least some trouble. But I wouldn’t expect my precautions to hold up against, say, a twitter mob that decided it didn’t like my face. Given enough eyes, someone would find a connection.
LLMs give J. Random Nosy Bastard the eyes of a twitter mob. I expect that 9⁄125 rate to climb quickly, and I’m not sure what to do about that.