philh

Lon­don Ra­tion­al­ish meetup—Newspeak House

• philh 28 Nov 2025 17:37 UTC

  24 points

  11

  in reply to: Collisteru’s comment on: You Are Much More Salient To Your­self Than To Every­one Else

  This has been proven to me on multiple occasions when I have done relatively “transgressive” things in public, things like jumping fences, and been surprised that no strangers noticed.

  I guess it can be hard to distinguish between “no strangers noticed”, “someone noticed but didn’t care”, and “someone noticed, cared, but didn’t react”. I once saw someone do a wall backflip in public, and thought it was cool, but he presumably didn’t notice me notice him.

  I feel like jumping a fence is pretty likely to be noticed—though not shocking if it isn’t, depending how many people are around. But even if someone does notice, and dislikes that you’re doing it, what are they gonna do?

  So distinguishing between them also doesn’t usually matter.

• philh 25 Nov 2025 23:36 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Lorxus’s comment on: Why Is Print­ing So Bad?

  The ways that printing and 3d printing are cursed feel different, to me.

  My expectation is that if I manage to give a printer any instructions at all, it usually prints the thing I expect. If not, it’s usually because it’s out of paper or (more rarely) ink/​toner. If it has raw materials and receives instructions, I expect it to print a document that looks substantially like I expect. But “trying to give it any instructions at all” may well be an exercise in frustration.

  With my 3d printer, giving it instructions hasn’t been the hard part. (It’s maybe not quite straightforward. You need a microSD card, formatted correctly, with a .gcode file, and I can see those feeling cursed to someone, but they’re the kinds of problems I know how to solve. Then you put the card in the printer and select it using the sufficiently-intuitive interface on the printer.) The hard part is that the instructions I give it don’t reliably result in a physical artifact that looks or functions like I intended. Airflow, ambient temperature, properties of my filament, bed adhesion, calibration. There’s too much that can vary in the environment, and those differences can mean I need to give my printer slightly different instructions (like different nozzle or bed temperature, more supports, slower speed).

  2d printers, in my experience, seem to have solved that kind of problem. Though I imagine professional printers have exciting problems that I don’t.

  (John’s blank page 1 is an admittedly weird case here, but “printing a blank page” is still less surprising than, say, “oops, near the top of the page I printed a black area that was too large, and that caused the paper to skip 3mm up higher than the printer thought it was, to fix that next time I need to make sure the printer slows down in that area, or inject some subtle yellow dots”.)

  (Maybe part of the difference here is “printing at some point on the paper is independent of printing at some other point”? There might be calibration errors, that mean every point is slightly offset or slightly the wrong color, but because they affect everywhere equally I’m unlikely to notice them. And there might be random errors, where ink is fired slightly too late and a specific red dot is in slightly the wrong place. But I don’t expect that red dot to cause the next line to also be in the wrong place. With a 3d printer, a missing or unexpected bit of plastic causes the next bit of plastic to be in an unexpected place too, so the random errors compound, sometimes into a goopy blob. Part of the point of printing a skirt is to avoid this: the perimeter of the first layer is some of the most likely plastic to be not-where-expected, but if it’s in a skirt it doesn’t get printed on top of so that’s okay.)

Sols­tice Sin­ga­long Watch Party

• philh 11 Nov 2025 23:23 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: Screwtape’s comment on: The Snaw

  Hrm. “But” is better than “For.” I think “Now” might be better than either, but I’ve been staring at these lines for a while- thoughts?

  I prefer “but”. To me, “now” doesn’t have the “compare-and-contrast” feeling, and does feel like it’s setting up for something that doesn’t come.

  If I turn each verse into a single sentence, I get:

  A Snaw thinks something is true, even if it’s really just a guess. [But/​now] a scientist checks the things they believe. On a lake, a scientist’s boat crashed into a Snaw’s.

  And the “now” makes me think that the third sentence will be more closely related than it actually is. In the actual poem, I guess the setup could be for the second half of the verse, but it feels like it needs more, or something.

  Eh. I like “so the best off their work is the kind that’ll replicate” over “so the best of their work is what can replicate” but admit mine isn’t great.

  Valid. In any case Richard’s is a clear improvement on both.

• philh 8 Nov 2025 11:44 UTC

  9 points

  7

  on: The Snaw

  Neat! Some suggestions:

  by a person which we trust, quite wise and quite old.

  “by a person we trust, who’s quite wise and quite old.”

  You can check it yourself. You can and you ought.

  “You can check it yourself. Yes you can and you ought.”

  For a Scientist checks things again and again

  “While” or “but” instead of “for”.

  So the best of their work is the kind that’ll replicate.

  Maybe “so the best of their work is what can replicate”? It’s a lot less clear.

  “Why test?” said the Snaw with a sniff.

  “Why on Earth [should/​would] we test?” said the Snaw with a sniff.”

• philh 31 Oct 2025 20:27 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: Veedrac’s comment on: On Flesh­ling Safety: A De­bate by Klurl and Tra­pau­cius.

  Not a proper reply, but on some of your specific points:

  • Why was Klurl paying specific attention to the rock-sharpening skill, when evolution has a great many more much more impressive natural feats?

  • Why was this specifically noticed in humans, rather than other animals that do this?

  What examples are you thinking of here? I’m not aware of any other animals that deliberately sharpen rocks, or make any tools that I’d consider equally impressive to stone handaxes, let alone bows and arrows.

  (Caveat that this article says monkeys have been seen making sharp rocks, but not using the sharp rocks they made.)

  Why did Klurl think this was time-urgent, when the vast majority of the time this would be a bad heuristic?

  “One does not live through a turn of the galaxy by taking occasional small risks.”

• philh 29 Oct 2025 9:39 UTC

  11 points

  5

  in reply to: Veedrac’s comment on: On Flesh­ling Safety: A De­bate by Klurl and Tra­pau­cius.

  Can you elaborate less metaphorically? I’m not sure what coincidence you’re pointing at.

• philh 27 Oct 2025 17:42 UTC

  7 points

  0

  on: Brightline is Ac­tu­ally Pretty Dangerous

  Another part of the calculus here is that Brightline is faster than driving. Very roughly:

  Wikipedia says it takes 3:25 and Google says driving takes 4:03. If we call it half an hour saved per long distance trip, that’s ~1.5 million hours saved.

  Long distance trips were about 60% of the passenger miles in your model, so if we assume they were also 60% of the fatalities, that’s a statistical cost of $1.5 billion, or $1,000 per hour saved. (Minus some adjustment because cars also kill people, so we can call it $950 instead if we take the 20x number.) Compared to the $40/​hr that a life seems to be valued at (assuming a fatality represents 40 years lost and we value the cost at $13.7 million).

  ...I didn’t actually generate an advance prediction, but if I had I think it would have been at least an order of magnitude lower.

  By contrast: if we assume a fatality represents 40 years of life lost, and we value the cost at $13.7 million, that’s about $40/​hr.

• philh 18 Oct 2025 7:57 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: How I Be­came a 5x Eng­ineer with Claude Code

  Some details that might be relevant (in that I can imagine you’d get different results if the answers changed):

  • What language(s) is your codebase in?

    • If it’s an optionally-typed language, how much do you use types?

  • How big is it?

  • How familiar are you with it?

  • How big are the changes you typically have to make, across how many files?

  • How thorough are the existing tests?

  • How much of what you do is fixing bugs versus implementing features versus refactoring versus other?

  • Something like… how interesting is the code you write /​ how much boilerplate is there? Like I expect different amounts of help from the agent if a task looks like

    • Copy the 150 lines across five files that were used to implement this other feature, and change a few parameters.

    • Integrate with this new external API.

    • Improve performance of serializing and deserializing this data structure, when it’s streamed over a slow connection.

    • Change the underlying storage of this particular type from a search tree to a hashmap (most places we use the type won’t be affected, but a few places where we access internals need to be updated).

  (Or if you think some of these aren’t relevant, I’m interested to hear that too.)

• philh 17 Oct 2025 22:59 UTC

  5 points

  1

  on: The Bio­chem­i­cal Beauty of Re­ta­tru­tide: How GLP-1s Ac­tu­ally Work

  Semaglutide (aka Ozempic and Wegovy) activates only GLP1Receptor. We’ve covered why that helps, but often comes at the cost of fatigue.

  Hm, I’m missing why it comes at the cost of fatigue?

• philh 11 Oct 2025 21:47 UTC

  2 points

  0

  on: Toni Kurz and the In­san­ity of Climb­ing Mountains

  Both Willy and Toni had been swept off. In the fall, the rope had tangled itself around Willy’s neck and strangled him. Edi, still at the top of the cliff face and tied to both the fallen men, had been smashed against a rock at the top, fracturing his skull before freezing to death soon after. But his frozen body remained pressed against the rock, saving Toni from certain death.

  Not important, just something I noticed: wikipedia has it that these causes of death were the other way around.

  [Willy] Angerer also fell and was killed when his body hit the rock face, while [Edi] Rainer quickly asphyxiated from the weight of the rope around his diaphragm.

  But it doesn’t source that claim specifically and I didn’t go hunting.

• philh 11 Oct 2025 21:37 UTC

  4 points

  0

  on: Toni Kurz and the In­san­ity of Climb­ing Mountains

  Incidentally, there’s a film called the Eiger Sanction involving an attempt to scale the Eigerwand, in which

  ³⁄₄ of the team die. (It sounds like the novel it’s adapted from was partly based on this event.)

  During filming:

  While the team was preparing to be helicoptered off the north face, [climbing advisor Mike] Hoover remembered they had not taken any footage from the climbers’ point of view of the boulders crashing down on them. With his handheld camera, Hoover and 26-year-old British climber David Knowles rappelled down to the ledge and took the needed footage. As they were gathering their gear, a huge rock broke free and smashed into the climbers, killing Knowles and leaving Hoover with a fractured pelvis and severely bruised muscles. Following an impromptu wake for Knowles, [director Clint] Eastwood considered cancelling the production, but the climbers persuaded him to continue, assuring him that they all knew the risks of their trade and did not want Knowles’ death to be meaningless.

2025-10-12 - Lon­don ra­tio­nal­ish meetup—Periscope

• philh 6 Oct 2025 10:16 UTC

  5 points

  0

  in reply to: Max Niederman’s comment on: No, That’s Not What the Flight Costs

  Did you update the post? By my read, Mis-Understandings’ comment still disagrees with it, in particular with

  The entire business of selling flight tickets is actually a loss leader for the airlines’ real business of selling miles.

  But I’m not sure if I’m reading right.

• philh 1 Oct 2025 11:54 UTC

  7 points

  2

  in reply to: Foyle’s comment on: Why you should eat meat—even if you hate fac­tory farming

  By contrast the lives of factory farmed animals are incredibly gentle and easy, with almost no suffering

  I find this believable for cows, but not chickens.

  We have been breeding domestic animals for millennia to thrive in captivity

  As I understand it, factory farming conditions in the past 100-200 years are very different to what farmed animals experienced prior to that. If people in 1700 had tried raising chickens in conditions we raise them in today, the chickens would have died of disease and vitamin deficiencies.

  So sure, farmed chickens are probably very different from the wild chickens they’re descended from. But farmed chickens aren’t raised in the conditions we’ve been breeding them in for millennia.

• philh 23 Sep 2025 21:43 UTC

  2 points

  0

  in reply to: JustisMills’s comment on: Obli­gated to Respond

  As an audience member, I often passively judge people for responding to criticism intensely or angrily, or judge both parties in a long and bitter back and forth, and basically never judge anyone for not responding.

  I rarely notice myself judging someone for not responding.

  I do judge people for making mistakes, or for omitting important considerations. And when a person doesn’t reply to criticism, I’m more likely to believe they’ve made a mistake or an important omission.

Zendo for large groups

• philh 8 Sep 2025 17:38 UTC

  6 points

  0

  in reply to: Zack_M_Davis’s comment on: Critic Con­tri­bu­tions Are Log­i­cally Irrelevant

  I’m glad the idea got through despite that.

  Oh, I’d say it didn’t. At least not to me, and judging from my memory of the comments, not to many others either.

  That is, when I read the essay I thought: “Zack thinks that Oli and Duncan think X, and Zack thinks X is wrong. I think instead Oli and Duncan think X’, which is obviously true.”

  Judging from this comment, you actually thought Oli and Duncan think X’, and you think X’ is wrong. And sure, after reading the essay I thought “Oli and Duncan think X’”, so arguably the essay transmitted that to me. But it felt more like the essay pointed me in a direction that let me generate the hypothesis myself, rather than actually transmitting the hypothesis to me.

  Not sure if this is particularly a meaningful distinction.

  Different in what respect?

  This is kind of hard to answer because the distributions overlap, but they still seem like clearly different distributions to me. For example:

  • If I’m writing a post-like-thing, I need to come up with a topic, and I might change the topic half way through writing it. If I’m writing a comment-like-thing, I’m continuing with the topic that someone else started.

  • Post-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that I’ve picked myself is true/​useful, comment-like-things are more likely to argue that some claim or idea that someone else picked is false/​useless-or-harmful.

  • I’m more likely to try to come up with an analogy when writing a post-like-thing, and more likely to dive into an analogy when writing a comment-like-thing.

  • A post-like-thing usually can’t assume any one specific text as background knowledge. A comment-like-thing can typically assume the reader’s also read the thing I’m commenting on and knows the argument it’s making.

  • A post-like-thing is more likely to be written in the form of “fiction that communicates an idea” than a comment-like-thing is.

  Hypothesis: even when you (i.e. Zack) write top-level posts, they’re typically towards the comment-like side of things, and that’s part of why it’s not clear to you that there’s a difference. For example, this top-level post is fairly comment-like.

  It doesn’t need to, but should it?

  Meh, not a conversation I feel like having.

  To reiterate: you made an obviously-wrong argument for an obviously-wrong conclusion. (“For a given comment, the same bytes are written to the database regardless of the author. So the text screens off the author; that is, given the text, the effect on the reader can’t change depending on the author.”) And you know the conclusion is wrong, but you still left the wrong argument in the text, without pointing out where the mistake was or even that there must be a mistake, and that bugged me.

  This isn’t necessarily a flaw in the post, but I felt like pointing at it and grumbling anyway.

• philh 4 Sep 2025 22:17 UTC

  4 points

  0

  in reply to: avalot’s comment on: When Both Peo­ple Are In­ter­ested, How Often Is Flir­ta­tious Es­ca­la­tion Mu­tual?

  Hm, to clarify...

  Like, we can imagine that I (in the UK) might flirt with someone by telling her “you’re very pretty”, and she’d likely receive subtext like “philh is possibly interested in going on a date with me, or kissing me, or having sex with me”. (Or something. I don’t claim to be an expert in flirting.)

  Is it that in France, it’s common for a man to tell a woman “you’re very pretty” (or “tu es très jolie” according to Google translate), and it would still have that subtext? And maybe additional stuff like “in the UK there’s a higher bar for expressing that subtext than in France; in the UK you’re not supposed to express that subtext if you’re in a relationship with someone else, where in France it’s fine”?