2025-04-02 21:00:00
The internet has massively decreased the cost and effort of publishing. While "random people writing on the internet" doesn't sound like a good source of information, this would fit the majority of my favorite writers. Except most aren't "random people" anymore: by writing publicly over time readers have learned what these authors are good at and when to pay attention; the writers have built reputations. And with extensive practice at getting ideas across and quick feedback from the world on how successful they were, many bloggers have progressed from people who really like writing to people who write very effectively.
The team behind LessWrong is organizing LessOnline, a "celebration of blogging, truthseeking, and original seeing", the weekend of May 30th in Berkley. Many of my favorite writers will be there, including Kelsey Piper (formerly the Unit of Caring, now a journalist), Scott Alexander (formerly Slate Star Codex, now Astral Codex Ten), Patrick McKenzie (Bits About Money), Zvi Mowshowitz (Don't Worry About The Vase), and Julia Wise (Otherwise). [1]
While there's something a bit weird about an in-person gathering of people selected for their skills at communicating in online text, I've previously really enjoyed talking to other writers. Excited to be going!
[1] Pretty sure this is the first time Julia and I will be
traveling together without our kids. Though we're not actually
traveling together: I'll stay home through Friday morning so I can get
the kids off to school, and she'll be coming back earlier Sunday night
so she can get the kids from my dad (who is very helpfully watching
them for the weekend!) before school.
2025-03-29 21:00:00
I run a lot of one-off jobs on EC2 machines. This usually looks like:
If the machine costs a non-trivial amount and the job finishes in the middle of the night I'm not awake to shut it down.
I could, and sometimes do, forget to turn the machine off.
Ideally I could tell the machine to shut itself off if no one was logging in and there weren't any active jobs.
I didn't see anything like this (though I didn't look very hard) so I wrote something (github):
$ prevent-shutdown long-running-command
As long as that command is still running, or someone is logged in over
ssh, the machine will stay on. Every five minutes a systemd timer
will check if this is the case, and if not shut the machine down.
Note that you still need screen or something to prevent
the long running command from exiting when you log out.
(This is an example of the kind of thing that I find goes a lot faster
with an
LLM. I used Claude 3.7, prompted it with essentially the
beginning of this blog post, took the scripts it generated as a
starting point, and then fixed some things. It did make some mistakes
(the big ones: a typo of $ for $$, a regex
looking for PID: that should have looked for
^PID:, didn't initially plan for handling stale jobs) but
that's also about what I'd expect if I'd asked a junior engineer to
write this for me. And with much faster turnaround on my code
reviews!)
2025-03-23 21:00:00
Each year I put together a digital photo album with my favorite pictures from the year. Pictures for 2024 initially went very quickly: Nora (3y) and I did a lot of curation together, and the opportunity "do pictures and videos" was very motivating for her as she worked through her morning routine. After I got it all together, though, it got stuck at the pre-publication review stage.
I want the kids to look over the pictures and let me know if there're any they'd like me to exclude: I'm not perfect at predicting what they'll find embarrassing. While sometimes they're interested in looking over pictures, however, they have a lot of things they like doing.
We finally had a bit of time this morning, though, and it's complete! Here are pictures for 2024:
2025-03-21 21:00:00
A few months ago I was trying to figure out how to make bedtime go better with Nora (3y). She would go very slowly through the process, primarily by being silly. She'd run away playfully when it was time to brush her teeth, or close her mouth and hum, or lie on the ground and wiggle. She wanted to play, I wanted to get her to bed on time.
I decided to start offering her "silly time", which was 5-10min of playing together after she was fully ready for bed. If she wanted silly time she needed to move promptly through the routine, and being silly together was more fun than what she'd been doing.
This worked well, and we would play a range of games:
Standing on a towel on our bed (which is on the floor) while I pulled it out from under her.
That, but jumping and I needed to time the pull right.
We roll around with me tickling her.
That, but I keep pretending to fall asleep only to wake up and tickle her more as she nearly escapes.
Pretending she's a burrito, by rolling her up in the towel along with a bunch of imaginary toppings and then pretending to eat it all.
Lots of one-off things, some of which she'd ask for a few times and then get bored.
After a couple weeks Lily (10y) and Anna (then 8y) said they wanted silly time too. I told them if they were completely ready for bed by their official bedtime (8:30 for a 7:15 wakeup) they could have silly time too. This has been very motivating for them: they pay attention to the time and try very hard to be ready. I wish they wouldn't cut it so tight—it's common for them to come running up to me at 8:30 on the dot asking "did I make it!?—but at this point I only very rarely end up skipping silly time because they took too long.
Initially they wanted to do the same games as Nora, but more recently they've been really into 2-on-1 wrestling. The rules:
While we're not evenly matched (they still haven't pinned me), in operating under the constraint that I need to not hurt them we're close enough that it takes a good bit of effort for me to pin them. If I just try to pin one with no strategy the other will rescue before I count to three. I really like this dynamic, because it means they're working together, and I think it's good for their relationship.
courtesy of Ajeya
Another thing I like about this game, weirdly enough, is that people do accidentally get mildly hurt sometimes. For example, last night Lily kneed herself in the nose twice. Unlike most parts of their life where they generally take time to focus on their injury and ideally blame someone, they like this game enough that they recover very quickly and we keep going. This even happens when one of them hurts the other; normally they'd probably try to convince me to intervene and punish but here they're on the same side and need each other's help. While if I thought was likely to get actually injured I would want to change what we're doing, over the last few weeks of playing this I've seen them get substantially more resilient.
Probably the biggest downside is that this isn't very restful, but they seem to be falling asleep fine, and I haven't noticed increased morning tiredness or anything.
I don't expect to continue doing this indefinitely. Maybe they'll get bored (as they already did once; we had a few weeks of pillow fights in the middle), someone will get hurt enough that this isn't fun, or Nora will want to join in and we'll need to change it a lot (the current version would be too dangerous for her). But it's fun for now!
2025-03-16 21:00:00
Over the past six months there's been a huge amount of discussion in the Davis Square Facebook group about a proposal to build a 25-story building in Davis Square: retail on the ground floor, 500 units of housing above, 100 of the units affordable. I wrote about this a few weeks ago, weighing the housing benefits against the impact to current businesses (while the Burren, Dragon Pizza, etc have invitations to return at their current rent, this would still be super disruptive to them if they even did return).
The impact to local businesses is not the only issue people raise, however, and I wanted to get a better overall understanding of how people view it. I went over the thousands of comments on the posts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16) over the last six months, and categorized the objections I saw. Overall I found comments by 90 different people opposed to the proposal, and ignoring super short ones ("Stupid idea", "Oh no") I put them in 11 different categories. I counted some comments towards multiple categories: the goal was to understand how many people hold each objection. Here are the objections, sorted by the number of unique people raising each, and with some representative quotes:
23/90 people:it won't bring down the cost of housing:
"I'm tired of this simplified idea that building more buildings here will solve the affordable housing problem"
"It isn't going to lower prices like people think. It is going to drive prices up because the new construction will be of the unaffordable type."
"Somerville can't build its way out of a housing crisis."
21/90 people:it's just too tall:
"We don't want a high rise building"
"These ugly, tall buildings are destroying the city."
"They are better off just making a 3-4 story building"
20/90 people: I don't want these businesses displaced:
"When it takes out 3 local businesses two of which are institutions it's not just nimby"
"Many long time tenants won't return after being forcibly closed for the renovation"
"Losing any local independent businesses in Davis Square will have irreparable harm to what we all love about Davis or any locale that's unique."
16/90 people: this should be built somewhere else:
"What I don't really understand is, why *this* particular spot"
"How about they go build it in the middle of West Medford square and you can go live there"
"Density is good but not here."
15/90 people: The roads / sewer / other infrastructure is not up to it:
"Nice. Where are all the delivery vehicles going to park? Figure 50 meal deliveries, 10 UPS, USPS, Fedex, couple of ambulance calls EVERY DAY."
"I'm worried about our aging sewer system and the impact of 500+ flushing toilets!"
"let's see what happens if you turn the Boston area into New York level density without New York level public transit"
11/90 people: This kind of building is aesthetically unacceptable:
"It damages our home city visually by rising like a giant pr*ck over a small town. Aesthetics matter."
"This place is an eye sore and monstrosity"
"A large, impersonal, brick and mortal prison, with few local independent shops and stores; few parking spaces; high consumer prices; and no character."
11/90 people: Units won't actually be affordable, or there should be a higher fraction of affordable ones:
"The developer has no intention of making any of it 'affordable' housing"
"I would accept 8 stories if the building was 100% affordable"
"the affordable housing part is all smoke and mirrors, it will still be very expensive."
4/90 people: Mostly new construction just sits empty:
"The problem is that builders keep building 'luxury condominiums' which they then can't rent and so take a tax deduction"
"Where's your evidence that all of the market rate units are leased up?"
"Just because you build it doesn't mean people will actually live there. More and more apartments are being purchased as investments by people who are not at all invested in living in the community."
3/90 people: Density makes us worse off:
"We don't need to live on top of each other. This city is already too crowded."
"You want this place to become Hong Kong and Kowloon"
"Keep jamming people in small areas. Fcking ridiculous. More people more problems."
3/90 people: This will damage our culture, beyond just losing the businesses:
"Nothing is sacred anymore. Without a solid base, life comes tumbling down. Take care of what there is instead of creating future problems. The small town feeling is being lost"
""when you start putting high rise building in a smalllll neighborhood, you lose the sense of community. It just naturally dies because you cram a bunch of people in a big building and everyone stops seeing one another"
"Multigenerational families who haven't been displaced physically are culturally and socially displaced"
2/90 people: Tall buildings make solar panels produce less:
"Those in the immediate area who put solar panels on their homes will see the damage."
"Project supporters care about climate change but you're S.O.L. if you got solar panels...which *check notes* helps fight climate change."
There are solid responses to all of these, and I saw lots of great ones in reviewing the comments. I'm not getting into rebuttals here, just get a sense of what the objections are and how common each is.
(An hour ago someone started yet another thread in the group, which already has sixteen comments. I'm not looking at it here, though, because this post is done. Serves me right for mostly drafting last night but not finishing it until this afternoon.)
2025-03-13 21:00:00
While in a more remote area bike lights let you see where you're going, in a city there's usually enough light around for that. But you still need lights, so other people see you. [1] Unfortunately, lots of people end up biking without lights: it's easy to forget them, have them break, or end up out after dark when you intended to be home sooner. Batteries and LEDs have gotten so cheap, however, that you can get little be-seen lights for $1/each:
They don't last all that long and they're not rechargeable, but they do work for their key purpose: glowing brightly so people can see you. I've bought a bunch of them so I can give them out when people are leaving our house without lights. And they're good as backups if your main lights break.
[1] I recently almost hit a cyclist when I was pulling out of a
parking lot onto a busy street at night. While it didn't help that
they were biking on the wrong side of the road, I think the lack of
lights was the biggest issue. I did notice them in time, but I came
closer than I'd like to pulling out in front of them.