2025-12-28 21:00:00
I like writing retrospectives for things I'm involved in, especially if I'm likely to be involved in them in the future: it's a good place to set thoughts down so I can find them again, link materials I'm likely to want, and collect feedback from others (but also: fill out the feedback survey!). As a bonus, they can be useful to other people who are doing similar things.
I've written ones band tours, failed attempts to limit covid spread, and dance weekends; Saturday night I ran the music for the 2025 Boston Secular Solstice, so here's another one!
This was the tenth Boston Secular Solstice in the Ray Arnold tradition. These go back a bit over ten years, and have been an opportunity for the rationality / lesswrong community (with some effective altruism representation) to gather, sing, and consider hard truths.
We were in in Connexion for the second time, and I continue to be very glad to no longer be trying to squeeze this many people into our house! They didn't charge us, because this is the kind of event they'd like to encourage, but you could consider sending them some money to help them maintain the space.
Over time the singing at these has been trending in the direction of being mostly my family: this year Alex sang three (and was great!) but all of the others were me, Julia, and Lily. While it certainly is convenient for practicing to be working with people who live in my house (or, in my case, are myself) I'd love to have a wider range of singers here. Let me know if you'd like to be on the list of people I reach out to in ~October to ask if they might be interested in leading any songs this year.
Same goes for music: Max accompanied three of these on guitar, and I'd love to have more volunteers if this sounds like it might be fun! If we had enough people we could do things like play the melody of the tune, or add harmonies.
In past years I've had a somewhat elaborate setup, including footdrums and breath controller overlays. This year I decided to try doing at most two things at once: singing plus guitar or piano. This made the sound setup simpler, and the overall production a bit more folky. Anyone have preferences in either direction? By default I'll probably stick with the simpler thing.
We had some issues getting the people speaking amplified well: a lot of them just weren't close enough to the microphone. I think next time we should ask them to come early enough that we can spend a few minutes with each one on mic technique. I should also just plan to adjust mic positioning for each speaker instead of expecting them to handle it themselves.
Similar attendance to past years; I counted about 45 people.
As in past years, I used my VSL1818 8-channel audio interface to make a multitrack recording, and then mixed it down to stereo. I set up two hall mics, on opposite sides of the room, and panned them hard left and right in the mix, and these are the majority of what you're hearing.
Here are the songs and speeches we did this year:
Most likely not actually by Harry Dixon Loes. I think this worked well as an opener, because it's well known and easy to sing. Getting people feeling like what we're doing is singing together is very important in an opener.
Lots of people know the Ghostbusters theme, and the Harry Potter parody of it is fun. The connection between Potter and the rest of the evening is a bit hard to contextualize for newer folks, though. Kazoos were fun, but this is one where we should have tried to all get in a room together first to run through.
I'd love someone to write a "Circle, shrink and shrink" song with a verse about ancestors, one about nature, etc.
When I was younger and more into traditional science fiction the idea of sending physical humans out into space seemed very clearly a thing humanity was building towards. This feels much less resonant to me now, though I do still really like how the song sells the idea of intense effort towards a goal you will not live to see achieved.
The original song is in seven and has many aspects that make it tricky for group singing, so a few years ago I worked out a cross-genre cover, recasting it as more of a gospel song. The hardest part for me is not rushing it, since it sits best around 85bp and I have a very "contra dance speed" musical aesthetic.
This song has a lot of words very quickly, which makes for a bit of a chaotic group singing experience. Though perhaps apt given the topic of the song.
We cut the Zombies verse this time. With where it fell in the program it was a bit too silly.
One of the approaches to group singing is to have melodies that are written to be really easy to pick up, which praise music uses extensively. Given how much Secular Solstice draws from religious traditions it makes sense that a praise-style song would work well in this context, though there's also just something that bugs me about it aesthetically. I think it's coming from how the religious traditions that use praise music are some of the ones that feel least resonant to me personally?
A poem set to music, which we do most years. I think it would have been moderately better with subtle accompaniment, to help hold the group together.
Earlier Skyler had told us he would be inserting something false later in the program, and asked us to call him on it if we heard it. Several people tried, and Lily's was my favorite.
This is the version Julia and I put together for the 2023 solstice. The original has some parts that aren't sung, and has some very complex bits melodically; this one is easier for the group to follow.
The only song we do every year, marking the transition back out of the dark part of the evening's arc. Boston version.
Same mildly trimmed version as last year.
The timing is a bit tricky, but it was helpful that this was our second time. It also helped that with Lily leading (and living in my house) we could practice it together more times.
I like this one a lot, but I'd also be interested to hear something similar where a group in a similar position took positive expected value risks that didn't work out. It's much easier to give credit for success.
I like the mood of the song, though the advisibility of the amateur salvage operation depicted is seriously questionable. Even if it's worth $250k "floating at the dock" it will need major repairs to get to that point, and the risk to the participants is significant. Perhaps ships belong in "Circle, Shrink and Shrink"?
We've been singing this Pete Seger song to end the program for several years now, and I continue to like it.
2025-12-27 21:00:00
As part of the general discourse around cost of living, Julia and I were talking about families sharing housing. This turned into us each writing a post ( mine, hers), but is it actually legal for a family to live with housemates? In the places I've checked it seems like yes.
While zoning is complicated and I'm not a lawyer, it looks to me like people commonly describe the situation as both more restrictive and more clear cut than it really is. For example, Tufts University claims:
The cities of Medford, Somerville and Boston (in addition to other cities in the area) have local occupancy ordinances on apartments/houses with non-related persons. Each city has its own ordinance: in Medford, the limit is 3; in Somerville, it is 4; in Boston, it is 4, etc.
As far as I can tell, all three of these are wrong:
Medford: it's common for people to cite a limit of three, but as far as I can tell this is based on a misunderstanding of the definition of a lodger. Medford:
Since a shared house typically does function as single housekeeping unit (things like sharing a kitchen, eating together, no locking bedrooms, a single shared lease, sharing common areas, and generally living together) this is allowed.
Somerville: the restriction was repealed two years ago.
Boston: defines family as "One person or two or more persons related by blood, marriage, adoption, or other analogous family union occupying a dwelling unit and living as a single non-profit housekeeping unit, provided that a group of five or more persons who are enrolled as fulltime, undergraduate students at a post-secondary educational institution shall not be deemed to constitute a family." Then they define a lodging house as "Any dwelling (other than a dormitory, fraternity, sorority house, hotel, motel, or apartment hotel) in which living space, with or without common kitchen facilities, is let to five or more persons, who do not have equal rights to the entire dwelling and who are not living as a single, non-profit housekeeping unit. Board may or may not be provided to such persons. For the purposes of this definition, a family is one person." I read this to say that a group of people (even students) who live as a single housekeeping unit don't make something a lodging house.
This isn't just my reading zoning codes: a similar question came up in Worcester in 2013: City of Worcester v. College Hill Properties. The MA Supreme Judicial Court ruled that the unrelated adults sharing a unit together did not make it a lodging house because they were a single housekeeping unit and rented the whole place.
In other places there may be different restrictions, but everywhere I've looked so far it looks to me like this kind of shared housing, where a group lives together like a family even if they're not actually related, is allowed.
2025-12-25 21:00:00
The world is divided into plain text and rich text, but I want comfortable text:
Let's say I want to send someone a snippet from a blog post. If I paste this into my email client the font family, font size, blockquote styling, and link styling come along:
If I do Cmd+Shift+V and paste without formatting, I get no styling at all:
I can deal with losing the blockquote formatting, but losing the links is a pain.
What I want is essentially the subset of HTML that can be represented in Markdown. So I automated this! I made a Mac command that pulls HTML from the clipboard, passes it through pandoc twice (HTML to Github-flavored markdown to HTML), and puts it back on the clipboard. I also packaged it up as a status-bar app:
You can run it by clicking on the icon, or invoking the script:
$ normalize-clipboard
Which gives:
Alternatively, if I actually want Markdown, perhaps to paste into an LLM interface, I can skip the conversion to HTML:
$ markdownify-clipboard
I'm pretty happy with this! It's open source, on github, so you're welcome to give it a try if it would be useful to you.
Note that I haven't paid for an Apple Developer subscription, so if you want to use the pre-built binaries you'll need to click through scary warnings in both your browser and the OS. I've documented these in the README, though an advantage of building from source is that you don't have to deal with these.
This was my first time using Platypus to package a script as a Mac app. It worked well!
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2025-12-24 21:00:00
There's been a lot of discussion over the last month on whether it's still possible to raise kids without being rich. Housing is a big piece of this, and if you need to buy a house where each kid has their own room, yes, that's expensive, but it's also not the only option. We didn't wait to buy a house (or have multiple bedrooms) before having kids, and I think that was the right choice for us.
To give you a sense of what this looked like, two configurations from early on:
Living with extended family, in a six bedroom ~2,500 sqft house with 8-10 people. Our baby first slept in a co-sleeper, and then in a mini-crib I assembled in our closet (door open).
After we bought a house our toddler was still in our room because I was renovating what would become her bedroom. There were two other bedrooms, but housemates lived in these, for a combination of us liking to live with other people and wanting to save money.
It was definitely not ideal! Trying not to wake the baby when you have different bedtimes, staying out of the bedroom during naptime, both parents waking when the baby does, etc. But there were also large advantages to a first kid at 28:
Having kids at a time in our life when we physically had more energy. Not to say we have no energy now at 40 and nearly-40, but ten years ago we did have more.
More years of overlap with our kids, and an even larger increase in how many years our parents overlap with them.
Better time in our careers for us to take leave: it's generally easier to be away as an IC than a manager.
Fertility is highly variable, but definitely gets harder as you get older.
Much more practical to have three kids.
Overall, I think this was a good choice for us. It's definitely not right for everyone, but I think hard rules of "buy a house first" and "have enough space that each kid can have their own room" are right for very few people.
There's a pattern of rising expectations for what it means to be doing ok, but sometimes people describe these as if they're rising requirements. For example, Zvi:
Society strongarms us to buy more house, more healthcare, more child supervision and far more advanced technology. The minimum available quality of various goods, in ways we both do and don't care about, has risen a lot. Practical ability to source used or previous versions at old prices has declined.
He focuses on childcare (reasonable!) but also discusses how this applies to housing:
You can want 1,000 square feet but that means an apartment, many areas don't even offer this in any configuration that plausibly works.
See also Aella:
being poorer is harder now than it used to be because lower standards of living are illegal. Want a tiny house? illegal. want to share a bathroom with a stranger? illegal. The floor has risen and beneath it is a pit
While Zvi, Aella, etc are pointing at a real problem (housing is way too expensive, primarily because we've made it too hard to build more in places people want to live; we should stop doing that), I think they're more wrong than right. They're overlooking a major option, families sharing housing with others:
Before we had kids we lived with another couple when they had their first kid. We were renting a 3br together in Somerville, walking distance to the Orange Line. The husband was a paralegal, the wife quit her job to watch their baby. My memory is that she didn't like being home full time with the baby and later on did a range of other things, but it was doable on one income and the option is still there.
One of my cousins lived in a 4br with their partner and another couple. Both couples had two kids. It was tight, and there were definitely downsides to having less space, but again, the option is there.
There are specific ways the "floor has risen", and both high minimum unit sizes and effectively banning SROs should be reversed. Similarly, we could make housing much cheaper with simple and broadly beneficial policy changes, and I would love to see a world where people did not have to make these painful tradeoffs. But "put lots of people in a medium-sized space" has always been a major way people saved money on housing, and is still a legal and practical option today.
(I asked my kids, "Imagine we could only afford a small apartment, and you had to share a bedroom with your sisters. Would you rather that they didn't exist so you could have your own room?" None of them did, and they were moderately outraged by the question, though they mentioned sometimes not liking their sisters very much.)
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2025-12-23 21:00:00
Every time someone releases code publicly under some kind of "look but don't touch" terms a similar argument plays out:
A: This is cool, X is now open source!
B: It's cool that we can read it, but we can't redistribute etc so it's not "open source".
A: Come on, if it's not "closed source" it's "open source".
B: That's not how the term "open source" has historically been used. This is why we have terms like "source available".
A: It's bizarre that "open" would be the opposite of "closed" everywhere except this one term.
I'm generally with B: it's very useful that we have "open source" to mean a specific technical thing, and using it to mean something related gives a lot of confusion about what is and is not allowed. While A is right that this is a bit confusing, it's also not unique to open vs closed source. Some other examples:
If a country doesn't have "closed borders" then many foreigners can visit if they follow certain rules around visas, purpose, and length of stay. If instead anyone can enter and live there with minimal restrictions we say it has "open borders".
If a journal isn't "closed access" it is free to read. If you additionally have specific permissions around redistribution and reuse then it's "open access".
If an organization doesn't practice "closed meetings" then outsiders can attend meetings to observe. If it additionally provides advance notice, allows public attendance without permission, and records or publishes minutes, then it has "open meetings."
If a club doesn't have "closed membership" then it's willing to consider applicants. If anyone can join who meets some criteria, it has "open membership".
This is just how language works: terms develop meanings that are not always ones you can derive simply from the meanings of their component words. I agree it can be confusing, but I also want to do my part to resist semantic drift and keep "open source" matching its useful and socially beneficial definition.
2025-12-14 21:00:00
My house has radiators for heat. There are three heating loops ("zones") but the house has more than three rooms and it's not very well balanced. Fixing this properly involves hiring a plumber, but it turns out we can make it much better with just a small fan!
Radiators heat passively: they warm the nearby air, which rises and allows cooler air to flow in. This new air then warms, and the cycle repeats. This works pretty well: no electricity, no noise, just smooth heating.
What we can do with a fan, though, is accelerate this process in a targeted way, at the cost of a small amount of electricity, hardware, and noise. By fanning the radiator we want more output from, we can bring the system into balance.
I'm now tempted to put efficient little fans on all the radiators in the house, network them together, add temperature and occupancy sensors, predict future occupancy, and see how much more efficient I can make the whole system. But while this sounds like a fun project, and possibly even something someone could turn into a product that pays for itself in saved money and fuel, [1] this is really not something I should take on right now.
[1] I did some looking and there are (a) commercial radiator booster
fans, and (b) smart radiator valves, but nothing that ties this all
together.
