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I designed a set of 10 Christmas ornaments that can be 3D printed in vase mode for Printables’ Winter Holidays Decorations contest.
I knew when I started my design process that I wanted to design something that could be printed in vase mode. There were lots of ornaments posted to the contest already, but very few in vase mode. I’ve written about vase mode before, but to recap:
Typically in the type of 3D printing I do (called FFF/FDM¹) plastic… Cartoons Hate Her has written about the village nobody wants. In principle, parents usually want a community to help take care of their kids: someone to bring meals when they get sick, keep an eye on their children while they play, and talk to about parenting issues. In practice, parents are isolated and stressed and usually get by with hired help. Cartoons Hate Her points out that the reason no one lives in a village isn’t “capitalism” or even the phones: it’s that people mostly This post is a collection of parenting takes that sometimes go through my head, based on my experience raising our two boys (5 and 2 years old). All of this is based on my experience and might not apply to others (see the law of equal and opposite advice). My overall parenting philosophy is pretty […] Inkhaveners requested that I write up my best tips for writing sex scenes. I was recently a contributing writer at the blogging retreat Inkhaven. Some writers say that there’s no One Weird Trick that will bring you writing success, no secret handshake.
Yesterday, I made a Christmas wreath. Here's how to make one.
First, find an evergreen tree near your house. Clip off a few
branches from the tree. Try to have as many leaves or needles on the
branches as possible. Next, bring them home. What I usually use as
the base is a wire or pipe cleaner circle. After that I cut the
branches from the tree so that I have a bunch of branches that are
about, I don't know, six inches long. Once I've cut the branches I
make them into bundles of th…
Today, me, my sisters, and my dad went to a park. While we were there,
it started snowing! It was one of the first times it had snowed this
winter, so I was pretty excited. I ran around with my mouth open,
trying to catch snowflakes on my tongue.
The snowflakes were huge. Some of them were so big that they
were almost the size of a large bumblebee.
My little sister, Nora, was so
interested in playing kickball that she didn't want to run around with
me and Lily and catch snowflakes.
I was disap…
I love playing Carcassonne. Almost every time I play, I win. My
method for winning us usually you get into all the big cities on the
board, and you create a lot of big cities. I just think making a big
city is just so satisfying. I love being blue. Usually I play with
my dad and my sister.
Earlier this year, while designing the songbook for Emma’s Magnolia Sun album, I encountered the challenge of creating “chord over lyrics” style chord charts.
Emma provided me with a document of monospace-formatted lyrics with chords above each line, aligned exactly as she wanted them. She also wanted to indicate beats without chord changes – in this case using / marks, which is slightly less common for chord charts.
I could have copied this into InDesign as is, changing the text … The teapot hold is the most dangerous common contra dancing figure, so I’ve been avoiding it. The teapot hold, sometimes called a "courtesy turn hold,” requires one dancer to connect with their hand behind their back. When I realized I could avoid putting my shoulder into this vulnerable position, my contra dancing felt safer.
In New England, where I dance most often, the teapot hold is used both for the courtesy turn, where the couple rotates to face the opposite direction, and also the pro…
She's very little and she likes to do stuff with me. She also likes
to bark around and run around and jump around. She also likes to go
to places with me and that's all I have.
I am one of the students who goes to the Somerville Public Schools. I
just graduated from the Brown School, and have been hearing about how
there are some plans about how the Brown School might be combined with
the Winter Hill School. I really don't like this because I think the
Brown School is a really great place and it would be really sad to
have it gone.
I am the oldest of three sisters, one of which is already at the Brown
and one of which will be starting next year. I really want them t… I’ve been working on this for a couple weeks now: a summary of various theories of change across the animal movement. I’ve been doing life tracking for around 10 years, and this post is looking back at some things I learned from the data (since my previous retrospective in 2017). Highlights include what I get out of the Oura ring, correlations between sleep and deep work / distraction, seasonal patterns in health, and regret patterns for […]
On May 18th, the contra dance band Elixir had their last gig
ever. The dance was packed: there were three hundred people. It was
the only dance BIDA has ever done where they sold tickets. People flew
from across the country just to hear Elixir play one last time.
Elixir has been playing for twenty years, and is a very well-known
band among contra dancers. But if you asked someone who wasn't a
contra dancer or who had been dancing only a few times, they might say
"what on earth is Elixir?&#… Anthropic recently released Claude 4 Sonnet and Claude 4 Opus, and I’ve been using them at work for the last two days. 4 Opus seems okay, but 4 Sonnet feels “off” – less sharp than 3.7 Sonnet. My assessment is almost entirely vibes-based, just from chatting with the models and using Claude Code a bit. Lauren Hoffman interviewed me about Workshop House and wrote this post about a community I’m working on building in DC. understand + work backwards from the root goal • don’t rely too much on permission or encouragement • make success inevitable • find your angle • think real hard • reflect on your thinking
When I thought about this question it was really hard to figure out
because the way it's phrased it's essentially either a chicken just
pops into existence, or an egg just pops into existence, without any
parent animals involved. I thought about this and decided that because
of evolution it would be the egg that came first.
The reason I think this is because two birds that were a tiny bit like
chickens would probably have had an egg, and then when that bird was
all grown up it was more like…
A couple days ago Ms. Davis assigned a really big math packet. I was
having some chocolate for a snack. Ms. Davis has a thing where when
we take the MCAS, at school, she gives us some Hershey's Kisses and
mints to help us focus, and also for motivation. I thought I could
try using the same system for homework.
Every time, after I finished a math problem, I'd take a bite of
chocolate. I'd tell myself I wasn't allowed to eat more chocolate
until I finished the math problem.
I found … have accurate expectations of yourself • prioritize ruthlessly • unemploy your future self • a five-step “help, I’m overwhelmed” checklist • carve out focused time We’re seeing AI features pop up in every product we use. Slack, Google Drive, etc. focus • maintain a detailed plan for victory • run a fast OODA loop • overcommunicate • break off subprojects • have fun • bonus content: my project management starter kit I cook most of my meals and am pretty frugal. I do a lot of meal prep (cooking in bulk), so I don’t have to cook every day in order to have food. But sometimes I run out of my meal prep or just want something different, and don’t have energy to cook something fresh. In these cases I often go for frozen food which requires very little prep.
Over February break I made breakfast for me and Nora three days in a
row. Normally, my dad makes me, Nora, and Lily breakfast, but my dad
and Lily were on a
trip and my mom wasn't up yet so I was basically the only one in
the house who was awake and could make Nora breakfast. Every morning,
I would go downstairs at about 7am and I would wait for Nora for about
15 minutes until she came downstairs, if she wasn't already
downstairs. Then I would make us breakfast.
The first day I made guacamole… This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, travel, etc) and analyze my life tracking data. Overall this was a pretty good year. Highlights include adjusting to life with two kids, moving out of the group house, lots […] Remembering Max Chiswick, may his memory be a blessing. This post contains javascript content and must be viewed on site. I’m deeply fond of weighty phrases – little snippets with cultural gravitas and mystical overtones. Most of my favorites have biblical origin or are fragments of culturally foundational art, remixed memetically over the centuries until they become units of their own. A few of my favorites: Not by bread alone A thousand and one nights All men are created equal That the strong might not injure the weak Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind M… Where I'm donating in 2024, where I donated in 2022/2023, why, and how my approach changed from previous years.
I have some stuffies and I just have a bunny. Bunny is a rabbit.
Woof is a seal. My favorite stuffie is bun bun. I play with my
stuffies. Sometimes I jump up with them and I roll them. I can just
throw them in the air when I want to play bthululubp with them. I
like to quick get my stuffies and throw them in the air.
Selina watches me. When Selina has a different job Justina will watch
me. It's the same.
A lot of people play fiddle. Basically nobody starts by learning
chords before learning melodies. But that's actually how I learned.
I started with chords.
One of the nice things about learning to play violin this way is that
you can go busking even when you've only had just a few lessons. When
I go busking I like to go to Davis Square where there are lots of
people who are excited to listen to music. Part of busking is that
when people think you're good at playing, sometimes they&#… Warning: fully political post, which is not the typical genre here and not the vibe I’m mostly trying to cultivate. I pretty much stand by this, though my emotions have cooled in the weeks since the election.
There's a common narrative that Microsoft was moribund under Steve Ballmer and then later saved by the miraculous leadership of Satya Nadella. This is the dominant narrative in every online discussion about the topic I've seen and it's a commonly expressed belief "in real life" as well. While I don't have anything negative to say about Nadella's leadership in this post, this narrative underrates Ballmer's role in Microsoft's success. Not only did Microsoft… Like many people with my demographics, I’ve long had strongly materialist and utilitarian philosophical intuitions. I think empirical science is a good way to learn about the world; material explanations suffice for most phenomena we encounter in everyday life; more people having more well-being is better than fewer people have less well-being. But over the last two-ish years, these intuitions have unmistakably softened. I attribute this change to several causes, roughly ordered: My friend Doug…
If you're a kid like me, most kids have probably never heard of contra
dancing before. You're probably wondering: contra dance -- what's
that? Contra dancing is in some ways similar to square dancing. It's
a group dance with a caller and a live band. When you think of
dancing you probably think of rock and roll or pop or something, but
no. It's folk music. If you are interested in learning more about
that, whether you're a grown up or a kid, you can try out contra
danci… There’s a great bagel shop near my house that has consistently long lines on weekend mornings. This is a market failure: if the line is predictably and consistently long, then the price in dollars is not high enough. The bagel shop could charge more on weekend mornings, which makes them better off; the average customer would then pay more in dollars but less in time.1 The mixture of customers might change. In a higher price regime, people who were previously excluded by the high time cost of th…
About eight years ago, I was playing a game of Codenames where the game state was such that our team would almost certainly lose if we didn't correctly guess all of our remaining words on our turn. From the given clue, we were unable to do this. Although the game is meant to be a word guessing game based on word clues, a teammate suggested that, based on the physical layout of the words that had been selected, most of the possibilities we were considering would result in patterns that were … overall direction • people management • project management • technical leadership • example divisions of labor non-trust is reasonable • trust lets collaboration scale • symptoms of trust deficit • how to proactively build trust
There've been regular viral stories about ML/AI bias with LLMs and generative AI for the past couple years. One thing I find interesting about discussions of bias is how different the reaction is in the LLM and generative AI case when compared to "classical" bugs in cases where there's a clear bug. In particular, if you look at forums or other discussions with lay people, people frequently deny that a model which produces output that's sort of the opposite of what the user a… A clinical trial is a statistical problem multiplied by a logistical problem; some drugs are dramatically easier to study than others. Six things that make poker suboptimal for teaching about decision making under uncertainty, especially relative to Jane Street's card game Figgie.
From 2011-2012, the FTC investigated the possibility of pursuing antitrust action against Google. The FTC decided to close the investigation and not much was publicly known about what happened until Politico released 312 pages of internal FTC memos that from the investigation a decade later. As someone who works in tech, on reading the memos, the most striking thing is how one side, the side that argued to close the investigation, repeatedly displays a lack of basic understanding of tech indust… After 7 years at Deep End (and 4 more years in other group houses before that), Janos and I have moved out to live near a school we like and some lovely parks. The life change is bittersweet – we will miss living with our friends, but also look forward to a logistically simpler life […]
In 2017, we looked at how web bloat affects users with slow connections. Even in the U.S., many users didn't have broadband speeds, making much of the web difficult to use. It's still the case that many users don't have broadband speeds, both inside and outside of the U.S. and that much of the modern web isn't usable for people with slow internet, but the exponential increase in bandwidth (Nielsen suggests this is 50% per year for high-end connections) has outpaced web bloat for… I wrote ~2 years ago that it was hard to find concrete ways to help the most important century go well. That’s changing. This is an annual post reviewing the last year and setting intentions for next year. I look over different life areas (work, health, parenting, effectiveness, travel, etc) and draw conclusions from my life tracking data. Overall, this year went pretty well (and definitely better than the previous two). Highlights include a second kid, hiking in […] This post contains javascript content and must be viewed on site. This post contains javascript content and must be viewed on site. “Why can’t a robot be built without the First Law? What’s so sacred about it?”
Dr. Gerrigel looked startled, then tittered, “Oh, Mr. Baley.”... Early signs of catastrophic risk? Yes and no. Governments could be crucial in the long run, but it's probably best to proceed with caution. Major AI companies can increase or reduce global catastrophic risks. People are far better at their jobs than at anything else. Here are the best ways to help the most important century go well.
Designing Christmas Ornaments for Vase Mode
Parenting standards and the village
Opinionated takes on parenting
My best advice for writing smut
Inkhaven Blog Recommendations
Secrets to popular fiction
How to Make a Christmas Wreath
Snow
Carcassonne
Chord charts in InDesign
Against the Teapot Hold in Contra Dancing
Little Puppy
Making a New School
How to end factory farming
Retrospective on life tracking and effectiveness systems
Elixir's Last Dance
Claude 4 Sonnet feels off
Workshop House case study
Impact, agency, and taste
Which Came First, the Chicken or the Egg?
Chocolate for Homework
Advice for time management as a manager
Product in the age of AI
How I've run major projects
Frozen meals are actually great
Breakfast Over February Break
2024-25 New Year review
When each proud fighter brags
Dance Calling By The Numbers, 2024
Weighty phrases
Donations 2022-2024
Stuffies
Starting With Chords
Reflections on the 2024 US Presidential Election
Steve Ballmer was an underrated CEO
Update to my philosophy: less resolutely materialist and utilitarian
Don't Help Kids With Contra Dancing If They Don't Need Help
Dynamic pricing, not discriminatory pricing
How good can you be at Codenames without knowing any words?
Categories of leadership on technical teams
Trust as a bottleneck to growing teams quickly
A discussion of discussions on AI bias
Drug development costs can range over two orders of magnitude
Poker is a bad game for teaching epistemics. Figgie is a better one.
What the FTC got wrong in the Google antitrust investigation
Moving on from community living
How web bloat impacts users with slow devices
Good job opportunities for helping with the most important century
2023-24 New Year review
My first brush with covid
11ty and Observable
Asimov on building robots without the First Law
What does Bing Chat tell us about AI risk?
How major governments can help with the most important century
What AI companies can do today to help with the most important century
Jobs that can help with the most important century