Most snakes are like fish. You don’t have them to snuggle, just to appreciate from nearby. Many, even most, can be handled perfectly safely, but it’s not about bonding with them like a mammal. They don’t want to kill you. That’s cats. Snakes just want you to leave the mouse and go.

They could barely afford it before. The scary question is what they’ll do when they realize how screwed they are.

Pragmatically, I am, not because I chose to play the game, but because I didn’t play well enough to win.

With the benefit of perspective, no one’s. There is no author. The game, the loss, all of it, and even the world it took place in are meaningless. It’s all just part of the universe playing with itself.

Not really.

‘Mood disorders’ are highly heritable. Poor economic circumstances are highly heritable. Unhappy people who have children rarely cite them as the cure to their unhappiness. It’s very likely that, if an unhappy person had kids, they’d be unhappy too. Not a given, but more likely than not.

The truth has value in decision making, while comforting lies have value in stress reduction. Choosing ‘truth’ over ‘comfort’ is a long-termist strategy. Being satisfied by a simple answer will make you feel better now, increasing survivability in the short term, but finding a better model of the world to operate by, a.k.a. learning, lets you make better decisions for the rest of your life.

Free will is based on the concept of the individual, a concept bounded by a separation already as arbitrary and illusory as a nation’s border. It’s pragmatic to pretend these things exist in your day to day life, but they don’t mean anything to the universe.

Oh man, that first sentence, already…

This summer, Elon Musk spoke to the National Governors Association and told them that “AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization.”

Any technology is cool if you look at it in isolation. I just can’t get terribly excited because I generally doubt they will be used in a sensible/humane manner.

Med tech is looking cool. It’s one of the few unambiguously good uses of AI. AI systems for reading scans, detecting disease, etc. seem like they could be used to make medicine faster, easier, and more affordable, but I have doubts that the tech won’t just be used to increase profit margins and somehow mess things up to benefit insurance company executives.

CRISPR/synthBio looks like it could do amazing things, but I have to wonder how long until things hit the sweet spot, intersecting democratization of powerful tools and destructive ideology, and lead some lunatic or group of lunatics to develop a society destroying bioweapon.

It’s hard to get excited about the development of a new power when you look at who’s likely to hold it.

Playing Receiver in Receiver 2 was a fun surprise.