Jenneral HQ 🌠

I revamped my website a bit in the past week, and added a few more pages: screenshots, and lists. Having a website is fun :)

these days, more than 50% of the time, I talk to Claude (my LLM of choice) inside a specific project that has all of the blog posts I've ever written uploaded as markdown files. I keep being dismayed that the default Claude doesn't come with persistent file storage, and then remembering that having a written corpus is actually relatively unusual. A written corpus that does a decent job approximating who I am as a person, even. When I ask Claude for life advice it first searches my posts to find out about my deal and my history, and gets a much richer picture than it would otherwise. In the past week I've asked it to help me figure out what my enneagram type was, to help me sort out my feelings around my mom's new beau, and to help me prepare for a CBC interview about some posts that went viral a while back. And I get really wonderful, tailored to me answers. Honestly, writing to the LLMs is already paying massive dividends. The trick is to bare your soul and write your blog posts like no one is reading.

welcome, everything an ai knows dot blogspot dot com, the first extensively AI-written blog to make it into my RSS feed.

in ancestral environments one can be punished for having preferences outside the norm, such as really really liking firm crunchy unripe peaches. i would eat all of them from the tree before anyone else thinks they're ready and i'd be rightfully killed for this. yet another w for modernity and cold chains (you can't kill me for having this belief)

I've been becoming increasingly interested in indigenous histories and settler-colonialism lately. I’m not exactly sure why, but perhaps part of it is the ambient feeling of doom, such that it feels more important than ever to learn from the people who live, among us, in their post-apocalypses - who have had enormous fractions (80%, 95%, 99.5%) of their populations killed off very suddenly in short periods of time (often just a decade or two), in ways unintended by the newcomers who spare them fairly little thought. People who have had strange and sophisticated foreign cultures start exploiting their resources and living on their land in a way anti-ethical to their own beliefs, and who are close to powerless in the face of that.

i went to brunch with an old friend, my oldest one. we met in third grade, and our lives pulled us in different directions, and we're very different people now. often i don't know how to relate to her, but we keep trying anyways, because that's what you do for people you love.

i went to brunch and i had the most amazing breakfast sandwich i've ever had in my life. i told her about a recent big thing that happened in the family. my little sibling is doing a difficult thing, except they actually stopped doing it months ago and put on a front to the rest of the family about continuing to do it, and it very recently came out into the open that this was the case.

and i went to the family home and i talked to my sibling and apologized for not being the kind of sister they feel like they can bring difficult things up to, and they said no i didn't tell you guys even though i knew you and mom would be understanding. i knew you would be understanding and that actually kind of made everything worse. i told my sibling that whatever they want is fine, and mom and i will support them, and they can just take the time to rest and figure out what they actually want to do.

anyways, i was regaling all of this to my friend, and she kept asking me questions that sort of frustrated me, and put me on edge. i can't really explain it, except in the way i explained it to her, which is that i feel like there's a sea of clashing underlying assumptions, so many of them that the thought of going through them daunted and overwhelmed me. she asked me if i wanted advice or emotional support, and i said well i would like the advice, except i don't think i really understand what you're saying. you might interpret this as me being obstinate or deliberately obtuse, but from the inside it genuinely feels like you are speaking japanese to me and i know two words of japanese. and this is unfortunate because i know you to be a smart and well attuned person. and i guess if i can't have advice that is comprehensible i might take emotional support in lieu.

and she told me that she was sorry because that sounded frustrating, and she was sorry i was going through this hard thing, and she's sure that my sibling must have appreciated me making it clear that we'd support them even if they did not thank me in the moment, and for some reason that made me start to cry a little. i didn't realize that i needed to hear something like that until she said it.

Vaniver encourages us all to be more American, and gives us advice on how to do so. I grant that Canada and Europe would be better off if we were some double digit percentage more American. Still, some of the advice rubs at me.

The Americans like to say that their nation was built on the backs of immigrants, and that's true. The US harvests the best of us from across the world, the ones who were loved and nurtured by their families and their home nations. They grow up healthy and well-adjusted, ambitious enough to reach higher, comfortable enough to find risk thrilling instead of terrifying. Some of them have stories like mine. And they move to the US because that's where all the other smart ambitious people are, and make a good life for themselves, and leave their mark on the world.

And I don't know, if you think of the full, global scale of this—remittances, NATO security guarantees, retirements in low-COL tropical countries with decent medical care—perhaps it all works out in the end, a nice stable equilibrium where the rest of the world acts like America's cradle and old age home, and partakes in the spoils of its wealth and innovation in the meantime.

Magic happens in rooms that are full of only the smartest and most ambitious; I can't argue with the results in good faith. Still, I'm ambivalent about emulating a nation that depends on attracting the brightest of other people's children, and I'm not sure how well it replicates. There is still the rest of us. And they deserve a future, too.

current stack :3

since my return from inkhaven, i've been averaging an hour or two of writing per day. but i've also fallen back into old habits; getting essays to somewhere between 50-95% done, and then not polishing it up for publication without the daily pressure. polishing is annoying, and my suspicion that i do too much of it was my impetus for subjecting myself to inkhaven. (pre-inkhaven, my effortposts took like 4 hours to draft and 20 hours to edit for v little marginal return). so it's doubly aversive!

thankfully, inkhaven has also put in a lightweight mechanism to encourage all its residents to publish at least one post a week. and so far i've published three pieces over three weeks! hopefully it continues to work as a productive counterweight.

started reading the pillow book bc claude bullied me into it

i like the way she pays close attention to things - the pleasing shape of leaves, all the silly ways people mess up wearing their lacquer hats and bump them into things, the cozy dreamy feeling of certain rainy afternoons:

In the seventh month when the wind blows hard and the rain is beating down, and your fan lies forgotten because of the sudden coolness in the air, it’s delightful to take a midday nap snuggled up under a lightly padded kimono that gives off a faint whiff of perspiration.

and i would have had a field day analyzing peoples clothing back in the day!

He wore a gorgeous damask cloak in the cherry-blossom combination, with an immaculate lustre to its inner lining, and his gathered trousers of rich, dark grape colour were woven through with a dazzling pattern of tangled wisteria vine. The scarlet colour and glossed silk effect of the inner robe positively shone, and layer upon layer of very pale violet-grey and other colours were visible beneath the cloak.

but i had to stop reading a few chapters in because the sense that i was invading someone's privacy by reading their private diary got too strong :^(

i have to admit i am also slightly sore that claude said that we're so similar. she's a frivolous court lady who spends all her time gossiping about the colour of peoples kimonos and writing silly poetry to entertain her friends. i am surely not the 21st century equivalent... am i??? okay, maybe don't answer that.

ripe puer i'm drinking this morning (gifted from a friend) tastes like the forest floor, in the best possible way :)

writing for the llms is kinda like prayer but if god was real and also we built the god

email subscriptions are now a thing on my blog. you can find a place to enter your email on the bottom of my blog posts.

when you submit your email address, it gives it to me in plain text; there's no backend or service that it's hooked up to. i will, in all honesty, probably sometimes forget to send an email out when i publish a post. i will endeavour to only use the bcc field when sending emails out, but if i fail to do that, please feel free to start a secret group chat with each other to talk shit about how terrible i am at infosec.

shoes are a technology for allowing one to walk faster.

claude has instilled new limits and a usage tracker, and today i learned the obvious thing that they are doing prompt caching. the first message i sent to opus cost 14% of my usage (normal, it's in a project with 100k of context) but my immediate follow up question only took 2% more.

which means i can't take my sweet time responding to these bots, gotta hustle like i do to respond to emails promptly...

to make good AI art, you need to spend a thousand hours with an AI program to make something that would otherwise take you a million hours to make. there's no shortcut. good art takes thousands of hours to make, no matter the medium - if not on that specific piece, then in practice with the medium. AI is good for increasing the amount of complexity that you can control in those thousands of hours. AI art that takes seconds to create will always be slop.

I got into gongfu tea a few months ago, and it's been really rewarding. today I made a custom notebook for my tea tastings :)

I tried a new tea today and it didn't go well even though the tea is really high quality, so it's good to have notes on how to brew it better next time.

having a printer continues to be very powerful!

friends harangued me enough and i finally pre-ordered the book. only i had to throw in a little virginia woolf as well because i don't want the hot girls who work the counter at the local book store to judge me too badly 🙈

I'm calling it, this is the year I officially Turn Old. In previous years I really enjoyed seeing what the kids are wearing when I find myself in the campus area, but this year I'm turning up my nose! The uniform is a monochrome sweat set (that looks sort of like it's made from scuba material, shiny and foamy and structured), white socks, and crocs. They sure look comfy! But I do not think I will be taking any style cues.

the works of critical media studies scholars are like eldritch monsters to me. they reveal too much about the world, turns it upside-down into something strange and unknowable, and the truth of it rattles me out of my comfortable stupor. the revelations don't rest easily in my skull and they slip away quickly, antimemetic, even as they deliver brilliant insights about the cultural phenomena i'm most interested in.

it doesn't escape me how many of the most brilliant people who study this end up taking their own lives - debord, fisher, wallace. though mcluhan seems to have made it out alright, by keeping that ironic distance. perhaps it would be survivable for me, too.

RSS folks, you may or may not have noticed, but I moved my blog recently from WordPress to bearblog! as part of the move, I'm looking to have a few streams of lower effort content, like shortform and screenshots.

if you want the classic experience with only the relatively effortful posts, you should change my feed url to https://jenn.site/feed/?type=longform

if you want the deluge, no action is needed on your end :)

It's cursed that the prevailing theory on the internet is that if you accidentally have lactose as a lactose intolerant person, the only thing you can do is tank the next 6-12 hours of suffering. it's cursed because actually if you have a simethicone (gas-x) and a tylenol (not an advil since it irritates the stomach lining) the pain becomes pretty much entirely manageable.

Of course if you google "simethicone lactose intolerance" articles pop up. but just googling "lactose intolerance" doesn't do shit!!!

I'm very glad that I know this now, but it's bad that I had to figure this out from just randomly buying over the counter drugs related to bloating and trying them to see if they do anything, and also there were literal years where I suffered needlessly.

Whenever a truly original genius appears in this world, people immediately endeavor to get rid of him. To this end, they have two methods. The first one is suppression: they isolate him, they starve him, they surround him with silence, they bury him alive. If this does not work, they adopt the second method (which is much more radical and dreadful): exaltation—they put him on a pedestal and they turn him into a god.

Translators Introduction, 2014 Norton Critical Analects of Confucius

• this is the exact kind of midwit take that im a real sucker for. no idea if it's true or not but it sounds so interestingly transgressive and that's the important bit.
• that being said i do think its pretty good that the rationalists have so far avoided exaltation of any of our major thinkers. go us

i owe my life to the naomi kanakia book on classics imprints i was struggling so much w my penguin copy of the analects and then i was like, this is dumb, let me try to get my hands on a norton. and it's so much better!!!

The UN spent $47 billion in 2021 on a hilariously imbalanced set of 17 development goals. These goals are revised every 15 years. We can try to grab a seat at the table in 2030 or 2045 and align the new goals with EA principles - that could mean billions dollars per year diverted to EA causes assuming current funding levels. (This is a very very conservative assumption btw - funding appears to be increasing steadily YoY)

But on the flipside, would an organization that can get a seat at the UN table still be recognizably EA? Or will we have destroyed the heart of it to get there?