Having studied Latin, or other such classical training, seems to be but one method of imbuing oneself with the the style of writing longer, more complicated sentences. Personally I acquired the taste for such eccentricities perusing sundry works from earlier times. Romances, novels and other such frivolities from, or set in, the 18-th century being the main culprits.

I suppose this sort of proves your point, in that those authors learnt to create complicated sentences from learning Latin, and the later writers copied the style, thinking either that it's fun, correct, or wanting to seem more authentic.

I can do more projects in parallel than I could have before. Which means that I have even more work now... The support and maintenance costs of the code itself are the same, as long as you maintain constant vigilance to make sure nothing bad gets merged. So the costs are moved from development to review. It's a lot easier to produce thousands of lines of slop which then have to be reviewed and loads of suggestions made. It's easy for bad taste to be amplified, which is a real cost that might not be noticed that much.   

There are some evals which work on large codebases (e.g. "fix this bug in django"), but those are the minority, granted. They can help with the scaffolding, though - those tend to be large projects in which a Claude can help find things.

But yeah, large files are ok if you just want to find something, but somewhere under 500 loc seems to be the limit of what will work well. Though you can get round it somewhat by copying the parts to be changed to a different file then copying them back, or other hacks like that...

I have a feeling this might be a bit more complex. So I'd say there is vector pointing from where you are to where God want's you to be, and that if on each step you always minimize the distance, then you're getting closer to what God wants as the crow flies, but that there are a bunch of traps, detours and other such things along the way. And that if you just directly follow the vector, you'll probably end up in a bad place because you'll take a bad path.

So just following the vector would be a form of consequentialism, where a naive approach ends with you falling into a hole from which you can't get out, or ending under a cliff which you can't climb. And the main value of religion (either as God's laws, or a collection of known paths) is that it will lead you along a safe road, even if that doesn't always seem to be pointing in the right direction.

I like how you frame searching for God's will as a facet of a more general process, where often the best road to a very complex goal might seem pointless or at least strange.

I can't remember where it was, but he somewhere talks about the goblin mindset being common. Orcs here is not a specific "team", it's people that act and think like orcs, where they delight in destruction, havoc and greed

There seems to be a largish group of people who are understandably worried about AI advances but have no hope of changing it, so start panicking. This post is a good reminder that yes, we're all going to die, but since you don't know when, you have to prepare for multiple eventualities.

Shorting life is good if you can pull it off. But the same caveats apply as to shorting the market.

This is one of those mechanisms which are obvious once you notice them, and really useful to know about, but weirdly non-noticed. After reading this I started noticing a lot more of these, and (hopefully) became more open to accepting non extreme versions of various things that I previously thought horrific.

It's sad that Duncan is Deactivated, as there are multiple posts like this one that make me a better person.

This is an enjoyable, somewhat humorous summary of a very complicated topic, spanning literally billions of years. So it naturally skips and glosses over a bunch of details, while managing to give relatively simple answers to:

• why sex
• why 2 sexes
• why have one sex bigger than the other

I really appreciated the disclaimers at the top - every time I discuss biology, I bump into these limitations, so it's very appropriate for an intro article to explicitly state them.  

Wealth not equaling happiness works both ways. It's the idea of losing wealth that's driving sleep away. In this case, the goal of buying insurance is to minimize the risk of losing wealth. The real thing that's stopping you sleep is not whether you have insurance or not, it's how likely it is that something bad happens, which will cost more than you're comfortable losing. Having insurance is just one of the ways to minimize that - the problem is stress stemming from uncertainty, not whether you've bought an insurance policy. 

The list of misunderstandings is a bit tongue in cheek (at least that's how I read it). So it's not so much disdainful of people's emotions, as much as it's pointing out that whether you have insurance is not the right thing to worry about - it's much more fruitful to try to work out the probabilities of various bad things then calculate how much you should be willing to pay to lower that risk. It's about viewing the world through the lens of probability and deciding these things on the basis of expected value. Rather than have sleepless nights, just shut up and multiply (this is a quote, not an attack). Even if you're very risk averse, you should be able to just plug that into the equation and come up with some maximum insurance cost above which it's not worth buying it. Then you just buy it (or not) and sleep the sleep of the just. The point is to actually investigate it and put some numbers on it, rather than live in stress. This is why it's a mathematical decision with a correct answer. Though the correct answer, of course, will be subjective and depend on your utility function. It's still a mathematical decision.

Spock is an interesting example to use, in how he's very much not rational. Here's a lot more on that topic. 

It's probably not that large a risk though? I doubt any alien microbes would be that much of a problem to us. It seems unlikely that they would happen to use exactly the same biochemistry as we do, which makes it harder for them to infect/digest us. Chirality is just one of the multitudes of ways in which earth's biosphere is "unique". It's been a while since I was knowledgeable about any of this, but a quick o1 query seems to point in the same direction. Worth going through quarantine, just in case, of course. Though that works on earth pathogens which tend to quickly die off without hosts to infect, which very well might not hold true for more interesting environments.