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March 05 2026
I don't think I like writing.
There are two different meanings to that title. The boring meaning is that the process of writing isn't enjoyable to me. My evidence for that fact is that I started this “blog” over two years ago, and I'm currently writing the third total post. I built pagination into the backend, and after more than two years, I'm not even a third of the way to needing to use it.
Writing the code for the blog took a lot of effort, but it was also fun. It was work that I enjoyed doing, so I was happy to spend nights and weekends working on it. I assumed writing the content of the blog would be the same. So far, that hasn't been the case.
It's not that I don't have ideas. Since building the blog, I've written down any ideas I have that I could turn into blog posts
(though not necessarily good posts). That list has more than 25 entries now. It's just that the process of turning those ideas into a ~1000 word essay is a pa...
March 05 2026
I recently read
this piece by Scott on his blog
Astral Codex Ten, and I have opinions about it. Everyone has opinions about everything, and not all of them are particularly interesting, but I actually want to share my thoughts about this. If you haven't read the article, it is nominally about genetics, but really about what it would mean for one human being to be "inferior" to another. Scott discusses a lot of common objections to calling anyone "inferior" or "superior"
(Like that it's unlikely that you are worse than someone else at literally everything or that regardless of what traits we have, we should treat everyone equally). Then he goes through these objections and shows that they aren't all that legitimate
(Nobody uses "superior" to mean "literally better at everything", and we prioritize the life of a man who can cure cancer over on...March 05 2026
Everything I say is a lie. The following statement is false, the previous statement is true. The shortened form: this statement is false. All these rewordings of the liar's paradox show it's one of the most iconic paradoxes in history. Like a good paradox, it's simple, it defies logic, and trying to follow it makes you go round and round in circles forever.
The statement says it's false, so "this statement is false" is false, which means it must be true.
Or does it?
Recently, I read a clever solution to the liar's paradox;
on Wikipedia of all places!
The classic solution is to say a logical statement is invalid if it references itself. Treat self-reference like dividing by zero. You can write it, but the rules stipulate that you can't make a meaningful statement out of it. That always felt like a bit of a cop-out though, espec...
March 05 2026
A man stands before a judge awaiting punishment. The judge deems his crimes to be heinous enough to deserve a unique sentence. The man will be put to death before the end of the week, and what's more, the day of his execution will be a surprise.
The man returns to his cell. With nothing to do, he contemplates his death. If his execution would happen before the end of the week, then the latest it could be would be Friday. But, if Friday morning comes and he is still alive, then he would know the day of his execution, and it wouldn't be a surprise. This means that he couldn't be killed on Friday, and the actual execution would take place between Monday and Thursday.
But wait! If he can't be killed on Friday, then when Thursday morning arrives, he would know that he would be executed on Thursday. That means that he cannot be killed on Thursday either. The man repeats this logic and rules out Wednesday, Tuesday, and Monday. He concludes that he could not be execut...
March 05 2026
First Post (Finally)
I tend to move slowly. When someone tells me I need to watch some movie, it can take me more than a year to finally get around to it. That's why I'm writing this first blog entry now. This website has been up for over a year. I first found
the 'yesterweb' over a year ago. Eden's excelent
article on the personal web finally convinced me to start a blog of my own, and even then, it took months to get around to writing the first post. I took so long that
the yesterweb forum has shut down. Part of that delay was writing up some php to handle the actual blog, but most of it was just coming up with something to write.
The first post seemed importnat. Like it should be about blogging itself, not some topic that caught my attention. It's not that I didn't ha...
