So yeah. Transition seems to have worked, though the DNS change took longer than I wanted. Also, comments are finally because because Disqus was fucking with me. Sorry about that. But everything is fine now, I think.
At least the site’s down to a whopping 12MB now. (Previously almost 100MB due to several WP installs.) I’m currently paying about 2-3 cents a day. That’s acceptable.
Another advantage: I can finally do all my writing in Emacs. Much nicer than the stupid WordPress editor. Even hooked up a spell-checker. Fancy shit.1
I also merged all my various mail accounts, filters etc. into one Gmail account and finally uninstalled Thunderbird. So it’s all Webmail (+ local backup). 2006, baby, here I come!
Unfortunately, that leaves me without mail notification ‘cause I don’t have a system tray (or taskbar or any of that other fancy “desktop environment” crap). So I decided to bite the bullet and finally began the switch from Xmonad to Awesome (again). Porting over all my configs will take ages, but oh well, it’s time. Worked some hours (literally) on that.
I started a short overview of several conceptions of “self”, mostly so that I can use it as a kind of checklist in the future for the various no-self arguments. “Please show me in this list what it is you think I don’t have.”, basically. (Of course, I also believe that most of those conceptions are wrong.) Also, because it finally clicked how rebirth in (Theravada) Buddhism works, and how the use of anatta by certain Neo-Buddhists is quite misleading.
Then wrote a overview about “universality” of morality. That’s not really ground-breaking, but should be helpful once I get around to claiming some things “are” and “aren’t” universal, as I understand it. I want to just introduce a bunch of new terms ‘cause “objective” and “universal” are horribly overloaded, but I feel makes me sound unnecessarily cranky. Introduced them anyway, fuck signalling, yay understanding.
Then I read the kind of stuff I didn’t want to engage for a while (oh well), then thought for a long time about it.
It’s not so much the topics that worry me these days, but arguments about them. I’m increasingly getting entangled in discussions (including indirectly by getting quoted / read), and I feel that everything I ever wrote is vastly inadequate, and that I really wish I could first a clarify a hundred things before anyone ever even thinks about me or those topics again.
I feel simultaneously responsible for any kind of misinterpretation/misunderstanding, and stupid for talking about stuff I don’t understand nearly as well as I wished. Then I thought even longer about whether I should continue, and under what circumstances, and even wrote a long-ish post, and for the first time in like ever, I decided to not share it, and remain silent about certain ideas, at least for a while. (He who knows Aumann, let him update!)
I’m also wondering how much my inexperience with strategy games and “if I do X, they’ll do Y”-style thinking is hurting me. However, Will Newsome keeps on recommending it, and I reached much the same territory almost entirely without it, so maybe sufficiently strong narrative (as in tropes) / elegant (as in Lisp) thinking makes it obsolete (because the multiverse is optimized), but dunno. Might try getting into a serious strategy game for practice, though not sure which. Don’t want to solve Go with Anki, for example. (Though that seems easily doable.)
(Also, really liking the Beeminder-induced habit of “minimal effort, on average”, and the new habit, “only increase the average if you have 20 safe days”. Has prevented me from several regression-to-the-mean screw-ups already.)
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And I can finally put proper footnotes in blog posts so I don’t have to use parentheses so much. Soon I’ll write my articles as pseudo-code and you’ll all be forced to adapt my exact thinking style! Then I’ll rule the world! ↩