Macro help

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Tweets to my teen self
People started tweeting at their teen selves on Twitter. I tried to pack all the advice I could into one tweet, and then expanded.

Teen self: Future great, get there faster. LISP Ethical slut Weights Tighter clothes Oneitis (Stop!) No god More math GEB TRUST YOURSELF

Teen self: get yourself a Scheme and work through all the problems in SICP. SERIOUSLY YOU COULD BE HAVING SO MUCH FUN RIGHT NOW.

Teen self: Future you lives in a house with his girlfriend and her boyfriend. Seriously, it's not even a big deal.

Teen self: Weightlifting is not just for jocks. Like looking at pretty girls? They like looking at hot guys! Getting hotter is Cooperation!

Teen self: it being possible to tell there is a human body under your clothes does not make them rude. Seriously, you are swimming in those.

Teen self: She is halfway down the hallway why are you standing there holding the door WTF you are making her feel so awkward WHYYYYY

#teenself: Your intuitions about math thingies being more fundamental than brain thingies are right on. Future you is fine with this.

Teen self: Just because you've learned all the high school math doesn't mean there's no more. Group theory Category theory GEB KEEP READING

#teenself: yeah, you forget/lose things a lot; you'll be able to function as an adult *anyway*. Things can be replaced.

#teenself But seriously, even if you don't hear any of this, it all turns out pretty awesome. It's ok. *hug*

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Naturalism is the radical notion that people are composed of parts that aren't people.

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Twitter stuff!
#polysongs
@lumiousalicorn

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Principle of Optimism
Drawing both from the Principle of Charity and from the discipline of Holding Off On Proposing Solutions, the Principle of Optimism (also known as Aang's Principle) states that in any dispute, both parties should, as long as possible, assume that everyone's desiderata can be obtained if everyone's clever enough, without recourse to argument or fighting. The Principle of Optimism seeks to keep things in the frame of problem solving, rather than that of conflict.

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"So there doesn't seem to be any soap in any of the men's showers except the one with the curtain."
"Yeah, we know, but there's no men on shift until 10, so we can't do anything about it."
"Oh.... Well can I help? I'm totally a man!"

TL;DR: Now I know how to change the soap dispensers at my gym.

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Transformations of brainfuck programs
A brainfuck program is any string of characters in which the square brackets match. That is, you could walk the string, pushing addresses of left brackets to a stack, popping when you encounter right brackets, never encounter a stack underflow, and end with an empty stack.

A brainfuck program represents a transformation between strings (slightly complicated by the fact that some don't terminate. This can, of course, not always be programmatically determined in advance.)

Two brainfuck programs will be considered equivalent if they represent the same transformation between strings.

Any character not in the set "<>+-[].," can be removed from a brainfuck program.

If a brainfuck program ends with any character not in "].", that character can be removed.

If a brainfuck program ends with a ']', and there are no '.'s between it and the matching '[', the entire postfix (including both brackets) may be removed.

Any of "<>" "><" "+-" "-+" can be removed.

Once these rules are applied, nothing commutes nontrivially. That is, angle brackets commute with eachother, but adjacent opposite angle brackets should already be removed, and the commutation of '<' with '<' is pretty trivial =P. Same applies to '+' and '-'

That's all I've got. Any other easy simplifications of brainfuck programs that preserve behavior?

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‎"Yess, I hear," hissed Harry. "You are an Animaguss?"

"Obvioussly," hissed the snake. "Thirty-sseven ruless, number thirty-four: Become Animaguss. All ssensible people do, if can. Thuss, very rare."

-HPMOR

Serious question: What one thing do all sensible people do (if they can) in real life?

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Rick Santorum

Because the fucker does *not* deserve to have his campaign site top his google results.

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10:15
Michael Blume
*hug*
so I had an odd BART ride
train from MacArthur->SF was standing
but there was a biggish dude in a hoodie sleeping across a bench
so I decide I'm going to sit on the bench with him
so I say "excuse me, sir, can you budge over please" a couple times
in my usual sorta timid high voice X3
and he doesn't move at all
so I stand for a while
and then I deepen my voice a bit and say more loudly "sir, can you scoot over so I can sit on the seat next to you"
still nothing
so I just squeeze into the spot next to him
and eventually shove his leg out of my side
which gets an "aww, ferchrissakes"
and ride like that to SF

10:23
Lindsey Snider
lol
wow
you are brave

10:23
Michael Blume
lol
I guess?

10:34
Michael Blume
I dunno, I still can't quite decide whether I was being a jerk or standing up for my rights as a BART passenger X3

10:35
Lindsey Snider
you were both =P

10:35
Michael Blume
lol =)
ok

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*roughly 24 hours after we got together*

Ida: So how was karaoke?

Lindsey: Mike was singing songs about my ass!

Me: I wasn't singing about your ass, I was singing about asses in general...

Lindsey: Everybody loved him though. They were all up and dancing and shouting his name and girls were whipping their bras off and flinging them at the stage....

Me: Yeah, I think that last bit was mostly you, dear.

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congrats Junio
Have I ever mentioned that I've been pulling and building from Git's development tree daily for about a year and have never once been hit by a regression? That is some damned fine project management.

Current Mood: impressed

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Lindsey (in reference to the mushroom stew on the stove): We make such delicious babies.

Me: We do!

Me: Speaking of which, how is our baby -- how's Sean?

Lindsey: I don't know, I was playing Myst all day.

Me: Let's not ever have that conversation about a non-Sims baby

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A year later, this thread still makes me absurdly happy.

Haven't actually chatted anyone up on a train in ages. Not sure if people are less friendly during commuter hours or if I just need to poke at myself a bit.

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I have been known to make a rather tasty breakfast by pouring tomato sauce into a pan, breaking eggs into it, and scrambling the eggs in situ.

Today there wasn't any tomato sauce, so I decided to try cooking down some V8 and scrambling the eggs in that.

Freaking awesome.

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"I can't believe how many engineers I know who are straight. I mean, you're going to school for engineering and you only want to date girls? Yeah, good luck with that." -Zak

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From the "Rationality Quotes" discussion thread on LW
HonoreDB15:
Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can't see where it keeps its brain.

--J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Eliezer_Yudkowsky:
I can't help but ask whether you've ever found this advice personally useful, and if so, how.

MBlume:
Actually my first thought upon reading that was "follow the improbability" -- be suspicious of elements of your world-model that seem particularly well optimized in some direction if you can't see the source of the optimization pressure.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/37k/rationality_quotes_december_2010/35sf?context=2

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Snap.
"Two men, two women, a man and a woman, a cooperative commune of many men and women…they can all serve [the purpose of caring for children]. Oh, and in all those cases, who is having sex with whom is pretty much irrelevant to the children, since these typically are not Catholic Sunday schools, so the children won't be participating in the sex."

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Hitler, as "Downfall producer" orders a DMCA takedown from Brad Templeton on Vimeo.

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