Essays

Advantageous Trades Vastly Outnumber Strict Upgrades
August 5, 2025
13 min read
Vol. 4 of becoming uncringe (1, 2, 3)
tl;dr
political messaging and narrative media encourage us to treat most problems as straightforward when in fact most problems are very challenging dilemmas with uncomfortably slim margins between costs and benefits. even when you accept that most choices incur a cost, there are some personal interventions you can deploy right now that are a relatively low cost with a rather outsized upside
maybe this is obvious
Tool Banditry and also a Modest Defense of Echo Chambers
- argumentation
- philosophy
June 25, 2025
12 min read
Vol. 3 of becoming uncringe (1, 2, 4)
tl;dr
try not to sweat where someones ideas come from. theyre just words we use to capture slippery concepts. the mere invocation of an idea, framework, or vocabulary from a source you dont like is (very often!) not an endorsement of that source or even an enthusiastic acceptance of the sub-claim that specific idea/framework/word captures. rather than being treated as loadbearing evidentiary claims, these concepts can just be useful to pump intuition and guide your audience somewhere else completely unrelated. speaking of completely unrelated: talking with people who already agree with you about most things can get you to the interesting parts faster so "echo chambers" arent ENTIRELY lame and pointless.
two theses are better than one
Requiem for a Prius
- personal
- crime
June 8, 2025
11 min read
tl;dr
surprise! i dont like being victimized by property crimes and being crashed into by people's cars, and every time its happened has made me feel weird. recently my prius got totaled and my moped got stolen and im feeling a sense of cosmic injustice, like the thieves are doing actual spiritual damage to me by messing with my stuff. pathetic, right?
CONTENT WARNING: whining (and blood i guess)
Vim and Vigor
April 26, 2025
7 min read
tl;dr
you should learn vim.
one for the engineers
Tremble Before the Mighty S-Curve
April 25, 2025
5 min read
tl;dr
all exponential curves are actually s-curves. this has... troubling implications (if we are actually currently near the top of the s-curve)
art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable
A Glossary of Accidental Social Defections
- social
- game theory
April 21, 2025
19 min read
Vol. 2 of becoming uncringe (1, 3, 4)
tl;dr
dont be overconfident dont make isolated demands for rigor dont tease dont psychoanalyze take responsibility for understanding people before you respond to them dont say obviously true crowd pleasing statements dressed up as claims dont nitpick dont stick uncharitable context to statements and likewise dont demand that nobody shall stick the "wrong" context to your statements.
i just want you to know that you were the person i was thinking about while i was writing down all these mean things
Why Do Online Zoomers Enjoy Discussing Aesthetics?
- culture
- internet
April 19, 2025
22 min read
tl;dr
zoomers who spend a lot of time online like talking about aesthetics and categorizing imagery/art/software as belonging to a certain aesthetic. why? probably because those same zoomers have been party to the extremely aesthetically disorienting development of meme culture, which has piqued their interest and sharpened their instincts for how to transformatively participate in a memetic (aka aesthetic) moment.
an oral history of dank memes
Survivorship By Us
April 5, 2025
18 min read
Vol. 1 of becoming uncringe (2, 3, 4)
tl;dr
all information that ever reaches you is subject to some level of survivorship bias because information undergoes a darwinian selection process to get to your eyeballs. this means your world model is quite inaccurate, and reading more information won't really make it more accurate unless you are strategic about how acquire this information to purposefully defang the selection pressures. also your own personal experience can give you insights that are useful to your own life and nobody else.
anti-media media
Defeeding the Web
August 4, 2024
32 min read
Vol. 1 of technotherapy
tl;dr
the core profit model of every free app is selling your attention to advertisers. this has the unfortunate side effect of optimizing to waste massive amounts of your time and make you feel awful but unable to quit. on top of that its increasingly hard to quit the apps simply because they have so successfully become vital knowledge platforms. but there is a way with a little web magic to block all the attention-sucking parts while keeping the knowledge-sharing parts. youre just gonna have to read part 3 to figure out what that means im sorry dude.
no, it's not a typo of "defending". it was supposed to sound like “defeating”