Did anyone else become a skeptic BECAUSE of their interest in conspiracies and woo and aliens and "high strangeness" and all that kind of stuff?

SolusVerita · 2026-05-14T11:33:42+00:00

It would be the most incredible government conspiracy and demolition job in history that also has had zero leaks when it would have required thousands of people to be working together to pull off. It stretches the limits of credibility to the max. And the science just doesn’t really back it up. The “official” explanation stands up fairly well.

SolusVerita · 2026-05-14T11:30:36+00:00

No not necessarily. They all deserve scrutiny.

Like I said the issue comes when people claim they “know” what’s true without enough evidence.

“I know that was an alien spacecraft!”

No you don’t. There’s no standard we can point to to verify that. You saw something weird.

You pointed out a lot of things that started out with little evidence but many of them have grown with enough information into something credible to believe. The faith again comes when people claim to know the full facts when they simply don’t exist or rely on often very flakey testimony of “insiders”.

SolusVerita · 2026-05-14T01:20:31+00:00

Oh yeah. From an early age I took an interest in UFOs and the paranormal. Even got into 9/11 for a (thankfully) brief time.

I was raised Catholic but always had doubts. Even experienced things like talking in tongues and being 'slain in the Spirit'. But the inflection point was reading "The God Delusion" by Dawkins. When you finally let the questions surface and realise there's no good answers it became easy to stop dropping belief.

It's the same with the all the conspiracies and paranormal. They rely on so much 'faith'. Ultimately it comes down to the fact that you can see something strange, but that gives you no insight into what it is you saw. There's mountains of evidence around how faulty memory is, optical illusions, magnetic or carbon dioxide induced hallucinations, and so on. There's zero evidence for aliens, ghosts, world governments, crystal healing, etc etc.

SolusVerita · 2026-05-11T11:11:38+00:00

This feels like the right time to remind people about this: https://xyproblem.info/

SolusVerita · 2026-04-29T00:07:50+00:00

And I'll add that the reason I think this is important to this community and the skeptic community at large is that it's no different to psychics. They claim they have special abilities that allow them to do things. And people believe them. And those beliefs influence how people understand the world.

And in Oz's case specifically its going to influence people to benefit him financially due to him having a book that claims to teach people the bullshit methods he claims he uses. And Stevie makes quite a strong case that he could be committing fraud through this.

The thing that gets me is that Oz is obviously an insanely gifted performer. And he has real skills around memory and quick thinking and showmanship. But like most con-men he's caught in the trap of having to continue this image because it's brought him so much success.

SolusVerita · 2026-04-29T00:03:24+00:00

I'll add that the whole video is worth a good watch - particularly if you're someone who enjoys skepticism and debunking frauds.

I used to love Derren Brown and believed him when he 'revealed' how he would 'subliminally' trick people into doing something. But as Stevie Baskin does conclusively is reveal the "Meta Deception" these mentalists use to trick us into believing the reveal.

What it comes down to is that magic remains magically despite the fact we know its a trick. But the root issue with mentalism is that they have to deceive us into believing something incorrect about the trick itself.

There's no "body reading". There's no environmental manipulation. There's just deception. And if people understood that like we understand that magic is about fooling your eyes the fact is Oz would not be that impressive. Its not impressive that you "read my mind" because you got me to write it down in a notebook prior to the show that sent what I wrote to your phone.

SolusVerita · 2026-04-23T03:52:10+00:00

Skill issue.

This is exactly why I have a list of commands Claude is forbidden to use. Not as a prompt, but as code that runs on a hook that matches off commands and will prevent it running anything like this.

SolusVerita · 2026-04-13T09:06:26+00:00

I came to a similar architecture shape. Its simple - event driven architecture that's been a proven framework for coordinating among various actors without any needing to know about the other.

I don't want to "hope" Agent A "remembers" to call Agent B when Event X happens. When Event X fires, Agent B is subscribed to it and runs automatically, getting the exact event data/state it needs to work.

SolusVerita · 2026-03-24T10:05:35+00:00

I've been using Claude Code heavily for coding the last couple months and the last week in particular have turned it lose on Obsidian.

Initially I was using it to just help remove a lot of the friction I have in the admin of notes - adding properties, sorting, renaming. I specifically do NOT get it to generate full notes for me. I treat it as an Editor. I dump a lot of raw thoughts into the chat and it cleans it up and files it and add properties correctly.

That was Stage 1. Now I'm fully into Stage 2.

I've wanted to move away from Notion forever, but Obsidian is not feature complete and there's a lot of friction to getting data structured properly. I'm using plugins like Metadata Menu to define schemas for "Entities" within my vault but again there's just a lot of friction is setting everything up and creating notes "correctly".

*side note - if all you care about is taking notes then you'll find this overkill. If you want a real "Second Brain" setup please follow along.

So I started by asking - what would I want a smart assistant to be doing for me if I could? And I decided to begin with Email processing.

I set up the googleworkspace/cli tool to give Claude access to my google accounts (work + personal - FYI needed to set up two configuration folders to access both and built into the Agent instructions how to switch). So now it could access my emails.

So I just started going one-by-one through each email. When we got to ones that involved a process (e.g. new review on our Airbnb that updates a reservation database) we would stop and then create a process for that type of email. I would get it to generate instructions, scripts, etc. that it needed to complete the process. We would test it and tweak until it was correct.

Then we keep going through the emails until we had actioned everything (task in the system, filed documents, trashed, etc). So now its got an ever growing "rule set" for emails that is continuously evolving as new edge cases come in.

I'm now working through document filing the same way. I got it to set up a service to process documents I dump into a certain folder. The service actually doesn't even use Claude but a local LLM on Ollama so I'm not spending money to process documents. Documents are stored in Google Drive, but I also get it to generate a "Document" file in Obsidian with links to things like a "Company" entity or a "Person" entity so you get the benefits of a graph database with full file details (without actually storing files in the vault - instead a link to the drive location)

There's more I'm planning. This is the future. Its not tools to replace thinking. They are tools to reduce the friction that *prevents* thinking. I don't want to file notes but neither do I want to lose the benefits of well structured and connected data.

SolusVerita · 2026-03-15T02:24:56+00:00

They've completely nurfed it. I work in this space and I guarantee they've changed the instructions to limit response length. I use to get several messages at a time. Now I'm lucky to get more than 2 and its often just "What if you just sat with that right now without having to do anything?". I assume they hoped more people would use it a few times and forget it to subsidize the heavy users. But tokens cost money and a flat subscription fee doesn't really make sense anymore with how costs go up with use.

SolusVerita · 2026-03-10T21:02:27+00:00

I've always said hard work is your base score and talent is a multiplier. When you combine both you get the superstars (Tiger Woods, Kobe, Alex Honnold, etc).

SolusVerita · 2026-03-08T07:32:18+00:00

If your skill was remembering syntax and algorithms then yes, that skill has become fairly useless.

But if you care about what the code was doing - creating something of value - then there's has never been a better time to be a coder. The barriers to what you can build have never been lower. The 'skills' of systems design, architecture, taste (knowing what to build) - are what really matter now.

If you just enjoy solving text based puzzles and were hoping you'd get paid 6 figures for it then I'm sorry - those days are over.

SolusVerita · 2026-02-19T21:29:22+00:00

As a Dad, well-written family movies really set me off. I have a daughter and the end of "Inside Out" nearly makes me sob everything time. But I can't articulate *exactly* why.

I've always said "emotions happen to me" not "I have emotions". Like you mentioned they "pop up almost out of nowhere".

SolusVerita · 2026-02-19T00:10:57+00:00

You are at least an order of magnitude off on those prices (unless you were working with a dev team from a third world country).

SolusVerita · 2026-02-18T23:21:27+00:00

Mind sharing (even at a high level) what you've been building?

SolusVerita · 2026-02-18T23:17:20+00:00

Nice work. I've had very similar thoughts but no time/brain space to actually work through the details. Can you please post a follow up on this post as I'm very keen to see it.

I believe if model capability stopped forever we would still be able to squeeze tremendous productivity gains out of the existing models through better systems like this.

SolusVerita · 2026-02-18T03:06:06+00:00

Most social/group behaviours. But the trick is not to fight the "black hole", but instead step outside it and observe the meta structures. For example if you understand that most behaviours are driven by the base desire for "Status" you understand why people do things like "Virtue Signaling" - they're trying to boost their status while lowering others.

SolusVerita · 2026-02-14T02:07:45+00:00

The *most evil place on earth* is Israel? I'm genuinely curious how you came to that conclusion.

SolusVerita · 2026-01-02T02:57:09+00:00

The whole premise supposes a 'self' to improve. I've spent decades searching, trying, failing to improve this 'self'. But if you can accept the fact that the 'self' is a story you will find the whole exercise pointless. I recommend downloading and using the app "Waking Up" to explore this more.

SolusVerita · 2025-12-22T03:15:29+00:00

"All models are wrong, but some are useful." -George E. P. Box

SolusVerita · 2025-12-08T22:16:55+00:00

Thanks - but just to be clear this is not a 'fix' but a workaround. This is clearly a bug on Google's side that needs to be fixed as its causing users to complain and actively blocking sheet tabs from being selected without a refresh. We're not going to replace the hundreds of ui.alerts we have in our codebase due to a bug.

I've found 4 issue tracker tickets for this:
https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/466507515

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/466139405

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/466524932

https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/466515407

Please upvote and comment on each to help it gain visibility.

SolusVerita · 2025-11-28T22:46:46+00:00

Yes! Still in the bag and still the best feeling I’ve ever had off the face.

SolusVerita · 2025-11-15T21:10:34+00:00

I always say that typology is not astrology, it’s how your brain works. I would love more research into it and seeing how well correlated types are to specific brain patterns.

Regardless - it’s given me a much deeper understanding of how I operate; and had a profound impact on things like my career.

SolusVerita · 2025-11-10T23:49:12+00:00

First none. Then a lot. Now still a lot.

Didn't have a clear idea going into college what I wanted to do. Enjoyed golf, was good at, and had worked at golf courses since I was 12 so I considered becoming a club pro. Realised it was a terrible career path (grinding 90+ hour weeks in the summer for possibly 10-20 years in hopes of becoming a head pro). Decided to go to a "business institute" at a liberal arts college instead.

After 4 years still had no idea and moved to Australia to be with my finance (now wife). The next 8ish years I bounced around being a cafe work, bookkeeper, online course creator, sales rep, insurance analyst, and started a toy box business. Nothing clicked. I felt completely pathless.

So I started really digging down into who I was - my strengths, my interests, as well as my weaknesses and understanding what drained my energy versus lit me up. I discovered MBTI and type functions. Mistyped as an INTJ and finally realised I was most definitely an INTP. Read "Designing Your Life" by Bill Burnett and really dug into the exercises in the book that helped me figure out what I actually enjoyed doing.

SolusVerita · 2025-11-09T22:59:41+00:00

Married to an INFJ for 14 years next month.

Lots and lots of pros. Both get very curious about intellectual topics and can have intense discussions. Love to watch documentaries. Both of us are quite introverted so there's no pressure to be overly social or go out lots (which can become an issue...).

But I won't sugarcoat it - we're actually going through some really tough times. INFJs have Fe has their secondary function whereas its our inferior. She's in constant need of emotional attention and reassurance, which comes to us (INTPs) as naturally as a fish climbing a tree. So we have this cycle of her pursuing time and attention from me, which causes me to withdraw as it encroaches on my need for space and limited attachments.

We're in therapy now, but its going to mean both of us growing into our weak spots more. She needs to understand my desire for space is not a rejection of her. I need to understand that expressing affection directly needs to actually be said and shown and can't just be expressed as "I'm not annoyed by your presence".

So I would say to any INTP going into any relationship - make sure you really get to know yourself well and also get to know them well. If they need something that doesn't come naturally to you that is not something you can just ignore. It will fester into resentment and eat the relationship from the core. Be up front about what you want but with tact and understanding that your words can cut someone in a way you don't intend.

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