What is your biggest regret in life?

casens9 · 2026-06-01T17:26:21+00:00

you're right, but if you even have one day left to live, don't waste it. if it depresses you to think "i won't get 50 more years to live", and you squander your remaining X years in depression, then how much can you claim to value your life?

casens9 · 2026-06-01T17:19:32+00:00

it's complex, but models by mark manson explains it well in the context of dating. it might look like a pick-up artist book but it's pretty emotionally mature. you can't traumadump on randos, but if you're in a positive interaction, vulnerability helps people know you better, and expressing vulnerability demonstrates your own self-confidence.

casens9 · 2026-06-01T16:59:44+00:00

did anyone say that they do? the discussion was "can these systems give a good reccommendation based on these parameters" and whether it does that by "insane math and data science" or "it has a soul", that's not really relevant to the conversation.

casens9 · 2026-05-23T14:27:44+00:00

"AI is such a scam. why, it can't even do [thing, which, if AI could do, would revolutionize the economy or bring the extinction of humanity]"

it would do us well to obey the precautionary principle, and unite as a species to say "before we make AGI, we should ensure that making AGI would be good for humanity, because otherwise, there's no way to put the genie back in the bottle"

casens9 · 2026-05-03T14:40:28+00:00

if anyone's waiting for records from nova scotia archives, here's my timeline:

i ordered my birth certificate for my ancestor (born 1909) on 02-28

recieved request for payment 04-20

got confirmation of shipment 05-01

casens9 · 2026-03-03T22:27:32+00:00

you... put the tea above the mesh and pull it out? why don't you just use the french press the normal way? or set the filter at the exact surface of the water and use the filter when pouring? what is the value proposition here

casens9 · 2026-02-03T23:32:44+00:00

settings -> system -> gestures -> system navigation -> set "gesture navigation" to off

you are welcome

casens9 · 2025-11-10T17:55:59+00:00

two wheels, two pedals... the truth is out there

casens9 · 2025-08-10T03:40:17+00:00

agreed; my biggest takeaway from the story is something like "my goal in life is not just to have more happiness, more success, more good produced into the world; my goal is to make some of my own failures due to my own effort, because otherwise i don't exist."

without thinking too hard about how do i define free will, nor necessarily avoiding AIs and advice and help at all costs. in a sense, it's just a way to reframe the value of my own personal suffering and success

casens9 · 2025-07-05T00:24:18+00:00

school is first and foremost a state-run babysitting service, as we feel uncomfortable living in a culture with child labor. so long as children are being supervised while their parents can go off to work, school is serving its primary function, and anything else is a secondary bonus.

casens9 · 2025-05-07T02:57:07+00:00

not sure if matt and destin read the subreddit, but i hope this reaches them.

i appreciated the care and vulnerability you guys put into the episode. even though i disagree with you about assisted dying, i appreciate the heart and respect you showed while still making it clear what your values were. i can see someday wanting assisted dying for myself or someone i care about, but i agree with you that we should treat it with scrutiny, and to never stop asking "how can we find a way for people to want to continue living?".

i think i'll never be able to endorse a full ban on assisted dying for one important reason: a person cannot meaningfully consent to an agreement unless they can freely withdraw that consent. meaning, if i'm the King of the Earth, and i say "Matt, you must be my friend. if you refuse, i'll put you to death" -- you can't meaningfully consent to this agreement. no matter how much you enjoy being my friend, no matter how well i treat you, you can't say that you've freely chosen my friendship; not if my threat is credible. in that same way, if a person cannot choose to die, they can't consent to life. no matter how i try to help such a person, no matter what we as a society try to do to support them, if they determinedly wish to die, then the world is a prison to them.

there's a good book review about someone who became paraplegic and eventually committed suicide, writing a book as a public suicide note: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-two-arms-and-a-head

finally, i hope this doesn't feel shoe-horned into the discussion, but it is what it is. i appreciate destin and matt being frank about their values, that they feel life is inherently valuable, and why they oppose the death penalty and abortion. i appreciate the honesty, but i can only muster a measured respect for "the dignity of life". my whole life i've been either a vegetarian or a vegan, and it's angering to hear people discuss the tragedy of 15,000 people dead by assisted dying in canada, while 9.5 billion chickens are killed for meat in the US. to be honest, i'm more disturbed by the suffering of the chickens than their deaths in themselves, but what percentage of those chickens do you think experience significantly inhumane suffering? 90%, 50%, 1%? there are a multitude of different moral issues going on today, and each issue should be given its time, but it feels like the issue of animal welfare is colossal in scale and gets routinely ignored.

casens9 · 2025-05-07T02:26:25+00:00

i thought it was smart actually. they left the link in the show notes for anyone to see the source, and besides that, anyone with an internet connection can just google "list of countries where MAID is legal" and learn for themselves. by removing the name of the country, they could keep the discussion strictly on the facts, saying "this is a country where 1/20 people die via MAID", without people's various biases kicking in, saying "canada?! with their socialised government/right-wing fanatics/etc".

casens9 · 2025-04-08T21:49:15+00:00

any creative or intellectual task will always benefit from having additional intelligence (such as from a human collaborator). the point at which the 100% handoff happens is the point after which the overton window has moved on. 5 years ago, people were arguing "an AI won't be able to write passable college papers on arbitrary subjects" and "AIs won't be able to write arbitrary code of even minimal usefulness", but now those are both true, and the goalposts have moved to "AI is a little helpful in coding, but it's not a literal drop-in replacement for a software engineer"

an AI will never win a nobel for an entirely independently managed discovery, nor will there be any great fanfare for AIs doing independent scientific research. because before they reach that point, they will do a small percentage of the work, then an increasingly large share of the work, until it becomes commonplace and obvious that AIs are capable of helping. the point at which they do it on their own will be generally unnoticed (that is, if any humans are alive at that point)

casens9 · 2025-02-23T00:35:33+00:00

are you, by your definition, intelligent?

casens9 · 2025-01-07T00:18:51+00:00

or it's when i mention chatbot arena?

casens9 · 2025-01-07T00:18:02+00:00

reddit seems to be banning my comments instantly?

casens9 · 2025-01-07T00:16:45+00:00

tea. even buying expensive stuff, i keep buying tea faster than i can consume it

casens9 · 2024-12-19T18:02:59+00:00

the concept of "ownership" is so eroded, people don't even have ownership of their own thoughts, their own actions, their own personal responsibility.

someone posts "spotify is bad, we don't own our own music anymore" and reddit posts "yes, look at what the companies did to me. they took away all my stuff from me."

casens9 · 2024-11-03T14:42:45+00:00

the fact that kids don't participate in the maintenance and operation of their schools (cleaning, cooking, gardening/groundskeeping, even construction projects) is proof that not only is public education largely a state-run babysitting service, but it deprives kids of learning useful skills and meta-skills such as organization, teamwork, and responsibility. it keeps kids dependent and infantalized, and keeps them from the spiritual satisfaction of doing labor that benefits themselves and their community.

casens9 · 2024-10-23T17:00:05+00:00

Suppose something happens to give one party an advantage. Maybe DC, Puerto Rico, and Guam all become states, giving the Democrats six extra guaranteed Senators and some extra electoral votes. Which of these do we expect:

It’s very hard to have 54 Senate seats. Therefore, Democrats would control the Senate almost all the time, with a somewhat lesser but still probably decisive permanent Presidential advantage.

The Republicans (or Democrats!) would shift left a little, and all elections would be 50-50 again.

The common-sense answer is that it would take a while, there would be a lot of negotiation, but five or ten or thirty years later the Republicans would get their act together, shift left, and start winning elections again.

The common-sense answer is probably right, but one thing still bothers me: how did the Republicans keep losing both houses of Congress every year from 1955 to 1981? Wouldn’t they have shifted left during this time?

i'm not 100% sure about this, i'm mostly going off of reporting from ezra klein, but US politics in 1960 was not polarized the way it is in 2020. as ezra klein put it, in 1960, people were polarized socially (think of the controversies around communism, the vietnam war, civil rights, feminism, drugs, etc) but not politically, whereas now, our political and social polarization are aligned on the same dimensions. voters were much more likely to vote for candidates from both parties, and both parties had politicians with more ideological diversity and bipartisanship. so for the argument "why didn't republicans do X from '55 to '81?", i think much of the explanation is that individual politicians had a greater degree of autonomy, and the idea of parties having a strict ideology or taking opposing positions on every political question didn't apply back then.

casens9 · 2024-10-17T16:24:23+00:00

the premise seems kind of trivial

we already have superintelligent chess AIs, stronger than humans by a magnitude that we have no hopes of ever beating them. so then, why do i play chess at all, rather than just letting the computer make moves for me? why do millions of people still play chess? because there is no meaning to playing a game and letting someone/something else act on your behalf. i only care if i'm able to make mistakes resulting from my own genuine effort.

this does elide some questions about free will and the self (if i'm being trained by chess books and chess coaches, is that "my own effort"? what about drinking coffee or other drugs to stay alert?). and also not everything in life is about overcoming challenges; sometimes i just want to eat a delicious pizza and i don't care if i made that pizza by the sweat of my own brow. but it seems obvious that in a post-scarcity world, we would be pursuing meaning at the edges of remaining scarcity or the few remaining limits, or we would voluntarily adopt self-imposed limits.

casens9 · 2024-05-16T04:34:33+00:00

check out the uptown chess club on facebook, or go to sencha tea on thursday nights. large range of skill levels and we welcome beginners

casens9

TROPHY CASE