Interesting grants program from Slate Star Codex:

astralcodexten.substack.com/p/acx-grants-r…
One interesting thing the last few years has been observing that there are classes of very valuable things needing very small amounts of money, and some very large pots of money seeking valuable things, and sometimes market doesn’t clear.

Worth thinking why this is true.
I wonder if part of the problem is that if you have e.g. $500k to give away and you would even consider 100X $5k grants this implies either a personally irrational amount of time investment or hiring the minimum viable foundation staff, which is probably $1M a year++.
Plus weirdly perverse incentives where the downside risk of being associated with a terrible failure or noteworthy ungood recipient for grant #63 causes you to overcorrect in having A Legible Process (TM) incorporating Charitable Best Practices (TM) with multiple specialists.

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More from @patio11

30 Dec
The number of U.S. government systems which are not accessible by Americans and other legitimately interested individuals abroad is disgraceful.
Most of the time it isn't even a conscious decision, it is "Check this box to use recommended security rules" by someone with no independent rulemaking authority to say "We don't let you operate corporations from Japan anymore."
Note that this will, very predictably, not be accepted as a mitigating factor if e.g. the person who happens to live in Tokyo but who is extremely unambiguously subject to the laws of the United States or a jurisdiction therein can't comply due to web application firewall rules.
Read 5 tweets
30 Dec
Goodness do I have so many thoughts about this exchange, which is more worth reading than most gossipy exchanges because there are large portions of economy that operate this way and you may want to select out of working for them.
One: it’s healthy that the economy have a mix of jobs where people can both be expected to drop everything the week after Christmas if required and where approved time off is sacrosanct, and it is important both sides of each job understand what agreement they’ve struck.
Two: if you’re a manager, and you have a critical business process which absolutely positively requires a particular person and will SPOF without them, you have at least two problems and should start fixing them with some urgency.
Read 14 tweets
28 Dec
Took kids to a dinosaur park. At souvenir shop, Liam was eyeing a paint set.

Clerk: Great choice! I did that triceratops.
Me: That’s really excellent, how do you say in Japanese, dry brushing?
Clerk: *startles*
Clerk: 40k?
Me: Fantasy.
Clerk: The Emperor protects, bro.
Globalization is wild.
Wonder which of the two of us would have said this interaction was less likely to ever happen, as of this morning.
Read 5 tweets
28 Dec
Oxygen Not Included is a fun base building game where the primary source of challenge is your own resource requirements and pollution output as you grow. Has about three fun and novel physics systems, which aren’t real-life simulators but fun analogs

It occasioned the following:
Me: This colony is going to die within weeks without a solution to two pressing problems: 1) lack of potable water 2) we’re expelling far too much waste heat and the backwash from it will make our air uninhabitably hot.

Lead explorer: Bad news, sir. Instead of useful things, …
… the next biome over included a mountain of -50C ice.
Me: What?
Explorer: A solid block of ice. At least kilotons worth, sir. It will take days to cut through.
Me: … Months, certainly. Excellent!
Explorer: Sir?
Read 9 tweets
16 Dec
The first version of the Bingo Card Creator CMS needed to create PNGs and PDFs of bingo cards given word lists, but it was my first Ruby/Rails project.

I did not yet actually have a functioning SaaS version of the app, just the downloadable Java swing app.

So here’s workflow:
Freelancer uses CMS to write new word list. It gets saved to database.

Periodically, I log in and run a rake task which dumps text files containing word lists which don’t have associated PNGs/PDFs created yet.

I then download them to a windows machine.
On that machine, I run a scripting thing (have forgotten name) which allows the computer to software automate the mouse and keyboard.

It then: opens the Java swing app, moves the mouse to X, Y whatever, clicks “New bingo card”, moves to the input area, clicks, types first…
Read 9 tweets
15 Dec
The quilt of red flags is now on fire.
None of this is all that surprising to anyone who knows the words “binary options” given the company kept there, and shady characters abound in crypto but were largely forced out / marginalized / conveniently ignored as the industry has may a play for legitimacy.
Celsius is not marginalized. They’re tied at the hip with Tether, the central bank of crypto, and there is a thin DeFi fig lead between them and centralized, ~indisputably legitimate organizations who are now offering crypto “earn” products.
Read 4 tweets

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