Max Kaye's Site

ATM you need to register an account to post/reply, but anon comments are mb on the cards -- just not a priority right now.

I've been focusing on philosophy more lately. During late January I decided to post my self-unendorsement video. I've been adding to my curi.us microblog regularly. That is where you should go to find my latest work. I post almost everything I produce to that thread. For the past few days I have been doing making daily updates to my makeup vlog and will continue doing that for the next week and a bit. I've also created a vanity URL for the playlist: https://xk.io/muv. I link the playlist for these videos (and most videos individually) in my microblog, too. I will continue posting to my microblog. I consider my blog at xk.io mostly deprecated -- I don't anticipate posting much here until I find a new blog system.

<p This is post-dated to when I posted the video.</p <p In Jan 2021 I unendorsed all my past work and ideas. There are details in the video, but basically it's an FYI that I have changed my mind on some important things, and I'm not sure that I believe the things I used to (but revisiting all those things takes energy, so that won't necessarily happen soon/ever).</p <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ Hd1AmLPEyA" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen </iframe

I've been doing a lot of work on philosophy recently. Public work takes two main forms: the tutorials are all up on youtube, and a site where I've been publishing related work. I've hired Elliot Temple to tutor me with the ultimate goal of improving my writing. We discuss a lot of things in the tutorials; topics so far include grammar, text analysis, controlling and directing one's habits, time and energy managements, epistemology (including one of Elliot's most significant contributions: Yes/No Philosophy (1) (2)) I am regularly updating <https://xertrov.github.io/fi/ with notes and things I'm writing or thinking about. I've come to realise the current site I have is pretty bad for higher volume stuff, and jekyll is bad in general for maintaining a library of criticism. So I'm thinking about potential new things to use for a site. I want to migrate everything, have a large amount of customizability WRT…

Edit 2020-08-03: I don't stand by this article. I think it's poorly written, and on a subject I don't know enough about. I'm glad I wrote it because it's been part of my progression to taking ideas (and seeking their improvement) more seriously. I've left it basically untouched besides these edits for posterity's sake. Edit (June): this isn't written well enough, and I intend to move this to a category off the main page in the near future. I could be wrong, but if I am I don't know why, so please enlighten me. As it stands, this feels robust to me atm. Comments/discussion: <https://github.com/xk-io/xk-io.github.io/issues/5 (FI link once posted) Alternative: Since GitHub is not great for discussion, if you – for whatever reason – do not think it's a good enough makeshift-forum: please post on Curi’s open discussion, and if possible please post a link in the github thread or…

<p <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1J7U-rcoRBMYnLxKRJq5OaRuLa5r mCDx B4kPCwZiIo" Slides</a </p <p <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwDANKTgc c" title="Max Kaye | BLOCKWALKS" <img src="http://img.youtube.com/vi/nwDANKTgc c/0.jpg" alt="Max Kaye | BLOCKWALKS" </a </p

Legend: \<date consumed\ - \<title\ , \<author\ (\<publication year\ ) \<link\ commentry (optional) update \<date\ : some update (optional) tags: thing one, thing two, another thing really good stuff 2015-ish - The Beginning of Infinity , David Deutsch (2011) http://beginningofinfinity.com/ update 2018-06-12 : best book ever written. incredibly consistent. breathtakingly profound. tags: philosophy, epistemology, AI, quantum physics, morality, general science, memes, society, political philosophy, aesthetics, environmental philosophy 2017-late - The Fountainhead , Ayn Rand (1943) https://www.aynrand.org/novels/the-fountainhead update 2018-06-12 : deep book on the nature of integrity, relationships with others, the meaning and purpose of one's actions (in the service of oneself and in the service of greater ideas / greatness). i've thought about this book quite a bit over the last 6 months, not only is there more to learn, but it's a source of great ideas to build on (esp with harder questions re: integrity). tags: integrity, society, purpose,…

I've long thought about compiling and documenting things I find that I think are worth watching / consuming I'm starting to do that here: https://xk.io/stuff-worth-watching (includes more than just videos)

Here's a guessing game that I believe is secure. Setup You want people to guess the answer to some question. The answer is in ASCII, and all lowercase. Additionally, you want automatic (though not instant) payout for correct answers. Fully trustless, though. That question could be anything with a certain answer. Example: "Who wrote Macbeth? (canonical full name)". To do it, this is what's required of the winning guesser. (this example is written in the context of a trustless host network like Ethereum) . Winning Players Actions: Step 1 Come up with the answer. Got it? Great. Step 2 Publish to the contract: Where (Keep these details private for the moment) Aside Why should we commit this collection of things, and why do we have ? Does mean proof of work? Step 3 After some time (set by the contract), publish this transaction: Wait some more time (set by the…

archiving for my own future purposes + i don't know if this is replicated anywhere else on the web. round 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20210512150518/https://syd.blochaus.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/03/sbs2021results round01.pdf round 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20211217124144/https://syd.blochaus.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/04/BHAU-61424-Sydney-Boulder-Series-Round-2-Results DC03.pdf round 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20211217124126/https://syd.blochaus.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/04/BHAU-61424-Sydney-Boulder-Series-Round-3-Results DC02-3.pdf round 4: https://web.archive.org/web/20211217124114/https://syd.blochaus.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/05/BHAU-61492-Sydney-Boulder-Series-Round-4-Results DC02.pdf combined 1,2,3,4: https://web.archive.org/web/20211217124059/https://syd.blochaus.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/05/BHAU-61424-SBS-Combined-Round-1 2 3 4-Results DC02.pdf combined 1,2,3: https://web.archive.org/web/20211217124859/https://syd.blochaus.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/04/BHAU-61424-SBS-Combined-Round-1 2 3-Results DC02-2.pdf participant info pack: https://web.archive.org/web/20210512144534/https://syd.blochaus.com.au/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2021/03/sbs2021info-1.pdf

this script will speed up (or slow down) video and audio via ffmpeg. put the following in e.g., and it. <br license: public domain

e.g., governor) - relevant to learning - redlining in a controlled env can be useful for like measuring progress or something, but that shouldn't be the norm - by maintaining excap one can ensure there's room to move -- buffer. that's important while learning b/c you're focusing on creating new organization of knowledge and reorganizing existing knowledge. trying to learn without excap is like trying to do tetris with no v-space. with lots of v-space tetris is manageable, but it gets hyperbolically harder as you approach the top. re long-running learning conflict: the more exploratory side means exhausting excap quickly (manageable when surveying, but not when trying to complete a project).

Climbing gyms (and everything else) have just reopened (for the vaccinated) in Sydney, following a 3.5 month lockdown. Now that climbing is frequent and regular again, I've been reconsidering climbing goals. Before lockdown, my goal was to send every new grade 3[^1] (out of 6) problem, every week, for 6 weeks (I'd done 5 weeks when lockdown started). 6 weeks is a full rotation, so achieving this means that I would have consistently been able to project any purple in 2-3 sessions. The purpose of this goal was to emphasise consistency over results (better to do be capable of any grade 3 problem than some grade 3 and some grade 4). The current goal I've settled on is to send every grade 3 climb (in the gym) in a week -- there's about 24 or so (give or take depending on what gets set). I sent 10 this morning (over…

I think freedom and universality must have some deep connection. If you have the freedom to do something, that means -- wrt that context -- you can do whatever you like. You're unconstrained ; that aspect cannot (or at least should not) be a bottleneck . That gives you some unboundedness wrt method, or content, or whatever the freedom relates to. Freedom of speech removes a bound on speech. Freedom of thought removes a bound on thought. Freedom enables universality; and without certain freedoms, you cannot have certain universalities. I thought that freedom and thinking were like orthogonal; both necessary for philosophy and good life, but neither sufficient. Now I suspect there's more there than I realized.

I like a lot of Louis Rossmann's videos and his thoughts. This topic is for discussing and collecting good ones. Here's two; one recent, one old (2021-09) Rossmann vid on covid+society; seems good - perspective on being a business owner, masks, lockdowns, etc. (2013-07) The $30,000 pocket dial - a story from Rossmann's early days

This is a repost of a post I made to reddit on June 13th 2017. I found it again recently and wanted to document it here. The Problem (what's the optimal encoding?) You have a known list of n candidates on a ballot. In the act of voting, the voter must number each candidate from 1 to n, using each number once. The voter is thus describing a transformation on the list of candidates into a particular permutation. What is the minimum number of bits needed to exactly describe any order, and the method? My naive approach is to count (from the left) the number of 'jumps' each candidate must take to arrive in their ranked position skipping any previously ranked candidates . So if we had 3 candidates: and a list of ranks we'd do this (where matches candidates to ranks): First, should be in the 2nd position, which…

I started doing outdoor bouldering about a week ago (we've been in lockdown for the last 2 months). I found an unclimbed wall that's close enough to home (for current exercise-distance restrictions) and have been working on that recently. I've posted some videos of this to my max's bouldering playlist on YT. I've also documented the wall on theCrag: https://www.thecrag.com/climbing/australia/new-south-wales-and-act/sydney-metropolitan/area/5156697663 Before lockdown I was 4-5 weeks in to my 'send all the purples' goal at my gym (purples are bouldering routes of a particular grade) -- my gym resets a few sections of wall every week and has a 6 week cycle.

I've had some spam (only 3 topics) since migrating the site. I've locked-down thread creation in open discussion until I implement some anti-spam measures.