LessWrong Community Weekend 2015

29 June 2015

2129 words

[Kinda sappy and emotional in parts. Being posted sort of a long time after the event. Not totally happy with the way this post turned out, but, you know, better finished and mediocre than perfect and imaginary, or something. Epistemic state: I deleted a lot of “as far as I can tell”s. Just pretend like every sentence ends with those words, and please do tell me if I’m wrong about anything.]

I attended this year’s European LessWrong Community Weekend. The initial draft of this post began thus:

This is the event report I did not want to write and you do not want to read.

I decided I didn’t like this approach. During the Weekend, people always said, “make it your own.” So let’s do that instead.

This is a collection of things I learned while I was in Berlin.

LaTeX

2 June 2015

Modified: 20 September 2026

2105 words

I have helped typeset three theses and many shorter documents in LaTeX and I realized that I find myself googling the same things over and over again. Therefore I decided to collect all the problems I have solved so far on this page. At the bottom there is a list of unsolved problems. The reader is invited to give me advice at nino@ninoan.com.

Observations

27 May 2015

438 words

Observations:

How not to design a watch

17 May 2015

395 words

[This gets kinda rant-y. Don’t worry though, it’s not about the Watch.]

I found it irritating that I had to adjust the time on my wristwatch twice every year because of DST, so I bought a radio controlled watch that would do this automatically, and it’s working fantastically: Now I don’t even notice when DST starts or ends. Except when I stop and ask myself why I’m feeling so tired all of a sudden – but that’s beside the point. Here’s the thing:

Reaching the goal is not an action

29 March 2015

814 words

[This was difficult to write in a way that makes sense to someone who doesn’t live inside my brain and I don’t know if I succeeded. I’d be curious to know if this makes any sense at all to anyone who is not me.]

Nate Soares writes

When I have a big problem that I want solved, I have found that there is one simple process which tends to work. It goes like this:

Move towards the goal.

What I’m about to write is kind of part of what his post is about, but it adds a layer of framing that has allowed me to feel virtually no anxiety about the future for almost a week now, which is extremely unusual for me. I wanted to share my thoughts in case anyone finds them useful.