I've decided to post these in weekly batches. This is the fifth of five. I'm posting these here because Blogspot's comment apparatus sucks and also because no one will comment otherwise. Because this is the last week and because there's only two posts in it, I'm also going to mention a few highlights and talk about what went well and what missed the mark.

29. My PhD Thesis: Part 1: Preliminaries - Algebra, Topology, Algebraic Topology

Surprise! We've actually been thinking about the basics of algebraic topology this whole time, skipping right past the horrors of point-set topology...

Every topological space has a fundamental group. Some of them are extremely weird. (Your search term here to start off down that rabbit hole is "Hawaiian earring space".)

30. Atoms to Agents As Filtered Through Some Tame Research-Creature

Tools are not agents, but they're almost agents. They have no goal, but seem to be clearly designed for some purpose, or have been subjected to some kind of selection pressure comparable in optimization strength to intentional design. They are always composed of other tools, all the way down to atoms; they are the bedrock of our theory. I claim no constraint on their actionspace, or the actionspace expansion that they afford to an agent wielding them. Hammers, bones, pens, ribosomes, and spoons are all tools; viruses are marginal.

Highlights! I've picked out the handful of posts with the ~most reads after a little while, and the handful that I was most proud of. I'll crosspost the best couple of each category at some point.

Highlights (as judged by estimated readers/day, measured on 12/9):

• Live Absurdly Decadently By Ancient Standards (3.15)
• My PhD Thesis: Part 1: Preliminaries - Algebra, Topology, Algebraic Topology (2.50)
• Atoms to Agents As Filtered Through Some Tame Research-Creature (2.44)
• Join Me Here In This Darkness (And Fight On Anyway) (1.93)
• ...And We Stare At The Sun, But We Never See Anything There (1.75)
• Several More Delicious Scalable Recipes for Posterity (1.57)
• Every Accusation is an Admission (1.50)
• How To: Move Cross-Country, Trial Therapists (1.47)

All others had <1.34 readers/day.

Highlights (as judged by me and what I thought were my best posts):

...OK I'd thought these were going to be substantially different from the reader's choice highlights but they mostly overlap. A few notable posts that I really liked but don't seem to have got a ton of attention: Seven-ish Evidentials From My Thought-Language, The Ultimate Sylow Theorem Guide for Algebra Quals, A Partial Theory of Flavor Pairing in Foodcraft, What's the Type of an Ontological Mismatch?, and In Defense of Boring Doom: A Pessimist's Case for Better Pessimism.

Ultimately, though, I was pretty happy with like half of these posts.

Postmortem! What was I hoping to get out of this? What went well, and what could have gone better? What could I have done to get more out of Budget Inkhaven Halfhaven?

• I think it went pretty well, given that I was doing this alongside both a research grant and substantial surprise problems in my personal life.
• I wish I'd started writing up some of the higher-context ideas earlier on, but then again there's a handful of possible posts I didn't end up writing that I'm glad I didn't.
• I think that keeping up on writing at a comparable pace to my previous posting project was valuable, and definitely moved the needle a bit on my ability to express ideas, write quickly, and talk about high-context topics I'd otherwise be too timid to discuss. I'm still not happy with how much/little of that I did, but it's something to work off of.
• I regret not going to Inkhaven, a little, but personal commitments, scheduling constraints, and budget constraints all conspired to make that impossible.
• All the same, this was a good opportunity to keep emptying out my "post ideas" file; that's even with having generated a fair few extra ideas in the meantime!
  • I even ended up getting to a few of the post ideas that went into the "maybe not" folder last time around:
    • My Theory of Cooking and Flavor Pairing and How To: Move Cross-Country, Trial Therapists were both pretty much as planned.
    • "On Pulling Shards of Glass Out of Your Heart, Staring Into the Sun, And Breaking Your Twisted Arm Deliberately" got split into numerous different assorted posts. So many.
    • What It’s Like to Be a Fox of Tindalos didn't end up quite as planned, because the planned version of that post is just way too weird and high-context for me to write just yet.
    • "I plan to write about my thesis properly; I already have the post half-done and I managed to dig up the old thread from vulpine.club from way back in late 2021 that I’d feared lost when v.c closed." This one I actually found an archived version of the thread! Hurrah! It's also ended up being a way bigger undertaking than I might have guessed. More on this one as I have time and energy.
• A few ideas didn't quite make the cut this time around, just like last time.
  • Here are some of the working titles and descriptions of those varyingly dead-but-dreaming posts: A Model of Kakonomics and Low Equilibria, Three Sketches in Overendurance, Things To Know About The Bay Area Ratsphere, Go Hard And Go Weird, Attractor Basin vs Filtering vs Cultivation, Why Conceptual Engineering Is So Important, Three Thumbs Up: The Cultural Event of Blaseball, Homology Chains of Leftovers, Anxiety Is Not the Unit of Effort Either, Seven Affixes From My Thought-Language, Comprehensive Zendo Rules, and The Con Badge Problem.
  • As before, if you really want to see one of these written, reach out to me! Maybe it'll even change my mind.

As ever, I accept public feedback here, and private feedback at https://admonymous.co/lorxus .