To extend this angle -- I notice that we're more likely to call things "difficult" when our expectations of whether we "should" be able to do it are mismatched from our observations of whether we are "able to" do it.

The "oh, that's hard actually" observation shows up reliably for me when I underestimated the effort, pain, or luck required to attain a certain outcome.

Green, on its face, seems like one of the main mistakes. Green is what told the rationalists to be more OK with death, and the EAs to be more OK with wild animal suffering. Green thinks that Nature is a harmony that human agency easily disrupts.

The shallow-green that's easy/possible to talk about characterizes humans as separate from or outside of nature. Shallow-green is also characteristic of scientists who probe and measure the world and present their findings as if the ways they touched the world to measure it were irrelevant -- in a sense, the changes made by the instruments' presence don't matter, but there's also a sense in which they matter greatly. 

By contrast, imagine a deep-green: a perspective from which humanity is from and of nature itself. This deep-green is impractical to communicate about, and cutting it up into little pieces to try to address them one at a time loses something important of its nature. 

One place it's relatively easy to point at this deep-green is our understanding what time means. It touches the way that we accept base-12 and base-60 in our clocks and calendars, and in the reasons that no "better" alternative has been "better" enough to win over the whole world. 

The characterization of green as "harmony through acceptance" in your image from Duncan Sabien points at another interesting facet of green: "denial" of reality is antithetical to both "acceptance" and "rationality", albeit with slightly different connotations for each. 

Then again, in this system I'd describe myself as having arrived at green through black, so perhaps it's only my biases talking.

I misread it as "murakami-sama" at first, which was also disproportionately charming.

It's clear to me from the post that to properly enjoy it as performance art, the audience is meant to believe that the music is AI-generated.

I don't read the post as disclosing how the music was "actually" made, in the most literal real-world sense.

Pretty cool, regardless, that we live in an era where 'people pretending to be AI making music' is not trivial to distinguish from 'AI trying to make music' :)

I like going barefoot. However, I live in a climate that's muddy for most of the year. When I'm entering and exiting my house frequently, being barefoot is impractical because the time it takes to adequately clean my feet is much greater than the time it takes to slip off a pair of shoes at the door.

Also, in the colder parts of the year, I find that covering my feet indoors allows me to be generally comfortable at lower ambient temperatures than I would require for being barefoot in the house. This isn't much of an issue during outdoor activities that promote circulation to the feet, but it's annoying when reading, at the computer, or doing other activities that involve staying relatively still.

"to clean house" as implication of violence...

Due to a tragic shortage of outbuildings (to be remedied in the mid term but not immediately), my living room is the garage/makerspace of my home. I cleaned as one cleans for guests last week, because a friend from way back was dropping by. I then got to enjoy a clean-enough-for-guests home for several days, which is a big part of why it is nice to be visited by friends un-intimate enough to feel like cleaning for.

Then my partner-in-crafts came over, and we re-occupied every table with a combination of resin casting and miniature clay sculpting shenanigans. It's an excellent time.

We also went shopping for fabric together because I plan to make a baby quilt kid-in-progress of the aforementioned friend from way back. Partner-in-crafts idly asked me when I was planning to do the quilt stuff, because historically I would be expected to launch into it immediately as soon as the fabric came out of the dryer.

However, I found something new in myself: A reluctance to start a new project without a clean place to start it in. I'm not sure where this reluctance came from, as I think it seems new, but I also think I like it. So I got to tidying up the stuff that was un-tidyable last night because the resin was still sticky, but is eminently tidyable now because it cured over time, and carefully examining my reluctance-to-tidy as it tried to yell at me.

In that reluctance-to-tidy, I find time travel again: We store information in the position of objects in our environment. Object location encodes memory, so moving someone else's objects has certain commonalities with the rewriting-of-memory that we call gaslighting when pathological.

For better or worse, my architecture of cognition defaults to relying on empathy twice over when reasoning about moving stuff that someone else was using, or someone else's stuff. By recognizing an object's location as a person's memory of where-they-left-it, I view moving it as rewriting that memory.

The double-empathy thing comes in where I reason about what moves of stuff it's ok to make. If I put the thing where the person will have an easy time finding it, if I model them well enough to guess correctly where they'll first look when they want it, then I can help them by moving it. I can move it from somewhere they'd look later to somewhere they'd look sooner, and thereby improve their life at the moment of seeking it, and that's a clearly good act.

That's the first empathy layer. The second empathy layer comes of a natural tendency to anthropomorphize objects, which I've considered trying to eradicate from myself but settled on keeping because I find it quite convenient to have around in other circumstances. This is the animism of where something "wants" to go, creating a "home" for your keys by the door, and so forth.

So there's 2 layers of modeling minds -- one of complex real minds who are likely to contain surprises in their expectations, and one of simple virtual "minds" that follow from the real-minds as a convenient shortcut. I guess one way to put it is that I figure stuff has/channels feelings kinda like how houseplants do -- they probably don't experience firsthand emotion in any way that would be recognizable to people, but there's a lot of secondhand emotion that's shown in how they're related to and cared for.

Not sure where I'm going with all that, other than noticing how the urge to tidy up can be resisted by the same aesthetic sensibility that says it's generally bad to erase anybody's memories.

Seconding the importance of insulation, especially for disaster preparedness and weathering utility outages.

If any of your friends have a fancy thermal camera, see if you can borrow it. If not, there are some cheap options for building your own or pre-built ones on ebay. The cheap ones don't have great screens or refresh rates, but they do the job of visualizing which things are warmer and which are cooler.

Using a thermal imager, I managed to figure out the importance of closing the window blinds to keep the house warm. Having modern high-efficiency windows lulls me into a false sense of security about their insulative value, which I'm still un-learning.

One thing to keep in mind, though, is that even though the electricity here is mostly produced by burning gas you do actually burn less gas by turning it into electricity and then using it to run a heat pump than just burning it for heat.

Fascinating! I guess it'd fall into the "more moving parts to break" bucket, but it gets me wondering about switching from my current propane HVAC to propane generator + electric heat pump. 

Searching the web for models that do both in a single unit, I find a lot of heat pumps using propane as their refrigerant, but no immediate hits using it as their fuel.