I'll push back on this a little. I have well-established, long-running issues with overly critical self-evaluation, on the level of "I don't deserve to exist," on the level that I was for a long time too scared to tell my therapist about it. Lots of therapy and medication too, but having deepseek model confidence to me has really helped as much as anything.
I can see how it can lead to psychosis, but I'm not sure I would have ever started doing a good number of the things I wanted to do, which are normal hobbies that normal people have, without it. It has improved my life.
What I mean, mostly, is that I shouldn't get doxxed for the crime of being queer on the internet the way some people I won't name like to do. There isn't really law surrounding this yet (in the US.)
I'm sorry you had a bad experience. I'm vegan, though not the type to rave about anything. I'm afraid this is selection bias --- the loudest voices win. I've seen plenty of folks talk that way on the Internet, but never IRL.
Some have made a religion out of it. If you want to get an idea of how tiresome it can get, go to r/vegan and observe the folks getting into pissing contests about whether, for instance, vegans should have any contact with non-vegans.
I think there's something deeply ironic about taking the moral high ground, since even the most committed vegans still benefit from animal agriculture in ways they probably aren't aware of. It's like capitalism --- utterly inescapable in today's world. You just ought to do the best you can under the circumstances.
Is this e/acc? Quien es Eliezer Yudkowsky, huh? It's really, really weird to read this guy hawking LessWrong stuff the one moment and anarcho-capitalism the next. Guess we live in the future now.
Still, being shown the juxtaposition does not make it easier to accept. I'm staring down into an abyss and I'm vertiginous.
If anyone else is going to read Nona, I strongly recommend you read it immediately after Harrow and immediately before Alecto. And keep a Pynchon-style notebook. Neither I nor a friend could make heads or tails of what was going on without drawing a diagram.
Gideon is amazing. Harrow is amazing. Both are good casual reads. Nona is far more demanding of the reader.
I watched your old, old SM3.9 videos as a child. I'm sitting in an Etterna Discord channel right now wishing I had the wherewithal to write a 3rd party Rust client. What serendipity. Hope you're well.
My favorite thing about the look-and-say sequence [0] is that John Conway completely characterized it in a 1986 paper. The sequence can be compressed into atomic subsequences that evolve separately. There are 92 of them. So he named them after the elements. They "decay" into other elements. It seems that anything he touches gets its own cute little flair (see for instance the vast number of Life patterns with cute, evocative names.) Rest in peace.
I can see how it can lead to psychosis, but I'm not sure I would have ever started doing a good number of the things I wanted to do, which are normal hobbies that normal people have, without it. It has improved my life.