Dennis Hackethal

Kitty Comes Home: my first game made with Claude Opus 5.5.

You play as a little kitten trying to find your way back to your mom.

Play for free here: https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/kitty-comes-home

Teaser trailer: https://youtu.be/bcM2BI-41cY

Midnight Ride: Production Errors That Fix Themselves (Almost)
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/midnight-ride-production-errors-that-fix-themse

What If You Could Hear Your Code?
https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/what-if-you-could-hear-your-code

Understanding in the Age of AI:
https://libertythroughreason.com/understanding-in-the-age-of-ai/

Apparently Scribd profiles are public? 🤷‍♂️ https://www.scribd.com/user/430906064/Dennis-Hackethal

I want to go to the gym today but I didn’t sleep well last night.

How to Be Rational: https://x.com/dchackethal/status/2091272979791659054

The Blind Truth-Seeker:
https://libertythroughreason.com/the-blind-truth-seeker/

~All previous methods of preference formation focus too much on what the ideas say; on their content.

Nobody really knows just how simple an idea is (Occam’s razor) or how likely (Bayesianism), for example. In some cases it’s obvious how ideas compare, but in others not so much.

Adherents of those epistemologies are all fooling themselves into thinking they’re being rational when really they’re still acting on whim. Just fancier whim.

Focus instead on how the ideas relate, on the structure of the current state of the discussion, and preference formation gets much easier and simpler.

Then you can easily see which ideas you can adopt and which you can’t. You can even see exactly which criticisms you’d need to address to change someone’s mind, say.

Beautiful.

Idea: rational discussion graph with recursive criticism evaluation, like Veritula does now. Except the ideas are programs, not natural-language text. And they execute when they have no pending criticisms.

Experimental Controls Aren’t What You Think:
https://libertythroughreason.com/experimental-controls-arent-what-you-think/

I should write a blog post about intellectual dementia soon…

I’ve been using Spotify for over a decade.

Every few months I try Apple Music only to run into bugs and switch back.

But this most recent switch is actually decent.

Transferring my favorited songs from Spotify finally worked.

AutoMix song transitions are fantastic.

Spatial Audio is a win.

Fingers crossed I won’t have a reason to return to Spotify this time.

Taking Popper Too Far, Again: https://libertythroughreason.com/taking-popper-too-far-again/

Rationality as Computation: https://libertythroughreason.com/rationality-as-computation/

Another way to approach AGI? (Very early, preliminary thoughts.)

Say you write an evolutionary algorithm, like the ones that have been written before. Then DD would argue it’ll get stuck because all it can do is explore a given landscape for its best features. Whereas real evolution creates new landscapes.

To address this issue, you subject your algorithm itself to variation and selection, by wrapping it in another evolutionary algorithm. But this approach just kicks the can down the road because now it’s the space of programs that’s limited.

How do you break out of this limitation?

You can’t just keep wrapping your programs in evolutionary algorithms like that because that only keeps kicking the can down the road. It’s like adding more and more entries to a multiplication table. It’s not the same as a multiplication algorithm. But for evolution, the problem is harder, in a way, because not even recursion solves the issue, and the starting point wasn’t as ‘flat’ as a multiplication table. The starting point is already an algorithm, not just a list.

What’s needed, in DD’s lingo, is a jump to universality. But a jump to what kind of universality, exactly?

cc @tyler-mills

Freedom of Association Maxxing:
https://libertythroughreason.com/freedom-of-association-maxxing/

Interesting insight from TheBentist on Instagram. He’s a dentist making a new toothpaste.

He says cavities are caused by a bacterium called strep mutans. A popular misconception says cavities are caused by sugar. That’s not exactly right: strep mutans feeds on sugar and then ‘poops’ out an acid that corrodes your teeth. But sugar itself does not cause cavities – it only feeds strep mutans that’s already there.

The thing is, people aren’t born with strep mutans in their mouths. And they don’t get it from food. They get it from other people who already have it. Like when parents kiss their kids or share food. I’m guessing things like ‘double dipping’, sharing utensils, or drinking from the same bottle are especially problematic.

TheBentist made a toothpase called ‘Zero Pro’ that supposedly kills strep mutans. Conventional toothpastes just scrub it off your teeth. Zero Pro is said to actually kill it. So my understanding is that you could never get cavities again as long as the strep mutans is dead.

That would also eliminate the need for mouthwash, which he calls a ‘scorched-earth approach’ that kills a lot of good bacteria.

Fact-check me on this stuff. I’m not a dentist myself. I’m not giving any medical advice. But this toothpaste sounds interesting and promising to me. Somebody is actually thinking about the root cause of oral disease, and trying to fix it rather than find ways to live with it.

How to tell you’re ahead, objectively:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-hwx-mUfjAg

This comprehensive playlist of Karl Popper videos is sure to have some videos of his you haven’t seen: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQtm033Fi_N1ZCu2ElpqrJ_pXNWLk3WW

Simple Refutation of David Deutsch’s ‘Hard to Vary’:
https://libertythroughreason.com/simple-refutation-of-david-deutschs-hard-to-vary/

Beating procrastination is simpler than you think:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a_UTkkSZhzs