I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in college.

D&D is great fun. I could spend a whole post singing the praises of tabletop role-playing—but this is not that post. Suffice it to say that I played (and still play) the game with a group of my high-school friends—geeks and techies, all. Of all my hobbies, D&D quickly surpassed all others in importance; it became my main creative outlet. I started running games myself; designing adventures; creating worlds.

Now, if you don’t know anything about Dungeons & Dragons, these are the key points: it’s traditionally played by a half-dozen players, sitting around a table, armed with paper and pencils, some oddly-shaped dice, books of game rules, and overactive imaginations fueled by fantasy novels.

(In actual play, D&D bears a striking resemblance to “a bunch of friends excitedly talking to each other about orcs and wizards”.)

The problem was, my friends and I were scattered across the country (and, at times, across the world). How do you get together for a weekly game when you live in different cities? Read more...

This post is part of a diary-style series of posts that catalogue my design and development of Meil—an IRC client application for the Mac. See the first post in the series, “Making a better IRC client”, for the background.

I have a confession to make. I first decided to try writing a new IRC client because I play pen & paper role-playing games¹ (a.k.a. tabletop RPGs or TTRPGS) online,² and no existing IRC client is as good for that purpose as I would like.

People have all sorts of odd wants, needs, and preferences when it comes to software. For me, RPG gaming is a big part of what I use chat programs for. I’m going to talk about that in a later post; for now, bear in mind that at least some of what I want from an IRC client is unusual.³

Anyway, this post is about design motivations. Not requirements, mind you; that comes later, further into the design process (and after a good deal of research and analysis). Right now, I’m asking: why am I doing this? What do I want? How will I know when I have it? Read more...

If you want something done right, don’t ever let anyone else touch it

Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one of my primary means of online communication, and it’s easily the most useful and enjoyable.¹

The problem is, most IRC client applications are terrible. Yes, I’m picky to the point of cantankerousness, but that’s beside the point, which is this: who makes a chat client with a nonresizable one-line-height input field? People are crazy and the world is mad.²Read more...

Do you know what hyperreal numbers are? They’re a concept in number theory, a sort of number, like integers, real numbers, imaginary numbers, etc. I myself have only a passing familiarity with hyperreals; I know that they’re represented by infinite sequences of finite integers, that you can perform arithmetical operations on them (though these are quite different from operations on everyday numbers), and… that’s all. I don’t know how one would operate on hyperreals; one thing I certainly don’t know—not an inkling—is how one would go about multiplying two hyperreal numbers together.

Imagine that I’m placed in a locked room. People outside the room pass pieces of paper to me through a slot, and on these papers are symbols; perhaps alphanumeric characters, perhaps ones and zeros, perhaps strange squiggles I’ve never seen before. They don’t seem to be in any sort of pattern, at least not one I can discern. Read more...

This seems to come up somewhat often, and I figured it would be useful to have my answer(s) gathered in a convenient place. Some of these thoughts are taken from things I’ve previously said on LessWrong; others are new.

Summary: In this post, I explain why I am not a utilitarian. I’ll start by explaining why I’d even consider utilitarianism in the first place, and then I’ll say why I reject it.

NOTE: This post does not end with me advancing my own complete, coherent, ethical framework. Sorry. Truth be told, my ethical views are not anywhere near completely fleshed-out. I know the general shape, but beyond that I’m more sure about what I don’t believe—what objections and criticisms I have to other people’s views—than about what I do believe. However, utilitarianism is so prevalent among the rationalist set, and (in my opinion) so wrong, and so dangerous if taken for granted, that saying “I don’t know what the right answer is, but it’s definitely not this” is important and justified.

1. Some quick definitions

People use some of these terms in diverse ways. The way I use them is basically the way that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does, and in my experience this usage is prevalent among professional philosophers: Read more...