Icosian Reflections

…a tendency to systematize and a keen sense

that we live in a broken world.

IN  WHICH Ross Rheingans-Yoo—a sometime quantitative trader, economist, expat, EA, artist, educator, and game developer—writes on topics of int­erest.

Adding HTTPS

My Faults My Own (and other rossry.net and r-y.io subdomains) are now available over HTTPS, with certificates from Let's Encrypt. (cf. https://blog.rossry.net/https)

The setup took nontrivial effort, so I've narrated it here for my or your future reference. I don't think there's anything technically novel here, and there may even be an HTTPS-setup guide for 2019 somewhere else that dominates mine for usefulness, but there wasn't one easy-to-find enough that I found it, so here we are.


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First, the dramatis personae:

Let's Encrypt (hereafter "LE"), a project of the nonprofit Internet Security Research Group, issues free TLS (née SSL) certificates; they recommend that site administrators with shell access use the LE client Certbot, a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

My Faults My Own, and other rossry.net and r-y.io subdomain services, are happily hosted by Digital Ocean (this turns out not to matter), running nginx on Ubuntu 14.04. (Certbot supports many other servers and OS setups as well; I'm listing my specifics here just as context for the following narration, especially as this combination specifically has some tricky issues.)

My domain registrar and DNS provider, Namecheap, sadly does not really support Certbot's automated DNS-based authentication (necessary for a "wildcard certificate", which will cover all of *.rossry.net), and I don't want to manually mess with DNS records every 90 days to get new certificates issued.

Fortunately, joohoi/acme-dns is a lightweight DNS server intended specifically to help automate ACME DNS challenges, and even comes with a certbot hook by the author. The dns-01 challenge protocol of the Automatic Certificate Management Environment standard involves setting _acme-challenge.

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Donations 2018

Well, it's been a crazy calendar year in any number of ways...and here at the end of it, I have a few commitments to uphold. I remain committed to donating at least 10% of my income to the organizations that I think best make the universe a better place, and to talking about it on this blog. Here are my thoughts at the end of 2018.


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While I've recently been conducting some independent research into investment strategies for effective altruists (results forthcoming), I haven't been particularly active in producing my own independent opinions on the effectiveness or value of organizations. So, as in 2017, my perspective here is primarily a synthesis of a raft of conversations I've had with a (uncredited) gaggle of friends and friends-of-friends.

disclaimers: I've made no particular attempt to be discriminating or fair in these conversations. Some of the friends who have helped me form my opinions here are involved in some capacity in the areas or organizations I'll mention. Some have their own positions on advisory or evaluator boards, or publish their own opinions separately.

Rather than get into the weeds of these conflicts, I'll just advise you to keep your brain engaged throughout. Not all of my reasoning that shapes these opinions was appropriate for this post, and not all of it will be covered here. I've erred towards providing more unexplained information, rather than restricting myself to what I can explain fully here.

I cover logistics (1a), donor lotteries (1b), my general approach to non-lottery donations (1c), the specific charities I’m supporting this year (2a, summary), and further reading in the form of evaluators’ reports and personal writeups (3

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Review: Ready Player One

tl;dr: For yet another techno-corporatist dystopia, I found Ready Player One a surprisingly refreshing, hopeful, humanist story about uncynical protagonists whose only superpowers are earnestly caring about something. The visual effects are pretty well on-point, the action is well-done, and the dialogue is inconsistently but occasionally witty. I went in expecting the most vapid of action movies, and was pleasantly surprised.


I'd read plenty of thinkpieces explaining ways that Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One was shallow, bad, and/or problematic, but I had an evening to burn, so I went to go see it with a friend of mine.

I'm glad that I did; I enjoyed it a lot. (I'm going to say ~nothing about the 'and/or problematic'; just not going to go there today.)

spoiler note: Mild spoilers for references, worldbuilding, and visual style. No significant plot spoilers.


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On its face, it's a effects-rich action-romp. And in that genre, it felt reasonably well-done, if not particularly deep (though it had its thematic notes, see 2A below). It would have been super easy for the plot to get stuck in a side-quest, but it somehow never really seemed to fall into that trap, and the pacing felt brisk throughout. The visual effects managed to be on the right side of intentionally-oversaturated without Hobbit levels of oh-come-on. My advice is to get a giant bucket of popcorn and sit back to just enjoy the show. (For more notes on what I enjoyed about the visual style, see 2B below.)

I was pleasantly surprised by the occasional witty quip of dialogue that dropped out of the blue -- the consistency was well below films or TV series that

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Review: Terra Ignota

i. e., Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle; excluding Perhaps the Stars

I have many wonderful friends who consume far more media than I can ever hope to keep up with, so I'm pretty much always inundated with recommendations that I know I'll never get to. But when the same book is independently recommended to me by a (grad student in philosophy) old friend from college and a (mathy, rationalist-y) work colleague, I'll sit up and listen. And shortly thereafter, buy the entire trilogy on my Kindle for airport reading almost on the spot. Which turned out to be a good choice.

My spoiler-free recommendation is that the trilogy is extant first three books of the quartet are a brilliant feat of worldbuilding with a triple-helping of shockingly clever philosophy stirred in, clearly pitched at nerds by a dyed-in-the-wool nerd sci-fi fan. Its stylistic quirks are sometimes charming and sometimes frustrating, but it never really gets bogged down long enough for me to despair of getting back to the good parts soon (and yes, they keep coming, through all three books). Rarely have I felt such absolute joy at discovering piece after piece of an author's world.

spoilers: Assume constant worldbuilding spoilers from this point on; I'll try to flag spoilers for plot and characterization section-by-section.


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Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning and its sequels share much of what I enjoyed about Anathem -- incessant, rich, clever worldbuilding, characters who deeply believe that ideas matter (and aren't utterly stupid about it), and a sort of wish-fulfillment adventure for

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Onward, abroad!

attention-conservation notice: short personal-update post

Tomorrow, I'll be moving to Hong Kong (for at least a few years). I'll be working for Jane Street, as I was in New York, doing roughly the same things, and still earning to give. Most of my worldly possessions are already on the slow boat to China, so there's no going back now...

I expect to be thrown back into learning-things mode for a while, but after that to have time to travel, to live in a new place, and spend some time off the well-trodden path. Expect either more blog posts, or fewer; I'm not yet sure which.

Meanwhile, feel free to send any travel recommendations my way, or let me know if you'll be in that part of the world anytime soon -- I honestly don't know when I'll be back in the New York/Boston area next!

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Donations 2017

I don't write about it much on this blog, because it it's slightly awkward to talk about, and I'm a small little mind that isn't used to fighting against hyperbolic discounting. But I remain committed to donating at least 10% of my income to the organizations that I think best make the universe a better place, and to talking about it on this blog. Here are my thoughts for 2017.


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These reflect a relatively small amount of thought, reading and discussion with people in the Effective Altruism community, and effectively no independent research. I don't expect that I'm particularly advantaged in evaluating charities, and so my opinion-forming strategy this year has mostly been to seek out the opinions of better-advantaged friends who I believe share my values, ask for their thoughts and reasons, and attempt to understand them.

However, I want to support a culture of sharing and building on each others' opinions, and to that end, I'm sharing my thoughts on my donations for this year, to create common knowledge about organizations that I believe deserve support and to share considerations to which I am sympathetic or find persuasive.

Disclosure: Some of the friends who have helped me form my opinions here work for, or are on the boards of, some of the charities I'm giving to.

I discuss tax considerations unique to 2017 (1a) and logistics for donating (1b), my general approach to identifying charities (2), the specific charities I'm supporting this year (3a, summary), and further reading in the form of evaluators' reports and personal writeups (4).


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To many people, the 2017 tax environment gives larger incentives to donate than will 2018's. For some people,

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Congratulations, Margo!

It's outside my typical poetic gamut, but as tradition dictates, and with apologies to Dr. Seuss...


She's got courage and brains
and a heart of great size,
and she's witty and clever
and patient and wise.
No fictional hero (though no challenge melts her),
she's our one and only Margo Ilene Seltzer!

She's taught 61, 161, and its 2---
she's taught so many courses, and flipped quite a few, too!
She's taught 50 and 51 -- really, it's true!
But really the one thing that matters a lot
is the incredible love for students she's got,
for it's no good at all to take a genius rare
and put them in a class for which they don't care.
But that's not our Margo!
No, our Margo gives
cooler lessons than any professor that lives.
And though it's said lecturers pump into sieves,
it's the flippers that give teaching new perspectives!

Though her thesis was on file systems to start,
she's a wizard with databases as an art:
Databases for graphs!

Or for provenance (PASS)!
To say nothing of BerkeleyDB in her past---
or of using ASC to make computers go fast!

And still that's not all; she's got a few tricks more
She's got plenty of talents and hobbies in store:
She's advisor to WiCS (and was prez' USENIX)
and her soccer team benefits from her strong kicks;
she's a masterful baker -- with no gluten at all;
she's a black belt, a poet; yes, she's got it all!

Oh Ms. Seltzer Margo!
Oh the places she'll go!
And though her Harvard colleagues may all cry "oh no",
there's a world to show
just how

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