This would normally be one of the hidden open threads, but I’m posting it visibly so we can sort out issues around the adversarial collaboration contest. As the off-weekend thread, it’s still culture-war-free, so please try to avoid overly controversial topics. And:

1. Of the fifteen teams that signed up for the adversarial collaboration contest, two submitted a piece by the deadline – JohnBuridan’s team and TracingWoodgrains’ team. One more – lamaybe’s team – thinks they can get it in if they’ve got a little more time, which I will give them. Right now my plan is to extend the deadline one month, to August 22. If we only get three teams, we only get three teams, and the competition will go forward anyway with the $1000 prize (I won’t ask anyone else to contribute prize money to something this minimal).

This would also mean that any fourth team that manages to get something done in the next month will have a 25% chance at winning $1000. If you’re looking for teammates, try all the people who started a collaboration but whose teammates abandoned them – or post in the thread below. I will reserve the top comment here for people who want to enter and coordinate with each other. I will not ask you to formally register this time, though it would be helpful to inform me. Anyone who gets something in before August 22 will be officially entered.

(people who did finish on time, I beg your patience for extending the deadline)

2. New ad on the sidebar, for James Koppel’s programmer coaching. He wants me to announce RIGHT NOW that he’s doing an Advanced Software Design Weekend Intensive Session this weekend (July 28 – 29) in San Francisco, so if that’s the sort of thing that interests you, you’ve got five days to sign up.

3. Many people’s good comments are being caught in the spam filter for mysterious reasons. I don’t want to disable the filter because it catches a lot of spam, and I don’t always have time to manually sift through it and save good comments, so I don’t really know what to do here except, again, beg your patience. You can improve your chances of missing the filter by not putting more than five or so different links in your comments.

4. There were some really good comments and other-people’s-blog posts on the value differences posts last week. I want to write a response to all of them, but for now consider reading Ozy and SarahC on how learning to think of laziness as not existing was emotionally important and transformative for them, Sniffnoy on how many people really do think in terms of metaphysical essences, moridinamael on cognitive decoupling, and Zvi on why the characters in the dialogue should have had opposite names.