1,212 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2025
    1. SOLID principles (Single Responsibility, Open/Closed, Liskov Substitution, Interface Segregation, Dependency Inversion) are design principles that promote maintainable and flexible code.

      Reading this makes me want to write more functional code

    2. Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a software development approach that emphasizes writing tests before writing the actual code.

      "Get Ahead of Development" was what Thor on Youtube used to talk about.

      Yea that's not how I develop something, I start with a function and print out a bunch of stuff from inside it, I write a test or way to run it manually, then run it over until the print statements all make sense. I can may use a testing framework for that or I might just have a bash command I run over and over that I save in the docs.

    1. What are the most effective governance and administration models in place on medium-to-large sized Fediverse servers?
    2. Fediseer continues to be a growing resource for Lemmy and Mastodon administrators, and fedi-safety is a novel tool that can classify genAI CSAM on Lemmy and potentially other services. Pixelfed introduced comment controls and enhanced spam classifiers. BlueSky introduced Ozone, an innovative moderation tool designed to support moderators in managing their communities. Ozone’s integration of advanced filtering systems makes it a standout contribution to the trust and safety ecosystem, powering several “composable moderation” projects on the Bluesky “ATmosphere” with the notable success of Blacksky, an AT Protocol implementation prioritising the community building efforts of marginalized groups; especially Bluesky’s community of Black users after which the project is named.

      So Much Moderation, it must be fun having all that power. I want that power. Anyone else want that power?

      Would I do anything good with that power though? Would you do anything good with that power?

    3. A New Social was launched to liberate people’s networks from their platforms, leveling the playing field across the open social web – with it’s first project to adopt and expand BridgyFed.

      Now this is something I did not know exists and am interested in running

    4. support moderators and administrators, and will guide our work in the coming year.

      Who are these people?

      I want names and accounts.

      They are the role models of internet culture

    5. In October, our community demonstrated exceptional resilience during a large-scale spam attack on the Fediverse. This collective effort showcased the strength of our network and our ability to address challenges collaboratively.

      The Fediverse never implemented a proper WOT(Web of Trust) system. You know you can't get a WeChat account unless you know three other people on WeChat? Or that's at least how it was in the past.

    6. We also introduced FediCheck, a transparency tool that helps users evaluate the policies and safety measures of various Fediverse servers. By making this information accessible, FediCheck empowers service administrators to make informed choices about the platforms they engage with.

      This makes recommending the fediverse to normies much easier.

    1. The benefit to individuals is resilience to media manipulation,

      Hey @ConsilienceProject what would you all do if you had control of the Media? Ever ask that question? What kind of Consent do you want to Manufacture.

    2. The benefit to society is to decrease polarization and tribalism, decrease outraged certainty on all sides, and increase the quality of public sense-making and good faith civil discourse towards a civilization that can actually coordinate effectively and solve problems.

      Brah what about more division but a system of integration like the "United" "States", United states is an oxymoron is you think about it. Also look at Christianity and all its derivatives, one Umbrella many communities.

      Also the Consilience people need to understand Mencius Moldbugs' "An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives" cause that's a proper deconstruction of Progressivism by a Progressive. And Consilience seems to be filled with Progressives.

      Or maybe do the Consilience Project style Progressives attain enough self awareness to become Conservative or something else. BTW the Zeitgeist Movement were totally Communists even if they like to articulate that they aren't.

    3. The goal is to restore the health of our information commons by helping educate people on how to improve their information processing so they can better detect media bias and disinformation while becoming more capable sense-makers and citizens.

      If people are the organs of a sense making apparatus then how do we model their role and measure their weight within the system?

      So many people's model of the world is produced by "Manufacturing Consent".

      I remember learning Media literacy in Elementary and High School, but most people I went to school with don't need media critical thinking skills because their profession is so segmented.

      Or is it more like everyone is being psyoped allt he time. Every profesion has their own Aristocrats that produce memes that flow through the minds and social media accounts of the meme spreaders to the populus.

      Ah the audience of this is the Meme Spreaders. But what lies below the meme spreaders. The NPC's that just want to vibe and embody the values of the mediocre mediocre?

      The Mediocre Mediocre existing within the same system you do. They just respond to incentives differently. Like when your Grandma know's who Andrew Tate is, you know something interesting happened. Or when Liberal's always seem to mention Jordan Peterson at a party in a negative light for some reason and no one acknowledges it. There are memetic spells being cast

    1. I learned to develop my own facilitation style that is less about facilitation and more about being a conversational host.
    2. The professional facilitators would be far too controlling, far too smug and always seemed to love the sound of their own voice. OK, not all, but far too many.

      Is there a checklist to Diagnose this?

    3. It was serial death by PowerPoint!
    4. But like the Coffee Machine, far too many speakers ran over their time. And weak chairpeople would fail to manage them.

      Any examples of strong Chairpeople?

    5. death by PowerPoint

      Is there a checklist some where to help mitigate the symptoms of this disease

    6. and then there was time for Q&A. Finally, some of us would go to a local pub for a few drinks afterward.

      This is typically where all the interesting stuff happens

  2. Dec 2024
    1. - Behaviorism.  The Thing shall not model other minds in predictively-accurate detail.

      Just like in Dune, Never Create a Machine in the Image of a Man's Mind

    1. Every transaction record includes a complete set of verified timestamps, creating an immutable record of when the transaction occurred. These timestamps include the signed responses from multiple time servers, the TEE signatures verifying when execution began and completed, and any cross-regional timing information. This timestamp bundle becomes part of the transaction’s permanent record, enabling future verification and audit of exactly when and in what order transactions occurred.

      Do transactions themselves have to include the signatures form the RTP servers?

    2. The verification process is time-critical — responses must be received within a tight window to be considered valid. If a time server takes too long to respond or provides a timestamp significantly different from others, its response is discarded. This ensures that network latency or server issues don’t impact transaction ordering. The system requires responses from a minimum quorum of servers, typically more than two-thirds of the active servers in the region.

      There may be good money in running NTP servers in the future. How do you get paid? IDK yet but I can feel that this will be true

    3. When a transaction begins execution, the TEE pair initiates concurrent requests to multiple time servers. Each request must be signed by the TEE, and each response must be signed by the time server, creating a cryptographic chain of evidence for when the transaction occurred

      If we need to get say 10 signed current time signatures for every block how much does that limit block productions?

    4. The TEEs collect signed timestamps from regional time servers, verify them against each other, and include them in the transaction record.

      What are examples of signed timestamp providers?

    5. Cross-regional transactions become explicit rather than implicit, allowing for clear rules about when and how value moves between jurisdictions. This matches traditional finance’s approach to cross-border transactions, where different rules may apply to domestic versus international transfers. The system can enforce regulatory requirements for cross-border transactions while maintaining efficient local processing within regions.

      Reimplement world governments on Blockchain much

    6. Regional deployment of smart contracts creates clear lines of regulatory authority. When a contract is deployed to the Singapore region, it explicitly operates under Singapore’s regulatory framework. This clarity benefits both developers and regulators — developers know exactly which rules they need to comply with, while regulators have clear jurisdiction over contracts operating in their region.

      This might make the "Veil Children" of Accelerando birthed via Limited Liability Corporations a reality!

    7. What makes this approach unique is how it maps to real-world market structures and regulatory frameworks. Smart contracts become geography-aware by default, deployed to specific regions with explicit rules for cross-regional interaction.

      How does the Enclave become aware of what region it is running in? The Latency to other nodes?

    8. However, centralized sequencers introduce their own geographic realities that are often overlooked. The physical location of a sequencer creates natural advantages for nearby participants — a fact that becomes crucial at high-performance timescales. While this might seem like a limitation, it actually reveals an important truth: geographic advantages cannot be eliminated, they can only be acknowledged and managed fairly.

      Do people even do High Frequency trading on Blockchian, like a IRL transaction can take 3-5 seconds to validate that's okay

      What are the use cases for these high frequency transactions?

    9. The core issue is not centralization versus decentralization, but rather how to acknowledge and design for geographic reality while maintaining the security and transparency benefits of blockchain technology.
    10. Even Layer 2 solutions and rollups, while improving throughput, don’t address the fundamental geographic reality.

      What about State Channels like those ones on the Bitcoin Lightning Network?

      Actually for Bitcoin Lightning network to operate at true scale it will require some level of Insurance.....

      Now that's an industry to get into, State Channel Network Insurance for when disputes have to go on Chain

    11. High-performance chains claiming sub-second finality often achieve this through centralization while still failing to acknowledge geographic realities — they’re essentially creating a single global matching engine with all the associated physics-based fairness issues.

      Blockchains need Fractals

    12. The blockchain industry’s attempt to make every transaction global fundamentally misunderstands this reality. A trade between two parties in Singapore doesn’t need validation from nodes in Stockholm or São Paulo — the speed of light delay makes such validation not just inefficient but potentially harmful to market fairness. Regional transaction processing isn’t just an optimization; it’s an acknowledgment of fundamental physical laws that cannot be circumvented.

      What about Bitcoin Lightning Network State Channel transactions, those are regional right?

    13. This global-first approach creates artificial barriers to blockchain adoption in traditional markets.
    14. Despite this reality, blockchain architecture has largely ignored geographic considerations

      Except ICP, but are they really a Blockchain... really

    15. The original promise of cryptocurrency was to democratize finance and enhance local economic autonomy.

      This seems to be completely forgotten

    16. The social media landscape has fundamentally shaped how cryptocurrency values are formed and propagated

      What kind of values are we talking about here?

    17. creating secure borders that enable rather than inhibit efficient cross-border interaction.

      Don't the Globalists WEF types want to dissolve boarders?

      Does blockchain exist to enhance or dissolve boarders?

    18. “The more the planet becomes a global village, the more vital become the values of cultural identity.”

      The Culture, by Ian M Banks, is called that for a Reason

    19. McLuhan’s concept of the “global village.” McLuhan’s 1962 work “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” which introduced this concept, has been frequently misinterpreted as a call for dissolving all boundaries in favour of a single unified global system. This misreading has significantly influenced blockchain architecture, leading to design choices that paradoxically work against the very efficiency and connection that McLuhan envisioned.

      Now that is a Thesis

    1. This contract of external accountability keeps the fire going through the long slog, and it forces me to make clear-cut decisions about what to include, what to leave out, and how to manage my spare time so I make progress.
    2. With no deadline, there's no urgency, and so things just don't happen.
    3. Iron Triangle
    1. I think knowing yourself is the most important thing to do before changing yourself.
    2. Everyone has seen the articles about the brain’s approach to social media content, which offers a quick, easily accessible way that makes you happy or, even if it doesn’t make you happy, offers an escape from the thing that makes you unhappy.

      Social Media is a drug

      Many drugs exist to regulate emotional context, separate the emotion from the context and it goes away, put the emotion in a different context and it has nothing to interact with

    3. The relativity of time is a reality I feel to the core while doom scrolling. Besides the lost time, there’s the confusion after realizing it and putting the phone down, trying to get my dazed mind back to normal. And then, not finding anything to do, not being able to putting yourself together, and reaching for the phone again.

      I wonder if this doom scrolling stuff was first developed in some brain washing program like MK Ultra?

    4. I want to know everything, immediately, quickly. Since this is not humanly possible, I end up doing nothing.

      If that were to literally happen to you I bet your consciousness, sense of self, would pop like a ballon

    5. Jules Payot
    6. At this point I am convinced that fast consumption is harmful to the brain, mind, and soul.
    7. Fast consumption, constant consumption, more consumption.

      Consumption of what?

      From a systems perspective we exist to consume, but is there anything more to reality than systems? Emergence... I think there is some Dune quote from Heritics that talks about why we should not try and optimize for the most number of people living

    1. Ethereum’s testnet experienced the problem of this a few years ago. They were using it to check that their local clocks weren’t off by a good amount.
    2. There it is: what if we used an external (decentralized) time source? We’d have proof that you aren’t a time traveller. We could begin to use time as a primitive.
    3. Noone mentions the last attempts to build regulated markets for blockchain and why it was a complete failure.

      What were those projects? Polymath

    4. VDF’s

      Verifiable Delay Function

    5. Any host could easily manipulate that. Intel used to include a hardware based monotonic counter and a trusted time service but that was removed.

      Why was that removed?

    6. TEE’s

      Trusted Execution Environment

  3. Nov 2024
    1. In a world where language is weaponized with such precision, every interaction becomes a potential site of influence. Thus now you have a glimpse into the world you are walking into, and what Cognitive Warfare truly is.

      We need cognitive defences

    2. This mistrust does not just undermine particular messages; it destabilizes the foundation of shared meaning in society.

      1984 much

    3. Ultimately, the weaponization of language through AI’s information density and resonance creates a feedback loop that erodes trust in language itself.

      So when what will people trust instead?

    4. Once this threshold is crossed, the recipient is not simply receptive to the message; they are absorbed by it, responding almost automatically to the embedded cues. This state of cognitive capture transforms resonance from mere communication to a form of psychological assimilation, where the message becomes intertwined with the receiver’s mental framework, embedding itself within their cognitive architecture as if it were an original thought.

      The people become they resonance meme they were infected with

    5. Resonance thereby capitalizes on preexisting cognitive patterns, taking advantage of the brain’s tendency to recognize familiar stimuli and create associative shortcuts, resonant words, and phrases that engage the target’s mental framework, embedding messages seamlessly into their neural pathways.

      What did Jordan Peterson do?

    6. The functioning of resonance within the mind parallels the architecture of neural networks.

      I wonder how this work on resonate memes relates to what BAP(Bronze Age Pervert) does?

    7. Each resonant word or phrase activates vast networks of associations, turning minimal input into maximal output.

      I think one of my problems in life is that I stack these resonance memes and become mentally overwhelmed.

    8. With information-dense language, the goal is not to argue a point but to create resonance, to instill a thought or bias so subtly embedded that it feels self-generated.

      So basically what they do in Inception?

    9. The concept of information density is quintessential to understanding AI-led Language weaponization and cognitive manipulation.

      If special phrases can resonate within Humans what about with LLM's?

    10. Dense encoding can plant persistent cognitive seeds with minimal interaction.

      I remember when I was young, saying "Diversity is strength" when I was having an anxiety attack

    11. How exactly certain strings of words, or memes are as effective as bioengineered viruses, while others aren’t.
    12. there is another deeper truth to the weaponization of Language and bypassing our mental defenses and “hacking” cognitive subroutines.

      I wish I could hack myself in some way

    13. direct and shape the cognitive subroutines.

      The interviews of "Trump is Racist, can you provide an example" and "Andrew Tate is BLANK" come to mind. People were never this programmed before

    14. The amplification of certain narratives or linguistic structures by algorithms also presents a form of cognitive warfare, one where the line between organic and engineered influence becomes blurred.

      How do we measure if some narative is being aplified?

    15. Just as language models can tap into the brain’s implicit linguistic processing, algorithms exploit these cognitive shortcuts to present information in ways that maximize engagement, often reinforcing existing biases or emotional responses. The result is a feedback loop in which language, tailored by algorithms, reinforces the very patterns of thought that the system is designed to exploit.

      The "Ayn Rand Premisies" concept becomes so much more important under these conditions

    16. These decisions are driven by the same probabilistic models that govern language generation, meaning that algorithms, in essence, control the flow and structure of language itself.

      I have noticed that "youtube cadence" "tik tok voice" is a thing, I wonder what is signals. They way people cut out their breaths when they edit videos is facinating. Those were important before and allowed us to process information.... now it's a strait, unnatrual, high bandwidth flow of information

    17. Building on the mathematical nature of language, algorithms—particularly those driving AI models—are fundamentally reshaping how language is processed, generated, and disseminated.

      How is language disseminated? What models (graph with node and edge) do we have to understand this

    18. At its core, language can be seen as a system of probabilities — each word or phrase is connected to others by a web of relationships, shaped by syntax, semantics, and context. Language models, like those built on transformer architectures, are designed to capture these probabilistic relationships, allowing them to predict and generate coherent sequences of text. This is where AI’s understanding of language goes beyond simple mimicry: it taps into the deep structural and mathematical underpinnings of language itself.

      I want a map of these relationships

    19. And in mimicry lies a deeper truth to our existence.

      What is this truth?

    20. This isn't just about the manipulation of individuals, it’s about influencing entire populations through the systematic deployment of language that exploits human psychology. Social media platforms, news organizations, and political movements and now AI-frontier labs have harnessed this power, often without fully realizing the implications. The implicit subroutines of the human mind are engaged on a massive scale, and the consequences remain unrealized to the vast majority of the population, including the ones engaging in such weaponization.

      We created the weapons but lack the people (Philosopher Kings / Ayn Rand Protagonists) capable of wielding them

    21. Language is no longer confined to speeches, texts, and broadcasts, it is algorithmically generated, analyzed, and disseminated at a pace that far exceeds the ability of our conscious brain to keep up. With precise algorithmic tailoring, Language can be tailored to penetrate specific patterns in the brain and subroutines, evoking specific emotional responses and affecting behavior at scale.

      So how do we defend outselves?

    22. What makes now distinct from any time before is the scale, velocity, and precision with which Language can be weaponized.

      Can we get an example use case?

    23. When linguistic patterns are wielded with precision, they can be far more dangerous than overt propaganda or coercion.

      What is the difference between cognitive patterns and propaganda or coercion?

    24. thrive on algorithms that curate, manipulate, and amplify language in ways that can bypass critical thought and activate emotional or behavioral responses almost unconsciously.

      The "Medium" does not allow for critial discussion, just outrage bait

    25. “Ears have no lid” and one could posit eyes also don’t, in a more philosophical sense, ears lacking a lid infers that you can’t consciously filter sound and the spoken word, therefore you could be affected by words uttered to you. After quite a significant amount of research into neurology, brain chemistry, and language centers in the brain, and attempting to mix mathematics to all of this, I hypothesized the brain could process absurdly more visual data than estimated by “the experts”.

      I wonder what tiktok and friends are playing this game

    26. .hack (dot hack)
  4. Oct 2024
    1. Our state-of-the-art is still “think of 53 different things and then try all of them.” This isn’t super reassuring—if I hired a plumber to install a toilet in my house and he was like, “Sure thing, I’ll just install 53 different toilets and then check which ones flush,” I’d be like, “perhaps I’ll get another plumber.”6

      Ouch

    2. I don't see Jordan Peterson's Self Authoring Program mentioned anywhere in here

    3. We do not appear to have progress of this kind. According to this meta-analysis, we’re no better at treating youth mental illness today than we were 50 years ago.
    4. I’d love to see more lists of self-evident phenomena we can’t explain; not “how do we reduce scores on the Modern Racism Scale by 10%” but “people do this weird thing…WHY.”
    5. I think pretty much all progress in psychology can be summed up as “overturning intuitions.”
    6. In order to survive, every human needs to have some model of the world: how their body functions, how animals behave, how matter moves, etc. Psychologists call these “folk” theories—folk physics, folk biology, folk economics, and so on—the kind of explanations you might come up with if you just kinda bumble around, explanations that are good enough to keep you alive, but often go wrong.

      Folk Theories

    7. I’ve got this picture in my head: we’re all on a bus that’s supposedly going to Cincinnati. But there are no road signs and we don’t have a GPS, so we have no idea if we’re going in the right direction. We can’t measure our progress by how much gas we’re burning, or whether we’ve upgraded from a manual transmission to an automatic, or whether the government bought us a new bus. And you can’t just look out the window and go, “I dunno, kinda feels like we’re headed toward Arkansas,” which, I realize now, is what I’ve been doing so far.

      Knowledge Graphs can help?

    8. There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years: we’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers and…then what? The stack of papers just gets taller?

      Now this is how you hook me as a reader

    1. But what was wonderful about the web, was that here was a machine for finding people with similar interests and experience, anywhere in the world. That’s the web I want back.

      The Tech World before IRC chat rooms sounds painful

    1. Because, If we can’t tell a story about something, it’s as if it didn’t happen.
    2. If we want people to see these things as real, we have to integrate them into narrative descriptions of incidents.

      Who are the best story tellers of our time?

    3. Without a narrative schema to anchor it, the pandemic all but vanished from public discourse soon after it ended.
    4. In The 1918 Flu Faded in Our Collective Memory: We Might ‘Forget’ the Coronavirus, Too, Scott Hershberger speculated in Scientific American along similar lines about why historians paid little attention the Spanish Flu epidemic, even though it killed more people than World War I (emphasis mine):

      There seems to be an inherent value higharchy here for what makes an epic story, Corona was sold as a very epic story, 1918 spanish flu, not so much

    5. We use stories to make sense of the world. What that means is that when events occur that don’t fit neatly into a narrative, we can’t make sense of them. As a consequence, these sorts of events are less salient, which means they’re less real.

      Ya Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow - Wikipedia author Yuval talks about this a lot

    1. Three sentences on what I just read,

      I believe that BAP is aware of his place in history just like I assume Yuval does. Both authors are not writing as bots recording facts but provide a specialized idological prism to see our current civilization through. Each prisim has its own take, Yuval trying to articulate what the Silicon Valley "Open Conspiracy" types dream of. BAP trying to remind us what it was like to actually be part of history.

      The "Why don't CEO's have Harrem's" is the one thing here that is going to stick with me. The women of today are so different from the past. In fact maybe the "Brave New World" reality of nameless sex with strangers and nude play as children is a more desireable world to the Incel, video game, monster can drinking of today.

      It seems like the Puritan/Christian sexual practices have really shaped the west into becoming what it is today. I believe most men get their sense of identity from the type of sex they have access to. What's weird about modernity is that we are talking about sex rahter than women with the inherent consideration of children.

      This population collapse, as articulated on the Georga Guide Stones, is going to be interesting.

      What is the Opposite of "The Open Conspiracy"

    2. Unfortunately, too much of our era has an emotionally negative predisposition toward too many things, including our current elites, and for reasons that are mimetic rather than justified, whether rationally or even by our impulses to breed.

      I think this is why Curtis Yarvin's first instruction in Gray Mirror is to detach

    3. “I will add only that Nietzsche says somewhere that it is the duty of a philosopher to promote precisely those virtues or tendencies of spirit that are most lacking in one’s own time…”  For all its pretense to the contrary, that is exactly what this book does not achieve.

      I think we could use more "Bronce Age Mindset" right now. But if every other philsopher was promoting that and not just Bap and his little cult +Andrew Tate I agree we might have a problem.

    4. “The chief intention of this study has been to offer an explanation for why the ancient city perceived philosophers as dangerous and as associated with tyrants — to argue that there was something to the ancient prejudice that philosophy was associated with tyranny.”

      Philosphers are a type of Tyrant?

      They create memetic prisons that design people's behaviors.

      They stop people from acting instread requiring people to think and think and think

      Ah philosophers are the origional beurocrats

      I wonder what Greek Philosophers would think of Ayn Rand Objectivism

  5. Sep 2024
    1. I needed to build a bespoke python GUI tool to help me categorize hundreds of websites.

      I want one of these

    2. Star Trek-level UI

      Any one got a counter example to this, what is a Sci Fi UI that is super intuative and understandable. The book Daemon (Daemon, #1) by Daniel Suarez describes one, even Ready Player One does a good job but those are not actual interfaces we can use.

      Actually Westworld (TV Series 2016–2022) does a great job showing how the Hosts are programmed.

    3. It will hurt. It will suck. It’s not like starting to use a new, elegant tool on some pet project. A lot of brain power needs to go into this, and it’s mostly boring, menial work. But hey, nobody said this stuff is easy. Not even Vannevar Bush. None of us are entitled to easy work.

      It's always the people not the tools that lead to greatness. As is the lesson of Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams (2002)

    4. And when I inevitably need to review something a few months from now, I know exactly where to look. For example, I will want to measure whether the app is actually getting faster, and I will want to use the exact same methodology and code as at the start. Thankfully, both are right there in my memex trail.

      I find writing something, and coming back a couple days later to reread it with a fresh mind is very helpful. A "memex" medium would remind me to do that, if you spend 3 hours writing something it should call you up and ask, hey wana read through this again so future you a long time from now will make sure to understand it

    5. Even if I deleted the folder at this point, it would all still be a beneficial exercise. By putting all of this together, I need to organize my own thoughts. I get to see everything in context. I understand the problem more clearly.

      A meme is not a folder of notes, it as an attitude the user has with a folder of notes

      So the medium is not the message, the attitude towards the medium is......

      One medium can have many different messages, it is about distilling value from it. Some people only open up books to look at the pictures, others read the words, other people consume both pictures and words

    6. At first, I just add a single document in this folder. This is the project’s main document, or “index”. It probably has the same name as the folder. It should serve as a guide to the project, for others in the company as well as for me (when I look at it 2 years from now). In here, I describe the project and I link to other stuff inside the folder (and outside of it, if needed).

      I have been using Obsidian and friends (Dendron, OrgMode, Trilium Notes) for years but I have never explicitly created a specific sub graph for a specific "Quest" or "Research Topic". Is is easy to do in Obsidian With tags.... though I have always wanted to link to specific documents instead of using tags.

      I should write about the two different knowledge graph methodologies

    7. Memex is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed If you look back at the list above, you’ll realize that these things are already very much possible. They might not be in a single shiny app, but that doesn’t matter. (In fact, it’s probably better, in many ways, that today’s memex isn’t a single app. We’ll get back to this later.) To create a new memex “trail” in the year 2020, just create a shared folder (in Zoho Workdrive, Dropbox, Synology Drive, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, etc.) and put some documents in it. That’s it. I know: it’s not glorious. It’s not shiny. It’s just a boring old folder with boring old documents. But I hope to persuade you that it’s good enough, and that you don’t need to wait for some vaporware to work the way Vannevar Bush imagined in 1945.

      Yea but there is no version control on that stuff

      Well I guess google docs has it, but other stuff does not

      Bug google docs does not have backlinks

      Hmm Jupyter notebooks would be very cool to be multi user as well, but that can get very messy

    8. Imagine that you and I are working in the same company. I tell you there’s a new project for us two to work on. I explain it to you and you get reasonably excited. And then I tell you that I’ve started a new “bloorp” in BloorpyBase, a piece of software from 2012 that almost nobody uses. You grudgingly install BloorpyBase. The app doesn’t use the same keyboard shortcuts you’re used to. The shortcut normally assigned to adding a comment instead minimizes all windows. Sigh. You try to link some exploratory source code to it, but BloorpyBase only works with Mercurial. Sigh. You read some of my initial thoughts and try to respond but you don’t know what’s the best way to do it. Should you create another bloorp? Should you make a suggestion, or an edit? You spend half an hour reading a “How To Bloorp” guide on the internet but come back empty handed. Sigh.

      This is too real...

    9. A piece of software that works with your existing files, and which people around you can use, will generally win over some new way of doing things that you first need to migrate to, and then also ask others around you to migrate to as well.

      I got a friend of mine using Obsidian, but they don't know how to share stuff with people... teaching people git can be hard

      Multiuser git, is a nightmare when you are not writing code

    10. Interoperability is more important than features.
    11. Here’s the thing. If I’m being honest, most of my experiments with the different memex descendants mentioned above just kind of faded after a few weeks or months. And the reason is not just habit. If they were such a huge boon to my productivity, I’d change my habit the same way I changed it for better IDEs, better social media consumption strategies, or better terminal defaults. No, the reason those shiny new apps don’t stick is interoperability.
    12. I have used about 4 different TODO apps and over 5 different text editors in the past 10 years alone. So, go ahead and indulge yourself if you need to.

      Why can't we get a good enough TODO or text editor app?

    13. I think you’ll agree with me that, while Xanadu is a lot closer to the idea of memex than the web, it’s kind of underwhelming as a piece of software. I remember playing with it a few years back, and I just didn’t find it that compelling.

      I don't think I have seen any current PKMS(Personal Knowledge Management System) tool like Notion, Obsidian and friends used to annotate that kind of text.

      It would be nice to read Sci Fi with annotations like that, you could also go cross medium and allow voice notes on timestamps of audiobooks

    14. There are projects that explore this space, of course. The most obvious descendant is Ted Nelson’s Xanadu project, a piece of software more than 50 years in the making. You can see its 2016’s incarnation in this video.

      If only I could link back to my previous comment in the article where I mentioned Xandeu.... if only

      Oh wait I can

      https://hyp.is/aNEw8HqYEe-LYgdose0r7Q/filiph.net/text/memex-is-already-here,-it's-just-not-evenly-distributed.html

      If only Hypothesis had internal backlinks and labels for links like a memex

    15. For this reason, some people assume that the web is an advanced version of memex. But in fact, the web is a terrible approximation of Vannevar Bush’s original vision.

      Hmmm no mention of Project Xandeu in here, that project's original 17 rules which you can read here on wikipedia would constitute a memex

      https://hyp.is/qYKfhHqZEe-ZcOOxU0K_ug/filiph.net/text/memex-is-already-here,-it's-just-not-evenly-distributed.html

    16. This blog is primarily for developers, and software development is in many ways a research job.

      I need friends that have proper research jobs so we can nerd out about this kind of stuff, I only know Dev's

    17. His “trails” are similar in concept to a physical binder that contains documents that you can freely annotate, highlight and interlink. Any given document can of course be in multiple different binders, and its annotations and links depend on the context. Even for a single person, every “page” can exist in several different forms, depending on what the person is researching or trying to remember at the moment.

      I believe fed.wiki does a good job implementing that "trail" functionality

      Side Note: I want my reading stats accessable in this "trail", I want every page turn on my kindle timestamped and accessable as a Dataframe preferably JSONLD formatted

    18. What Vannevar Bush proposed with memex wasn’t a publishing platform. It was a memory expansion device.

      For me this is probably the most important part of the article, I have always though of a memex as a publishing platform with epic RBAC(Rule Based Access Control)

    19. You can’t annotate a relationship between two paragraphs on two separate sites.

      Someone is trying to build just that,

      Memex

      Too bad is is completely centralized and I really dislike their data export functionality, Hypothesis on the other hand is also centralized but has a great API

    20. There are hyperlinks on the web, but again, they are not yours.

      It would be cool if hyperlinks had standard labels like edges on a graph

    21. Memex was to be an “enlarged intimate supplement to one’s memory”.

      But then what is one to do with this enhanced memory, list off the problems of the Kardashians?

    1. I will continue to send updates on my blog, and I intend on adding more content on my alpine climbing. I will continue to stream on Twitch, and work on my technical projects.This blog, and the RSS feed will slowly grow into read-only automation that will publish to all of my channels.I do not intend on engaging in social media moving forward. I am too happy to change anything at the moment.Stay tuned for more.

      So how would the medium of social media have to transform for someone like the author to want to engage.

      What is the true Twitter 2.0? Twitter was just Usenet+IRC message boards with a script to merge them right?

      The screen is always separate from our reality

      Doing pushups doesn't enhance your relationships with people on the other side of the screen? Or does it... Running clubs are the new social hangout places I hear

      Who are you if you can't run 5k, think about it

      If you can't do 20 pushups, what can I decern from you

      Maybe there is a reason SAO(Sword Art Online) the medium did not allow people to switch sexes, or as the SJW's prefer "Hormonal Profiles"

      George Carlin on Soft Language - YouTube

    2. I have rediscovered a sense of self-respect for my ability to accomplish my goals when nobody is watching.

      Bro this goes hard, who are you when God is not watching.... something to think about

    3. However it has robbed us of the most critical dialogue, our dialogue with ourselves.
    4. You can’t tweet your way to self-respect.
    5. Broadcasting virtue to the world will never provide internal fulfillment regardless of how true it may be. Virtue signaling is effective in shifting public perception, but remains powerless in shifting an internal self-image.

      Go say genocide is bad, then throw money at anti genocide charity, good luck trying to understand why the genocide is happening

      Project Itoh: Genocidal Organ - Official Trailer - YouTube

    6. We are a collective of depressed authors trying to persuade other equally hopeless authors of our integrity.

      Yea we gotta think about, who are the people that actually consume social media rather than just living their life

    7. Regardless of how delightful, jarring, shocking, funny, cute, or aggressively virtuous my content was, internally I remained empty. Regardless of how much content I consumed, internally I remained empty.

      What would a counter example of being empty be?

    8. I remember feeling the need to out-perform my previous display of extreme morality.

      Wearing that mask during Covid must have felt pretty empowering eh

    9. We have lost our prerogative to enact change.
    10. I believe social media has drifted to a doom and horror conduit similar to the tabloids.

      Wow everyone is addicted to tabloids, also does gen Z even know what a tabloid is?

    11. I notice this internal tranquility seems to be related to my exodus of social media.

      What do you do instead?

      What habits replaced social media?

    1. In company after company, whenever I present the BAPO model, the first reaction is: Yes, of course! And then, after a few seconds, some or several people in the audience realize that this is exactly the opposite of how their company really works. And the realization (and associated embarrassment) that the company actually uses OPAB sets in. The result often is a lively discussion across the participants on the times the company has falling into the trap in the past and whether we are at risk of falling into this trap again right now.

      Now this is an excellent example of brainwashing

    1. Meet the seven people who hold the keys to worldwide internet securityThis article is more than 10 years oldIt sounds like the stuff of science fiction: seven keys, held by individuals from all over the world, that together control security at the core of the web. The reality is rather closer to The Office than The Matrix

      How can they not mention "Private Key" once in this entire article.

      A much better job could be done describing that this is used for DNS authority, and maybe tell people that the internet routes themselves BGP are actually an old boys club

      Also this seems to be for the DNS registar, the ~150 root certificate authorities that actually secure websites with TLS certs are much more interesting.

      Overall bad technical writing

    1. Problem-solving: There are other kinds of meta-learning, separate from either planning or receiving knowledge. If you’re faced with a problem you’ve never solved before, and you don’t know where to look up an answer (or don’t want to), then you can try to simulate the probem in your head, and mentally consider potential solutions. If you arrive at an idea you like, this is it’s own kind of learning.

      So like shape rotating?

      I wonder what problem being Scitzo solves, or if it is a specific type of problem solving taken too far by the brain?

    2. Association: Often you don’t know when you’ll need to use a new piece of knowledge, such as learning to ask directions in a new language. In this case, it’s useful if you can recall a relatively unpracticed action based on the correct context.

      I personally can't learn stuff unless I know where it hangs on the branches of the meme tree within my own mind.

    3. Once a model has learned to look for a certain key, it’s hard to unlearn. To change the model’s behavior, it seems easier to change what the key points to rather than to get the model to change so that it ignores the trigger altogether.

      Attention is all you need, am I right?

    4. I’ve phrased things this way specifically because human brains don’t seem to be good at erasing past memories, but rather they seem to be able to replace values associated with pre-existing keys. In this case, the keys are triggers that kick off actions.

      Append only list, just like a blockchain?

    5. action sequences which are initiated by triggers.

      So a bunch of ordered events from a Kafka Queue?

    6. Another kind of learning happens at a higher level, which requires longer-term thinking. For example, suppose you write a first draft of a book, and then give that book to some beta readers for feedback. You can view this as a process with many months between the action first taken — writing your first word of a new book — and receiving useful feedback on that action. The recent memory is no longer a useful vehicle for this kind of learning.

      What is the best way to model and measure feedback loops like this?

    7. For example, if the mind is in a happy mood, it’s more likely to appreciate the positive aspects of a conversation; if it’s feeling defensive, it’s more likely to notice a perspective from which a conversation can be seen as judgmental.

      So using a BCI(Brain Computer Interface) to directly influence people's emotional states. Or maybe just get those emotional masking drugs used in "Genocidal Organ"

    8. In order for the model to remember something, it must be both (a) something the action model has paid attention to, and (b) something the mind cares to remember based on the emotional state.
    9. Human brains seem to have separate locations for long-term memories and whatever our equivalent of an action model is. Cases of amnesia suggest this: People can forget much of their past while otherwise acting normally. If our memories and behavior depended on the same set of neurons, then this wouldn’t be possible. However, in the mind model above, I’ve let the long-term memory be implicitly part of the action model because this is effectively how language models currently store their version of memories.

      Accessing long term memory counts as an actions if you think about it

    10. Longer-term memories don’t seem to have a pre-determined time limit, but they do tend to fade over time. This pattern is consistent with knowledge baked into LLMs, and so can match the way an action model would effectively remember things — without a time limit, but with the ability to fade over time, especially if not referenced for a long time.

      A mind has to judge what is worth keeping in memory

      I remember that Adam Savage Quote, I got all the lyrics of every ___ type of sone stuck in my head competing with useful spy knowledge or something

    11. Different people have different recent memory capacities, but it’s common to remember what you ate for breakfast this morning, but not what you ate for breakfast several days ago, ignoring predictability (such as if you cheat by eating the same thing for breakfast every day). This type of memory matches what can fit into the recent memory module.

      So having a routine is cheating?

      Noted

    12. A third motivation to have a separate recent memory module is that a detailed memory of the past few hours is much more valuable that an equally-detailed memory of some random window of a few hours from when you were four years old.

      So we have different levels of Caching, we have CPU cache levels, Ram, NVME storage, disk storage, S3 object storage, and archival storage on Tape Drives

      It is interesting how the mind navigates the brain equivalent cacheing systems, probably has some sort of knowledge graph

    13. Just as language models come with knowledge baked into them, an action model is also capable of holding knowledge, but I’ve included a separate memory module. The motivation for the recent memory module in the mind model is a place that can essentially memorize exactly what has happened recently before it’s integrated (through some kind of training) into the action model.

      So Kafka event queue?

    14. To explain the ideas of memory in this mind model, I’ll split memory into two broad categories: Story memory is the memory of everything that’s happened to you; and action memory is the modification of how you act based on positive or negative feedback.
    15. While I can’t confirm details internal to OpenAI, my educated guess is that these facts are available to the model because they can be selectively added to the prompt. That is, I believe the only common way for LLMs to “learn” today is to implement an additional system to store data from conversations, and to selectively insert that data into prompts when we think it might be useful.

      So is this RAG or something else?

    16. Now the LLM can choose to switch, at its own discretion, back and forth between a talking and listening mode. When the LLM wants to listen, it can produce a special <listening> token many times in a row, until it wants to say something. When it wants to speak, it outputs what it wants to say instead of the <listening> token.

      I don't believe there are any systems built like this at the moment

    17. However, we can imagine a change that adds agency to any LLM-like system. Think of a model that receives two interwoven input streams. One input stream is the person talking to the model, and the other is the model being able to see its own output. Current LLMs see both of these streams, but they’re set up so that only one person at a time can talk — the LLM or the user. The difference in the two-input version is that the model is designed from the start to see its own feedback, constantly, as well as simultaneous real-time input from “the outside,” such as the user.

      In Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow the author talks a lot about how the thinking machines of tomorrow will be like humans with sense organs spread out all over the world, being able to hear what is going on in Europe, see what is going on in America, and smell when is going on in Hawaii.

      The AI's in Person of Interest communicate this fact very well.

    18. A large language model doesn’t have agency because it can only react to input; it can’t independently take action.

      Well ain't this the concept of our time. A Blockchain is only a linked list, A LLM is just autocomplete. I think these things are both more than their raw materials, they are emergent phenomenon, more than their component parts.

    19. We may even have an effective stack of goals, a small data structure that we can push new goals onto, and pop them off as we complete them.

      This reminds me of the Bobiverse series. Bob, a digitized mind, has a TODO list that is always growing larger and faster than the rate he can do tasks. It is sorta like the Ouroboros in a sense, one part creating new goals, one part working on them in a constant cycle.

    20. our current goal fundamentally shapes how we filter the incoming information, and can be edited by the action model itself.

      How can AI help people identify their goals?

    21. I’m imagining the action model as receiving a lot of data that we could view as one giant vector

      The Mediocre Mediocre seem to have some good heuristics for dealing with this onslaught of data

    22. I’ve chosen this flow of data carefully. In effect, there are two filters on what we store in recent memory: First, when the action model receives a lot of incoming information, it will effectively pay more attention to some information than the rest. As in a language model, the unused information essentially disappears from the network as it passes through later layers; the attended ideas persist until the end. The second filter is based on our emotional state. When we’re bored, what’s happening is not considered important, and not flagged for longer-term memory. When we’re experiencing an emotional spike, a lot more data is kept around in more detail. Our usual life tends to be somewhere between these extremes.

      Okay so maybe my Kafka example from earlier still counts, but it works as a First in Last out queue where the most recent 7 to 12 things are held in memory. If stuff wants to stay in memory it need to keep getting loaded back in

    23. The emotional state module is doing a lot of work: It’s meant to represent all of our bodily needs, such as feeling hungry or tired, as well as our state of mind, such as feeling elated, frustrated, nostalgic, or intrigued. In this model, our emotional state can change based on what’s coming out of the action model, and it also filters that output into the recent memory module.

      One of the flaws the Bene Gesserit have that Leto II the snake king has is that they always disassociate, seeing reality through a screen or filter, therefore can't take full advantage of their natural instincts and have been trained specifically to not listen to them.

      That all changes in ChapterHouse Dune

    24. Since I’m imagining an action model can be a slight generalization of a language model

      We used to think the steam engine and water wheels were analogs of how the mind works

    25. perceive visual objects (“face”) rather than a raw image (“pixels of a face”).

      Those objects detected belong to some sort of knowledge graph

    26. Each arrow represents a flow of information. Solid arrows are what I consider to be the most important flows.

      The only thing that exists is self preserving algorithms across time, not everything is energy maximizing because there is also the meta of the parasite and the Mediocre Mediocre

    27. 2.2 The model at a high level Here’s the model:

      The Power Process Quote from Unabomber Manifesto

      The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later

    28. You can think of an LLM, in simple terms, like this: context -> LLM -> next_token By analogy, an action model works like this: context -> Action Model -> next_action

      If you create a multi agent LLM system what framework would it use to make "decisions" rather than generate tokens. For example a LLM that has to create tickets for a software projects, it has a lot of separate LLM's agents looking at each part of the project and the PM who has to assign, set priority, close, and reassign tickets. That's an example of a framework for decisions.

    29. I’m thinking about minds in terms of data flow between simultaneously-acting modules. If you have a computer with a GPU, a multi-core CPU, and a camera attached, then each module (GPU, CPU, camera) can do its own work in parallel. The modules in a system like this talk to each other, but they can always process information as it’s received.

      When I read this I immediately think of Kafka as the bus that these disparate parts use to communicate. Even though I realize it is more UDP

    1. I wonder if Mediocre Mediocre has anything to do with Female mate selection?

    2. Question, is Marriage some sort of Mediocre winning scenario? It accomplishes some sort of equilibrium that creates better societies it seems like.

      Just how long were hominids killing one another's tribes, one million years, two, five?

    3. That’s how you can consistently exist in the current finite game, and leave yourself open to the surprises (and the possibility of being surprising) in games that don’t yet exist that you don’t know you’re already playing. And that’s how you continue playing.

      This reminds me of, Leto II Atreides allowing for surprises within his Eugenics program, Paul Atreides dies because he tried to use his power of the spice to articulate a exact future rather than getting hints and adapting to it as it came along.

      In reality it is better to have guide rails on a bowling alley rather than a machine that can get strikes for you. Cause when you go play Croquet or lawn bowling or Batchi ball that machine ain't going to help you but you still got some skill from Bowling and still got a high score from playing bowling.

    4. One way to remember this is to treat the infinite game of evolutionary success as a sort of Zeno’s paradox turned around. You never reach the finish line because when you’re mediocre, you only take a step that’s halfway to the finish, so there’s always more room left to continue the game.
    5. In Douglas Hofstadter’s Metamagical Themas, there is a description of a game (I forget the details) where the goal is not to get the top score, but the average score. The subtlety is that after playing multiple rounds, the overall winner is not the one with the highest total score, but the most average total score. So to illustrate, if Alice, Bob, and Charlie are playing such a game and their scores in a series of 6 games are: Alice: 7 5 3 5 6 2 Bob: 5 8 2 1 9 7 Charlie: 3 1 5 4 5 5 We have the following outcome. Bob wins game 1, Alice wins game 2, Bob wins game 3, Charlie wins game 4, 5, and 6. So Alice gets 1 point, Bob gets 2 points, and Charlie gets 3 points. The overall winner is Bob, not Charlie. Charlie is the most mediocre, but Bob is mediocre mediocre. His prize is (perhaps) highest probability of continuing the game.
    6. Mediocrity is the only source of advantage.
    7. Data’s strategy of mediocrity is also the essence of guerrilla warfare of any sort. As Kissinger noted, the conventional army loses when it does not win. The guerrilla wins when he does not lose.
    8. Starships manage energy, not performance. Starships are deeply lazy.  Starfleet captains aim to continue the game, not win every encounter.

      A lot of star ships within The Culture seem to be pretty dam lazy too,

      The Culture - Wikipedia

    9. Star Trek, I think embodies this kind of mediocrity very well. Starfleet officers are all B Ark type bureaucratic bullshit-job mediocrities. They are rarely seen excelling at something or being perfect at executing something. Instead, they are constantly cutting corners here, muddling through there, and going with improvised hacks everywhere. And generally putting up a very mediocre performance by the standards of say, Vulcan intelligence, Klingon valor, Ferengi profit maximization, or Borg efficiency. When those non-humans adopt Federation culture, it is most evident in their adoption of mediocrity as an ethos. When they exhibit their “alien” traits, it is usually by regressing to an unfortunate pursuit of excellence in a specific alien way.

      Bullshit Jobs - Wikipedia

      Characterization of Star Trek really reminds me about the values of The Left as outlined in this video, The Anthropology of the Left - YouTube

      Oh Hard Mediocrity is the Left soft Mediocrity is the right, or is it the other way around, let's come back to this

    10. But while disruption always involves mediocrity, mediocrity does not always imply disruption.
    11. When caring is possible, and some people actively care, not caring represents agency for other people over those who do.
    12. what creates excellence is not that people are good at something, but because people care enough to be good at something.
    13. Not surprisingly, hard mediocrity characterizes domains David Graeber characterized as “bullshit jobs.”
    14. Remember Douglas Adams’ story of the Golgafrinchans Ark B? To refresh your memory, the Golgafrinchans got sick of the mediocre people in their midst: “telephone sanitisers, account executives, hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives and management consultants.” So they convinced these mediocrities that some sort of doomsday was looming and that they had to get off the planet in a big spaceship, the B Ark. The B-Arkers were assured that the rest would follow in the A and C arks. The A Ark would contain all the excellent people, Golgafrinchans at their best: scientists, artists and such. And the C Ark would contain all the people that did the actual work. Of course, the supposed A and C Ark people never left.
    15. Moravec’s Wedge. The problems that are hard for us are easy for computers. The problems that are easy for us are also easy for computers. What is hard for computers is being mediocre.
    16. High intelligence, of the sort we tend to describe as prodigal genius, is also a case of the domain being bounded in a tight and leak-proof way. The difference is that the enclosed space contains an intractably huge number of possibilities with no general and tractable formula for the right behaviors. Here, learning to recognize patterns from history is key, and depending on how rich and complex your historical library is, your actions will seem more or less like magically intuitive leaps to people with smaller history stores.

      I guess AI's are trained to win, not just survive over 1000's of human life spaces (generations)

    17. Moravec’s paradox is an observation based on the history of AI: the problems thought to be hard turned out to be easy, and the problems thought to be easy turned out to be hard.
    18. But so far, they’re not doing it quite as well as we do. Computers have learned to be mediocre, but haven’t yet learned to compete at mediocrity out in the open world.

      I wonder what a proper Mediocre computer would be like

      Also it seems that mediocre for the IQ Bell Curve / Midwit | Know Your Meme meme is actually on the left side not the middle.

    19. There are instances of programs respecting the rules of the game while blatantly violating its spirit.

      Usually most of the work of a task is defining and understanding it rather than actually doing it

    20. For instance, there are instances of programs figuring out how to use tiny rounding errors in simulated game environments to violate the simulated law of conservation of energy, and milking the simulation itself for a winning strategy. Like the characters in The Matrix bend the laws of physics when inside.

      I wonder when AI will start speed running video games?

    21. Every principal-agent game is of this sort. Every sort of moral hazard is marked by the ability of one side to pursue mediocrity rather than excellence. In each case, there is an information asymmetry powering the mediocrity.

      This is the cure to being a perfectionist

    22. This kind of indifference-driven mediocrity is the hallmark of games where one side is playing a finite game and the other side is playing an infinite game that isn’t necessarily evil in the Carse sense of wanting to end the game for the other, but isn’t striving for excellence either.

      Can you compare this to WOW(World of Warcraft) proper and the PvP and PvE parts of the game. One of an infinite game but there are finite games within the infinite game that people play.

    23. like honest, by-the-book bureaucrats.

      So Bureaucrats are the tyranny of the good at the expense of the mediocre and excellent, bro that is just the IQ Bell Curve / Midwit Meme

    24. Mediocrity is not about what will satisfy performance requirements, but about what you can get away with. This brings us to agency.
    25. Humans have a rich vocabulary around mediocrity that suggests we are not talking satisficing: dragging your feet, sandbagging, pulling your punches, holding back, phoning it in, cutting corners.

      Mediocrity would mean someone has a very simple language

    26. You could say mediocrity seeks to satisfice the laws of the territory rather than the laws of the map.

      What does this mean?

      Does it take extra energy to generate a map therefore one can just walk around and figure out how to survive?

    27. This is just a different way of playing a finite game. Instead of optimizing (playing to win), you minimize effort to stay in the specific finite game. If you can perform consistently without disqualifying errors, you are satisficing. Most automation and quality control is devoted to raising the floor of this kind of performance.

      This phrasing reminds me of "War Games", the only way to win is not to play

    28. I like to think of laziness — manifested as mediocrity in any active performance domain — as resistance to optimization.
    29. The inner ear bones for instance, evolved from the optionality of extra-thick jaw bones.

      I did not know that

    30. The universe is deeply lazy. The universe is mediocre. The universe is functionally unfixed self-perpetuation, always in optionality-driven perpetual beta, Always Already Player 0.1.
    31. Mediocrity is the functionally embodied and situated form of what Sarah Perry called deep laziness. To be mediocre at something is to be less than excellent at it in order to conserve energy for the indefinitely long haul. Mediocrity is the ethos of perpetual beta at work in a domain you’re not sure what the “product” is even for. Functionally unfixed self-perpetuation.

      Wana talk about being Mediocre, check out Sam Larson who understood to win the game show alone, you just need to get really really fat and just sit around not wasting calories trying to get more calories in an environment where that can't really be done.

    32. So middling performance itself is not the essence of mediocrity. What defines mediocrity is the driving negative intention: to resist the lure of excellence.

      I think this part really gets to the core of the argument

    1. That being said, the most important problem in digital immortality may not be technical, but economical. It may not be about how to scan a brain, but about why to scan a brain and run it, despite the lack of any economic incentive.

      You ever think that Reincarnation is just what you get after you figure out the economics of Immortality?

    2. Fidelity will be among the most important problems in neuropreservation for a long time to come.

      Hmm how do we go about measuring "Fidelity"?

      Westworld did a good job exploring this

    3. An adult human brain takes up around 1.2 liters of volume. There are 1 million mm³ in a liter. If we could scale up the process from Google researchers 1 million times, we could scan a human brain at nanometer resolution, yielding more than 1 zettabyte (i.e., 1 billion terabytes) of data with the same rate.

      I think Ray Kurzweil has some different estimates in The Singularity Is Near

      The lower bound was 100Tb

      Though LLM's didn't exist back then, the jist of a person can probably fit in 1tb given how much data is compressed in Lllama3.1 8b

    4. But then, why not just create a new AI from scratch, with the same knowledge and skills, and without the baggage of your personality, memories, and emotions?

      Can an AI be a better version of you?

      How would we describe a person in order to ascertain this question?

    5. For one second, let’s assume that they could. Let’s assume that they could inject your scan with 1000 years of knowledge, skills, language, ontology, history, culture and so on.

      If they have this tech they can just run people in the matrix

    6. On the other hand, it would be a pity if a civilization which can emulate brain scans is unable to imbue them with relevant knowledge and skills, unable to update them.

      Bro just imagine managing your own mind like a git repo with git ops that deploys to Kubernetes

    7. 1000 years into the future, you could be as helpless as a child. You could need somebody to adopt you, send you to school, and teach you how to live in the future. You—mentally an adult—could once again need a parent, a teacher.

      This reminds me of the movie Iceman,

      Iceman (1984) - IMDb

    8. To give an example, I am a software developer who takes pride in his craft. But a lot of the skills I have today will most likely be obsolete by the 31st century. Try to imagine what an 11th century stonemason would need to learn to be able to survive in today’s society.

      That almost feels like a slap to the face, but that seems like an accurate statement