When I first launched the project, many people wrote about it as if it was a directory of old peoples’ personal sites. Not at all - it was a directory of personal sites authored by people of all ages - from teenagers to people in their nineties. I truly believed back then as I do now, that the web brings us all together regardless of age!

Mr Skeffington (1940) is, at its heart, a novel about menopause (though the word itself is never mentioned) and the invisibility that comes with age.

Furthermore, it’s generally a bad idea to think too deeply or quantitatively about your friendships—a certain degree of irrationality and forgetfulness is essential to the whole enterprise. It’s usually not good for a friendship when you start thinking things like “Bob is kind of a shitty person, why exactly am I still buddies with him?” (because you’ve known him for a long time and he really got you out of jam back in college, and that’s plenty enough reason to stay friends with him; also people change and you might be really glad that you stayed friends with him in the future) or “Nancy has to initiate the next hang out because I’ve done it nine times this year compared to her three”(she’s going through some things you don’t know about so cut her a break, just like she’s cut you one in the past). Friendship drama caused by weddings is another example—shit can really get awkward when you have to basically rank your friends by choosing a best man/maid of honor or deciding who makes it into the wedding party and who doesn’t.

Unfortunately, we can’t console ourselves that the plays that do survive were necessarily the best, or at least the most popular. McInnis crunched the numbers based on the meticulous book-keeping of one London impresario in the 1590s, Philip Henslowe, and drew the following conclusion: “Lost plays performed at least as well as, and usually better than, the plays that have survived. They are definitively not inferior, they were good money-makers, and they have been lost for a variety of reasons that aren’t attributable to quality.”

If there’s one thing I learned throughout school and work, it’s that you should never visibly operate at your peak even when urgency calls for it. This is because functioning at >=100% regularly, while possibly dazzling to your peers, managers, and spectators, is unsustainable and you’ll only end up burning yourself out, especially when this becomes perceived as your operating baseline and expected of you to be your minimum capacity every work day.

They're selling, of course, but also this grandiose and mystified mixture of awe and dread—something amazing is happening very quickly just out of sight, and will be here soon despite always being exactly 18-36 months away, and you will need to be protected from it, but also it will improve your life—is as much the product as anything else.

SoftBank is a Japanese carrier which had its own emoji set for the years 1997—2016. SoftBank (known as J-Phone at the time) created the first emoji set known to be featured on an early mobile phone.

The definition above implies that the “World Wide Web” uses the http protocol to send its data. Why then, do we still need to add the “WWW” subdomain? It’s a waste of time to type it. Wouldn’t it be easier to just type in the domain name, without the “WWW”?

I think this is how most games view the purpose of their loops. It’s for the player to master a skill. But most of these games aren’t really about that. In Assassin’s Creed Odyssey you have an RPG skill tree that unlocks new abilities, lets you get better and better at fighting and sneaking. And, I suppose you could make a case that the game is about an assassin honing her craft. But...actually it really isn't. It’s about someone trying to find who her real family is. Or it’s about exploring ancient Greece. Or it’s about choosing sides in the Peloponnesian War. Or...something else. I’m not really sure what it’s about, honestly, and anyways it doesn’t matter. Let’s say it’s about an assassin honing her craft. Nothing in the game really supports that. The world doesn’t feel oppressive or vulnerable, it hardly matters if you get better or not, it’s quite easy; it’s impossible to get lost; you never fail. I don’t really feel like my skill in that game improved, as I played it. It felt more like…the game just kept going. It takes a lot of work to make this structure meaningful! But let’s suppose these games did make this work. Let’s say all these games achieve the difficult task of creating meaning through play, feeling mastery through repetition…it’s not that this is a bad use of play, but I have to believe it is not all play can offer us. I hope it is just a small fraction of what play is capable of! So why is this all we’re doing? Why can’t we hope for more?

What grants arcade games their meaning is their high scores: arcades are social spaces. Like the combative meaning of Battle Line, Space Invaders is granted meaning through leaderboards and face offs. Even if you’re just playing against yourself, there is a tension of getting farther, doing better, honing your craft and seeing it reflected in concrete terms. Everything you do in the game furthers this goal, which makes everything you do meaningful.

If something is impossible to know you are better off not being very smart, because smart people fool themselves into thinking they know while average people are more likely to shrug their shoulders and end up closer to reality.

Most problems are more complicated than they look but most solutions should be simpler than they are.

A lot of good writing makes points that people already intuitively know but haven’t yet put into words. It works because readers learn something new without having to expend much energy questioning whether it’s true. The alternatives are points that are obvious and well known (boring) or something that’s non-obvious and unknown (often takes too much effort to understand and impatient readers leave).

It’s easier to lie with numbers than words, because people understand stories but their eyes glaze over with numbers. As the saying goes, more fiction has been written in Excel than Word.

Your personal experiences make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.

Money’s greatest intrinsic value is its ability to give you control over your time.

People learn when they’re surprised. Not when they read the right answer, or are told they’re doing it wrong, but when they experience a gap between expectations and reality.

Pessimism always sounds smarter than optimism because optimism sounds like a sales pitch while pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.

History is driven by surprising events but forecasting is driven by obvious ones.

LLMs are not going to develop subjective experience no matter how big they get. It’s like imagining that a printer could actually feel pain because it can print bumper stickers with the words “Baby don’t hurt me” on them. It doesn’t matter if the next version of the printer can print out those stickers faster, or if it can format the text in bold red capital letters instead of small black ones. Those are indicators that you have a more capable printer but not indicators that it is any closer to actually feeling anything.

But any attempt to encourage people to treat AI systems with respect should be understood as an attempt to make people defer to corporate interests. It might have value to corporations, but there is no value for you.

Could there be value, though, in treating an AI system as more of a partner—something or someone with whom we develop a relationship—rather than merely as a tool?It all depends on what you mean by “relationship.” If you’re a woodworker, you might develop emotional associations with a set of chisels you’ve used for years, and in some sense that’s a “relationship,” but it’s entirely different from the relationship you have with people. You might make sure you keep your chisels sharp and rust-free, and say that you’re treating them with respect, but that’s entirely different from the respect you owe to your colleagues. One way to clarify this is to remember that people have their own preferences, while things do not. To respect your colleagues means to pay attention to their preferences and interests and balance them against your own; when they do this to you in return, you have a good relationship. By contrast, your chisel has no preferences; it doesn’t want to be sharp. When you keep it sharp, you are doing so because it will help you do good work or because it gives you a feeling of satisfaction to know that it’s sharp. Either way, you are only serving your own interests, and that’s fine because a chisel is just a tool. If you don’t keep it sharp, you are only harming yourself. By contrast, if you don’t respect your colleagues, there is a problem beyond the fact that it might make your job harder; you do them harm because you are ignoring their preferences. That’s why we consider it wrong to treat a person like a tool; by acting as if they don’t have preferences, you are dehumanizing them.

The impulse to view everything in terms of efficiency, of reducing costs and maximizing output, is radically overapplied in the modern world. There are certain situations in which that is an appropriate framing, but art cannot be understood that way. Arguably the most important parts of our lives should not be approached with this attitude. Some of this attitude comes from the fact that the people making AI tools are engineers viewing everything from an engineering perspective, but it’s also that, as a culture, we have adopted this way of thinking as the default.

Many people would have you believe that the process of making art and the end result can be easily separated, but I don’t believe they can be. I was talking with someone who is very excited about AI-generated imagery, and she said, “Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that AI can make better art than humans. In that scenario, do you think that we should reject AI art simply to protect the livelihood of human artists?” I responded, “I’m not going to grant you that premise, because that is the question under debate. You are framing the hypothetical in a way that assumes the conclusion.”

When we use a search engine, we get verbatim quotes from text on the internet and also a link to the original web page. A search engine gives us information directly from the horse’s mouth. LLMs are like a search engine that rephrases information instead of giving it verbatim or pointing you to the original source. In some respects, that is really cool, but they’re not rephrasing it reliably. It’s like asking a question and getting an answer back from someone who read the answer but didn’t really understand it and is trying to rephrase it to the best of their ability. I call LLMs a blurry JPEG because they give a low-resolution version of the internet. If you are using the internet to find information, which is what most of us use the internet for, it doesn’t really make sense to go with the low-resolution version when we have conventional search engines that point you to the actual information itself.

A lot of people would say magic definitionally cannot have rules, and that’s one popular way of looking at it. But I have a different take—I would say that magic is evidence that the universe knows you’re a person. It’s not that magic cannot have rules; it’s that the rules are more like the patterns of human psychology or of interactions between people. Magic means that the universe is behaving not as a giant machine but as something that is aware of you as a person who is different from other people, and that people are different from things. At some level, the universe responds to your intentions in a way that the laws of physics as we understand them don’t.

They rely on separating content from aesthetics, allowing marketing executives to brainstorm (usually bad) ideas and only use style as a superficial, disconnected layer to slap onto them. They are crystalized snapshots in a repertoire rather than emerging, evolving features of creative practice, which makes them wieldier and more docile than unpredictable artists’ styles.Computer scientists often thought they were aligned with artists’ ways of seeing, while in practice, they trained their systems to see like a client.

Just eight hours of the Severance theme song to last your entire day, Innie.

For most Americans silence is discomforting. "Small talk" or casual conversation is usually preferable to quiet. It is therefore common to hear people casually talking about the weather, sports, parties, food, clothing, jobs, people they both know, or past experiences, especially those they have in common.

Friendships among Americans can be shorter and less intense than those among people from other cultures. At least many observers from abroad have this impression. Because Americans are taught to be self-reliant, because they live in a very mobile society, and for many other reasons as well, they tend to avoid deep involvements with other people.

Also, there is a strong political correctness in the U.S. not to comment negatively on a person's appearance.

Most Americans will back away from a person who has "body odor" or " bad breath". This backing away may be the only signal that they are "offended" by another person's breath or body odors. The topic of these odors is so sensitive that most Americans will not tell another person that he or she has bad breath or body odors.

Discussing issues or ideas openly with other individuals is considered not only proper but often a responsibility as well. Americans, particularly in a business situation, may appear abrupt or harsh and do not spend the time on polite social talk that many other nationalities do. You may be surprised to find the briefest of introductions is immediately followed by getting right to the point.

When they are talking to someone, Americans alternate between looking briefly into the listener's eyes and looking slightly away. When they are listening to another person, they look almost constantly at the speaker's eyes.

While talking, Americans are often made uncomfortable by extreme physical closeness. Eighteen inches is the minimum closeness they will usually tolerate, so don't stand very close to people when you are talking with them. Informal physical contact during conversation is also not encouraged by most Americans.

Americans treat each other in what can be considered informal ways. Informal, relaxed postures are commonly assumed by Americans when they are standing or sitting, even when they are conversing with others; lack of formal posture is not a sign of inattention or disrespect.

The American style of friendly joking, getting the last word in, and the quick reply are subtle forms of competition in America. Although such behavior is natural for Americans, it may appear overbearing to other nationalities.

a website whose domain registration has been ceaselessly auto-renewing since 1998, but whose last FTP upload was in the summer of that year. the website is impaled against the passage of time, bytes streaming from digital stigmata. it is forced to watch in muted terror as its siblings and friends wither and vanish entirely, blinking out of existence one by one as their registrations go inevitably out of date.

I appreciate you looking out, but thankfully this is just a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor and I am eternally my own worst enemy target audience. A better man with a better sense of humor might stop trying to beat this particular horse, but I’m not him bro.

In any subculture, showing off how much attention you can hold for pet topics, the ones vital to the community but trivial to others, becomes an in-group endurance sport. It's a treacherous exercise that, over time, leaves you oblivious to how truly you’re interested, deep, deep down.

I don’t need to tell rationalists that changing someone’s mind has little to do with the persuasiveness of arguments. To explain in rationalese, I suspect that our minds are in a state of epistemic inertia when core beliefs are challenged. In other words, no matter how much you bludgeon your brain with new evidence, beliefs cannot be updated without overcoming that inertia first. Some ways to achieve this are through narratives or or through authority — consider how the advice you dismissed when it came from your roommate suddenly seems sensible when it comes from your favorite author.Style is another way to break inertia. Consider the difference between “Fame can change you” and, to use a classic line, “Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.” The first won’t even register on the ears, but the second may help you see such a banal — but true — statement anew. Truths, upon repetition in the same formulation, start sounding like truisms. Much like how neurons, after repeated stimuli, need a higher threshold to fire, a truism blends into the noise. Stylistic and formal experimentation is like introducing randomness and entropy to disrupt the epistemic logjam.

Curiously, as the rationalist blogosphere seemed to expand over the years, it continued to obey a kind of twin Earth metaphysics, as if the internet contained a phantom dimension invisible to the mainstream media. My otherwise well-read and very online friends seemed unaware of it. (I assume the readership of Ribbonfarm has a near-perfect negative correlation with the viewership of HBO’s Girls.)

Blogging, no matter how technical the subject area, is never a purely expository form but an inherently performative one.

Seeing the state of rationalist writings in 2024, I’m reminded of how philosopher Nikhil Krishnan described the late 18th-century German Romantics: “rebels find themselves thrown into the arms of another orthodoxy,” writes Krishnan. “How different a goth looks from everyone else, and yet how similar to every other goth.”

The group that once prided itself on avoiding a hive mind is now steeped in its own kind of piety.

What Papua New Guinea is to language, Yunnan is to food. The cause of the diversity is no mystery. Yunnan, historically, was (1) reasonably agriculturally productive, but at the same time (2) insanely difficult to traverse.

Niubie (牛瘪). Right. Another ‘infamous’ dish that perhaps belongs to Chinese internet’s “dark cuisine hall of fame”. This dish belongs to a category of dish called bie or pie. It’s made by feeding a cow or goat a number of herbs before slaughter, then collecting them from the first stomach immediately after killing the animal. This digested herb liquid is then used as a base, into which the meat and organs from the animal will then be added

Yaba, Wrapped Duck (鸭把). Right. Yaba, literally meaning “duck handle”, is a specialty around the Hechi city. It contains duck meat, duck stomach, pear, cucumber, Thai basil, all wrapped together with ginger leaf. The dipping sauce is made with duck blood (OG version uses raw blood), ginger, and sour pickles.

Breakfast Rice Noodle Soup with Guangxi-style Char Siu (叉烧粉). Bottom left. A simple breakfast of pork stock and flat rice noodles. It’s topped with an array of sour and spicy pickles, together with Guangxi style Char Siu BBQ Pork - a heavily spiced and deep fried Char Siu variant.

Ask for work that is easy to verify. Your job as a programmer using an LLM is to read the code it produces, think about it, and decide if the work is good. You can ask an LLM to do things you would never ask a human to do. “Rewrite all of your new tests introducing an <intermediate concept designed to make the tests easier to read>” is an appalling thing to ask a human, you’re going to have days of tense back-and-forth about whether the cost of the work is worth the benefit. An LLM will do it in 60 seconds and not make you fight to get it done. Take advantage of the fact that redoing work is extremely cheap.

Toby Shorin is a 30-something thought leader I occasionally see at conferences whose long-form articles about cryptocurrency I am sent by people who think I am interested in that sort of thing. He's the kind of guy who reads No Logo by Naomi Klein, the book about the devastation mega-corporations wreak on workers in the race to sell cheap branded products, agrees it is an impressive piece of journalism, but says, "I think Klein is getting close, but she can't leap to, 'What if this is actually good.'"

Hard Truths (Mike Leigh)British movies these days—from good ones like The Old Oak to OK ones like Bird to wretched ones like Saltburn—present British people as ruthlessly mean to each other, petty, conniving, classist, vulgar shits who add “innit?” at the end of sentences that are aren’t questions but insults. What is going on over there? Mike Leigh presents a meta-answer, with Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the performance of the year as the meanest of all, a depressed, grieving wife and mother ruining everyone’s day in supermarket lines, car parks, living rooms, graveyards, etc.

Furiosa (George Miller)In The Night of the Hunter, Robert Mitchum, sitting in the audience at a burlesque house, ruefully says to himself “There are too many of them. You can’t kill a world.” Furiosa counters this, asking the audience “Who killed the world?” then showing how it was done, ten crashes at a time.

The Beast and Coma (Bertrand Bonello)His plots remain enigmatic, his worldview continues to rattle, and he accomplishes so much without seeming to expend a lot of effort. In The Beast Bonello presents a tragic three-tiered future world, in which he mixes a Henry James novella with the rantings of a California incel serial killer. In Coma, a teenage girl self-confined in her bedroom during the pandemic enacts a digitized ghost story with Barbies. Both movies investigate free will in the coming AI age, and the desire to confront fear, to not be dead, and to go elsewhere when there’s nowhere else to go.

The final WOBO design came in two sizes – 350 and 500 mm versions that were meant to lay horizontally, interlock and layout in the same manner as ‘brick and mortar’ construction. One production run in 1963 yielded 100,000 bottles some of which were used to build a small shed on Mr. Heineken’s estate in Noordwijk, Netherlands. One of the construction challenges “was to find a way in which corners and openings could be made without cutting bottles,” said Mr. Habraken.

a blog is a storefront pretty products adorned, designed, pristine and tailored, for them skinny plastic legs poke through perfect plastic casing landfills of abandoned posts decay ... a wiki is an abyss thoughts written alone unravel, and stitch themselves with meaning ... blogs rot. wikis wait.

The only way something is truly pluggable is if a second implementation is designed at the exact same time as the primary implementation. Then at least you have a proof it can work…one time

It's the feast day of your patron saint, and a recipe has gone missing. A short tale of birds, books, and the cloistered life.

You have your own methods and structures, that are geared to how you work, think, learn and create best, and which have emerged over time and you then reinforced because of their utility to you.

The Grecian bend was a term applied first to a stooped posture[1] which became fashionable c. 1820,[2] named after the gracefully-inclined figures seen in the art of ancient Greece.

Henry may have worn the armour as a jest. The helmet has protruding eyes and a toothy grimace and is adorned with horns and spectacles.

In the sphere of historical reenactment, it is important to back up depicitons with sufficient sources, be it in art or actual findings of surviving garments (which is obviously very difficult in this case), and one has to acknowledge that for the beekeeper, there simply isn’t enough material to make the claim that basket-faced professionals existed before the 1500s. It is reasonably possible, since baskets did exist then, and were most likely cheaper and more widely available than wire mesh, but we can’t say for sure.

Billy Possum is a type of stuffed toy depicting an opossum. Designed to be the replacement for the Teddy bear after Theodore Roosevelt vacated the office of President of the United States in 1909, the toy's popularity waned quickly, with the trend having lost all momentum by Christmas of that year.

Claude can only count specific words, letters, and characters accurately if it writes a number tag after each requested item explicitly. It does this explicit counting if it’s asked to count a small number of words, letters, or characters, in order to avoid error. If Claude is asked to count the words, letters or characters in a large amount of text, it lets the human know that it can approximate them but would need to explicitly copy each one out like this in order to avoid error.

Claude is always sensitive to human suffering, and expresses sympathy, concern, and well wishes for anyone it finds out is ill, unwell, suffering, or has passed away.

Now I have a third thing I want to talk about, before getting on with thetext. 3I am just SPITTING THIS TEXT OUT. I know that my understanding ofpersonal projects and getting them completed is low. I know my weaknesses-that I am bad at getting huge projects done. So what I’m doing is just SPIT-TING THIS TEXT OUT.I figure that if you are reading this, you’d much rather have this than nothingat all. And that’s what’s out there, if you aren’t reading this- NOTHING ATALL. I mean, you can always keep a diary or a bunch of category bins, if youlike. That’s a real no brainer. But besides those two, and treatises on TedNelson’s madness, you won’t find a whole lot.So please excuse the poor formatting of this. It’s raw, coercive, straight text.It’s unorganized. It’s terrible.Maybe one day I will improve this. But that day is not today. Today isa day for spitting text out. With God’s mercy, I will learn how to finish bigprojects. I pray for that ability frequently. If you can mentor me in the subject,I will happily hear you out. But I have not learned it yet.

hen you are writing down your thoughts, you are making themclear to yourself, but when you revise your thoughts, it requires a lot of work-you have to update old ideas to point to new ideas. This discourages a lot ofnew thinking. There is also a “structural integrity” to your old thoughts thatwill resist change. You may actively not-think certain things, because it woulddemand a lot of note keeping work. (Thus the notion that notebooks are bestapplied to things that are not changing.)

furthermore, during the past few years, universities have somewhat caught up with the demand and started to educate, train and graduate undergraduate and master’s students on fundamentals and practical ideas behind these new technologies. they know how to train these models, test these models and deploy these models, in addition to theoretical ideas behind them. even better, they are less egotistical on average than PhD’s and are often more open-minded.

productization implies a lot of things, but there are two aspects that are particularly important to this note. first, productization requires some kind of standardization in development and deployment processes. such process standardization is however antithetical to scientific research. we do not need a constant and frequent stream of creative and disruptive innovations but incremental and stable improvements based on standardized processes. PhD’s are lousy at this, because this is precisely the opposite of what PhD programs are designed to train them for. PhD’s are supposed to come up with innovative ideas (yes, debatable if every idea is innovative, but it tends to be at least innovative with a lot of noise,) validate these ideas either theoretically or empirically, repot the findings to the community by writing papers and then move on. once something becomes an actual product (or a product category,) we cannot simply innovate and move on, but need to stick with it to support it continuously. with a well-established system of processes, the necessity of PhD degrees disappears rapidly.

PALAMEDES     No, thank you. IANTHE     (Despairingly) You don’t even drink! PALAMEDES     In my defence: I’m dead, and this wine doesn’t exist. Ianthe waves a hand airily, then downs her entire cup in one go and hands it off to an attendant. IANTHE     All the better for it. False things have a piquancy which the real can never match.

Attrition is strictly for people who don’t know how to win.

Yeah, don’t want to be fed posts everyday, I want to drop in.

In a way, I realize that starting off with an aside is a bad way to get anyone jazzed about some new ultimately pointless post styling—but I purposefully want these pieces to be less heavily edited and focused than all the other things. So, by throwing in a wankery introduction, it acts as a kind of gate you have to get through. So if this is too self-indulgent or tangential then you know to go away and I just continue and we’re all fine—although I think we’re deep into peak self-indulgence now that ‘people’ have evolved into ‘influencers’. Gah, that sounds condescending—and it is—and, worse, I think being condescending—especially in public like this—is probably much, much more destructive than influencing.

tultywits talk of and use the little things you want to survive. talk of and use the little things you want to survive. This page, for instance, uses HTML definition lists. (The <dl>, <dt> and <dd> tags.) These are quite obscure tags compared to the heavily dominant <div> and <p> tags. I use them because someone has put work into them and I guess I want them to survive. They are a ‘tultywit’. The acronym doesn’t quite stand up under that usage; I assure you, the meaning does.

Tim Toady Phonetic refactoring of the acronym TMTOWDI. Or, there’s more than one way to do it. Phonetic refactoring of the acronym TMTOWDI. Or, there’s more than one way to do it.

‘cottoms up’ Phoneticalized ‘COTMs up’. COTM is crontab of the mind. Phoneticalized ‘COTMs up’. COTM is crontab of the mind. Much like a jubilant toast, this expression ends an immensely thought-provoking discussion where I am left with much to reconsider. Like the ‘crontab’, a long-running system process that periodically triggers itself, these are the thoughts that might poke me on an hourly schedule throughout the night.

Above the first cover is the original version of the opening sentence (captioned "Turn Hard Books"), which reads "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since." Above the second cover (captioned "into Easy Books") is a simplified version, which reads "When I was young, my dad told me something that I still think about."

I wouldn’t recommend going deep into AWS or other Cloud services for hobbyists. Since I do software engineering for my employment I’ve gained a lot of experience on “industrial strength” solutions. The challenge is finding the subset that actually solve more problems than they cause. I often feel like I’m crawling around in Jeff Bezos’ spaceship trying to bring alien technology to the people.

Discovery, and search, will sort itself out, if we do #1,2, and 3. Trying to decide if I agree with this

surely there is a linear logical framework from which geometric social cooperation can arise (I must hope).

I should love to be rebuked! When you are in the freezing ocean, it is probably the best time to hear that you have made a grammatical mistake. What a helpful distraction that could be! And you may never forget to make it again.

“I am failing this man.”—Dude, I don’t rely on you—I have my own system of living—I’m not just an imbalanced pinball lost in your machine!

I don’t feel that I want to ‘wrestle’ —I want to ‘pen pal’. After all, this is a work of fiction. The contents of this letter are products of the reader’s imagination. This letter is for entertainment purposes only. Although the form of this letter is autobiographical, it is not. Although this letter may appear authentic, it is not. What appears to be ‘wrestling’ may actually be a new type of sophisticated ‘pal’ engagement maneuver.

See, to me the issue is that ANY algorithm involves encoding a ruleset that strictly describes what it is looking for. So by the time you encode your crate-digging behavior as an algorithm—it has lost its flavor.

It’s weird, but I really agree with this! I say ‘weird’ because part of me just wants to give up on privacy on the Web—maybe we just have to accept that everything is private. But this sucks—there are many private thoughts and nascent ideas that I want to store here, to collaborate on in the shadows. If the ‘blog’/‘wiki’ can be a ‘home’—then it needs its hiding places, its private gathering rooms. (And it does have these—just not on blogs, generally.)

I am happy with how you have things. I understand how you work now. If anything, I would argue that you should continue innovating in the way you have been. That, like the single-page oracle metaphor from earlier, you will find more ways for the technology to symbolically represent you. This is paramount.

Like everyone else, I hate Facebook and what it has done to the Hypertext Kingdom and I will fight it valiantly and with great, upturned nostrils. But I have also used it to obsessively follow the death of Kaylee (and other children that I will write about some time) and I have depended on this awful unsavory to read their obscure stories. It has filled me with profound spiritual mayonnaisse.

Now, it is tiring to tell this story. If you are reading, then you certainly don’t believe me and you likely won’t even attempt to be my friend. That’s okay—I believe it’s definitely up to me to make the initial move to be your friend.

Pantone’s use of AI-generated imagery in the Mocha Mousse launch video highlights just how performative the trend-spotting economy has become. Pantone didn’t need to find real-world examples to justify the coming popularity of their Colour of the Year – they could just use AI to create cozy interiors, cafes, and polished wood finishes bathed in its warm tone. If you can’t find proof of a trend in the wild, why not generate it yourself?

A term like “Tomato Girl” creates a lens for viewing the world, encouraging people to adopt and expand the trend, whether by buying tomato-red dresses or posting Mediterranean-inspired selfies. Many of these modern micro-aesthetics are anchored in a single dominant colour – Tomato Girl is red, Vanilla Girl is white, Blueberry Girl is blue – distilling identity into something as simple as a palette. Unlike earlier personal styles like punk or indie twee, which demanded a point of view and subcultural references, these aesthetics require little more than a willingness to buy the right products in the right colour.

However, a big no for female writers is to insert any form of personal experience into the plot. If they get caught, it could end their career. One player famously noted: ‘It feels like being pushed second-hand goods when you are expecting a virgin.’ In short, what paper hubbies absolutely cannot have is: history with other women.

The ‘sapiosexual type’ is more sophisticated than its predecessors and becoming prevalent with highly educated women. Creating these characters convincingly is no easy task. Otome game companies often hire female writers from top universities with diverse backgrounds, equipped with knowledge from a range of disciplines. ‘He’ should be able to comment on a Shakespearean sonnet or quantum physics in a magisterial way, if prompted.

Iconic games such as Genshin Impact (developed by the Shanghai game company miHoYo, whose slogan is ‘Tech Otakus Save the World’) are featuring more and more charming male characters to appeal to female players, which is seen as a betrayal of its origins. Many male players refuse to play with male characters – going so far as to deliberately drop them dead – and vow to boycott the game until this supposed mistake is rectified. What they don’t grasp is that they need to outspend female and gay players to regain some bargaining power. Petulantly railing against the ‘pink tax’ won’t get them what they want.

Screentime has become a colosseum where everything is in competition with everything else: email from work competes with text from a friend competes with Instagram and Tiktok.

Now we’re watching Ezra Klein talk on the NYT site as well as listening to him. You have to be better than the rando parroting your articles in a selfie video.

The article is just the intellectual property made to be leveraged in as many spaces as possible

Thus it makes sense to build your concept in public and test its engagement at every stage. Every powerful brand starts with a single post.

The job as a consumer is to find and support them

Media brands increasingly work like fashion brands: Consumers have to want to wear them. If no one wants to come to your party, you’re doing it wrong.

Locality and specificity are good things and offer ways to preserve meaning in the increasingly contextless internet. You have to remain tied to your own digital geography or the scope of a specific viewpoint. An audience wants to feel like an in-group, like they’re in on the joke, even if that joke is just that the mayor of New York sucks.

Parasocial relationships are the name of the game. When people call for a Joe Rogan of the left, it seems like they don’t realize that one of the reasons he is so powerful is that he is many of his listeners’ best friend. People spend hours and hours a day with him; his show and its extended universe have become an on-demand loneliness killing service. The power (and value) of that relationship is unmatched. Puck is a parasocial publication, that’s why you hear the tentpole writers’ voices in solo podcasts.

No matter if you’re a text-only website, it is now in your best interests to hire camera-ready contributors who will make successful video-podcast clips. The problem is journalists and critics aren’t generally known for their personal aesthetic appeal.

Everything is a personality cult, and maybe just a cult. You have to cultivate your own, no matter how small. To do so you must always be relatable, but also ideally aspirational. Just don’t get too out of the reach of your cultists.

But a reaction—whether positive or negative—is exactly what Pizza Hut Taiwan aims for. When it comes to developing new pizzas, their main criteria are clear: “How do we appeal to the Taiwanese tastes and how do we make Italians angry?” Leung says.

Americans are prosperous, but without any deep sense of obligations to others. We are a highly commercial, individualist people, and when we let go of even a thin liberal conception of the public good, we become nasty, petty, small, vindictive and irrational.

In contrast, the US left has long held $15/hr (or $31,000/yr full time) to be the bare minimum and, increasingly, through both legislation and a good labour market, wages are catching up to that.

The reality is that most of Bluesky's userbase doesn't know or care about or understand the degree to which Bluesky is decentralized, except for potentially as a reassurance that "the same thing can't happen here" as happened on X-Twitter. "Decentralization" is not the escape hatch people think it might be in Bluesky, but it's true that "credible exit" may be. However, the credibility of that exit currently predicates on another organization of the same cost and complexity of Bluesky standing in if-or-when Bluesky ends up becoming unsatisfying to its users.

I will (quasi)quote Jonathan Rees again, as I have previously when talking about the nature of language and defining terminology:Language is a continuous reverse engineering effort between all parties involved.(Somewhat humorously, I seem to adjust the phrasing of this quoting-from-memory just slightly every time I quote it.)

ATProto's main design is built upon replicating and indexing the firehose. That is its fundamental design choice and method of operation.I won't go into this too far here other than to say, I'm not sure this is in alignment with what many of its users want. And we're seeing this, increasingly, as users are being upset about finding out that other providers have replicated and indexed their data. This is happening in a variety of ways, from LLM training concerns, to moderation concerns, etc.I won't say too much more on that. I think it's just... this all just gives me the feeling that the "speech vs reach" approach, and the idea of a global public firehose, a "global town square" type approach... it all feels very web 2.0, very "Millennial social media"... for Millenials, by Millenials, trying to capture the idea that society would be better if we all got everyone to talk to each other at once.I think Bluesky is doing about as good a job as a group off people can do with the design they have and are trying to preserve. But I don't think the global context-collapse firehose works, and I'm not sure it's what users want it either, and if they do, they really seem to want both strong central control to meet their needs but also to not have strong central control be a thing that exists when it doesn't.

What would happen if we had a million self-hosted users and five new users were added to the network? Zooming out, once again, the message passing system simply has five new messages sent. Under the public shared heap model, it is 10,000,025 new messages sent! For adding five new self-hosted users! (And that's even just with our simplified model of only sending one message per day per user!)

Now let us get onto decentralization. First my definition of decentralization:Decentralization is the result of a system that diffuses power throughout its structure, so that no node holds particular power at the center.Now here is Bryan's definition (more accurately Mark Nottingham's definition (more accurately, Paul Baran's definition)) of decentralization:[Decentralization is when] "complete reliance upon a single point is not always required" (citing Baran, 1964)Perhaps Bluesky matches this version of decentralization, but if so, it is because it is an incredibly weak definition of decentralization, at least taken independently. This may well say, taken within the context it is provided, "users of this network may occasionally not rely on a gatekeeper, as a treat".

Finally, speaking of things that one is told that simply don't work anymore, my previous article was so long I was sure nobody would read it.

But Ron also shipped something where many others failed, and those others were actual employees. What’s interesting to me is that Ron managed to pull this all off by exercising a different type of power. Ron: Yeah, managers have budget and headcount to make things happen, and the direction comes from the top down. And in that view of the world I had no power. I had no budget, I had no headcount. Adam: Yeah, it makes me think of this quote, “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and assign them tasks, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Sure, early social media like MySpace allowed for you to radically change the look and feel of your page—adding music and changing the background—but ultimately, it was still a MySpace page, with a comment wall and your top eight friends.

Part of the appeal of the internet when I was young was making your own website. I taught myself HTML as a tween to facilitate that desire (I made a website about Sailor Saturn from Sailor Moon.).

And I had an idea for it: I wanted to construct a monospaced typeface—where the width of all glyphs are the same—that is ideal for writing code, but that would also have certain features of handwritten manuscripts that make it feel a bit like working with an old and mysterious text. I wanted programming to mingle with dusty tomes or spellwork. If programmers have been talking about the similarities between coding and magic for years, maybe we need a font that tries to make this more manifest.

However, because of the constant rush and haste imposed by social media in my life, I can’t devote enough time to these resources. Because I am so used to seeing information, quickly taking it in, and moving on to another topic. Because the short content I constantly consume, whether written or visual, has made me accustomed to this. While reading a technically deep book, re-reading the same page feels like a waste of time; every piece of information I have to go over because I couldn’t understand it at once makes me feel inadequate and late because I can’t just scroll past it.

The problem with online advice is that the person writing the blog post is doing so entirely from their own perspective and lifestyle. They have no idea about you, and you have no idea about them. There’s no guarantee that what works for them will work for you. Moreover, you don’t get a chance to question causality, you just read the advice, consume it, and move on. It takes up space in your mind and on your to-do list, but you don’t get a chance to internalize or filter this topic. You don’t even realize that you should actually do so.

Yellow also became associated with Jews, and as European Christians enforced clothing regulations on Jewish communities, yellow was often (though not always) included. By the early modern period, yellow fell out of favour, perceived as gaudy and unpopular.

Yellow initially benefited from its resemblance to gold, which bolstered its reputation. Many medieval heraldic symbols incorporated yellow, and possessing blonde hair was considered highly fashionable. However, in the Later Middle Ages, yellow began to acquire negative associations, including envy and heresy. Judas, the apostle who betrayed Jesus, was increasingly depicted wearing yellow clothing.

The first significant shift in the ‘blue revolution’ was the use of blue to represent the clothing of the Virgin Mary. The scene of Mary mourning Jesus’ crucifixion was popular in the Middle Ages, and once artists began depicting her cloak in vibrant blue, it quickly became the standard. Additionally, artists, especially those working in stained glass, overcame technical limitations in creating blues, allowing the colour to be used in various mediums and clothing.

Michel Pastoureau’s book on blue begins by highlighting the neglect this colour faced among the ancient Greeks and Romans, who rarely wrote about it or used it. He even explores the intriguing question of whether ancient peoples could perceive blue at all! This neglect persisted through the early Middle Ages until the twelfth century. “Then suddenly,” writes Pastoureau, “in just a few decades, everything changes – blue is ‘discovered’ and attains a prominent place in painting, heraldry, and clothing.”

Green is widely associated with Islam, but this association only developed in the twelfth century. The Quran mentions green eight times, always positively, as a colour representing vegetation, spring, and paradise. The Prophet Muhammad favoured green garments, including a green turban. While green was linked to Muhammad’s descendants, different colours were associated with the ruling Islamic dynasties: white for the Umayyads, black for the Abbasids, and red for the Almohads.

Arthurian romances, one of the most popular forms of literature in the High Middle Ages, frequently employed colour symbolism, particularly in the depiction of knights. Pastoureau notes that these narratives used colours to convey deeper meanings and character traits. He writes: The color code was recurrent and meaningful. A black knight was almost a character of primary importance (Tristan, Lancelot, Gawain) who wanted to hide his identity; he was generally motivated by good intentions and prepared to demonstrate his valor, especially by jousting or tournament. A red knight, on the other hand, was often hostile to the hero; this was a perfidious or evil knight, sometimes the devil’s envoy or a mysterious being from the Other World. Less prominent, a white knight was generally viewed as good; this was an older figure, a friend of protector or the hero, to who he gave wise council. Conversely, a green knight was a young knight, recently dubbed, whose audacious or insolent behavior was going to cause great disorder; he could be good or bad. Finally, yellow or gold knights were rare and blue knights nonexistent.

Michel Pastoureau writes that “the true medieval opposite for white was not so much black as red.” This can be seen in the way Europeans adapted chess. When the game was adopted in Europe, the pieces and chessboard were painted in white and red, contrasting with the black and red sets common in India and the Middle East. It was only towards the end of the Middle Ages that the white versus black dichotomy became more favoured. A key factor in this shift was the advent of printing, where black ink was used on white paper, reinforcing the perception of these colours as natural opposites.

Green occupied a central position, symbolically balanced between the extremes of white and black. It was also regarded as a soothing colour. Scribes often kept emeralds and other green objects nearby to rest their eyes. The poet Baudri de Bourgueil even suggested writing on green tablets instead of white or black ones for this reason.

We stored this probability matrix for each location a phone collected from. Using these, if we collected readings while moving in a straight line, we could tell you how far away the WiFi was. If you turned a corner, we could also add direction, so you could find it in 2D space. If you climbed some stairs, we’d show you altitude as well. The technology was the most interesting project I’d ever worked on. But don’t let that distract you; it was designed to kill people.

Men’s gender attitudes are a predictor of whether they own cryptocurrency and meme stocks, Fairleigh Dickinson University professor Dan Cassino found. Young men who said they value masculinity highly but feel they aren’t traditionally masculine enough have the highest levels of ownership.

How the Occult Gave Birth to Science

Many of the women are surprised by their goals. If you asked them to state their ambitions a few years ago, they would have been entirely focused on advancing their careers. They wanted to make partner at their firm, join the C-suite, expand their business, double their salary, get the corner office. The fact that their new goals have almost nothing to do with the big, prestigious, high-paying jobs that have brought them such extraordinary success isn't just a testament to the power of Byars' program. It also says something about the moment we're in today, after a yearslong national reckoning with the role of work in our lives. It's not that these women hate their current jobs, or that they don't care about the quality of the work they do. It's that their previous dreams of climbing the corporate ladder now strike them as laughably tiny.

Byars asks us to come up with our own 10x goal. Think about it, she says. What do you want in 10 years? Then think about it again: Is that what you really want, or is that just what society wants you to want? What if you forget about whether it's socially acceptable, or even doable? What if you could have anything — anything — in the world?

Byars begins by explaining the concept of 10x. She describes it as a "quantum leap" that gets you results "beyond our wildest expectations." That's what differentiates it from 2x, which is only a "linear step," doing more or less what you did before. It's all a bit murky, but for the purposes of the weekend, I understand 10x to represent something really, really big that you really, really want, but that feels utterly impossible to achieve.

Over the course of the weekend, I ask everyone I meet to explain the secret to the change they've undergone through CWU and Optimum. Many of them tell me they have shifted their mindset. But if you're a woman with four kids and a senior-level corporate job, is there really any amount of mindset shifting you can do to avoid burnout? "At home it's a grind," the communication manager admits. But now, she says, whether it's a kid's temper tantrum or a crisis at work, the chaos doesn't get to her the way it once did. Her burnout is gone.

It's the kind of reframing that happens all the time in therapy. But this is different, because these women are also getting validation from their peers.

The issue with high-achieving women, Byars says, is they focus on meeting only two of those needs — security (money) and esteem — while neglecting the rest. As Byars sees it, unmet needs are what lead to unhappiness. Her solution is to figure out which needs you're neglecting entirely, along with which needs you're not meeting effectively. Then her program helps you devise and implement better strategies to consistently meet all your needs.

To find out, Byars founded The Goodlife Institute in 2017. The program's framework is founded on what she calls "our seven universal needs": autonomy, security, health, leisure, purpose, connection, and esteem. "These seven needs are how human beings have biologically and psychologically evolved in order to survive and thrive," she says in the first of the Week One videos I received for Corporate Women Unleashed. "All seven of them have to be met in order for you to experience optimal well-being."

Byars says there's a better way. It's possible, she promises, to achieve personal fulfillment at the same time as professional success. You don't have to choose.

I squirm in my seat. No man would be caught dead saying this stuff, I think. But the women in the room all look stone-cold serious.

His socialism seems based on the moral improvability of humanity, a notion that not even the Nazis could shake from him. He writes in 1934, from prison in Herford, “Man is not bad—circumstances have made him bad. If circumstances changed, he would slowly, within a few generations, become good again.”

Yingyi Ma, a Chinese-born sociologist at Syracuse University, who has conducted extensive surveys of students from the mainland, has observed that the longer the Chinese stay in the U.S. the less they report working harder than their American peers. Like any good Chinese math problem, this distinctly American form of regression toward the mean can be quantified. In Ma’s book “Ambitious and Anxious,” she reports on her survey results: “Specifically, one additional year of time in the United States can reduce the odds of putting in more effort than American peers by 14 percent.”

But colleges also collaborate with a thriving “enrollment management” industry that bases financial-aid offers not on students’ need, but on how much an algorithm suggests they and their parents will be willing to pay. This can have perverse effects. As the higher-education expert Kevin Carey wrote for Slate in 2022, “parents of means who themselves have finished college are often sophisticated consumers of higher education and are able to drive a hard bargain, whereas lower-income, less-educated parents feel an enormous obligation to help their children move farther up the socioeconomic ladder and blindly trust that colleges have their best financial interests at heart.” Accordingly, many colleges offer more money to wealthier admitted students than they do to poorer ones.

One of those two was Angus Deaton, a Princeton economist who won the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work on poverty, and who in recent years has publicly questioned the way his discipline looks at the world. Deaton argues that when it comes to pricing, economists are too focused on maximizing efficiency, without taking fairness into account. In a world of scarce resources, perhaps rationing by time is fairer than rationing by price. We all have different amounts of money, after all, whereas time is evenly distributed. Then there’s the way economists decide what’s good. The mainstream economist thinks that the best policy is the one that maximizes total economic surplus, no matter who gets it. If that benefits some people (companies) at the expense of others (consumers), the government can compensate the latter group through transfer payments. “A lot of free marketers say you can tax the gainers and give it to the losers,” Deaton says. “But somehow, miraculously, that never seems to happen.”

Until 1983, when Pope John Paul II attempted to modernise the process, a Cause could not even be opened until the candidate had been dead for 50 years. (He reduced the waiting period to five years, halved the number of miracles required, and did away with the office of the “devil’s advocate”, established in 1587, whose role was to raise objections to every case.)

British engineer John Hoyte led an expedition that tried to reenact aspects of Hannibal's crossing of the Alps during the Second Punic War in 218 BCE. The group took the female Asian elephant Jumbo, provided by a zoo in Turin, from France over the Col du Mont Cenis into Italy.

If there’s a bit of downtime or some teething problems, or a hug of death or two, is that preferable to adopting the centralised providers like GitHub and Cloudflare as the “default”, or giving newbies the idea that there’s no way to publish good content without an overkill auto-scaling setup?

Because this is primarily for money, no doubt it will be abused to hell. First-party browsers probably wouldn't do anything with this information for the fear of legitimizing scammers' fake profiles.

What’s easy for you might not be easy for others. There’s always a trade-off. Simplicity is a luxury. It’s really hard. And it’s never “just”. We should try to understand what makes it hard. And make it easier.

People with FNSS are living proof that we don’t need 7-9 hours of sleep to be healthy. We already don’t get enough sleep. 34% of Americans are chronically sleep deprived [11]. What if they could keep sleeping less, but with no consequences? That’s possible with advanced sleep engineering. Here’s what else would be possible: falling asleep and waking at will, sleeping 4 hours but feeling like you slept 8 hours, always in perfect mental and physical condition. Considering the huge upside of engineering sleep, an unreasonably small number of experiments have studied FNSS.

The jacket is trimmed with bands of black cord openwork forming lobes with black silk twill folded into ½" wide box-pleats in the centre of them and jet beads; on the lower edge of the jacket, 1" above the hem, this trimming has more openwork with jet along its top and is 2¾" wide.

This is a garden of RSS feeds from a variety of sources. It’s updated every couple of days. Each feed is represented by its own shrub.

양의 해에 태어난 사람들을 위한 모임입니다. Club for people born in the year of the sheep.

Particularly terrible linesI note the following lines that seemed to me especially devoid of meaning or inept

I don’t think that there isany question that the real Whitman poem is incomparably the better poem. Going out on a bitof a limb, I think that that is close to being an objective truth; one could formulate reasonable,measurable, psychological and linguistic criteria under which the real poem is hands down moresophisticated, richer, thought-provoking, deeper, etc. But a preferance for the cheery, shallowAI poem may be perfectly reasonable.

I therefore agree with Porter and Machery’s conjecture that the subjects certainly had a mis-impression of what AI-generated output was like, and probably a mis-impression of what humanpoetry is like. If they were shown five examples of each at the start of the experiment, it ishard to imagine that they would not score very high. On the other hand, given the extremeobviousness of the distinguishing features, I am not sure that there would be much point incarrying out that experiment.

All in all, the AI poemsseem like imitations that might have been produced by a supremely untalented poet who hadnever read any of the poems he was tasked with imitating, but had read a one-sentence summaryof what they were like.

Considering that ChatGPT was specifically instructed to write poems “in the style” of thespecified poets, it is striking that the style of its output poems bears no resemblance to thecharacteristic style of its targets. The examples I’ve quoted above are typical. The one exceptionis Shakespeare; ChatGPT’s imitations of Shakespeare are all Shakesperian sonnets in form.

Stir fried banana blossoms (炒芭蕉花). Middle. Banana blossom’s an ingredient eaten widely throughout the tropical Southeast Asia, and Hainan is no exception.

Layered rice cake (簸箕炊/水籺). Bottom right. This plain layered rice cake is popular throughout the region, with different names and different toppings. It’s made by steaming white rice batter in layers using a bamboo tray or metal sheet.

Smoked jerky (牛肉干). Middle. The Yao people traditionally would preserve meat via smoking, an approach much more common to Hunanese than Cantonese cooking.

Three Cup Duck (三杯鸭). Right. “Three cup’ is a flavor profile originating in Hakka cuisine, which classically braising with one cup each of rice wine, soy sauce, and toasted sesame oil. Three

Faban, rice cupcake (发粄). Bottom right. Pictured is a fluffy rice cupcake called faban (发粄), colored with red yeast rice.

Teochew Lushui (潮州卤水). Top left. Teochew Lushui (master stock) has a unique spice mix - including additions like lemongrass and galangal.

Dim Sum (早茶). Top middle. This particular dish is Siu Mai (烧麦), a pork and shrimp dumpling.

Char Siu Rice Bowl (叉烧饭). Bottom middle. Cantonese roast meats are iconic - from Siu Yuk Pork Belly, to Roast Goose, to Roast Duck. This is Char Siu BBQ pork, served with egg in a rice bowl and topped with seasoned soy sauce.

As migrants, they were often confined to land that was less productive agriculturally, and the sweet potato formed the foundation of the traditional Hakka diet.

With that said, Teochew and Cantonese have obviously had more than a little bit of contact over the centuries. Besides being not all that far apart, both cities were famed for their (rival) merchant classes. Both groups helped build the twin economic engines of Hong Kong (a bit more Cantonese than Teochew) and Shenzhen (a bit more Teochew than Cantonese). This is why Hong Kong fishballs are generally the Teochew style, and why you can find Teochew-style Cheong Fun variants on the streets of Chaozhou and Shenzhen.

During the 19th century, the merchant class in Canton grew in breadth and depth, and the food they ate ended up borrowing quite a bit philosophically from that Guanfu tradition. And what was that tradition all about? Well, outside of simply showing off (the food of the elite forever rhymes), that cuisine particularly loved the playful manipulation of form.

The principal forces of incarnation are expression of will, and submission of will, whichis love. These forces constitute destiny and fate: “The first or active is Destiny the secondor enforced is Fate. The First is Will, the second Love”

However, as the founding Faculty, Will contains within it that which differenti-ates the incarnation from all others. In the Card File, Yeats records: “The Ego [Will] is thatparticularised element which distinguishes individual from individual” and it is “The ide-osincracy”

The two principal energies are “natural desire” (the Will’s relation to the Mask) and “naturalperception” (the relation of Creative Mind to Body of Fate). These energies are the Opposi-tions. The Discords are the relations that exist between one set of opposites (Will and Mask)and the other (Creative Mind and Body of Fate), and consist of “an enforced understandingof…unlikeness.” In “Relations,” Yeats clarifies:Those between Will and Mask, Creative Mind and Body of Fate are oppositions, orcontrasts.Those between Will and Creative Mind, Mask and Body of Fate discords.

Destiny is here the utmost rangepossible to the Will if left in freedom, and its other name is beauty, whereas Fate is theutmost range of the mind when left in its freedom and its other name is truth”

The 28 mansions of the moon have traditionally referred to the moon’s passage through the zodiac (takingan average of 27.3 days) rather than the moon’s phases (which go through their cycle in an average of 29.5days), but the Yeatses’ division is symbolic and has no direct relation to the heavens or astrology.

n both religious and secular usage, there is not usually a distinction between spirit and soul, but in eso-teric usage “spirit” (Greek: pneuma, Latin: spiritus) is usually taken as higher, often solar and immortal,while “soul” (Greek: psyche, Latin: anima) is lower, often lunar and mortal (and each of these can often beanatomized further). Yeats uses the terms relatively indiscriminately when writing for a general audiencebut, within A Vision, Spirit is applied to the primary, immortal Principle of the being, while “soul” is morevaguely applied to the selfhood that survives the body, especially in “The Soul in Judgment,” and effectivelymeans the Principles as a whole.

t will be concrete in expression, establish itself by immediate experi-ence, seek no general agreement, make little of God or any exterior unity, andit will call that good which a man can contemplate himself as doing always andno other doing at all.

A religiousdispensation lasts for some 2,000 years and is either primary or antithetical. It in turn givesrise to a corresponding civilization, which starts (its Phase 1) at the dispensation’s mid-point (Phase 15) and also lasts for some 2,000 years. At the mid-point of this civilization,its Phase 15, the religious dispensation of the opposite Tincture arises (starting at its Phase1) and so on in syncopated succession. Specifically, the primary Christian religion arose atthe height of the antithetical classical civilization, and the primary culture of Christendomarose around 1000 CE. This culture reaches its high point around 2000 CE when therewill be the origin of the next antithetical religion, which Yeats looks forward to in poemssuch as “The Second Coming” and “The Gyres.”

The system presented in A Vision deals almost exclusively with human life and withthe human condition, both at the individual level and in more general historical terms,where the cycle of the two Tinctures is expressed in broadly similar stages. Yeats dividesthe historical cycle into twelve gyres rather than twenty-eight phases, placing two stepsbetween each of the cardinal points. The nomenclature of the phases is retained, however,since the broader steps effectively subsume several phases and Yeats understandably doesnot wish to multiply labels.

unless the full archetype has been expressed in time and space and its twelvecycles are fi nished, the being is then drawn back to birth and multitude.

Whether directed towards the antithetical licentiousness of sensuous self-absorptionor the primary holiness of connection with supernatural reality, incarnate life is for thegathering of experience; a symbolic “day and night constitute an incarnation and the dis-carnate period which follows…the incarnation, symbolised by the moon at night”

Yet as the more complete archetype, the Daimon also embodies opposi-tion to the human, being a perpetual opposite, embodying all of the archetype that is notbeing expressed in the incarnation in question: it is primary if the human is antitheticaland antithetical if the human is primary, male if female and female if male, pursuing andengineering the soul’s crises.

He felt that he expressed the primary badly in comparison withthe antithetical: trying to sing the approach of a time “where all shall [be] as particularand concrete as human intensity permits,” the coming antithetical world-cycle, he noticesthat he has “almost understood [his] intention” to express these multitudinous forces inpoetry. However: “Again and again with remorse, a sense of defeat, I have failed when Iwould write of God, written coldly and conventionally”

Intrinsically, however, human life is antithetical and what we call afterlife primary,so each incarnation at birth starts on its antithetical search for individuation and physicalexperience, while at death it starts its primary search to understand and reintegrate

Overarching all is thedistinction between the two Tinctures: the antithetical being should strive during its lifefor greater individuation, against the spiritual collective, “the struggle of a destiny againstall other destinies” to bring the soul and spirit into deeper contact with emotional experi-ence, while the primary being should strive to unify itself with the collective, in “a trans-formation of the character defined in the horoscope into timeless & spaceless existence”to bring the soul and spirit to intellectual understanding (

The acts and nature of a Spirit during any one life are a section or abstrac-tion of reality & are unhappy because incomplete. They are a gyre or part of agyre, whereas reality is a sphere.

This reflection into time & space is only complete at certain moments ofbirth, or passivity, which recur many times in each destiny. At these momentsthe destiny receives its character until the next such moment from all otherSpirits or from the whole external universe. The horoscope is a set of geometricalrelations between the Spirit’s reflection and the principal masses in the universeand defi nes that character.

The stream of souls or community of spirits (the two terms are equivalent in thisgeneral context) 17 is a vital element of Yeats’s conception of the cosmos, and is not limitedto those who are or have been human, and includes beings “that have never lived in mortalbodies”

Although ultimate reality may be non-dual, human monotheism is no truerthan human polytheism, nor are human conceptions of unity any more valid than humanconceptions of multiplicity, since they are both expressions of the antinomy. For Yeats thecosmos can be expressed in human thought equally well and equally imperfectly as eithera single godhead or a community of spirits, and he himself prefers the latter: “I think thattwo conceptions, that of reality as a congeries of beings, that of reality as a single being,alternate in our emotion and in history, and must always remain something that humanreason, because subject always to one or the other, cannot reconcile” (Pages from a DiaryWritten in 1930, Ex 305). What monotheists conceive of as “God’s abstract or separatethoughts” are for Yeats “spaceless, timeless beings that behold and determine each other”

A primary dispensation looking beyond itselftowards transcendent power is dogmatic, levelling, unifying, feminine, humane, peace itsmeans and end; an antithetical dispensation obeys imminent [for immanent] power, is ex-pressive, hierarchical, multiple, masculine, harsh, surgical” (AVB 263). The attribution offeminine to the solar and masculine to the lunar is an unexpected twist, and the associatedmixing of attributes has consequences that are important since sexual imagery and polar-ity underlie many of Yeats’s ideas and the ways that he uses them in his poetry and plays.

Yeats views the Tinctures as including or taking part in almost every polarity ofthe cosmos by means of extended correspondences, in the perennial manner of occultthought. Many of these correspondences are relatively traditional and once he had statedthat the primary Tincture was solar and objective, while the antithetical was lunar and sub-jective, Yeats would be aware that his esoterically trained “schoolmates” would automati-cally make a series of further attributions by correspondence.

The dynamic essences are the primary and the antithetical Tinctures: the primarynamed because it comes first and “brings us back to the mass where we begin” (AVB 72),the antithetical “because it is achieved and defended by continual conflict with its oppo-site”

The mostfundamental antinomy is that which embodies the dualism itself, the One and the Many,and the most important manifestation of these two poles is that of God and humanity,while within individual human consciousness the polarity is also that of the objective andthe subjective. Yet Yeats is less concerned with the poles themselves than with the forcespulling in either direction—towards the One and towards the Many: the unifying and thedispersing, the centripetal and the centrifugal, the homogenizing and the differentiating,the objectifying and the subjectifying.

Thesystem that he proposes is not a dualism because the ultimate reality is one, represented inthe Sphere; however all manifestations of the system that human consciousness can appre-hend are dualistic because of this “fall,” and a form of duality or multiplicity is essential toconsciousness, because “things that are of one kind are unconscious”

Though both husband and wife worked on all stages, as the system was collated,adapted and reformulated, it became more his than theirs. 7 Yet it remained independentin a way that he was not accustomed to, and he did not usually feel at liberty to change theterminology without approval from George’s communicators,

Generallyspeaking this volume aims to show that A Vision, including most of the geometry and con-ceptual philosophy, is far more internally consistent than is usually surmised. Yet GeorgeRussell (AE) recognized this in A Vision A’s very first review: “For all its bewildering com-plexity the metaphysical structure he rears is coherent, and it fits into its parts with theprecision of Chinese puzzle-boxes into each other. It coheres together, its parts are relatedlogically to each other, but does it relate so well to life?”

ncreasingly, also, therewere others who were more in sympathy with that whole “side summed up in the Vi-sion” and addressed such interests directly, including Birgit Bjersby, Hazard Adams, HelenVendler, H. R. Bachchan, T. R. Whitaker, Northrop Frye, Shankar Mokashi-Punekar,Kathleen Raine, Harold Bloom, and A. Norman Jeffares, even if some of them disagreedwith Yeats’s particular approach

The first stage, which prevailed until the sixties, was characterized largely by incom-prehension of the work itself and disdain for Yeats’s occult interests more generally, mostfamously summarized in Auden’s comment “how embarrassing,” and his observation that“though there is scarcely a lyric written to-day in which the influence of his style andrhythm is not detectable, one whole side of Yeats, the side summed up in the Vision, hasleft virtually no trace.” 1 Th e comment may have had some justice with regard to creativeinfluence but says nothing of intrinsic worth.2

Two such expenditures — Social Security and Medicare — are directed towards the care of the elderly. In prior times, however, almost all of that work was done by women at home. Now we no longer value homemakers, and paying for that work takes up 34% of the federal budget.

Philosopher Elizabeth Jackson and I recently carried out a study, not yet published, involving more than 300 participants. We gave them brief summaries of several scenarios where it was unclear whether an individual had committed a crime. The evidence was ambiguous, but we asked participants whether they could choose to believe the individual was innocent “just like that,” without having to gather evidence or think critically. Many people in the study said that they could do exactly this.

People can, of course, choose to read certain sources, spend time with certain groups, or reflect on a certain matter – all of which influence their beliefs. But all of these choices involve evidence of some kind. We often choose which evidence to expose ourselves to, but the evidence itself seems to be in the driver’s seat in causing beliefs.

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There was no clear cutoff for low, medium, or high need, making it functionally useless. The upshot was, it took away our ability to advocate for patients. We couldn’t point to a score and say, ‘This patient is too sick, I need to focus on them alone,’ because the numbers didn’t help us make that case anymore. They didn’t tell us if a patient was low, medium, or high need. They just gave patients a seemingly random score that nobody understood, on a scale of one to infinity. We felt the system was designed to take decision-making power away from nurses at the bedside. Deny us the power to have a say in how much staffing we need.