bobson381

In TFA which includes a foreword by Anthropic - just under "On investor expectations"

>Scientists write for other scientists who already know why they use the language they use. Compromising that language to try to cater to fools who couldn't care less about the truth would just make the scientist a greater fool for trying.

This is a better version of the point I was trying to make, thanks. The framing / who is the audience makes the biggest difference. Had fun watching Digger.

And because of this, many will starve as a result of oil shocks from the disruption and chaos in the gulf region. We solved the trolley problem by throwing a magic lever that puts five descendants of the original person a ways down the tracks.

This technically useful skepticism can be weaponized against you by a rhetorical opponent by just pointing out that you "refuse to say for certain". All you have to do is say "some scientists believe there is some uncertainty" and you can convince a crowd to stop listening. Scientific communication works very poorly as mass communication.

Oil has produced the political system, as well as the complexity it sits atop. [0] [1]

[0]https://www.apocalypse-confidential.com/the-autonomous-chemi...

[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCSsKV5F4xc

How would you go about this given that it's the current WorldOS?

Yep. Here's a fun follow-up, and where I got that idea.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8

It's the same process that has been running - creation of complexity as a dissipative structure - but now with even less friction. Some say we'll transcend, I think we're spiraling into the language-navel of cartesian dualist logical positivist insanity.

As far as I can tell he was fairly ecumenical being UU - his spirituality is probably close-ish to Alan Watts or Joanna Macy.

Time for some Michael Dowd [0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/@thegreatstory

This is a techne/metis split. You would probably like this [0] chapter about the "rightness" struggle between engineering and service at Xerox. Some paralells to A Big Little Idea called Legibility from Ribbonfarm, too.

[0] https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everyth...

How about Adam McKay, then?

I tuned out when it switched, also. How to move on when job is in front of screen?

Thanks for posting this. Very GEB

If you're watching through VLC, you can set the mix to stereo in the audio settings - perhaps there's a similar setting you can find? Not sure if you've got the tv's optical going straight into an amp. Some stereo receivers also have a "night mode" that can do this, you might find an older cheaper one with pre-outs or similar.

Feels like the way a video game will render the outside of a wall or solid surface, but you can run into it and warp partly through and there's nothing internal to it at all.

To add on - complexity itself is a perceptual feature introduced by language - we treat and describe things as though they are made of an unimaginable number of tiny parts. So this also increases the fun of the wordy wine/coffee/whisky descriptions!

Not certain if this has been posted here before. I found it a fascinating thing to read as context. The author also has some interesting theories about universe evolution over time.

it's that it's 1 Trillion less in incentivized middlemen. A la Graeber.

the linking thread for all three is self-reference, either in the form of a fugue or in a painting showing its own creation. Doug is a loop guy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth is why. The financial economy sits on a finite store of physical goods, and as a dissipative structure, our high-energy, high-complexity global society acts as a low-friction conduit from stored past energy to high-entropy degraded heat.

Number go up until we cannibalize the foundations.

GHG would keep leaking out of the permafrost. Warming goes up even if we stop all emissions tomorrow.

okay wow. I have seen a lot of quieter bands on those, absolutely insane that they captured this. Funny blend of genre and space.

Right. This would make it possible and reasonable if you could find a house that is enough, such that you can live in it, expect a reasonably good experience in it for the life of your time in it, and that that mortgage payment, plus all maintenance, insurance, tax, etc. is reasonably comparable to an equivalent rental. Depending on where you are, this is not always the case. Or you need to buy a small place at current rates and prices to make it at all comparable.

You have to decide what "enough" is, and that's variable depending on your expected standard of living, etc. I am personally currently lucky enough to be in a good rental situation, which colors my view.

Having a landlord that will fix problems and eat incidental appliance/roof/major expenses is a form of insurance paid as rental.

Agree here. But I'm a doomer/collapsenik - so, the same future coming for "retirement" is the same future coming for "house always appreciates in value". Maybe 1990 -> 2020 was an okay 30 year period, 2026 -> 2056 sure won't be.

30 year mortgage is founded partly on the idea that your house will be worth more in the future when you sell it. That you can lock in a lower price now.

Number cannot always go up. We are at the top of the carbon pulse. Financialization has taken us far from the material baseline of the rock we are flying through space on. Debt will only get us so far.

For this and many other reasons, why would you believe a house "as an investment" is a reasonable thing to keep hoping for, especially 30 years from now? If you have even a reasonably stable rental, it's less risk exposure if you can save some money that isn't tied up in a down payment.

I Eat the Stars was pretty good. Nice take on grasping the absurdity of the coming metabolic failure of the complex systems we live inside of. Everything dies, even big patterns like industrial society.

A guy on the sysadmin subreddit managed to 8x the global GDP https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/1uz2fv2/aws_says_...

Sounds good, thanks for your response. I didn't mean to denigrate your word choice at all, it's mostly that I'm hypersensitive to that kind of phrasing now because there's so much auto-written stuff on e.g. Substack, LinkedIn, etc. Sam Kriss has a nice article about it all.

Language is already a lossy map, but it is not really an expression of another person's thought or mind if they translate it through an LLM. Or at least it's a much harder to decipher representation of it. Form is void, void is form, and the two are not separate.