motohagiography

i ran down the rabbit hole on this, it's surprisingly nuanced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50360821

A visual essay about luxury, tech, and AI perceptions of taste.

minimalism, privacy, security, these are all mostly a pursuit of luxury.

ive spent a lot of time on that topic, and tech always comes up just short of producing a truly distinguishing luxury good.

the ones that succeeded became the macbook and iphone, blackberry, early facebook when it was only open to ivy schools, blue check twitter, tidal, early slack, Signal, and some others.

the looming question is, what is luxury? the answer as a positive definition is a kind of alchemical mystery. its failure mode is vulgarity, its imitations are cheap, economics only criticizes it, and its very context specific.

my working model is a triad of desirable, thoughtfulness, and belonging, where you can describe a luxury product on these axis and predict whether it will succeed.

for minimalism, notable challenges are things like the ReMarkable tablets that are high desire and thoughtfulness but lack the integration for belonging.

post-systemd Linux has low belonging vs the bsd communities, and is kind of mid in nerd desire and has too much slop attached to be thoughtful.

when you take an obvious luxury product like the proverbial LP pullover or a Ferrari, they imbue a belonging, where an entry level watch or a lamborghini do not. "class" was always a dumb framework bc its critical instead of constructive.

digital minimalist luxury hasn't really been invented yet in spite of some really good attempts. id argue because they lack something in this triad.

He played one of the most exemplary men of the last century, and brought life to an ideal of what humanity could aspire to be. The fiction was a vehicle, and through it he represented our best.

I didn't know anything about him other than his work, which is perhaps as fine an epitaph as any man could have.

my argument is that ideology is not a substrate, its is a construct, and an entraining or zombifying one.

the basic problem is that rooting consciousness in language is inferiorizing, and then iterating this yields the narrow cone of "everything is ideological" which conflates it with perspective, experience, and the rest of the whole shebang.

it becomes relevant with AI and machine alignment because as they are not conscious, this prison (to us) of language is (for now) their substrate, and interestingly a lot of our garbage ideas about how to entrain humans with narratives may become tools for managing these super powerful language machines.

however, it requires that as humans, we "pop" up a level in our own ideas of consciousness if we are going to learn to manage these new mechanisms.

these days i ask people, if you were an agent, what would you do next? the analogy is worth reflecting on because we didn't have this meta understanding of unconscious but autonomous agents until recently. indont think we have found a new kind of consciousness, but we have found something that forces us to reflect on our own. it begins with recognizing that ideology was not a substrate.

i tune out when i see criticisms of opposing ideology because the very concept itself requires one.

when you have an ideology, everything becomes an ideology, and this serves only to reinforce its own cycle of criticism. thinking in terms of ideologies is just a materialistic mind virus.

the essential ingredient of news or a story is conflict, and "ideology" just synthesizes and manufactures conflict to hang the facts and events of the day on. This false, solipsistic foundation is why the news is garbage.

im glad we have fun podcasts as a kind of replacement social fabric because they are based on sincere interest and desire, whereas the news was a system of braying, histrionic criticism in a permanent power struggle.

the old news establishment were impostors, and a kakistocracy of compromised pretenders. I say good riddance to them.

what was always remarkable about surveillance is that given these immense intrusive powers and a total panopticon, this is still the best they can do.

fentanyl epidemic, mass illegal migration and trafficking, networks of terrible abuse, flagrant public corruption, infiltration of schools and academia, conspiracies to demolish the entire western world, and yet even with total information awareness or some variant, these crimes occur in the open.

the scandal isnt that they are spying, its what they have explicitly chooseb to allow and enable.

The economics need to be rethought. What even is capital anymore? A ledger entry, compute, a license, IP? We are getting returns on what, setting the initial conditions?

All that’s left is offence surveillance logistics and insurance for a breakaway civilization.

"idea guy" was one of the great misleading tropes of the last century.

not only do you need a community for a product, they need to like you too. i did a "hey i solved a lot of your job!" product once and it was received as well as it sounds.

do you have the respect or affection of others? of not, they wont want your thing no matter what it does. do you like them too? or is it something you think someone else should do?

the hardest part of make something someone wants is the someone part, and we have still made almost zero progress on solving that.

i often observe, "the constraint is the technique."

there isn't much to add to it other than the slight refinement that constraints yield technique. it's similar to relating to rules as tools and not merely limits or constraints. it's an orientation.

there's a really amazing program for Canadians who have skills or startups, its to exit the country before they become encumbered by assets and any fruits of success that would have to be liquidated and double-taxed if they leave. probably the most successful capital flight/rescue op in history. its named something mathy, combinatoric? combinator?

This govts to attitude to the dignity of its citizens is demoralizing. I have more hope in the outcome of a US annexation than I do for any significant positive policy direction. it’s done. Bureaucracy has triumphed and there’s nothing to save.

The whole business of being a producer is to make a product with a moat. The grid and all the current fluff is to signal “production” as a kind of powerful social proof to sell higher margin product.

Auto tune is just a signal that you are a player in the music business the way a distortion pedal used to signal transgressive taste, even though punk was indistinguishable from The Monkees, just performed by hiring cheap drug addicts who couldn’t read contracts.

Do pop musicians have talent, sure, but being a musician and being a recording artist are rarely the same thing.

Writing well is ultimately a seduction, and that opinion is still an example of a form. It’s generally true, and it’s flattering to think about, but it’s also a pretty standard grey tribe trope. A kind of joke that appeals to a fairly broad audience.

I do think it’s an early example of emerging super persuasion, where models are approaching p85 cool guy personas, but not worried yet. Maybe that’s the fatal conceit, where AI doesn’t have to be super intelligent, it just needs to be a solid 110 with automated search at scale.

Why do engineering when if you can do sales you can do literally anything.

Maybe every abstraction is a finite state machine, and we can construct an analog circuit of any of them. I have an opinion about metrics where they are not the data, but the emergent analog signal from a system.

The idea of collecting data and deriving metrics from it is absurd when you look at your system as a thing that has inputs and an output and the line for the output goes up or down over time. The beauty of these industrial systems is that the makers understood this principle. The system produces a signal that bears meaning that these interfaces express.

It would have been useful to use the internet from 1995-2015 as a reference model for economic impact, and then ask how the trajectory of AI will resemble it.

Regardless of what people think of blockchains, it's the necessary foundation for any agent governance. If not this protocol, then something in this direction.

The analogy I would use is the only thing reliably containing humanity is interstellar distances, and the equivalent for ASI would be cryptographic distances, where the only way to relate to anything safely will be via a crypto interface. Compute is the physics of an ASI's substrate, and cryptography is the only meaningful barrier we've been able to create in it so far.

Before yielding to concern about CIA influence in modern art, consider what they would have been up against. Situationism and the post-surrealist projects were wildly successful tactics to demoralize western culture and separate it from a sense of purpose and identity. Do you think Punk was entirely organic, or did it get nudges and windfalls from interested parties?

I was involved in the industrial/alternative club scenes in the 90's and the degrees of separation of those bands from what we would call obvious influence operations today are few. If someone were to design a cost effective machine for cultivating troubled loners into a recruitment pipeline for a sabotage and activism capacity, a few thousand dollars here and there to promote and exalt some drug addicts making angry subversive noise would be the way to do it. Night life and its various vices and perversions was such a fantastically successful anti-capitalist operation that if you ask a modern CIA agent what flag sits on their boss' desk today, they will tell you there is more than one.

In the words of John Lydon, "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?"

Orwell's work was peak english literary culture, and what they call criticim and theory are really just a way to dissolve meaning and kill culture by preventing it from persisting as coherent meaning in time. It's an unmooring and uprooting, and it does not produce anything anyone actually desires other than a set of shibboleths for a conspiracy to destroy a culture and rule over its ashes.

There is no political-right, it is an artifact of whatever these people are criticizing to destroy and rule over the ashes of, it means nothing. Specifically, it uses ideology to assign or project an othering counter-ideology on its enemies to manage them with further criticism. It's mesmerist gibberish all the way down.

That we need words at all to describe it is a fairly modern invention, because historically it was just evil trying to dissolve your society and enslave it, everyone saw it, and you just smote it for what it was.

In their own words, suffocate it from the oxygen of attention it needs to survive.

a back squat form checker would be a product in itself. dressage is probably too niche, but an interesting control or test case. yoga would be a large market.

This thread was so long I vibecoded a clustering similarity graph of it to navigate with voronoi territories, should be available for the next little bit.

https://bejewelled-meerkat-91d099.netlify.app/

I think i know where you're going with it, but what is the Why for the semantic properties? Is it to characterize a given address, predict behavior?

there is foresight in this, as there's going to be a cryptographic layer between agents and people at some point, compute complexity is the only thing that can contain them. like a logical field or space that was conceptually equivalent to keeping them light years of distance away. The analogy scales as well.

this is interesting for sports i'm involved in. does it sort images by various symmetries? being able to "green line" (don't search that) an image to show where the expected vs. realized symmetry should be would be very useful for athletes.

the impact of this would be significant. You should check out Issey Miyake's "A Piece of Cloth" (Issey Miyake: A-POC and 132 5) collection, which was clothing based on a single piece of fabric. It's old, like 1999 era, but the concept has come up a few times since.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/100361 is a start, but there are other examples. Rei Kawakubo also did a collection called Square based on a similar concept. Yoji Yamamoto did a couple as well, there were a few moments in Japanese fashion that would work extremely well with a full garment knitter.

These pictures are the top level concepts, but the rest of the collections if you can still find them have more examples.

The discussion is not about whether it's a good or bad idea, but whether we will yield the power to these people to ratchet in further oppressive laws onto formerly free countries.

Tech companies should ignore it and just publicly name whoever attempts to prosecute them and see how the population responds. I think people today are orders of magnitude more informed about their privacy and the consequences of digital ID laws. A few countries are on the edge of revolt at the moment anyway, and this would be a good way to get young people into the streets.

20 years ago, people would have had no defense against it or understanding of what was being imposed on them. Today, normal people use Signal and encrypted messengers, faraday bags, and leave their phones at home. Where we were nerdy security guys back then, non-technologist women and girls use spy tradecraft level electronic opsec for their own safety and security from middle school. People are much more sophisticated about their privacy now. They're ready to take this on.

The laws coming into force are on people who are not in favour of them, and I'm so optimistic that I will not interrupt the enemies of privacy and human dignity while they are making a mistake.

that's a philosophical view. We don't want a single grid, we want power in places we need it. Building for a single grid has a bunch of expensive opinions that serve mainly to provide a control layer instead of serving the basic economic need.

A micro reactor can practically fund itself on model training, data processing, and cryptocurrencies, and where it can't there is actual usage.

new micro reactor tech makes this much more appealing. We probably don't need Darlington scale plants, we just need a capacity to add new ones. Diversifying the ownership and management of them would also improve the economic benefits. We would need a leverage cap on securitization of energy as debt collateral. Something akin to banking leverage limits of 10-20x for them to be operated responsibly.

We should have more nuclear, but they should be run for profit to hold them to account instead of massively indebting them to create public sector crony slush funds the way the current hydroelectric system has been run into the ground.

my error, i actually thought it was an omnibus. it doesn't change my view, but toward the specific encryption concern, indeed, less relevant. thank you.

the odd thing about it to me is that other than passports, all regular identity documents in Canada are issued by the provinces under specific mandates and regulations, which means that the provinces could choose not to endorse the usage of their IDs for age verification to foreign providers.

Other than passports, the government of canada does not have an identity card to base any kind of sweeping electronic age verification regime on. Sure there are some tech players looking to bring products to market that leverage banks and payment networks, but I suspect even they haven't figured out who owns the assertion of the persons attributes.

Maybe they've done the regs legwork and some scumbag backdoor account policy changes in the banks, but the PHIPA legislation that governs PII collection, use, and disclosure in the provinces would need to align with it.

I wouldn't be surprised if there were challenges to the law based on a lack of federal mandate for provincial identity repositories, no accountability or ownership for the accuracy of the age assertion, WTO and trade agreement challenges against subsidized providers, to speculate about a few.

The spirit of the law is contemptible, and is being pushed through by a farcically illegitimate, corrupt, and demonstrably foreign influenced majority that has made a mockery of our processes, and is expressly against the interests of Canadians.

The good news is that if you are a 13yr old who can jailbreak a foundation model, we are in a new golden age of hacking. The cryptography behind any of these systems of oppression won't last a month.