undershirt

Hi Daniel, you didn’t waste my time publishing this stream of consciousness. You’re tackling something that can’t be broken down easily, and part of your prose painted enough of the mystery for me to believe that it had some shape, and it made me check out your books. Thanks for publishing. Would love to chat.

I don’t understand all of this essay, but something about his awareness of cybernetics makes me want to keep reading it until it makes sense.

> We think of computers interacting with people as something created by programmers… That's not true, though… folks creating UX receive vastly more stimulus from machines than they ever would create for others.

> Programming languages, IDEs, and dev environments affect the people swimming in them far more than those people change the world for others

Yeah, and I think this is obvious, but it certainly depends on the origin of the data being checked. We can prove the structure of “allowed” data ahead of time if we want guarantees on what’s possible inside our program. We also want a facility to check data encountered by the running program (i.e. from the user or another program.) which of course we can’t know ahead of time.

It is a design decision to be able to build a clojure system interactively while it is running, so a runtime type checker is a way for the developer to give up the safety of type constraints for this purpose—by using the same facility we already need in the real world, a way to check the structure of data we can’t anticipate.

Yeah, blue doesn’t seem to appear in the New Testament (Greek), but it’s in the Old (Hebrew) as “Tekhelet”[1] which can apply across different blue hues, from turquoise to violet.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekhelet

It converts an NES rom to an SNES rom. Here are the instructions from the source[1]:

    Step 1, click "Open Nes" and select a game.
    Step 2, (optional) select or create a profile.
    Step 3, click "Save Snes", a file will be created in the same folder as your Nes game.
    Step 4, play on Snes hardware or Snes emulator.
    Step 5, (Optional) click "Load SRM" and select the SRM file(s) generated by the Nes emulator,
     feedback will be saved to the profile so the game can run faster after repeating steps 1-4.

[1]:https://github.com/Myself086/Project-Nested/blob/fc108119/Pr...

CollapseOS is trying to meet that promise too. It’s interesting because it does unwittingly follow Wirth’s thinking. Collapse would be a consequence of allowing ourselves to not to understand our systems.

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> There is no science without reason; there is reason without science.

I heard this stated as “you can’t validate the scientific method using the scientific method.”

I missed the golden age of lisp, but i know this project for its legendary structural editor, SEdit[1], released the year I was born. i found it mentioned in an old paredit readme, something poignant like “paredit is only a shadow of what interlisp was: true structural editing”.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qsmF8HHskg

It’s clearer in 2D. Rotating by angle `a` tilts the x-axis to (cos(a), sin(a)), because that’s the very definition of cosine and sine (i.e. the x and y components of angles on the unit circle). The y-axis just flips the components and negates one, because that’s what 90° rotations do.

Harry Melling forever sealed the way that I read it.

thanks for that. what would you point us to if we were interested in learning political science? (e.g. books, courses, communities, podcasts, blogs, channels?)

I hope this better mapping is used for this:

> Seabed 2030 supports the UN's Sustainable Development Goal 14: 'to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development.'[1]

and not for this:

> A new report by the Deep Sea Mining Campaign and MiningWatch Canada examines the potential risks of seabed mining operations… 16 international mining companies have contracts to explore the seabed for minerals within the Clarion Clipperton Zone (CCZ) in the Eastern Pacific Ocean, and other companies have contracts to explore for nodules in the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific Ocean.

[1] https://seabed2030.gebco.net/faq/#q1

[2] https://news.mongabay.com/2020/06/deep-sea-mining-an-environ...

I like your choice of phrasing on “impression”. I think it captures what is meant by embodiment, that the knowledge is in the body, so you can get at it by imitating the whole of a person.

my comment was way off the mark, didn’t realized it sounded sarcastic. i was instead trying to appreciate his approach to the intangible—pointing to direct experience to avoid stockholm criticism.

> Forth doesn't elegantly describe complex algorithms… However, this mental pain does makes you question your need for complexity… This is something that I think few developers are familiar with and is hard to describe with words. It needs to be experienced.

Nice framing, that it’s not an intellectual argument you can make to justify the benefits of drawbacks (i.e. an infamous red flag of stockholm syndrome), so you have to point to the experience of the thing itself (“you had to be there”).

Seeing this—every map projection approximated as idealized orange peels—did something to me when I saw it in 2008. I can’t quite remember the feeling, but it was similar to how I felt after watching Inventing on Principle—the authors as toiling metaphysicists, returning from the mountain with gifts for physicists.

I think another author was similarly affected, creating a nice web version on its 10th anniversary:

https://medium.com/vis-gl/unfolding-the-earth-myriahedral-pr...

i agree, and thanks for your charitable reading (re-reading what i said, i actually hate the way i said it).

> love is entirely rooted in lower cognitive states

you likely already know this, but emergence adds a famous corollary to what “rooted in” means:

> Downward causation can be defined as a converse of the reductionist principle: the behavior of the parts (down) is determined by the behavior of the whole (up), so determination moves downward instead of upward. The difference is that determination is not complete.

It gets into an example that makes this sound less mystical. But applying that here, “love love” abstractly might be the higher signal abstraction for understanding “lower cognitive states”, because the lower stuff emerges higher stuff that constrains its behavior using higher complexity rules.

[1]: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DOWNCAUS.html

> I don’t believe they actually miss the tourists themselves. Tourists are merely delivery vehicles for food.

I’ve recently taken to the idea that intellectual stances and embodied experiences are not derivable from one another. Each toolkit is separate, and weird things happen when you try to extend one into the other.

For example, I felt it emotively when reading your comment, that the intellect is extraordinarily good at reducing everything into nothing, because it is a core presupposition that we must view things mechanically, to have mechanical proficiency.

Similarly, to have emotional proficiency, we must make our emotional presuppositions. This is not the obsolete definition of “myth” as stories we make up to make us feel good, because that’s again a framing of a reductionist intellect.

What I’m trying to limn is not anti-intellectualism, but that there is no common framework to contain both of these separate modalities. Don’t let the stomach cannibalize the liver, we need both.

My favorite approach[1] to the mind–body problem is a recent one, placing the interaction between the mind and body at actual primacy. Neither the perceived nor the perceiver can exist without the process of perceiving. However absurd, the things related can be seen as derivative of the relationship itself.

Resonates with zen, as famously espoused by Alan Watts[2]: “How does the thing put a process into action. Obviously it can’t. But we always insist that there is this subject called the knower. And without a knower there can’t be knowing. Well that’s just a grammatical rule, it isn’t the rule of nature. In nature there’s just knowing.” Also said[3]: “The grammatical illusion is that all verbs have to have subjects.”

[1]: https://www.magic-flight.com/pub/uvsm_1/imc_01.htm

[2]: https://www.alanwatts.org/1-1-2-not-what-should-be-pt-2

[3]: https://www.alanwatts.org/1-1-11-limits-of-language-pt-1/

Is solar just a stopgap tech? Like, do they still require fossil fuel energy to create, not to mention maintain and rebuild? And I know we’re now strip mining the ocean for battery metals. I don’t yet sense the sustainability in this amid all this economic hand-waving of “it’s getting cheaper”. (forgive my tone, i have a hard time of making sense of the big picture of renewables, hoping to eventually see how it actually fits into a utopic idea of a “closed-loop economy”)

I’m reminded here a bit of Ted Chiang’s short story, Exhalation, where the people devise clever ways to try to put air back in the ground without using more than they’re sequestering. I hope our situation is better than that.

i feel this, and i think i finally understand why people like vinyl static.

chesterton’s fence is great. I’ve recently appreciated the synthesis of the conservative and progressive impulses—to respect what has come before as it encodes unseen wisdom, but to recognize that there are fundamentally new things happening that we must account for.

that’s profound. we should have drinks.

your comment resonates with the thesis that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism—that our inability to imagine and provision for the future, is the death of our imagination, of our transcendence, and the world.

I like your take on it, that love has to point in every direction of time, timeless.

“the future according to the past” as my writing teacher called it quite pithily

looking forward to it! great work so far, congrats on publishing

I don’t really understand your descriptions. Maybe you can ground it for people better by comparing visuals produced by normal FFT and your novel method.

I might go further by letting people hear the difference between them (by transposing the visuals back into audio, to ground our sense of quality loss in the original medium, sound).

A question comes to mind: What would be preserved if converting the visuals back into audio?

This may help answer another question: What type of visual would allow feeling the music without hearing?

I got stuck on causality invariance—not getting the orange edges on the graph. It seemed like the root should’ve been connected to every node, so I’m clearly missing something.