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from 2023 Year End Review/Part 2

    • July

    • Got my own copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a real mindblower of a book. Odd that I hadn't encountered it earlier. Rather than absorb it properly I am developing my own cringe theory of Zengineering, but that's how my mind goes.
    • For some reason dug up some old flames of mine on a rightwing anti-evolution blog Telic Thoughts. Note this is exactly what I want to say about Determined, maybe I don't have to read and review it after all.
    • Finished The Passenger/Stella Maris, that was something
    • An actual vacation for a few days at a ranch in rural Marin.

    • August

    • That's why the concept of "alignment" sounds so weaksauce to me. It's like the protagonist of a Lovecraft story encountering Yog-Sothoth and saying "hm, how can I work with this guy?"

    • September

    • Start of massive John Zorn residency. Took over my life for five days.
    • Reading God, Human, Animal, Machine in between sets.
    • John Zorn's recommended book list I got 6 Zornpoints, 7 if you count other Crowley writings.
      • That is, 6 books on his list that I've already discovered and read on my own. This comes from a game we used to play at Fenway House called "Whole Earth Points".

    • October

    • The Hamas attack on Israel happened, and the aftermath (still ongoing). I started trying to formulate a response Collected thoughts about Israel/Gaza. Trying to go meta, since that is the only conceivable way I might be able to say anything useful interesting or new about this terrible situation.
    • A friend is sending me bits from Krishnamurti: "You must begin to question the very foundation of authority"
      • For a man who is living fully, completely, for a man who is truly cultured, beliefs are unnecessary. He is creative. He is truly creative, and that creativeness is not the outcome of a reaction to a belief. The truly cultured man is intelligent. In him there is no separation between his thought and his emotion, and therefore his actions are complete, harmonious. True culture is not nationalistic nor is it of any group. When you understand this, there will be the true spirit of brotherhood; you will no longer think in terms of Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, in terms of Hinduism or Theosophy. But you are so conscious of your possessions and your struggle for further acquisition that you cause distinctions, and from this there arise the exploiter and the exploited.
    • Nura AI course is ongoing, a got into a dialog JFM theory of the imaginal
      • Meaning occurs in the interplay between these two aspects of reality: what is the case and what may be the case. This is obviously true for an individual person. I'm arguing that it is also true of nature as a whole.
    • Marc Andreesson wrote a particularly stupid manifesto for tech, I sent this to the WS AI course forum. A good rule of thumb: don't trust manifestos from people who are already very powerful.
      • I've ben battling this sort of stale Ayn Rand bullshit in tech for decades. I usually feel like I'm losing, but this piece is getting mocked all over the place (eg https://wheresyoured.at/p/everything-looks-like-a-nail)) . It's so obviously self-serving and short-sighted that nobody seems to be taking it very seriously.
      • This is a very minor point, but I was particularly pissed off by his enlistment of Doug Engelbart in his cause. Engelbart basically invented the modern user interface and is generally held to be a proponent and founding figure of the more humanistic, mind-enhancing use of computers. He was also very much socially engaged and active with CPSR (Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility), so to have him be named a patron saint of an ideology that claims social responsibility is "anti-life" is an offense to his memory.
      • Ah well, perhaps technology gets the spokespeople it deserves. It's not so much technology (or so I would like to believe) but the combination of tech and capitalism, which rewards the wrong kind of uses and the wrong kind of people.

    • November

    • The Business of Extracting Knowledge from Academic Publications
      • makes the case that the dream of capturing and synthesizing knowledge from scientific articles (or any public text source) is a sham.
      • TL;DR: I worked on biomedical literature search, discovery and recommender web applications for many months and concluded that extracting, structuring or synthesizing "insights" from academic publications (papers) or building knowledge bases from a domain corpus of literature has negligible value in industry. Close to nothing of what makes science actually work is published as text on the web
    • Gaza and the Extremist’s Gambit – The Scholar's Stage
      • **The key insight at the root of this entire series of essays is that polarization is intentional.** Many see polarization as something of a downward spiral: social polarization causes crises that further polarize society. I will not disagree. But in many cases large, impersonal socio-political forces like “polarization” are **not **the locus of agency. Societies can, and often do, polarize because small groups of committed radicals believe it is in their interest to polarize their societies. Strategy is as important to these stories as sociology.
    • Parted ways with my employer, Ganymede Bio, in less than happy circumstances.

    • December

    • My toot last night went viral, 1000x more engagement than normal. Weird. Secret of that, don't have a very original thought, make it something that people are already feeling.
    • A thought on package managers, the bane of a software engineers life:
      • Everybody hates package managers, because they tend to be quirky and cause problems that block the more important work of coding. God knows I've cursed out many in my time. But, would just like to say, when they work, it is fucking magic when you think about it. You have literaally every useful thing anyone has thought of at your fingertips, basically. None of the pieces fit together as smoothly as we designed things in the Lisp days, but they do come together.
    • Tried to pick an argument with Meaningness about the reality of values
    • Cartoon of two men walking down the street. One says to the other: "I engage in too much negative self-talk, like a total fucking idiot."
    • Doing some Advent of Code for the fun of it. Since I don't have a job.
    • Seem to be drawn inexorably into commenting on Determined even though I am resisting. Writing a review No Blame
    • To be freed from self-obsession – no imperative more urgent. But can a cripple abstract himself from his handicap, from the very vice of his essence?
    • Something about Alfred E. Neumann and Buddhism
    • image.png
    • Nice end of the year visit by some distant and interesting cousins including an Israeli blues guitarist and the legendary Cat Yronwode.
from 2024 Year End Review

2023 Year End Review

27 Dec 2023 - 28 Sep 2025
Open in Logseq

    • Overview

    • Just to be clear, there is almost nothing in here about my personal or professional life, for what are, trust me, good reasons. This is all the random other things I read or watched or thought about.

    • World

    • Israel/Gaza of course. Trump and everything inching slowly towards fascism.
    • It was a year of AI and like everybody else I spent time experimenting with it and trying to make sense of it.

    • Books and study

    • Another desultory attempt to learn category theory, but it continues to be the kind of thing I should be into rather than something I am actually into. Also another half-assed attempt to learn to play keyboards.
    • Ribbonfarm organized a new Summer of Protocols project, which I didn't really participate in much (chimed in at the beginning and the end) but it inspired me to write Protocols/Protocol Thinking

    • Music

    • Highlight of the year, no contest, was the 5-night John John Zorn residency in September. I'm still vibing from that. Ripped all his albums I have including 6 or so bought at the shows. Shortly after he finally put his catalog on Spotify so I've been listening to a lot from there.

    • Movies / TV

    • Killers of the Flower Moon
    • Bosch (very mid police procedural, but enjoyable for what it is)
    • Scavengers Reign (excellent)
    • Tár
    • Crumb (rewatch, I'm a big fan)
    • Joel Coen's version of Macbeth (for WS class)
    • Transatlantic The true-ish story of how the precursor to the International Rescue Committee got Jews, artists, and intellectuals smuggled out of occupied France). Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin appear. Serviceable drama.
    • Killer Joe dir the late William Fredkin, kind of hated it
    • Succession final season was good. I wrote this comment:
      • It's pretty obvious what's going on with the Roy children – their goal is the love and approval of their father, which they don't know how to get. The best they can do is try to be a ruthless asshole like him now and then, but they don't have the ability to really pull it off, and it doesn't actually address the goal.
      • What makes the show work is that this is very relatable, many ordinary people have the exact same problem without the money and helicopters. Goals like "I want my father to love me" are unconscious for good reasons, you actually can't just make that a conscious goal and go after it, that doesn't work (even if you could make it happen, the real goal would remain unsatisfied). The ego's job is to try to make plausible, respectable, daytime goals that serve the unconscious goals without acknowledging them. This is an inherently difficult and absurd task, what makes Succession funny is that this very ordinary absurdity is amplified to ridiculous proportions and made public.

    • Hacking

    • Learned Typescript and its dev ecosystem. Did a lot of data curation projects using Clojure (voracious). Advent of Code.
    • Increasingly frustrated with Logseq and tempted to do something about it. Played around with BlockNote but could not quite get it to do hyperlinks, and can't get anybody on their team to take an interest in this obviously feature.
    • Unfinished farting around: Mastodon API. Generalizing Enflame for SPARQL WWEII.
    • image.png

    • Writing

    • What you see here: Index-Date.
    • image.png

    • Deaths

    • Carl Hewitt and Doug Lenat, two leading lights of early AI who I knew and worked with.
    • Rudy Rucker's wife Sylvia. Only met her once. but she was very warm and welcoming.
    • There was a mass shooting in Half Moon Bay on Jan 23
    • Many famous actors who everybody has this oddly personal relationship with. Andre Braugher for instance -- his performance in Homicide was astonishing, and memorable, but why should losing him seems like losing somebody I know? Weird.
    • Henry Fucking Kissinger

    • April

    • Why poetry is a variety of mathematical experience | Aeon Essays by Peli Greitzer, this looks fantastic.
      • Two hundred years ago, the poets and philosophers of the Romantic movement came to an intoxicating thought: art can express the otherwise inexpressible conditions that make everyday sense and experience possible. Art, the Romantics said, is our interface with the real patterns and relations that weave up the world of rational thought and perception...My purpose here is to show that today’s first blushings of a mathematical viewpoint on pattern, mind and (human) world make the Romantic theory of art literally plausible.

    • May

    • June

    • An unsent tweetstorm
      • Is the term "prompt engineering" supposed to be a kind of ironic joke? Because whatever it is, it is about as far from engineering as you can get.
      • Engineering is the process of designing artifacts to achieve some particular specification, generally quantitative, out of materials with known properties.
      • Software engineering is barely engineering, but it at least pretends to it.
      • In prompt engineering, people who know almost nothing about the system they are trying to manipulate make hopeful incantations that may or may not nudge the unknown machinery towards a vaguely desired result.
      • That may be an important new skill or art form or something, I don't mean to say that it is valueless. But it isn't engineering and calling itself that sounds absurdly pretentious.
      • "prompt hacking" would be less pretentious but I that term is meant to indicate malicious manipulation, so I guess that is out.
    • In a convo about AI on WS Discord:
      • Well, they clearly have biases and specific content and maybe even goals, certainly people are trying to make them more agent-like every day. But despite some efforts to make them talk about themselves, they lack a self , there's no there there – no actual person, whatever that means. Or at least, that is what it seems like from a technical standpoint – since we don't know what selves really are, we can't say for sure, maybe they do have an emergent self and are not just clever fakes (this was in the context of one of those Jill Nephew podcasts; she is very adamant in her view that they are fakes; I am less sure).
      • Now, it may also be the case that in humans there is similarly no there there – that is one of the teaching of Buddhism, as I understand it (which is to say, poorly). That is what emptiness means, all things are without an essence, especially ourselves. From that standpoint, we don't have any reason to put ourselves on a higher ontological plane than these LLMs. We are clever fakes too. Realizing this can be liberating or it can lead to nihilism. It's certainly challenging.
    • Trying to explain science on WS
      • I think there is a lot of misunderstanding around this point. Absolute objectivity is not attainable, true, but what science does is produce knowledge that is more objective than mere personal observations. Exactly what that means is open for interpretation, but there is definitely some quality that a proper scientific finding has that, say, a movie review does not. It might be best conceived of in terms of strength as Latour does – a scientific statement has stronger allies than an opinion, in fact science knows how to make the material world itself into an ally.