2023 Year End Review/Part 2

30 Dec 2023 - 04 May 2024
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    • 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
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    • Nice end of the year visit by some distant and interesting cousins including an Israeli blues guitarist and the legendary Cat Yronwode.