Have you ever wondered why, in Buddhist meditation circles, the stated idea is to deconstruct self-identity, but everyone talks the same, as if the real point is becoming the dullest vegetarian possible?

The Macy Meetings

Goal means not that we have a fixed set-in-stone goal, more like goals are a necessary component of action, we are always acting or considering acting. (Andy Pickering)

The idea of purpose is what defined the field, uniting the disparate fields

cybernetics, neural nets, ai all intertwingled . Story about rise of AI from cybernetics. Expert systems, Hinton wars, etc. I know this story.

Wicked Problems. No shit.

AI is a pandemic.

require conversations that are transdiciplinary, trance-national, trans-generational

something cosmic going on with the word "conversation", obviously he doesn't mean idle chit-chat but serious interchange between different disciplines and points of view.

Conversation is the bridge between cybernetics and design

–Ranulph Granville

Conversation necessitated by the need to cooperate, to act together.

This is interestingly protocolish, although maybe more cooperation-minded in outlook

What follows from conversation (when it works)

shared history, relationship, trust, respect, unity

something in me wants to scoff at this. I don't know why, we certainly need all that stuff. It's too idealistic? The real world has irresolvable conflicts that conversation won't solve. Protocols (engineered arguments) are like cybernetic conversations with the idealism excised and replaced by a sort of ruthless pragmatism.

I think conversation means something closer to what I'd call interaction?

Essence of cybernetics (aside from being concerned with purpose)

Antidisciplinarity (Andrew Pickering)

Seeks to regulate, not dominate

Contains an ethical imperative

Conversation contrasted with AI

But cybernetics can bridge this divide, it is bilingual

Minsky/Papert/Perceptrons story. von Foerster at Urbana got funding cut out through Minsky. See Marvin Minsky/on Cybernetics. There's much confusion between tech as an industry (Silicon Valley) and the intellectual side of AI.

Gordon Pask

He doesn't say this explicitly but I sense that the point of conversation is goal-alignment? "Resonance" resonates with this.

Stafford Beer /Flores/ Project Cybersyn as centralized control. Distinguishing cybernetic control from the more evil-sounding kind – why not say, self-control (for systems) rather than domination?

Organizing Principle

I shall act always to increase the total number of choices

"choices' does not mean options (?) choice is a viable option, consistent with authentic self/being (?)

Guess this is a famous line but I disagree; acting requires commitment which is decreasing available choices.

Someone in q brings up Paradox of Choice

"I shall" vs "Thou shalt". I like this. Non-moralistic, acknowledging that you are part of the world and taking responsibility (feels very Buddhist)

Ah from Heinz von Foerster, "ethical imperative"

"Don't make a decision, let a descision make you"

Applied to UI design

Amazon is options, not choices, because not to do with me. It is superficially personalized based on my past choices, but has no idea of my present.

Ethical design principles

apply models of human conversation

strive for interfaces that are cooperative, ethical, humane

push for new forms of conversational interface

Hm, this talk was pre-LLM era (2021). Now of course all interfaces are conversational or going that way. But I suspect not in the authentic way PP is talking about.

Google doesn't explain its recommendations so not a good conversational partner (LLMs actually are getting better at that, there's a whole subfield explainability). He views non-explainability as unethical, which seems a bit of a stretch to me, esp in 2021 when Google wasn't pretending to be a human.

Depressing side:

Having your primary skill set / craft be taken over by machines is an economic threat and and ego threat.

Nail in the coffin for GOFAI, OOP, ontology, and all other attempts to put computational knowledge on a structured footing. Also death knell to visual programming languages, something I used to specialize in.

Software slop is even worse than text slop. The latter can just be ignored; but software is where I live.

At my age I should be settling into old habits instead of inventing new ones. The pace of change is exhausting for everybody, but especially me, I'm too old for this shit.

Exhilarating side:

It's easy to make stuff, and its ridiculously easy to turn vague ideas into real software.

It's not really the death of all the old powerful ideas of computation. something like them will have to be reinvented for the new world. I would hazard they are needed more than ever, it's just nobody knows what that means yet.

In fact maybe this is what the Protocol movement is really about, now that I come to think of it.

The thing I actually care most about – building better interfaces between human and machine knowledge – is a problem and task that won't go away. The design space just changed radically, but the basic goal is the same. This is actually great news because UI thinking has been stuck in a rut for like 40 years.

Much as I might like to rest, it's probably better if I'm forced to learn new tricks. old

but held off commenting for many reasons, not least that he's on his last legs. But then this happened on X

Stewart – I was surprised and disappointed by your praise of Musk in your Maintenance book. Aside from his other sins, he's responsible for dismantling many important institutions of maintenance like the CDC. Any change of heart about that?

— mtraven (@mtraven) October 17, 2026

This also is one of the central teachings of Buddhism (AFAICT!)., In meditation you can observe various mental processes doing their thing. Do that enough and you start to get a feel for what energies (desires) make it all go, and you might feel some control over them. But that too is just an illusion. Going meta is great but it sin;t enough, you have to go hypermeta.

From Blygger

From Gordon Pask

No Kings is pretty brilliant as a political slogan. It captures the essence of the US founding principles, at a time when they are under attack by actual monarchists (or cosplaying monarchists, but same difference). ABOUT — No Kings

The Protocol movement does not have a clearly defined political alignment (probably smart), but obviously has some affinity with No Kings. In a protocolized world, individual leaders don't matter that much. Protocols when they are successful tend to flatten hierarchies, replacing rulers with rules.

From Maintenance of Everything

From Blygger

From Blygger

From Blygger

I actually appear as a character in The Atrocity Exhibition (and yes I had a long and wearisome dispute with an unpleasant director)

...the director watched Travers with his unpleasant eyes. His aggressive stare had surprised Travers - seeing himself confused with the psychotic patients was too sharp a commentary on his own role at the Institute, a reminder of his long and wearisome dispute...

Burroughs gets a lot of credit for popularizing cut up but he was too drug addled and shooting apples off his wife's head to really be a virtuoso cut up writer. Ballard is probably the writer who cashed out on cut up the most. Atrocity Exibition is a cut-up novel which had all the seeds of ideas for later Ballard works like Crash. And I believe the idea originally came from pointilist and surreal painters. Francis Bacon was a big influence on Ballard, post-cubist art was a big influence on Burroughs.

Writing advice from William Burroughs

You can’t write unless you want to write. And you can’t want to write unless you feel like it. Say you’re a doctor with a nice practice. You don’t feel so well today—family troubles and other things you can’t quite put a name to...Well you can still carry on and what the hell, quarter-grain of morphine for each patient; no matter what is wrong with them, *they will* feel better immediately and prize me as the greatest of croakers. And if I get any sass from the Narcs, I’ll just tell ‘em, ‘Well I’m off to work in the Bahrein Islands so you can shove it up your ass.’ I mean, even if you don’t feel like practicing medicine you can still do it… In these other professions you can always cover for not feeling like doing it, but writing you didn’t feel like doing—ain’t worth shit.

—A Word to the Wise Guy, from The Adding Machine, 1985 via Kipple, Jun—by Cat Celebrezze | Metapsychosis

I wonder what Burroughs would say about LLMs, which are basically his cut-up technique perverted by capitalism. It's producing an enormous flood of words that nobody feels like doing.

Ask Claude

• This is a genuinely rich observation that cuts to something important about Burroughs's entire worldview. Let me lay out the tension:

• The cut-up's original premise

• "Word and image locks" control the mind, locking us into conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking, and speaking. The cut-up was conceived as a way of exposing those word and image controls and freeing oneself from them — an alteration of consciousness in both writer and reader.

• Crucially, Burroughs perceived the method of collage as a way towards rebellion — an insurrection against the system of control inherent in language itself. So the cut-up was always a weapon against control, specifically against institutional, corporate, propagandistic language.

• It was a politically radical form of writing that highlights the power relations inherent in language.

• The LLM inversion

• Your observation is exact and Burroughs would almost certainly have seen it as the nightmare scenario he spent his career warning against. He already identified the early version of this in The Electronic Revolution:

• alphabetic languages control people, the word virus subverts human autonomy, and even recording and recombining words mechanically can lead to "false news broadcasts or garbled political speeches causing confusion and psychic control over individuals."

• His view of the cut-up technique was already contradictory — initially viewed as an agent of liberation and only later regarded as a means towards mass control.

• He knew the technique could be flipped. LLMs are that flip, industrialized.

• The "wanting to write" problem

• The passage you quote is about felt necessity — the writer who doesn't want to write produces nothing worth reading. Burroughs was explicit that writing came from an almost compulsive, unchosen place.

• In the last year of his life he wrote: "An artist must be open to the muse. The greater the artist, the more he is open to 'cosmic currents.' He has to behave as he does."

• And on the other side: when asked if he'd write even if nobody would ever read it, he said "most emphatically yes — I would go on writing for company, because I'm creating an imaginary world in which I would like to live."

• So for Burroughs, writing is necessity made from desire. The cut-up, even at its most mechanical, was still driven by a person who desperately needed to break out of something real.

• What he'd probably say

• He'd likely see LLM output as the word-virus achieving full autonomy — language replicating itself without even the pretense of a host consciousness.

• His theory was that language operates as a virus replicating itself within human beings, shaping identity and limiting human potential by controlling consciousness through linguistic structures.

• The LLM removes the human entirely and the virus just... runs. It's not cutting up language to escape control — it's control using the aesthetics of cut-up to generate more of itself.

• The doctor analogy from your passage maps perfectly: LLM text is the quarter-grain of morphine for every patient regardless of diagnosis. Patients feel temporarily satisfied, the system profits, and nobody is actually being treated. The difference is Burroughs's croaker at least felt bad about it. The model doesn't feel anything at all, which for Burroughs would be the most sinister outcome possible — not malice, just

• agents of forces that exceed them, that possess them, with the possessing force now being capital rather than junky

Well that felt unclean. And complicated by the fact that Burroughs was from a family that made its money in early computing technology.

Ben Affleck says AI is simply matrix multiplication, linear algebra and floating point calculations, and however convincingly it sounds like a person, it has nothing to do with thought, humanity or feeling

“Nor do I believe, and I think it’s important to draw the distinction… https://t.co/J6SZalzZQW pic.twitter.com/YAeVi8ATiv

— Fireside Alpha (@firesidealpha) October 15, 2026

Well the real place of interest is where the formalisms and the real world intersect.

If you don't like that there's always the even-more-intense Artaud (see writing )

All writing is pigshit. Those who attempt to turn any part of the mind into words on a page – are pigs.

There is an urge to rationalize it – yes, no doubt all this frenetic fun has some evolutionary purpose, its how animals in the wild learn to be hunters and killers. But it doesn't seem very efficient. Sharks are pretty good killers but they don't train up by playing (I think!)

Ask Claude

• Your instinct about the "efficiency" puzzle is well-taken, and it's actually a live debate in evolutionary biology. Here's the state of the science:

• On kitten play:

• Cats' play behaviors closely resemble hunting behaviors, and these activities allow kittens to acquire cognitive and motor skills, and to socialize with other cats.

• More specifically, at the time of weaning, kittens begin to act out the behavioral sequences associated with hunting — chasing and stalking moving objects. This "object play" is believed to be important in the development of eye-paw coordination and hunting skills, and the presence of an experienced hunting mother increases the kitten's opportunity to develop hunting prowess.

• But your skepticism about the "practice hunting" explanation is well-founded:

• While play was once thought to help build skills or endurance, studies have found little evidence for these explanations. Instead, play appears to significantly activate many areas of the brain in ways that may enhance brain connectivity and creativity. Bigger-brained species also tend to play more — suggesting play may have evolved to stimulate brain growth and development, making animals more intelligent and behaviorally flexible.

• There's also a more subtle theory: researcher Marek Spinka has argued that play helps animals prepare for the loss of balance they experience when chased by predators, or helps them deal with the emotions after losing an aggressive interaction — play, in short, prepares the brain to handle the unexpected.

• The cost-benefit puzzle is real too: 80% of deaths among juvenile fur seals occur because playing pups fail to spot an approaching predator. Play is also extremely expensive in energy terms — playful animals use around 2–15% of their energy cavorting. For evolutionary biologists, even 2% is significant; there must be a reason for this dangerous activity.

• **And about sharks — you may want to revise your parenthetical!**

• A new study published in Applied Animal Behaviour Science offers the strongest evidence yet that sharks engage in play behavior — findings that could force a rethink about shark intelligence.

• Researchers observed sharks (and a skate) behaving in ways that resembled play while testing enrichment toys at Southern California's Cabrillo Marine Aquarium.

• Video footage shows sharks swimming through hoops, picking them up with their nose, flicking toys with their tails, and — like in the wild — rushing toward a toy and abruptly changing direction at the last second.

• Porbeagle sharks have also been observed repeatedly rolling in kelp and being chased by another shark with a piece of kelp trailing behind them.

• So the broader picture seems to be: play is not simply about drilling specific skills, but is linked to brain development, flexibility, and handling the unpredictable — and it may be far more widespread across the animal kingdom than we once assumed, even in creatures like sharks that we've long written off as pure instinct machines.

Too much thinking is anathema to play but I keep trying to theorize it...AFAICT it involves substituting local, situated, lightly-held goals for global, abstract, tightly-held ones. Easy for kittens, rather more difficult for humans who are obliged to be serious strivers, at least in our culture. But necessary, especially in times like this.

You can’t write unless you want to write. And you can’t want to write unless you feel like it. Say you’re a doctor with a nice practice. You don’t feel so well today—family troubles and other things you can’t quite put a name to...Well you can still carry on and what the hell, quarter-grain of morphine for each patient; no matter what is wrong with them, *they will* feel better immediately and prize me as the greatest of croakers. And if I get any sass from the Narcs, I’ll just tell ‘em, ‘Well I’m off to work in the Bahrein Islands so you can shove it up your ass.’ I mean, even if you don’t feel like practicing medicine you can still do it… In these other professions you can always cover for not feeling like doing it, but writing you didn’t feel like doing—ain’t worth shit.

—A Word to the Wise Guy, from The Adding Machine, 1985 via Kipple, Jun—by Cat Celebrezze | Metapsychosis

I wonder what Burroughs would say about LLMs, which are basically his cut-up technique perverted by capitalism. It's producing an enormous flood of words that nobody feels like doing.

Ask Claude

• This is a genuinely rich observation that cuts to something important about Burroughs's entire worldview. Let me lay out the tension:

• The cut-up's original premise

• "Word and image locks" control the mind, locking us into conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking, and speaking. The cut-up was conceived as a way of exposing those word and image controls and freeing oneself from them — an alteration of consciousness in both writer and reader.

• Crucially, Burroughs perceived the method of collage as a way towards rebellion — an insurrection against the system of control inherent in language itself. So the cut-up was always a weapon against control, specifically against institutional, corporate, propagandistic language.

• It was a politically radical form of writing that highlights the power relations inherent in language.

• The LLM inversion

• Your observation is exact and Burroughs would almost certainly have seen it as the nightmare scenario he spent his career warning against. He already identified the early version of this in The Electronic Revolution:

• alphabetic languages control people, the word virus subverts human autonomy, and even recording and recombining words mechanically can lead to "false news broadcasts or garbled political speeches causing confusion and psychic control over individuals."

• His view of the cut-up technique was already contradictory — initially viewed as an agent of liberation and only later regarded as a means towards mass control.

• He knew the technique could be flipped. LLMs are that flip, industrialized.

• The "wanting to write" problem

• The passage you quote is about felt necessity — the writer who doesn't want to write produces nothing worth reading. Burroughs was explicit that writing came from an almost compulsive, unchosen place.

• In the last year of his life he wrote: "An artist must be open to the muse. The greater the artist, the more he is open to 'cosmic currents.' He has to behave as he does."

• And on the other side: when asked if he'd write even if nobody would ever read it, he said "most emphatically yes — I would go on writing for company, because I'm creating an imaginary world in which I would like to live."

• So for Burroughs, writing is necessity made from desire. The cut-up, even at its most mechanical, was still driven by a person who desperately needed to break out of something real.

• What he'd probably say

• He'd likely see LLM output as the word-virus achieving full autonomy — language replicating itself without even the pretense of a host consciousness.

• His theory was that language operates as a virus replicating itself within human beings, shaping identity and limiting human potential by controlling consciousness through linguistic structures.

• The LLM removes the human entirely and the virus just... runs. It's not cutting up language to escape control — it's control using the aesthetics of cut-up to generate more of itself.

• The doctor analogy from your passage maps perfectly: LLM text is the quarter-grain of morphine for every patient regardless of diagnosis. Patients feel temporarily satisfied, the system profits, and nobody is actually being treated. The difference is Burroughs's croaker at least felt bad about it. The model doesn't feel anything at all, which for Burroughs would be the most sinister outcome possible — not malice, just

• agents of forces that exceed them, that possess them, with the possessing force now being capital rather than junky

Well that felt unclean. And complicated by the fact that Burroughs was from a family that made its money in early computing technology.

From The AI/UI Thesis

Kevin Kelly says quite reasonably that we don't know what intelligence is yet, and he breaks it down into a bunch of different components. I have some quibbles with his framing:

A major part of our ignorance stems from our confusion about the general category of either electricity or intelligence. We tend to view both electricity and intelligence as coherent elemental forces along a single dimension: you either have more of it or less.

Quibble 1: There's been a live debate over the unity of intelligence for a long while. IQ theorists and Berkeley Rationalist types seem to think there is indeed a single dimension. Cognitive scientists tend to think otherwise. Marvin Minsky was very much in the multidimension camp. From his Society of Mind glossary:

Intelligence (7.1) A term frequently used to express the myth that some single entity or element is responsible for the quality of a person's ability to reason. I prefer to think of this word as representing not any particular power or phenomenon, but simply all the mental skills that, at any particular moment, we admire but don't yet understand.

Quibble 2 is that electricity did in fact turn out to be something pretty simple, that can be described in a few laws and put in an undergraduate textbook. Intelligence I don't think is that way (and neither did Minsky). In his view, thinking is not one thing, but a set of complex and intricate mechanisms and tricks.

We are using LLMs to answer questions or to code software without having a theory of intelligence. A real theory of intelligence is so lacking that we don’t know how our own minds work, let alone the synthetic ones we can now create.

The terrible truth about LLM-based AI is that we don't need a theory of intelligence. This is The Bitter Lesson. A coherent theory may never emerge, because thinking is just too complicated. There is no periodic table of simple components. Minsky's GOFAI was basically a failure, because it was too thoughtful, too concerned with understanding how minds work, and thus too slow to make progress, whereas the LLM approach is to not care about that, just pour in data and go brrr.

MoreWrong is the supreme achievement of human reason: the most intellectually formidable rationalist publication in history. Our essays on AI, philosophy, and civilization resolve questions that lesser publications are not yet intelligent enough to ask.

Ask Claude

• The search hit the Meaningness site's abstract-emergent page, which is promising. Let me look more carefully at that and also search specifically for whether David Chapman (Meaningness) mentions métis by name.

• The site: searches didn't find métis on either domain directly. Let me check the Meaningness page on situated cognition and the metarationality.com page on abstract/emergent reasoning more carefully, and also search for David Chapman's writing on practical knowledge or phronesis.

• This is very useful. Chapman cites Seeing Like a State and calls it "meta-rational," but doesn't use the word métis explicitly in what's indexed. Let me now fetch the specific Substack piece where he discusses Scott, and also check whether any of Chapman's pages on situated cognition or reasonableness use the term.

• Now I have a thorough picture. Let me synthesize this carefully.

• Based on a thorough search of both meaningness.com and metarationality.com, here's the situation:

• *The short answer: Chapman engages heavily with the same conceptual territory as métis, and cites James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State* (the book most responsible for popularizing the concept in contemporary discourse), but he does not appear to use the word métis explicitly.**

• Here's how the overlap breaks down:

• On situated action:

• Chapman's 1986 paper (republished on metarationality.com) argues that "computation in this internal world is just like computation in the real one; it is just as concrete and situated." He frames this as part of "a century-long conversation that re-thinks meaningness and what it is to be human."

• The paper is a direct ancestor of the "E-word" (embodied, enactive, extended, embedded, ecological) movement, and Chapman notes that he developed this framework in 1986, thirty years before the embodied cognition literature rediscovered it.

• This is precisely the AI/cognitive science face of métis — the critique of abstract, plan-first rationalism in favor of routine, situated, world-responsive activity.

• On metarationality and Seeing Like a State: Chapman directly and explicitly engages with Scott's book, which is the central modern source for métis.

• He calls Seeing Like A State "meta-rational" and discusses how it examines cases where "oblivious rationalism that ignored context, purpose, and nebulosity" caused scientific agriculture to fail, sometimes producing mass famines.

• In "Seeing like a Good King," he borrows Scott's framework directly, noting that Scott's "seeing" is metaphorical and "includes all perception, but also any means of gaining information, knowledge, and understanding."

• He uses Scott's villager/state distinction to build toward the idea of a "Good King" who can hold both concrete local knowledge and abstract systemic vision simultaneously — which is almost a literal gloss on métis vs. techne.

• The gap: Despite all this, the word métis itself doesn't appear to surface in his published work.

• Scott himself introduces the term in chapter 9 of Seeing Like a State, contrasting "practical knowledge" (métis, from classical Greek, denoting "the knowledge that can come only from practical experience") with formal epistemic knowledge.

• Chapman cites Scott extensively but seems to prefer his own vocabulary — "circumrational," "reasonableness," "situated activity," "nebulosity" — rather than adopting Scott's Greek term.

• So: the concept is deeply present in Chapman's work, the primary modern source (Scott) is cited and called "meta-rational," but the word métis itself appears to be absent. If you find it anywhere, it would likely be in his Substack posts (some of which are paywalled) or in unpublished/in-progress book sections.

No matter how powerful AI agents get, there will always be a need for:

better ways to express intent to them

tools for monitoring and interacting with them

This is an underexplored area

The more capable AI gets, the more this interface becomes the bottleneck and improving it provides value

My dissertation (1996) actually addressed this problem, tangentially. Ahead of my time!

What is the current state-of-the-art?

I'm not sure and need to research it. There must be dozens of agent harness type things that do stuff in this ballpark and I'm not that familiar with them

I should just build one (see PAgents KnowOS etc )

It's difficult to know what to build given how fast things are changing

One obvious approach – build a lot of small, composable components. I'm trying to do this with Hyperphor stack. But I need to rethink in depth (that's what this is for.)

TODO take every bullet item above and sic claude on it, with context

In a pitch conversation about AI x protocols, I just accidentally said… — Venkatesh Rao's Blyg

Immutability is kind of a cult value in the technical community I where I spend most of my time (Clojure). Here's an example

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.…

— Peter Girnus 🦅 (@gothburz) October 12, 2026

built a RAG for PICI (Pimento)

NLQ

ELI and Ontogeny (simpleminded but suggestive hacks)

Ellum and Hyperphor stack

All the Traverse/Exobrain stuff, semantic spreadsheets

AskClaude

PAgents

Tunamelt object store for persistant conversations

KnowOS putting it all together in a knowledge management environment.

A term I just invented. It sounds bad, but it just means programming for yourself, not for any external purpose or idea or team or faction or whatever. Not so much selfish as self-involved.

This stance is entirely inappropriate in professional contexts, where the whole point is to embody a kind of other-oriented practice. There's even a term for this: Egoless programming - Wikipedia. Software is not supposed to bear a personal stamp, its more like an effort to attain a Platonic ideal.

Well – to me it always has been. "The Right Thing" in MIT hacker jargon always had that quality. Lisp has that quality.

Ego-oriented programming is for amateurs, who practice something for love, not money. And the criteria for evaluation are different.

Of course the rise of LLM-assissted coding means that anyone can be an ego-oriented programmer, in fact you kind of have to be one now. Your personal taste is the one thing the machines can't replicate, and the more idiosyncratic or hard to define it is, the better.

Yes of course Donald Trump is a stain on the country. But some stains can be removed, others are permanent. Which kind is he?

My sense is that in his first term he was more of a removable stain. Once he left office, the country could in theory reassemble itself, rebuild a functioning government, be a respectable actor in the world again.

Once he was re-elected, that's no longer the case, the stain is permanent. It's what we are now. We could find a dozen Lincolns or Roosevelts in the future; we'd still be the country that elected Donald Trump twice. A country of dangerous morons.

Led me to Venkat's old post "Why We Slouch" in which he bascially reinvents the concept of slack from The Church of the SubGenius (See stance)

Ask Claude

• The observation is insightful, but the convergence — and the divergence — between these two traditions is worth unpacking carefully.

• ---

• The Shared Intuition: Nothing Is Permanent

• Both traditions start from the same empirical observation: the world is in constant flux and nothing holds its shape forever.

• **Marx & Engels:**

• "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned."

• This captures the notion of rapid and profound change — in emerging capitalist society, relationships, values, and institutions undergo constant transformation, leading to instability and uncertainty.

• Buddha:

• In Buddhist philosophy, Anicca (impermanence) is a fundamental truth of existence. Everything in life is transient and constantly changing — from our thoughts and emotions to relationships and material possessions, nothing remains the same.

• Everything conditioned is in constant change: arising, altering, and passing away. Nothing that is put together lasts. From galaxies to thoughts, all of it flows.

• ---

• Where They Diverge: Diagnosis and Prescription

• Despite the shared observation, the two traditions diverge radically in what causes impermanence and what to do about it.

• **For Marx & Engels**, impermanence is not a metaphysical law of nature but a historically specific consequence of capitalism.

• Marx was referring to the speed with which the capital system dissolves social relationships, leaving nothing between individuals other than the nexus of callous cash payment.

• The phrase highlights the relentless pace of industrialization and urbanization, where Marx and Engels illustrate how the bourgeoisie, through its pursuit of profit and expansion, destabilizes existing institutions and social relations, leaving nothing permanent in its wake.

• The phrase is a critique — a call to political action against a specific economic system.

• For the Buddha, impermanence is not caused by any social system — it is the fundamental nature of reality itself.

• Rather than treating change as an unfortunate exception, Buddhism teaches that change is the natural condition of existence.

• The response is not political revolution but inner transformation:

• the Buddha taught that deeply understanding impermanence is liberating — it frees you from clinging to what cannot last and opens you to fully experiencing each moment as it is.

• ---

• A Crucial Nuance in the Marx/Engels Phrase

• The original German phrase (Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft) evokes not "solidity" but rather "standing," as in social standing.

• This is significant — Marx and Engels are describing the dissolution of social hierarchies and status, not matter itself. The Buddhist anicca, by contrast, applies to literally everything:

• everything in the universe, from the smallest particle to the vastest galaxy, is subject to constant change — including bodies, emotions, thoughts, relationships, and even our most cherished beliefs.

• ---

• The Bottom Line

• The resonance is real: both traditions see clinging to fixed, stable structures as a source of suffering or false consciousness. But Marx sees the cure in restructuring society, while the Buddha sees it in restructuring the mind. One says the melt is imposed on us by economic forces; the other says the melt was always already the nature of things — and freedom comes from accepting that.

From Protocols/some questions for PIbot

Rooted in authentic biometric telemetry and multimodal intelligence, xVibe builds the next-generation operating system where language, emotion, and physical touch enter the same closed loop.

Also quite Protocol ized:

Standard Hardware Abstraction Layer: Universal HAL converting abstract emotional intensity into device-specific frequency, amplitude, and motor dynamics across all major manufacturers.

No details about this, but I would be interested in seeing a technical standard for emotional intimacy.

DOGE is a light rebranding of Curtis Yarvin's RAGE, "Retire all government employees". 'Yarvin is the brain' behind DOGE, Washington Post reports

It will never cease to amaze me how this midwit nerd managed to gain enough influence to actually do serious damage to the fucking United States federal government.

Got to give the radical right some credit I guess. The radical left hated the government just as much, but never was actually going to do anything about it. Symbolically levitating the pentagon was cute but just symbolism. The rightists actually have demolished it. Mostly the parts that were doing good of course.

From Weird Studies/Courses/Moby Dick

Artisanal automation? Yes, that's us. Curation done right. With humans and machines. Every day, we find hundreds of intellectual gems. The gems that vanish in social media noise. We vet them. Carefully. And you only get to see the best. No noise, no distraction, no clickbait. Only the serious stuff you miss.

From Full STEAM Ahead

Sections 28.2-3 of Society of Mind address the question of mental marketplaces, so he didn’t ignore that type of theory, he just didn’t like it.

His feeling I think is that quantitative competition between agents is stupid, and real intelligence comes from making manager agents that turn the competition into something more cooperative. That is how you get complex patterns of thought, not from different drives competing with each other.

Not sure he was right about that. If you are familiar with the work of George Ainslie, it is almost exactly what you would get if you crossed society of mind with economic thinking.

This was interesting because, while I am in no way a conservative catholic, pretty opposite in fact – some of these arguments make sense! They get at the feeling of unease I have with LLMs – that they are insidiously infiltrating my being and sapping my spirit.

Conversation is for communion. The ability to speak and to listen, to discuss, to reveal our hidden, intellectual life by articulating ourselves in a public, common language with the hope of receiving a response—all this has as its natural correlate in another intelligence, one who receives our meaning, understands it (or misunderstands it), and has the power to respond in kind, revealing the hidden reality of his or her own subjectivity.

The use of AI chatbots deliberately frustrates the act of conversation from attaining its natural end (communion with another intelligence) by wasting it on a non-intelligence. Of course, the development and sale and marketing of robots that appear to listen, understand, and converse is not the only sin against the act of conversation.

Now this is all predicated on the usual stupid Natural Law philosophy that says things have only one purpose and to use them for other purposes is a sin – so masturbation is a sin, contraception is a sin, etc. I'm a good modern liberal and I don't believe in that – putting things to new purposes is perfectly fine. That's how evolution works, both biological and cultural.

And yet...the unease remains.

From eigenvirtues

So you have to pivot, if you'll excuse the jargon. Change your purpose in life, or at least, the marketable side of your purpose, the thing that people will pay you for.

On this point, software engineers are in pretty good shape – if they are any good they are already adept at thinking in product-management terms, so now they just have to do nothing but that, basically. Not that AIs won't learn to do that kind of thing, but it means surfing the wave rather than being crushed by it. It's a challenge to the entire field but not really an existential threat, there will always be a need for those who tend to the machines.

Visual artists on the other hand – I don't know what they are supposed to do. Some of course will embrace the new tools (I'm a fan of Kelly Bosche Kelly Boesch🏳️‍🌈 on X: "‘Everybody’s Got Their Thing’, one of my favorite things to say. Wrote this one about the things we are all drawn to individually. Images: Midjourney Animation: VEO Lyrics by me and song made using Suno ai aiart music dance" / X) https://x.com/kellyeld/status/2103483156850692560/video/1

but not everybody can do that.

And there is something creepy about her videos. They embrace the machine and allowing youreslf to be entranced by them is letting yourself become more machinelike. (I don't mean to be critical, I love them but also feel like I'm in an endless surrealist shopping mall).

Ken's friends lightshow thing

In both cases our hand-work has been absorbed into industrial slurry and sold back to us.

As a software engineer, I say, that's life, I was already an open-source advocate, this just forces the issue.

As an artist – well I'm not an artist so I don't know, but I'd be pretty damn pissed off.