🚂 Steam locomotive under construction. Brand new, not a restoration! Nevada Railroad Museum, Carson City. A must for engineering geeks in the region Image
🚂 This one is a restoration and it’s stunning ImageImage
🚂 A Victorian tech giant: Baldwin was the world’s biggest maker of steam locomotives. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_L… Image
🚂 Being a locomotive designer/builder in the early days must have been exhilarating—so many open possibilities, obvious ideas no one had tried!

But, actually, nothing is ever so easy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baldwin_L… Image
Same in software… When I got started, the space was wide open, and it was easy to do something exciting and new.

In 1981, I implemented a sophisticated hypertext system, with markup and CGI-like features for arbitrary server code execution, on the MIT CADR Lisp Machine. Image
I planned to use my hypertext system as a documentation server for the Lisp Machine manual (known as the Chine Nual, for obvious reasons).

Unfortunately the Lispms were literally hand-made, and so crashed every few hours. A server was infeasible. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=151869… ImageImage
BTW, have I mentioned that I invented the iPhone in 1977? metarationality.com/pocket-computer

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with David Chapman

David Chapman Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @Meaningness

22 May
🎙࿇ @joffe_p on tantric Buddhist sex (“karmamudra”). He and his teacher Dr Nida Chenagtsang have been the first to teach this openly, after centuries of Tibetans making a big fuss about how secret it is, for dumb political reasons. Hooray!

soundcloud.com/guruviking/ep9…
@joffe_p ࿇ Tantric sex is one approach to tantric energy practice (“tsa lung”). For dumb political reasons, the Tibetan mainstream narrowed tsa lung to a single system, the Six Yogas, rigidly applied. The Six Yogas are good mostly only for teenage boys.
@joffe_p ࿇ A much broader range of energy practices survived on the margins of Tibet, where the oppressive monastic hegemony of Lhasa barely reached.

Historical research within Tibetan texts turns up many more, and there are similar practices in Shaivism, Taoism, and elsewhere.
Read 7 tweets
20 May
My pinned tweet is about that. You can read the comic essay it links as a deadly serious exploration of the deep structure of wicked problems:
.@vgr’s essay ends with what I’ve called “wizardry.” When you understand the inseparability of pattern and nebulosity, you can weave the flow of energy around and beneath islands of interpretability. Your effective action will appear incomprehensible. breakingsmart.substack.com/p/good-people-… Image
@vgr I’ve made this point in the context of Buddhist ethics… vividness.live/emptiness-form… Image
Read 6 tweets
20 May
If you have the capacity for it, you should be less moral. Not more immoral, not more self-interested, but less confined by fixed ideas of goodness.

Essay from @vgr resonates with my writing on ethics, although in somewhat different conceptual framework.

breakingsmart.substack.com/p/good-people-…
@vgr Morality suffices to navigate well-defined ethical domains. It fails, and may be worse than useless, when facing “wicked problems”—nebulous ones, in my terminology.

“Being a good person” is the essence of the culture war. Y’all should stop that. It’s profoundly destructive.
@vgr Strong analogy: both ethics and technical rationality fail in the face of nebulosity.

In both cases, one should *not* revert to immorality or irrationality. metarationality.com/nebulosity
Read 8 tweets
15 May
Going through the gigantic _Meaningness_ draft and removing numerous sections that are currently just notes and which, realistically, I will never get time to write.
Most are “archaeology of meaningness,” i.e. histories of where current popular bad attitudes came from.

These are illuminating, but it takes an enormous amount of research to do a good job, and SUPPOSEDLY there are academics whose actual responsibility this is.
Quantum woo is dire stuff, but it’s partly the fault of the original quantum physicists, who were infested with German Romantic Idealism and Hindu monism:
Read 4 tweets
12 May
🎙 Ian A. Baker on Buddhist energy practices.

A must if you are into this esoteric topic! He doesn’t explain them at all—he assumes knowledge of them.

This is at the meta level: discussing principles, purposes, and especially context.

soundcloud.com/guruviking/ep2…
Buddhist practices were profoundly shaped by pre-modern social and cultural contexts that no longer exist. "Buddhist modernism" adapts accordingly.

That process has barely begun for the energy practices. Much work required!

vividness.live/the-making-of-…
The Tibetan energy practices ("tsa lung," tummo) were adapted from a non-monastic Indian context to Tibetan monasticism, which is the reverse of what's needed in modernity.

Ian Baker's tales of his adventures seeking non-monastic survivals are... vivid vividness.live/sutra-tantra-a…
Read 4 tweets
6 May
“Philosophical beliefs” aren’t beliefs in any normal sense, nor in any useful sense, afaics. This is question #1 in the survey; what could any answer possibly mean?

Philosophy is Actually Bad, and everyone should stop it.
Professional philosophers seem to mostly understand that philosophy is mostly bad, or at best mostly pointless.

Those who leap to defend it when I say “Actually Bad” are lay people, presumably resembling the left panel below. If reading it makes you cry…
Many lay people apparently adopt “Philosophy!” as a quasi-religion, just as others adopt “Science!” as a quasi-religion.

This is a cultural/social phenomenon worthy of investigation. Studying it sociologically might be meaningful where “experimental philosophy” surveys aren’t.
Read 5 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(