it would be kind of nice if AI didn't exist and Bill Clinton was the president again and there was a new version of Windows 2000 called Windows 2001 and you could drink Jolt Cola while playing Half-Life 3 with your AGP Voodoo 3dfx and there would be a new kind of yo-yo that made loop the loop feel better and David Foster Wallace just released the new book in his series of increasingly normal and well-adjusted novels

MacIntyre's After Virtue chapter 15 contains a theory of action that is indispensable if you are designing an LLM-based system for assisting people and it's so extremely interesting and why isn't anyone else talking about it basically the only representation of the situation of a person that can provide the appropriate context for reasoning about what to do is a set of nested narrative histories at different scales all driven by the fundamental quest for the good which is never fully characterized

simplest way to explain adhd is just like imagine the most boring thing you were ever forced to do and now imagine that like 80% of everything that's absolutely necessary for your survival and social respect is even worse than that now imagine that as a task becomes more important, your motivation to do it decreases instead of increasing while your shame and guilt also ratchet up in a way that's so internally torturous that life itself begins to feel like a punishment

I have discovered a fundamental harmful error in the temporal ontology presented by systems like "Google Calendar" which I believe is a significant source of suffering and confusion especially for neurodivergent phenotypes like myself or at least an opportunity for improvement one aspect of the error may be intuited by looking at the figure–ground presentation here, where the scheduled events are substantial blocks standing out against a blank emptiness

I love Christopher Alexander so much I want to shout from the rooftops, I can't believe he actually lived and did what he did and wrote those books, it seems like a legitimate miracle to me ever since I saw A Pattern Language in hardcover when I was 14 or whatever it's been crystal clear that this is the benchmark of wisdom, competence, and sensitivity, and I only grow more and more confident about it as I start to really apply it

I'm gonna start referring to logic programming as Aristotelian programming hmmmmm I think Harel's behavioral threads might be exquisitely suitable for implementation in Prolog... this seems very interesting 🤔

chill out @Wise, it's okay that you can't let me send 1,000 United Arab Emirates dinars... that's just your own default parameters in the money sending dialog box for some reason... you didn't "let me down" society thinks I'm a fucking moron for not paying bills on time but I literally have ADHD and you motherfuckers insist on designing these systems to demand truly bizarre levels of executive function to deal with all the OCR numbers, two factor authentications, it's all BULLSHIT

I would like a persistent session language model chat bot that's trained to model a person's life world such that it can predict their "todos" and act as a coach for executive function and relevance realization this seems to be the destiny of e.g. Siri as AI comes to replace the rigid and superficial formalisms of "recurring calendar events" and "atomic tasks nested in hierarchical projects"

hey @DavidSHolz and @algekalipso I bet you guys would have a GREAT time riffing with @midjourney_ai on the themes of hyperbolic DMT geometry and high valence AI imagery as a potential great good in terms of cost-efficient custom fine-tuned qualia @DavidSHolz @algekalipso @midjourney_ai cuz in my AI art journey I've discovered that Midjourney has a refined & delightful taste within the hyperbolic DMT paradise realm which you invoke by appending the phrase "hyperbolic DMT paradise realm, incredibly beautiful psychedelic line art"

🎭 thread of avatars ✨ @Malcolm_Ocean

thread of architectural inspiration

very nice little essay tedgioia.substack.com/p/you-dont-nee… cc @visakanv he brings up the "composers more productive when living in proximity to other composers" and attributes it not to cooperation but rivalry

“I’m reading more theology than anything else right now!”

— @vervaeke_john

put on a french press of coffee, started doing a bit of tidying, realized the kid's room is too crowded, moved the futon to the bedroom, started on a speculative rearrangement of the entire living room, redid it a few times, vacuumed, started doing the dishes, remembered coffee and it's not even cold

I’d love recommendations for specific recordings of classical or baroque or impressionist or any kind of beautiful music with a bit of complexity but also lightness and radiance and softness I quite like Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos but they can be a little bit too intense for background music at the office. Satie and Pärt are a bit too crystalline or sweet or something

hmm this is very interesting mh.bmj.com/content/medhum… cc @nosilverv @magicianbrain I should write some threads about it because it links up super generatively with the theme of adhd, theology, hierarchy, narrative, etc @nosilverv @magicianbrain it's about a research field that emerged from the insight that we experience abstraction as a kind of distance: if something is abstract, low in detail, then it's probably "far away" in a more general way than just in visual perception

the sunk cost fallacy is the only way to get anything done, the only way to live, the only basis of identity make yourself into an unstoppable flywheel of ridiculous inertia

work on idiotic projects for 20 years

my dream of building a timber-framed cabin with sturdy joinery is like a desire for a good skeleton, a safe body, peace, boundaries, stable structure, interlocking frames of intelligibility, deep rugged coherence, unpretentious unquestionable beauty, fields of strong centers embodied embedded enactive extended cognition: it seems to me that to participate in life is to be perpetually dissatisfied with the state of the surrounding environment and continually work on it as if refactoring and optimizing a computer program or editing a book

“Ethics, if it is anything, is supernatural and our words will only express facts; as a teacup will only hold a teacup full of water.”

—Wittgenstein “I will now describe the experience of wondering at the existence of the world by saying: it is the experience of seeing the world as a miracle.”

I feel pretty strongly affected by nonalcoholic beer so I guess a lot of the effect of beer isn’t actually due to alcohol. Basically it makes me tired and sleepy. Is it just because of grains or carbs or whatever Oh, it’s the HOPS?!

whoa I just got this weird but fascinating idea to use Lisp itself as an issue tracker and work journal the first part there is a set of dummy no-op macros that enable me to write the chronicle in this format

the chronicle now is "code" that doesn't actually do anything... yet

this is the essential Lisp principle: "code is data, data is code"