Thats him Id recognise him anywhere officer

 

 the tech scene in the KSI headquarters where Stanley Tucci demonstrates Transformium , is more science-y for me than any scene in Silicon Valley.

how far astray am I ? I spent my entire childhood with the idea that science is what everybody is going to be doing daily to break past our human barriers and birth a Jetsons-style age.

has all our lives been, and continuing to be, one large wank ?

the engine of  modern civilisation is thus - create misery in free creatures, who know what a misery-less life is . this will force them to come to you for relief. make them do work for you, like slaving in factories. 

the drug dealer is the pinnacle of our economic evolution.  in his existence you find ALL the qualities that made the imperial and industrial ages come to be

illegal, (and hence)  monopoly on  supply, causes misery with product AND without product for those involved

waiting for matter compilers to create a world without economics

if driverless cars killed less people overall than drunk drivers and accidents, and society wouldn't accept them, can you justify that society's existence, and take seriously its other life-preservation laws on, say, murder ?

now replace driverless cars with vaccines which have a 0.001 % fatality (- ie - 1 in 100,000 folks injected with the vaccine will die)

isn't it scary that measles wipes out the body's immune registry ? resets it to zero ? isn't it scarier that there are humans going around unvaccinated and fighting to prevent wholesale vaccination ?

like Rama in the mythology, do the good folks HAVE to live a life of pain and suffering and meaningless work forever ?

watching : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeEJ4HhrB8U

 gas shortage in US is a BIG thing. pipeline hack achieved that ?

 

Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.”

― Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough for Love

Covid and quarantine has proven this to a very great degree, that the ones we choose to spend our lives with, we cannot tolerate permanent exposure to

Somebody ( Graeber?  no it was Turchin (the son, not the dad, the dad made Refal (thank you, Principia Cybernetica)) was making the case that we have a ton of over educated elites and this is a marker for a particular flavour of the end of times to come about.

That our civilisation machine has stagnated  enough for the large middles with surplus to compound their surplus up to elite status.but they still don't have power of the real elite net that controls the world, for that is a closed ,insiders-only club . Forever.

Anyways. Graeber 's book was about how most of us don't have any real work to do anyway ( cos innovator's dilemma ? counterpoint - sacred cows make the best burgers ), and capitalism has evolved to be a system that buys a person's life through their time, rather than anything else, probably in an attempt to keep the masses distracted and a well-fed surplus, while the machines continue to churn out economic progress.

Tainter argued something on the lines of increasing complexity involved in getting things done in a society makes it inefficient over time, with the core (80/20) surviving at the last plush savepoint of progress while the rest lose the bricks of their walls one by one ( Mark?)

Samo Burja's point was that civilisation is already too complex for the folks that built it and that we keep losing the engineers who know how things work, and pretty soon everybody's flying blind. End of times.

Now Ran Prieur talks of the skills crash coming up,as no one knows how things work down to the metal (or earth)

At some point, population will fall locally the point that bodies of technology will fall to disrepair. Has happened before. will happen again. 

reading the excellent 'Unauthorised Bread' by Doctorow C

in 2012 , Halting State was delicious near future SF. Now most of it is mundane banal  routine day-to-day tech encased soul-less drudgery  that our lives have become. 

Seriously i don't want to hear about any startup doing anything any more. From reinventing the wheel (juice pressers with overpriced tech ?) to the insanely difficult AND unnecessary - driverless trucks driving in a convoy (trains anyone?)

enough of everyone and everybody coming up with 'new' things, which are anything but. 

also the Hyper-Suffering-Drive  that powers the economy needs to go. The princess is always in another castle, but just eat this burger buy this house this car this wacko protein bar or shake or this salad made from lawn mowings marked up 10000% .....

Doing a job that you have no feel for, in the hope that some marketer will persuade someone to spend $ on , is the root of all evil. 

Feed that troll and it metastasizes (turchin!)  to the point that everyone is running on a treadmill turning out turds feverishly   that   Central Marketing Committee believes is shovable-without-gagging to some segment of the population. 

And you consume the party propaganda  ads, drink the kool-aid and spend your $ on it 

and round and round it goes. GIGO

Benjamin Hoff :
"And so, after two or three centuries of pushing, pushing, and pushing the once-fertile earth, and a few years of depleting its energy still further with synthetic stimulants, we have apples that taste like cardboard, oranges that taste like tennis balls, and pears that taste like sweetened Styrofoam, all products of soil that is not allowed to relax. We're not supposed to complain, but There It Is."

No one thinks of writing ,say, Java code, and having it compiled for a Golang runtime, or javascript compiled into kotlin. 

C platformised servers ,but at compile time.

The JVM platformised servers at runtime, with its WORA

 It's time to platformise program runtimes, don't you think ?

maybe its time to bring fire down from the gods, and give programming to the people. write code in a non-magic language, and make your devices work for you.make your files work for you.  then maybe we'll get closer to our molecular assemblers and nano-bots crawling your veins eating up cholesterol and killing invasive pathogens,then maybe we'll get cold fusion and the Epstein drive

until then, boycott the lie sold you in the name of tech

 grist for my procrastination mill

a reading of King Lear, accompanied by Gutenberg Galaxy.

Coincidentally downloading the former on Gutenberg.org

one of the only places where i hear someone say 'default state of oral societies is terror'

maybe help understand india

2001/cosl adventures

project gutenberg ( TK told me about it. Joy of WOrk also)

sacred-texts

liar's poker(book)

voidspace.org.uk (most of it is now gone)

 _au gratis_ : a latin phrase meaning sprinkled like the cheese the waiter puts through through the grater

 i am guessing it takes around 400 to 500 ping pong balls to fill up the space a seat takes in a plane...

starting from the floor all the way into the overheard space

 chess is a game of no hidden information

doesn't make it easy

it took a supercomputer like deep thought to 'see' all the information

and even then it lost  to kasparof, 

not once, many times

poker is a game of hidden information

so is kriegspiel

or battleship

verbing a noun

verb : a word describing an action .

verbing : a sin for which you'll pay in the afterlife

verbing a noun : a sacrilege. get the stones and pitchforks

 https://web.archive.org/web/20130729203423id_/http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail3773.html

kathy sierra on how to kick ass

this is the most awesome thing ever

 if cory doctorow retweets your joke, are you literally famous ? literarily famous ? literary ?

in my dreams i get a lot of awards from impressed citizen committees, sometimes an oscar or a nobel prize... no biggie

most recently though , i've started noticing that the person giving me the award is also me.. feels like even my dream-conscious doesn't believe that others would give me awards ....

 while the world's the same, it's divided among 7billion souls today. and even though it's not evenly split per head, the combined power of 7b to harvest it is seen

 Foody buddy tourism - visiting friends to see what their fodoy buddy neighbors .have to offer

Greek

 Samo burja ,via ranprieur,  recommends reading republic,peloponnesian war, on war, his book and one other,maybe Aristotle. 

Recommendation is that reading these allows one to make sense of the news

Wondering what men in  sheets knew 

Watching percy Jackson lightning thief 

Love the whole Greek setting,  Greeks were the original heroes

Original collapse guy was jared diamond then tainted

Tainter made more sense, but burja is a lot more chewable

The central premise appeals to me, collapse by inefficiency, knowledge loss ...

Bullshit jobs seems to tie in beautifully with this - the last phase before collapse leads to a rise in bullshit jobs as people dont want to recognize collapse nor question the validity of their lavish  income and plush lifestyles,while the other end of the line falters and dies

 it's hard to persuade someone  to do zazen, because there is no reason to do zazen.

those who do do it, find the experience to be very real.

so , people must be tricked into it.  this seems immoral.

however, those who don't do zazen are deluded, and we must use their delusions ,or the effect of it to persuade them

zazen is an end in itself, but unless you know this from experience, or rather your gut and spine are conditioned to  this zazen state,  you cannot be convinced to do some

so we say, zazen relieves stress. zen is cool, zazen makes you sharper at stock trading etc..

these are like the  cars that take you to the airport so that you can fly in an airplane ..

When I try to 'work hard', I make the mistake of measuring the endeavour by the amount of sweat and grunting involved. For a knowledge-work task, I measure by the not-happening-ness of it.

It is  easy to confuse the effect with the result. I seem to have developed a tendency to associate not-completing , not-achieving with working hard. It's an easy cop out.

I tend to plan & structure work in an outrageous way such that  it never completes. Then, when I set to do this futile task after binge-ing on some secret-agent based tv series, I feel like I am working hard. Or punishing myself. The rationalisation doesn't get caught . Actual work gets done when someone asks for it. Left to myself, the task is planned perfectly and then abandoned. **

The normal - planning actual work to complete in the given time for an expected result, then doing it -   gets avoided but feels amazing when done. 

Maybe normalising this takes away an easy /within reach /dependable hit, and the novelty is needed to keep it fresh. Solution is to suck it, and seek better sources of happiness - like higher results than completing given tasks such as , say, completing a product ...

essentially the delayed gratification muscle is atrophied beyond recognition.

** solution here is to not plan the task in abstract to the end, but get off the ground in small chunks....

fomo.

when stepping into a task with a probability of failure, there is fear of never coming back to the happy place i started from - the environment, the identity, the fantastic self constructed from hours of day-dreaming and copy-paste-ing from online media and tv..

Ever since meetings have started ,maybe its 1.5 year long fatigue or what, I have 2 months worth of tickets proceeding at a glacial pace

I can jump ahead when someone's talking to me but I need to leach off others' mental constructs....

So far, this blog has been dedicated to things that are completely non-things. I've gone out of my way to avoid putting anything here that is representative. Maybe that was a mistake.

today, I  want to write about diversifying  . here are ideas that i have been harbouring for too long.

1) alternate index of a retail site/ sub site/ amazon mini stores

retail giants have pages optimised for certain things, such as max throughput. there must be a market for others, like artisanal products, products made by certain orgs etc etc

small stores will need more eyeballs

some users prefer cute non flashy store fronts

- newspaper mode store (monocle)

- 3d store

- just a typical retail site but with focus on, say, laptops. - cos on amazon, the spectrum is not clear

amazon purchase lists - this will help 

2) home network purchaser

buy from wholesalers for apartment complex, maybe from affiliate links

3) self help book. seriously, you've read it all

action/result quadrants ( now on

tripod of self

checklist planning

4) stock market speculation

find highly fluctuating stocks of companies with  sound fundamentals

5) redbubble/threadless model (no postergully)

just make art, have the site fulfil it, promote on your own website, just focus on marketing

6) monocle

personal site with  twitter and blog feeds ,games, chat, todo lists, notepad/blogpad, portfolio ,maps etc, for a personal social circle at family level

(decentralize facebook - federated social media )

also a good project todo

can also do personal library with pics

7) ? scale + ai = do what how ? dunno. 

I will come back with more, hopefully, and flesh these out, put them in my violence-of-action gun and fire them

 

the trouble with a big brain

a)

is that more grey matter means higher sensory acuity, and much faster processing within a given time frame. in other words, larger heads perceive more 'tigers in the bushes',  a lot faster, and have more vivid being-torn-to-pieces scenarios running all the time inside their heads.

if you could harness large heads  for positive things ,of course there is huge upside.

it is more typical that these large heads set up demons all over their environment and get tipped into horror story movies in their head. 

 not their fault, brain is wired for simulating disaster.  

so when the subconscious thinks 'how can we avoid the tiger eating me ?', it first simulates all scenarios where tiger-eats-me as well as tiger-doesn't-eat-me, and then tries to pick the latter. however, the damage is done. the mind-man has been eaten by the tiger many times and has felt abstract pain.  Some people have a 'totem' which puts in relief this abstract pain to reality, and lets them off the hook. Others, not so lucky, don't know for sure that it won't happen, and suffer endlessly.

b)

you can run simulations of others  inside your head. superb empathy.

if you don't control it, others' moods are your moods, others' personality , attitudes and behaviours are yours tool. it's like a personality prison . you also have trouble when with more than one person - you flip between cliches. ultimately you don't have a unique personality, only bits of others that you thought were worth emulating, and now you only show up when they do.

c)

watching dr gabor mate on addiction  - rationalising trauma ends up with having to assign personal responsibility to it. if it happened to you ,you caused/wanted it in some way. this cannot co-exist in your brain with the   normal person instincts of success, friends, puppies and ice cream. the first casualty is personality - you do things that are you, and also not you. a bit of the abyss is in you now. 

 so you try to destroy that mind ( here mind is a neural network system of weights that has now assimilated personal hurt along with other goals ) . 

since the mind is invisible,  you try to destroy the brain. 

your mind is now warped, as your actions feed to your image of yourself, and incite further actions.

addictions are ways to escape this pain. 

if this is not clear, here is another attempt. 

your mind knows : a 'good person' is nice to people, works hard towards positive goals.

your body does - being nice to people, working hard towards good grades, or a promotion etc .

your environment : some body systematically does bad things to you that you are not able to control. a harassment, being mean, stealing your work/credit,  and there's no recourse, no one to acknowledge that this is wrong 

your mind : let's reconcile things. If bad things happen to you ,you must've deserved it  somehow or caused it somehow due to failure on your part, or lack of virtue ( I  always thought virtue was something like attitude or moral principles, never realised 'virtue' just mean ability, like arnold has more 'pumping-weight-ability' virtue than you ( I bet that's a word in german ( w-t-f*ck!  Pumpengewichtsfähigkeit)))

no, i was wrong -virtue means 'behaviour showing moral standards', and *greek* virtue   =  ability to excel to max potential, like be the best water carrier, don't worry about being a quarter back ?)

OR

your body : bad things happened to me, i don't feel like working on my work tasks, i need ice cream or alcohol or to sack out instead of working , or yell at kid when she's pestering me to come play

mind : when you take the two things above together,  you'll see that this person does <bad thing> so must be a bad person

once this little event is part of your identity, you are now a double person, and your actions get divergent .

the dark  misinformed part of you either 

a ) starts doing bad things to reconcile with the 'i am bad' "fact" inside your mind, or 

b)  resorts to  pleasure-seeking to alleviate 

         1) the pain of the bad thing that happened to you  , or  

         2) the guilt of   doing a) above  or

         3) loss of success from all the pleasure seeking/guilt avoidance

as you can see, this is a self feeding cycle and grows exponentially without intervention.

in highly crowded regions , personal boundaries are less and people are more borg-y and hence wouldn't mind telling off someone trying to do something wrong, and vice versa. - a person wouldn't try to resort to self damaging action as the self is partly others too ( wouldn't damage state soul machinery, would you ?)

religions try to come up with moral models which allows for the self to accept the hurt and appeal to a higher power for succour and help.

 buddhism has anatman 

but, this cannot be solved by theory alone.

ajahn brahm says you need to treat addicts by engaging the part that is not warped. 

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=addictions

 https://www.verywellhealth.com/understanding-anticipatory-grief-and-symptoms-2248855 

this has been a very unorganized post .

being an engineer, one can see that the suffering inside the head is real. being a 'realist' one can see that it is simply not true and has no reason to exist. the latter doesn't give you a tool to work with, unless you develop strong 'ignorer' muscles in your brain.

again, let-go meditation.

both alan watts and nicholas cage agree - never go to war with yourself, self-improvement is a kind of aggression against the self etc etc