fragments of a dream, august 2022
the difference between surprise, doubt, and uncertainty
Sometimes the Newslettr sends private issues. A few of you have received them on occasion.
Or perhaps not. Perhaps1 sometimes Alex Power2 writes news-laden emails, fragments of which later show up in the Newslettr.
Previously, I have written this type of email up as a Mason Machine. Today, we try putting the abridgement in the “Esoterica” channel.
some thoughts on spiritual visions:
what is the difference between a concurrence and a synchronicity?
we can make our own concurrences.
i have watched a media file. i can rewind and re-watch, and hopefully get the same mental train again.
one of the things was "four times. think it, then write it, then do it twice".
a nice mantra. the mantra of four.
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a second mantra: on matters of emotion, it never comes down to anything more complicated than your ability to count to three.
if there is more than that, you should question the details.
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a third mantra3: give me women, wine, and snuff; until i cry out "halt, enough"
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when one sees a terrible truth, one asks oneself: if i were to not say it, might it make it not happen?
is it pride to think it possible? or merely a failure of willpower to think it impossible?
after some tedious discussion of COVID policy:
but they didn't. they all care more about having a good narrative than saving lives.
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i bet they enjoy it. all those millions of
campaign donations ... from the funerary industries ...one of the nastiest tricks of rhetoric. accuse your enemy of getting paid. bribery. graft.
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yes. er, no. the republicans do not enjoy watching people die of covid because of the millions they get from funeral directors.
that would be ghoulish.
after an off-color joke4:
rule number three: all zombies are communists.
no, no.
there are thirteen rules number three, er, rule number threes. check your runes, as well as your disk LUNs.
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we shall have some CONTEXT for our next email.
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rule number three. all zombies are excited.
the circle continues.
leading off another discussion of “maybe this solar panel idea will take off”:
the dominant mind is lazy, and the submissive mind is confused.
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an Aes Sedai cannot heal herself, only others.
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i have ideas, and then cannot do anything about them.
some thoughts on history and community management:
<<< the common themes:
* the essentiality of the uncertainty principle to a physics-based cosmology
* the impact of the frailties of the psyche on philosophy
* the course of human affairs being less uncertain than people imagine
* the inability of psycho-history to impact the above >>>----
Wikipedia gets approximately 100k edits per day, and has had around 1.1 billion edits since its founding twenty-odd years ago. (bots, talk pages, etc. give enough wiggle room for the math to work out. pi is approximately ten.)
the question: how to get a group of people to review all of them.
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over the course of my career, i have come to realize that i was thoroughly spoiled by the quality of Google's Internal Controls. I more-or-less assumed that any public company (due to SOX) would have similar controls. That has not been the case in the slightest.
one of the controls: "all code must be peer-reviewed". with a second two-person rule for production pushes (this one generally being a soft Chinese wall between SRE and Release Engineering).
the suggestion that every Wikipedia edit should be positively reviewed would get laughed at by ... well, don't make me count votes on the functionaries. the gutter-snipes who populate the talk pages would hate it. the inmates of Arkham Asylum ( née Wikipediocracy.com ) would also hate it, though in more exciting ways. some would promote it as a way to kill enwiki through sclerosis. others would just want to watch it fail.
i don't see it as an impossible dream.
especially if the chaff is dropped before the edit is permanent enough to require review.
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and here Chesterton's Fence emerges.
one of the reasons that Wikipedia suffers for a lack of editors is that approximately every marketing/promotion channel is likely to bring in The People We Don't Want. (the reasons why differ.)
and there are some only-mostly-stupid "anti-canvassing" rules that tend to enforce that.
except i really don't care what rules the status quo has. i make new rules as i go along.
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i run models of history, and do the integration, for "how much of an impact can the average person really make?"
and the answer, always, of course, is "not much".
but, for better or for worse, i am not average.
(( some people call me mean, but "average" isn't what they mean. such homonyms, much bad. ))
"throw some integrals on that blog post. people love math equations they don't understand!"
after some tedious discussion of Andrew Yang:
I did mention that I might get baited into starting the Backwards Party, as a direct insult to Mr. Yang and his supporters. We're going backwards. We are de-populating an entire county of humans, and handing it over to various cats. We're turning off airplanes as a permitted mode of transportation. We are ... not sure how, but surely more Big Solar will be a part of going backwards. Let's have an internet that only travels at 500 mph. Let's have free breakfast at schools, not just for children but also for the parents.
this is one of those nightmares that, fortunately, writing about does not make more likely.
And finally, Stable Diffusion announced the open beta. More on that later. The initial reaction: it feels like the software does a “bag of words” analysis of the text prompt, and fails to pick up on grammar cues. Also, “photo-realism” often fails horribly, but if you ask for an artistic style, it works better.
In a large business, there might be concerns with moonlighting and work-for-hire concerns. While the Newslettr is formally owned and operated by Yevaud Platforms LLC, this is primarily a formality, and there is no need to track the alignment of each document.
the first rule of the Mathematical Proof register is to never use the first-person, specifically the pronoun “I”
this is stolen from Keats; it is one of his early works.
The specific off-color joke: “the final triumph of affirmative action. when they allowed blind people to umpire major league baseball games.”