A blog, a book, a plan.
It’s now been six years since I wrote Caramel City as a draft in this same blog and lots has happened since then, so I thought I’d put together some words about the situation. What hasn’t happened is me editing or otherwise improving what I considered a rough draft barely worth publishing in this little blog; I sometimes wonder if I will ever come back and actually edit Flancia into something…
Yep, that’s this blog! Maybe. I wonder if this is the last post then. It very well could be. I could get struck by lightning . Or I could just get back to writing mostly in the Agora as I’ve been doing it over the last few years. But something pulls me back here; and then I realize what it is. Some unfinished business, you could say. I’ve been meaning to write about how we will defeat Moloch .
As of [[ 2022-03-26 ]]: An Agora exists. It is https://anagora.org . Flancia Collective exists (update: we sometimes meet on Saturdays). I try to write [[ Wikilinks Everywhere ]], even in platforms that don’t yet support wikilink resolution. Please assume that all links point to https://anagora.org; they can be looked up there, or you can automatically resolve them using extensions. I am back here…
Several people have asked me what I think is the best available open source alternative to Roam currently. I’ve procrastinated writing about this long enough; here go some relatively raw thoughts in lieu of a proper answer. I’ll try to keep this updated. Foam As of the time of writing I believe the best Roam-like is Foam ( https://flancia.org/go/foam ). At least that’s what I’m currently using.…
In Flancia the internet is truly open: they managed to get rid of walled gardens . How they did it is an interesting story. Status quo Let’s take just one example; it should suffice to represent the general approach they took. In Flancia they had a social network – well, they had many of course, same as we do, but one in particular had grown into dominance. People had sort of liked it at some…
I’ve had several conversations with people surrounding go links recently, over on Twitter and Matrix; that made me realize I’ve been procrastinating on writing something about them, so here I am. Procrastination over. Before I lose you, let me tell you outright why I think go links could be interesting or even important to you: They are complementary cognitive artifacts. They are URLs made truly…
Be careful with Twitter , they said. You’ll get addicted. I said: don’t worry, I have it under control. I recognize you can get addicted to social networks; I’m doing this purposefully. I want to investigate how to hack dopamine hacking, in a way: how to use the dynamics that social networks exploit for my own benefit, or (stretch goal) for the benefit of society. I still got hooked. I do believe…
What is Flancia in 2020? Lots has happened since I last wrote here. I continue to try to advance the principles of the Agora, as I can. I continue to have a day job; the day job has been particularly busy due to Covid-19; the product I help maintain at work was affected particularly by it, and I worked long and hard in the last four to six weeks. Nevertheless, I also found the time to think a lot.…
This is a thought experiment that makes the case for Identity Politics as useful and desirable. It was inspired by Sam Harris, a thinker I admire and deeply respect but who I believe is at least partly wrong in his assessment of Identity Politics and other ethical matters related to privilege as it interacts with personal identity. I hope rational-minded people might find some arguments here…
Computer Science and Machine Learning provide an effective vocabulary to talk about mental states. As I go about my life, I tend to think of the computational processes I could be applying to solve tasks. I’m not sure everybody does this as often as I do; probably geeks do it more often? I’m doing it more and more since I started meditating and became more aware of my mental processes and…