August 13. My big project this month is going through the blog archives adding visible permalinks. I've also been fixing broken links, doing minor edits, and noticing some of the best posts. This is a full repost of this post from 2015: David Graeber piece, What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun? When industrial age biologists see animals playing, they assume it must have some hidden utilitarian…
August 10. I thought Ask Reddit had a bias against doom, but this thread was not removed by mods: What industry is secretly on the verge of collapsing, but people outside of it haven't noticed yet? And this thread was removed: What product genuinely got BETTER over the years instead of worse? Four more optimistic links. For the First Time, a Cell Built From Scratch Grows and Divides . I continue…
August 7. Great analysis of the implications of AI, Taste Is All That's Left : Ninety percent of every field is bad.... We have now removed the throttle and left the ratio intact. Ninety percent of an infinite output is still infinite. The signal did not get worse. The noise became free, and free noise rises without limit, and every real thing you make now arrives into a sea of plausible nothing…
August 5. Stray thoughts on "apocalypse", a word that points to a lot of things. The ones I like the best are the ones that are weirdest, where reality itself is overthrown. My favorite scenario is the one in my novel, where everyone splits off into their own private universe, and then over hundreds of years we gradually merge back together. Even if we split into only two groups, for example if…
August 4. Just found out from Hacker News that the classic Ray Bradbury short story There Will Come Soft Rains is set today. Also, in the Star Trek universe, 2026 was the start of WWIII. Also, I found out yesterday from this Reddit comment that there is a decent argument for 2026 being the 2000th anniversary of the death of Jesus. Come on, Jesus, do it. I don't believe in the biblical apocalypse…
August 3. Going through my archives last night, I found this 2009 post about the importance of autonomy . An excerpt: American-style "freedom" means you can zip around the world and buy toys and choose from 200 varieties of soda. Autonomy means that as you go through your daily activities, nobody is riding you -- you're not micromanaged, coerced, or denied participation in power. ... The…