Gordon
@gordonbrander
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Everything around me was someone's lifework.
Liminal Threshold
Joined November 2006
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It’s a race between miracles and civilizational collapse.
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They did it. Those crazy architects did it. They fixed modernism.
New architecture style just dropped … mass timber brutalism
By Charlap, Hyman & Herrero, Montana
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Thinkcels: “logical”, “being smart”, “high IQ”, grinding for basic insights.
Dream rotators: “sleep on it”, long walks, “unconscious cognition”, answers revealed to you in a dream.
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“LLMs don’t arrive at the answer by logic, it’s purely probabilistic”
My friend, have you considered your own logical faculties may be probabilistic? What if things like “logic” emerge from probabilistic processes?
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“The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise.” (Dijkstra, 1972)
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For the next 12 years, and maybe forever, only two stories will matter: climate and the engineering we use to adapt.
Everything else is downstream.
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Map of the internet, 1973
Going through old papers my dad gave me, I found his map of the internet as of May 1973.
The entire internet.
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I am literally begging web3 identity/reputation/credential maximalists to read Seeing Like a State.
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You can’t measure demand for a bridge by counting how many people swim across.
Infrastructure unlocks new demand and value that previously could not have existed. Literally a bridge to new value.
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llms can never “do” “anything” because “doing” “things” would require that they have a mysterious “essence” which I alone possess but also refuse to define
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babe u ok? you’ve barely touched your bowl of ancient cuneiform tablets
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HTML was invented to accelerate the sharing of science papers, and then grew into a platform for shipping full-fledged apps, but we are still sharing science papers via 8.5x11” PDFs in an era of ubiquitous networked 5” screens.
The fact that most research papers are published as PDF, but not HTML is a real design and accessibility issue.
Found a paper on design research that looks promising, and is freely available. But 3 vertical columns per page?!? Ouch.
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Got Wolfram-pilled reading this excellent post.
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I need to start getting serious about collecting alpha testers for Subconscious. Reply to this thread if:
You like tools for thought.
You like open protocols.
You want to own your data.
You’re willing to be open-minded and patient as we build the plane in-flight.
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semweb researchers fear a “hard semantic takeoff” scenario where a succession of ontologies bootstrap yet more perfect ontologies at a superexponential rate, until we find ourselves supplanted by eternal Platonic Forms that care for us as little as we care for our own shadow.
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Dune is NOT a hero's journey. It's a tragedy about someone trying to control the future and getting swallowed by fate instead.
Frank Herbert: "Heroes are painful, superheroes are a catastrophe."
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just make things.
make a lot of small things.
then sometimes a big thing.
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There’s a missing solarpunk design movement somewhere at the intersection of metabolism and earthships.
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“A series of problem-solving experiments reveal that people are more likely to consider solutions that add features than solutions that remove them, even when removing features is more efficient.”
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Imagine a language where every concept required a unique word and you can’t combine words into sentences. That’s GUIs.
Every user interface is a programming language already.
It just so happens that the majority of them have the poorest of grammars, which is to allow you to manually write out every concrete instruction. No reuse, no abstraction, no transformation.
Straitjackets for the mind.
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A Technique for Producing Ideas:
Completely immerse yourself the a topic for a day. Surround yourself with it. Read nothing, watch nothing else.
Then...
*do nothing*
*don't think*
Take a long walk. Shower. Sleep on it.
Soon...
Idea!
Works every time
Thinkcels: “logical”, “being smart”, “high IQ”, grinding for basic insights.
Dream rotators: “sleep on it”, long walks, “unconscious cognition”, answers revealed to you in a dream.
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Excited to share we've raised a seed round for . Very lucky to have found investors
@betaworks
and
@blueyard
who believe in our vision of an open, decentralized, worldwide thought graph. 🖖
Subconscious - Transforming the whole internet into a Tool for Thought.
Founded by
@gordonbrander
and Chris Joel
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What if most of what we experience as cognition is not happening “in” the brain, but is embedded in the structure of language itself? Language as extended mind.
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“Writing is thinking. Learning to write trains you to think.”
Writing is narrative. Learning to write trains you to *narrativize*.
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imagine experiencing this but the only word you have to describe it is moo
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Why isn’t interoperability more common between tools for thought?
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Very true, in my experience: “A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox”
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What's going on here? The Mechanical Turk (fake) pranked inventors into making radical technological advances (real)... Which means all these things were already possible, but they didn't seem plausible.
The Mechanical Turk expanded the range of the plausible.
@natural_hazard
Oh my gosh. I had to look it up, and not only is this one true, but ADDITIONALLY the Mechanical Turk indirectly trolled Alexander Graham Bell into inventing the telephone
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The easiest thing always seems to be to add another feature. But each feature you add interacts with other features, often increasing complexity exponentially, not linearly.
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Index cards are pretty nice cognitive technology. We forget, because spreadsheets and databases obsoleted most of the institutional use-cases. But they're still very useful. Thought legos.
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dang we did it we built a decentralized protocol this is the craziest thing I ever built
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So
@pieratttt
just sent over the finished logo/branding for Noosphere protocol. I'm sweating 🥵🥵🥵
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Noosphere, a protocol for thought
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Cryptocurrencies are unintentionally catalyzing a shift in our social understanding of money, from Kegan stage 4 (market = natural law written in stone) to stage 5 (self-authoring).
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Something I'm playing with and prototyping for Subconscious... Geists!
Geists are little bots that live in your Subconscious. They do useful things... finding connections between notes, issuing oracular provocations and gnomic utterances.
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it is difficult to get a person to understand second-order effects, when their salary depends on their not understanding it.
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Systems fool us by presenting themselves as a series of events.
– Donella Meadows
recorded these birds hoping to capture their flocking behavior, but was pleasantly surprised by how much they’re doing this in context of air currents
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People don't want to buy a quarter inch drill. They want a call to adventure, to encounter a threshold guardian, then cross into the unknown, undergo trials and failures, die, be reborn, atone, receive a gift from the goddess, and return home as the same, yet a changed person.
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We will be stuck until we learn to talk about feedback loops as fluently as we talk about linear causality.
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It occurs to me there is something fundamental going on with copy/paste. It is *the* basic mechanism of end-user computing.
Copy/paste reflects deep truths about the medium of software:
Unlimited copying at zero marginal cost.
Permutation.
Composition.
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The unreasonable effectiveness of hyperlinks
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Releasing Stable Diffusion into the open has completely changed the energy around AI.
Good example of how permissionlessness provokes innovation.
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If you want a vision of the future, imagine a computer removing the issue of skill and replacing it with the issue of judgement—forever
The great benefit of computer sequencers is that they remove the issue of skill, and replace it with the issue of judgement. - Brian Eno
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Finite players play within boundaries. Infinite players play with boundaries. (James Carse)
Artists installed seesaws at the border wall so that kids in the U.S. and Mexico could play together. It was designed by architect Ronald Rael.
Beautiful reminder that we are connected: what happens on one side impacts the other.
🇲🇽 ❤️ 🇺🇸
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👀The fate of the world (or at least millions) rests on a few hundred people, mostly located or trained in Vancouver & Klosterneuburg, Austria, & working at lab benches, who know how to make the lipid nanoparticles that protect mRNA vaccines until they can enter human cells.
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Iron-flow batteries. Another ARPA-E funded breakthrough.
Softbank Energy to buy a whopping 2GWhs of iron-flow batteries from ESS. That's ~100x the energy storage of Tesla's Hornsdale Power Reserve battery in Australia, once the largest battery on earth.
Energy storage is getting real. Non-lithium storage is hitting its tipping point.
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Xanadu by way of Markdown?
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Me: *sobbing* you can’t just make everything a token
Crypto: *pointing at me* token.
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Best books I read in 2019:
Systems Generating Systems (Alexander)
Computational Design Thinking
Origins of Wealth (Beinhocker)
Evolutionary Design by Computers
Creative Evolutionary Systems
Designing an Internet
Energy and Civilization (Smil)
Political Order and Political Decay
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“The myth of the objective”. Applying insights from curiosity-driven AI algorithms to question the notion of objective functions in general.
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Plausibility is a failure of imagination (Clarke's 2nd hazard of forecasting).
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The web’s killer combo move is multiplayer + no-install + URLs.
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Core HCI insight: things that users need to understand and control should be given an object metaphor.
The web does not give data an object metaphor. Ergo, the web does not want users to understand or control their data.
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What if the OS never had copy/paste?
Weirdly easy to imagine. It’s a “glue between” feature. Literally invisible from a UI perspective, and hidden behind a keyboard shortcut. Hard to retrofit, easy for designers to shrug off. Almost ended up without it on mobile.
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Scale is key when it comes to reality distortion bubbles:
1 person = clown
100 people = cult
1 million people = culture
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Everyone pointing at different parts of the feedback loop and shouting “no THIS is the root cause!”
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Can't Tweet this enough. Wikipedia adds 3D model support!
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Coordination technologies...
Instincts (fairness, cooperation, etc)
Charisma (bands/authoritarianism)
Sheer force (gangs/empires)
Lineal tribes
Religion/ideology
Bureaucracy
Democracy
Markets
Networks
What else?
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Caveman: “Sure, a wheel can simulate walking, but a wheel can never *truly* walk.”
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Really, I've spent ~ 10 years repeatedly trying to design something better than a wiki, only to discover, at multiple levels, these invisible illegible emergent magic qualities-without-a-name that are difficult to produce, but which wikis generate effortlessly.
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Focusing on structured data when GPT-3 exists feels like solving yesterday’s problem.
Think sloppy.
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Pretty good synthesis of the state of web3
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It's so funny the extent to which AI innovation has been gated on what PMs in the Bay are able to imagine + generate for blog posts. Teddy bears and astronauts on horses.
One good-enough open-source model and we get several years worth of pent-up innovation nearly overnight.
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"One in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest." (Bucky Fuller)
Gratitude to everyone who had a part in making the vaccine happen this year.
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Slouching toward Xanadu: a roundup of block reference mechanisms
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Subconscious alpha-1
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Many of the smoothest web app experiences (e.g. Instapaper) aren't react-based SPAs. They're just old-school individual pages served over HTTP, with light scripting on top.
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Natural language is a UI for navigating high-dimensional spaces.
-
@DavidSHolz
to me, some months before he built
@midjourney
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I want my systems to be technically rigorous at the core so I can be technically lazy at the edge.
The deeper the stack of well-engineered systems, the more expressive my dumpster fires can become.
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IMO most takes dismissing LLM intelligence as anthropomorphizing are themselves anthropomorphizing.
Intelligence is getting information and doing something with it. This doesn’t need to look anything like human consciousness, and often doesn’t. A rainforest is intelligent.
<clutching my blankie as the bunker walls turn into paper clips> it’s not real intelligence. it doesn’t understand things. it’s not real intellig–
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If it can't reprogram itself, it's an appliance.
If it can reprogram itself, it is a computer.
If the user can reprogram it, it is a personal computer.
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Gaming is a heatsink for elite overproduction.
What's the best theory on why games have such a low cultural footprint despite the incredible economic prowess?
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Small brain: crypto is fake money.
Big brain: wait... what if all money fake?
Galaxy brain: money is something we imagine together, and can be reimagined to accomplish a plurality of goals.
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at last... a product to fill the void left by the death of god
The first person to walk out of the Apple Store with their Apple Vision Pro gets a big round of applause 👏🏻
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The insight from cybernetics that a system doesn't end at object boundaries, but includes everything that supports the continuance of that system.
The extended phenotype of a living system includes the water, air, trophic network, ecosystems that support that living system.
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Accidentally catching a glimpse of web3 evolutionary eldritch energy
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What are your favorite creative prompts and provocations? What gets you unstuck? What do you ask yourself to spark new ideas?
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