design code @vana | folly ~ persist | mise en schema
Joined February 2009
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Apr 13
The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure.
— James Joyce
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“There are not even such languages as classical Latin or early modern Irish. There is only Latin-as-written-and-spoken-in-the-Rome-of-Cicero and Irish-as-written-and-spoken-in-sixteenth-century-Ulster.”
Macintyre on language as standard of thought in a community.
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It would seem Nagel, writing for Wittgenstein, would agree: "if a lion could speak , we could not understand him. Translation between languages requires translation between lives"
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Language-in-use-as-community as the invention/acquisition of conceptual resources
So Jaynes bicameral consciousness was not just a psychological state but a linguistic-cultural world whose conceptual resources radically differed
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Linguistic resources are also conceptual resources. Of course.
Macintyre argues it is not merely English, for eg, that warrants such access but Irish-as-written-and-spoken-in-sixteenth-century-Ulster.
“How far can he or she pass as a native?”
“Limits to the possibilities of speaking otherwise than in accordance with the dominant beliefs of such communities are set by the language-in-use of those communities”
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Saas productionises being right within some domain. The i/o bounds are necessarily finite.
LLMs productionise being wrong. The written word can be endlessly paraphrased.
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Jun 12
When Debbie Harry starts I Want That Man with I wanna dance with Harry Dean, she's talking about Stanton.
The world has cool things in it, fables, myths and so forth. X is not the place to discuss it.
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Jun 5
LLMs return the voice of the gods not as bicameral narrative but external hyper consciousness by answering when a person summons a question over receiving an inner voice.
Not from within but from outside. Amplification without humbling. Without resistance.
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Jun 9
This is so so cool. Bloom's 1:1 tutoring via end user programming. You can just learn stuff.
Jun 8
I poured my 10 years of teaching experience into a skill.
It's called /teach, and it can teach you anything.
Here's how it taught me to solve a Rubik's cube:
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Jun 6
language/code/prompts/specs become world-making when they are bound by datum, joint, sequence, and resistance
datum: what gives orientation?
joint: where does consequence bind?
sequence: what must follow from what?
resistance: what cannot pass?
(context is under all this)
Jun 5
Using agents effectively requires embracing their stochastic nature and setting up a framework for them to reason rather than giving them a pile of rules.
Harness engineering and knowledge base curation does not (and cannot!) rely on all information being pulled into context—and given things like autocompaction over long horizon work, context is constantly getting blitted so you can't really rely on things being in context either.
In general you want to tell agents your expectations on how/when/what type of context they should seek and how the tools in their environment can help them complete their work.
You need to tell the agents what they are working on, what parts of it matter, and how they should approach tasks. Tell them about common tasks for the things you’re working on and where they can learn more about them. Make your agents collapse a prompt they are given into a paved workflow.
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Jun 6
this is the difference between production (the center holds and recursively returns) vs rendering (slop ceremony, looks complete, but nothing holds)
Étalon #00: Conditions of Production draws the distinction between production and rendering underlying the Inmachinations and Expanded Field series. What follows is a diagnostic framework for testing whether anything—system, text, image, institution—was produced at all.
covidianaesthetics.substack.…
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Callum retweeted
That’s exactly where my mind was going. “What is forbidden?” struck me as a local answer to a more general question. Your language of scope and friction gets at the same thing from the engineering side.
This is exciting.
One more thing: we both seem to be circling that resistance may be the most general category of the four. Datum gives orientation, joint gives binding, sequence gives continuation—but resistance determines the shape of the possibility space.
Which raises an interesting possibility. Look:
Datum: where am I?
Joint: what connects?
Sequence: what follows?
Resistance: what shapes the space in which any of these questions can arise?
If that’s right, resistance starts to look oddly fundamental. The others all describe <relations within a space>; resistance describes <the conditions under which the space acquires shape at all>.
The implications are riveting.
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Jun 1
Forgot: Anatomy of a Fall. Probably the best recent film I've seen,alongside Aftersun. Highly recommended.
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May 4
The sentence has no author. The world will be Tlon. (Or Hamlet's ghost).
Language runs forward under constraint. Coherence appears after the fact.
No one authors Tlon locally. Everyone advances it one plausible token, citation, interface, policy, law, code & shared idiom at a time.
The improv stage, the transformer, the inner monologue — same loop, three settings, three constrainers. But only one compressor. The thinker is the compressor.
The sentence is not in mind before the thinker runs language. Words appear from outside. The thought is being negotiated by the language under the constraint that each next move must keep things compressible, must not stop the rolling juggernaut of just-in-time makes-sense-ness. The wetware struggles and the struggle is the compression.
Pause, stop. Makes enough sense, you-know-what-I-mean? (Can you help me understand what I said? I was not the author, the language just came through me, "I" has no idea, so we must agree or delete that sentence to claim authorship. So, let me ask, was that pattern of shape I threw at you interesting to you?).
Ficciones stumble into names. Friction takes those names into being. Names pointed at socialise the schema. Eventually, generative phenomena collapse under naming. The world becomes Tlon when compression replaces encounter: "Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels."
Apr 25
Example of a compressor running forward one token at a time, rewarded by the compression-progress its output produces in another compressor running forward, in parallel interplay w others doing same
The improv stage, the transformer, the inner monologue: same loop, 3 scenes
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May 4
But JLB, I query you. Language might be chess, but Angels bring the names (just like Cassirer said)
Angels > “momentary gods” > naming
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