• 

  Visakan Veerasamy

  @visakanv

  ·

  Apr 2, 2019
• woke up, glimpsed something before my brain fully loaded, suddenly shocked with the reminder/re-realisation that all learning is a matter of defining and solving problems, soliciting and integrating feedback, it’s that simple, Fuck
• from time to time i get excited abt embarking on a project of reading my old stuff but i always get tired like 10% in and then abandon it, lol  I ask my wiser self for wisdom and he tells me "well obviously this is a large project and needs to be carved up into manageable chunks,
• eople who use the phrase "in the real world" are pretty much always talking about their limited concept and experience of reality rather than the actual real world, which is incomprehensibly massive, complex, and full of exceptions to every rule, and markets for everything
• "the discourse fails in focusing on the content of the insight rather than (formal) nature of the shift occurring at the moment of insight." introspection is equivalent to happiness because both are incidental, they are products of happenstance which are idiotic but work
• allow me to indulge for a second about one beautiful word in the tv show The Bear: "heard"  "heard" is used by kitchen workers to improve coordination. it's like "message received". reduces miscommunication.  - "burger and fries for table 7" - "heard!"  but in the show they exapt it, out of the kitchen and into their interpersonal relationships. I share something heavy and you say "heard"  "heard." period. no ritualised performance of empathic listening. no defensiveness. no advice. just a decisive "heard"  it's solid af
• random fragments and snippets on my mind rn:
• AI is not a young technology. It’s an ancient one.  AI is more appropriately understood as superhistory, not superintelligence  This has application beyond AI. It changed how I view myself and those around me. You are a centaur
• finally figured out something i've been trying to do a long time  "from:visakanv filter:links -url:twitter", to search for a list of links i've tweeted that aren't links to other tweets
• a subconscious calculation i seem to do when dealing with the tremendous amount of stuff that competes for our attention (“try this app! read this book! watch this movie!”) is to ask, will this still be relevant a few years from now?
• feeling quite morose that I can't splay out all 58,400 of my tweets onto a giant 360 degree superdome, with all the threads visualized, and then wave my hands around Minority Report style to delete the clutter and rearchitect the best into a megaweb of megathreads
• it’s ok to be creative just for the pleasure of it. delightful, joyous, a lovely gift to yourself and those around you  that said, if you want to be Serious and go pro, my core recommendation is to define a compelling creative expedition for yourself
• “The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them – especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.”  — Daniel C. Dennett (1942-2024)
• being self-employed is not for everyone, but if you get good at it, it does allow you to avoid the hellscape of jobs  funnily in my last job i happened to interview about a dozen entrepreneurs and what they all had in common was "I'm too X to ever work for someone else"
• i've probably said this before but i wish i could emoji react to my own blogposts as a sort of tagging system. whenever i spend some time in my paper notebooks i'm struck by how tedious it is to "mark up" digital notes and documents
• the stuff you joke about (even ironically or whatever) has a way of shaping your reality so be careful and deliberate with that stuff. a lot of people out here fumbling their own bags by joking about outcomes they don’t want. you might as well joke about the outcomes you do want
• I had this flip recently where philosophical problems suddenly became way less interesting to me. problems that I've repeatedly come back to with fascination, like moral realism vs relativism, or the hard problem of consciousness, suddenly felt like a giant waste of time
• Different seasons of the podcast...  Episodes 0 to 100:  • Completely unknown  • Had to build reputation • Mission: do 100 reps  Episodes 100 to 250:  • Hardest part  • Got distracted by shiny objects  • Doubted if it would actually work  Episodes 250 to 400: • Running downhill • Easier to get guests • Transition from virtual to in-person • Better at craft • More feedback/audience  Excited for the next 150.  Hope this is helpful for someone earlier on their journey.
• I think a cycle of working on yourself and working on the world is important  Too much of the former, and you fall in love with your neuroses and navel-gazing, too much of the latter and you burn out and lose touch with what you really want
• I originally wrote this after thinking through a question someone asked me about how to deal with doomscrolling  Today someone else asked me about how to deal with validation-seeking and I realize it has the same core answer
• while writing today's essay i noticed myself casually using the phrase "my notebooks are full of false starts". the moment i wrote it down it hit me that this is a terrible metaphor carelessly ported over from sports to art, and i've been subtly suffering for it for years lol
• for the past week I tried to write tweets from my body. It already started shifting my relationship to Twitter (I’m having fun) and reduced some anxiety about posting (re-started my Substack)
• when i was a kid i used to be confused by the idea that maybe past generations/civilizations were smarter or more skilled or more effective in some specific ways. i remember thinking... "how do you just... forget better ways of being?"
• making predictions about my own creative process is such a trip. whenever I try to predict what I'll write tomorrow, I'm basically always wrong (re: tomorrow), but i'm basically always right that I'll write about it within say the next 5 years
• I saw this tweet yesterday and I'm still thinking about it.

  Quote Tweet

  

  DoubleBlind

  @doubleblindmag

  ·

  Jun 27

  “I'm only okay with it if it's going to solve a problem,” says Former US Congresswoman Mimi Walters. “I'm not okay with using #psychedelics because you want to go trip and have a good time.” https://doubleblindmag.com/psychedelic-ca
• there are many different kinds of sexy and not enough scholarship about how many different kinds of sexy there are
• the best thing i've done for myself in years as a writer/blogger/notetaker is to use my archives blog as a dump to publish all sorts of stray nonsense, decluttering my workspace + making everything linkable. i feel such a huge relief from untangling this mess
• “improbable” matches can happen if you’re strategic, bold, persistent, ask for what you want, enlist other people in your search   most people don’t have the guts to really do this and follow through, which makes it a remarkably effective filter
• the coolest psychoanalytic discovery is that people unwittingly communicate things about themselves by accidentally inducing feelings in each other. and that this goes both ways between all people in all relationships. and most people are not aware of either direction.
• One of the best ~10 minutes in any podcast -

  @visakanv

  on Infinite Loops with

  @jposhaughnessy

    Paraphrased: "Consider the possibility the current description of your problem is mis-diagnosed. If we have Problems, we either solve them or avoid them. If we can't avoid or solve it, we're probably not thinking about the problem in the right way (mis-framed). Your current way of thinking is poorly fit to the problem, it's misdiagnosing the problem in some way.   To break out of this mis-framing: Try to rephrase and describe the problem in funny, joking ways... and the best ideas come as jokes. Rapid fire, "I can't do x because *joke*". Eventually you'll hit on an insight.  In general: when talking about something you can't help but talking about everything else (revealing what you noticed, what's important to you, what's on your mind, etc)"
• ‘original sin’ is generationally inherited psychological technical debt
• you don’t win big from being the goodest good boy you can be (minimizing negative variance to try and please your internal taskmaster)  you win big by being a bad motherfucker who’s sensitive to feedback (maximizing positive variance in alignment with your deepest feelings)
• everyone gets “stuck” when they are   1. unwilling or unable to define the problem  2. unwilling or unable to solicit the right feedback 3. unwilling or unable to integrate it  it’s recursive all the way through, all the way up and down  that’s “all” there is to anything
• the value of an insight is not the content of what you know, but the essential 'break' which allows you to produce this truth for yourself. it is, as Jonathan Lear calls it, a lucky break, a chance occurrence which loosens something in your psyche, which you can take advantage of
• from:visakanv url:youtube for a list of youtube links i've tweeted
• Visa you might like best Mari Ruti's book The Call of Character. it's a work of anti-self-help self-help that draws heavily on Lacan but presents it for an audience which knows nothing about Lacan, or psychoanalysis, or philosophy
• Two days ago I was journaling about the process of writing from my body and I shared how it feels like here https://intotheliminal.substack.com/p/writing-from
• art is not a race, there is no starting pistol, no finish line. I've been beating myself up about this for years and it's completely the wrong frame! haha
• then, funnily, I grew older, and since I have elaborate records of a lot of things, from time to time I encounter my own past self being sharper than I am now. so... I myself repeatedly come up with better ways of being, and then forget them. change is fragile even when its good
• it's crucially important that i have this archives blog mentally labelled as "the dump" so that I don't feel any sort of obligation whatsoever to make anything in there make any sort of sense
• being a good mom makes a person more attractive to me in similar ways like how someone being good at their job is attractive, someone being a good leader is attractive, being a skilled musician or athlete is attractive. the texture of someone's care inspires me to care too
• it's such a stark representation of one of the deepest, most foundational things that I think is wrong about the world today. this... puritanical(?) notion that "solving problems" and "having a good time" are separate things. evidently the 1500s are still with us
• I also noticed that it significantly removes the problem of ‘what to write about’   I close my eyes and feel into what’s already here. It makes me free to express publicly in a new way
• "my notebooks are full of partial sketches and studies" feels so much better. literally just improved my life satisfaction by changing my words
• I recommend doing an overview/audit of the work you’ve done, and the work of others that you’ve enjoyed. What are the patterns? What do you like about it? Why? What’s missing? What do you wish someone would’ve done already?   Articulating this well can make ppl wanna give you $
• restated: witnessing the micro-details of how my wife artfully manages motherhood, makes me better appreciate what an art motherhood IS, which makes me appreciate moms-as-artists. and i have always loved and admired artists in all their forms
• “how do I doomscroll less” “how do I be less validation-seeking” are both kinda losing frames. The upstream question is: what’s the point of doing that?
• I'd add, for some, a third cycle of not working, too.   A badly aligned not-working cycle would be inertia and not good. But when aligned, its life-changingly awesome for you and everyone close to you.
• i tweeted for many years without getting any responses, but even then I didn't think "nobody cares", I thought "I just haven't found the people who care yet". I kept at it and found them eventually! and now every day I hear from more people who care
• but ok yea he's right fine lol i should have a more strategic approach with a proper overview and "chapters", some sort of segmentation that anticipates i will stop, and particularly, make it easier for myself (another version of myself) to start where previous-self left off
• Carmy says "say more" quite a few times, or enough times that I noticed and loved it. It's empowering without leaning on asking questions which can overload someone or direct the conversation away from what they wanted initially.
• I loved music a lot as a teenager. I think I will always love music until the day I die. But I remember once playing a show with my band, seeing another band perform after us, and thinking… I will never love music as much as those guys. those guys sweat music from their pores
• The point is typically to free you up to do your best work, whatever that means to you. And it’ll be easier to work backwards from focusing on doing what you want, than by focusing on not-doing what you don’t want
• the ability for the bot to generate “5% success rate” tweets for basically free, however, does change the game in an interesting way. It makes it an excellent *collaborator*. Which is exciting to me  Maybe the next iteration of the thing will have taste and feeling but I doubt it
• you basically fail so hard so many times in so many ways that you transcend the whole thing and start to levitate off the ground. you no longer need anybody's advice or validation or feedback or recognition. and in that moment the sparks fly and the crowd goes wild
• I’m lying on my sofa now after putting my son to bed and thinking about my life, and I’m struck by the sense that I feel a bunch of unease and nervousness downstream from the fact that I never quite got around to proceduralizing my stuff in a way that makes small wins easy
• those guys wake up in the morning thinking about music. they go to bed thinking about music. I don’t do that. I will probably always be a B- in their world. And I’m content with that. I still like to play the guitar for fun, it brings me peace
• 6. steve jobs was a big fan of both sony and polaroid (at one point said apple was to be the sony of computers) and once you consider this, its hard to unsee how the iphone is the child of both the walkman and polaroid
• I used to work with someone who would review my work in a draft state and just say “keep going”. It was the best feedback and so validating. No flowery language needed.
• - do not extend mental models beyond what is necessary to win - know what winning looks like, and if you want that - developing your edge is an iterative process - know your edge, and your handicap - edge + handicap are so nuanced, so you really have no rivals. focus on yourself
• the main problem that people have is that the expect that there is this one singular insight which would fix everything, which you have to grind for, there is a piece of knowledge which would cure you. rather, there is no one salvation, but a series of "blessings of more life"...
• Now when we come to poasting though  let’s be real  I’m an A+ poster  always been  I wake up with writing and ideas on my mind  I write essays and threads in the shower, and oftentimes even in my dreams  I sweat words the way those guys sweat music   and… I can’t teach this
• deeply understanding your handicap is crucial to knowing your pitfalls and failure modes.  this is extremely important so that you can pick a domain which minimizes the negative impact and so you know how to get yourself out of situations.  (I found this extremely fascinating)
• a good open question invites people to participate in it, and if you wanna go pro as a creative you’re going to need some kind of participation   sometimes what tragically happens with is a artist dies before someone else frames their work in a way that invites ppl to participate
• 2. i got to hang with some country musicians once. one says, let's get [john] on that track. other guy says: no, he cant do it. i asked why. he said, john only plays live. when you get guys that only play live into the studio, they freeze up. after fifteen years of playing live, they get in their head, they feel like this is the "one" time it really counts, it just doesnt work.  its good to mix up what you're doing as often as possible.
• like, 2010 visa was much more impressive than 2023 visa, because he busted his ass with nothing to show for it, and kept at it regardless. it's comparatively easy to be 2023 visa, he has the benefit of a badass like 2010 visa struggling and sacrificing to build him a better life
• both of these were inspired by a conversation with

  @__drewface

  , where he asked me "Visa, can you challenge me right now?" and I ended up pointing out that some of his stuff could be more accessible. Then I had to look in the mirror and admit that the same is true for me too
• 

  Visakan Veerasamy
• Added a lens to introspection / self-analysis for me: What interpretation, if true, would make me the most uncomfortable?
• trying to reinhabit that state: I think what was mindblowing at the time, which i've since internalized and now take for granted, is that every thing affects every other thing. this can seem "duh", but the question is whether it manifests in your felt understanding of reality
• if you have an existing body of work and you haven’t done this yet I highly highly recommend it: do an audit/overview and ask “what are the questions this work is exploring?”
• 10. in 1184, 60+ nobles from across the holy roman empire met king henry vi at the church of st peter to discuss resolving a feud between a duke & an archbishop  the floor collapsed under their weight, they fell into a cesspit & drowned in shit   (
• in the interest of scenius-building I now issue an open challenge to all my mutuals to QT this tweet with "<name>, explain <your thing> right fckn now, in one breath, standing on one foot" in a 1-page screenshot
• ive studied enough history and culture and participated in enough forums, discussions, etc over a long enough time and talked with enough people about their experiences to have this emergent sense of, oh. every utterance is a proposal. so be thoughtful about what you propose
• assuming you know the best practice of setting realistic goals, let me propose the two you should start with:  1. make the mental shift to consider it productive to maintain the house 2. be intentional with the life force
• 3. knew a guy that was in a jazz trio. he told me if you're not enjoying playing, the audience can always tell. jim davis said the same thing in one of his books - the audience can feel if you're not enjoying it. how you feel about doing the work always comes through within in.
• Juissance  There's a pretty good Wikipedia entry  TLDR:  Pleasure gets complicated by fear and excitement as you approach its limits
• oh yea this is a better word choice. do we get to choose what we’re devoted to? I don’t know. it doesn’t feel like it. not exactly. it’s complicated. feels like a lifetime is not enough time to spend figuring it out
• 4. cant say who told me this one, but its true. if feels good to make the audience cry. i have no idea why. maybe its a subtle flex to yourself or something? i genuinely don't know. but the point is, you can only do that like once a year max. after that it just gets weird.
• but i get bored going over like the little hygiene principles. i would like to really brush all of that aside and get to the heart of hearts of the matter. and i think that is that people lack a sense of conviction in their own sovereignty, their own power to shape their world
• imagine what it feels like to be in in the company of someone you enjoy, or a beloved pet.   this feeling of the moment being easier bc they are there to lighten the weight.   this is what i want to propose as a feeling you can conjure all on your own. this is "the life force".
• the one thing I feel that they didn't touch on is optimizing for survival.  yes, this is how you create big outcomes. but how long can you afford to iterate and make bets for without getting results?  a big problem is that many people attempt to do this without having enough time
• with power comes responsibility, and if you have this narrative that you’re a little powerless worm then you never have to take responsibility for anything.
• how many ppl do you know that haven't gotten their recognition and yet you haven't initiated a coordinated promotion of them/their work — a reputational barn raising — that could change the trajectory of their career by months or years?
• you’re very unlikely to get what you don’t ask for if it’s significant  if you ask for something totally “impractical/unrealistic”, it’ll likely require a bunch of additional work — you’ll have to stay with the ask consistently for months, years, and answer the followup questions
• without realizing it, over time i learned how to bring in this presentness feeling so i didn't feel so alone  for one thing, i got cats. that helped.  but for another, i summoned whoever i wanted to be spending time with there in the room with me. we did it together.
• these days I index my highlights in regular paper books too, which lets me find memorable passages more quickly. here’s McLuhan quoting John Donne’s The Sun Rising, which struck me with the phrase “rags of time”
• 17. solar energy was actually an exciting new technology in ~1900, there were technologists, there were investors, early prototypes, everything looked really promising. then franz ferdinand got shot and the world went mad and churchill’s oil-fired navy set us on petrochem path
• One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of people who have sharpened their intuition through conscious effort had a phase where they made super complex charts similar to this.   It almost seems like a necessary midwit step to get to where you are now
• as time went on the person i brought in didn't need to be so corporeal. i realized they were just a proxy for my needing to feel like what i was doing was bringing value into the world. it's hard to see that at first, when the work feels so temporary and invisible.
• "Aging" is more relevantly viewed through the lens of data exposure, not bodily decline.  Example: if I can impart 5 years worth of experience to you, you just got 5 data years older.  AI can age centuries in days. It can do this due to its vastly superior data surface area.
• how do we loop this back to the original question… oh, i think it helps *tremendously* to have sense of what you’re building over time. a network of correspondence, a collection of ideas… im playing simcity rather than call of duty
• it can be easy to fall into the idea that the Important Work is happening somewhere else, that this is a brief embarrassment away from what will bring us closer to who we want to be  but then the misery of the chore sets in and were we really going to Become in that 5 minutes?
• >that i focus my time and energy on what i want to see more of  This is where I see your suggestion to "start curating your taste" as a hack/reframe.  If people approach the internet with: "I'm making a list of great stuff" then they can't help but drive positive energy.
• 22. jimi hendrix debut album iirc received bad reviews, rolling stones magazine initially called jimi arrogant and pretentious  in 2004 they wrote a new review describing it as divine madness
• 25. there is no single authoritative copy of Marco Polo’s travels. he dictated a bunch of it to his cellmate (from when he was imprisoned for a bit for taking the wrong side in Venice vs Genoa or some italian kerfluffle), and then from there its all remixes and vibes
• 26. speaking of imprisonments, the guy who invented neon lights was a Parisian monarchist who was imprisoned for collaborating with the Germans during WW2. people used to get cancelled way harder
• patience is necessary but yeah you describe the help you need, talk to people about it, ask them what they think, refine how you ask...
• a quick sketch of a blogpost: how to ask for help   http://visakanv.com/blog/help
• we are always imbuing our presence in the world with a background enchantment that impacts, if nothing else, our emotional ties to that thing.   you can assess what feelings you distribute in your home, and address any spaces you currently tie to tedium or annoyance.
• 28. when his narrow simplistic utilitarianism drove John Stuart Mill into a despondent despair, it was William Wordsworth’s poetry that got him out
• 29. dylan might be underrated for how he directly influenced jimi and the beatles to get weirder. steve jobs was a fan too. i love steve’s description of how, when they met, steve worried dylan would be a caricature of himself (like many successful people), but he wasnt
• one enchantment i find surprising is the giving of spare moments to a space, and just sitting and being with it  i do this in my kitchen sometimes  it's a quiet moment, an appreciation  feels something like a cleanse, and a small recommitment to one of my values
• 30. batman was influenced by, a remix of: the mask of zorro + da vinci’s contraptions  superman was influenced by tarzan who was influenced by the founding myth of Rome (remus and romulus nursing from a wolf)
• 31. seeing all people as worthy of basic human dignity is historically a very recent and radical idea. i remember getting whiplash reading something about ancient sumerians or something talking casually about murdering anybody outside the tribe – “theyre not real people” etc
• 32. the world may never have known of bob marley if not for chris blackwell, who started island records with $10,000 from his parents  the idea that $10,000 mightve been a bottleneck to reggae reaching the world makes me wonder what else is bottlenecked thus

104 more annotations...

• I don’t have a philosophy. I have a camera. I look into the camera and take pictures. My photographs are the tiniest part of what I see that could be photographed.

• The difference between expressing and controlling is in your expectations. What do you expect your partner to do? Is your goal to express your feelings or to change your partner’s behavior? Just as the difference between asking and demanding lies in whether you can accept a no, the difference between expressing a feeling and being controlling is in whether it’s okay for your partner to continue her present course of action. Are you demanding, or are you informing and negotiating?

• On AI replacing humans in jobs
• On AI replacing humans in jobs
• Do not hand autistic boyfriends label makers
• I think that any effort to resist AI replacing humans in jobs is doomed to failure *if* the goal of that effort is to maintain the status quo. Humans are already being treated like "artificial artificial intelligence", which is what makes them replaceable in the first place.
• mnl mnl mnl mnl mnl @mnl@hachyderm.io

  @Mae @inherentlee that misaligned label hurts my feelings

• @freakazoid @kirch one area where I feel I can contribute is build and write about building software that does leverage machine learning models that center the user, because it is so very hard to actually find examples and writing about these.

  Both critics and hypebois focus so much on the technology being able to do human jobs, which it per definition can’t, that I feel a lot of the debate is circular.

  In the meantime the shitty products march forward.

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• I’m a teacher and a com­put­er pro­gram­mer, and I often find myself in the posi­tion of teach­ing com­put­er pro­gram­ming to peo­ple who have nev­er pro­grammed a com­put­er before. Part of the chal­lenge of teach­ing com­put­er pro­gram­ming is mak­ing the his­to­ry and cul­ture avail­able to my stu­dents so they can bet­ter under­stand the tools I’m teach­ing them to use. 

  This talk is about about that process.
• be fore­warned that this talk is also about bias in com­put­er pro­grams and about hack­er cul­ture. Maybe more than any­thing it’s a sort of polemic review of Steven Levy’s book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
• the quote here is from an amaz­ing essay called ​“A Non-Euclidean View of California as a Cold Place to Be” by one of my favorite authors, Ursula K. Le Guin. It is about the dan­gers of fool­ing your­self into think­ing you’ve dis­cov­ered some­thing new when in fact you’ve only over­writ­ten real­i­ty with your own point of view.

• in this book Steven Levy iden­ti­fies the fol­low­ing as the com­po­nents of the hack­er ethic.

  • Access to com­put­ers should be unlim­it­ed and total.
  • All infor­ma­tion should be free.
  • Mistrust authority—promote decen­tral­iza­tion.
  • Hackers should be judged by their hack­ing, not bogus cri­te­ria such as degrees, age, race or posi­tion.
  • You can cre­ate art and beau­ty on a com­put­er.
  • Computers can change your life for the bet­ter.

  Now, Levy defines hack­ers as com­put­er pro­gram­mers and design­ers who regard com­put­ing as the most impor­tant thing in the world.
• To me, even though I’m about to launch into a polemic about the­se things, they still make sense in an intu­itive and vis­cer­al way. How could any of the­se things be bad? 
• But it wasn’t until I recent­ly actu­al­ly read Levy’s Hackers that I came to a full under­stand­ing that the prob­lems with the hack­er ethic lay not sim­ply in the fail­ure to exe­cute its prin­ci­ples ful­ly, but in some kind of under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy of the ethic itself.
• This anec­dote relates an event that hap­pened in the 1960s in which a hack­er named Stewart Nelson decid­ed to rewire MIT’s PDP-1.

• But, the tenets and the effects of the hack­er eth­ic deserve to be reex­am­ined. In fact the past few years have been replete with cri­tiques of hack­er cul­ture, espe­cial­ly as hack­er cul­ture has sort of evolved into the tech indus­try. And I know that many of us have tak­en those cri­tiques to heart, and in some sense I see my own process of grow­ing up and becom­ing an adult as being the process of rec­og­niz­ing the flaws in this eth­ic, and its short­com­ings, and becom­ing dis­il­lu­sioned with it.

  But it was­n’t until I recent­ly actu­al­ly read Levy’s Hackers that I came to a full under­stand­ing that the prob­lems with the hack­er eth­ic lay not sim­ply in the fail­ure to exe­cute its prin­ci­ples ful­ly, but in some kind of under­ly­ing phi­los­o­phy of the eth­ic itself. And so to illus­trate, I want to relate an anec­dote from the book. 
• Levy clear­ly views this anec­dote as an exam­ple of the hack­er ethic at work. If that’s the case, the hack­er ethic in this instance has made it impos­si­ble for a bril­liant wom­an to do her work, right. For Levy, the sto­ry is passed off as a joke but when I first read it I got angry.
• The men­tion of Margaret Hamilton in this pas­sage is one of may­be three instances in the entire book in which a wom­an appears who is not intro­duced as the rel­a­tive or roman­tic inter­est of a man. And even in this rare instance, Levy’s fram­ing triv­i­al­izes Hamilton, her work, and her right to the facil­i­ty. She was ​“a begin­ner pro­gram­mer” who was ​“offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned” but also just ​“showed up.” And she ​“com­plained” about it, lead­ing to reper­cus­sions and rep­ri­mands. Levy is all but call­ing her a nag.
• Levy clear­ly views this anec­dote as an exam­ple of the hack­er eth­ic at work. If that’s the case, the hack­er eth­ic in this instance has made it impos­si­ble for a bril­liant woman to do her work, right. For Levy, the sto­ry is passed off as a joke but when I first read it I got angry.
• So. If the hack­er ethic is good, how could it have pro­duced this clear­ly unfair and hor­ri­ble and angry-making sit­u­a­tion?
• The Margaret Hamilton men­tioned in this sto­ry, by the way, is in case you were curi­ous the same Margaret Hamilton who would go on to devel­op the soft­ware for the Apollo pro­gram and the Skylab pro­gram that land­ed astro­nauts on the moon. She’s like a super­star. The men­tion of Margaret Hamilton in this pas­sage is one of maybe three instances in the entire book in which a woman appears who is not intro­duced as the rel­a­tive or roman­tic inter­est of a man. And even in this rare instance, Levy’s fram­ing triv­i­al­izes Hamilton, her work, and her right to the facil­i­ty. She was ​“a begin­ner pro­gram­mer” who was ​“offi­cial­ly sanc­tioned” but also just ​“showed up.” And she ​“com­plained” about it, lead­ing to reper­cus­sions and rep­ri­mands. Levy is all but call­ing her a nag.

• Anyway, the book is replete with exam­ples like this. Just like every page, espe­cial­ly in the first half, is just like some hack­ers being awful and then Levy excus­ing them because they’re fol­low­ing the all-important hack­er ethic.

  So after read­ing this I thought, this isn’t what I want my cul­ture to be. And then I asked myself, given that I grew up with the idea of the hack­er ethic being all-important, what assump­tions and atti­tudes have I been car­ry­ing with myself because of my implic­it accep­tance of those val­ues?

• So first of all the idea that access to com­put­ers should be unlim­it­ed and total. The hack­er Nelson suc­ceed­ed in gain­ing total access. He was enact­ing this part of the eth­ic. But what he did­n’t con­sid­er is in the process he did not uphold that access for anoth­er per­son. Another per­son was denied access by his com­plete access.

  Two, all infor­ma­tion should be free. No one who real­ly believes in the idea that all infor­ma­tion should be free would start a secret orga­ni­za­tion that works only at night called The Midnight Computer Rewiring Society? Information about their orga­ni­za­tion clear­ly was not meant to be free, it was meant to be secret.

  Three, the mis­trust of author­i­ty. The ​“mis­trust of author­i­ty” in this instance was actu­al­ly a hack­er coup. Nelson took con­trol of the com­put­er for him­self, which was­n’t decen­tral­iz­ing author­i­ty, it was just putting it into dif­fer­ent hands.

• But if you kind of unwind the Hands-On Imperative, you can pluck out some pre­sup­po­si­tions from it. 

  One is that the world is a sys­tem and can be under­stood as being gov­erned by rules or code. 

  Two, any­thing can be ful­ly described and under­stood by under­stand­ing its parts individually—divorced from their orig­i­nal con­text.

  Three, sys­tems can be ​“imperfect”—which implies that a sys­tem can also be made per­fect.

  And four, there­fore, given suf­fi­cient access (poten­tial­ly obtained with­out permission)—and suf­fi­cient ​“debugging”—it’s pos­si­ble to make a com­put­er pro­gram that per­fect­ly mod­els the world.
• So, the hubris inher­ent in the Hands-On Imperative is what con­vinced Stewart Nelson that his mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the PDP-1 would have no reper­cus­sions. He believed him­self to have a per­fect under­stand­ing of the PDP-1, and failed to con­sid­er that it had oth­er uses and oth­er affor­dances out­side of his own expec­ta­tions. The Hands-On Imperative in some encour­ages an atti­tude in which a sys­tem is seen as just the sum of its parts. The sur­round­ing con­text, whether it’s tech­no­log­i­cal or social, is nev­er tak­en into account.

• Anyway, the book is replete with exam­ples like this. Just like every page, espe­cial­ly in the first half, is just like some hack­ers being awful and then Levy excus­ing them because they’re fol­low­ing the all-important hack­er ethic.

  So after read­ing this I thought, this isn’t what I want my cul­ture to be. And then I asked myself, giv­en that I grew up with the idea of the hack­er eth­ic being all-important, what assump­tions and atti­tudes have I been car­ry­ing with myself because of my implic­it accep­tance of those values? 
• And there’s always one con­tin­gent in that dis­cus­sion of sci­en­tists and pro­gram­mers who believe that they can elim­i­nate bias from their sys­tems if only they had more data, or if they had a more sophis­ti­cat­ed algo­rithm to ana­lyze the data with. And fol­low­ing this phi­los­o­phy, pro­gram­ming is an exten­sion of sort of Western log­i­cal pos­i­tivism, which says you start with a blank slate, and with enough time and appli­ca­tion, adding fact upon fact and rule upon rule, the map becomes the ter­ri­to­ry and you end up with a per­fect mod­el of the world.
• So what I tell my stu­dents in intro­duc­to­ry pro­gram­ming class­es is this: pro­gram­ming is for­get­ting. And this is both a method­ol­o­gy and a warn­ing.
• The process of com­put­er pro­gram­ming is tak­ing the world, which is infinite­ly vari­able, mys­te­ri­ous, and unknow­able (if you’ll excuse a lit­tle turn towards the woo in this talk) and turn­ing it into pro­ce­dures and data.
• In the process of pro­gram­ming, or scan­ning or sam­pling or dig­i­tiz­ing or tran­scrib­ing, much of the world is left out or for­got­ten.
• So, the hubris inher­ent in the Hands-On Imperative is what con­vinced Stewart Nelson that his mod­i­fi­ca­tion of the PDP‑1 would have no reper­cus­sions. He believed him­self to have a per­fect under­stand­ing of the PDP‑1, and failed to con­sid­er that it had oth­er uses and oth­er affor­dances out­side of his own expec­ta­tions. The Hands-On Imperative in some encour­ages an atti­tude in which a sys­tem is seen as just the sum of its parts. The sur­round­ing con­text, whether it’s tech­no­log­i­cal or social, is nev­er tak­en into account.
• The process of dig­i­tiz­ing audio cap­tures that ana­log phe­nom­e­non and con­verts it into a sequence of dis­creet sam­ples with quan­tized val­ues. In the process, infor­ma­tion about the orig­i­nal sig­nal is lost. You can increase the fideli­ty by increas­ing the sam­ple rate or increas­ing the amount of data stored per sam­ple, but some­thing from the orig­i­nal sig­nal will always be lost. And the role of the pro­gram­mer is to make deci­sions about how much of that infor­ma­tion is lost and what the qual­i­ty of that loss is, not to elim­i­nate the loss altogether.
• This slide is from a paper by Mary Bucholtz, a lin­guist. The paper is called ​“The Politics of Transcription.” And the paper talks about how any­one who has actu­al­ly tried to tran­scribe a con­ver­sa­tion knows that spo­ken lan­guage con­sists of fre­quent false starts, rep­e­ti­tions, dis­flu­en­cies, over­laps, inter­rup­tions, utter­ances that are inco­her­ent or inaudi­ble or even pur­pose­ful­ly ambigu­ous. In the papers, she also argues that there is no such thing as a per­fect tran­scrip­tion. That inter­pre­tive choic­es are always made in the act of tran­scrip­tion that reflect the bias­es, the atti­tudes, and the needs of the tran­scriber. In oth­er words a tran­scrip­tion is an act of for­get­ting, of throw­ing away part of a phe­nom­e­non in order to pro­duce an arti­fact more amenable to analy­sis.
• Sometimes for­get­ting isn’t a side-effect of the dig­i­ti­za­tion process at all. This is JPEG com­pres­sion, for exam­ple. Sometimes for­get­ting isn’t a side-effect of the dig­i­ti­za­tion process but its express pur­pose.
• So here we go. Toward a new hack­er ethic. So, the approach in which pro­gram­mers acknowl­edge that pro­gram­ming is in some sense about leav­ing some­thing out is opposed to the Hands-On Imperative as expressed by Levy. Programs aren’t mod­els of the world con­struct­ed from scratch but takes on the world, care­ful­ly carved out of real­i­ty. It’s a sub­tle but impor­tant dif­fer­ence. In the ​“pro­gram­ming is for­get­ting” mod­el, the world can’t debugged. But what you can do is rec­og­nize and be explic­it about your own point of view and the assump­tions that you bring to the sit­u­a­tion.
• what I want to do is I want to fos­ter a tech­nol­o­gy cul­ture in which a high val­ue is placed on under­stand­ing and being explic­it about your bias­es about what you’re leav­ing out, so that com­put­ers are used to bring out the rich­ness of the world instead of forcibly over­writ­ing it.
• So to that end I’m propos­ing a new hack­er ethic. Of course propos­ing a closed set of rules for vir­tu­ous behav­ior would go again­st the very phi­los­o­phy I’m try­ing to advance, so my ethic instead takes the form of ques­tions that every hack­er should ask them­selves while they’re mak­ing pro­grams and machi­nes. So here they are.
• Instead of say­ing access to com­put­ers should be unlim­it­ed and total, we should ask ​“Who gets to use what I make? Who am I leav­ing out? How does what I make facil­i­tate or hin­der access?”
• Instead of say­ing all infor­ma­tion should be free, we could ask ​“What data am I using? Whose labor pro­duced it and what bias­es and assump­tions are built into it? Why choose this par­tic­u­lar phe­nom­e­non for dig­i­ti­za­tion or tran­scrip­tion? And what do the data leave out?”
• Instead of say­ing mis­trust author­i­ty, pro­mote decen­tral­iza­tion, we should ask ​“What sys­tems of author­i­ty am I enact­ing through what I make? What sys­tems of sup­port do I rely on? How does what I make sup­port oth­er peo­ple?”
• And instead of say­ing hack­ers should be judged by their hack­ing, not bogus cri­te­ria such as degrees, age, race, or posi­tion, we should ask ​“What kind of com­mu­ni­ty am I assum­ing? What com­mu­ni­ty do I invite through what I make? How are my own per­son­al val­ues reflect­ed in what I make?”
• So you might have noticed that there were two final points—the two last points of Levy’s hack­er ethics that I left alone, and those are the­se: You can cre­ate art and beau­ty on a com­put­er. Computers can change your life for the bet­ter. I think if there’s any­thing to be res­cued from hack­er cul­ture it’s the­se two sen­tences. These two sen­tences are the rea­son that I’m a com­put­er pro­gram­mer and that I’m a teacher in the first place. And I believe them and I know you believe them, and that’s why we’re here togeth­er today. Thank you.

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• Introduction¶

   

  GIMP comes with a so-called batch mode that allows you to do image processing from the command line. It also makes it easy to apply the same set of operations to a number of images. We have got a lot of questions on the mailing-lists on how to use the batch mode and this small page tries to explain the basics to you.

• Jimi Hendrix Electric Lady Land in spatial audio is just magic… my fav album of all times maybe and it feels like I’m rediscovering it for the first time.

• overmono.bandcamp.com/track/cold-blooded

  Not procrastitooting at all…

• Simulate a class with 3 pupils and a teacher.

  One pupil is not very smart and is often very confused by the questions and topic. One pupil is quite the smartalec and knows everything, except that he often makes subtle mistakes that are then corrected by the third pupil, who is more cautious and often asks clarifying questions to the teacher.

  The teacher makes sure to address anything that needs to be corrected or clarified at the end of the learning session.

  2/

• ok i have a pretty wild prompt for learning / getting information about something, in terms of "useful data / prompt count" ratio. I often find it hard to get the model to generate a lot of information in one go, and have multiple facets of that information balanced against each other (often it will just regurgitate some kind of meaningless consultant-esque platitudes).

  #llms

  ---

  Not with:

  1/
• the police, joy divisions, new order, the smiths, Iron Maiden, napalm death (ok ok that’s just me), pet shop boys, eurythmics, Phil collins, massive attack, …
• Fuck, I can finally hear the guitar parts on gipsy eyes clearly and it’s even better than I thought it’d be. My fav Hendrix song.

• A learning session consists of the teacher asking a question. This question will be discussed during the learning session.

  Then 3 round of discussions among the pupils and the teacher, all answering and expanding upon that initial question. During each round of discussion, each pupil gets to talk, and the teacher sometimes intervenes or clarifies.

  After the 3 rounds are over, a final message from the teacher that clears up errors and clarifies, and summarizes the content of the lesson.

  3/

• It's not even that this tool might already exist, or that I could have pasted some PNGs together from a webpage.

  It's that I built a tool, for my use case, that I can fix and expand, and that was way more fun than dig through machine stuff I don't care about.

  I used my LLM lathe and my LLM mill and I crafted myself the tool I wanted at the time I needed it.

  This is what I live for.
• lsdxoxo.bandcamp.com/track/dev
• Moritz Von Oswald, Forest Drive West, The Bug, Stingray live sounds intersting
• william basinski ist ziemlich cool, bogdan raczyinski
• Objekt mostly for his production skills. Blawan is some proper techno, Donato Dozzy I like at times but it's a bit high brow, Shanti Celest slaps, LB DUB CORP!!!!! PLANETARY ASSAULT SYSTEMS!!! (luke slater is my hero) DVS1 is a cool dude too

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