Basement Whatever

An interesting theory for better government?

…we should vote for a party based only on our values. The winning party is responsible for choosing an explicit mathematical function that represents how well the country is doing on its values. For example, this function might be “GDP”, or “percent of the population employed,” or “global happiness ranking,” or what have you. Probably, it will be some combination of these things.

The government’s only job is to define what success looks like, and how we’re going to measure it. That’s all the government does. They don’t get to raise taxes, or allocate spending, or appoint judges, or anything like that. They are responsible only to pick the utility function, and to create any agencies that might be required to measure it

The author recommends betting on whether metrics will be succeed or fail based on proposed policies. More here.

With LLMs, we can ask our documents questions. Reading will change:

A static wall of text demands effort for diminishing insight. But a PDF piped into an LLM?…I can chat with it. Extract patterns. Mine underdiscussed takeaways. Highlight blind spots. Summarize arguments. It’s like outsourcing the heavy intellectual lifting (Subjective).

We moved from the oral tradition, to the written word, to the PDF and then the blog and social media. Now we’re giving a voice to the documents we read, like spirits inhabiting books.

Documentation will exist less as content and more as contextual proxies—something to interrogate, not ingest. We’re not building static libraries. We’re building living conversations.

More here.

1. “Apple’s Strategic Bet on the Post-Touch Future.”Apple’s introduction of Liquid Glass is a calculated strategic repositioning that reveals how the company thinks about the next decade of human-computer interaction.
2. “Corporate Ozempic”. “
   “AI is trimming corporate America [by]…picking off individual tasks and augmenting teams with more capabilities.”
3. “The value of good management.” Strong managers retain good people and actually increase earnings of those they manage. More here.
4. “Being Poor.” A healthy dose of perspective and bubble-bursting. Be grateful for what you have.

1. Sources of inspiration for Unknown Armies (Reddit).
   Unknown Armies is a roleplaying game about modern paranoia, Jungian archetypes, and an occult system that focuses on class. It is, in a word, really interesting. I got a lot of mileage out of this link, which leads to movies and TV shows dealing with the secret intrusion of the supernatural into real life.
2. “The Serendipity Machine: Notes on Using Twitter.”
   Some guidelines for using Twitter as a superpower – meeting people, getting questions answered, learning. It covers how difficult it is getting traction at first.
3. Caesar’s Messiah.
   Write-up of a fringe theory that the New Testament was written by imperial Rome as a pacifist philosophy to subdue Judea. It’s nonsense, of course. But interesting nonsense.

The problem that the Vampires’ Castle was set up to solve is this: how do you hold immense wealth and power while also appearing as a victim, marginal and oppositional? The solution was already there – in the Christian Church. So the VC has recourse to all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented, and which Nietzsche described in The Genealogy of Morals. 

More here.

1. “20 Albums I’d Save.” The ever-reliable busybody with a list of deep cuts, some I’d never known existed. Conan the Barbarian appears.
2. “Should the Bus be Free?” Sometimes people approach a question from a different angle and find a better result. This article is one of those times. Brings to mind this quote about advanced cities, with which I happen to agree.
3. “The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life that Really Works.” Timeless and functional.
4. “The Real Information Inequality of Our Time.” Infovores are living their best lives.

1. Politics is the Mind-Killer. It really, really is. It activates so many built-in software programs that prevent you from seeing things clearly. There are strategies to keep a clear mind (thinking in bets, developing your own political philosophy) but none of them are easy. “If you want to make a point about science, or rationality, then my advice is to not choose a domain from contemporary politics if you can possibly avoid it. If your point is inherently about politics, then talk about Louis XVI during the French Revolution.” More here.
2. Resumes are Dying – Here’s What’s Replacing Them. Everyone I know who is hiring is dealing with the same thing – a deluge of resumes, often AI generated, often not relevant. Job-seekers aren’t to blame; this is what happens when applying is easy and digital. This creates an opportunity.
3. Considering “mythopunk” (X). People have argued that a rise in mysticism is coming, an idea I happen to agree with (even though I lack evidence). Enter mythopunk?
4. “Mystic Union: An Essay in the Phenomenology of Mysticism.” Speaking of mysticism – here’s a discussion on what mysticism is, and the two forms it takes.

The Corrupted Blood incident (also known as the World of Warcraft pandemic) took place between September 13 and October 8, 2005, in World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Blizzard Entertainment. When participating in a certain boss battle at the end of a raid, player characters would become infected with a debuff that was transmitted between characters in close proximity. While developers intended to keep the effects of the debuff within this boss’s game region, a programming oversight soon led to the debuff becoming an in-game pandemic that spread throughout the fictional world of Azeroth.

From a real incident that occurred in World of Warcraft due to an in-game bug. More here.