Escape the algorithm
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Today I worked a 13 hour day, got yelled at, dealt with office politics and the worst part of my day was the Uber home. The driver was playing a flute rendition of Unchained Melody.
I love Unchained Melody. It’s a song about love that endures over decades. It’s very catchy. It is awful, in a penetrating way, as flute music.
Don’t google this.
If you’re unaware, there’s a new conspiracy theory moving around the Internet that Roy Jay, an eccentric 1980s comedian, never existed. According to the theory, our memories have been manipulated by AI, so that we believe his existence, making it a deliberate Mandela effect.
This is not true, but the longer, more interesting answer is that it’s increasingly possible with digital technology. Current technology can mass overwrite data and we would never know about it.
Now that we’ve essentially offloaded our cultural memory onto the cloud, how can we tell if anything we didn’t directly experience really happened? Are the dates on some YouTube videos enough proof for you? Are the comments on forums that seem to be from real people enough evidence? What do you do with the vague feeling that it just isn’t right?
Some conspiracies are meaningless; this one offers an early chance to think about how to deal with new technologies. There is an excellent write up here.
Lots of reasons, but the biggest one is that being around people and dealing with their various hang ups is part of being human, and we forget that at our own peril. But also because when you smile at the world, the world smiles back.
The author chose to become kind after a lifetime of bullying, which led them to believe they liked people even more, and I can’t help but detect it’s also because they know what it’s like to not be wanted, and want to stop that from happening to someone else.
The author laments the cultural shift giving people permission to walk away from difficult people and relationships, partly because the destination is to safe, unexamined worlds filled with AI and artificial experiences.
I had to decide to like people. My life didn’t make me do it by default. It was something I had to think about, and choose to do. I’m not being clumsy in my choice of words here, by the way: I think that liking someone, or a group of people, or the concept of humanity, is something you do. It’s an active choice.
There’s a lot to learn in this piece, about bullying, about becoming kind, and about deterring what relationship we want with technology. Read it all here.
The author thinks we could eventually move away from screens completely, which would be welcome relief to parents, internet addicts and office workers alike. The shift will be due to advances in computing which remove the screen entirely.
Increasingly, I envision a world without phones or tablets or computers. A world defined by a more immersive, primarily hands-free technological experience. A future where our children will view screens the way most of us view cigarettes. “You used to look at a screen all day?” they’ll say. “Do you know how bad that is for you?”
I’m not convinced, though the idea of returning to a world without screens completely— at least one which gives us the freedom to focus on each other a bit more — sounds appealing. The link includes technologies the author thinks could lead to this breakthrough.
considering all the content i consume about society’s rapid decline, it’s consistently disorienting to put the phone down, step outside, and look at how little has changed since my childhood.
And more:
we have spent roughly equal amounts of time letting strangers on the internet tell us what the world is like as we have actually experiencing the world on our own
From the comments:
I think we’re starting to see this—people setting fire to “permission mindsets” with extreme prejudice. And seeing “if it bleeds, it leads” bad news for what it is—junk food that doesn’t belong in a healthful information diet.
The point is that the more specific a lesson of history is, the less relevant it becomes. That doesn’t mean it’s irrelevant. But the most important lessons from history are things that are so fundamental to the behaviors of so many people that they’re likely to apply to you and situations you’ll face in your own lifetime.
These five lessons that explain the world are worth absorbing, because you see them everywhere. More here.
During his lifetime, Ross produced tens of thousands of paintings. Yet, only a handful of his works have popped up for sale in recent years. When they do appear, they often fetch $10k+ and attract dozens of bids.
Major auction houses — Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Phillips — have no Bob Ross sales history. Craigslist draws a goose egg. A scan of eBay only turns up 3 sales in the last 6 months, 2 of which are of dubious origin.
Now I want a Bob Ross painting. More here.
What I intend to describe here are some unexpected changes I have noticed in my life, outlook, and general cognition. It is not a surprise that changes occurred – using your brain for new things helps it grow, but the specifics are interesting at least to me. I know some of these changes have been observed in other founders, with whom I now form an unexpectedly close bond. Founders can pick founders from across a room.
More here.
what i stumbled upon wasn’t just a collection of silly memes; it was a masterclass on the language of the ultra-wealthy. under a thick veil of irony, these memes revealed which brands, restaurants, events, and even career choices were deemed cool (more often, uncool) by rich kids around the globe.
More on the embedded language of memes here.
I believe enjoyment is a skill that anyone can improve at. I learned out of necessity: my childhood was unpleasant, and as a coping mechanism, I tried to love, hard, the passably pleasant moments….In my experience, high-level enjoyment, like a sport, is composed of many interlocking micro-skills that must be trained individually, but which reinforce each other.
Learn some techniques for appreciating culture here.
The system, upon detecting a small hostile drone, autonomously launches a small, hyper-fast interceptor drone that detects and tracks approaching hostile drones and “locks on” to them using proprietary advanced AI vision
The intercepting Raider drone follows the target, incapacitates the hostile drone using a mesh net and a parachute to safely lower it to the ground. The whole process, including detection, deployment, tracking and capturing the hostile drone is fully automated removing the need for a human pilot.
The future is here; more at the link.
Since ChatGPT, the “assistant” frame has dominated how we think about LLMs. Under this frame, AI is a helpful person-like entity which helpfully completes tasks for humans.
In this post, I’ll argue for training AI to act as an “amplifier.” This new frame could help us sidestep some potential alignment problems, tethering the AI’s behavior more closely to human actions in the real world and reducing undefined “gaps” in the AI’s specification from which dangerous behaviors could emerge.
Read more here about different ways of thinking.
Some years ago, I saw a painting that knocked my sense of the sexes sideways. It was an 1884 work by an Impressionist named Gustave Caillebotte of a nude figure emerging from the bath — the same trope that Degas or Bonnard so often employ because it allows you to observe a woman’s naked body in motion, absorbed in a private ritual replete with sensual pleasure
Except that the nude that Caillebotte is presenting for our delectation is male, and this gender-switch totally upends our preconceptions about masculine power and prerogatives, about who gets to look at whom doing what.
More here.
A lot of important and commercially viable pre-existing biology that can be translated into real world applications is thus ignored. Here are some things I wish there were more startups working on…
This list of startup ideas is engrossing. Partly because Elad Gil lists what is already being done in the area, and how far along we are with some technologies that read like they’re in an episode of Star Trek. More here; the implications are huge.
There’s something a little odd or eccentric about the English mindset that produces some wonderful, imaginative things….I think it’s perhaps because we’ve been invaded so many times. Perhaps because of the English language itself. English is a kind of brilliant slave patois. We’ve borrowed words from everybody who has invaded us. There are just so many choices and shadings of words and meaning that are to be found in English. Perhaps this has got some bearing upon our thinking as well?
The problem with fantasy at the moment is that most of it is purely escapist. It isn’t fantasy that’s going to tell you about the real world. It’s not using its symbols to illuminate, but give you access to another world that doesn’t have the problems and responsibilities of this one.
More:
It was John Dee who invented America, in that he came up with a plausible-sounding legend by which Elizabeth could claim that America already belonged to England. He wanted to create a world based upon Christian Kabbalah which had Elizabeth I essentially as a kind of moon queen at the centre of it.
In every way, Alan Moore is an independent thinker. More here.
I was self-banishing to Instagram, the only social media platform that did not haunt me, get under my skin, and cause me to feel shortness of breath and numbness in my fingers. I had a theory that everyone was haunted by at least one of them, and which one depended on your insecurities, the type of people who gathered there, and the style of communication its interface allowed. I surveyed new acquaintances: “When you think, ‘Social media is terrible,’ which are you thinking of most?”
More here.
I rarely wear T-shirts or any other apparel that advertises my involvement in the hobby – at least not publicly. I do own a handful of such things, of course, but I mostly wear them as sleep shirts. This isn’t out of embarrassment. If I were embarrassed, I probably wouldn’t have spent so many years publicly documenting my thoughts on obscure RPGs, old AD&D modules, or the ins and outs of Tékumel. At my age, I’m quite comfortable with who I am and how I enjoy spending my free time. Even so, I don’t define myself by my hobbies, let alone feel the need to broadcast my interests in them through textiles.
This is a personal preference, of course. But I do find there’s something just a bit strange and even a little off-putting about wearing one’s enthusiasms like a uniform. It can feel, at times, like a kind of branding, as though we’re walking billboards for our subcultures. I understand the appeal: there’s comfort in signaling shared interests, especially in a world that, particularly in recent years, feels increasingly fragmented and alienating. For many people, these shirts and hats and pins are conversation starters or community badges, small ways of affirming, “These are my people. I belong here.” I can respect that. I really do. It’s just not for me.
This set off a great conversation in the comments, and it applies to many hobbies today.
The US, compared to the rest of the world, is optimistic because it is still the land of possibilities. You can remake yourself here, because we are generally forgiving, and provide everyone many chances to reclaim who they are. We don’t only give second chances, we give third, fourth and fifth ones.
Some of that is because of our size — there are many different Americas in the same nation, and if you fail in one, you pick yourself off the mat, move to another America, and try again. Some of that is from the Judaeo-Christian notion, baked into our nations culture from birth, that while humans are fundamentally flawed they are also gifted with free will and capable of transformation. Nobody is perfect, and while perfection can never be achieved, not at least here in the city of man, you can, and should, work towards it. The US, with its wealth of possibilities, provides many different routes you can take.
From the very perceptive Chris Arnade. Read more about his travels through America here.
Perhaps it’s just nostalgia, but despite having “little to hide,” I recall a better way to use the internet. My interest in the internet as a kid was entirely exploratory, rather than performative. Bored out of my suburban small-town mind, I wanted to play Starcraft and learn random things and chat on IRC with new people around the world who shared my interests. The content-clout-access-alpha treadmill that Packy McCormick smartly observes did not yet exist.
Why was that pseudonymous presence on the internet better? Social media platforms have made all of us minor celebrities, and celebrity is an unpleasant thing. Celebrity psychology is fundamentally anxious, burdening us with constant performance, self-consciousness and self-censorship. We all become shades of Princess Diana, looking over her shoulder for the paparazzi. It limits our sense of self, and our self-expression.
There may be a light at the end of the tunnel for anyone that seeks an escape. I believe we are going to see the opposite of the context collapse of the internet today. I call it identity dispersion, where individuals control the creation, separation and unification of their multiple online selves.
I think this topic will become more and more prevalent as the years go on, and we develop tools to manage our online selves.
There’s no aesthetic neutrality here. These rooms are loud, lived-in, layered. Some lean towards the soft and hyper-feminine, others erupt with anime iconography, but all are united by a sense of unapologetic presence. shelestvetrovki also 3D scans them. The result is a digital fossil of entropy, preserved with all its chaos intact. “Girls always have so many little things,” she says, “the usual camera wouldn’t work here.”
Really neat. Make sure to click the video in the article.
Basement Whatever 