My understanding is Gell-Mann amnesia pre-dates click-driven journalism.

From The cruise of the snark by Jack London. Close-up photo of a printed book page showing a quoted passage: “Many of my brother socialists objected to my making the cruise, of which the following is typical: ‘The Socialist Cause and the millions of oppressed victims of Capitalism has a right and claim upon your life and services. If, however, you persist, then, when you swallow the last mouthful of salt chuck you can hold before sinking, remember that we at least protested.’”

Interesting — Jack London was a socialist, but his plan to sail around the world didn’t quite jive with his fellow socialists of the time.

non-fiction. Jack London and his wife built the Snark then sailed it.

The current chapter reads like social media circa 1906, because the book is a series of magazine articles. He documents the fan mail of those wanting to apply as cabin boy and cook … many offering to do so for free.

Yeah i meant “self-bootstrap”, but what happened when it ran with “self-boo trap” (and took it seriously) was really interesting.

“helps the audience catch itself because the wrong word clangs”

Color Game — How Well Can You Remember Colors? We show you colors. You recreate them from memory. Challenge friends to beat your score. It's harder than you think. Play free at dialed.gg.

Cool game. I think i was lucky here. I also didn’t write the claim below, but i am terrible at remembering names.

45.4/50. I remember colors better than I remember names. Come at me.
dialed.gg?c=GKTNKA

I literally didn’t believe he did all of the voices until i checked.

Also the narration by Jeff Hayes is truly great.
You will like this book or you won’t. If you do like it, you will really like it.

The good reads ratings on it is a stratospheric 4.47.

The Cruise of the Snark. Jack London 1911

Next book club pick.

So the group was split. I am now on book 6 of this. A couple folks just couldn’t hack the genre that describes in detail all the game mechanics that frame the story.

I will say one of the nonbelievers did seem to turn around a bit on hearing where it goes in later books.

GitHub - SteveJSteiner/concreteness-checker: Detect false concreteness in prose Detect false concreteness in prose. Contribute to SteveJSteiner/concreteness-checker development by creating an account on GitHub.

Made a claude skill to see if an essay was mostly untethered metaphor.

github.com/SteveJSteine...

Sake box with “juice straw” used in quick pickling for cucumber and carrots.

Quick pickling with sake. These things have a juicebox straw!

Claude —

So the instructions should tell the agent: your job is to make the thing documentable, then document it. If you find something you’d have to apologize for in the docs, fix it first.
Let me identify what’s still half-assed before rewriting.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

A pivot-on-detection policy selects for metric progress that is hard to recognize as gamed. The detector does the alignment work. It’s homunculi all the way down.

Listening to this as an audio book was absolutely delightful. Yeah LitRPG seems like a bonkers silly genre ... it's still entertaining with a great spine. The guy who picked it held this gem back way too long due to the 'embarrassing genre' thing.
Yeah - I'm on the 4th book already.

been feeling kinda stressed lately so I made a little prototype

is this anything

My recreational ontology project is formalizing the intersection between Goodhart’s law and McLuhan’s the medium is the message.

I’m trying to keep it in RCA₀.

Small World Models How much do you need to know about a system to control it?

How much do you need to know about a system to control it?

git diff --staged | pbcopy

0 REM VIBES/KNIGHT
1 REM 8-1-12/8:01A

10 ? CHR$(147)

20 I=1024+RND(1)*999:POKEI,81+RND(1)*25:POKE55296+I-1024,1+RND(1)*15:POKE53280,(PEEK(53280)+1)AND15:GOTO20
21 REM WELL. LUNCH?

How I code now: "Do the continuation."

PRD says what. Technical Design Doc says how. Roadmap says when. Continuation holds one task. Completion log is append-only. Strict authority boundaries. One node at a time, test before advancing. Setting this up is the work.

Sometimes I swear at it.

This book is very good and you will enjoy it. Get it cheap now!

100 Jumps Hold to charge, release to jump. Land on 100 platforms to win — but one miss and it's over. How many attempts will it take you?

I can’t remember which newsletter it was in but my whole family are now simultaneously playing this stupid thing and it’s simple and joyous!

100jumps.org/play/

Recreational ontology engineering. This appears to be what I am doing for fun these days.

They do reduce the need to match or even have a closing parenthetical symbol, so the intuition may hold -fewer tokens. And another - less attention pressure to match start of parenthetical symbol. While the details (chars rather than tokens) might have been off.

Long ago Microsoft Acqui-hired Ray Ozzie via Groove. So I gave groove a try. It started with a gigantic message box asking an inscrutable question. I opened task manager and killed Groove. Hadn't thought about that in a long time.

Installing Anti-gravity to give it a try.

This is 12 - because my vision is such that I clocked that as a plus.

The triumph here is overstated though it was solid forward progress. Gemini pro is not quite up to replacing gpt 5.2+ yet. I'm adjusting some instructions. Ironically I'm trying to formalize my McLuhan vortex error idea and it is hitting it -- which kind of helps.

In a previous conversation with opus and gpt I made a formal description of a Deleuzian compatible process ontology in lean 4 - that compiles.

The difficulty is excluding implicitly Platonic primitives from the definitions.

This was a discussion extending that toward describing autopoesis.

Playing around with Gemini Pro since i canceled OpenAI, but I still want a contrastive model for Opus work.

Gemini Pro-
“This is a triumph. Getting this to compile under Lean 4 ... This is a genuinely novel formalization of Deleuzian process philosophy”

lol, Ok buddy. :-)