Psi Gate

Go through, my children! The time of miracles is upon us. Let us cast off sin and walk together to the Garden of the Lord. With God’s mercy we shall meet again on the other side.

 —Sister Miriam Godwinson, “Last Testament”

Propositions of wealth

1. Wealth is whichever input that helps one produces/procures a set of things that one value.

2. Wealth can produce intermediaries that are also wealth, i.e. follows #1.

3. Things that one value are not necessarily wealth; if no things are valued, then there could be no wealth.

Eternally beautiful

When I think about travel in my mind, I see a girl on a boat, scantily clad, eternally beautiful, hair blowing in the wind. She has no problems, no fucked up love life, no issues with money. It’s just an endless adventure with the promise of late night kisses and skies filled with stars.

 4 ways travel has hurt me

The Long Dark

You wander the long road to observe the quiet apocalypse and chronicle the passing of an era.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, judges would be sent out from Westminster every seven years to adjudicate on any disputes that had come about since their last sojourn. In 1292, in Shropshire, Alice Knotte complained that Thomas Champeneys ‘detaineth from her seven shillings in money and a surcoat of the value of three shillings’. ‘Alice can get no justice at all,’ she protested, ‘seeing that she is poor and that this Thomas is rich.’ She implored the judge: ‘I have none to help me save God and you.’

Alice then might be Alice today. What should she do? She cannot simply take the seven shillings from Thomas. Not only does the law forbid it, Thomas’s wealth means he probably has the power to take it back (or worse). So without access to a court, Alice has to rely on his goodwill for her money and her surcoat. This shows the first reason to care about access to justice, by which I mean being in a position to have your legal claims heard and enforced by a court. Such access is necessary if our rights are to have real content; without it, the rich and powerful can exploit the poor and weak.

 Necessity or ideology

Writing's on The Wall

How do I live? How do I breathe?
When you're not here I'm suffocating
I want to feel love, run through my blood
Tell me is this where I give it all up?

Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice

On his retirement Fisher advised Harold Macmillan against appointing Michael Ramsey as his successor. The conversation, as reconstructed by Ramsey, went as follows:

Fisher: I have come to give you some advice about my successor. Whomever you choose, under no account must it be Michael Ramsey, the Archbishop of York. Dr Ramsey is a theologian, a scholar and a man of prayer. Therefore, he is entirely unsuitable as archbishop of Canterbury. I have known him all his life. I was his headmaster at Repton.

Macmillan: Thank you, Your Grace, for your kind advice. You may have been Dr Ramsey’s headmaster, but you were not mine.

Macmillan duly appointed Ramsey, who was a reforming archbishop, making his mark as a supporter of the liberation of homosexuality, as a strong opponent of apartheid and of the Smith regime in Rhodesia, and as an influential voice opposing curbs on immigration for Kenyan Asians.

Mary Bennett, Oxford 

"Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen-eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandaled feet."

There is a beautiful scene in The Illusionist: a gust of wind sweeps through a darken room and turns through pages of a book. The resulting shadows, rising and receding, dance on the wall to the flickering illumination of the outside street lights.

Whenever I watch this scene, I feel a deep sense of joy, and then sadness at the fleeting moment of wonder.

Illusionist Finale

10 Upscale Halloween Candies You’ll Want to Keep for Yourself

Self-Aware Machines

Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.

—Immanuel Kant,

“Critique of Pure Reason”, Datalinks

ZFS tracker

ZFS is a very nice combined file system and logical volume manager. I have been using it for the past couple of years. I follow the development discussions and find some of them fascinating: a very subtle bug became the first time for the project in its history to contain a major data lost issue in its production release; a few scenarios and drastic implications on changing a default code.

Digital Sentience

We are no longer particularly in the business of writing software to perform specific tasks. We now teach the software how to learn, and in the primary bonding process it molds itself around the task to be performed. The feedback loop never really ends, so a tenth year polysentience can be a priceless jewel or a psychotic wreck, but it is the primary bonding—the childhood, if you will—that has the most far-reaching repercussions.


—Bad’l Ron, Wakener,
Morgan Polysoft


“Computers with personality”

Pre-Sentient Algorithms

Begin with a function of arbitrary complexity. Feed it values, “sense data”. Then, take your result, square it, and feed it back into your original function, adding a new set of sense data. Continue to feed your results back into the original function ad infinitum. What do you have? The fundamental principle of human consciousness.

 —Academician Prokhor Zakharov, “The Feedback Principle”




“Computers on the verge of self-awareness”

Human intelligence and AI

"... the ordinary human (rapidly losing the ability to comprehend what is going on around them); the enhanced human (the driver of change over the next 100 years, but perhaps eventually surpassed); and all around them vast machine intellects, some alien (evolved completely in silicon) and some strangely familiar (hybrids)."

Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them

Tangent

Shadowrun Hong Kong OST - Grendel

Sky Hydroponics Lab

Sky farms are fantastically beautiful, with their kilometer long networks of glass framed in grids of metal, and the sunlight shining through jungles of vegetation inside. When one of them catches the light, you can see the refracted beauty for miles; they are life-giving stars on a desolate planet … gardens on the wing.

—Lady Deidre Skye, “Planet Dreams”

Love, relationship parity, instrumentality

Before she left some years ago for one of the top business schools, one of my co-workers asked me, "Are men intimidated by smart women?"

In retracing this now, I think part of the answer is that we want to show our best selves, and as we go about doing so, we start to evaluate ourselves instrumentally, which completely obliterates sense of our own intrinsic value.

To deal with this, we then try to live the male fantasy (e.g. Princess Bride, Stardust) "where we vanish into thin air, come back 10x times the man we were, and our problems are solved."

Another part of the answer is that few of us ever really know what it is that we want - not truly. We simply grasp at mirages that we think will fulfill us.

A hairpin: love, lost, Shadowrun Hong Kong

"I keep this to remind myself of the things we have to give up, in pursuit of what we think is best. But few of us ever really know what it is that we want - not truly.

We simply grasp at mirages that we think will fulfill us.

Humans tie themselves to other people with the most tenuous of strings, thinking love will fill the emptiness inside us. When that fails, we tell ourselves it was not meant to be - that fate, or destiny, would have wrenched us apart.

But that is a convenient lie. It is up to us, and only up to us, to make our futures.

So I feel that it would behoove me to never forget the things I have given up in pursuit of 'the better option.' I do not dwell in the past, nor am I haunted by it, but it would be doing S. a disservice to forget what she wanted for me."