Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2024-10-21T21:30:53Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com October 21. http://ranprieur.com/#2e9493b5815376d422814d0410b6025fd690493e 2024-10-21T21:30:53Z October 21. Political links. From 2013, a Reddit comment on the word homeland:

It's hard to explain how weird the word "Homeland" sounds in the ear of a pre-911 American. I can only say that it's not an American word. It's an Old World word.... It's a word used by a besieged, defensive and frightened people; not a word used by a confident, optimistic, powerful people. It's a word for serfs.

From 2017, in simple language, What Is Fascism? A Detailed Guide to a Dangerous Philosophy:

Under the pressures of real economic hardship, the fascist believes the problem can be solved by getting rid of of some undesirable group.... Violence from the bottom up is never to be tolerated. Violence from the top down is seen as equivalent to justice.

From 2019, Could American Evangelicals Spot the Antichrist? It's funny, the people who believe in the Antichrist are almost all under Trump's spell. But a few aren't, and this guy has written an impressive comparison of Bible passages and stuff Trump has done.

I don't believe in the Antichrist, but I believe in meaningful coincidences, in the intelligence of chance, and in the Trickster archetype, of whom Trump is an obvious and powerful incarnation. Related, a thread from the Spirituality subreddit, Could Trump actually be the catalyst that awakened masses?

He is an incredibly accurate and complete representation of America's collective shadow. Of course Americans are recoiling in horror, that's what people do when faced with their own shadow.... You don't put your shadow in charge. You accept it, because the suppression and denigration of those traits is specifically what creates the shadow in the first place.

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October 17. http://ranprieur.com/#60e0cbdf65c1a5fec1037735cbd0dfcb65904924 2024-10-17T17:50:31Z October 17. Fun links. A study in Japan suggests that video games are good for your mental health

YouTube video about a jigsaw puzzle with two distinct solutions

Psychedelic Mushrooms Are Getting Much, Much Stronger

Mysterious gooey blobs washed up on Canada beaches baffle experts (thanks Gryphon). So far we don't even know if the origin is industrial or biological.

And some cool answers to this open-ended question on the Sprituality subreddit, What have you witnessed?

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October 15. http://ranprieur.com/#aa3c69b5a355c7ed0fc108396829d370bfd5be22 2024-10-15T15:30:54Z October 15. Part two of my new novel is up. Somewhere I read that a novelist doesn't really know how to write until their fifth novel. After seven years of steady fiction writing, I understand why Witches of the Pinspecked Void never found an audience. My worldbuilding was extremely ambitious, and my clunky exposition did not have nearly the bandwidth to wrap the reader's head around that world.

Exposition is 1) what you tell the reader, 2) when you tell them, and 3) how you tell them. It's basically writing. The most obvious way is usually wrong, and doing it right requires grinding through a lot of choices and developing an intutitive sense for what to say next.

Anyway, in part two, my protagonist leaves town and has some adventures in what is now eastern Washington, one or two thousand years in the future. The name Itchywanna is based on Nch'i-Wana, an indigenous name for the middle Columbia River.

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October 14. http://ranprieur.com/#f8a47cb09e0cd3158e3259470dfe9e0f72e3f41a 2024-10-14T14:20:46Z October 14. Today's subject is health. Last month I learned, from this reddit thread, that the human body is really bad at storing water. One comment:

My understanding is that the control system for deciding when to send the water to urine and the control system for whether the parts of your body needs water were put together by different contractors who didn't talk to each other. As a consequence your kidneys can be busily shoving out water to your bladder while your organs are crying out for water.

Since then I've been self-experimenting. My habit for decades has been to wait until I'm obviously thirsty and then drink about ten swallows. So I started limiting it to three swallows, and overall I did not feel more thirsty. Then I tried one swallow every three minutes, for thirty minutes, and it was much more thirst quenching than ten swallows all at once.

You can do your own experiments. More generally, part of getting older and not dying is to give increasing attention to your body. Supposedly young people are physical and old people are mental, but for me it's been the opposite, because when I was young I could afford to ignore everything but my thoughts, and now I can't.

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October 11. http://ranprieur.com/#47320d438b98b236e81acf83c60cdce5a1a94d92 2024-10-11T23:50:59Z October 11. One more quote on the theme of the human-made world being less alive than the world outside it. This is from one of the letters of H.P. Lovecraft, after he explored a part of Manhattan that had not yet been turned into a grid street pattern.

What awesome images are suggested by the existence of such secret cities within cities! Beholding this ingulph'd and search-defying fragment of yesterday, the active imagination conjures up endless weird possibilities - ancient and unremember'd towns still living in decay, swallow'd up by the stern business blocks that weary the superficial eye, and sometimes sending forth at twilight strains of ghostly music for whose source the modern city-dwellers seek in vain. Having seen this thing, one cannot look at an ordinary crowded street without wondering what surviving marvels may lurk unsuspected behind the prim and monotonous blocks.

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October 9. http://ranprieur.com/#ef61895d043da6002b260c974c0144d4fb6f6d8c 2024-10-09T21:30:57Z October 9. Years ago someone recommended the book The Perception of the Environment by Tim Ingold. Since then I've been reading it sporadically, and I'm still only a fifth of the way through. It's a large book with small print, and dense dense dense -- not hard to read, but full of ideas that take mental effort to integrate.

Ingold is an anthropologist, and a theme that keeps coming up is something I first encountered in Jerry Mander's book In The Absence of the Sacred: that what we see as human mastery or transcendence of nature, is better seen as humans getting deeper and deeper into our own little world. This is from chapter five, and it's basically the same as Monday's quote about AI:

Dogon cosmology envisages a kind of entropic system in which the maintenance of the village depends upon a continual inflow of vital force from the bush, which is worn down and used up in the process. If the village is a place of stability, where things stay put and proper distinctions are maintained, it is also a place of stagnation. In an almost exact inversion of the modern Western notion of food production as the manifestation of human knowledge and power over nature, here it is nature -- in the form of the bush -- that holds ultimate power over human life, while the cutivated fields and gardens are sites of consumption rather than production, where vital force is used up.

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October 7. http://ranprieur.com/#145e589655211269072af4240f2d9d6cc7e43870 2024-10-07T19:10:27Z October 7. Picking up from a week ago, America Is Lying to Itself About the Cost of Disasters. "This mismatch, between catastrophes the government has budgeted for and the actual toll of overlapping or supersize disasters, keeps happening."

Related: How Soon Might the Atlantic Ocean Break?

The AMOC transports a staggering amount of energy. Like a million nuclear power plants. It is such a core element of the Earth system that its collapse would radically alter regional weather patterns, the water cycle, the ability of every country to provide food for its inhabitants.

New subject, sort of. This long Hacker News thread has lots of debates about how well AI is going to work. The popular fear is that it's going to work too well, but I lean toward the opposite position, explained in this comment:

At the root of all these technological promises lies a perpetual motion machine. They're all selling the reversal of thermodynamics.

Any system complex enough to be useful has to be embedded in an ever more complex system. The age of mobile phone internet rests on the shoulders of an immense and enormously complex supply chain.

LLMs are capturing low entropy from data online and distilling it for you while producing a shitton of entropy on the backend. All the water and energy dissipated at data centers, all the supply chains involved in building GPUs at the rate we are building. There will be no magical moment when it's gonna yield more low entropy than what we put in on the other side as training data, electricity and clean water.

When companies sell ideas like 'AGI' or 'self driving cars' they are essentially promising you can do away with the complexity surrounding a complex solution. They are promising they can deliver low entropy on a tap without paying for it in increased entropy elsewhere. It's physically impossible.

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October 4. http://ranprieur.com/#bc6bd2dc00d03168e87c76e3ea27e0579322929a 2024-10-04T16:40:03Z October 4. Music for the weekend. I've finished testing a new playlist, One Song Per Year, 1964-2024. It's not exactly my favorite song for each year, because I subbed out some songs that are not on Spotify, and a few times I put in a softer song for smoother transitions.

Also, in honor of Kris Kristofferson, who died last weekend, this is Johnny Cash's cover of Sunday Morning Coming Down.

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October 3. http://ranprieur.com/#e04d353071452387b1efefd053cabb97756dd4c4 2024-10-03T15:30:30Z October 3. Negative links! From Cory Doctorow, There's no such thing as shareholder supremacy. Supposedly corporations have an obligation to increase profits for shareholders, but that rule is unfalsifiable, because CEOs can do anything they want and claim it's for the shareholders.

Mississippi Town Ran Debtors Prisons. I used to think that small systems are automatically better than big systems, but right now there are a lot of small towns in America that are extremely corrupt, and this will get worse as the federal government gets weaker and less able to intervene.

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age. It's about creative work, which is most satisfying if you're only trying to please yourself, if you're in an "off duty" and not an "at-job" mental state. But now it's getting difficult to stay in that mental state, with so many temptations to measure your success with online stats.

Pro bettors are disguising themselves as gambling addicts. A comment from the Hacker News thread says it all: "The fact that people good at gambling have to pretend to be addicted money losers in order to not get kicked off platforms tells you how predatory these platforms are."

An Ask Reddit thread full of stories about the psychology of power: Women who left a rich guy, why did you do it?

Finally, a positive link from Ask Old People, What qualities of today's youth do you like?

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