Category: Misc
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Exploring the Experience Manifold
Work in progress. One way of looking at the nature of reality is that of exploring the manifold of possible experiences. A tree, a coral reef, and a geode all explore different branches of the possible experience space in much the same way that a person can learn the piano or eat a donut. Whether…
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Loss Functions
Humans are pretty bad at articulating what we want. If you want a perfect example of this – look at almost all performance management and recruitment ever. Ask the average employee what it is that they do, and how they provide value, and you’ll find that a large chunk of the working population don’t have…
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Untitled Consciousness Thing
Consciousness recognises consciousness. Every production of a conscious being resonates to some degree with other conscious beings. Consciousness continually reforms and remixes into another entity that has a unique take on reality. LLM-generated content is so easy to spot precisely because the uniqueness is limited to the prompting chops of the user – but I’m…
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The Pot Noodle Makers
I have a successful cafe that does one thing really well: Pot Noodles. You can come in and order any type of noodle pot and we’ll throw it together for you. We have all the flavours you can imagine, and there’s nothing we do better than pouring that boiling water over powdered seasoning and dried…
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Software is Frozen Search. AI is Live Search.
Every piece of software we use today represents a problem space that someone explored once, encoded into instructions, and now replays cheaply billions of times. When you open Salesforce, you’re running the result of thousands of decisions about how CRM should work – decisions made years ago, frozen in code, distributed to millions of users…
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Foundations of Monothink
Culture programs a society to operate in a desired way. Social norms, memes, and even the very language we use, shape how we think and therefore act in the world. Newspapers, TV, social media – these are all powerful engines of cultural message delivery and curation. This is why we have PR, brand, and influencers…
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Scarcity and Abundance
We live in a mindset of material scarcity and time abundance when it’s the other way around. When was the last time you thought about how long you had left to live? Unless we get a diagnosis we almost never think about how much time we have left.
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What if selfhood is a parasitic meme?
Julian Jaynes explores the idea that the “self” is installed via culture, not emergent by default from our minds. In his book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, he explores a beautifully complex and wide-ranging theory that suggests that we developed internal monologues as a mechanism of coordination and control.…
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Fake Science
Fake Science is a beautiful term. It perfectly captures the art of defining a metric, taking measurements, analysing those data points, and continually generating a complex output before chaining it to other inputs for yet more bullshittery. This is something I see almost on a daily basis, and it gets to the core of what…
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Honeymooning in Crete
A memory bank of our time away on the beautiful island of Crete. Take Off The journey is the reward – so say those beyond the finish line – but I’ll agree that the buoyancy that appears in the days leading up to a holiday is wonderful. While I’m typically dialling up my stress levels…