The Taoist idea of Wu Wei (無為) has always seemed very ambiguous to me. In my own life, I often recall this principle, along with whatever interpretation of it suits best at the time, when making decisions. Here, I wanted to try think through some of the potential meanings of it.
These are from the Rich Hickey talk on “Design in Practice” at Clojure Conj 2023.
Currently, there is a working group at the IETF studying decentralisation in the internet - Decentralisation of the Internet Research Group (DINRG).
I dreamed that it is night and I am lying in my bed (the foot of my bed was under the window, and outside the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know that it was winter in my dream, and night-time). Suddenly the window opens of its own accord and terrified, I see that there are a number of white wolves sitting in the big walnut tree outside the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were white all over and looked more like foxes or sheepdogs because they had big tails like foxes and their ears were pricked up like dogs watching something. Obviously fearful that the wolves were going to gobble me up I screamed and woke up.
This is a note about an interesting article I just read, The New Control Society by Jon Askonas.
I was just reading a great post by Geoff Huston about the IPv6 transition.
A note on some thoughts around ‘data’. Inspired, in the first instance, by this discussion on hacker news.
In 1967, Roland Barthes published his influential essay “The Death of the Author”. The essay was a key reference point in the structuralist and post-structuralist movements and called for the abandoning of the idea of the ‘author’ as the focal point for meaning when interpreting a text. According to structuralist theories of language, meaning arises through a variety of factors (grammar, culture, history, etc.). Seeing the meaning of the work as the product of a single mind (the ‘author’) misses this diversity of perspectives at the heart of language.
In a certain sense, the measure of hermeneutics is understanding. Through careful interpretation, we begin to grasp the meaning of the text. Through careful listening and active engagement, I begin to understand, more deeply, what you are communicating to me. This is the heart of hermeneutics, this active movement toward understanding the meaning of something. The movement from uncertainty toward clarity.
Some alternative formulations of Chaos, taken from Chaos: Making a New Science, by James Gleick
An (in)famous concept from the hermeneutic philosophy of Martin Heidegger.
The term ‘concrescence’ was coined by Alfred North Whitehead and figures strongly in his systematic account of process.
A difficult term to explain in a brief note, but I’ll try anyway.
An influential philosopher of technology.
I putting this note here more as a reminder to go an do some actual research on this topic. This is not in any way an authoritative note.
The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness is one of those philosophical ideas that has stayed with me ever since someone first told me about it. These are some notes about it. Please do not take them to be in any way authoritative.
One of the most noticeable things about Gemini is that it is text-based. Sure, it can support images but, depending on the client, these are mostly left hidden. Gemini gains a lot of its identity from this emphasis on text. One of the first things you’ll notice if you compare an average web page and a page on Gemini is that one is filled with images and highly visual, while the other is just a wall of text.
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The second characteristic of minor literatures is that everything in them is po- litical. In major literatures, in contrast, the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background; this is so much the case that none of these Oedipal intrigues are specifically indispensable or absolutely necessary but all become as one in a large space. Minor literature is completely different; its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable,
A series of posts by James Williams.
This reduction of the real to the possible is exactly what Deleuze seeks to avoid, because he wants the potential of radical novelty in every part of his system. When I called this series of posts ‘Deleuze’s timed logics’ it was an allusion to Arthur Prior, temporal logic and tense logic. For Prior, the difficulty of time for logic is a problem of undecided possibilities in the future. For Deleuze, the problem of time for logic is the difficulty of how propositions are both decidable and undecidable at all times and beyond any set of possibilities.
I’ve been experiencing moments of melancholy and nostalgia over the past months. Nothing too intense, just notable. It’s an old, familiar feeling, but one I hadn’t felt in a long time.
The 4 hour conversation, available on youtube: Cage & Feldman
I originally wanted to upload this here so that I could talk about some of the topics that Cage and Feldman discuss. I realise now that that would be a futile task. This isn’t a conversation that can be ‘summarised’ or ’talked about’ very effectively.
Much of the Gemini ‘content’ I’ve found so far, at least, some of the most engaging and unique, centers on technical questions about Gemini itself - how to set it up, navigate it, write in it, etc. These questions are usually accompanied by musings on what we can then do with this new protocol or about what Gemini ‘means’. Neither the answers to the technical questions, nor the accompanying speculations, are fully concrete. This is because both how Gemini works and what it can do remain somewhat vague. Yes, the broad brush-strokes have been laid down, but the smaller details have yet to be filled in. This is not a bad thing at all. Gemini is still in its very early stages. Much of its appeal stems from its huge potential.
A problem:
A corresponding idea:
Lindelof, HBO, 2014-2017
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The Leftovers is about a lot of things. Too many things to write about here, unfortunately. Nora is my favorite character in the show, and Season 3 was my favorite season the first time I watched it. In attempting to write these posts, though, I ended up focusing mostly on Kevin, and on Season 2. Actually, much of the content for this review derives from the end of Season 2, when Kevin’s ‘dies’ two times. So, maybe this should just be called ‘an account of that really weird moment in that one American TV show’.
