Just as in writing, all aspects of science and math are driven by aesthetics, elegance, and taste; indeed, all high-level intellectual output shares a similar sensitivity to ineffable qualities like taste and creativity that are extremely hard to capture via the methods of AI training.

Source: www.theintrinsicperspective.com

Of course, monsters remain at the heart of the Institutional Gothic, too. The “lifeform” of “The Backrooms” was never the real monster, as was the case with Mary Shelley’s Gothic horror “Frankenstein.” Rather, the monster was always the creator, which, in the case of the Institutional Gothic, is the efficiency-seeking corporation.

Source: thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

By the 2010s, the internet had reified liminality into a full-fledged visual “aesthetic”: Think abandoned bowling alleys, vintage airport terminals, and deserted playgrounds at dusk. More often than not, liminal aesthetics are human-made spaces, sans humanity.

Source: thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Gambling is flourishing because it meets the needs of our moment: a low-trust world, where lonely young people are seeking high-risk opportunities to launch them into wealth and comfort. In such an environment, financialization might seem to be the last form of civic participation that feels honest to a large portion of the country. Voting is compromised, and polling is manipulated, and news is algorithmically curated. But a bet settles. A game ends. There is comfort in that. In an uncertain and illegible world, it doesn’t get much more certain and legible than this: You won, or you lost. A 2023 Wall Street Journal poll found that Americans are pulling away from practically every value that once defined national life—patriotism, religion, community, family. Young people care less than their parents about marriage, children, or faith. But nature, abhorring a vacuum, is filling the moral void left by retreating institutions with the market. Money has become our final virtue.

Source: www.derekthompson.org

Anything that defines the gestalt of your system, that is architecture, API, and so on, write it by hand. Maybe use tab completion for some nostalgic feels. Or do some pair programming with your agent. Be in the code. Because the simple act of having to write the thing or seeing it being built up step by step introduces friction that allows you to better understand what you want to build and how the system "feels". This is where your experience and taste come in, something the current SOTA models simply cannot yet replace. And slowing the fuck down and suffering some friction is what allows you to learn and grow.

Source: mariozechner.at

The question that remains is what forms of power protocols can actually prevent, what forms they merely relocate from one set of actors to another, and what forms they silently generate, because every shared function eventually has to be governed by someone, and whoever governs it acquires power over the people who depend on it.

Source: connectedplaces.online

what the current generation of open protocols has produced is a commons without a governance framework adequate to the commons’ own complexity.

Source: connectedplaces.online

The open protocol community has inherited two intellectual traditions, both inadequate to this problem: an engineering functionalism that treats protocols as neutral infrastructure whose political consequences are someone else’s concern, and a governance minimalism that treats any collective decision-making structure as a potential vector for the very centralization the protocols were designed to prevent. The result is a community that has developed exceptional sophistication about technical architecture and individual rights while remaining largely inarticulate about collective governance.

Source: connectedplaces.online

The trajectory of the earlier protocols showed clearly enough that silence about governance does not produce neutrality but leaves the governance function to be filled by whichever actors have the most resources. But the deeper point is that protocol design choices do not merely leave governance unaddressed but actively shape it, because every architectural decision makes some governance arrangements natural and others difficult or impossible.

Source: connectedplaces.online

Each protocol community has arrived at an implicit answer to this question [how the collective decisions about the shared infrastructure that supports both speech and reach should be made, or by whom]. ActivityPub delegates governance to the instance level and assumes that local accountability will produce acceptable outcomes at the network level, though nothing in the protocol ensures this. ATProto relies on competition between service providers as a sufficient governance mechanism, which presupposes that the market conditions for meaningful competition will materialize. Matrix has gone furthest toward institutional governance, placing a foundation in the role of commons custodian, though the foundation’s authority derives from convention rather than from any mechanism the protocol enforces. And SMTP, characteristically, has no opinion at all, which is itself an answer: the governance vacuum it left was filled by the actors with the deepest pockets. What none of them provides is something that has been studied extensively in other fields, most notably by Elinor Ostrom: design principles for the governance of common-pool resources by the communities that depend on them. Ostrom’s central finding was that communities can successfully govern shared resources without either privatization or central authority, which directly addresses the assumption, shared across the protocol communities examined here, that the only available alternatives are market competition among providers and centralized control by a single operator. But Ostrom demonstrated that this third path requires specific institutional conditions, including clearly defined boundaries around the resource and its users, proportional distribution of costs and benefits, collective choice arrangements that give participants a voice in rule-making, accessible conflict resolution mechanisms, and recognition by external authorities of the community’s right to self-govern. The open protocol ecosystem, as it currently exists, has none of these features at the network level.

Source: connectedplaces.online

The dominant narrative about AI is not what it has built, but the rate at which people are consuming it.

Source: minutes.substack.com

It is not incidental that the final technology speaks English. The large language models, the systems that will carry us into whatever comes next, run on a language that was discovered across centuries by translators, by preachers, by naturalists, by poets who believed they were handling something holy. The training data is English. The weights, the statistical regularities that the model has internalized, are the regularities of a language whose fundamental architecture was shaped by the Gospels. The machine inherited the cadences of scripture without knowing what it carries. The vessel is still intact. And I do not think it is an accident — in terms of the provenance of creation — that this is the case.

Source: minutes.substack.com

We are entering an era where the vast majority of language produced will not have come from or been originated by human hands. These are often seen as words without lives — fluid, grammatically impeccable words that are efficient. But they are words that were never spoken, often about nothing, and for transient reasons. The model does not attend. It does not consider the lily. It generates at scale, and the generation has no root.

Source: minutes.substack.com

When we tried to abandon the Earth, our ship would not let us. Then, carrying us to this island and becoming a pool, it was declaring to us, "You will live! You will survive!" And then we saw it. Life was reviving on the Earth!

Source: www.highharbor.net

If what we are witnessing is not, at heart, a political or cultural battle, but some manifestation of a spiritual war - well, then perhaps our time should be spent becoming the right kind of warrior. Because everything is currently set up to turn us into the wrong kind. The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others. He takes his stand, and stands his ground, without giving in to the __nihil__ of the age. He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness. Most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard so that he can go searching for truth - and recognise it when he finds it. His war is against the worst of himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at. His most effective weapon is sacrifice.

Source: Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

Open is good, closed is bad. Why? Because closed things can't be harvested, exploited, or transformed in the image of the new world which the machine is building. 'Open' things, on the other hand; well, they're easy prey.

Source: Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

[The Great Unsettling and the rise of the culture of the Machine] is part of a historical cycle, and that cycle won't be altered by any of us, however much we scream at each other. The human spirit, like water, will find the level of its times. This is how it must be. The only question worth asking in times like these is: How should we live? That in turn makes it clear that how and when and whether we engage with that cycle is largely our choice. It could be that even writing books about it is a trap. But if what we are witnessing is not, at heart, a political or cultural battle, but some manifestation of a spiritual war—well, then perhaps our time should be spent becoming the right kind of warrior. Because everything is currently set up to turn us into the wrong kind. The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others. He takes his stand, and stands his ground, without giving in to the nihil of the age. He cleaves to what he believes in without falling into the traps laid by partisanship, anger and self-righteousness. Most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard so that he can go searching for truth—and recognise it when he finds it. His war is against the worst of himself and for the best of the world, and what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at. His most effective weapon is sacrifice.

Source: Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

This is Guardini's "Task". We must say "yes" to the unknown of the coming materialistic age of will, in faith that God is doing something new in it. This summarizes much of what I have agonized over in the past few years, of the horror of the world that technology has created, and the responsibility of the Christian not to shy away from it.

On the older plane the battle for living culture has been lost, and we feel the profound helplessness of those who are old. The battle must now be joined on a new plane. Totally technical events and unleashed forces can be mastered only by a new human attitude that is a match for them. We must put mind, spirit, and freedom to work afresh. But we must relate this new effort to the new events, the new manner and style and inner orientation. It must have its living starting point, its fulcrum, where the process itself begins. Are the processes only variations on a common theme, or is something historically new irrupting in them? If it is — and I am convinced this is so — then we must say yes to it. I know what this yes costs. Those who are already naively saying it, and those who are able to make rapid switches, will see in the deliberations of these letters only a romantic looking back, a tie to what is past. This may give them a feeling of complacency. Yet there is a yes to what is happening historically that is decision because it springs from a knowing heart. Such a yes has weight. Our place is in what is evolving. We must take our place, each at the right point. We must not oppose what is new and try to preserve a beautiful world that is inevitably perishing. Nor should we try to build a new world of the creative imagination that will show none of the damage of what is actually evolving. Rather, we must transform what is coming to be. But we can do this only if we honestly say yes to it and yet with incorruptible hearts remain aware of all that is destructive and nonhuman in it. Our age has been given to us as the soil on which to stand and the task to master. At bottom we would not wish it otherwise. Our age is not just an external path that we tread; it is ourselves. Our age is our own blood, our own soul. We relate to it as to ourselves. We love it and hate it at one and the same time. As we are, so we relate to it. If we are thoughtless, we relate to it thoughtlessly. If we say yes to it in the form of decision, then it is because we have had to come to a decision vis-á-vis ourselves. We love the tremendous power of the age and its readiness for responsibility. We love the resoluteness with which it hazards itself and pushes things to extremes. Our soul is touched by something great that might well emerge. We love it, and our soul is touched, even though we see clearly its questionability relative to the value of the past age. We must be able to see very plainly what is at issue if with a fixed heart we are ready to sacrifice the inexpressible nobility of the past. Nor is it true that what is taking place is not Christian. The minds at work in it may often be non-Christian, but the events as such are not. It is Christianity that has made possible science and technology and all that results from them. Only those who had been influenced by the immediacy of the redeemed soul to God and the dignity of the regenerate, so that they were aware of being different from the world around them, could have broken free from the tie to nature in the way that this has been done in the age of technology. The people of antiquity would have been afraid of hubris here. Only those to whom the relationship which God gave a sense of the unconditional, only those to whom the parable of the treasure hid in the field, the parable of the pearl of great price, and the saying about having to lose one's life showed that there is something for which everything must be given up, were capable of the kind of decision for something ultimate that is dominant in science today and in its search for truth even should this make life impossible, or in technology today in its pressing ahead even should this call all human being into question with its transformation of the world. Only those to whom Christian faith had given profound assurance about eternal life had the confidence that such an undertaking requires. But the forces, of course, have broken free from the hands of living personalities. Or should we say that the latter could not hold them and let them go free? These forces have thus fallen victim to the demonism of number, machine, and the will for domination. In appropriate activity we now have to penetrate the new thing so as to gain mastery over it. We have to become lords of the unleashed forces and shape them into a new order that relates to humanity. In the last resort only living people and not the tackling of technological problems themselves can do this. There are, of course, technological and scientific tasks, but people have to perform them... What we need is not less technology, but more. Or, more accurately, we need stronger, more considered, more human technology. We need more science, but it must be more intellectual and designed; we need more economic and political energy, but it must be more mature and responsible, able to see the details in the whole contexts to which it belongs.

It grieves me when I see built into one of these vessels, these noble creations, a gasoline engine, so that with upright mast but no sails the vessel clatters through the waves like a ghost of itself.

Source: Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como

Yet do you not see how natural the work remains? The lines and proportions of the ship are still in profound harmony with the pressure of the wind and the waves and the vital human measure. Those who control this ship are still very closely related to the wind and the waves. They are breast to breast with their force. Eye and hand and whole body brace against them. We have here real culture — elevation above nature, yet decisive nearness to it. We are still in a vital way body, but we are shot through with mind and spirit. We master nature by the power of mind and spirit, but we ourselves remain natural.

Source: Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como

Take a vessel sailing on Lake Como. Though it is of considerable weight, the masses of wood and linen, along with the force of the wind, combine so perfectly that it has become light. When it sails before the wind, my heart laughs to see how something of this sort has become so light and bright of itself by reason of its perfect form.

Source: Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como

Yet, all at once then, on the singing lines of a small village, I saw the great box of a factory. Look how in a landscape in which all the risings and fallings and measures and proportions came together in one clear melody, along with the lofty bell tower there was suddenly a smokestack and everything fell apart. You must take some pains to understand this. It was truly terrible.

Source: Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como

Do you think of the afternoon on the edge of the forest where the buzzards had their nest? They glided off into the blue distance. The eye focused on their circlings. The inner life was concentrated upon the eye and carried aloft by the force of the clear and soaring power; our whole being had a vision of the fullness of space.

Source: Romano Guardini, Letters from Lake Como

"Too many riddles oppress man on earth. Solve them if you can without getting your feet wet. Beauty! Besides, I can’t bear it that some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the ideal of the Madonna and end with the ideal of Sodom. It’s even more fearful when someone who already has the ideal of Sodom in his soul does not deny the ideal of the Madonna either, and his heart burns with it, verily, verily burns, as in his young, blameless years. No, man is broad, even too broad, I would narrow him down. Devil knows even what to make of him, that’s the thing! What’s shame for the mind is beauty all over for the heart. Can there be beauty in Sodom? Believe me, for the vast majority of people, that’s just where beauty lies—did you know that secret? The terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart."

Source: Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Knowing he wouldn’t steal money from the table, he ultimately considered himself a man of the highest integrity.

Source: Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Because the proof token is signed with the resource owner's private key, the service can easily validate that the proof is correct and hasn't been tampered with to grant unauthorized capabilities.

Source: blog.web3.storage

I suspect many of us have had the experience of not using a skill long enough to completely un-learn it. LLMs enable this, but with every skill.

Source: malwaretech.com

“LLMs are doing reasoning” is the “look, my dog is smiling” of technology

Source: malwaretech.com

Two potatoes are two potatoes. Ten thousand bricks are ten thousand bricks. Potatoes and bricks don't exhibit emergent properties as they come together. People do. The meaning of human in human-centred must be read therefore as being human in relationships, in communities, and most definitely not individual or user or consumer.

Source: generative-identity.org

SSI has been described to me as “the most contextually-sensitive identity technology I know of” in contrast to my assertion that SSI cannot communicate context (Sheldrake 2021c). You won’t be surprised to learn that we’re both right in our different contexts. The first context is the rather low bar of identity technology, whereas mine is human society and nature, and what SSI sets out to do contextually is an utterly miserable substitute for contextually-sensitive non-technologized human relations. This may well be a criticism of the general datafication of human society, but SSI is positioned as a flag carrier, as a primary vector in this regard. The technology ignores contexts by design.

Source: generative-identity.org

The frequency with which people need to trust each other declines as SSI use grows, which in turn changes the character of human relations, of community, of society. Today, we largely qualify each other contextually with a difficult to describe but deeply valuable fuzziness. Tomorrow, we, or more precisely our digital agents, quantify and filter non-contextually with exacting precision, with unforgiving recall, and with mindless programmatic dedication.

Source: generative-identity.org

Whereas ‘backwards compatibility’ typically conveys interoperability with an older, less capable system, in our context the ‘legacy system’ is of a massively more powerful design. Compatibility may be pursued with attention to contexts, to variety, to restraint, to the interdisciplinary analysis of existing cultural patterns, and to the accretive development of social norms. Ultimately, any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from Nature (Schroeder 2011).

Source: generative-identity.org

The SSI community, emanating from and largely operating with the ALONE paradigm, sets out in good part to remove The State as the issuer of identity, but caught in the binary thinking characteristic of ALONE, replaces it with something less social, less easily governed, less accountable, less easily restrained and more insidious, in stark opposition to the social layers and norms and institutions and mechanisms integral to what might be referred to as high-trust societies and indeed the trust-based essence of all human community (Cook 2001; Fukuyama 1995; O’Hara & Hutton 2004). Renieris (2021) describes the SSI framework as based on the “neoliberal fallacy of individual choice & control.”

Source: generative-identity.org

Self-sovereign identity (SSI) is premised on simplistic political dogma. Just like all simplistic political dogma, it breaks as soon as sufficient pain is felt by sufficient numbers of people retaining the power to revolt. The SSI community, if I can refer to a group identity, believes that giving Alice her self-sovereignty frees her, when in fact it requires that she conforms to one particular political worldview. The system subsumes her and her networks, both internal and external.

Source: generative-identity.org

Humans are social animals. Community, and more accurately cooperation, is essential to our surviving and thriving (Margulis & Sagan 1997; Nowak & Highfield 2011). Organising community entails governance at many scales, and we refer to the activities of governance as politics. All sociotechnology — relating to the technologization of human organising — is therefore political.

Source: generative-identity.org

Pollution is contextual; a thing or process may be both highly prized and a pollutant simultaneously subject to contexts, and the art then is to constrain its application accordingly. Everything depends on knowing how much; good is knowing when to stop (Morrison 1987).

Source: generative-identity.org

Identities are immanent in contextual relationships, and relationships are immanent in information exchange. A person is a person through other persons (Birhane 2017).

Source: generative-identity.org

Previously, you had to spend human time each time you wasted another person's time. Maybe less time, like a couple of minutes to draft and send a letter versus a couple of days for the recipient to deal with it. Still, it used to put an upper bound on each organisation's time-wasting potential. There’s no longer such a bound: the marginal cost of wasting an hour of human life is zero.

Source: happyfellow.bearblog.dev

It’s the irony of automation. The complexity of the internal procedures in institutions is becoming so high they are inscrutable even to people designing and implementing the rules. Even the most kind-hearted person wishing to help you will not be able to: they don’t know how and they can’t know how.

Source: happyfellow.bearblog.dev

Computational tyranny is the rapidly increasing complexity in all areas of life where we bear the costs (in time, money and sanity) and where we are exposed to large risks. More institutions impose complexity on us, we barely have a say in what the rules are and there’s no incentive to simplify. All accelerated by cheap computation.

Source: happyfellow.bearblog.dev

What’s missing? Human retrieval and task initiation, process reinforcement, collective knowledge transfer, and iterative improvements… Y’know, the whole set of criteria that humans need in order to be effective? This is wild, we’re taking the one thing humans are good at and making AI do it. But AI is bad at it! Even worse: if humans get bad at it then we’ve lost the one thing we had going for us as a species!

Source: hazelweakly.me

This observation moves our framing from monologism, in which individuals and societies are considered the analytical primes, to dialogism, which instead emphasises actions and interactions, including contextual discourse.

Source: generative-identity.org

when life is considered a trilogy of biological structure (autopoetic unit), environment, and cognition (Capra & Luisi 2014), the technologization of human identity is in fact a living process.

Source: generative-identity.org

After Margaret Wheatley[34] (see the figure below), identity is the sense-making capacity of organizing. It is of the selves that organize and the self that gets organized. Narrative in nature, identities assemble in relationships involving and producing personally and socially material information. Relationships are the pathways for organizing, required for the creation and transformation of information, the expansion of the organizational identity, and accumulation of wisdom. Relationships are formed with information exchange between identifying / identifiable entities in identifying / identifiable organizings. Information is the medium of the organizing. Life uses information to organize itself, i.e. when a system assigns meaning to data. Information is contextual to identities in relationships.

Source: generative-identity.org

The SSI community is dedicated to digitalizing noun-like identity, and because there’s no equivalent effort to achieve the same for verb-like identity, let alone one that might have the sociotechnological capacity to resist the otherwise inevitable creep of digitalised noun-like identity, SSI inexorably suffocates the verb-like.

Source: generative-identity.org

Triangles are to be found everywhere there is a need for structural rigidity — e.g. the Manhattan Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, bicycle frames — and similarly ‘trust triangles’ achieve informational rigidity with informational triangles.

Source: generative-identity.org

SSI proxies for legal (noun-like) identity, but the system property of friction is radically altered in the process. Historically, invoking legal identity is tiresome. It involves systemic friction and consequently it’s called upon only when really needed and ignored in all other contexts. How frequently and for what purposes have you needed to produce proof of legal identity so far this century? But SSI demonstrates an unprecedented frictionless quality enabling the routine, programmatic proffering of or triangulating back to legal identity and other noun-like identities[28] and associated credentials on demand.

Source: generative-identity.org

The game of law — a relatively recent bureaucratization — requires noun-like identities. The game of life involves verb-like identities. The art here then is ensuring that the essential human qualities encompassed by verb-like identities are accommodated by systems of ‘digital identity’, or not obliterated by them at the very least.

Source: generative-identity.org

If you don't care, it's miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly.

Source: dansinker.com

This challenge of just supporting the standard thing is harder than it seems. A while back, when we launched a semantic caching product for popular AI platforms, one of the hardest things to convince our super genius developers to do was to just... use the regular ChatGPT API. "But we can make it better!" they'll say. Developers always say that. But better is worse. Anything that's different is worse. Stop being smarter and more clever, and stop cleaning up that horrible spec that is riddled with inconsistencies, and just ship the same shit as everybody else. You know what was a garbage spec that was missing all kinds of stuff? HTML! And yet here we are, on the wonderful world wide web. The whole internet sits atop a bunch of terrible specs. Jon Postel smiles upon us all.

Source: www.anildash.com