Second installment of my monthly newsletter. We are at the beginning of an enormous upswing. Careful observers will piece together the puzzle; others will see the present after it is is past, and be satisfied.
Updates
Work — Progress in hiring; a member of the original team rejoins. Leverage explores memetics, and a Leverage alt account is contemplated. Brief internet commotion; it falls beneath notice. Multiple things are now cued up for release.
Play — Nightclubs in Miami, watching the sun rise over Miami Beach with friends. Evaded the beach animals, visited a beautiful but depressing casino.
Art — Thinking about AI-generated art. Saw this. Co-formulated a view on the nature of architecture, unifying the timely and the timeless; visited a few locations.
Travel — Visited Miami as part of Leverage city search. Very hot. Loved the combination of energy and boundaries. Also, the city is surprisingly complex. Now my top personal choice for where to move.
Writing — Wrote some poetry and an unfinished parody. Penned a forthcoming essay for Palladium. One of my more serious writing projects is making its way to the light; 20% complete, have begun circulating a draft privately.
Reflections
Suppositions of grammar — The grammars of different languages (English, German, Latin) put words into different orders. The order in which words are heard or read, however, affects how they are interpreted. We must thus expect that speakers of different languages expect to interact with one another differently, simply because of the differences in expected word order. Learning to interact better with one another may then require us to learn each other’s languages—or styles of speech within a single language.
Describing relations — Imagine that there are natural types of relations between humans that people have been existing in for centuries or millennia. Imagine further that most of these have received names. It is then possible to ask not what relation two people want to stand in to each other, but what relations they do stand in. One may then find that one and another person are friends, or true friends, or true friends and allies, or not friends at all but companions, or co-travelers, or people who happen to know each other.
News
Design — See: image generation.
Technology —
Image generation — Stable diffusion pulls ahead. Some people are upset, but with respect to adoption, this is a revolution that is already complete. The coming months will bring continued refinement.
AGI — AGI is far; the relevant changes pertain to opposition and support. Regarding the former, opposition is no longer taboo. Regarding the latter, support takes unusual forms. Also, here is a prize contest.
Ideology —
Effective Altruism — EA’s popularity spreads; the next stage of the culture war is spotted. The EA Criticism contest wraps, with an inadvertently illuminating A/B test.
Rationality — Public conversation with Oliver Habryka; Anna Salamon mediates, Lulie Tanett investigates. All sorts of gems; publication pending. A friend is trapped in the Rationality community delusion; as recompense for previous perceived slights, the delusion should be undone.
Micro-movements — Effective Accelerationism (e/acc) fizzles; Fractal Altruism is announced. In private conversation, I see energy gathering for something big and new.
Other —
Game — Empire and Colossus forge an alliance, and a greater game begins.
Recent Work
What’s Next
October — Visiting New Orleans, city of shadows. Then Phoenix, then Austin, then back in the Bay for Halloween. Unclear when the wave will crest, but possibly October.