faun @faun@merveilles.town

One of the things I really love about @bee's paint scrap photos is that it demonstrates that it does not even take conscious intent to produce paint splatter art. As I understand it, all of those are a byproduct of an industrial process. How much of this beauty radiating from the work is a reflection of the artist's inner life? Literally none.

@rek Remember that kelp powder you gave me. I hear it's good for reducing the flatulence potential of bean dishes, so I'm going to try putting some with my next batch of Desi Chick peas, pinto beans, adzuki beans and amaranth. It's very old, so I don't know whether it will work, or whether I'll just get sick =3 We'll find out!!!

Noticing that effect where I have weird firm feelings about how adjectives should be ordered ("No! 'dead, warm stuff' is not proper english! It should be 'warm, dead stuff'!") starting to get seriously fascinated about where they come from because I'm getting the sense the ordering applies to every single common word.

Dreamed that if you want to wear black in china, you have to email your town's fashion planner and justify it. You have to have wholesome non-nihilist reasons.

Presumably a reflection of the real world fact that you can't unlock a xiaomi phone without sending them an application (wearing black is the fashion equivalent of rooting your phone) (Xiaomi says that this is to prevent third party sellers from installing malware on xiaomis)

Checking out Hubzilla and they get it. Your profile is straight up *called* a "channel". You create an account and then you have to create a channel. You can have multiple channels.

(And hashtags aren't a solution, as they are. We should not be seeing all topics by default, but given that we are, we should be able to unsubscribe from one with a single click (in mastodon, "unsubscribing from a topic" translates to muting everything that contains that word, which is usually more than we want))

On facebook, switching to one of your pages and posting as that page is basically effortless. You can already very easily give other people the ability to post as the page. This, coupled with facebook's equivalent to G+'s Circles, would be sufficient to make a really thriving system.

But it's facebook, so that's kind of not an option. We need our own version of all of those systems.

Is facebook really the only platform that makes it easy to manage multiple pages? To decouple human from brand?

I'm kind of losing interest in using mastodon (or twitter) because... everyone is just throwing all kinds of content in the same bin. That generally means nobody will be able to find what they're looking for. Instead we get a muddy mush of things we're not looking for. Some people have topic-specific alts, but switching between alts is way too awkward as a UI, currently?

"To this end, I develop computational models of facets of human collective intelligence, and test these models in specific case studies. The models I introduce suggest distributed Bayesian inference as a framework for understanding shared belief formation, and also show that people can overcome other difficult computational challenges associated with achieving rational group agency"

http://people.csail.mit.edu/pkrafft/papers/krafft-thesis-final.pdf

At least one of us has to internalise all of this theory before our cults can be good.

Hidden polycules, encircling the world, holding it together

All I have to do to get myself to work 6 unbroken hours is open my work scent trigger and inhale. Consequently, I'm finding it very difficult to open this little jar. So it always goes. My true preferences are revealed. The goals I weren't pursuing were not my goals. I am still not home.

It's not wrong to think of the history of philosophy as one long conversation, but I distrust anyone who thinks they were able to trace the whole memetic lineage.

Environment has a greater influence than inheritance, here.

The book would work towards the thesis that we were adapted for an environment where our tribes (the group of people who spoke our language) were small enough that these kinds of confusion did not occur. Our instincts for language are so thrown off by these new confusions that we kind of need to imagine them as spooky invisible demons before we'll be able to take them as seriously as they deserve.

It would talk about how many arguments turn out to be about the meaning of words, how impossible it is to resolve those arguments, how undeserving those chimeric words are of all of this attention, but also how close they've managed to get to our hearts despite all of that.