Neon Vagabond
⚠️ UNRELIABLE PROPHECIES WARNING ⚠️
THIS PROPHET'S FORETELLING MAY OR MAY NOT BE ACCURATE. NO REFUNDS WILL BE OFFERED FOR INACCURATE PROPHECIES.
WOULD YOU DESTROY A BETTER WORLD TO SAVE THIS ONE?
TO GO STILL FURTHER ... IN THE MOVEMENT OF THE MARKET ... FOR PERHAPS THE FLOWS ARE NOT YET DETERRITORIALIZED ENOUGH, NOT DECODED ENOUGH ... NOT TO WITHDRAW FROM THE PROCESS, BUT TO GO FURTHER, TO "ACCELERATE THE PROCESS" ... THE TRUTH IS THAT WE HAVEN'T SEEN ANYTHING YET.
I SWEAR BY MY LIFE AND MY LOVE OF IT THAT I WILL NEVER LIVE FOR THE SAKE OF ANOTHER MAN, NOR ASK ANOTHER MAN TO LIVE FOR MINE.
EVERY MAN IS FREE TO DO THAT WHICH HE WILLS, PROVIDED HE INFRINGES NOT THE EQUAL LIBERTY OF ANY OTHER MAN.
IN ITS COLDER VARIANTS, WHICH ARE THOSE THAT WIN OUT, ACCELERATIONISM TENDS TO LAUGH.
WE WILL ENJOY OUR ALIENATION
DARKLY • AESTHETICIZE • WHAT'S • COMING
Index
To briefly explain the structure of this blog: this is a nearly direct export of my Zettelkasten knowledge system. I call the hypertext nodes here thoughts instead of "posts," because they can be changed, rewritten, and edited over time — to erase mistakes or represent my changing views — but can also remain stagnant and unedited as I move on to thinking more actively about other things — whether unrelated, or specific related subtopics — and my views change but I haven't had time to go back and edit them.
Thus, if you want to get a more complete and up to date understanding of my views on a topic, look at a whole thought page, not just an individual thought: like any brain, my public second brain is a constantly changing, evolving web of beliefs which is moved forward precisely by the tensions between various parts of it, forcing it to move in one direction or another.
Recent Updates
-
Seriously? Using DARE scare tactics?
This study focuses on finding out the cognitive cost of using an LLM in the educational context of writing an essay. We assigned participants to three groups: LLM group, Search Engine group, Brain-only group, where each participant used a designated tool ... to write an essay. We conducted 3 sessions with the same group assignment for each participant. In the 4th session we asked LLM group participants to use no tools (we refer to them as LLM-to-Brain), and the Brain-only group participants were... -
Intelligence Augmentation
Tools for Thought is an exercise in retrospective futurism; that is, I wrote it in the early 1980s, attempting to look at what the mid 1990s would be like. My odyssey started when I discovered Xerox PARC and Doug Engelbart and realized that all the journalists who had descended upon Silicon Valley were missing the real story. Yes, the tales of teenagers inventing new industries in their garages were good stories. But the idea of the personal computer did not spring full-blown from the mind of St... -
Do we really need macros much?
I've kind of fallen out of love with macros to a certain degree. Now that we don't just have snippets, but also AI, to help deal with boilerplate and refactoring, to a certain degree, yeah --- but there's more to it than that. Ultimately, it's because the vast majority --- like 99% --- of things you do with macros in Lisp, are just basic textual compression, basically. You get rid of boilerplate, but the resulting DSL is completely isomorphic to the structures and control flow of the underlying ... -
An inconvenient truth (for Lispers)
If you're going to quote Erann/Ron, you should include some ofhis more recent writing, such as: "at Google ... I saw, prettymuch for the first time in my life, people being as productiveand more in other languages as I was in Lisp. What's more, once Igot knocked off my high horse ... and actually bothered to reallystudy some of these other languages I found myself suddenlybecoming more productive in other languages than I was in Lisp. For example, my language of choice for doing Web development ... -
Who uses LLMs?
There's this common argument that only those who are bad at coding, or don't care about the craft of it, use AI to code. I think this is pretty clearly false. Let's look at a list, shall we? More iffy ones:This refutes a few arguments that I see a lot of people make, especially in places like lobste. rs:The point isn't to say that you have to use AI, or that it has no downsides or risks, or no reasons to be skeptical, but more to say that at this point it's just not sane or feasible to claim tha...