plantimals

now

Sun, 28 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

nostr

I am always working towards decentralizing information flows. To that end I am working on various components in the nostr ecosystem.

drss.io is a bridge between RSS and nostr, and nostr and RSS.
npub.blog is a reader for long-form content.
npub.dev is a tool for configuring one’s outbox relays.

nostr

Sun, 19 Feb 2023 00:00:00 +0000

the protocol

nostr is a protocol for establishing pseudonymous identities and using them to cryptographically sign messages and pass them around via relays. it grew out of a small community of bitcoin/lightning devs, specifically fiatjaf. it was a reaction to the counter-party risks in using centralized social networks (twitter, facebook, etc) and the failings of other, semi-decentralized approaches (mastodon).

bitcoin familiarity helps when groking nostr. the identity portion of nostr is private/public key pair. similar to a bitcoin wallet where one uses one’s private key to sign a transaction and publish it into the network, one uses a nostr private key to sign an event and publish it to relays. there are various defined kinds of events, from profile information (name, about, url, avatar url, etc), to contact lists (follows), to notes (a short plain text message). the bitcoin network is peer to peer (distributed), where nodes will gossip transactions around to all the other nodes, but this is not the case with nostr. events stay where you publish them, relays only talk to clients, not other relays. this makes nostr decentralized, but not distributed. since it’s not peer-to-peer, one client doesn’t need to see the entire traffic of the network, or to query some distributed hash table a la IPFS, to find content across the network. this middle ground between centralized and distributed allows snappy response times yet prevents the domination of network lock-in.

soundscape meditation

Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

mindfulness meditation with the goal of scanning the soundscape from internal to progressively larger spheres. mindfulness in this context implies an attempt to change one’s perspective from looking though the senses to looking at the senses. observe how you observe things, pay attention to how the experience of sound changes over time, how some sounds have a texture, how some sounds are the signs of other things happening, which can cause reveries, and so on.

siddhartha dialogue

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

by: GPT-3

Siddhartha and Govinda are discussing Being and Becoming, the voice of the river, and the meaning of life.

Siddhartha: Wisdom cannot be communicated. It can be only hinted at.

Govinda: But how did you come to understand this?

Siddhartha: I’m not sure that I understand it. I am still looking at it. I am still listening to it. It is not words, it is not thoughts, it is something more than that, which is trying to be expressed through me. But I am only its vessel, not its voice.

papers

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

books are civilization’s best way of transmitting ideas across the centuries. there is a parallel tradition, alongside books, of circulating papers with succinct descriptions of ideas, which I would also like to aggregate over time as I do with books. papers are meant to be less wordy, a more analytical exercise than books, and tend to be less lindy. in that spirit I present here a list of papers I’ve read, thought about, and discussed, indexed by the order I read them in.

self sovereign identity

Sun, 05 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

on the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog. self-sovereign identity can allow this dog to participate in the secure commerce and activity of the internet without ever needing to establish its humanity.

trusted third parties are the most common mode of identity verification. email is a common mode of verification, with the email verification loop establishing ones control over an email address. this implicitly trusts the email provider, which is the third party in this example. direct verification from other parties, for example facebook, twitter, etc are also common. this approach has the advantage of being relatively easy to implement and so long as the third parties are incentivized to be trustworthy, it is also relatively secure.

starlink

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 00:00:00 +0000

long exposures of starlink satellites

technology is useful to the degree that it changes behavior.

starlink from spacex is a technology worth following. I believe it will change behavior.

spacex has been building the capacity to launch satellites into low earth orbit cheaper than any other entity. while that is amazing in and of itself, it wasn’t obvious how they would convert this capability into positive cash flow. starlink may be exactly the product they need to exploit their low earth orbit delivery capabilities.

charter cities

Mon, 14 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

there’s been a lot of discussion about how new firms are created and find their way to becoming self-sustaining. I’m thinking of paul graham and similar thinkers on this. the benefits of startups include the ability to create a new organization with new goals and new ways of operating such that the faulty assumptions of the past are no longer weighing on the ability to move forward. the trade off is that the nascent firm has no established customer base, little money, and no existing internal culture or social capital.

a financial fable

Wed, 09 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

in the early 2000’s I came across a reference to an old donald duck comic book as an explanation of the causes and effects of inflation and wealth redistribution. the story is titled “a financial fable”, and it still gives me a clear mental picture that helps to think about the unintended side effects of money creation and redistribution, or at least a visual metaphor to get a grasp on the dynamics of th situation.

epicycles

Sat, 05 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

in the geocentric models of the solar system (universe?), planets were said to move in circular paths. it was observed that the planets did not appear to move in this way, as during certain periods they enter “retrograde” motion, appearing to move backwards for a while, then return to moving forwards. in order to explain this deviation from the explanation, the epicycle was added. the epicycle, as you might predict from the name, is a cycle on top of another cycle. in this case, a circle that the planet moves around, which itself moves around the sun.

managed complexity

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

the following dream descriptions and interpretations are produced via the GPT3 playground from openai. the algorithm was fed a prompt with description and interpretation I wrote of a dream that I had. I then had the API produce more descriptions and interpretations on that pattern. the contents of these dreams are totally unrelated to my actual dream, but retain the writing style and tone.

a collection of dreams and interpretations by GPT3

filecoin

Thu, 27 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve mentioned IPFS in the past as a distributed storage network. a simple way of stating what IPFS is, is to say that it allows clients to store and retrieve files without having to locate those files on a specific computer. but this notion is too simple when considering the longevity of storage. it is the case that you can push files into IPFS and retrieve them via gateways and do various short-term experiments, but eventually your files will be pushed out of everyone’s cache and while their addresses will still be meaningful to the their holders, the network will no longer have those files to give you. the problem is around incentive alignment.

on aphorisms

Sun, 16 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

GPT3 prompt:

aphorisms

GPT3 completion:

The life of man is so complex and the causes of his behavior so obscure that one cannot even predict from one moment to the next what the next moment will bring. Who can’t remember that time when a stranger approached to ask for directions, and the next thing you knew you were best friends for life? I am constantly amazed at how different people are. Even the simplest things are so unpredictable.

Ada and Rainbow

Sat, 15 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Once Ada met a unicorn. Ada made it her pet and they went on adventures. Its name was rainbow. They explore new places. They watched volcanoes erupt. They had a picnic at the park. They went to the pool together.

One day rainbow was playing by the stream. She saw a beautiful mushroom and wanted to eat it. As she reached out her neck to take a bite, a bag went over her head. She had been captured by an evil queen. It was a long and dark trip back to the queen’s castle in the back of a wagon. The queen’s evil helpers took rainbow out of the wagon and put her in a cage with a big lock.

openai

Fri, 14 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

today’s feed friday is the blog of an organization that set out to safely improve the field of artificial intelligence. it remains to be seen whether or not their advances will be seen as safe, but the improvement is clear.

website: https://openai.com/blog/

feed: https://openai.com/blog/rss/

rather than paraphrase, I will reproduce openai’s mission statement here:

OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI)—by which we mean highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work—benefits all of humanity. We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

uncle lovecraft

Thu, 13 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

continuing from yesterday’s GPT3 generative content, I present an absurd dialog generated by artificial intelligence. I provided the prompt:

hp lovecraft meets jorge luis borges

lovecraft: greetings jorge.

and submitted that to the openai API for completion. the results worked best when drawn a few hundred words at a time, iteratively.

for those of you still trying to wrap your head around what exactly is happening here, I’m sorry to say that I’m right there with you. the best I can say is that the product of this human computer collaboration is something that personally interests me. the fact that it was written by an algorithm changes my view of it. there are clearly continuity issues, as the algorithm seems to have a very short term memory. that being said, I gave it nothing but the above prompt and let it rip. it has the feel of a dream. that is, there’s a certain fog to it, that makes it understandable, but not exactly clear. the subject matter is also a meeting which, as far as I know, never happened.

welcome to the apocalypse

Wed, 12 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

a long while ago I applied for the private beta of openai, and was recently granted access. the openai API is a way of making use of GPT3, a deep learning model trained on a large corpus of text. the user of GPT3 provides a prompt, which a chunk of text, and the model returns a completion, which is based on the prompt. a simple example from the docs goes like this:

how much land does a man need?

Sun, 09 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

by Leo Tolstoy, from the public domain

village scene with performers by f. lavdovskii

I

An elder sister came to visit her younger sister in the country. The elder was married to a tradesman in town, the younger to a peasant in the village. As the sisters sat over their tea talking, the elder began to boast of the advantages of town life: saying how comfortably they lived there, how well they dressed, what fine clothes her children wore, what good things they ate and drank, and how she went to the theatre, promenades, and entertainments.

feed friday: mike solana

Fri, 07 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

this week’s feed friday is mike solana. mike is a vp at founders fund and someone involved in building things in the real world, yet he still seems rationally optimistic about improving.

mike solana

website: https://www.piratewires.com

feed: https://www.piratewires.com/feed

twitter: @micsolana

mike is a gifted writer. I am always happy to read his posts, as I know there will be a compelling point to understand, whether I agree with him or not. I often agree.

what the moon brings

Thu, 06 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A Ruined Castle on an Outcrop by Moonlight in the Scottish Highlands

by HP Lovecraft from the public domain

I hate the moon—I am afraid of it—for when it shines on certain scenes familiar and loved it sometimes makes them unfamiliar and hideous.

It was in the spectral summer when the moon shone down on the old garden where I wandered; the spectral summer of narcotic flowers and humid seas of foliage that bring wild and many-coloured dreams. And as I walked by the shallow crystal stream I saw unwonted ripples tipped with yellow light, as if those placid waters were drawn on in resistless currents to strange oceans that are not in the world. Silent and sparkling, bright and baleful, those moon-cursed waters hurried I knew not whither; whilst from the embowered banks white lotos blossoms fluttered one by one in the opiate night-wind and dropped despairingly into the stream, swirling away horribly under the arched, carven bridge, and staring back with the sinister resignation of calm, dead faces.

iris

Wed, 05 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

the revelations

Tue, 04 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

a few weeks ago my copy of “the revelations” by erik hoel arrived. here I relate some of the subjective experience of reading the book, with an eye on pointing out particularly enjoyable turns of phrase, allusions, and decoding the signals I received. I was primed to read this book by the swarm of memes around Hoel.

my experience of this book is one of being drawn down a funnel. the mouth of this funnel for me was the article “enter the supersensorium”, which introduces some of hoel’s own research into neuroscience and some conclusions that reasonably follow from it. specifically, he introduces the “overfit brain hypothesis” which draws from experiences in deep learning and applies them to biological neural networks. the hypothesis is that during the course of the day, human brains are always learning our environment. this implies that the more frequently we encounter something, the more likely our brains will estimate it to be. hoel suggests then that dreams are a mechanism for loosening this overfitting, by mixing and matching disparate sensations from the course of the day in odd ways, it surprises us, and keeps our mental models from become too rigid. hoel then takes it a step further and applies this to fiction itself, suggesting that one explanation for the human appetite for fiction derives from our desire to dream, the loosen the overfitting by getting surprising juxtapositions in stories related to us. this is a bold hypothesis. and one that is worthy of much investigation and effort to understand. it’s not just bold, but plausible, and has implications for day to day human behavior. as it is not just any fiction that can bring the benefits of dreaming for loosening the overfitting, but art. that is, works that challenge us, that are just beyond our reach, that cause us to have to reconsider existing patterns and look for extensions or exceptions.

hugo

Mon, 03 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

if you want to get into blogging, want to retain control of your content, and don’t want to write something from scratch, a static site generator is a pretty good way to get this done.

there have been many static site generators in the history of the web, one of the first being dreamweaver for flash, but the current best of class is jekyll. the model established by jekyll is a collection of markdown files, a series of templates, and bit of code to plumb it all together. jekyll is implemented in ruby, and as such wants various ruby package management software to be installed for it to work. as you may have intuited from the fact that this post is not titled “jekyll”, I do not use it.

38th parallel lineament

Sun, 02 May 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I have greatly enjoyed reading roadside geology of missouri by charles g. spencer. spencer assumes no prior knowledge of geology and does a good job introducing a base layer of terms to build on. the layout of the book is composed largely around highway corridors, and what sort of geology is visible in roadcuts or other publicly accessible lands. said layout makes for enjoyable random-access readings. they function like non-fiction day trips across various parts of the state.

franklin county mo 1878 plat: part 3

Fri, 30 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

published from the public domain.

previous page here

grist mill, saw mill, and carding machinery property of jp norlin esq., Robertsville, Franklin County, MO

HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY—Continued.

EARLY MANNERS, CUSTOMS AND AGRICULTURAL IMPLEMENTS, ETC.

Our fathers after the flesh and in civilization, were as hospitable, and as sociable a people as ever lived. If a neighbor took sick, he was watched over as a brother ; and if his sickness was prolonged, his crops were looked after and his wood cut and hauled, if in winter. If a deer was killed, the first thing done was to divide with the neighbors. If a house was to be raised, men would go for ten and fifteen miles to assist, and their wives would often accompany them, for our mothers were as sociably inclined as their lords ; and a better, purer, or more virtuous class of women never lived, than the pioneer ladies of this country. A log-rolling was an event in the period to which log-rollings belonged ; and while the men rolled together and burned logs, the women managed to have a “quilting” at the some time and place, when enjoyment peculiar only to those good old days reigned supreme.

franklin county mo 1878 plat: part 2

Thu, 29 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

published from the public domain.

previous page here

HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY—Continued.

RIVERS.

As already remarked, the Missouri river forms the northern boundary line of the county, and is one of its important lines of commerce. Fine steamers ply between the different towns located along its margin to and from St. Louis, the great metropolis of the West. The navigable season generally opens in March and lasts till the middle of November, and as there is always a sufficient depth of water from the different points of the county, below, to St. Louis, the county derives great benefit by water transportation. The successful opening of the Mississippi river at its mouth by the jetty system, will eventuate in the increase of the commerce and means of transportation on both the great rivers washing the soil of the state, and the people may confidently expect a revival of the river trade at no distant day.

franklin county missouri, an 1878 plat book: part 1

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 12:59:55 -0500

from images (found here) of the original book. republished public domain

HISTORY OF FRANKLIN COUNTY

A vast region of country in North America was claimed by France, on account of explorations made by Marquette and Joliet, in 1763, and by Hennepin and Dugay, from 1680 to 1683. Sparse French settlements were made in various parts of this vast region, extending from the lakes on the North to New Orleans on the South, and on both sides of the great rivers draining the Mississippi valley. In 1712 the territory of Louisiana was granted to Crozet, who resigned it in 1717. It remained a province of France till 1763, when all east of the Mississippi river, with the exception of certain reservations in the southeast, was ceded to the English, and all west of this river was given to Spain, inclusive of the territory reserved East of the Mississippi.

third vcp appearance

Tue, 27 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

vance invited me back on the podcast. I always enjoy my conversations with vance, and I hope you will too. it’s hard to know if the language and topics are of interest to other people, but this is generally how it goes when we talk.

if you have any comments about our conversation please reach out to me on twitter, I’d enjoy hearing them.

this is the link to the podcast episode. and a link to the feed.

in the desert

Thu, 22 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

by Stephen Crane

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;

“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”

in the desert by carl haag

ivan bilibin

Wed, 21 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

the artist beksinski is challenging, but relatable to modern times. he presents dreamscapes, in many cases nightmares. but there’s something much more hopeful, if still dreamlike, in ivan bilibin.

bilibin’s work is dominated by russian folk culture. these images are distillations of the most memorable stories in this memeplex. even if you are not familiar with the stories, there’s an understanding that these are not frivilous images. something important is being conveyed, and presented with maniacal detail.

morels

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

mid to late april in the midwest is morel mushroom season. once you’ve seen one, they’re hard to mistake. if you’re out walking keep your eyes open and you’ll find them growing out of the leaf liter around fallen trees and branches. they are by far the best mushroom, and even if you don’t like mushrooms, they go for ~$20 / lb.

common morel

ozymandias

Sun, 18 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

by Percy Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:

on buying a farm

Sat, 17 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

cato the elder on buying a farm from de agricultura

When you are thinking of acquiring a farm, keep in mind these points: that you be not over-eager in buying nor spare your pains in examining, and that you consider it not sufficient to go over it once. However often you go, a good piece of land will please you more at each visit.

Notice how the neighbors keep up their places; if the district is good, they should be well kept. Go in and keep your eyes open, so that you may be able to find your way out. It should have a good climate, not subject to storms; the soil should be good, and naturally strong.

wealth distribution

Tue, 13 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

let’s return to a recurring fixture in the startup/tech space, paul graham. previously I noted the idea of building up a mental model of some worthy personalities over time. if you have suggestions of people to follow over time, please engage with me on twitter @plantimals.

my first encounter with graham was in 2005 when I heard a podcast recording of a talk he gave at oscon about startups. one of his opening riffs was on the topic of wealth distribution, or more specifically, the distribution of innovation. his point was that an uneven distribution was not in itself a good thing, but the sign of a good thing. that if everyone were equally innovative, it would not be so because everyone was thomas edison, but because there are no thomas edisons.

beksinski

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I find myself returning to the theme of dreams and dreaming. when I come across art that has this quality it arrests my attention and I feel obliged to let it sink in.

for example, my recent post ex oblivione is a republishing of a public domain hp lovecraft story which is a narration that is almost exclusively set in a dreamscape.

the article enter the supersensorium by erik hoel elaborates on some of his work in the field of neuroscience describing the “overfit brain hypothesis”. this line of thinking suggests a function for dreams along with a meaningful way to differentiate art from entertainment. that is, art is that set of inputs which works to loosen our overfit mental models, rather than running in the same grooves. in short, art is mentally challenging to understand.

ceramic

Sun, 11 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

we live in a time great innovation in distributed systems. bitcoin, ethereum, IPFS, and many others worth tracking. self-sovereign identity (SSI) in particular is an area under development which has the potential to allow the creation of forms of authentication that allow the user to be in full control of their identity.

ceramic builds on what IPFS has established, adds SSI, and streams. IPFS is a layer for static files, with IPLD for graph-structured content. a recent ceramic blog does a better job laying it out:

ex oblivione by hp lovecraft

Sat, 10 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

trying to communicate the ultimate subjective experience, dreams, is a worthy goal. to that end, I reproduce here a short story by hp lovecraft, which has entered the public domain. for more of these please visit hplovecraft.com. previously on plantimals.org: dagon

ex oblivione by h.p. lovecraft – from the public domain

When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water that torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim’s body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.

feed friday: 1729

Fri, 09 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

1729 is ramanujan’s number.

1729 is now also the name of Balaji S. Srinivasan’s new project.

website: https://1729.com

feed: https://1729.com/all/rss/

the 1729 feed is rather new, but it has been a fascinating read so far. balaji (I’d normally refer to creators by their last names, but in this instance I believe that would be less clear) is trying to put together a community via the internet. he is a proponent of the notion of digital sovereignty, and my favorite rational optimist. he can be found on twitter as @balajis. he had a conversation with tim in which he describes the 1729 concept in great depth, along with a lot of other fascinating ideas.

diffusion limited aggregation

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

some algorithms have an attraction. beyond the straightforward utility of providing a measurable solution to a highly defined problem, some of them are satisfying analogs of natural processes, or seem promising windows on the mechanics of reality. I’m not sure how to categorize them, but there’s also a class of algorithms that have a particularly visual satisfaction, that explain some process and provide an intuition, that intuition being not a new thing, but the alignment of something previously recognized, falling into place.

ipfs pinning service api

Wed, 07 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I still owe you a detailed introduction to IPFS, as promised in my post centralized fragility, and that is on its way.

in the mean time, for those of you who don’t need an introduction, but like me, were not aware of this new feature…

ipfs pinning services api

the ipfs pinning services api allows you to add a remote service, very much like a remote repo in git, and pin local files to a remote service which implements this api.

the revelations begin

Tue, 06 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I discovered the works of erik hoel, specifically his article “will the bitcoin bubble pop? or will it envelope us all?” which I wrote about previously here.

hoel’s works have motivated me to keep digging. I find them to be truly unique in scope and inspiration. to that end, when I found that hoel was in the process of publishing a novel I was excited to get at it as soon as possible.

six spotted tiger beetle

Mon, 05 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I spotted this beast yesterday and was able to approach close enough to take a picture of it eating something. if you can identify the prey, please let me know. it looks like an ant or a spider, but it’s hard to tell.

the six-spotted tiger beetle

phase changes

Sun, 04 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

pattern language entry: phase change

the organization of matter progresses through a series of changes depending upon the temperature and pressure present. these changes are through a series of phases, or states, most of which will be familiar: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma.

solid matter has a fixed volume and shape. sometimes solids an internal structure, a crystal lattice. liquids take the shape of their container, but have a fixed volume. gases have neither fixed shape nor fixed volume. they take the shape and volume of their container. plasma is similar to gas, lacking a fixed volume or shape, but is electrically conductive, has magnetic fields, and is responsive to electromagnetic fields.

360 experiments

Sat, 03 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been tinkering with VR after getting an oculus quest 2 for christmas. I’ve previously mentioned using the aframe library to spin up basic content quickly.

check out this oceanic setting: become ocean

and a random collection of photospheres: 360

if you’re on a smartphone you should be able to sweep it around in physical space and view these scenes in “smart window” mode. you can also rotate by dragging left or right. if you have an oculus or similar, you can navigate to these items and hit the “vr” button and jump into the scene.

feed friday: schneier on security

Fri, 02 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

this week’s feed friday is bruce schneier’s blog:

website: https://www.schneier.com/

feed: https://www.schneier.com/feed/atom/

schneier is a researcher and writer on cryptography, who has himself developed several algorithms. he is one of those people I’ve gotten value in tracking longitudinally over time. he’s an outlier on blockchain, as in, he’s skeptical. the best I can summarize his position is that he sees blockchain as shifting trust from a set of people to an implementation of an algorithm and the underlying systems it runs on. I get the impression that he thinks blockchain is as likely to work as any other technology, he just doesn’t see a use-case. he seems unimpressed by the goal of decentralization. and to my mind this is something to be treasured. schneier is a thoughtful, competent cryptographer who is capable of communicated thoughts with the public, both in blog and book form.

mountains of possibility

Thu, 01 Apr 2021 00:00:00 +0000

sometimes twitter brings fodder for interesting conversation. I’m down on centralized social media a lot lately, but I’ve enjoyed it over the last 11 years, and still occasionally get some utility out of it. for instance, I happened across the following diagram:

tim urban's original tweet

it’s simple concept, but communicated beautifully. your life is a series of decisions, and at each point you are simultaneously closing off possibilities and going deeper on others. sometimes visualizations bring the point home and collapse the meaning into a smaller mental artifact than a long-winded description.

samizdat

Wed, 31 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

get started fast with IPFS. self-publish a markdown document that renders into html and is hosted on the inter-planetary file system by pinata.cloud. link a domain name to it. access it via gateways. share something valuable.

find the souce code on github

self-published markdown, packaged for the distributed web

what is markdown?

dead-simple syntax for formatting text. there are headings, lists, links, images, and more.

make a new folder
write markdown in that folder
add samizdat files
publish

samizdat files

download the four files from the following links into your new folder

networking

Tue, 30 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

the concept of networking gets thrown around a lot. I think the importance of it is often lost in the throw-away phraseology. it is not an accident that this word also applies to other things. namely, collections with many individual parts, put in relation to one another. there are networks of: computers, roads, rivers, ecological interactions, economic flows, family trees, electricity, gene interactions, and the ever-popular social networks.

there’s a core mathematical abstraction underlying all of these things, that being the graph. graphs decompose networks into nodes and edges. nodes are the things in the network, while edges are the connections between those things. this is the very essence of pattern languages, moving between levels of specificity, from specific to general, and then back down from general to specific. all of the aforementioned specific cases of networks share this one general property: they can be modeled as graphs, and any conclusions that are true for graphs are also true (some interpretation may be required) on any of these specific network cases. for instance, there are algorithms for finding the shortest path between two nodes in a network.

pater patriæ by h l mencken

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

originally published in 1918, this work of H L Mencken is in the public domain

If George Washington were alive today, what a shining mark he would be for the whole camorra of uplifters, forward-lookers and professional patriots! He was the Rockefeller of his time, the richest man in the United States, a promoter of stock companies, a land-grabber, an exploiter of mines and timber. He was a bitter opponent of foreign entanglements, and denounced the evils in harsh, specific terms. He had a liking for forthright and pugnacious men, and a contempt for lawyers, schoolmasters and all other such obscurantists. He was not pious. He drank whiskey whenever he felt chilly, and kept a jug of it handy. He knew far more profanity than Scripture, and used and enjoyed it more. He had no belief in the infallible wisdom of the common people, but regarded them as inflammatory dolts, and tried to save the Republic from them. He advocated no sure cure for all the sorrows of the world, and doubted that such a panacea existed. He took no interest in the private morals of his neighbors.

century books

Sun, 28 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

the phrase

it’s better to read 100 books 10 times than 1,000 books once

is stuck in my imagination.

for every book I read I use a 3x5 card as a bookmark and note on it when I started and when I finish. I’ll also take any notes, parts that interested me, words I enjoyed or didn’t know, and paraphrasing of important messages. so I have a growing stack of these cards, but I don’t do any specific accounting of them. I’m not worried about my velocity. I read quickly enough for my purpose, which is to understand more about those areas that seem most valuable for me to understand. this does not limit me to nonfiction, as I think there are many truths that can only be expressed via fiction.

century books

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

it’s better to read 100 books 10 times than 1,000 books once

I don’t know who originated this concept. I’ve heard it said by Naval. the idea is to go deep on a narrower slice of possible books than to be spread so thin. this isn’t so much an algorithm as a heuristic, a tactic for filtering the kinds of books you read, and also a way to measure your own growth over time. I’ve had the experience of getting something different from reading the same book at different points in my life. checking in with different books over time is a good way to get an informative but different perspective on your own mentality.

the sovereign individual

Sat, 27 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I enjoy using the imagery of Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception line describing every human group as a “society of island universes”. that image strikes at the root of my conception of the individual. in a very real sense, we all have a unique window on the universe from our individual perspective which can never be shared and no other person can cause our body to act. I refer to this as absolute individual sovereignty. sovereignty because we have the power to act in whatever way occurs to us to act, and absolute in that no other entity can ever come between us and our actions. there may well be consequences to our actions, and other entities can use threats, violence, or other tactics in an attempt to influence us, but ultimately it is our will that determines our actions. I made a similar point when describing my thoughts on attention:

feed friday: the vance crowe podcast

Fri, 26 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve known vance since 2012 when we crossed paths at a startup weekend here in st.louis. we are so different that we’re almost identical. we’ve been throwing lit matches into the bog of culture for a long time now, and I think you will find it a valuable source of productive entropy to subscribe to the vance crow podcast.

the vance crowe podcast

website: https://www.vancecrowe.com/podcast

feed: https://feeds.transistor.fm/the-vance-crowe-podcast

the podcast is worth your time. vance has a wide variety of people that speak to different topics. ag is heavily represented, which is a fascinating point of departure for conversation, that keeps the topics rooted in some form of reality, if you’ll permit a terrible pun.

the momentous dichotomy

Thu, 25 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

david deutsch has boomed through the skies of my memesphere on numerous occasions, but never in way that caused me to pause long enough to take on his ideas. but this time, something is different. this pass originated from naval, specifically his recent parceling out of painfully short podcast episodes on the topic of deutsch’s book “the beginning of infinity”. it sounds as though naval sat down with brett hall to talk about the book and its ideas, and then chopped that conversation into tiny pieces.

shaun newman

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

on Monday I had a conversation with Shaun Newman, which he recorded and published on this wednesday’s episode of The Shaun Newman Podcast. we talked about the origins of bitcoin, philosophy, the trend of offense vs defense over the centuries, RSS, and social media/filter bubbles. I really enjoyed talking with Shaun, so give a listen, and subscribe to Shaun’s podcast via his feed here.

reverse memory palace

Tue, 23 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

the memory palace, or method of loci, is a procedure for committing a sequence of details, points to make in a speech for example, to memory such that they can be recalled when delivering the speech.

this method works by chunking the details into another system that is already well established, such that cross-linking the details to be memorized with locations in ones home or the site of the speech allow the speaker to associate the points with those locations and only be required to memorize a path through them.

nabokov

Mon, 22 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I lifted this quote from here:

Just as the universal family of gifted writers transcends national barriers, so is the gifted reader a universal figure, not subject to spatial or temporal laws. It is he—the good, the excellent reader—who has saved the artists again and again from being destroyed by emperors, dictators, priests, puritans, philistines, political moralists, policemen, postmasters, and prigs. Let me define this admirable reader. He does not belong to any specific nation or class. No director of conscience and no book club can manage his soul. His approach to a work of fiction is not governed by those juvenile emotions that make the mediocre reader identify himself with this or that character and “skip descriptions.” The good, the admirable reader identifies himself not with the boy or the girl in the book, but with the mind that conceived and composed that book. The admirable reader does not seek information about Russia in a Russian novel, for he knows that the Russia of Tolstoy or Chekhov is not the average Russia of history but a specific world imagined and created by individual genius. The admirable reader is not concerned with general ideas; he is interested in the particular vision. He likes the novel not because it helps him to get along with the group (to use a diabolical progressive-school cliche); he likes the novel because he imbibes and understands every detail of the text, enjoys what the author meant to be injoyed, beams inwardly and all over, is thrilled by the magic imageries of the master-forger, the fancy-forger, the conjuror, the artist. Indeed of all the characters that a great artist creates, his readers are the best.

hierarchical thought

Sun, 21 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

working memory limits us to the number of concrete details we can hold in our minds at any one time. depending on the type of detail, the consensus is somewhere between 4 and 10, usually quoted at 7. given first hand experience, I believe this idea has some legitimacy. but there’s a hidden detail that changes the implications of this limited work space hypothesis.

a detail in this context is answer to a question: the number of dollars in your bank account, the name of someone you want to communicate with, or the second digit of a novel phone number. that last one is the odd one. the number of dollars in your bank account is a single detail, you don’t recall the digits individually, nor do you recall the nth letter of someone’s name, but the name as a whole. so why divide up the phone number in this way? because we remember things based on connections to other concepts we’ve already established. names are recognizable as names, and we’ve heard most of the names we’re likely to encounter. in the case where we’ve not encountered the name, or anything like it before, they are indeed harder to remember, though we probably fall back on the larger chunks of syllables rather than the letters that make up the name. but how did we establish those other concepts if they are also expressed in terms of connections to other concepts we’ve previously learned?

dagon

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

by HP Lovecraft

from the public domain

I am writing this under an appreciable mental strain, since by tonight I shall be no more. Penniless, and at the end of my supply of the drug which alone makes life endurable, I can bear the torture no longer; and shall cast myself from this garret window into the squalid street below. Do not think from my slavery to morphine that I am a weakling or a degenerate. When you have read these hastily scrawled pages you may guess, though never fully realise, why it is that I must have forgetfulness or death.

dagon

Sat, 20 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

link to the story: HP Lovecraft’s “Dagon”

when copyright law was first established in the United States by the copyright act of 1790, the term was 14 years, and if the author was still living, it could be renewed for another 14 years. then in 1831 Noah Webster argued for an extension to 28 years originally, and then renewable for another 14 if the author was still living. the copyright act of 1909 extended the renewal term from 14 to 28 years. and on it goes until the sonny bono act of 1998, the most recent copyright update, which grants a copyright for the life of the author, then another 70 years.

feed friday: cal newport

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

welcome to the second installment of feed friday. this week’s subject crosses the streams with both a blog and a podcast feed. he also has several books, appearances on other podcasts, etc.

cal newport’s study hacks blog and deep questions podcast

blog: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/feed/ podcast: https://feeds.feedburner.com/StudyHacks

I’ve been following Newport’s blog feed for at least 10 years. he doesn’t post content daily, but when he does it’s always well researched and thoughtful. some of the core ideas that have informed my approach to work and productivity have come by way of Newport. deep work, digital minimalism, and the hyperactive hivemind are the most memorable examples.

how you know

Thu, 18 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Paul Graham is the founder of Y-combinator and someone I enjoy checking in on over the years. there are some writers who have a consistent enough subject matter and personality that reading them over a long period of time yields a useful mental model. I’d enjoy hearing from anyone who can suggest other people that they’ve followed for a long time.

Graham’s essays are how you should get to know him. I have found them an amazing source of inspiration over the years. ever since I first encountered his 2004 oscon talk “great hackers” via podcast, I have enjoyed his ideas. my favorite example being:

digital commonwealth

Wed, 17 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am always looking for sources of novel thinking. so if you have some you think I would like, send it to me.

I read an article describing a theory of dreams, which is extended to explain humanity’s desire for art, and which suggests it is not only possible to distinguish between art and entertainment, but necessary.

A belief in an aesthetic spectrum may be all that keeps a civilization from disappearing up its own brainstem.

moderation in infrastructure

Tue, 16 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

the balkanization of the internet has been discussed for decades, but it may finally be upon us. the highly centralized public cloud providers are caught in the dilemma of how to handle their increasing power as people everywhere realize how important standing at the high-ground of the internet can be. from the most recent stratechery article:

public clouds in particular would be better off preparing for geographically-distinct policies in the long run, even as they deliver on their commitment to predictability and process in the meantime, with a strong bias towards being hands-off. That will mean some difficult decisions, which is why it’s better to make a commitment to neutrality and due process now.

works

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

in order to make the various projects I’ve accumulated over the years more accessible, I’ve linked to them from a single page, accessible from the front page of plantimals.org called works. I’ll make additions as new projects are added and style it for a more visual indexing of the content.

works

Mon, 15 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

complexity

logistic map - the logistic map is a mathematical model for thinking about population growth. on the x axis is the growth rate, with the y axis being population level. at growth rates below 1.0 the population goes to zero after a finite number of iterations. between 1 and ~3.5 the population has one or more stable points it arrives at after some number of iterations. above ~3.5 there are region of chaos, which are visible in the visualization by wide clouds of points, with sweeping lines through them. pay attention to where those chaotic regions coalesce back into discrete lines, and then back into chaos. there is also a fractal structure, where the overall shape of the graph is visible in those regions where the shift between order and chaos happens. the image was rendered by a custom program written in Go and is rendered as a deepzoom in the browser by the openseadragon javascript library.

a-frame

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 11:37:23 -0500

another day another fascinating javascript library. as much as it pains me to say it, there’s definitely a pattern here.

virtual reality has been five years away from mainstream adoption for 25 years. previously the problem has been the lack of depth in the market place, hardware that can’t refresh fast enough to prevent nausea, and ultimately the curse of tightly linked hardware and software. that curse being that no one is motived to develop software that will only run on a single device. there were historic attempts to solve this problem, including VRML

mermaid.js

Sun, 14 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

markdown is a wonderful technology. so I was excited when a colleague told me there was a markdown language for graphs.

mermaid, which is a javascript library and a CLI, syntax looks like this:

graph LR
    Beginning --> Middle
    Middle --> End

which is rendered into this:

graph LR Beginning --> Middle Middle --> End

the LR part tells us it’s going left to right. we could swap in TD to make it go top to bottom:

attention

Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

attention is your bandwidth for changing the universe

@plantimals

human attention is the most valuable quantity yet known to humanity. it is the sole link between the platonic realm of ideas and the real world.

every human has a finite supply of attention, plus any attention that is given by others. the word “given” here is appropriate, as attention can never be taken. there can be dire consequences, threats, violence, etc., but in the end every individual has the ultimate and final veto on what to focus their attention on. this implies that all attention is voluntarily given to that which the individual believes is most valuable to devote their attention to at any given moment. that individual may not be trying very hard to find the most valuable thing beyond their immediate grasp, or they may be mistaken about their beliefs of what was valuable and wish they had done something different ex post facto, but in the moment, they are focusing on that which they implicitly believe benefits them the most to focus on.

feed friday: the jim rutt show

Fri, 12 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

no traditions like new traditions.

introducing: feed friday, in which I introduce an RSS feed that I follow and suggest why readers might also be interested in following. the feed could be any kind of RSS feed, a blog, a podcast, or something totally off-the-wall.

the jim rutt show

website: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/

feed: https://jimruttshow.blubrry.net/feed/podcast/

I first crossed paths with today’s feed by hearing his appearance on the vance crowe podcast. Rutt is the former chairman of the Santa Fe Institute, former CEO of Network Solutions, DNS provider in the early days of internet commercialization. Rutt is also involved in several ongoing projects, including BigChainDB.

long-form content

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

when I use the term “long-form content”, I am referring to writing, and sometimes to podcasting, which takes the time to develop an idea, to establish with the consumer of the content a rapport, a durable pattern language which is then used to elucidate something of value to both parties.

we are all starting from a unique and entirely idiosyncratic place in the universe. we share some common experiences as human beings who share a language and biological history, but what those events are like from the first-person perspective for anyone else is still opaque.

tinukajazojipodi

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

a few years ago my daughter asked the question “what is programming?” she was quite young at the time, and heard me referencing the skill for one reason or another. so rather than just explain with words, I got out the laptop and we wrote a program to demonstrate.

programming has always been an enjoyable activity in and of itself for me. I work as a software engineer, and have found that this is not the case for everyone doing the work. but the ability to enjoy the act itself is what allows you to keep up with the field. if the only programming you ever do is that which people are paying you to do “on the job”, you will not discover new things, as employers rarely are willing to risk your time on the clock on wild new ideas. so I wanted to convey this aspect in some way.

centralized fragility

Tue, 09 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

without realizing it, we have added a layer to phone numbers. most people don’t remember the digits of other people’s numbers anymore, and some of us struggle even to remember our own at times, since we rarely use them. now we just scroll down a list of names, and tap the one we want. the phone takes care of mapping that name to a number, and does the dialing behind the curtains.

really simple syndication

Mon, 08 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

I am immediately distrustful of claims made of simplicity or honesty. usually these properties are self-evident. truly simple or honest people/ideas don’t need to be labeled as such. but “really” simple? probably not.

while I won’t defend the name, I support the goal of RSS, enabling anyone to become a publisher in a light-weight, publish/subscribe framework for human knowledge.

the RSS feed is one way of accomplishing the distribution of content, and one which has been around for a long time. many of you will already be familiar with it, some will be meta-happy to be reading this work about RSS via my RSS feed. I have a lot to say about RSS and its successors, so I’m starting with the basics here.

fractal localism

Sat, 06 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The best way to summarize Fractal Localism … is by its opposite: abstract universalism.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Principia Politica

Principia Politica is a nascent work (available in draft form) by Nassim Taleb.

Fractal Localism is a way to think about answers to questions on how to interact with complex systems, especially ones in which the agent is immersed. think about scaling one’s interest in solutions to problems based on their proximity and solubility. it has a very stoic feel to it, a sort of categorical imperative of oikeiôsis.

gardener vs gardened

Fri, 05 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000

concerns over internet centralization have been present since before it was released to the public. some of those concerns proved to be hyperbolic, some have been prophetic. AOL was once criticized as a “walled garden”, where its users were stunted in their ability to find and curate useful content. it does seem as though there was a residue of castaways left behind by AOL’s ultimate demise, but largely people just left when it became clear that there were far greener grasses outside the wall.

character

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 00:00:00 +0000

he does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the universe has in store for him - doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. for we carry our fate with us, and it carries us.

the stoic fly-wheel

you have to assemble your life yourself, action by action. and be satisfied if each one achieves as much as it can… if you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself - another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. action by action

timefulness

Tue, 26 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

the Long Now Foundation, a worthy subject in itself, brought Marcia Bjornerud’s book Timefulness to my attention. I was immediately interested by the prospect of reading a contemporary work on geologic time and hoping for some poetic intersubjective understanding of what it’s like to experience deep time mapped onto physical space. I imagine looking upon the face of a cliff, with many layers of exposed rock, and wandering back in time like leafing through pages in a book.

logistic landscapes

Wed, 13 May 2020 00:00:00 +0000

the logistic landscapes are a series of images captured from the logistic map bifurcation diagram. the diagram is generated as a sequence of vertical slices of the diagram rendered by a custom program for the purpose.

each vertical slice is 2,500 pixels wide by 50,000 pixels tall. the diagram fits on 200 of these vertical slices. the slices are then processed to build a representation which allows a viewer to zoom in and out and pan around in the composite image as if in a map app. explore the logistic map and built some tacit knowledge of its shape from this bifurcation diagram.

collected wisdoms

Sat, 08 Feb 2020 22:59:32 -0600

He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the universe has in store for him - doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us, and it carries us.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

You have to assemble your life yourself, action by action, and be satisfied if each one achieves as much as it can…. if you accept the obstacle and work with what you’re given, an alternative will present itself from another piece of what you’re trying to assemble. Action by action.

we carry our fate

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 21:40:06 -0600

He does only what is his to do, and considers constantly what the universe has in store for him - doing his best, and trusting that all is for the best. For we carry our fate with us, and it carries us.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

bridge of chaos

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 07:31:09 -0600

A snapshot from the logistic map, in the neighborhood of r = (3.65,3.7).

textures

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 08:47:55 -0500

460 mya

6 ya

transcendent triangles

Sun, 22 Sep 2019 08:42:13 -0500

Rob Long

Sat, 21 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000

tilt-shift st.louis

introduction

I live in St.Louis, Missouri, where I am focused on industrial genomics (the organization of large-scale datasets for biotechnology), distributed systems, web3, RSS, paleontology, art, and pattern languages.

industrial genomics

A blog post I co-wrote with Google Kubernetes Engineers on some of my work on Industrial Genomics: “Bayer Crop Science seeds the future with 15000-node GKE clusters”. I gave a talk about my work at the Plant and Animal Genome XXVIII Conference titled: Industrializing Genotype Data on Public Cloud Infrastructure. in which I discuss my work organizaing genomic/genetic data for Bayer Crop Science, with a massive scale genotype imputation project as the use case. my team of data engineers implemented an imputation engine that takes all varieties of genotype data, along with reference style imputation from Beagle and a rich graph of pedigree data, combined with a novel pedigree-based imputation algorithm to render the best possible view all germplasm given all known genotype observations, in an always-on manner.