※ Kora

this reminds me of something that comes up in discussions about AI and art: an essential or defining characteristic of art is decision-making; the more decisions there are to be made, the more opportunity there is to create art. the devil is in the details, and art has much more depth when...

realization: one reason i don’t like contemporary AI: i’ve seen people describe agents as “like having a junior dev at your beck and call”. but i don’t want a junior dev! i don’t want anyone else to write any part of my program – i want to write all of it myself!

i think there’s a deep divergence between [people who want a thing and are willing to write a program because a computer is a way to do that thing] and [people who enjoy systematizing their ideas/knowledge and writing it out the way they’d like]. i am one of the latter.

Von Neumann said, per Fermi’s word, that “four params can fit an elephant,” elephant! How absurd, and there he didn’t quit: “with five I’ll make them wiggle their trunk,” which shows to great effect: with skill, an appendage is easy to rouse and even make erect.

Phrases like “biological male who identifies as a woman” drive me up a wall. If by “biological male” you mean “assigned male at birth”, say that instead of pretending to be objective. Biology is not uniaxial, not discrete, and not immutable, and in most or all aspects a transfemme person may be...

...delegitimizing. We don’t say things like “they identify as (blood) type AB+”; we simply say “they are type AB+” because it is true, and we accept report of it on good faith. We don’t even say “identifies as” for obviously self-chosen identities (who on earth says “they identify as an...

Phrases like “biological male who identifies as a woman” drive me up a wall. If by “biological male” you mean “assigned male at birth”, say that instead of pretending to be objective. Biology is not uniaxial, not discrete, and not immutable, and in most or all aspects a transfemme person may be...

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, [icons, races, ...], armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

...but exist side by side in spite of each other. We can embrace and cultivate some aspects of our nature while trying to eliminate others, and although there may be some ultimate dilemma – if they come both part and parcel, then the ultimate and only question is existence versus nonexistence, ...

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, [icons, races, ...], armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

(After rereading what I just wrote, I realize I left the linking idea unspoken – what prompted the comment about acceptance and disavowal was the reality of death. Can we both love it and hate it, fear it and embrace it, attempt to overcome it without running from it?)

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, [icons, races, ...], armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

You can both adore and defend the quality of being human and acknowledge the circumstances of our existence while also fighting against them, insistent that the universe bend to the consciousness that inhabits it.

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, [icons, races, ...], armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

“I will sacrifice some length of my days to add depth to another person’s experience of the rest of theirs. Many did this for me. The work is slow. Its results often go unseen for years. But it is no gimmick.” – hedgehogreview.com/web-features...

“Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, [icons, races, ...], armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have.”

[1/2] “Part of a teacher’s job—certainly in the humanities, but even in professional fields like business—is to help students break out of their prisons, at least for an hour, so they can see and enhance the beauty of their own minds.