harrylove

40k years from now, a hominid excavates a computer and materializes a login page in the ether. "We think they used this for ritual sacrifice or to brush their teeth or both."

A more accurate analogy is Charles and Henry Greene using tech to construct an intricate rig to fasten the joints in a delicate jewelry box to fit inside the Gamble House. Yes, they could make the rig by hand, but time is a precious resource to people with so much to build.

What Tao and other artists of his caliber are demonstrating is that the tech is capable of building the rig. And the machine makers are incrementally demonstrating that the machine can make not only the jewelry box rig, but rigs to build rig-making machines.

Love love love this. So much wisdom I wish I’d had 30 years ago.

Here’s the tl;dr in my opinion, with my own paraphrase:

> Approach [life] with curiosity and generosity, not transactional hustle.

Everything else essentially follows.

Imagine what they’ll say 600,000 years from now.

“Humans began to acquire knowledge around the time of Dacro and the Second Wormhole Leap. The farther back we go…”

Should have put a “C.” in the middle of the name. Would have been an instant buy.

My daily meditation: “Now when we fought you had the eye of the tiger, man—the edge—and now you’ve got to get it back, and the way to get it back is to go back to the beginning, you know what I mean?”

RIP Carl.

This comment was the best roller coaster I've ridden in a long time. Thank you for the great writing. I can't stop laughing.

This answer unlocked a principle in my thinking about a certain class of problems I’ve been struggling with in a different domain. Thank you!

FWIW, I used Suica on Apple Wallet on my iPhone 12 in July of this year. Adding money to the card required a debit card tied to my bank. Payment failed with a Visa credit card. Additionally, payment only worked during Japan business hours. But as long as there was money on the card, the card itself (on the phone) worked around the clock. The card worked for train travel, convenience stores, and vending machines.

Even so, it feels like an off-brand article for The Paris Review, in both content and style. I’d be interested in learning the context.

> Your airports have security because your leaders learned the same things on 9/11 that the US did.

I have to imagine that politics and power plays also contributed to these changes, as they did with the creation of Homeland Security, the apparent changes in surveillance, the uptick in militarization of police forces, the apparent changes in our attitudes toward incarceration, interrogation, and torture of suspected terrorists, and so on.

When irrationality takes over, people want to feel safe more than they care about being safe. So, as a politician, if I want to achieve and maintain a high approval rating, I must attend to people's beliefs more than I must attend to their needs.

Thus, if other world leaders enact hardline policies and I am a leader in a country where my constituents are innumerate, illiterate, ignorant, or civically uninvolved, then following the lead of a strongman country is a shortcut to achieving my political ends. And in these cases, if other world leaders make these changes and I choose to do nothing, even if doing nothing is the right course of action, I should probably expect my approval rating to drop.