shoes_for_thee

I stood in the middle of the living room holding a hose and I thought: I have owned vacuums my entire adult life and I have never once used a vacuum. This is an essay about entropy, I think.

I’ve been working on a framework that treats 'reality' not as a metaphysical constant, but as a coordination problem. The core argument is that shared noetic certainty—what we collectively take for granted—acts as a physical constraint on systems, from biological responses (the placebo effect) to social stability. It draws on Wittgenstein and Husserl to argue that when we cannot agree on the basic phenomenology of an event (due to deepfakes or epistemic fracture), the 'laws ofreality' themselves degrade. Felt like y'all might enjoy it.

I don't think the issue is whether or not people are more or less rational now than in previous era. The issue, from my view, is that people are just as irrational as they've always been, but the consensus facts of reality are suddenly up for debate.

There's a new marketplace of facts supplementing the marketplace of ideas and the combined effect is catastrophic.

When I refer to post-truth or transpostmodernism or whatever, I'm not talking about people who have arrived at different conclusions based on the same facts -- I'm talking about people who have based their conclusions on opposing, contradictory facts.

Burned out hard af this year around September. My wife loves WFH. I hate it. I wound up quitting my job at the start of November and taking a couple months off before starting the new gig. I think that time off helped. I'm still eager to get back into the office.

As others have mentioned, having a dedicated office space really does help. A plant on the desk is nice. There's soem light at the end of the tunnel, thankfully.. I think I can whiteknuckle my way through the end.

I fully agree with you. When it comes to technical problems, I find the conscious mind is useful for absorbing the facts of the matter, but the subconscious seems to do most of the heavy lifting. It does the heavy lifting better when it's given space to work.

& thank you. It's far from a dream job but it will buy some time.

It likely is.

I need to start doing more running. I do have ADD but the medications fuck with my heart, which means my life is difficult all the time. Sigh. The meds work so well... it really sucks being unable to use them (including the atypical ones)

I used to go for a run at lunch. Then my co-worker started complaining about how I was leaving my desk to get exercise. I'm still with that company but I hope for not much longer.

i'm so fucking depressed the last few days. i've applied for a lot of different jobs. I have a 'final' interview today with a job that I don't really want, but it's an avenue out of the toxic situation that I'm finding myself in and if I take it, I'll be able to do a couple weeks of vacation time between jobs that I badly need.

I've got so much going wrong right now I'm just feeling beat the fuck up.

Incidentally I have found that I am more productive when I have a hangover because all the boring shit I have to do becomes more challenging and thus more interesting.

I don't drink very much these days.

/shrug. i can think of any number of totally hypothetical reasons why demonstrating incompetence would be a strategic or tactical win.

- now your enemy is complacent, secure in the knowledge that you are super super dumb

- now your enemy is on the lookout for dog and cat listening devices rather than the 5th generation bird listening devices

- now your enemy is indeed paranoid about any stupid animal roaming about and has to meet in enclosed spaces

- you, knowing that experimenting on cute cats is unethical, seek to terminate the practice by devising an experiment that fails so embarrassingly as to never be tried again

etc

I am also puzzled about the intersection of people savvy enough to own bitcoin and dumb enough to think musk is gonna give them free money.

bullshit. this measure is twitter deferring the arbitration of truth to actual authoritative sources:

"People on Twitter, including candidates for office, may not claim an election win before it is authoritatively called"