A year and 60,000 characters of tweet drafts

I like tweeting. But a little more than a year ago I read a damning series of passages in Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

I stopped tweeting so much for a while (not just because of that) and mostly just kept a document of notes. From the start they overflowed 140 characters. Here they are, lightly redacted, with some addenda.

1 May 2015

The only honest writing is written straight from start to finish. Editing attempts to contrive a sequence of thoughts that never actually occurred unbroken in any human mind, so it has to take pains to fake “flow”. Much bad writing could be broken up, quoted, and rearranged without loss of meaning; the best writing is unquotable, continuous and whole.

• 17 May 2015—“Elsewhere Nietzsche writes that the; philosopher “must not, through some false arrangement of deduction and dialectic, falsify the things and the ideas he arrived at by another route…. We should neither conceal nor corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us. The most profound and inexhaustible books will surely always have something of the aphoristic, abrupt quality of Pascal’s ‘Pensées.’” We should not “corrupt the actual way our thoughts come to us” — Milan Kundera, http://metaismurder.com/post/17615327040/i-think-nietzsche-cast-doubt-on-this-assertion
• Wolfram on “random” cellular automata as those with no shortcuts for computing a future state. Deterministic, but incompressible; cannot be expressed in a shorter algorithm. An incompressible book cannot be spoiled. Taleb also talks about this.

June–September 2015

The hunting oscillation of thinkpieces: how efficient are the frequency and amplitudes of “more designers should learn to code!” and “designers don’t need to learn to code!” in navigating the phase-space of popular career decisions?

If you apply the efficient market hypothesis to the cultural currency the efficient market hypothesis holds, then there is probably roughly the right amount of faith in efficient markets.

Grossman-Stiglitz paradox in conversation: nobody wants to talk if what you say is totally true, or unfalsifiable. belief differentials as dynamo. how does this relate to Kundera “it’s exactly the same w me, I…”?

compliment is stable; incisive critique is unstable. if you miss you’re f’ed. a slightly-off attempted compliment is still complimentary; a slightly-off attempt at incisive tough-love critique is just mean.

“one is very often conscious of such enigmas in the street, but they become resolved in a remarkably easy manner by being forgotten” (Musil)

OH: “Twitter is the easiest thing in the world. People on Twitter love you being bad at life, so literally just tweet the stupidest things.”

I never lie, but I would say I have only had one completely honest conversation in my life.

• 13 June 2016 — This is such melodramatic bullshit on both fronts. But there is some kind of power law distribution of honesty.

Finished Knausgaard. Very good, but reinforces that the person whose memoirs I’d most like to read is precisely that person who is least apt to write them.

Kanye West: “lost 30 mil so i spent another 30…unlike hammer 30 million can’t hurt me.” Good line, funny line. 30 and 30 is 60, soo… why didn’t he say 60? but it is actually a stronger statement, in context, than “60 million can’t hurt me,” and not just lyrically but logically, because it makes an implicit statement about the first derivative: not only can 30m not hurt him, but it also has a negligible effect on the degree to which 30m hurts him. i.e., it still doesn’t.

Re: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” —

• weird how that becomes more prominent than just “do what they want”
• subtle failure of empathy when they want to be treated differently than you do
• i sometimes say things to people that i would want them to say to me, & they don’t.
• sometimes when we are mistreated we blame the other’s malice or incompetence. a sort of bayesian dual problem: try assuming that they ARE treating you as they’d like to be treated. then their actions are information about the spread between your objectives.
• what determines whether the reciprocal feedback cycle will be vicious or virtuous?

Fossil fuels are so beautifully morbidly renewable: drilling into dinosaur graveyards drives the engines that’ll put human bones in the ground for the next generation.

A pedestrian breaks the surface tension at the curb; the stream of pedestrians refracts at the curb… (need pics from up high)

• Pedestrians crossing diagonally refract as they hit the lower-resistance sidewalk.
• Pedestrians refract at the curb to reduce time spent in the higher-risk street.
• What do you call the study of a very small number of liquid particles?

Great album

Once @ericajberry and I walked the High Line and laughed at the pedestrians on the street below who never looked up, then went to the Whitney and laughed at the pedestrians on the High Line who never looked up. And still we did not look up. (Did we? Probably, actually.)

My tweets (writing) are descending into nothing more than citations of relevant writing. Popova-style hypertext hypotrophy.

Measuring the length of a relationship can feel like finding the measure of the Cantor set. Take an interval, n years; then subtract the middle third, again, again.

If you could befriend a word, what would it be?

If you could write the census, what 10 questions would you ask everyone?

11 September 2015

Re: Tegmark — what are the integration and disintegration energies of a person? A city? A nation?

16 September 2015

Have folks studied optimal control problems in which the computation of optimal control is not free?

• 13 June 2016 — Similar: study of complexity class of an algorithm that endogenizes the process of implementation of the algorithm as part of the meta-algorithm under study.

Holding the first in a series of doors for someone is kind if the number of doors is odd; if even, almost passive-aggressive in threatened presumption of reciprocity.

The fundamental dilemma of life

• 13 June 2016 — Ha, Tom Gara made this joke to great effect in March. And how many others, surely, throughout time?

i wonder if joseph campbell always told his friends the same stories over and over again

2 October 2015

Like well-behaved functions are locally flat, every well-behaved interactive/dynamic interface is locally static.

10 October 2015

However much you fear you’re missing, you’re actually missing SO MUCH MORE!!!

Subway pole gravity assist on a decelerating train

11 October 2015

If I were President I’d ban coupons, discounts, sweepstakes, and freebies. Distortionary crap.

• 13 June 2016 — Such a bad idea

12 October 2015, 02:21

You know how, in element-isotope space, there’s a stable band that gets squeezed to oblivion as you go up and to the right? math is similar: like heavy elements, higher level math sorta starts falling apart. it becomes less well-behaved, less stable wrt perturbations, less extensible and soluble. Why do we observe the incidences of elements in the world that we do? there’s a lot of the lighter stuff. well, the heavy stuff is hard to make and doesn’t stick around very long. the same might be asked of math. why are so many of the laws of nature explicable in such low-level math? well, the obvious answer is: it’s not, you idiot, that’s just the stuff you’ve learned; we study what’s tractable, look for the keys under the streetlight. that john d cook tweet about linearity i tweeted at rustyk5. ok sure. but even so i’d reckon there’s more low-level than high-level. like, nth-degree hyperoperators are probably not uniformly common for all possible values of n. we seem to see a lot more 1s amd 2s than 373782726639s. ok ok ok selection bias. so. um. hm.

13 October 2015

Of man’s last disobedience,

14 October 2015

Phase transitions in text messaging between near-synchronous and asynchronous exchange

15 October 2015

I would watch a drama about the $300m cracking of a single prime. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/haldermanheninger/how-is-nsa-breaking-so-much-crypto/

20 October 2015

NYT Style section photo idea: row of men at urinals with Hamilton Playbills clutched in their teeth

8 November 2015

Everyone is the center of their visible universe

8 November 2015

Our cities have been designed without modern iformation infrastructure i n mind. that means that, as someone who had an iphone when he first lived in a coty, i am often amazed at how well i can still use the city if i just put down the phone, open my eyes, and reason thru. it also means… i mean it’s roughly like an organism designing its cities before evolved eyes. gret for accessibility!

why is 95th st between riverside and west end ave so nice?

i get to the end of settlers of catan and fear it as a microcosm. in life too i will profess contentness and humility and play so long-run a game it is unfit for the comparative shortness of the game.

i aspire to live like the amazon profit/revenue chart.

reciprocity of knowledge

when you’re hungry is the worst time to make plans to eat. get some food in your stomach and think again.

• 13 June 2016 — “grocery shopping when we’re hungry”

sometimes i want read receipts for read receipts [eyeroll to self, this is a straight snowclone of e.g. “like button for like button” tweets, old pattern of “self-reference or 2nd-order effects are funny!”, which i frown upon because i want to find self-reference intrinsically intuitive, not funny, even though it blows up consistent+complete arithmetic etc.]

“What did you do this weekend?” “Nothing much” “That’s cool, sometimes you need to just chill, it’s healthy, it’s great, other people are overrated, …” ← unconvincing, maybe but im not sure

these aren’t tweet drafts anymore it’s just a journal

9 November 2015

Will “see something say something” be as characteristic of this era in GWOT-driven domestic paranoia as “loose lips sink ships” etc will be of wwii era in domestic paranoia? how did the specialization of military and expansion of spy apparatus cure us of that paranoia? does the surveillance state attempt to solve “see something say something”? like do we just get over the fear or solve it?

Definition: a system is something that can break.

16 November 2015

I’m really scared I have hypochondria

Alex’s idea for a game: strip solitaire

Conway’s narrative corollary: stories tend to recapitulate the story of their own creation.

I like when people call the number 1 “unity”. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Unity.html Goes well with “infinity”. “Zero” sounds weird. Nullity? Nullity, unity, infinity.

“It is a bit like in general relativity: by omitting one postulate from geometry, we enter a whole new space of possibilities.” http://www.mathematik.uni-muenchen.de/~lerdos/WS12/MQM/mathQM_hilbert.pdf
“Il libro della natura e scritto in lingua matematica”
“What is new in quantum mechanics it non-commutativity.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noncommutative_quantum_field_theory

I want to learn more math so that I can be less mathematically reductive.

Has anyone ever actually written a work of fiction? True fiction seems impossible. All fiction is a true story of the author’s life in different language.

• 13 June 2016 — Eyeroll; all this does is deflate a useful category by false tautology. (False tautology?) Not true or useful.

19 November 2015

This is on some level nothing new. nature has spliced genes for ages. happens every time someone is conceived. We are part of nature, not above it, so we have no techniques available to us that are not available to nonhuman natural processes. And yet it has not resulted in “perfect babies”. The optimization problem is hard, and we sensitize to the scale of the heterogeneity. If we reduced birth “defects” a millionfold, our notion of injustice and imperfection would recalibrate to see that as more or less as much a tragedy as the current rate. Homogenizing the gene pool obviously has additional problems, from art to science to sports to love. Homogeneity is a sort of systemic sterility. (‘When the inferno comes it sterilizes the seed bank.’)

• 13 June 2016 — This is silly, like saying “car technology can’t get us anywhere our God-given legs can’t.” Also, acclimatization to a better world does not reject the betterness of a better world. Also, the acclimatization seems like less of a problem than the commercially-negotiated amplification/reification of certain overfit notions of perfection. Also, on some level this is obviously something very new, the inheritance/endogenization of control over something that’s always been happening in a more global scope.

“I think of umbrellas like ice cream cones: they’re great, but you should never share them with another person.” — Kaye

20 November 2015

“insecure but shameless”

London subway map with walking distances http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/london-underground-walking-map is a nice idea, but also highlights the price of the map’s warped projection of physical space. It is a truly stunning feature of Euclidean space that the (Euclidean metric) distance between any two points is, um, obvious and linear and continuous and monotonic and so on. That enables maps to be such an info-dense kind of graphic, y’know? Oof I wish I’d taken more [math] analysis.

• 13 June 2016 — A natural dual problem: a walking-metric map must explicitly label non-walking-metric distances (e.g. subway travel time); a subway-metric map must explicitly label non-subway-metric distances (e.g. walking travel time).

Photosynth for data

Contrast “Nero” on StackExchange http://math.stackexchange.com/users/88078/nero (NN Taleb) with “Nero” on Twitter

21 November 2015

The fact that terrorists are not known to have relied on encryption is actually a fairly weak reason not to ban encryption. The stronger argument acknowledges that these tools can help terrorists.

These Apple Watch ads are really good. I love the universes these people live in. The iPod ad universe but with a horizon line, or like the THX-1138 prison.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/17/9750890/rdio-shutdown-pandora — calling Rdio the “first modern streaming service” is kinda like when I arrive on the subway platform and it’s totally empty and I congratulate myself for making it to the platform first. It kinda just means you’re the first to have missed the last train. I mean, I had a Zune Pass! Pandora, obviously. Napster was totally social-first. It’s just, like, linguistic ontological bullshit. Don’t you just mean “it’s older than Spotify”? Calling anything “first” sometimes says more about how you mentally partition events into discrete classes. So it must’ve been groundbreaking, to get you to think that. Fine. Great. Fine language.

The weird Onion editorial cartoons have grown on me as I realize that (1) the joke is that they’re the only part of the paper that’s unfunny and (2) almost every single one features Lady Liberty http://www.theonion.com/features/editorial-cartoon

25 November 2015

Overton window-washing

My family really puts the “kitsch” in “kitchen”

27 November 2015

What does it say about the state of our state and world order that the enemy in Captain America and James Bond is now a deranged domestic surveillance apparatus?

I used to tweet but I have no opinions left. Now I will have only imperatives, or maybe eventually only acts.

• 13 June 2016 — Wishful thinking!

Plutarch’s “Parallel Lives”, an early example of hypertext

29 November 2015

Thick hyperlinks: more like a bridge passage between themes in a musical composition. A transitional sentence, or object constancy, interface transitions.

“Particularly charming is Advanced Rail Energy Storage, whose proposal is ‘using lower-cost power to drive a train uphill and then let the train roll downhill to produce power when market prices are high.’” http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/

As I read about grid-scale energy storage solutions like “rolling a boulder uphill and then letting it roll downhill” (one must imagine batteries happy), the whole unwinding of the universe starts to feel like the battery of a Kardashev Type IV civilization. An unwinding on that scale necessarily *defines* a civilization of that scale, of unknown [Tegmark-consciousness-style] integration.

“But as in the case of energy production, there should be a tipping point if storing and reclaiming renewable energy can be made decisively cheaper than generating it from natural gas, and can be scaled up to meet demand.” — What does ‘decisively cheaper’ mean? Well, potential options have an activation energy…

I love Uber’s surge pricing. It should be a million times more fine-grained in time and space. Efficient resource allocation is important and price signals are a great mechanism. If you want more stable pricing, layer microinsurance atop it — subscription Uber price-flattening. I want millionfold finer-grained pricing in all goods.

• Concisely: Uber should sell surge pricing insurance.
• 13 June 2016 — Renounced below

30 November 2015

The photos of Old Penn Station in New Penn Station are the saddest thing in New York.

Oh — “The destruction of Pennsylvania Station galvanized support for architectural preservation across the United States, leading to the advent of modern historical preservation.” Glad some good came of it.

4 December 2015

I repeat tweets on a terrifyingly short loop.

(Cf. read receipts note supra)

7 December 2015

Proposed elevator etiquette: hold the door for someone iff person-time saved > person-time lost. Some factors: how many elevator banks, coming how often, how many already waiting in the elevator car… (Surely this is just roughly what people normally naturally do.)

What’s the covariance between a person’s likelihood to say “grok” and their likelihood to say “overstand”? Heinlein × Goodie Mob.

Next-gen Excel: constraint solving. Visualizing under- and over-determination. Simple example: I have two columns and an equation relating them; if I fill one, Excel autofills the other.

Any apparent magic is insufficiently illuminated technology.

12 December 2015

A timely man does not often look at his watch. (after Musil’s Arnheim)

20 December 2015

Start with addition on the naturals. For every successive hyperoperator, expanding the set until it is closed under the inverse operation (subtraction, division, rooting) introduces the negatives, the irrationals, and then the imaginaries. Question: what about the “other” “inverse” of exponentiation, logarithms? Can we introduce a useful analogue to imaginaries-out-of-roots-of-negatives for logarithms of negative numbers? What about higher hyperoperators?

• 13 June 2016 — I think I saw something like this on Quora recently, and it came off sounding naive and juvenile.

21 December 2015

Can we backport the notion of a superconductor to mechanical physics? To what extent have we historically been studying the special case where gravitons are superconducted? Like, do we all live in a world of superconducting gravitons?

29 December 2015

I am ready for a counter-counterintuitive movement. I aspire to be normal. The world is more or less as you’d expect. “Actually” nothing.

30 December 2015

I cannot talk fast enough.

(On a particular topic, and maybe in general — ) I have been quiet and the world has not suffered for it. I do not need to talk. Why do I talk? It can only possibly be to hear the sound of my voice. Talking was only necessary when you could only hear the people physically nearby. Now that everyone can hear everyone everywhere, no individual needs to talk. Our voice will not be missed. There is enough talk. Talk is now so *dense* in space.

1 January 2016

Contra yolo: What if we don’t live only once? What if we live every day? (hahaahh)

No but seriously. YOU ONLY LIVE THIRTY THOUSAND TIMES.

Imagine a world where you didn’t only live once. What would it look like? You would be born from some unconscious darkness, live a while together with your community, maybe under some celestial marker of the passage of your finite time, marking out intervals with alarms or chimes or feasts, do some good in the world, love and be loved, and then peacefully retire back into the unconscious darkness. In your next life, you would want to retain some aspects of the lessons of the last, but somehow renewed and refreshed, ready to start again. It sounds a lot like a day! Is the problem just that our communities, networks, works, ambitions, reference frames and reference groups have so far outstripped the scale of a day, the natural unit of time that we get to try over and over, each lived better than the last?

• I do not mean to be inspirational. This is not a good thing. This does not make your life better than it is. At most it just means that your life could not be better — that life is better-designed than you might realize.
• It is not coherent to wish to be born again in a young body with continuity of mind and consciousness. Youth is precisely the lack of memory in mind and body, which are inextricable. The mind is a muscle; the body thinks.
• The wisdom and lessons of living are written as surely in muscle and scars and callouses as in memories and heuristics and habits. And as surely as those physical lessons give way to arthritis, the accumulated lessons in the brain give way to old closed-mindedness, outmoded thinking, old prejudice, bigotedness, falsified assumptions, overfitness of overtrained mental models—all the clutter that did a mind well in 1950, and 1960, and 1970, but has become baggage in 2010, as the mind of 2010 will become old baggage in 2060.
• If some parts sometimes age faster than others (we find Freeman Dyson’s young supple mind in contrast to his weary body near expiration), then this is just the price of bundling, integrating, componentizing, the efficient standardization of the container of minds. And the integration of the whole is arguably the very essence of consciousness! (cf. Tegmark) How Dyson would suffer, if his mind were factored out, from the loss of being the same kind of thing as the rest of us! So he faces death. (Your phone’s processor may become obsolete before its microphone, but that is no good reason to reconstitute an integrated iPhone as a tinker-toys assemblage as in the past, when computers were less integrated objects.)
• 1 April 2016 — https://twitter.com/TrueSciPhi/status/715886063311396865
• @philosophybites: Why does ‘Carpe Diem’ stress the day as unit? Why not a month or a year, or an hour? Or a lifetime?
• @TrueSciPhi: Seneca: “The very longest space of time possesses no element [not] found in a single day.” (Ep. XII)
• @TrueSciPhi: In this, Seneca was conveying an interpretation of Heraclitus’ statement “One day is equal to every day.”

2 January 2016

This is like an order of magnitude more sophisticated than any other analysis of Uber surge pricing I’ve read and makes me feel like a fool anew. http://www.interfluidity.com/v2/5822.html “stable prices enable longer-term economic calculation”

Whoa: “If the universe ends in a Big Crunch, the information inside a black hole just would not get out until near the Big Crunch. No observation today can show that the information is forever bound to being inside the black hole.” http://edge.org/response-detail/26690

“Eric R. Weinstein — Anthropic Capitalism And The New Gimmick Economy” http://edge.org/response-detail/26756 — Mark Fisher ‘argued that it was easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’, and Weinstein seems to agree; the circumstances enabling capitalism may be as lucky as those enabling life on earth. “The opportunities of the future should be many and lavishly rewarded, but it is unlikely that they will ever return in the form of stable jobs.”

“If cell types are such attractors, each drains a “basin of attraction” in its state space. Then cell differentiation is a flow among attractors induced by signals or noise, or “bifurcations” to new attractors as parameters change.” http://edge.org/response-detail/26575 This is probably how an awful lot of differentiation into categories works, no? Like species, nations, marriages, corporations…

“the geometric mean of the Hubble and Planck lengths is the size of a living cell” http://edge.org/response-detail/26742 — this sounds very suspiciously like a sort of abstract geocentrism! But see also my years-old Facebook post about the scalewise habitable zone… https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1915551768516

• 17 January 2016 — We should treat it with as much skepticism as Hubble’s realization that all galaxies are moving away from us. Seems more likely that info-processing structures (structures such as ‘human scientists’) have a log-scale scalewise focal length. Or else anthropic account.

5 January 2016

I think walking around in a non-inertial reference frame is so much fun, but I almost never get the chance; basically only in a train. If I had a theme park, it’d have a ride where you’re standing on rolling grassy knolls, like moguls (sp? the skiing thing), in an accelerating reference frame, so that the level set of what constitutes “flat” land is always changing. And then you’d play dodgeball in there.

How much of the appeal of messaging (as an ascendant interaction paradigm) is in the fact that it shows (serializes, linearizes, preserves, visualizes) the history of your path through the program’s state space? That is how we originally learned to talk to thinking things, after all.

7 January 02016

I remember from my childhood the Tinker Toys tic-tac-toe–playing computer on display at the Boston Museum of Science. It impressed on me at a young age that computation has nothing to do with electronics. That was amplified years later by e.g. Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest, Max Tegmark’s writings on consciousness, and Danny Hillis’s Clock of the Long Now. And only years later (i.e. just now) did I learn that Hillis built the Tinker Toys computer. I owe him a lot. I feel like I get some leverage out of standing on his shoulders — out of building that notion, that computation is not about electronics, into very low levels of my young brain. It is great to see a great new thought in the world, and great again to see the generation come of age that grew up assuming it and building on it.

12 January 2016

I’m hyperopic

All this Powerball hubbub is a great example of the hunting oscillation of thinkpieces. Historically I’ve hated the lottery, but now that everybody’s hating on it I’m more interested in justifying it. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/powerball-math/423558/

Eventually I will agree with everything in the world except myself; then I will die and my agreement will be complete.

http://phys.org/news/2016-01-evidence-bad.html — “unreasonable effectiveness of [analytic] mathematics in the natural science” may be because (like Stephen Wolfram kinda posited) we just study the things that are easy to study.

Lede: record skyscrapers suggest economic collapse. Antepenult graf: “no relation”. Of *course* record heights (of all kinds) precede drops — else record would’ve been broken! Like a mountain climber finding that his descents tended to be preceded by summits. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/12/the-worlds-tallest-buildings-may-come-with-a-curse/

• 2 February 2016 — Or: “something hits highs before something crashes” does not imply “something crashes after something hits highs”!
• Oh jeez I emailed someone about this last September and already forgot.

15 January 2016

“wheat domesticated humans, not the other way around” !!! http://kottke.org/16/01/the-invention-of-farming (of course it was really mutual)

Snape really is ultimately the best part of Harry Potter http://boingboing.net/2016/01/15/alan-rickman-as-severus-snape.html

16 January 2016

True story: My office book club started reading Infinite Jest, but halfway through we all bought Nintendo 3DSs and got addicted to multiplayer Tetris and now just sit drooling over The Entertainment having Too Much Fun. Like a method reading.

17 January 2016

What is the half-life of your social relationships?

If you’re really thirsty, you should probably drink a full glass of water before touching alcohol or soda; if you’re really hungry, eat a real meal before touching snacks. I guess this is obvious and well known but like… um…

• 13 June 2016 — Cf. same point Nov. 2015 supra…

19 January 2016

e was discovered by Bernoulli studying compound interest. “Unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in finance”?

Many of my anxieties are essentially metastability problems (Buridan’s ass). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metastability_in_electronics — “various engineers have proposed their own circuits said to solve or filter out the metastability; typically these circuits simply shift the occurrence of metastability from one place to another.”

20 January 2016

My “bots and gimmicks” list reads sort of like a gray-goo ecophagic eschatology of the Republic of Letters https://twitter.com/tophtucker/lists/bots-and-gimmicks

It is tempting to simply divide {Google,Facebook,Twitter…} ad revenue by usage and say “I’d happily pay $0.70/month to use this great website ad-free!” but the problem is, as ever, nonlinearities; they achieve economies of scale by being free.

• 28 January 2016 — e.g. https://twitter.com/pomeranian99/status/692541918778134528

22 January 2016

Apparent “spontaneity” may just be a byproduct of a mechanism you can’t see. See also: bayesians vs frequentists; hidden variable accounts…

23 January 2016

I think a good New Yorker cover would be De Blasio collapsing in the street with his arms around a carriage-horse a la Nietzsche.

24 January 2016

I feel like the sugary-perishables industry is still chasing the 2009 Coca-Cola “Happiness Factory” spot, which is just so much more creative, tasteful, and understated; edgy touches of tragic sacrifice (snowmen shredded to chill, the self-immolation of the fizzy rockets); the way the secret formula itself is still exogenous to the model presented; memorable melody; zero narration… Compare:

• Hershey Kiss: http://youtu.be/Plf9bzri6Rw
• Oreo: http://youtu.be/Bji57u_NCF4

A skill to drill into kids early: the ability to, when faced with new evidence contrary to expectation, simultaneously decrease their confidence in the expectation and their confidence in the new evidence, in proportion to prior confidence. I.e., Bayesian updating. Too many people seem to only be able to do unidirectional updating. It should be as much a required skill as playing piano with both hands is of young pianists.

All this talk of Twitter harassment is kind of funny because of course it’s the natural conclusion of the whole open flatness of the thing that excited everyone so much in 2007. So as usual history follows some kind of helix with much apparent progress on the cyclical side, and we’ll end up near where we started, but a good step ahead along some dimension, we hope.

27 January 2016

I have a lot of problems with this.

28 January 2016

What if messaging apps could be configured with deliberately-induced (random?) latency to throttle incoming messages? Like for when you’re really busy you can increase throttling. Also resembles some HFT regulation possibly? And the client could expose the latency your counterparty has configured. And maaaybe there could be a market for paying to get your messages through faster, lol, what could go wrong….

29 January 2016

Deprecating the Java plugin is sad. There is so much good work done in Java applets, an insanely long tail that will be lost. https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/entry/moving_to_a_plugin_free

2 February 2016

John Archibald Wheeler might have a problem with the atoms-vs-bits dichotomy in this intro video. https://newsroom.uber.com/celebrating-cities-a-new-look-and-feel-for-uber/

“Alphabet has dethroned Apple” is a bad framing. A throne confers dramatic nonlinear rewards on elevated status. A list of market capitalization is a vapid and impotent kingdom. Thanks for reading! (P.S. It’s a boring story anyway. Most local extrema like firsts, mosts, and bests are extraordinarily sensitive to arbitrary screening criteria. Go read a book.)

5 February 2016

My favorite kind of explanation is the kind in which a hammer explains what a nail does. A hammer explains what a nail does.

W/r/t math class “when will I ever need this in life” complaints — understanding convergence, divergence, and the non-paradox of how an infinite series can have a finite sum helps escape a lot of back-and-forth argument.

Just catching up with Matt Frost’s long-running Trump theory, the “Great Troll” theory of history. https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Amattfrost%20trump&src=typd

Great xkcd on escaping. http://www.xkcd.com/1638/ Escaping is a problem so hard it scares me.

Ebola+Zika is scary. Not individually or whatever — just bc it feels very plausible that climate change is kicking off a grand purgative epidemic of pandemics. What if we start to have something like this every year? And then faster? For fast new diseases, developing vaccines potentially too slow? Germ theory was a breakthrough, and it feels like we’re gonna need a global-ecological-systems–level analogue…? Something re: contagion tipping points that changes behavior as fundamentally as starting to wash our hands? Some kind of generalized adaptive meta-vaccines? Or else… idk, but climate-change-denialism will probably continue right to the very end, right? Believers and deniers alike dead in the streets. Too late.

Tried the iPad Pro pencil yesterday and the onscreen straightedge/ruler is so so so so so so soosososoo smart and good and beautiful and great.

There seem to be Google results for most 11-digit numbers (like 10598230915) but very few 12-digit numbers, except for the one in ten 12-digit numbers that satisfies some checksum algo or whatever and thus gets recognized as a Fedex tracking number (like 105982309152).

Of the many terms of art I drop too casually in conversation, one of the most dangerous (i.e., dangerous to use too casually) is “degenerate” (http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Degenerate.html).

8 February 2016

If Michael Pollan had ended up as a French restauranteur: “Force feed. Mostly corn. Far too much.”

10 February 2016

What if everything I like is a ripoff of something I’ve never heard of? :/

11 February 2016

I like the serialization shuffle as an elevator approaches its destination floor, the spontaneous implicit queueing for exit.

12 February 2016

Went to IKEA for the first time today. Man, the floorplan has the fractal dimension of a human lung!

Does art always flourish in the runoff of bursting capital bubbles? What beautiful little things rise because something large and ugly falls? Well — all light is emitted as an energetic but massless byproduct of a particle falling to a lower energy level. (Or sometimes due to mutual annihilation.)

I support eliminating pennies. But the value of a denomination is not its seignorage.

The “Great Man” theory of romance

17 February 2016

Can’t get over how good this Izabella Kaminska list of thoughts is https://dizzynomics.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/cryptic-bullet-points/

18 February 2016

Market failure. Hm. I kinda feel like every market failure is like leakage into some higher market. The mental analogy giving rise to this intuition is, like, conservation of energy; if energy is not conserved it just means you don’t have a closed system, you have a LEAK, and the natural conservative laws are just holding at a higher level. Market failures feel like a leak in the market.

In any case where successively greater degrees of enlightenment cause you to flip back and forth between two positions, bang-bang, like a square wave of varying period, it is hard to ever tell whether you are a step more enlightened or a step less enlightened than the people on the other side.

• 13 June 2016— I.e., the function belief→action does not always have an inverse; you cannot necessarily infer belief from action. I remember thinking this as Prof. Pietraho taught us about convergent and divergent series, and asking him if some the answer to some questions diverges with increasing understanding.

This observed anticorrelation of spending and polling among ‘top’ presidential candidates http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2016-02-17/the-failure-of-money-to-buy-the-presidential-nomination-in-one-chart seems like a straightforward statistical result, one that probably has a name, like a cousin of Simpson’s paradox. Obviously everyone spending money is doing a lot better than I am spending no money. Among all potential candidates, including all those not considered to be running, surely the correlation is positive. But at the competitive high end, yeah, there will be a natural sort of marginally efficient frontier. Why would Trump spend more when he’s already got the attention? Why wouldn’t Jeb when he doesn’t? Selecting for the most visible slice, of course there’ll be a distribution from “visible because spending lots” to “just polling well” (visible for other reasons). Compensating differentials of a sort.

21 February 2016

So, this thing about the FBI trying to get into a terrorist’s iPhone. Interesting! What precedent is there for strong encryption in the history of life on Earth? Hm. Well, our heads are opaque — literally and figuratively. Life is compartmentalized into cognitive black boxes who interface with each other only on the narrow, restricted, lossy bands of sight, sound, touch. You cannot ever really know what another person is thinking. That often feels like a bad thing. I know I often strain to understand someone better, and wish I could have a fundamentally clearer view. But the quest to build thinking machines has illuminated a lot about our own design. Maybe it would be a disaster for both security and privacy if we could read minds. Maybe these encryption cases are a sort of theodicy of the hard problem of strong empathy.

• 9 May 2016 — Via Jordan, DFW calls this tiny window into each other’s minds “the keyhole” in Good Old Neon. And all this is why I’m so vehemently opposed to the notion that some kind of automatic translator could let everyone understand each other, https://twitter.com/BoingBoing/status/729702158933884928 etc. I don’t even understand my best friends! The parable of the Tower of Babel teaches that we are DESIGNED to interface through tiny keyholes for VERY GOOD REASONS OF SYSTEMS ROBUSTNESS! Think API design.

“Fixed income” seems like a badly abused term. Bonds are no more “fixed income” than stocks, really, are they?

22 February 2016

Should a government be able to reads its citizens’ minds?

Something something about, like… Hobbes’s leviathan, what coercive force means if information is physical; should the government also govern information? how can it not? it’s a bit like religion, these platforms as new transnational power structures orthogonal to state power, governing magisteria that are *usually* non-overlapping but creating tension when they do. we agree to give the legitimate state a monopoly on violence; what’s the info-age analogue? giving apple a monopoly on deciding what code gets to execute? problem is, state is actually powerless to really stop strong encryption. when you outlaw encryption, only criminals will have encryption, etc etc. but same is true of, like, tanks. when information is real and physical and controls lives (internet of things), have we really reckoned with what its opacity to traditional state levers means? good convo with jordan on saturday about this. he was explaining how we don’t have the right not to tell the govt things. (some rights to non-self-incrimination etc., but you can’t just always straight up contemn court and refuse to talk at all…?) but to date that’s been implicitly very limited. (it’s so rare to be in court that the limits of the freedoms are rarely tested; de facto governed by your obscurity and litigative friction.)

Stars in galactic nuclei undergo gravitational Brownian motion!! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_motion#Gravitational_motion — So the clockwork nature of the celestial bodies is a mere local phenomenon due to low density of stars on human space- and time-scales. How essential is that predictable and stable firmament to life on this scale? Do we lie right in a circumgalactic habitable zone? Are there creatures somewhere looking up at a cosmos of particles in an exceptionally low-density gas? Or do fundamental scale-variance limits interfere? Is our galactic nucleus the heart of someone’s random-walking stock market? Is our stock market someone’s galactic nucleus?

Wow, classic @matt_levine trollfest http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-08-26/it-was-the-worst-of-ideas

23 February 2016

ISIS map — look at how it ‘respects’ the Euphrates but not any artificial nationstate border; like a return to older, more topographically influenced, less Western-bureaucratic gradients.

Trump is an avatar of climate change: shocking, volatile, and now unstoppable.

• Compare: “This feels exactly like how the books describe the Fall of France. Plenty of obvious things to stop it, but stunned helplessness instead.” https://twitter.com/pegobry/status/702382703774199808
• Ah! Will Saletan: “What would happen if Republicans ignored an oncoming disaster? Oh, wait, they did! Trump is the new climate change” https://twitter.com/saletan/status/702652858206969856

24 February 2016

Request for sociolinguistic study: “bye” as an interjection

Strong disagree! There’s a goddamn open text field right there! They don’t pretend to be exhaustive! This reaction is like pointing at a map and whining, “According to Rand McNally, America is all pink and white and yellow!! And just a couple feet wide! And has no people! And is made of paper and folds conveniently fits in your seatback pocket!” I mean it is basically the Zoolander “three times bigger than this” failure mode. Zoolander reviews new Facebook reactions, is disgusted, and shouts “To capture the full range of human emotion we need… at least three times as many discrete symbols!”

• 140 char: “Zoolander reacts to new Facebook reactions: ‘What is this?! To capture the full range of human emotion we need…at least 3x as many symbols!’”
• Or it’s like getting mad at an SVD / PCA for being too low-dimensional. Guys, that’s the POINT!! And it’s useful!
• That said… this https://twitter.com/nathanjurgenson/status/702538968756150272 does make sense. The unary Like was imbued with whatever subtle thing people used it to mean.

Feynman on gravitational waves http://www.edition-open-access.de/sources/5/34/index.html — they can do work, and their energy is absorbed by interference from new waves generated by the movement of the masses which the grav waves move! (If I’m understanding at all correctly.)

26 February 2016

What WolframAlpha really needs is a great GUI. And, uh, to be 100x faster.

29 February 2016

arguing with another person using language is like arguing over geography between two maps of different and unknown scales. you can infer some conversions from shared context, but when you have no shared context and the coastlines are all fractal anyway then who knows.

1 March 2016

Cool vid of Manhattan population density via @larrybuch:

Would be interesting to see a density × rent map; would probably be closer to monotonically increasing. I imagine the population volume bins pouring into rent bins; there is something quasi-conserved in the supply/demand flow. Gentrification waves exist!!! You can imagine these people-densities piling up, overspilling a dam, then pouring radially out, causing a density dip in the middle, like ripples in a pond. That video shows a low-dimensional slice of ripples in a high-dimensional shallow pond on rough terrain. People’s nonlinear attraction and repulsion to people (on dif scales, etc) creates compression waves where lots of people come together. At the points of greatest compression you get corresponding peaks in the orthogonal dimension of property value. So there is a dynamo at the core of a city, with churn and radiation and such.

All I do is make metaphors. I am nothing without metaphors. I am a petrostate of metaphors. It’s bad.

translating circular to linear motion → translating information to action, how code can kill a man

• 5 March 2016 — Info-mechanical kinematic pairs

3 March 2016

My long-distance sight is deteriorating fast. We have yet to reckon with the consequences of flattening the world we look at, i.e. screens. It makes me sick. My only value to the world is through screens, but I am so sick of screens, but I am losing the ability to even SEE anything else. Muscles we never appreciated atrophying under the new regime. How many long-term unintended consequences brewing? None of us was made for this. Evolving into hairless brain in vat, all thumb and cyclops, by choice… One environment’s evolution is another’s devolution. I wish I were just a monkey in a tree.

• 13 June 2016 — In retrospect this was slightly exaggerated.

The Great Man theory of history is just a belief in fat tails.

• N.b.: Mandelbrot made this application explicit just a few pages later in “The Misbehavior of Markets” :)

5 March 2016

What are cells thinking at the onset of a cancer? They probably sound like Silicon Valley technologists, venture capitalists, gerontologists. They are smart enough to wake up to the fact that they can “hack” certain controls on their own nature and being and growth, but not smart enough to wake up to the fact that they are part of a larger organism, which they depend on in subtle ways they won’t realize until they kill it. Meanwhile some poor Malthusian cell is publishing “Limits to Growth” but gets laughed off as not-yet-proven-right by the rest of the tumor.

The world needs better graphics relating the margin to the whole, the flow to the stock, fʹ(x) to f(x). Especially tricky when the magnitudes are orders apart.

8 March 2016

@matt_levine on counterparties vs. clients: “If the bank and the customer are on opposite sides of a trade, the trade is itself a conflict of interest, and the only way to avoid a conflict is never to trade.” http://bloombergview.com/articles/2016-03-07/portuguese-train-companies-can-t-escape-snowballs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road-rail_vehicle

10 March 2016

watching twitter trends and analytics is like watching specks of dust or dirt whirl around in wind or water. the whims of what people are talking about. model it like heat diffusion or something. #ZikaVirus is the red dye you’re trying to see diffuse, dropped in the stream. i wish i understood the Black-Scholes equation so i could understand how to re-abuse it into talking about general information dissemination. ooh: http://mathlets.org/mathlets/heat-equation/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_equation#General_description

• weird (in that very common and normal way) to call it the “heat equation” when it seems to describe a more general kind of diffusion! like calling it the “speed of light” just bc it was initially studied in the context of light. i feel like we should just call the speed of light something more like “the angle between space and time”.

14 March 2016

The Gibbs phenomenon is kinda cool and easy to anthropomorphize, a sort of quivering excitement before a jump. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gibbs_phenomenon

18 March 2016

You should be able to press-and-hold on the dog emoji for different breeds.

21 March 2016

If you find yourself ending an email with “You probably know this already,” maybe just don’t send it!!

I resolve to stop saying something or someone “sounds really familiar!!” when i have no idea who it/she/he is.

23 March 2016

Sometimes I come to downright relish the so-called “nonsense” that I can put up with.

24 March 2016

I can’t hear anything coming out of my iPhone earbuds! Can hear everything else in the world just fine. Very concerned. Do you think the problem is with my phone or my ears??

Actually, if you think about it, wasn’t Frankenstein the real monster?
(this must have been done a million times)

• “Actually, Gordias *tied* the knot.”

25 March 2016

The difference between geocentric and heliocentric astronomical models is not whether the Sun goes around the Earth or the Earth goes around the Sun; that’s just a question of perspective (and really they both go around their mutual center of gravity). The meaningful difference is whether the OTHER planets go around the Earth or the Sun.

hmm

4 April 2016

Evan: three methods of energy transfer: convection, conduction, and radiation

Old art directors don’t die, their alpha channels just go to zero.

25 April 2016

Sometimes I say “I know” when I don’t actually know. I am often surprised by what someone meant, what they thought I meant, why they did something, why they thought I did something.

28 April 2016

So what’s the difference between skeuomorphism and pastiche?

I think on some level the Less Wrong crowd (which I respect a lot!!) is suboptimally wrong. It’s like correctness distended and perverted into being the one and only virtue. Today I aspire to be somewhat more wrong.

What’s a null space again? If you have [1••,•1•,••0] in the [x,y,z] space, is the null space the z-axis? What do you call anything not spanned? This is how I’d like to attempt a rough definition of art. Our valuation models do not capture the extent of what’s valuable, and art is that which is not spanned. Is that like a null space in any way? (Musil, “the soul is that which retreats at the hint of a differential equation.”) Like are the irrational numbers the null space of some, un, y’know, division under the integers or whatever? What do you call the space not spanned by an operation (or set of operations) on a set?

29 April 2016

Twitter should let you write a private 140-character bio for anyone you follow so I can remember who y’all are

3 May 2016

Like the universe, I was born in a shockingly low entropy state.

5 May 2016

How many pleas for consistency are simply failures to see meaningful distinctions? Pleas for false symmetries (unities), like a blind man asking the world to go dark.

7 May 2016

We 3D people have left- and right-handedness. But even in n dimensions, afaict chirality only comes in pairs. What might be a useful set of hands (or other appendages, organs, tools) generated by not-necessarily-linear transformations other than reflection?

The Bailey–Borwein–Plouffe formula calculates the nth digit of pi independent of the (n-1)th!!! I am kinda shocked and confused that that is even theoretically possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailey%E2%80%93Borwein%E2%80%93Plouffe_formula & https://www.jasondavies.com/bbp/

Feynman used volcano shape analogy for molecular bonding. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE What do we call that shape? A raised well? Shows up a lot but kinda hard to reference!

Re: web design — I wish the mouse cursor could be easily affixed to the document (or any arbitrary element) instead of the window; it would often be a more intuitive reference frame to stabilize as the viewport shifts.

8 May 2016

What do you get out of life? In a functional programming sense, almost everything you do is a ‘side effect’ of your life. The final output is less important, just heat, waste, carbon. At the time you get out of life you no longer exist to get anything more out of it. If anything comes out it’s for others……. uhuhuhh

9 May 2016

The whole food chain is nature’s solution to the intermittent solar energy storage problem. The sun is stored in plants. Cf. same Feynman again https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1pIYI5JQLE

• To what extent are our grid and infrastructure’s efficiency gains offset by corresponding fragility gains vs. the preexisting ecosystem? God, it’s like [friend]’s metaphor for when people come in and don’t understand how everything is already working so they stand over the machine tossing junk into the gears out of curiosity until it breaks and then they’re like “See? It’s broken!” and rebuild a shittier drabber one.

“Thirst, for lack of a better word, is good.”

13 May 2016

Hidden variables: Amazing how often there is a simple explanation for events that’s simply too private to be said.

Hanlon’s Razor; when things succeed or fail, how sensitively dependent is your attribution to luck / skill / competence / malice on the predominant forces in your own life / head? Like the most recent reason you intimately understand casts a lens over your interpretation of everything ever; like by understanding a reason you see it in everything; like tuning to the frequency on which a certain signal is strongest and thus accidentally also picking up traces of that frequency in all other signals. like dark matter, what percentage of reasons are hidden? (is this an abuse of dark matter metaphors? aren’t they all?)

14 May 2016

Guessing the name of the first Secretary-General of the United Nations sounds like alternate reality conjugations of the irregular verb ‘to think’: “I think U Thant?”

17 May 2016

Looking at text reading “opposite-sex” and “same-sex”; could be useful to have an adjective that means “opposite- if hetero-, same- if homo-”. Maybe “attractive”? Like “attractive-sex friendships”?

I can’t believe it’s 2016 and people still express incredulity at the slow pace of progress as if we have any coherent notion of how the history of the world could’ve gone faster.

• ≤140: I can’t believe it’s 2016 and people are still incredulous at the pace of progress as if we have any idea how history could’ve gone faster

Are there virtues of metastability? What’s the difference between talking about metastability vs. local maxima? A rail (as in e.g. railroad) is a local maximum. Coned wheels hunt the local maximum. Useful for removing degree of freedom, constraining your motion to orthogonal directions.

Sorry for swooning but d3 is the rare project that gets more sane, clean, and compact with time. And not like in an insane Urbit way.

OH: “look around the new york street at all these people! and all their lives so hard; all of them have so many problems…. except for me!!!!” lol

18 May 2016

Fuck the WordPress ontological monoculture.

20 May 2016

The world needs some offspring of John Rawls, Donella Meadows, and Norbert Wiener to write a systems-cybernetics theory of justice.

21 May 2016

Not so absurd. Ten years later, machines killed >50 million humans. What if war is part of what technology wants?

23 May 2016

Is journalism one big edge case

“God of the gaps” but the gaps are the reals excluding the rationals. (God I use this metaphor too much.)

Wow, I’m going down this list of drafts imagining posting them on LinkedIn, which somehow just really drives home how terrible they all are.

27 May 2016

Thiel v Gawker — Isn’t it amazing how reliably journalists support Gawker and technologists support Thiel? Not all, but correlation seems strong. To what extent because people choose a field with a mindset they agree with? To what extent because chosen field shapes mindset by uneven distribution of exposure to considerations? To what extent because of tribal loyalty? Is tribal loyalty just emergent out of the previous things?

30 May 2016

The “Simpsons Already Did It” episode of South Park is like writing an original script by Cantor diagonalization.

31 May 2016

The <marquee> tag is a good idea and deserves reimagining. There should be topological css properties for carousels, toruses, spheres, Möbius strips, etc. Kinda like overflow scroll? Like `overflow-x: loop;` etc. Or reference another element to flow one thing into another. `overflow: url(#pt2)`. Self-reference would enable loops. What if you could specify equivalence relations between edges, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_polygon#Examples? Like: `overflow-x: url(#pt2) right;`, so things flowing off the right edge of one element can flow in from the right (or top, left, bottom) of another.

4 June 2016

View 1: A business model is a part of your ethics; good work done on the back of a bad business model (or free-riding on cross-subsidy from…) is no more ‘good’ than robber baron philanthropy, or [better analogy tk].

View 2: Good is in an essentially antagonistic relationship with capital, and should co-opt it wherever it can.

5 June 2016

*me looking at snapchat sunday morning* Man, the sum total of the best moments in the past 24 hours of the lives of everyone I know sure beats my last 24 hours!

• this makes for a fine ‘relatable’ tweet, but I don’t think I actually ultimately believe it. I would rather live my single continuous life than a montage of “best” excerpts of others.
• ok, but now I’m responding to a straw man; it’s not like I said “I wish my life were literally a Snapchat story”. there is… a stronger challenge to answer, here?
• 12 June 2016 — OH: Guy 1: “I’ve been having such a good time, I’ve never snapchatted so much.” Guy 2: “I’ve been having such a good time I haven’t snapchatted at all!”

5 June 2016

Our generation is uninoculated against tyranny. Also war. Also pandemic. I.e. anti-vaccination sentiment is a disease against which pandemic inoculates. OBVIOUSLY I DO NOT WAR OR PANDEMIC. It is ~incumbent~ upon us to find alternative methods to stay vigilant. Particularly true as the tails get fatter, i.e. war and pandemic becoming rarer but, conditional on happening, more costly. (Is that right? Idk.)

Don’t they all look ridiculous, extracted from their natural context and typeset in too-precious Medium styles? It reminds me, as things do, of a passage from Musil:

“But Leona knew that one should give something in return for refined entertainment even when one’s host did not express any wishes, and one must not let it go at merely being stared at; and so, as soon as she was once more capable of it, she would stand up and tranquilly but full-throatedly lift up her voice in song. For her protector such evenings were like pages torn out of an album, animated by all sorts of inspirations and ideas, but mummified, as everything becomes when it is torn out of its context, loaded with the tyrannical spell of all that will now remain eternally the way it is, the thing that is the uncanny fascination of tableaux vivants, when it is as though life had suddenly been given a sleeping-draught: and now there it stands, rigid, perfectly correlated within itself, clearly outlined in its immense futility against the background of the world.”

— Robert Musil, “The Man Without Qualities”

Reading them all together, they’re almost all riffs on a tiny handful of recurring themes, all reductive metaphors and scientism. My friend once challenged me: “It makes sense, but is it true?” — and I don’t know how many of these could pass. Maybe a few could stand alone as thoughtful little essays.

But I am grateful for all the banality, hypocrisy, and contradiction of people’s tweets. Anything less would be a dishonest representation of our minds. As Twitter, Inc. struggles, I am reminded not to take for granted that for a moment we have something like a single global conversation underway on the one and only capital-I Internet. Yes, biased in a thousand ways, but about as close as we have come. That cacophony may be unsustainable, and the future may be more fragmented. Confounded and strewn across a thousand slacks and apps and platforms. “So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they ceased building the city,” and maybe it was for the best.