Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.

The last two posts mull a vaguely defined problem, a set of issues and unclear design requirements. They have something to do with preserving data, making sure that preservation is robust against various failure modes, and making this cheap (free? as in libre?) easy, automatic, and beneficial to private individuals with modest abilities and resources.…

What is IPFS, anyway? How should I think about it? I claim, in this essay, that it’s a mediocre cache for content that mostly just slows down content delivery. It does have a degree of censorship resistance, though. This may sound like a negative, even harsh evaluation. And, with the addition of things like filecoin,…

Google offers something I want. Yeah. I hate to say that, but its true. Google wants me to pay for it. Given my aversion to all things financial, I don’t particularly want to. Just right now, I’d rather sysadmin my own solution. Here’s what they offer: automatic backups of my photos from my cell phone.…

A twitter thread. Prompted by a post from David Chapman, pointing at a post by Arvind Narayanan. Arvind talks about the whack-a-mole nature of adding more and more prompts to GPT to mask out and hide all of the objectionable content: all the stuff that does not conform to present-day Western moral and ethical standards,…

It’s all about information. Of course. Obviously. We’ve known this all along. Military commanders talk about “the fog of war”: the inability to really know what is going on in the battlefield: either about the single, lone enemy solider hiding just around the corner, or about the exact location of an entire battalion, known to…

An acquaintance wrote: don’t be an asshole I am thinking through a “don’t be an asshole” theory of public behavior. It seems to me that problems of social interaction don’t arise from opinions (or guns or drugs or …) but from people having some idea of entitlement to expressing the asshole in their nature. Maybe.…

tl;dr:  Meaning is provided by ancient and deep neural circuitry. The “crisis of meaning” (for humans) is the inability to find ‘meaning’ for issues deemed ‘important’ by other neural circuits. Anxiety and psychological distress arises from a feedback loop searching for meaning. This feedback loop manifests both as “Culture War” and is of concern for…

This is a list of interesting reads dealing with network theory, social media, and political crises. Stuff like algorithmic propaganda, memetics and the epidemiology of memes, as inflamed by social media. This provides footnotes and references for claims that I make in the other blog posts. This is a complement to the Capitalism Reading List…

Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I’m misreading. That I’ve misunderstood what was being said. That I misunderstood the intent.  Because surely, surely, the Texas Public Utilities Commission cannot possibly be so stunningly, overwhelmingly incompetent, as they were during this week’s electricity crisis.  Perhaps the biggest electricity crisis Texas has ever had. Because I read…