Month: January 2024

Went out last night with an old friend for what started as dinner and turned into a 6 hour venture. As such things do. Also, no hangover, which is an unqualified win at my age.

Inputs

1: An interesting quandary I hadn’t thought of before, that the Jones Act is negatively affecting offshore wind farm building because the US doesn’t have a steady manufacturing supply of the specialty ships to build the windmills. The Jones Act, star of every post-hurricane story for its impediment to supplying and rebuilding because we’re happy to let globalization into every part of our economy except our shipping to ourselves, which, 🤷‍♂️.

A telling quote for how dumb this all is:

No existing WTIVs¹Wind turbine installation vessels comply with these restrictions, barring them from transporting wind turbine components to installation sites from nearby US ports.

Instead, these vessels must use a workaround. One method is operating out of a foreign port, such as in Canada. Another is for the vessel to position itself at the installation site and have the needed components transported to it by Jones Act‐​compliant “feeder barges.”

https://www.cato.org/blog/jones-act-contributes-offshore-wind-growing-pains

I’m sure there are specific reasons to keep the Jones Act in place, but they’re growing increasingly asinine in a globally connected world.²I’m also very aware I’m linking to the Cato Institute, which does not exactly have the most even perspective on such things, but on this they and I are in some form of alignment.

2: Got a notification from Once that their first product, a you-buy-it-you-own-it distro of Campfire, is available for purchase. Once, from Jason Fried’s 37signals team, is fighting against the tide of SaaS and turning life into a subscription to everything, which is both a noble cause and one I sincerely hope succeeds. While I don’t, at present, have a real strong use case for hosting my own chat software, I’m still tempted to buy it to support the mission.

3: Hahahahahahaha, get fucked buddy.

Notes:

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  Wind turbine installation vessels
• 2
  I’m also very aware I’m linking to the Cato Institute, which does not exactly have the most even perspective on such things, but on this they and I are in some form of alignment.

Two days left in the first month of the year. How’s things? Feel accomplished? Feel like you put the shoulder into the yoke of 2024? Yeah, me neither. However! We do not exist to live in our disappointments, but to remember to strive ever forward, and to choose what direction forward is in for ourselves. Forgive yourself first, so that you can forgive everyone else. Feet shoulder-width apart, bend at the knees, good first step and punch, and drive your hips. You’ve got this.

Inputs

1: I maintain that one of the more profound and important things said during the Bush the Second administration was one of the more mocked in the media, which was Donald Rumsfeld talking about known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. The four quadrant theory of knowledge is vitally important to understanding one’s own limitations and to making better and more informed choices, even when those choices are informed by knowing what you don’t know.

Venkatesh Rao goes in a bit on this in relation to cultural identity and AI here. He discusses attempts to turn what we know into something we don’t, and evolving that generated freedom from truths to create new truths around which to rally, a danger that is easily weaponized against those who those truths look to cast as others, as outsiders, as opponents to a mobilized belief. As he says in the post, “You have to eventually come to terms with what you choose to unknow.”

2: Speaking of unknown knowns, Sam Altman would prefer that we not know how ChatGPT and generative AIs came to know what we don’t know that they know, especially as they’ve gotten very good at replicating their inputs so exactly that they show clear signs of plagiarism inherent in their models. Instead, he’d prefer we willingly give up the mass of human knowledge to him for free, and that we pay for the right to know it back again.

Gabe and Tycho get at the heart of it fairly precisely.

3: Finally, something we thought was a known known, that cloning would be our history. It wasn’t until reading this piece that my memories of the hype around cloning bubbled back, from Dolly to popular media with cloning-related plotlines, to the fears around the theological and moral implications of cloning humans. And all of that sort of went up in smoke, falling straight off the Hype Cycle past the trough of disillusionment into the nether of unrealized futures.

The Super Bowl is set after two good if error-filled performances from teams I thought had better chances. I really feel for Detroit’s fans, but I strongly suspect they’re still early in their window. Baltimore, on the other hand, feels like an evolution is coming, either in running game personnel or in the wide receiver room. Lamar far too often looks as if he has to do it all himself. Which he’s capable of in many circumstances, but not enough to carry him to a title. Just putting it here now to point at later, but I can see them charming King Henry into taking a veteran minimum deal to head up that backfield.

Inputs

1: First up, something elided over in the movies and TV shows, but clear if you’ve ever A) used VR or B) been on a treadmill before: Movement in VR via omni-directional treadmill won’t work without some severe advancement in biochemical manipulation.

I walk 30 minutes on the treadmill (nearly) every day. The first few times I was on it, I had the strangest sensation after hopping back off, where actually walking around felt odd because I’d spent half an hour moving my legs without my proprioception or vision changing. So, after moving on normal ground again, my vestibular system and the change in my location lent a weird spacial sense of wrongness to everything as I actually moved after having fake moved for so long. Over time this sense dulls and the transition isn’t jarring any longer, but at first, it’s a bit staggering.

Additionally, something happens to people when first using VR and the visual changes don’t match up with their physical sensations. This is why so many VR games and experiences use a sort of redraw hopping from place to place rather than simulating forward movement. Feeling as if your eyes are seeing you move when your body doesn’t feel movement is the same sort of thing that happens, evolutionarily, when you’ve ingested poison. Your body knows what to do when it thinks it’s been poisoned.

Those two differences combined mean that while you can simulate visual movement, and you can allow for a physical sensation of moving your feet along an infinite surface, you cannot trick your nervous system into believing you’re actually changing your physical location quite so easily. Player One is not quite Ready yet.

2: I’m a sucker for a process. I love watching videos of people making things, especially in wood (as an intrigued and often awe-struck fellow woodworker nowhere near that level of talent). So this series of paintings of the making and transportation of porcelain goods in 18th century China is fascinating, for the details of the processes and the thought behind capturing such things being as universal and lasting as it has been.

The juxtaposition of the beauty of the landscapes and venues and the various duties and lives of the people working through a collective process, creating mass-produced art, is enthralling to look through and imagine in motion and action. Also intriguing: these paintings themselves were made for export as consumer art. Created trade goods about the creation and trade of goods.

3: I’m a sucker for a map. I own two versions of these maps charting subsea communication cables across the world, mounted in my office¹Which is how I learned that framing things is expensive as hell, even though they look very nice.. This post, about the lack of complexity inherent to fantasy maps and worldbuilding, highlights an interesting problem of fiction regarding verisimilitude, in that it can never get anywhere near the fractal layers of history and experience inherent to reality, and that trying to get there only further shines a light on the dark places.

Notes:

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  Which is how I learned that framing things is expensive as hell, even though they look very nice.