My Heritage Cladogram
Date: 2025 Oct 13
Words: 2554
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
Recently I read the essay “How Dawkins Got Pwned” by Mencius Moldbug. Curtis Yarvin in his interviews repeatedly goes back to how his mother was a WASP and a very popular socialite in Nassau county, and his father was a Jew who worked in the State Department, and how his grandparents on his father’s side were members of the CPUSA. I think it a worthy exercise to do the same thing. Well, in his essay, Moldbug made a big point of tracing traditions into a cladogram. But I am not entirely sure where on the heritage cladogram I fall. My mother is what I would describe as a fanatic Catholic. Her beliefs can be characterized in this one pivotal moment, when she was going to go to Rice University in Houston for undergrad when she encountered the infamous “Rice Purity Test” at orientation week and got freaked out by its unholy inclusions and so left Rice and at the last minute enrolled in Thomas More College in New Hampshire, a fanatical, fundamentalist, even extremist Catholic bastion “in the middle of nowhere”, as she described it. A New Hampshire commune, but Catholic. Remarkably, even a non-papist Catholic bastion, as some there did not recognize the Pope’s authority since the Vatican II council from 1960, which “Protestantized” the Catholic Church. One of several of these Catholic educational outposts in this country, where the only place they could fester their strain was out in the woods. There are a few oth...
Social Dynamics, Continued
Date: 2025 Oct 11
Words: 1332
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
FRAMING THIS POST I have written two or three posts analyzing social interactions before on this website attempting to come up with a coherent framework for it, this is the next in the series. one of the most harmful ideas i’ve ever encountered was at my last job, where my boss was consistently like “keep your users in mind, always be asking them what they want”. that is dumb stupid wimpy person advice. neither him nor i are native stock michigander. but aren’t we supposed to, like, try to fit in as much as possible without denying essential elements of ourselves? i eat tacos sometimes, he can go to the ethnic asian mart sometimes. to take some (alleged) wisdom from the greatest michigander of the 20th century, Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” riffing on that advice: this post isn’t exactly intended for academic audiences, nor is it intended for a mainstream audience. it is a secret third thing. this may post may go over ground that has already been tread before by other people, but bear with me, i am trying to articulate something difficult to pronounce here, so to speak. i got some really good advice from a reader last week, that i need to explain what I mean more completely instead of going off things that I know what they mean but the reader might not. so this post is going to have a lot of explanations. i am trying to make a car, not a faster horse. ...
The State of Classical Computing Hardware
Date: 2025 Oct 09
Words: 1759
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
Someone interested in financial markets recently commissioned me to write about quantum computing. Since quantum computing is at least 10 years away for practical usage, I am going to be doing an overview of current and near-future computer hardware right now before talking about quantum computing. This is meant to be a brief overview, but every sentence in this series is a gross oversimplification and could have its own thesis written about it. Lord help me writing this, for I am not really qualified to speak on the topic, and I don’t know if I am going to stay on topic either. 1. Intro Right now the US and China are in a race for computational dominance. Whoever gets the best computers faster will be able to make better computers to make better computers to take off and do God knows what. If one nation can build powerful enough quantum computers, it can lead to a “fast takeoff” (even more better computers to do something with), but until then, the war is still being waged on the classical computers front. It is impossible to talk about quantum computing without first being familiar with classical computers, and it is impossible to talk about computing at all without being familiar with the geopolitical connotations, so, I am going to be repeatedly touching back on the geopolitics. There are a few metrics that we measure computing hardware on, and in this list the thing after the comma is which is better Classica...
Epistylometry
a forger’s skill becomes their signature.
epistylometry, from the greek “epistos” for
“knowledge” and “stylos” for “style”, is the knowledge
signature of a person. what someone does demonstrates what they
know, possibly what they don’t know, and possibly what they are trying
to obscure they know. the term borrows from the commonplace word
“stylometry”, which is used to describe someone’s writing style based on
various metrics.
you know in “breaking bad”, where it should have been obvious to
agent schrader that heisenberg was walter white, due to the advanced
chemistry knowledge needed to make blue meth? that chemistry is walter
white’s epistylometric signature.
this terminology pulls together a few other
similar-but-disparately-named terms and concepts from various places
(see the need for a nomenclator),
including:
in stylometry, analyzing writing patterns to identify
authors. this is how they unmask anonymous writers - your word choices,
sentence structures, even punctuation habits form a signature
in cyber attacks, security researchers analyze malware techniques,
coding styles, and operational patterns to identify threat actors
in art forgery, forgers must study not just technique
but the knowledge limitations of the period. anachronistic knowledge
reveals fakes.
counterfeiting currency
Epistemic Sentiment Modeling
1. knowledge
1.1 sentiment annotators
we introduce three symbols: plus + for positive
associations, circle o for neutral associations, and
dash/minus - for negative associations. we call these
sentiment annotators
when a sentiment annotators between two people are denoted over an
arrow indicating directionality (mono-directional or bidirectional)
A→+BA \xrightarrow{+} B
reads “A likes B”
A↔+BA \stackrel{+}{\longleftrightarrow} B
reads “A and B like eachother”
1.2 epistemic logic
it is possible that two people like eachother but don’t know the
other likes them, orr iso knows allo likes them, but allo doesn’t know
iso likes them. this becomes important in the construction of
self-reinforcing social structures (“granules” as they are called later
in the text). we bring in concepts from epistemic logic.
Knowledge and belief are represented via the modal operators
K and B, often with a subscript indicating the agent
that holds the attitude. Formulas Kaφ and Baφ are then read “agent
a knows that phi” and “agent a believes that phi”,
respectively.
: Epistemic Logic, Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
KA(B→+A)K_A (B \xrightarrow{+} A)
reads “A knows B likes A”
E{A,B,C}ϕE_{\{A,B,C\}} \phi
reads “everyone ...
How I Write Things
Date: 2025 Jun 09
Words: 1178
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
how i write using llms ethically it all stems from central two rules write every word, and if you have to paste from an llm, make it less then a sentence at a time and don’t do it more than two or three times per post. be respectful of your reader’s time in the bible there was a line about two great commandments. perhaps two rules is an irreducable. if these rules are followed, than using llms can greatly enhance your writing, primarily by making better use of the reader’s time. how can we do this? llms can be used to find objections and weakpoints in your posts, which can spur you to do more research and refine your idea. this saves the time that the reader might use to critique you and than rinse and repeat in a subsequent post. (this can also be used to steelman and so you shouldn’t steelman really bad positions) the new search tools in llms are very good for finding sources specifically relevant to your piece (again, can also be used to steelman) nomenclating – llms are exceptionally good at coming up with names for new ideas. especially if you don’t have a perfect knowledge of classical roots, or if you want to quickly find out about relevant terms from fields outside your own. llms can even be used in the proposed nomenclator perhaps your topic has been written about before and you just don’t know it. asking an llm about rel...
The Nomenclator
Date: 2025 Jun 08
Words: 970
Draft: 1 (Most recent)
THIS POST IS AN EXPLORATORY POST the emergent problem with recent technological advances of the 2020s, the amount of research that researchers have had to pour through has never been higher.1 at the same time, certain stand-alone broader fields like physics have hit “dead ends” and haven’t had any major breakthroughs; while cross-domain researchers and programs have become of paramount importance for the emerging fields of the 2020s.2 the newer coding agents of the 2020s like AlphaEvolve3have yielded cross-domain breakthroughs and shown what can be possible with “agentic”-computer-assisted human research teams. cross-domain breakthroughs are increasingly becoming the main driver of academic progress in the 2020s. one of the main obstacles that actively prevent cross-domain breakthroughs is ambiguous terminology across disciplines. terminological chaos is becoming a bigger bottleneck. And if computer agents are getting better at cross-domain synthesis, humans need better coordination tools to keep up. so, to unlock the next steps in academic research methodology; to build even better computer systems such as AlphaEvolve; and also to keep humans on the same edge as these computer systems, resolving these ambiguities is crucial. this brings up the necessity for a nomenclator
The Biostack
THIS IS A DRAFT FOR A DOCUMENT I’M SENDING TO A FEW PEOPLE. IT’S GONNA CHANGE A LOT LATER The Biostack is a potential inboard human-technological implant ecosystem, to do anything you could want to do with implants, really. The Biodock the biodock is the central piece to the biostack. it is a hollow dish-shaped implant that is a container for other implants to go in and out of, allowing for upgradability and serviceability for implants - previous methods of just surgery simply do not allow for that. common features of biodocks would include: implants that go in in an origami fashion and unfold, like this sattelite potential solar skin for implant charging flat cylinder/hexagon shape with rounded corners likely induction charging strategies would have to be undertaken to make sure it cannot get infected if left hollow, without access for maintenance for long periods of time. these include it would have to be self-sealing it would likely have to be filled with a saline solution that bacteria and pathogens cannot grow in perhaps have onboard uv lights shining inwards to sterilize it terminology used when talking about biodocks includes: the opening of the biodock is called the port. the actual hollow part is the dock. (think “usb port” - in tech contexts, a port does not contain the entire thing) subcutaneous means beneath the ...
Advert for Publisher
To the publisher: I have much to write. I suppose the best approach is to simply write what I am thinking about. It is the end of the year. Last year (not the year ending today, the one before that) was a pretty crazy year and I had some pretty crazy thoughts then. Thoughts about good vs. evil and spirituality. These were all things that I thought everyone knew, more or less… things that I thought everyone went about life not talking about it, because it wasn’t the type of thing you were supposed to talk about except in moments of birth and death, or falling in love, or making a blood oath of friendship or marriage, or betraying a friend, or taking a life, or attempting to resurrect the dead. Because these were all things that everyone knew, on some baseline deep instructions on what to do, that are kind of a requirement for being alive, for the whole rest of being a human to follow afterwards. The type of thing that everyone knows, and goes through life aware of, but not really talking about, because they are reserved for those sacred moments. I haven’t really shared thoughts of those things to other people very much. Kind of because I am scared of the reaction I might get, of speaking the unspoken, and awake some kind of terror in them that I had articulated the things they knew all along, and thereby putting myself at risk from them; and on the other hand, getting a response of, “yeah, of course, everyone knows that, why are you thinking so much about it? Everyone...