Vortex Egg @vortex_egg@hackers.town

As a chaos magician, what goetia do I need to read to summon Maxwell's demon?

Oof.

"Hacktoberfest is a corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community."

https://blog.domenic.me/hacktoberfest/

Speaking of podcasts and different ways of thinking, I keep sinking further in to the Weird Studies podcast [^1] which is a riotous dialogue and inquiry into "the weird".

It is among other recent borderline-outsider-academic studies of the subject, like that of longtime student-of-the-weird Erik Davis [^2] in his recent book-cum-phd thesis High Weirdness (about the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson).

I want to work the ideas of weird studies further into my thinking about emergent beliefs, where it is quite at home, and mash that up with the complexity and cybernetics studies.

Anyway here's a good interview with the podcast hosts on what Weird Studies is about:

https://blog.apaonline.org/2018/12/05/weird-studies-podcast-philosophy-outside-academia/

[^1]: https://www.weirdstudies.com
[^2]: https://erikdavis.substack.com

Omri Cohen is a treasure to modular synthesis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmXIkdE8n94

I've been laboring under the idea that maybe I need to go in to an academic social science context in order to work on the ideas I'm pursuing, but I just read a brutal takedown of just how bad things are in social science today*... and yeah I don't think that's the space where I'm going to live my best life.

I'm starting from the wrong end of the stick: I need much less "how do I publish a compelling argument for serious people?" and much much more "renegade complexity science art and hacking projects from the Outside" in my self-identity feedback loop.

* https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/

This article is a throwback to a cuter, simpler age when the flaws in our mindlessly networked unnecessary technology products weren’t going to spy on you, behaviorally manipulate you, algorithmically sort you in to discriminatory policing, undermine your democratic process for a fascist coup, or whatever it is that passes for good tech business these days.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/09/how-a-hacker-turned-a-250-coffee-maker-into-ransom-machine/

My partner and I live in a city right now, but we were discussing what type of lifestyle would suit us better. We discussed both an ecosteader lifestyle and a nomadic lifestyle. Both sound appealing in different ways, and would have different challenges. But it seems like it wouldn’t be possible to have it both ways at the same time. Are they mutually exclusive?

I’ve been thinking lately about the need for more small, compassionate, and helpful ideas and words and solutions instead of grand, totalizing, and influencing-at-scale ideas and words and solutions.

We already have so many of the latter, but I wonder if many of us would be better served by the former.

🖼

I heard about this upcoming book about propaganda called "Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education for a Digital Age". It looks like it could be interesting and informative for some of the challenges of our time.

I pre-ordered a copy and will report back about it later.

https://www.mindovermedia.us

I want to learn how to draw visualizations of the dynamic ecosystems I see inside my head. I guess I'll give #inktober a go?

Undiscerning should be a compliment instead of a pejorative.

I don't like putting distinctions on my life, but I think if I had to put a name on the work I'm pursuing, it is the study and promotion of "healthy communicating systems".

I just gave an impromptu TED talk to my boss about unhealthy organizational communication patterns and how they directly impact the production of working computer software.

At the end of the day CPUs can't execute generalities, only concrete definitions. The proper role of the management of software engineering is to drive the production of organizational know-how in the form of clearly defined concepts that can be reified as working software.