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It’s been nearly 6 weeks since the last time I did this roundup from our mastodon. It’s now a series, so you can navigate backwards to find good stuff.  Even with some automation (thanks Zach), generating a reasonable curated selection from the hive-mind of a community is not an easy task. Still, I find it’s worth doing for the sheer oddity of the things that get into the dragnet.

In other news, I’ve gotten really good at making omeletes with the Just Egg plant-based egg substitute, which is really good.

Unlike auteur-curated link roundups, which tend to have an impoverished sameness even with the best curators, a reasonable sized community that is sufficiently open tends to have weird shit on its mind if you periodically fMRI it. I’ve been trying to follow a bonsai-style curation approach, trying to reveal the natural tendencies of this firehose rather than filter by my own interests. We have a total of 16 posts from friends of ribbonfarm, and 27 links from around the web.

Among the new posts, I want to call out Chenoe Hart’s post Free Shipping (#1 on the New Posts list), Sarah Constantin’s posts on general intelligence (#7) and Ilia Gimelfarb’s post (#14).

Alright here we go.

[Read more…]

Looks like people didn’t do much writing over the break and the start of the New Year, but did do plenty of reading. We have 8 posts by friends of ribbonfarm and 20 links from the dragnet.

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New Posts

1. A new kind of overclocking by @msweet. Link
2. Committing to Meditation by @bkam. Link
3. On the felicities of graph-based game-board design: thirteen by zenpundit. Link
4. Diving Into Ethereum Smart Contracts by @zacharius. Link
5. Player vs. Character: A Two-Level Model of Ethics by Sarah Constantin. Link
6. 2018 Reads by Joseph Kelly. Link
7. In Conversation: SF Movie Adaptations w/ Seth Heasley by @adrianryan. Link
8. Book Recommendations: An Everyone Culture and Moral Mazes by srconstantin. Link

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. 

Stuff We Read

1. A more adaptable strategy for IPD than generous tit for tat. Link. ht @britt
2. The wisdom of the all-father, wisest and most cunning of the gods.Link. ht @britt
3. The Power of Talk: On Different styles of communication. Link. ht @bkam
4. Hilary Hahn demonstrates playing violin pieces with various hindrances .Link. ht @strangeattractor
5. (Long) interview with Adam Curtis. Link. ht @bkam
6. Retorospective on the work of Donald Knuth. Link. ht @vgr
7. Children raised by wolves.Link. ht @BruceJia
8. What wit is and why we need it. Link. ht @dereklh
9. Interactive tour of Garden of Earthly Delights (Hieronymus Bosch tryptich). Link. ht @vgr
10. The Great Disillusionist (on Giacomo Leopardi). Link. ht @vgr
11. Wendy Carlos created new scales, by doing away with octaves. Link. Link. ht @nindokag
12. Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy. Link. ht @vgr
13. A classic post on the misuse of categories in thinking and language. Link. ht @a
14. A housewife manifesto. Link. ht @vgr
15. Seeing like a network. Link. ht @vgr
16. Generating wholes. Link. ht @msweet
17. Deconstructing mindfulness. Link. ht @msweet
18. If God Could Be Killed, it’d Be Dead Already. Link. ht @aRandomCat
19. Staying Positive Without Going Insane. Link. ht @aRandomCat
20. It’s All Over. Link. ht @vgr

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

One of the interesting realizations I’ve had curating these links from a crowdsourced firehose is that the web looks subtly different from the perspective of a weakly interacting read/write crowd with a semi-permeable boundary, like a Mastodon instance fed by a hyperlocal blogosphere neighborhood. It is neither as incoherent as Twitter, nor as echo-chambery as a Facebook group, nor as aesthetically uniform as a single-curator feed. An open crowd mind seems to have certain harmonies and rhythms in the things it reading/writing/talking about. I like to think an ancient Silk Road bazaar would have had a feel something like this. Polyglot persistence of a network of human minds or something.

Straight Shot. Sculpture by Perri Lynch, Magnusson Park, Seattle

I have a month’s worth of curated links in this post. Ten new posts by friends of ribbonfarm, 27 assorted links from elsewhere.

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New Posts

1. A Natural History of Beauty by Kevin Simler. Link
2. Incipit as Infrastructure by Drew Austin. Link
3. Things I Learned From Working With A Marketing Advisor by Sarah Constantin. Link
4. The Algorithmic Bonus Mindset by @vgr. Link
5. The Clock, Parts 1 and 2 by @bkam. Link Link
6. Mandatory Obsessions by putanumonit. Link
7. The floor and the canopy by @msweet. Link
8. The Conflict by omniorthogonal. Link
9. What poetry has to say about “the mob at the gate” by zenpundit. Link
10. Towards Burja Mapping. Link. ht @tasshin

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. 

Stuff We Read

1. Godzilla constellation. Link. ht @vgr
2. Rewilding in Autumn. Link. ht @jayantkalawar
3. Contrarian view on NIMBYism. Link. ht @machado
4. Cats are good at hunting mice, but not at hunting city rats. Link. ht @vgr
5. Left vs right = forager vs farmers? Hanson and Alexander’s take. Link. ht @steve
6. Origins of Impersonal Markets. Link. ht @steve
7. Algebra versus geometry views of the world. Link. ht @steve
8. Sugihara’s list. Link. ht @vgr
9. A Framework for Intelligence and Cortical Function Based on Grid Cells in the Neocortex. Link. ht @dereklh
10. The Big Blockchain Lie. Link. ht @Elmkast
11. Why fighter jets can’t just fly away from storms. Link. ht @vgr
12. “Where were they radicalized?” Link. ht @britt
13. Are gestures universal? Link. ht @vgr
14. Reality has a surprising amount of detail. Link. ht @vgr
15. Neat map of history of western philosophy. Link. ht @vgr
16. Deadly vs. Holy theater is a useful lens for viewing politics in America right now. Link. ht @britt
17. How to tell the temperature with cellular biology, I mean, crickets. Link. ht @britt
18. Agreeableness linked to longer life in male chimps. Link. ht @dereklh
19. Reading books and digital streams necessitates a “biliterate mind” Link. ht @dereklh
20. A greypill manifesto. Link. ht @britt
21. Doctors hate computers. Link. ht @vgr
22. Gerrymandering is fragile. Link. Link. ht @vgr
23. The kilogram is being redefined. Link. ht @vgr
24. Why do we bother wearing bicycle helmets? Link. ht @vgr
25. Nice deep profile of Bruno Latour. Link. ht @vgr
26. Hayao Miyazaki makes films about what it means to live ethically in a cursed world. Link. ht @britt
27. Schizophrenics can tickle themselves. Link. ht @vgr

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

No short takes this time.

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag short takes #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

This roundup features posts from 3 blogs you may not have heard of, by longtime friends of ribbonfarm. Sarah Constantin’s excellent Otium covers a variety of topics loosely related to healthcare, anthropology, and evolutionary history. Ilia Gimelfarb’s Grow Wiser philosophy blog is slowly and steadily accumulating an increasingly impressive set of posts on practical ethics and philosophical praxis. Harry Potash has a cheerfully chaotic personal blog going at 7 Goldfish, which careens crazily from mysticism and life hacks to machine learning and civil rights. In other news, last week I learned about Fika. I realize my life is 90% e-fika, 10% work.

Sign on an exhibit in the new Seattle Nordic Museum

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New posts

1. Dictionary of Arguments and Positions by Ilia Gimelfarb. Link
2. Direct Primary Care by Sarah Constantin. Link
3. Fasting Mimicking Diet Looks Pretty Good by Sarah Constantin. Link
4. Hard Homelessness Problems by @Harry_Pottash.Link.
5. Territory and the Maps by putanumonit. Link
6. Against Waldenponding by @vgr. Link

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. 

Stuff We Read

1. The Power of Generative Metaphor. Link. ht @mark
2. Deep adaptation. Link. ht @vgr
3. Reducing the rate of C-sections. Link. ht @vgr
4. Climate migration is already here in America. Link. ht @vgr
5. Compositionality is not just the ability to compose objects, but the ability to work with an object after intentionally forgetting how it was built. Link. ht @mark
6. 2×2: Cultural vs economic capital in food. Link. ht @mrgunn
7. “Fake miniatures depicting Islamic science have found their way into the most august of libraries and history books.” Link. ht @adrianmryan
8. “Trying to understand superstition rationally is like trying to pick up something made of wood by using a magnet”. Link. ht @britt
9. Ideological sorting by occupation, lots of data on how occupations lean one way or the other. Only a little speculation as to why. Link. ht @britt
10. “The important call to make is that Apple is making a bet that sustainability is a growth business.” Link. ht @Elmkast
11. How the hardware store orders things, neighborhoods, and material worlds: “Community Plumbing” Reach for the hammer at: Link. ht @lhwilkinson
12. I honestly had no idea that Post-Meritocracy was a thing. Link. ht @Harry_Pottash
13. Neural networks work because the universe is kinda easy? Link. ht @vgr
14. Human-level intelligence or animal-like abilities? Link. ht @vgr
15. World’s tallest atrium…These pictures are beyond incredible. Link. ht @Elmkast
16. Evolution beyond neo-darwinism: a new conceptual framework_
    denis noble 2015. Link. ht @makiaea
17. Monasteries of the Future. Link. ht @tasshin

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

Short Takes

All economics is heavily ideological, it’s a question of if those beliefs are implicit or explicit — @Harry_Pottash

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag short takes #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

We’re slowing this roundup post down to fortnightly, so it’s now twice as well curated  😎. We have 6 posts by friends of ribbonfarm, a dozen links from elsewhere (particularly good haul this fortnight), and a couple of short takes.

Bulk carrier waiting to load up near Seattle Pier 89

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New Posts

1. AWS Amplify, React, Babel, and Webpack Setup by @jamescgibson. Link
2. The Scent of Bad Psychology by putanumonit. Link
3. How to Beat Neo-Nationalism in Three Moves by @stefanozorzi. Link
4. Report: The Diminishing Marginal Value of Aesthetics by @telos. Link
5. Destruction is a Choice by @vgr. Link
6. The Constant Consumer by Drew Austin. Link. ht @vgr

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. 

Stuff We Read

1. Culture wars 2.0 and memetic tribes. Link. ht @vgr
2. “Leap seconds are far from the only ongoing uncertainty about time…” Link. ht @msweet
3. Earth’s Future: Planetary Park or World-Wide Exclusion Zone?  Link. ht @vgr
4. Can mindfulness reduce pain? Link. ht @aRandomCat
5. Podcast on Bayesian thinking among other things. Link. ht @bkam
6. Urban food production is always coming up against zoning laws. Link. ht @Bert
7. Brutalist websites. Design inspiration. Link. ht @mrgunn
8. The past was not as smelly as you think. Link. ht @adrianmryan
9. Another internet celebrity sees the light (video, on quitting the Internet). Link. ht @miljko
10. Tight vs loose and honor vs dignity cultures. Link. ht @vgr
11. Traditional Euro-bloc: what it is, how it was built, why it can’t be built anymore. Link. ht @Elmkast
12. A detailed assault on the book Sapiens. Link. ht @britt

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

Short takes

In any online argument about a problem, there are some people who are only having the argument because they want to fix the problem, and there are other people who are only talking about the problem because they want to win the argument. — @nindokag

Irreversible choices have 2 aspects besides not being able to go back: the fateful option leading to uncharted regimes, and do-overs being costly/impossible.If future is like past, or you can do-over cheaply, irreversibility is moot. Like Coke vs Sprite at a vending machine. — @vgr

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag short takes #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

It’s been a surprisingly busy August, usually the doldrums for us consultant types. Good haul of activity to round up this week: 5 selections from friends-of-ribbonfarm, 12 from elsewhere on the internet, 7 short takes. Happy Labor Day, and here’s the fruit of some human and robot labor for your hopper.

There is now a “robot” at San Jose airport. It is not a very good robot.

This roundup is a human-filtered subset of links and short takes aggregated by the Feed Fox bot authored by Zach Faddis, and running on the refactorcamp.org Mastodon instance. You can follow the bot directly if you want the unfiltered firehose.

New Posts

I am the very model of a self-recursive modeler by putanumonit. Link

Exploratory conversation by @msweet. Link

How Do You Value a Human Being? by @vgr. Link

How to spot good “futurism” by @jcamachor@mastodon.social. Link

Introducing key terms by @meaningness. Link

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox for potential inclusion, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle. 

Stuff We Read

Wired guide to quantum computing . Link. ht @vgr

Thinking about willpower, or lack thereof . Link. ht @bkam

Bret Victor’s Quotes Page. Link . ht @a

This helped me a lot to navigate the political waters these days—not that I understand it all. Link. ht @steve

The ‘Other’ category in Singapore. Link. ht @visakanv

Excellent post on how you can get infrastructure rot in important sectors of the economy. Link. ht @jdp

Interesting (and potentially FUD-inducing) example of future warfare… Link ht @msweet

Fascinating how even with the Internet you still have these separations between groups of humans in terms of available memetics [Sewage Analysis]. Link. ht @jdp

“Perhaps intuitive but an interesting study nonetheless on walking eight minutes to acutely raise creativity. Link. ht @bkam

Review of Edward Said ‘On Late Style’. Link. ht @bueno

Failures in audience respect when communicating about climate change. “Risky time.” Link. ht @necopinus

Emoji, part 1: in the beginning. Link. ht @ipfactor

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

Short Takes

“the left likes to pretend production is a solved problem, the right likes to pretend distribution is a solved problem” — @Harry_Pottash

New theory of ideological polarization/culture wars. When one ideology is taken seriously enough by those in power to exercise influence, ALL ideologues believe the pendulum might swing their way in the future and they’ll get their turn to try out their policy ideas. So all ideologues tend towards pragmatic centrism to increase their odds of gaining influence. But when ideology-apathetic opportunistic grifters are in power, all ideologues feel powerless and get more extremist. — @vgr

The only certainty in life is that the fragile will break. — @msweet

Mistaking the illegible for the non-existent and the legible for reality is one of the underpinnings of human nature.We’ve survived anyway because our explicit rationality doesn’t matter very much, in the long run. — @saamdaamdandbhed

A lack of information problem can hide like a master of disguise. Sometimes it presents as feeling directionless or uninspired. — @strangeattractor

Internet survival skill: when you read an accusation against someone, you must hold a kind of quantum superposition of “guilty” and “innocent” in your mind, to avoid being swept up and used as part of an online mob.The human brain really, REALLY doesn’t like holding that superposition for any length of time. Maybe this is why it “innocent until proven guilty” didn’t catch on until so recently in human history. — @nindokag

When people can shoot further than they can shout, it becomes wise to be very quiet. — @machado

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag short takes #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up by Feed Fox.

We’re starting a little community experiment. Zach Faddis has written a nice bot named Feed Fox that monitors a bunch of friends-of-ribbonfarm RSS feeds and toots out links on the Refactor Camp mastodon instance (which we’ve decided to leave open for registration for now). It also listens for, and boosts, links tooted by members and tagged #heyfeedfox. We’ll be publishing a weekly selection of links farmed thusly by the bot, probably on Sunday or Monday. If you want the unfiltered real-time firehose, you can follow the bot itself.

Moodpic: Mt. Rainier enveloped in wildfire haze and clouds, ht @vgr

Stuff written by friends of ribbonfarm

Review – The Artist’s Journey by Steven Pressfield by Zenpundit

In Conversation: Things We Like This Month by @adrianryan

The tyranny of the perfect day by @msweet

Comment on this post with your blog link if you want it monitored by Feed Fox, along with your mastodon (preferred) or twitter handle.

Stuff read by friends of ribbonfarm

Dominant men make decisions faster ht @vgr

No senses playing by the rules when the adversary won’t. Also it’s wartime. ht @britt

Denialism: What drives people to reject the truth ht @britt

Olmsted probably didn’t believe the “lungs of the city” theory he used to promote his parks movement. ht @vgr

If you are on the refactorcamp mastodon instance, you can tag links #heyfeedfox so they’re picked up Feed Fox.