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sensitive machine's avatar

Hey Kat, I'm on a similar path and really enjoyed the links shared here. There's such a rich language in describing what AI can mean to us

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Defender's avatar

this was a very difficult post for me to get through, because I found myself in awe after every paragraph (and off on a rabbit hole, taking copious notes). After the first paragraph I thought to myself, "wow, I love this, this feels like a genre of writing where people just collect the things they find very beautiful and meaningful and share it, and explain why it moves them, and i wish there was more of this"

and then I read that this is very much the intention and I feel like I'm in the right place!!!

> Writing about the nodal points forces me to understand better not just them, but also why I’m drawn to them. This newsletter, a space that I grow and share my nodal points and, hopefully, the fruits they bear

- I have never heard of are.na before today, but I am shocked because it sounds like something I have been yearning for. "A garden of ideas, tumblr meets wikipedia", and also it's been going for 12 years?? (I also love love love that there is no "one founder", it's always "one of many founders of are.na". Makes it feel like a resilient network.

Reminds me of an Alan Kay snippet I recently stumbled on, 27:00 to 29:00 (https://youtu.be/NdSD07U5uBs?t=1630), about how the internet is the closest thing we've built to a biological system:

> "the internet has grown by 10 orders of magnitude without ever breaking, the internet has no center, it's replaced all of its atoms and all of its bits at least twice since it started"

I love this part so much:

> Indeed, “Morphotrophic” reads like a speculation of Levin’s research where cellular intelligence is acknowledged, albeit still yet to be fully understood

I used to dismiss fiction as a purely leisurely activity. Recently I've found great utility in it, when I pair it side by side with a non-fiction reading material. For me this accidentally started with "Three Body Problem" & Fall Of Civilizations, where I realized the fun fiction story was actually capturing something very real, about history, and the end of the world, that I couldn't see reading just the non-fiction because of a lot of preconceived notions about ancient civilizations.

(another example is "Children of Time" + "I Am a Strange Loop")

I now see fiction as something like, psuedocode? It is literally "false code" in that, you can't run it. But in a lot of cases, it is "more true" than the actual implementation (if I can't separate the algorithm from the details of the implementation)

Morphotrophic + Levin's work sounds like an amazing pairing together.

> LLMs weave living fictions that can be actualized.

> A few thoughts for experiments:

I love this so much. I keep thinking a lot about a genre where I as the author don't actually write words that are ever read by the reader, instead I just build this world, and lots of rules and dynamics and interpersonal relationships. And the reader discovers this, by trying things in this world, by asking questions. Like, I think this is what good writers already do: (1) you envision a world (2) you envision characters embedded in that world (3) you extract some facts in that world, that are all consistent with the underlying universe, such that the reader has that sense of depth about what is happening in the rest of the world.

But I think steps (2) and (3) can be done communally and collaboratively. Like, there IS a narrative, I as the reader am not creating the narrative, so much as excavating it (which I think is what I now do anyway in my head, when I'm really engaged with a novel, and it lingers with me long after)

wrote a bit about this here: https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1770058783605014687

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