Has anyone read Cody Alexander? Are his ideas useful or at all new?

peter turchin : cliodynamics :: norbert wiener : cybernetics

cliodynamics seems, somehow, structurally analogous to cybernetics. my read on the latter is that it was composed of many raw, powerful ideas and frameworks, but ultimately (mostly) sublimated for lack of a clear object of study. most of those ideas either became their own fields, or, were adopted by other fields of study. cliodynamics seems liable to experience a similar fate. also the names are both kinda doing that thing where you smash together two vague terms

did any of the painters in pre-modern europe write tutorials on how to paint like them? Curious if any of that knowledge was serialized

lmaoo I never thought of applying Boyd-ian thought to win in video games, but that makes total sense in retrospect. Really cool to see too: youtube.com/watch?...

i'm thinking mechanical-engineering might've just had its differential analyzer (ENIAC? ImageNet?) moment approximately a year ago: sci-hub.se/10.1088...

I think the best way to keep space, or at least cis-lunar space, as peaceful as can be will require some combination of an open skies treaty with some form of golden arches doctrine. The implementation of the former is pretty obvious, I'm unsure how to guarantee the latter however. Some form of equity seems appropriate though.

watching youtube tutorials on how cnc machines are programmed. it's pretty appalling, kinda like a time machine to the 50s. they require you to _manually_ type in assembly, which is mostly raw bytecode, with slight support for signed values. i'm not even sure it's turing complete, doesn't seem to support writing or reading from memory at all

Still sore we backed out of the TPP, was an absolute no-brainer. It easily would've had a larger impact than NAFTA. Feel it'll be referenced as one of those things which dramatically altered the course of history, akin to the end of Bretton Woods.

Surprised commodity markets haven't eaten the world to a greater degree, perhaps crypto will enable that in the near-future. Besides DRAMexchange, not a lot of markets for 'complex' products

Just found this, super helpful: bezier.method.ac

Surprised there isn't a parametric design tool for the fashion industry, like SolidWorks for garment design. Clo is neat, but seems insufficient.

Are there accounting fraud puzzles? Kinda like how there are crackmes and CTFs for computer security

Bunch of really interesting Harvard courses if you google 'site:canvas.harvard.edu': google.com/search?...

how did i not know that apple had a chief speechwriter, I wonder if they still do?

my iphone has been glitching for the past few days such that the top 1/5 to 1/20 of the screen is repeated across the whole screen. i've found that smacking the top of the phone from the back a few times resolves the issue for a few minutes. It's delightfully retro, like my phone is an old TV