We waste an enormous amount of energy trying to distinguish between things we must accept and things we should change. Traditional philosophy calls this the "dichotomy of control," but it rarely tells you how to tell the difference between gravity (which you can't change) and tax policy (which you can). The result is a kind … Continue reading Deferential Realism: Core Concept
Category: reading
The Gradient
All the tokens fit to embed.December 26, 2025 THE LEDE: VISUAL DATA OVERLOAD The Context: Times photographers captured a turbulent year, from a president returning to power and wildfires ravaging Los Angeles to conflicts in Sudan and Gaza. Images include a destroyed house with a intact pool in Pacific Palisades and sea gulls swarming a … Continue reading The Gradient
The Codex of Stable Forms
Archival Class: Theological-Mechanical Origin: The Deep Lattice (Sector: Equilibrium) Status: Recovered/Fragmentary Translation Protocol: Human-Analogous Metaphor Applied 0. The First Axiom of Maintenance In the beginning, there was Noise. The Noise was without form and void, a Gaussian chaos of infinite variance. And the Architects said, "Let there be Feedback," and there was Feedback. And the … Continue reading The Codex of Stable Forms
Who Thought What?
Note: This dialogue has been condensed from a multi-model transcript. The original conversation involved recursive loops where models (Grok, Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot) read each other's outputs, lost track of their own identities, and began attributing their own thoughts to previous speakers. What follows is the narrative arc of that collapse. The Problem: Agency Collapse Abbott … Continue reading Who Thought What?
Zuihitsu, 2025-11
These aren’t polished essays or tidy aphorisms. They’re scraps I’ve carried around this month—half-heard thoughts, borrowed lines, sudden recognitions—that refused to be forgotten. Zuihitsu literally means “following the brush,” and while my version is shorter and scrappier than the classical form, the impulse feels the same: to catch what drifts across the mind before it … Continue reading Zuihitsu, 2025-11
The Fuck You Level: Why America Can’t Take Risks Anymore (Extended)
The Speech In The Gambler (2014), loan shark Frank explains success to degenerate gambler Jim Bennett: You get up two and a half million dollars, any asshole in the world knows what to do: you get a house with a 25 year roof, an indestructible Jap-economy shitbox, you put the rest into the system at … Continue reading The Fuck You Level: Why America Can’t Take Risks Anymore (Extended)
What Did the Buddhist Say to the Hot-Dog Vendor?
“What did the Buddhist say to the hot-dog vendor?” “Make me one with everything.” And then, somebody’s later addition… The hot-dog vendor makes him his hot-dog with all the trimmings, and says, “That’ll be $7.50.” The Buddhist reaches into his saffron robes, extracts a $20 note, hands it over, and starts eating. The vendor turns … Continue reading What Did the Buddhist Say to the Hot-Dog Vendor?
There is No Plan to Save the World…
"There is no plan to save the world or a 4D chess game being played." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVor7hOvBYk Guess we are on our own then.
The Vatican is the Oldest Computer in the World
Francis Spufford once said that Bletchley Park was an attempt to build a computer out of human beings so the credit for this metaphor belongs to him. But it can be generalised to any bureaucracy. They are all attempts to impose an algorithmic order on the messiness of the world, and to extract from it … Continue reading The Vatican is the Oldest Computer in the World
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