Steve Mays @smays@mastodon.technology

"In a very real way our inventions assign us our jobs."

-- The Inevitable (Kevin Kelly)

When you hear the words “I’m willing to go to jail rather than…” you know you are listening to someone who has never been in jail.

I still remember my joy at replacing (supplementing) my Rolodex with a flat-file database called Reflex. It was the first commercial PC database to use the mouse and graphics mode, and drag-and-drop capability in the report formatting module. Sometime in the late ‘80s or early’90s I switched to ACT! an early contact manager.

Tasks got easier but never more fun.

My early experiences with computers and the programs (what we used to call apps) they “ran” were as exciting as my early experiences with sex, and much easier to come by.

In the late ‘80s I was doing affiliate relations for a group of radio networks made up of several hundred radio stations.

Continued…

“When you are sitting on a typical modern jetliner, you are traveling at 500 mph in an aluminum tube that is actually capable of some pretty scary acrobatics. Including generating brief periods of zero-g. Yet a typical air traveler never experiences anything that one of our ancestors could not experience on a fast chariot or a boat.”

“Air travel is manufactured normalcy.”

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2012/05/09/welcome-to-the-future-nauseous/

“ It is not what you do, but what you stop doing that matters.”

— ibid

“I have lived a life-time, and now what is left with me? A bundle of events, at best a short story.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

“In 1914, 3 million Russian noblemen, officials and business people lorded it over 180 million peasants and workers. The Russian elite knew how to cooperate in defence of its common interests, whereas the 180 million commoners were incapable of effective mobilisation. Indeed, much of the elite's efforts focused on ensuring that the 180 million people at the bottom would never learn to cooperate.”

— Homo Deus

“Realize that no ideas are your own, they all come to you from outside.”

— ibid

“Things just happen to be as they are, but we want to build them into a pattern, laid down by the structure of our language. So strong is this habit, that we tend to deny reality to what cannot be verbalized. We just refuse to see that words are mere symbols, related by convention and habit to repeated experiences.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj (I Am That)

“The Kekulé Problem” is a 2017 nonfiction essay by writer Cormac McCarthy for the Santa Fe Institute. It was his first published work of nonfiction. He theorizes about the nature of the unconscious mind and its separation from human language. The unconscious, according to McCarthy, “is a machine for operating an animal” and that “all animals have an unconscious.

https://www.smays.com/2021/08/kekule-problem/

“You may have read a thousand books and be able to discuss any one of them without remembering a word of the text.”

-- Cormac McCarthy

Don't know if TFG ever tweeted it but I'll wager he thought it...

Losers (Rudy) don't deserve help.
Winners don't need help.

Upside of this philosophy is you don't have to help anybody but yourself (A winner).

"I committed no crime, and if you think I committed a crime, you're probably really stupid, because you don't know who I am.”

"I am more than willing to go to jail if they want to put me in jail. And if they do, they're going to suffer the consequences in heaven.”

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/rudy-giuliani-calls-investigation-into-his-ukraine-dealings-lawless/3188886/

“You need not stop thinking. Just cease being interested. It is disinterestedness that liberates.”

— Nisargadatta Maharaj

“Instead of tie-dyed shirts, they donned red “MAGA” hats. Instead of being young adventurers running away from their parents, these “front-row Joes” (as he calls them) tended to be people who were “retired or close to it” and “estranged from their families or otherwise without children”; they also had “plenty of time on their hands.” What they found was that “Trump had, in a surprising way, made their lives richer.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-trumpists-prey-on-loneliness-and-loneliness-preys-on-trumpists

Kevin: “I’m trying to decide if I have time to pee.”

Oscar: “How long does it take you to pee?”

Kevin: “The peeing is fast, Oscar. It’s getting my tie back on.”

Do we love the technology *more* than the things it would enable us to do?

I keep picturing William Shakespeare sitting at his writing desk, frustrated because his quill pen wasn't cut quite right. And the ink is too blue, not dark enough. And this paper?! Don't get me started!

And Hamlet never got written because he was running all over town, looking for the *perfect* tools.

"...You can’t trust distant memories. But you can trust your daily diary. It’s the best indicator to your future self (and maybe descendants) of what was really going on in your life at this time.”

-- Derek Sivers on the benefits of a daily diary

https://sive.rs/dj

“Years from now you might be looking back, wondering if you were as happy or as sad as you remember during this time. […] We so often make big decisions in life based on predictions of how we think we’ll feel in the future, or what we’ll want. Your past self is your best indicator of how you actually felt in similar situations. So it helps to have an accurate picture of your past.

Continued...