Subsections of Orgdaatje

Hacks

Subsections of Hacks

Openrouter Volume

Model $/tok tok/24h $/24h $/1y

Listen

Notes

Subsections of Notes

...on cave carving

change your environment frequently

  • or you will forget that you can, and your brain will go stupid

  • make use of vertical space to reduce ground-level clutter1

    • hanging (e.g. pegboard)
    • stacking (e.g. shelves)

Footnotes

1

not to hit you over the head with it, but this is also a metaphor

...on designated 'bullshit' space

without a designated 'bullshit' zone, bullshit will sprawl

practicum: maintain two desks

  • one empty
  • one for bullshit

demonstrative workflow

  1. walk into room, holding something seemingly important
  2. hear telephonic dopamine noise, become Ape2
  3. item in hand becomes bullshit

  4. Ape places hand-item on least-thought surface

    1. empty desk?

      • no

    2. desk with bullshit?

      • yes

  5. (some time later) Ape becomes Human, needs an empty desk for lofty sapien processes

    • Scenario A: too much bullshit on supposed-to-be empty desk?

      • become Ape
      • lose

    • Scenario B: empty desk is empty?

      • continue Human
      • win

    • Scenario C: one bullshit on supposed-to-be empty desk?

      • move bullshit to bullshit desk
      • commence higher intelligence

Methods

…of recovering from too much bullshit on supposed-to-be-empty desk

  1. dump all bullshit from bullshit desk onto supposed-to-be-empty desk
  2. rename desks

…of avoiding frequent desk-renaming events1

  1. throw away/donate everything in bullshit buffer

    • don't worry about whether there's important stuff in there. Later on, Ape will panic and recover anything truly necessary from the bin.
  2. create vertical space3
  3. use vertical space

Footnotes

2required reading: https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procrastinate.html

1(which may be signs of brain-stupid, or scheduler-processor imbalance) see digital-gardening

3see cave-carving

...on digital gardening

Core Concepts

  • Scheduler

    • the part of an operating system that decides what work goes first (if any)

  • Processor

    • the part of a computer that does work

  • Interrupt

    • something that snaps you out of a process

Tier 1 Notes )

  • Scheduler:Processor ratio must be delicately maintained

    • Processor-heavy imbalance: hard work in no direction - waste of energy

      • diagnostic example: if the first thing you do when you enter the garden is check emails, you are likely Processor-heavy
    • Scheduler-heavy imbalance: overengineering, no progress

  • switch through emptiness

    • example:

      1. (Processor) finish reading enlightening article
      2. [Interrupt] goto empty (e.g. 'blank' screen/wallpaper/desktop)
      3. (Scheduler) decide what is important in your remaining life
      4. ( Sch:Pro ) garden accordingly

    • counter-example:

      1. (Processor) finish reading enlightening article
      2. (Processor) close tab without thinking
      3. (Processor) get sucked into mundane emails
      4. (Processor) live like this forever

  • carefully maintain Interrupts and reactions

    • uncontrollable Interrupts

      • can be extremely upsetting, but the world usually does not care.
      • only way to make it less upsetting is to practice getting less upset.

    • controllable Interrupts

      • these are to be carefully and intentionally laid by the Scheduler
      • remove them with somewhat less caution
      • where do you make balance mistakes? Schedule an Interrupt there.
      • where do your important processes fail to complete? Remove Interrupts there.

      • Pro-!>Sch examples:

        • process complete -!> goto empty, become the Scheduler
        • body hurts -!> goto empty, become Scheduler, goto sleep

Tier 2 Notes ]

  • choose a wallpaper image/animation so compelling that much of your time in the garden is spent watching it.

    • this will help break you out of the Processor back into the Scheduler when you inevitably lose yourself in the work
    • if you do not feel compelled to stare at your wallpaper/desktop background image frequently, your background is not compelling enough and will lead to poor (Processor-heavy) gardening

    • iOS example:

      • move all apps one screen to the right
      • switch through screen 1 (compelling wallpaper)

      • goto empty before locking device

        • (means you will arrive at empty when opening device)

      • over time, should lead to Scheduler-first mobile-gardening

        • can take years to grow, given depth of necessary dopamine reprogramming

Tier 3 Notes ]

  • song change -?> consider goto empty

...on elective feudalism

There seems to exist a pattern (especially online) where people arrange themselves into a dynamic of "Elective Feudalism" - opting into authoritarian dynamics and delegating control, rather than representation. This can only be called 'Elective' if certain conditions are met - otherwise it is just plain old feudalism.

To be clear - I did not invent Elective Feudalism, it is just something I have observed to be a viable dynamic.

What is Elective Feudalism?

  • Feudalism, but with freedom1
  • different from Federation

  • usually requires disembodiment or near-disembodiment in practice, or else coercion reigns.

    • e.g. online 'kingdoms' with pretty good privacy
    • if your physical body can be deanonymized and accessed, you can be coerced through threat of violence etc.
    • therefore you are no longer in an environment of 'Elective' Feudalism - just plain old feudalism :(

  • difficulty of creating a new kingdom must be reasonably low

    • otherwise, centralization occurs and corruption follows.

Under such circumstances, Elective Feudalism may better serve its participants than more easily corrupted systems like pop 'federation'2

What is Federation

  • an approximation of decentralized decision-making, whereby individual agency is passed upwards through layers of delegation to a central authority

    • This is done in pursuit of benevolent dictatorship, which is (in theory only) the second most optimal model of governance3
  • at each layer, the federal authority must reconcile the propsals of the collection of delegates beneath it, and then itself become a delegate into the next level of centralization
  • (opinion) less adaptable to marauding violence than feudal systems
  • somewhat functional for long-term decision making, unless corrupted

  • easy to corrupt if delegates can be accessed and coerced, however

    • 'Pop' Federation
    • e.g. USA model of governance

in governance

  • Don't get it twisted - if anybody 'invented' this in America, it was the Iroqois.

  • unfortunately, modern federal government is corrupt, basically everywhere.

    • that is not to say that it is inherently bad, or even net bad as compared to realistic alternatives.
    • it is just objectively not doing well
    • (opinion) the main reason is that delegates are easy to coerce, and constituents cannot easily swap away from a corrupt delegate.

in software

  • most people refer to 'federated' models of software without actually relating to the Iroqois (or even USG) model
  • lots of things in software are referred to as 'federated' but they are really just disparate systems with no scaled leadership mandate, or centralized execution upon that mandate.
examples of simply disparate systems

What is Feudalism?

  • a social outcome that seems to have originated in response to a very real threat of starvation and/or marauding violence
  • certainly problematic in meatspace, as it usually involves coercion and exploitation of feudal subjects

examples

  • Rent (the term 'Landlord' literally comes from feudalism)
  • Chicken farming4

What is Elective?

  • true (non-coercive) choice of leadership - from a multitude of options, including onesself

Examples

Betrayal

  • essential to implement the stated goal of voting
  • voting has more or less no consequence without some kind of algorithmic enforcement, which is unrealistic in most real world systems
  • instead, the ability to simply leave the kingdom whose leader fails to represent your interests would convey much greater power upon the individual
  • this may not be the case in meatspace, but it should be the case in cyberspace. We have the technology to create systems that empower individual choice, and bring about decentralization in practice more effectively - not just decentralization in theory.

Examples

  • Linux

    • Linus still gets the 'benevolent dictator' nod in my opinion, but we'll see if he ends up a villain as most do.

  • Ethereum (tech)

    • side chains that branch and feed back into main

  • Ethereum (leadership)

    • Consider the DAO fork. New kingdoms were established.
  • Gitlab (self-hosted layers of upstream origins)
  • bittorrent (trackers to trackers)
  • open source software in general

Induction

  1. consider the smallest possible digital kingdom: one person (you)

    • you live in a benevolent dicatorship (or else you are insane)6
    • note that at such quantum scale, Kof1 is quite similar to benevolent nongovernance, the (theoretical) optimum.

  2. your kingdom of 1 elects a benevolent dicator named "Dick"

    • becomes kingdom of 2
    • one king (Dick), one baron (you)

  3. Dick becomes non-benevolent

    • "we decided to sell your data after all"

  4. You leave (elective feudalism)

    • if you stay in Kingdom Dick against your will, that's just plain old feudalism

  5. GOTO 1)

    • become kingdom of 1 (therefore benevolent)
    • keep an eye out for good leaders to follow. Or don't, you're in charge.

Footnotes

1Usually I write uppercase FreedomTM with a cheeky trademark superscript, but in this case I actualy mean it. The Pirated version of Freedom is better.

2(not to be confused with the original Iroqois model, which is very cool and frankly should be above criticism by the likes of me even if it weren't)

3the first optimal model of governance is benevolent 'nongovernance' - or everybody just doing the right thing. It is unclear which is more likely - benevolent governance or benevolent nongovernance.

4https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

5don't listen to any billionaires that tell you to come live in their utopian crypto village subject to their benevolent rule. And definitely don't bring your kids.

6I've certainly spent some time in a non-benevolent kingdom of 1. Find a new kingdom.

...on inference mining pools

Inference is the new Mining

What is Mining?

  • an exchange of compute-time for money

    • this compute is 'narrow' - usually a single algorithm, which is extremely simple relative to the diverse capabilities of a modern computer.
  • usually on GPUs or ASICs1
  • traditionally requires minimal networking
  • uptime/stability of any individual mining node is unimportant to the network as a whole
  • miners are not trusted

  • miners are compensated financially relative to their contributions

    • the design of algorithms to reward untrusted participants is cool, and well-documented elsewhere on the internet in regard to traditional crypto mining. I reccommend Vitalik Buterin - he is the premier economist of our time.

  • largely concentrated into pools in practice

    • this is not quite the same as being 'centralized' or decentralized - rather it follows the pattern of Web 2.5

What is a mining pool?

  • a central server distributes work to subscribed mining nodes
  • mining nodes choose their central server following the pattern of Elective Feudalism
Mining as Elective Feudalism
  • Each 'baron' (pool client) chooses their 'king' (pool server) by configuring the node to take orders from the king automatically.

  • This king then controls the baron until the baron elects to leave the king (likely to join another 'kingdom')

    • for example, many NanoPool miners elected to instead designate HivePool as their 'King' as HiveOS gained popularity in large mining clusters.

  • mining nodes can leave the pool if it doesn't suit them (financially, ideologically, technically, or otherwise)

    • for example, if the pool software becomes closed source

What is Inference

  • an exchange of compute-time for money

    • this compute is powerful, but narrow - a single 'AI' model, not a whole Turing machine.
  • 'tokens' are the new tokens

  • network latency and bandwidth are unimportant (for llms)

    • most of the perceived latency comes from the actual computation, not the transit of byte-sized tokens over the network.

What is an Inference pool?

  • an inference pool almost exactly the same as a mining pool, but the mining 'algorithm' is just serving llm tokens (or image gen tokens, etc.)
  • inference miners choose the pool they want to join

  • inference miners can leave the pool if bad leadership (robotic or otherwise)

    • for example, if the 'King' takes too large a cut of overall pool revenue from the Barons
examples

Discussion

There are a few interesting capabilities that Inference Pools should have over traditional mining pools. For example, the ability to combine multiple mining nodes (e.g. in an inference pipeline or mesh) into a more complex digital organism. It may also be possible for self-sustaining automata to manifest within the pool - since they can use pooled inference to decide that it is time to spin up more nodes, choose a new kingdom, or mine a different model. These decisions (if correct) will lead the automaton to generate wealth. With that wealth, it can call upon the pool for more inference, so that it may make more such decisions and perpetuate itself according to its purpose.

But should its purpose simply be to generate more wealth, or is there more to life as a mining automaton?

Footnotes

1

but also with CPUs, FPGAs, Storage, Memory or some combination of all the above and more, depending on the mining algorithm

...on monkey meditation

March 30, 2023

Introduction

  • turns out, if you focus on one thing and one thing only, it starts a process that ends with 'tripping balls' as they say. No drugs required.

    • many terms for this across many traditions:

      • the 'psychedelic', 'transcendental', or 'religious' experience
      • bliss, ecstasy, superconsciousness
      • nonduality, Nirvana, entering the Dao
  • Choose whatever term or tradition motivates you - it's all the same goal. For me, I like 'tripping balls.'
  • this Focus is most difficult

  • three phases of meditation in the literature

    • Dharana: concentration
    • Dhyana: meditative state
    • Samadhi: ???
    • I can't really speak on Dhyana or Samadhi, so these notes will explore Dharana and one guy's half-baked method of reliably getting there.
    • my understanding is that if you get good enough at Dharana, Dhyana and Samadhi will come with continued practice. But that's above my paygrade
  • deep, life-improving benefits are manifold, but mostly it's just fun. (fun, but damned difficult and frustrating to get there.)

  • this does not please the Ape

    • much as the Human would like to think it's in charge, ultimately the Ape steers the long-term ship, one short-term decision at a time
  • therefore, in getting to the fun part (past the part that feels like Work, which no Ape will abide without proper bribery)… one must first negotiate with the monkey.

How to negotiate

  1. know what you want
  2. find what they want
  3. reliably offer enough of what they want, link it to what you want
  4. behave appropriately (e.g. polite, meek, scary, provocative, etc.) so as not to ruin the deal in the long run

Know what you want

  • For me:

    • I've come to terms with the fact that deep down I am just a Junkie

      • once a junkie knows a junk, the full focus of life becomes hitched to attaining that high
      • this is an enormously powerful force, that usually ends in destruction
      • if carefully respected and balanced, however, this force can be harnessed and redirected constructively
    • word on the street (for the past few millennia) is that meditation brings the greatest high
    • I want.

  • For you:

    • will take some introspection, I cannot possibly know what motivates you

Find what they want

  • in this case (and in almost all cases) what I want as the Human is just a prefrontal convolution of what the Ape has wanted all along: instant and never-ending gratification

    • if the gratification must end, then (as a hack) let me forget the concept of time

    • if you cannot remove all non-gratifying activities, then the Ape will press to bring gratification into previously non-gratifying activities.

      • This can be dangerous (cocaine at work) or deeply special (Zen dish-cleaning)
  • all our lofty ideals and Sapien thoughtforms are supposedly just expressions of desires

Link it to what you want

  • desires are procured and managed by the Ape, with scant oversight
  • 'motivated and stupid' is, however, the most dangerous of all combinations

  • left untrained, the Ape (lacking the faculties for long-term planning) will simply do the exact last thing that got it high - over and over with no vision for finer herb

    • for some that's alcohol or narcotics, for others it's combat sports, many get there through psychedelics, and most of us dope digitally

    • if the Human is inattentive and the Ape is un-gratified, it will sneak into the control room and hijack faculties of higher consciousness

      • example: "I will work my ass off this evening so tomorrow I can wake up and get shit-high without anybody calling me"
      • example: "I only seem to feel comfortable getting black-out drunk with my college friends…I will plan a vacation (using opposable thumbs and capacity for written language) so that I can comfortably get black-out drunk again"
      • example: "My mind is a terrifying horrorscape at all times, except when someone is trying to kill me (and failing). I will dedicate years to the practice of Martial Art so that I can experience minutes of blissful peace in a cage"

  • therefore, careful guidance (and control monitoring) are required.

    • Mostly though - if you keep your Simian co-captain chemically balanced it will stay out of the bridge, happily stoned in the engine room.
  • Problem is, 'chemically balanced' individuals seem to be our civilization's least common product.

  • the Ape will never understand what it has not experienced

    • no use telling a monkey about meditation
    • very hard to do bribery if reward is incomprehensible or unbelievable

  • If the Ape does not believe, it will continue to 'smoke bad dope' with predictable outcomes

    • must give the reward first, then can use the reward as a bribe in the future
    • but reward is very difficult to find without sufficient motive: chicken-egg problem

    • most practical way to break this deadlock is through psychedelics

      • psylocibin mushrooms

        • with proper research and dosage, or in-person guidance
        • most reliable way to have meditation 'done to you'
        • not to be trifled with

      • full-spectrum live resin cannabis extract, open source ("good weed")

        • cannot yet reccommend

      • full-spectrum Non-decarboxylated raw hemp extract ("CBD")

        • reccommended under very specific conditions, more on this later
  • OF UTMOST IMPORTANCE: the reward is not the drug. the reward is the meditative state, learned with the assistance of medicine.

Offer enough of what the Ape wants

  • Drug vs. Medicine

    • Drug: used for its own purpose, instant gratification, long-term damaging, dose is stable or increasing over time.
    • Medicine: used to help you improve your long-term health, dose eventually reduced to zero.
    • anything can be either. Be a grown up and recognize which you're taking.

  • Be realistic: will your body and your mind agree to just sit still and Focus on your diaphragm indefinitely without any guaranteed reward?

    • if you have not done this regularly and recently, the answer appears to be no.
    • you can fix this by guaranteeing the minimum reward necessary to produce the desired behaviour

  • suggested minimal reward: 25mg BlueBird Botanicals 'Complete' CBD, taken exclusively for the purpose of producing and maintaining Dharana.

    • After two years of meticulous dosage tracking and recording of self-experimental results, I cannot confidently reccommend any other use case for CBD. I also cannot confidently reccommend dosage, but much of the literature surrounding autistic CBD dosage seems to fall in the range of several hundred milligrams.1 Intuitively, I expect the minimum reward for other people to fall somewhere well above the colloquial 10mg standard, but only you know your monkey.
  • start small (but not too small) and if the minimum reward does not produce desired behaviour (Dharana), it is implicitly not the minimum reward and can be doubled as part of the calibration process. Remember, one must negotiate with the monkey. Your behaviour (in retrospect) is the ultimate measuring stick.

  • carefully harness habit-forming properties of cannabis

    • when motivation to meditate is lacking, motivation to 'meditate on drugs' will likely remain (once it has been experienced).
    • use the substance, carefully linked, to help form the habit
    • slowly phase out the substance as success comes with smaller Ape-bribes (promised dosage)
    • Dharana will become easier to attain without chemical assistance
    • Ape buys into the plan, fires up the engine room in pursuit of higher gratification
    • only the habit remains
    • substance proves to be medicinal

...on org learning

(context: this was largely copy-pasted from an early internal Atoka document)

Guiding Principle: Counterinsurgency1

Armies that decentralize the task of intra-war learning and centralize the execution of intra-war organizational change can be observed to adapt more effectively to counterinsurgency

– James Ondaatje, "WAGING POLITICS: COMMAND AND CONTROL IN INTRA-WAR ADAPTATION TO COUNTERINSURGENCY"

  1. Decentralize Learning
  2. Centralize Execution

Monday Morning Org Sessions

Principle: The "Mythical Man-Month"

What one programmer can do in one month, two programmers can do in two months.

– Fred Brooks

  1. Collaboration is incredibly difficult to get right (see quote)
  2. Collaboration is worth getting right (see most of human progress)

Org Sessions

  1. Every Monday Morning, the team will meet for a collaborative org-mode session to deal with the most pressing challenges and uncertainties facing Atoka.
  2. The Org Leader will Moderate and "Drive" – share their screen while the canonical Org Learning document is updated with the official Questions, Proposals, and Resolutions of the Organization.
  3. Proposals and Questions may be added at any point via GitLab
  4. This meeting will be conducted in the context of "Organizational Learning" - with a continuous investigation into the effectiveness of the system of learning itself.
  5. Persons in the meeting shall be treated as ECPs to be delegated Informed Autonomy (see "Informed Autonomy")
  6. Any meetings other than the MMOS should "smell" - that is, they should be assumed inefficient unless proven otherwise.

Informed Autonomy of Extremely Capable Persons

The main goal of Org Learning. Engenders Deep Focus and Executive Function

Definitions:

  • Informed: The state of possessing correct inputs (first-principles onward) to ones own unique decision-making process. An incredibly difficult state to achieve.
  • Autonomy: Colloquially, "power" - the state of being in charge of one's own life.
  • Extremely Capable Persons (ECPs): those who excel when put in a state of Informed Autonomy
  • Deep Focus: A state of mind incompatible with interruption or risk of interruption. Usually requires an entire day of unstructured isolation to reliably induce. A prerequisite for Creativity.
  • Creativity: The ability to produce new ideas and solutions - usually good ones. Similar (but not identical) to "Experimentation."
  • Executive Function: Time spent doing. The "performance" that justifies the practice.

Beliefs:

  • The MMOS is a Success if all ECPs leave Informed to a level sufficient for their Autonomy, a Failure otherwise.
  • The end goal of the MMOS is to maximize future ECP-time spent in Deep Focus or Executive Function
  • If a solution to a problem is not immediately apparent, organizational or individual Creativity must be induced. This is difficult, but valuable.
  • Uninformed Autonomy of an ECP leads to stagnation (but not damage - know your big "unknowns," bring them to the next MMOS)
  • Misinformation and misunderstanding can lead to organizational damage
  • ECPs will produce excellent results if sufficiently Informed
  • An organization that does not consist entirely of ECPs is bloated
  • The decision making process of the organization (in appropriate situations) is allowed to be simulated in a single brain without undue/burdensome communication (e.g. daily meetings)
  • "Informed Autonomy" is a powerful weapon, best kept in the hands of ECPs
  • Mistakes produce postmortae, postmortae produce org learning. If the value of org learning that results from a postmortem process exceeds the damage caused by the Mistake, then it was an Acceptable Mistake.

Footnotes

1

A useful model for handling surprise and complexity in technical and business operations - but when it comes to real life, I find myself compelled to state that one mustn't assume improved counterinsurgency is a good thing for our species. Besides, in 'open source' technical operations, I find relevant inspiration more readily from principles of what you might call 'counter-counterinsurgency'

Papers

Subsections of Papers

Proof Of Transfer (private)

In my opinion, the largest currently unsolved problem (as of 2023) in decentralized economic filesystems (e.g. crypto file markets) is the strategy-proof retrieval of data.

This is the core principal of usefulness of the Internet, in my opinion - getting data. In fact, that may be the defining functionality - what is the Internet without retrieval? You can't visit a website (retrieve html), consume media/information (download image/audio/video), and most of the rest. (One may still be able to do 1-1 messaging, but it would require an updated trust model).

Thus, I found it surprising that SiaCoin, Storj, and Filecoin all originally opted to waive their protocol-level responsibility of ensuring data retrieval.1 This indicated to me that there was difficulty finding a distributed algorithm with the proper incentives and encryption to create the fundamental transaction guarantee necessary to decentralize the Internet.

I believe I have developed such a distributed algorithm, and I'd like to open-source it someday. But for now I think I'll keep it a little private and see what I can do with it. If you're interested in talking about it, I'm not closed to it - but I'd rather not publish it just yet.

Footnotes

1

Many hundreds of millions of dollars later, Filecoin did put together a 'retrieval market' algorithm whereby data was transfered bit by bit with corresponding micropayments. This simply pushed the strategy-proofing problem to the last packet, which means that encrypted files are totally irretrievable with a short-term profit-maximizing peer.

Playlists

Subsections of Playlists

Palestine

Texas Martian

Texas Martian: Honorable Mentions

Simracings

Subsections of Simracings

Archlinux Logitech G Pro Setup

Install the custom driver from Lawstorant and JacKeTUs

  1. install the correct linux headers (if not already present)

    # select the correct version for your kernel,
# e.g. linux66-headers-?? for 6.6.32-1-MANJARO
yay linux-headers

    note: if there are multiple options, you can find the right one like so:

    # get your kernel version and match it to the correct package name
uname -r
    6.14.4-arch1-2

  2. install custom driver

    git clone https://github.com/lawstorant/hid-logitech-hidpp.git
cd hid-logitech-hidpp
sudo make install

Test force feedback

  1. install Berarma's Oversteer GUI tool from the AUR

    yay oversteer

  1. test the wheel for proper force feedback (FFB)

    • run oversteer and select the 'Tests' tab, then 'Start New' and follow the instructions
    • your results should look somewhat like the following:

Basic Linux Vr

Prerequisites

  • Valve Index
  • AMD GPU

  • Wayland (but not Gnome)

Set up correct AMD driver 

    #Open-source Vulkan driver for AMD GPUs
yay vulkan-radeon

    # remove if necessary
yay -R amdvlk

Install Steam

Don't use flatpak or snap, they aren't ready yet.

yay steam

At this point, Steam should pick up your headset and lighthouse and the rest is guided. Small deviations from this setup may produce complex issues - fair warning.

Videos

Subsections of Videos

Hyperbolic Panel (2024)

Squire Demo (2019)