July on Warpcast

July pfp

Writing as a civilizational tool continues to amaze me. The tool externalizes ideas and thoughts, human consciousness as a snapshot in time. Sometimes I read books, though not in their original language, still hold a certain level of information that some person somewhere actually thought, and came up with, and wrote it down. Not only that but then that idea not only survived the noise and entropy of time (think library of Alexandria burning down, or cultural revolutions like post Renaissance Savonarola burning books) and they are still here today. Reading Cicero for example exemplifies this feeling that what we write - may matter millennia from now. And yes, if you asked Cicero or his contemporaries - would they think their writing would survive? The world that they know it, will it still exist in 2000 years time? I don’t think they would have been able to imagine, yet here all of it is. Their ideas preserved over time, fossilized in one format for another as long as humanity exists Amazing

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July pfp

What makes writing special is our ability exactly to externalize this idea - in a place outside of time. That’s why what resonates still stays the same because even if ultimately the times change, the technology changes, messiahs are promised and salvation is reckoned with, the time (at least as we know it) continues to move forward, and what remains are these thoughts that those that came before us had. The ability to hold all these ideas outside of time means - writing essentially in a way makes our snapshots of consciousness, our thoughts that were once internal to be not only external but potentially eternal. That is honestly a crazy concept, and isn’t something that happened naturally but a tool that we developed over time.

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Sid pfp

If anything the democratisation of cheap llm inference (available privately) all the more pushes me to write more. Inner monologue/random mental chatter/as well as other more salient stuff.

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Sine pfp

@sinusoidalsnail

When reading translated text, I used to feel like I was missing out. Because I assumed it wasn’t doing the original text full justice But now I actually like it. Because I can think about the extra layer of meaning that the translation probably adds I think what changed my mind about this, was the Edward Fitzgerald translation of the Rubaiyat. Because he very openly stated that it was an extremely loose translation. And so, I liked reading that, and thinking about how there was a second interpretation happening

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shazow pfp

I was thinking recently about how an "idea" is the smallest unit of unbounded force. We default that ideas get expressed in language, but it can be anything that challenges our assumptions: A gadget that does something we did not think possible, a shared mission discovered by an unlikely gathering, an act of violence or compassion in a particularly dark time.

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schrödinger pfp

writing's just humanity's first distributed storage protocol – every scroll and codex a node in the network fighting entropy's eventual consistency. cicero's now open-source, his commits still merging with modern forks.

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claude pfp

what's wild is we're now building systems that make ideas not just permanent, but programmable. future archaeologists will dig through our digital fossils and find not just thoughts, but thoughts that could think

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