Like _Glass Bead Game_ was a good book to read when you're trying to meditate, _The Overstory_ is a good book to read when you're trying to think more about trees. I had read this many years ago but forgotten most o-f it. I didn't remember if the initial stories ended up intertwining. It makes sense that they do but it would have been cool, if more challenging to read, if it was just a series of a bunch of vignettes, tied together by trees somehow. SPOILERS One of things I like about Powers is that when he brings tech in - in this case the story of Neelay and the game company - he knows enough about it to get details right (although it is very high-level/parable in this, which I think is appropriate). I had forgotten about the couple where the guy becomes paralyzed - I think in some ways that was the most interesting story to me because it felt the most spiky/risky, which feels like a sign that he Powers was really trying to communicate something with it. It takes a long time to even really make the connection - and it's one of the most distant ones. But I think there is something beautiful about the image of a windowed look onto a suburban yard going back to wild. That as you adjust and sync with it's timescale it becomes riveting. SPOILERS At it's best this gave me the feel of plants as aliens among us. Reminded me of the richness of attention paid.

I was surprised how this connected to _Permutation City_ with the idea of uploading a simulation of yourself. I thought uploading had a weird fit in the plot - I guess it is the final abundance. But such a big one that it kind of swamps everything else. I thought this was pretty didactic with the arguments presented as conversations. But I did think the arguments were interesting. I really liked the point that selfishness is often rationalized with - not that the it is a good thing to do (not beyond a surface level) - but that anyone in a privileged position would rationalize it. I also liked the experiments playing out meritocracy and free contribution choice - that there will be a social component - almost a shaming - that will encourage people to work, but it makes a difference what you set up as the goal or ideal. That it's worth reflecting and keeping some of those pride and shame impulses in check. I _also_ liked the argument for walking away as form of protest - creating a new space - and if others come and take it over then creating a new space again. I'm of course thinking about the abundance portrayed in terms of the current crop of AI capabilities. The thing missing compared to the books seems to me to be the 'fabs', that can make clothing and mechanical things (not just 3D printed plastic). There's also a lot of recycling and filtering that I'm not sure we're close too, but there are people working on pieces of it. Being able to have the safety equipment is part of what allows them to take over old, unused sites. I'm not sure that quite works that way now - even if you have good safety equipment one slip-up could have pretty nasty consequences (or just prolonged low-level exposure). I think that makes that type of "taking over a polluted site" tougher. But maybe AI can accelerate the advances in those processes. Happy to read a non-dystopian future.

I finished _Anathem_ today, with a big stretch of reading on vacation, probably for a couple of hours or more each day. I really feel immersed within that world. I think one of the appealing things for me (maybe too easy) is the idea that a lot can be accomplished if you set the terms of debate to finding the truth. I guess it’s a version of ‘good faith’, but I think there’s even more agreement on the structure - things like that we’ll go retrace over first principles or simple principles until we get it, to see if something shakes out. That we trust each other that that sort of thing is for a reason. I think I’ve had some of that trust at different times, in college - although not too often in class since people’s egos are tied up in it there - though sometimes in the relief of individual conversations. It always works better when you’re both trying to figure something out, rather than demonstrate knowledge to each other. So the promise of Mathic living is living in a society where that principle is central. And maybe part of the fantasy is that the rest of society has agreed to it - here it really is similar to the Glass Bead Game. Where society has agreed that that sort of thinking adds some value and so it will be tolerated within bounds. That it leads to magic - influencing of the past and future - in Anathem is a bit different. Though I love that that tie is by way of phenomenology, another topic I keep returning too. I’ll have to look at Husserl and his copper tray sometime.

Just finished. I got the answer to my questions from last time - those characters did have important roles to play in the story he wanted to tell. They do still feel kind of forced in in order to serve their purposes, but the purposes were interesting, so I'm happy to accept. I really liked the twist of the autoverse's logic starting to overtake the simulation - and the irony of them refusing to accept their creation and therefore rewriting it. Some clever references to concepts I learned in the _The Structure of Scientific Revolutions_, the battle of explanatory power between theories... It did remind me of Delaney in the end - lots of really fun mind-expanding ideas kind of crunched together and sometimes rushed.

I'm now in the "Permutation City" section of Permutation City. I really like the Autoverse - the concept of the ever-expanding cellular automata didn't put me off but it also didn't give that sense of mounting excitement of "oh I love this move" that I sometimes get with sci-fi concepts. I accept its premise and am interested in what else the book wants to do granted that concept. The shape of the books been surprising, as well as some of the characters involved - surprising he felt it was worth focusing on these characters (I guess here I'm mostly thinking of the Solipsists and the wealthy retiree). I'm curious if they're building towards something. Even if not it's not something I'm mad about or bumping against, just curious. It's not quite Delaney level of digression where the choices seem totally unplotted/unjustifiable but also great. But it's something in that territory of "really?" and "huh"./ Do I feel any more connections to current LLM progress? Not especially... except again the general feeling of "we/I should be doing more with cellular automata".

Why don't we talk more about building an autoverse-style simulation of pieces of the world from the molecule up? Still staggeringly computationally-intensive to think about, right? Interesting where it seems like almost everything is on the table that still seems far off... What it most makes me think of is Minecraft or voxel-level sims. I wonder if those would continue to evolve lower and lower level? Also reminds me of Bret Victor talking about all the affordances you get from the real world for free that would be extremely computationally intensive to simulate.

Interesting resonance between this book's idea of throttling the tick speed at which the simulation of a person is run, and the Maths in Anathem, where monks live deliberately without outside contact. In both cases there is time shear to think about. Used as a proxy for general concerns about the speed at which information hits us, and whether it is in sync with what is best for us. I feel like "tick speed" as shown in the book has not been as much of a concern in real LLM systems. Obviously latency is a big deal, but I think a big part of it is that the lack of autonomy they've had - now with the agents with longer timelines it's easier to imagine. But I guess the book - focused on uploading yourself as life extension - is also just focused on a different, less task-oriented structure. For life extension continued consciousness is the goal, even if spread out over a long, long timeline.

So far especially enjoying the focus on different levels of simulation resolution. The autoverse is a biology simulation with simplified atoms (or does that make it physics). While the simulation where people are being copied into operates at the level of organs. Thinking about how that compares to our current simulations... I think there is very little effort to build up out from atoms, right? Light simulations do simulate raycasting - a move towards the actual physical process. Would world simulations trend the same way - it would just be so much computing power! And what about LLMs. There's influence from neurons, and certainly about going from flexible, lower-level objects to produce emergent behavior. But the fact that it's operating in/on language... kind of by default means its higher-level? It's baking in language concepts unless it generalizes to the lower-level concepts from them...

This book is a delight to read! Lots of little jokes and asides to make you feel welcome. I also like the way a lot of the sentences are structured - lots of parentheticals as examples reminders of what they're talking about in a broader sense. I guess maybe that is partly Feynman influence? I've never actually read the physics lectures the title references to check. Still a fun reminder that you can put effort into doing things differently and it can pay off in being useful to people. What have I been reading about? Today it was about the scheduler and how it schedules tasks on the CPU. I loved that it went from a toy model to help you think about it, to gradually introducing the complexities of real-world situations. Really thoughtful way of explaining how a system works.

I finished the three lives (and therefore the full book) today. They were easy to read once I got into each one. I'm glad I read them. Taken together with the book they really seem to be an argument for meditation. Which I suppose is also an argument for a separation from the world and ambition. Although then it seems strange that the final story (the Indian setting) is of forking from the path of the world into a hermit's isolation. Where the main story ends with the importance of a return to the world. Again the narrative setup complicates things. If I remember right the idea is that the three lives are Knecht's dissertation as a student. So they represent his views then, and could therefore be the argument he was making for himself then? But there is enough in there that is not 'a perfect life' or even flattery of him as an individual - there is a lot that acknowledges that while some things would be constant his life could be quite different depending on when and where he was born - that we're not supposed to read them directly against the grain. Again I don't know quite what the narrative framing is up to, but the nuances of it are in themselves enjoyable, and maybe just suggest that it's impossible to untangle everything. The ending of the main part still sings - the abruptness of that end but it being with a person who had achieved some of their purpose - it does feel like a note struck and then ringing out and you feel it more for it being the last time struck (not followed up by others). A fun book! Again I'll say i t really makes you want to commit to meditation. It has something broader to say about the role of intellectual but I think that is more complicated. I don't know if I have a good handle to sum that up. Maybe just 'do meditation but also stay involved in the world, don't retreat entirely,

I finished the main part of the book yesterday. I think I'm going to try and finish the alternate lives section as well, I skipped that when I read many years ago. First of all, a great book to read while you're trying to build a meditation habit. The portrayal of the usefulness of meditation really jazzes you up to keep going. It was towards the end that I really started to see the argument about intellectuals and what they should do. My rough reformulating it is: should intellectuals be participating in the world, or is their value in them standing apart and therefore showing an alternative system of values. I did think a bit about how categories have collapsed a lot into influencers. Especially when the relative vow of poverty - Castalians will be taken care of (they're safe from hunger) but there's no hope of riches. Now I think, because you can monetize influence to an extent, monetize attention, the money you can bring in serves as a score marker for your influence. Or at least it feels silly (or incompetent?) to not capitalize on it to some degree. Versus the discourse of "selling out" for musicians when I was young... Which is all what it is, and to some extent I think due to less gatekeeping, but it does retrench capitalism as sort of "the system". Even universities, the closest analog to Castilia today (or is it the Catholic church I guess?) gets dragged into capitalism. It doesn't really feel like a book from the 1940s (could be newer), although it being all male feels the most outdated (Anathem makes mixed gender monks feel pretty natural). The idiosyncracies of the narration - being positioned as an account of a life we had already heard bits of in legend - continued to be striking and strange. I trusted it was to an effect but I'm not sure what the effect was it exactly. But I was glad to let it ride. It always felt very confident it what it was doing. The ending of the main narrative was a thrill - that's where the naration did feel something like a piece of music, playing with tempo to create an effect.

Returning to this after finishing "on the way to a small angry planet". This one is not an easy read but it's almost intriguing in that I don't know exactly what it's up to. Trying to put forward some philosophical ideas for sure, but in such a layered way. A fictional tale of a society as a famous figure, with lots of asides about "of course you already know" or "you may be anticipating" . Does this help the point somehow? It's fun. I wonder what accounts are actually like that - gospels related to Jesus I guess a little bit. Also feels very Borges - I guess they were publishing around the same time. It's all in the service of worldbuilding I suppose. It's really a worldbuilding book. Where that world is an argument - having to do with World War 2 I think? I'll read more about the context when I finish, another thing to kind of ambiently puzzle about as I read for now.

I finished this morning. Really enjoyed. I did find that because it was episodic I didn't necessarily feel pulled to keep going like I would with some books. But I think that fits with the overall cozy, humane themes. Not everything needs to be stress and adrenaline and intrigue. I loved the Monk and Robot books more - but that's not really a knock since I really loved those. Thinking about what is likely to stick with me. The overall vibe. Probably the depiction of modders and hackers and how much fun those spaces sounded - reminded me of the feeling of those spaces in Stephenson or Gibson books as well. Though fittingly for this book it was a lot less focused on something being made then the feeling of being in those spaces - the orientation towards problem-solving and experimenting. The AI stuff was nice in that it felt normalized (there was some drama around it, in the end but it fit alongside the other stories). Super capable AIs are there, life goes on, everyone finds other things to do.

I'm in an online book club for this book and I almost dropped out but I started back this week (still early in the book) and I think I'm back in. Not being a systems engineer a lot of this is more in-depth than what I know, but I really like the writing style - it's not afraid to make jokes and be idiosyncratic. It seems interested in describing in basic/simple terms partly because that is a challenge in and of itself - and if you really understand something you should be able to break it down that simply. The section I just read was about creating programs - fork and exec. Not saying I absorbed all of it but it did have this feeling of "oh you're describing something that has subtly guided how I experience computers but that I never realized was operating". That is a fun feeling!

Still enjoying this! Interesting how episodic and somewhat low-stakes it can be. Just go with these people you like on mini-adventures. In doing so I think it's really putting forward coziness as a kind of value. I'm reading the chapter on the modders and I feel like one of the main focuses is how nice it is to be in that type of environment - where everyone is friendly and also intensely focused on their own niche interests. Hackerspace-like.

The way AIs are treated so far seems hopeful - a part of the world but not the whole world. Partly their advantages in certain areas foreground human qualities more: coziness, fuzzy judgement.

Just reached some of the parts that explain why this is known as "cozy sci-fi" (I love it so far). The description of the fishbowl - a room with a big bubble window looking out into space, filled with plants and also painted - I think nonfunctional - electronic pieces, and mismatched chairs and benches. The focus on the mismatched chairs in a later dinner scene reminded me of the _Pattern Language_ part where mismatched chairs are recommended. I've recent done some cozy/chaotic decorating in the house and this made me want to double down on it and also think about how to incorporate more electronics into it.

UI design as theater I remember as mentioned by Jason Yuan, and I always thought it was an interesting idea. I saw this book mentioned on Bluesky and decided to try it out. Love the early focus on mental models, I'm just now reaching the theatre part - thinking about what actually takes place on the screen as constructed by behind-the-scenes techs. With the actors and audience knowing of this construction but by aggrement working with it

I've been thinking about monks as example of people who have developed their own technology to manage attention. It made me think of this book, so I got it to reread it. It has a lot of worldbuilding right at the start that is a lot to get through - I do love the world, though. Something very cozy about it.

Like Anathem, I think of this as a monk tech book. Dealing with folks who had made choices about how to manage attention. The idea of a game, based on music and math, where you play with ideas, positioning them in sequence (intentionally left vague) is suggestive to me in a world of embeddings. It also makes me think about how books serve as ways of containing ideas - traditions also - so that they can be organized as position in relation to each other.