National Day Thoughts
Revolutions and lines of succession.
Hello from Morningside! This month contains two of my nationalities’ national days: Independence and Bastille Day. It’s funny to think that the latter was partly inspired by the former.
While on the topic, here’s a better word than “passé” for ya: “révolu.”
🌱 6/1
There exist companies such as Twist Bioscience that let you print proteins on demand. Simply contact them, give them the files, and they take care of the rest. In the context of AI safety folks have argued that this is bad for various reasons.
Here’s another type of on-demand biomass startup I’d like to see instead: managed farming. Simply order the seeds to the farm, rent a plot of land on it, and they take care of growing the best version of the plant possible in the space allotted.
This would be a more efficient replacement to community gardens: it would offer a sense of ownership over a plot of land and its outputs (perhaps even guided tours to let you visit your beloved garden), but the labor would be left to the hands of experts who know how to grow more with less effort.
🚀 6/10
My party platform for the future: reserve equal, yet theoretically infinite, slices of the lightcone for every sentient being to come into existence to do with each slice as one pleases.
I’ll leave the “what is sentience?” and “what is equality when it comes to regions of spacetime?” questions up to voters.
🌆 6/18
Speaking of property rights I have a firm belief that outdoor space should not be private in cities — or if so it should be mandatorily accessible to all who abide by its rules, such as in the case of a restaurant terrace or outdoor market. That includes city rooftops, though perhaps balconies can get a pass. The failure mode we currently have is that developers fully realize that proximity to green space lets them charge higher rent, so they reserve it for their residents in the form of raised and inaccessible gardens that obliterate the character of city streets.
It looks pretty, but the stretch between 97th and 100th Streets and Columbus Ave., nicknamed “Columbus Village,” is one of my least favorite stretches of Manhattan to walk through. It’s utterly soulless.
🔗 6/19
As a mechanism for information exchange, linkposts make sense: they’re a quick-to-assemble and easy-to-distribute index of information that an author found useful. And they’re far less painstaking to put together than a detailed bibliography — while meeting largely the same function. As such, I’m excited to see the rise of what I’d call the “takepost,” or organized list of atomic talking points, which looks like it can serve many of the purposes of a well-written essay while being far easier to aggregate. Here’s a particularly good one.
🎮 6/21
It’s interesting how modern day video game graphics, while excellent, still are a far cry from the level Pixar reached in the nineties. Find me a video game whose characters match the vivid movement and expressivity of Buzz Lightyear in this scene.
Of course, that’s a moot point: a Pixar movie requires no audience interaction, so its creators can pay attention to minute details in a finite setting, rather than a combinatorially exploding one. But then, why do we gauge our current level of A.I. capabilities based purely on chatbots used in interactive modes?
In this sense, much like Pixar’s role enables it to push the limits of what’s possible with computer graphics, companies like FutureSearch or Primer are pushing the limits of what’s possible with A.I., by using chatbots to craft one-off research reports in response to single, specific, and difficult questions.
🔭 6/28
Galileo revolutionized physics by building his own telescope lenses. I have high hopes for what Neel Nanda will accomplish with the lens he’s built into artificial minds.
🎬 6/29
Every day I think about how Jodorowsky's Dune almost occupied the titanic portion of our cultural canon that Star Wars eventually did. It was slated to be a nine-hour science fiction masterpiece that would have starred Dalí, Orson Welles, and Mick Jagger, while featuring a soundtrack by Pink Floyd. Much of the art created for it went on to inspire Star Wars, Alien, Bladerunner, and The Terminator, among others.
The plot, heavily adapted from the Frank Herbert books, would have woven a tapestry of deep spiritual themes, exploring the depths of human consciousness, and issuing a powerful call for unity. Instead, we were treated to yet another black-and-white, Good vs. Evil fantasy.
What if we’d all grown up quoting Jodorowsky’s Dune? Perhaps world peace would have been accomplished by now.
🦁 7/2
Football has a way of awakening deep ancestral lines. I’ve lived in the U.S. for twenty-seven years now, but you’ll catch me dead before you ever see me root for them against France or the Netherlands in the World Cup. And when watching Türkiye vs. Austria the other day, while I was happily rooting for the underdogs Türkiye on their way to an upset victory, a fact I had not considered in at least a decade sprung to mind: my grandmother, who I never met, was part-Austrian.
I immediately considered swapping allegiances, until I remembered that she had also grown up in Turkey. I wonder who she’d have rooted for.
Of course, my support for Türkiye’s amazing run unambiguously ended soon thereafter, as their next opponents were the Dutch.
📦 7/10
I’m on Bluesky! I was surprised to see my first post actually get some engagement. My question was: “would you lock yourself in a Skinner box if it actualized your best self?” In other words, would you subject yourself to a paternalistic force that was designed to manipulate you, via the right sequence of rewards and punishments, into accomplishing your dreams?
Personally, that isn’t something I’d unconditionally say yes to, and I worry it’s a potential failure mode of systems optimally designed to help us thrive. What do you think?
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I love “The World is Healing” as a meme format. Often, it captures instances where the excesses of humankind have had unexpectedly positive side effects.
One interesting phenomenon I recently heard about that could qualify: the numerous massive, often empty stadia we’ve built for long past sporting events have now made it easier for e-sports and other forms of modern mass entertainment to take off — by providing cheaper access to large physical audiences. When the world creates unexpected abundance of some resource, you often find flourishing complexity in its wake.
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Here’s another “would you?” for you. Would you be okay with a surveillance state apparatus, but one run entirely by the Fourth Estate? In other words, run by entities external to the interests of the legal system and ideally motivated by the sole guiding principle of “comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.”
🧬 7/14
Movie plot idea: a suspected bastard is born in a modern-day kingdom and genetic tests confirm he was born out of wedlock, creating a succession crisis. Eventually, however, the prince is discovered to be a chimera.