Reading Factfulness was an epiphany for me: our brains are wired to pay attention to the superdramatic in a way that is now harmful to it - the same way that preferences for sugar and fat are now harmful.
Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.
This was published in 2018, vut I believe some things have worsened in the last years for the west. Some examples are: Housing crysis, wars, rise of the alt right, loneless epidemic, betting, scrolling addiction.
Do you have any recommendations for literature you like? (My experience in eye science matches yours - the literature is WAY ahead of what people believe)
Having a good prompt-engineering skill is the highest-leverage thing IMO, so I burnt 2 Max 20x usage windows to help Fable help me refactor mine. With its partnership we:
- Went deep on "what types of guidance even are there? what does giving good guidance mean?"
- Sampled my existing Claude guidance (CLAUDE.md, skills, hooks, etc.) and broke their guidance into "atoms"
- Categorized them by clustering, the same way Big Five was generated
- Generated a new candidate
- Then used independent agents to compare it against my existing corpus assuming that the new one would be worse
Working with it felt like working with a supersmart entity capable of generating very plausible-sounding but not-necessarily-true statements. The outcome certainly felt like an alien artifact, like nothing I'd make myself.
Only time'll tell if it holds up, but it sure had some interesting ideas.
I see this with my dad as he approaches retirement. I try to remind him that if he doesn't pay with money, he's going to pay with his time... and right now he's saving money he doesn't need for time he doesn't have.
2. rotate your hands so your index fingers are on the base of your skull, middle fingers just above
3. now put your index fingers on your middle fingers and "snap" them down on the muscle at the base of your skull some 10-15 times
4. if your tinnitus goes away or reduces, it's caused by muscle tension instead of nerves
This blew my mind when I first tried it, but looked into it and it makes total sense: we all work on computers all day, necks get fatigued, and the impact forces the muscles to contract until they force-release, alleviating the tension-caused tinnitus.
Yeah, I've never had tinnitus last more than a minute or two thanks to this, however I rarely get it and I imagine those afflicted pathologically will get zero mileage out of it, but I am curious.
I never heard of the above, but I also have my own method that I discovered one night on some tinnitus forum:
1. Straight body, drop your head all the way down, chin to your chest.
2. Place the palm of your hands on your ears, blocking them, with the fingers to where the back of your neck touches your scalp.
3. Tap your fingers on your stretched, rigid neck muscles.
Just sharing it here since it has helped me and it doesn't help to have many techniques to battle this.
Now you have to hit the back of the neck with the tip of your middle fingers, and to get a harder hit you "snap" the fingers, putting the finger like "fingers crossed" position, and the pressing the middle finger towards the head. You should hear a big "thump!" inside your head.
It aleviates the tinnitus for a few seconds, but more likely due to the stapedial reflex than anything related to neck muscles.
It pulled back Plan 9, and I was shocked: this is exactly what we need today, as I'm convinced we need to think about minimizing agent permissions the exact same way companies do. Plan 9 was just too early.
It was too dogmatic. Lowest common denominator meant APIs had to shove square pegs through round holes. Unix had already partially gone down that path and stopped. IMO with good reason.
Then again, perhaps in this era of ever expanding storage and compute, maybe someone can make it work even better?
There's nothing "dogmatic" about containerization and providing services through userspace (IPC that's modeled as interaction with custom filesystem trees) rather than bespoke syscalls whenever feasible, which are basically the foundations of the plan9 approach. We do strive to do both in modern systems, but the approach to the problem space is clumsily bolted over the original system interfaces, and becomes overly complicated rather than elegant.
I've been wondering this too: for us, UUIDs are super opaque. But for an agent, two UUIDs are distinct as day and night. Is the best filesystem just blob storage S3 style with good indexes, and a bit of context on where everything lives?
One thing directories solve: they're great grouping mechanisms. "All the Q3 stuff lives in this directory"
I bet we move towards a world where files are just UUIDs, then directory structures get created on demand, like tags.
Filepath is just unique name that model can identify easily and understand grouping.
Uuid solves nothing but requires another mapping from file to short description.
You can have several versions of the same set of data object at once - an entire source set for a build, all the names duplicate but tagged with 'revision' so they can be distinguished.
Hard to do that without a UUID at root, to use for unique identification of the particular 'particle' of the particular data set.
The guy to watch here is https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone . He's rewritten SQLite in Rust with fixes, written his own Rust async engine with fixes that Tokio doesn't have, generated an insane number of tools for agentic orchestration (indexing of all sessions across all harnesses, on-demand skill storage, agent mail), and is currently building out agent orchestration terminal multiplexer stuff.
Source: been watching both these guys closely, as I've been building my own agent factory focused on security + learning: https://github.com/mieubrisse/agenc
I think Gastown is truly special, but I wanted something more focused on learning as I think that's the real bottleneck. So I built AgenC to make it trivial to roll learnings back into your Claude.
Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.
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