I figured I’d have to go to Home Depot and hunt through their hardware until I could find something I could jury-rig.

Then I had second thoughts. Why not go to Billings Paint & Hardware? It’s a four-generation family-owned establishment. It’s a little bit out of my way, and parking isn’t always easy. But I could go on a nice walk around the neighborhood and get my steps in.

The staff was a little doubtful that they’d have what I was looking for. But they took me to the hook section and I poked around for a while. Then, tucked away in a corner, I found exactly what I needed.

My purchase probably wouldn’t cover more than 15 minutes of their air conditioning. But I’m glad it went to a family business.

Is it not by his high superfluousness we know

Our God? For to equal a need

Is natural, animal, mineral: but to fling

Rainbows over the rain

And beauty above the moon, and secret rainbows

On the domes of deep sea-shells,

And make the necessary embrace of breeding

Beautiful also as fire,

Not even the weeds to multiply without blossom

Nor the birds without music:

There is the great humaneness at the heart of things,

The extravagant kindness, the fountain

Humanity can understand, and would flow likewise

If power and desire were perch-mates.

— Robinson Jeffers

There’s a feeling you get
in the presence of
beautiful buildings and bustling courtyards.
A sense that these spaces
are inviting you to slow down,
deepen your attention, and be
a bit more human.

What if our software could do the same?

This is the opening to the Resonant Computing Manifesto, a charter that aims direct our attention to the human aspects of computing, and how we are on the verge of building systems that can bring us together, or alienate us and drive us into isolation.

The Manifesto is a living document, soliciting suggestions and revisions from participants.

I’m not sure, but it could the the start of something important.

You can sign the document here

Via Thor Benson, How Can We Make the Internet Good Again

SEE ALSO

When Possible, Choose Human

Doing one true thing at a time to intensify life

The real question is, “are the robots adding life, supporting humanity, right now?”

For instance, when AI is used to help radiologists read mammograms, there is a 20% improvement in detecting cancer. This is clearly a case where AI adds life.

But when a Virgina-based AI data center had to run on diesel for 24 hours, causing residents to have to evacuate, then here is a situation where AI is taking away from life, and is not designed to foster humanity.

The average person doesn’t have much, if any, say in the design of AI systems. But we could start looking for ways to “buy local” in the sense of choosing products that are made by humans.

Benjamin Mayo proposes having a “proof of human” video attached to any piece of art that a company publishes. A video may be overkill, but some kind of identification in Alt text seems reasonable to me. It would be like country of origin labeling in the United States. Essentially, every use of AI should be identified as such, in order to give consumers a choice.

Personally I think that “choose a human” extends well beyond AI. Buying local, buying handmade, listening to live music in small venues are all ways to support humanity and create more life.

Via John Gruber on Daring Fireball

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A New Idea of Order the idea that everything we build should enhance life

Now of course you could very easily feed a LLM a big stack of research papers and ask it to create perfect Zettelkasten-style notes and save yourself a lot of trouble. But to Ahrens’ and Luhman’s point, you wouldn’t learn anything in the process. You wouldn’t be thinking.

David Millard , professor of computer science at University of Southhampton, used Anthropic’s Claude to construct a thought-provoking system of notes by using a concept known as hypertextual friction. Claude would read a research paper and then propose notes, but Millard had to accept them, reject them, or take them with reservations. The same was true with links and with interstitial objects such as Maps of Content. In all instances the AI put Millard firmly in the driver’s seat.

Millard discovered something unexpected in the process. Instead of leaving him feeling overwhelmed, on the point of cognitive overload as you might expect with hypertextual friction, he found the friction to be enjoyable.

The most striking experiential finding for me is that hypertextual friction (the moments of pause, decision, and interpretive effort described in Section 6) is not experienced as cognitive tax. It is experienced as the rewarding part of the work.

I suspect that this has to do with creating a living structure, where the smallest parts are working together to build a coherent whole.

This is fascinating, although not to the point where I’m going to turn over my knowledge base to Claude. But it demonstrates that AI does not, in and of itself generate “AI drift”. It all depends on how you use it.

Via Mark Bernstein,

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Using your notes to think through issues and discover surprises Ask Your Notes, Not ChatGPT

Impossible to Think Without Writing

Is Your Zettelkasten Alive? How Structure Impacts the Life of Your Notes

They are fun to watch. And thought-provoking.

A Matter of Form by Rene Jodoin

A Geometry of Circles by Philip Glass

Via Kottke

An outside engineer, looking at the plans, said “what if we didn’t do anything?”

After all, the satellite would be spinning. And as it turned out, the spin provided plenty of kinetic energy to deploy the panels.

Small, simple transformations have the benefit of being cheap, uncomplicated, and fairly easy to put into motion. They also don’t generate the resistance that large-scale, complicated, or expensive transformations often create.

Arguing that taking small, sequential steps that unfold into each other is far more productive than trying to create a comprehensive solution all at once, Christopher Alexander put it this way: “The unfolding process allows you to go one step at a time, precisely because it is based on a sequence which permits this without disturbing or screwing up the whole.”

In the satellite example, the small first step was simply to ask “what is the condition of the satellite at the moment the panels must deploy?” And the most elegant solution unfolded from there.

SEE ALSO

Nature of Order, Book Two The Process of Creating Life, p. 317 Christopher Alexander

Small islands of coherence have the ability to shift the entire system Making Sense in Incoherent Times

Jesus and the mustard seed Start Small

Tiny Experiments Take You Where Goals Can’t

In my workplace I’m seeing more and more cases where people are turning to AI to deal with tough problems they don’t want to think about. Problems such as formulating goals, writing memos, drafting proposals.

The danger here is that they are not writing these things themselves, meaning they are not truly thinking them through. Writing is thinking.

If I have an LLM write the goals for my team, I’ll get a list of objectives that have a reasonable probability of being a good match, but they won’t be tailored for the individuals.

I think that using AI to do your problem-solving carries an even greater risk because it can bypass your own sense of knowing, at the center of your being, what is true.

One of the fundamental methods for designing structures and processes that “have good fit” and “feel alive” is to use the Mirror of the Self Test. This is a learned skill that takes practice but produces excellent results by tailoring design solutions to perfectly match the problem space.

I consistently find that AI results often sound good, even insightful. They might trigger a positive gut reaction, such that I feel that they are true. But when I genuinely study the problem space I see that the LLM is lacking context and the solution really doesn’t fit. The only way I can reach that conclusion is to map out the space using what I know in my Self, or my whole experience of life.

And AI generated answers interfere with that Self-evaluation process, making it less human and less reliable..

• Via Mashable

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Niklas Luhmann – Impossible to think without writing

Imposed structure hinders thinking

Ask your notes, not ChatGPT

And I’m stuck.

My document has all kinds of structures and centers and boxes and arrows. But I don’t think it has enough of me in it. Or the categories I’m using don’t resonate. Or the relationships I’m building between notes is off. But it simply doesn’t have a good feeling which was one of the main things Alexander looked for in living structure.

Now I’m using Tinderbox with an MCP connection to Claude, so it would be very easy for me to fire up the LLM and try to use it to diagnose some of my problems. But I found myself hesitating on this.

Recalling that sociologist Niklas Luhmann interacted with his extensive collection of notes as if he were having a conversation, I decided to ask my notes to find an answer.

And the results were pretty interesting. I started with notes about Alexander’s use of feeling and introspection to identify “centers.” This lead me to Alexander’s thoughts on Self, which in turn lead me to a quote from Howard Thurman suggesting we are not single persons, but contain many persons, and the Self is a rallying point. From here I jumped to a note about the Internal Family Systems model which seeks to use the Self to mediate and heal the various parts of our persona.

Spending an evening in a bar alone with my notes turned out to be extremely worthwhile. Now I’m adding small notes for “parts of me” that I can identify – Curiosity Seeker, Smart Ass, Imposter, Care-Giver and the like. I don’t quite understand how this integrates with the “done-list” section of my life garden, but it has a better feel to it.

I think the answers that I got from my own notes are much more contextualized to my life and interests than anything I might have gotten back from Claude. Not that Claude is bad or AI is evil. It still doesn’t know me as well as I know myself, apparently.

Now what if I hadn’t taken such a bonanza if tiny notes about Self? I was actually expecting that would be the case. In that event, I planned to go straight to Christopher Alexander and have a conversation with him.

SEE ALSO

Hmmm…looks like I wrote a very similar post here: Why You Shouldn’t Ask ChatGPT about Information Architecture (or Anything Else You Want to Learn) in this case the LLM delivered precisely the wrong information. The models have improved considerably in three years. They are remarkably good at finding what you’re looking for. My notes, on the other hand, delivered something unexpected, topically unrelated but remarkably relevant.

Is Your Zettelkasten Alive? How Structure Impacts the Life of Your Notes

Links to notes should be unexpected

Reading Dillard I became aware that, far from being conservative…selecting for the least amount of energy consumption…the creative forces that bring us life are wildly playful, exuberant, and wealthy.

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames. The Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

In the end you don’t measure life by what you experience. It is measured by the time you spend.

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.

(Via The Marginalian)