2022-01-06

• [[oncall]] this week. got woken up by a page twice so far — about average :)
  • not a big deal, part of the job. but I can tell the different in sleepiness through the day, clearly.
• behind on messages in several networks, looking forward to getting back into it!
  • and finally write more about the [[commons]] :)

quick link

http://grahamenos.com/ looks like an excelleng blog. particularly interested in:

• CvRDT Exposition
• Time-travelling key value store
• learning more about scala and math

20220106

Mortal Science notes

• source
• [[ancient Greek philosophies]] were basically religions
• [[stoicism]] felt that it was true [[Platonism]]
• stoics and epicureans thought the gods were material beings
• English is a pidgin between Anglo-Saxon and French, which gives it nearly infinite vocabulary but no formal structure, unlike a romance language like French, which has a limited vocabulary but formal language structure
• People have been trying to address and get rid of [[gender]] for centuries. monks are an example of this

Misc notes

Stafford Beer on [[centralization vs decentralization is a false dichotomy]]:

Why do people talk (another dichotomy this) about the relative merits of centralization and decentralization? Because this seems to be a clear-cut issue on which a decision is required. But it is so only within the context of an inadequate and partial model. To take instead the model of a man, and then to ask such a question, quickly shows the dichotomy to be absurd. If the reader were centralized, in the sense in which some would advocate that enterprises should be centralized, so that all decisions of any weight whatsoever must be consciously monitored at the top, we should find the autonomous nervous system abolished. Thus, for example, the reader would have to remember to keep his heart beating—however interested he became in these paragraphs. If he became too interested, he would drop dead over the book; and although this would constitute an impressive effect from the author’s point of view it would do little good to anyone. On the other hand, if the reader were quite decentralized, in the way advocated by some theorists about the enterprise, his autonomous nervous system would really be autonomous; in this case, and again however interested he became in these words, a mild feeling of thirst overtaking him would cause him to rush from the room in search of water. No: the dichotomy is ridiculous. One could claim, perhaps, that the economy of a man is some judicious blend of the centralized and decentralized control arrangements; but how judicious is ’judicious’? To define what one means by this blend is as difficult a problem as the one with which we began-so the dichotomy of control procedures helps not at all to resolve it.

— [[Stafford Beer]], Decision & Control, as quoted from [here](https://twitter.com/evgenymorozov/status/1478779726521057282 pull).

“[Revolution] is the opening of social and individual bodies to each other, to different temporalities and spatialities, the rendering of property, nation, and family/ household inoperative as a result of such a movement: revolution means that dreaming becomes the dominant mode of being and becoming.”

The Theology of Democratic Modernity, Nazan Üstündağ, in Building Free Life - Dialogues with Öcalan

To read: Who Thinks Abstractly? To read: State Capitalism and Dictatorship