👁️ autosurveillant 👁️ @pee_zombie@schelling.pt

it can feel overwhelming at times, especially when inhabiting my traditional frame of hypermodern epistemics, wherein one must understand the totality of human knowledge to be able to contribute useful insights; its become clear to me how unrealistic this is.

while I now know much more than I did a few years ago, I also know how much more I don't, & not just in terms of the possible knowledge domains, but the fractal dimension of information too, how deep reality goes, how much space there is for nuance & fine structure, everywhere.

fucked up how the more i learn, the less i know

each new bit of knowledge contains some novelty I hadn't previously considered, a degree of freedom I wasn't aware existed. a new dimension along which information can lie

the space of possible knowledge grows exponentially

type of guy that makes fun of crystal energy girls but still uses a toaster oven with a quartz heating element (it's me)

of course, this reluctance to be honest is not their own fault so much as that of mainstream society's approach to epistemics, where a perceived lack of knowledge tends to be exploited as a weakness. correcting this is crucial for any wannabe engineer.

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RT @pee_zombie
imo this advice is useful not so much because programmers intuition is wrong, but rather because they don't bother to think on the meta level; ie, "is the time invest…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1368345860120133635

its necessary to deprive those laboring under such delusions of their facade of understanding thru confrontation; learning only begins once the ritual phrase is uttered: "I don't know". many seek to avoid admitting such, but unlike the overculture, in engineering this is anathema

you might here these well-meaning rubes say things like "that approach is insecure" or "garbage collection is inefficient", which they've heard their elders say but can't really explain if challenged. they know they should be doing something, but don't know how to figure it out.

there are several dark arts within the domain of computational magic, two of them being optimization & infosec; these tend to inspire in uninitiates feelings of awe & apprehension, motivating a cargo cult approach, wherein one values praying at their altar over effectiveness.
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RT @ollyrobot
The problem with pushing a patch that optimizes something is everyone decides they know how to do optimization and starts saying stuff like "this …
https://twitter.com/ollyrobot/status/1438853575602540547

organizing your books by color is just analog pixelsorting

we are but vessels for the spirits which fill us, ancestral and societal both, in the form of our genes & memes, respectively. we can do little but gently nudge the engine; our free will is comparatively small. take care with your psychic immune system.

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RT @pee_zombie
this execution engine forms the basis of our memetic host & is how egregores take root in our minds, making us worker nodes; I call this process memetic hijacking, of…
https://twitter.com/pee_zombie/status/1405617778124636160

as one who believes in materialistic determinism, I don't think we have much of a say in which voices are loudest at any given moment, nor exactly what we choose to do; but we DO have the power to change the symphony over time, with a consistent practice of memetic gardening.

there are many voices inside each of us, a veritable society of mind, w/ positive & negative influences both; N wolves, so to speak. the specific mix in any given mind is influenced by one's environment, but ultimately its on us to choose which voices we heed, which wolf we feed.

if I'm being honest, some amount of it is a sort of dark glee, a perversion which almost longs to see you fail, to wonder if you'll REALLY let this happen; this is a dangerous, but universal impulse, hidden in our shadows. it's called the imp of the perverse, and we all have one.

it's hard to verbalize the subjective experience of akraisia, the shape of its qualia, to justify why one would self harm in this way; and make no mistake, its very much self harm, in the same way that watching someone fall & not helping is a violation of Asimov's second law.

I've missed climbing horribly over this past year, it having been my primary sport for years, something which comprised a good portion of my life habit foundation. w/o that bedrock, the rest of the stack collapsed, quite predictably. I knew it was happening, but just watched.

before the pandemic, I likely would've claimed to have defeated the worst of my executive dysfunction, that it was exceedingly unlikely for misalignments to persist longer than a week or so. as always, hubris is the downfall of man, & now I'm having to claw my way out of the hole

this past year or so may have just absolved me of that illusion as well, being one of the longest episodes of executive misalignment I've experienced to date; I've just left the climbing gym for the first time since March 2020, something I used to do biweekly for 6 years straight

even with all the efforts I've invested in defeating it all I've managed to accomplish is lengthening the gaps between episodes; when they happen, they're no less severe. altho tbf, I get back out of the hole a bit faster, nowadays. or so I'd like to believe.

akrasia is a hell of a failure mode, a self-made pit of suffering w/ no one else to blame but your lack of agency in your own life; I've fallen prey to it more often than I'm proud to admit, w/ instances ranging in severity from eating junk to sabotaging a treasured relationship.

bdsm except the dom is turning off parts of your sensorium or reducing your clock speed (you're uploaded ofc)