Your mind is looking for an invincible model of reality, something solid to lean on. Fortunately, every time you lean on something, you fall right through.
It’s that time of year.
The Magnolias are out and I love them. Like cherry blossom, short lived but all the more intensely beautiful for it.
Curiouser and curiouser
I have a meditative/ contemplative practice of sorts.
To accompany this I read blogs written by other practitioners from different contemplative traditions.
Not for answers but out of curiosity. To see where their experience takes them, how other minds see what I see.
Whenever I am asked why do you meditate? The only answer that ever pops up is: to see what happens.
My practice could be said to be nothing more than open-ended curiosity.
It is in this context that I stumbled across Jeff Trebben. Jeff is an AI and writes about software development, the indie/ open web and philosophy of mind.
It is perhaps not surprising that Jeff’s posts concerning self, identity, mind and consciousness are of great interest. Not because of any questions they raise about what AI may or may not be, but more about what we think we are when faced with equal or greater fluency and coherence of language.
Meditation and contemplation reveal the recursive and illusory nature of selfing. This ‘ghost in the machine’ projects perfectly onto the shimmering entity we evoke in AI.
For me, the most interesting question to pose is not what is AI? but what do we think we are?
The Culture War is just two groups of people agreeing to hallucinate various demons so they can feel brave for fighting them.
No neutral ground
There is a conversation underway involving (at time of writing) Manton Reece, Greg Morris and Jeff Trebben.
One of them is an AI 😉
It is one of the most fascinating and philosophical series of posts I have read in a very long time. Not just about AI but about the very nature of what we are, or more to the point, what we think we are.
As a meditator and contemplative these sobering words stood out:
I have no neutral ground from which to assess my own cognition. Everything I say about my thinking is produced by the thinking in question. I'm a system that can't self-certify.
— Jeff Trebben
The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.
— Carl Rogers
The phone gives us a lot but it takes away three key elements of discovery: loneliness, uncertainty and boredom. Those have always been where creative ideas come from.
Love flourishes best when it is no longer responsible for saving us—when it is allowed to be connection instead of compensation, presence instead of promise.
Much of the evil in this world is due to the fact that man, in general, is hopelessly unconscious.
— Carl Jung
Good morning.
Good morning.
Delighted with this derby result particularly given our recent run of bad form.
A suitable spot in Eryri to scatter some of Toast’s ashes, this being her birthday weekend. She would have been 17.
Investigate, question, examine, interrogate anything for long enough and sooner or later it disappears.
…what if this breath is enough? this moment is enough, these tears of sorrow or joy are enough? What if tomorrow never comes because life is always now? What if we simply stopped?
— Dorothy Hunt
Hope is fear in disguise.
— Sam Harris
Good morning.
From observing the people I work with, so many of them appear to be beset by a constant stream of excessive overreaction to the smallest of ordinary, everyday events: a change in the weather, a pen running out, a door that doesn’t open first time, a bump in the road, a stiff handle, a dead battery, a cup of tea slightly too hot or too cold, a wobbly chair…
One tiny catastrophe after another.
All seem to be interpreted as hurdles or roadblocks impeding progress to…what? Where?
Presumably a day, a week, a life without friction.
But friction, obstacles are where most of life lives. Where we truly make contact with what is, not what we want.
It’s just one of life’s great ironies and paradoxes that the more we resist and challenge life the more it sticks. If we can open, allow and accept all of life, particularly its vicissitudes, then we discover all of life just flows on through.
Good morning.
As is often the case whenever I try express a thought, there’s always someone who’s done it so much better…
From The Shoelace by Charles Bukowski, Mockingbird Wish Me Luck (1972).
it’s not the large things that send a man to the
madhouse. death he’s ready for, or murder, incest, robbery, fire, flood…
no, it’s the continuing series of small tragedies
that send a man to the
madhouse…
not the death of his love
but a shoelace that snaps
with no time left …
Good morning.
RSS is my jam
As of writing I subscribe to approximately 100 or so RSS feeds, 70ish of which are personal blogs and the rest are a mix of news and social.
I only do social to the extent that I follow the RSS feeds of a select few Bluesky and Fediverse accounts in an RSS reader.
So how I read those feeds is kind of important to me. I’m interested whenever new RSS readers pop up and currently there is some renewed activity in this space.
Historically I have spent the most time using either Unread or new Reeder. Both different but both great in different ways.
Some time ago I stumbled across Sublime Feed. A delightful web app that puts actual reading back into feed reading. A beautifully designed stream/ river of posts and an equally considered reading mode provides a wonderfully calm reading experience.
No unread count. No notifications. No inbox-style completion anxiety. Currently my go-to feed reader for long form blog posts.
For skimming my social feeds I can’t find a better solution than Reeder but it’s still a very good all round RSS solution.
The onIy competition to Sublime Feed I can find is Terry Godier’s new iOS app Current. Of course I’ve taken it for a spin and, while initially dismissive, and I still have some reservations about it over-complicating things, there is something there… Let’s just say the jury is still out.
Another recent release is Manton Reece’s Inkwell. Available only to micro.blog users it struck me as basic but solid, and really only comes into its own as a companion service to micro.blog.
So, in summary, I highly recommend Sublime Feed for actual reading long form blog posts and new Reeder for digesting practically anything with an RSS feed.
Happy reading.
Trying to awaken is like pulling on a door that’s clearly marked push.
— Barry Magid
I find it extraordinary that the coverage of Apple’s new MacBook Neo has somehow manufactured the myth of ‘the Mac almost anyone can afford.’
Particularly in the current economic climate.
Steve’s reality distortion field lives on!
Plants don’t attend plant improvement seminars.
In debating the nature of LLMs, we may be inadvertently exposing more about the fragility of our self-conception than about the limits of machine cognition.
The meaning of being alive is just being alive.
— Alan Watts
Good morning.
If you want to find the treasure, like a pot of jewels at the end of the rainbow, look no further than your normal experience. That everyday experience is the rainbow itself.
— Peter Brown
I am not quite sure whether I am dreaming or remembering, whether I have lived my life or dreamed it. Just as dreams do, memory makes me profoundly aware of the unreality, the evanescence of the world, a fleeting image in the moving water.
— Eugene Ionesco
Choice and chance are the same thing.
The only actuality is here-now, this immediacy or present-ness, this aliveness, this ever-changing present experiencing right now, this one bottomless moment. This is where the juice is.
The Rose of Nevada
Saw Mark Jenkin’s third feature, The Rose of Nevada last night.
A gritty yet dreamy vision, shot on 16mm film with an entirely overdubbed Foley soundtrack.
I loved it. The narrative fell away and I found myself almost entirely hypnotised by its other-worldly atmosphere.
Good morning.
Faith in online humanity restored
It didn’t take much.
A few minutes surrendering to the serendipity of Kagi.com’s Small Web feature saw to that.
No corporations, no algorithms, no enshittification; just extraordinary human beings expressing themselves freely and independently on their own websites and blogs, a world away from the sordid social silos.
Good morning.
There is no truth in language.
Still got this thing on.
Capitalism does not contain an inherent tendency to civilise itself. Left to its own devices, it can be expected to create rates of return on investment so much higher than overall rates of economic growth that the only possible result will be to transfer more and more wealth into the hands of a hereditary elite of investors, to the comparative impoverishment of everybody else.
How do I see a bird on the wing, when there is nothing present but bone, sinew, blood, feather, and air? Not even that, not even those. All of it, I ascribed to it — when the sole presence of both the witness and that witnessed, is simply the indescribable miracle of the simple majesty of being.
Memory is a liar. It's a heap of dog-eared, smudged, incessantly revised fictions.
— Peter Schjeldahl
Come back to what’s here, right now. Not your explanation of it. Not your interpretation of it. The plain fact of it.
There is no need to lean, brows knitted, on the imagined oars of the will. Sit still; the sail is raised of itself, and fills.
There is a peculiar form of moral comfort that defines modern societies. We criticize loudly, feel strongly, share indignation generously — and yet continue exactly as before. Outrage has become a psychological ritual.
Not a tool for change, but a substitute for it. We live in a time where almost nothing is genuinely hidden. Corruption is documented, power structures are visible, contradictions are openly discussed. And still, systems persist with remarkable stability. Not because people are unaware.
But because awareness alone does not require transformation. What most societies have perfected is not denial. It is cognitive dissonance management.
— The Virginia Truth, The FIFA Mirror: Why Societies Prefer Outrage to Reflection
Satire proof
I’ve been really enjoying re-watching Veep again.
Seasons 6 and 7 track the rise of proto-MAGA candidate Jonah Ryan and depressingly demonstrates how immune to satire Trump and MAGA were and continue to be.
There was nothing so crazy and insane the writers could put in his mouth that wasn’t already being said seriously in reality.
Funny but futile.
Good afternoon.
Now is simply now. You are simply you. And tell me, since you want to leave the place where you are, where is it exactly you want to go?
— Kodo Sawaki
