A pet peeve of mine- the suggestion that an animal or an organization or any complex system can evolve to become better adapted.

I ran across this today in an otherwise interesting discussion of life beyond the earth’s environments:

SETI: Why extraterrestrial intelligence is more likely to be artificial than biological | Space

AI may even be able to evolve, creating better and better versions of itself on a faster-than-Darwinian timescale for billions of years. Organic human-level intelligence would then be just a brief interlude in our “human history” before the machines take over. So if alien intelligence had evolved similarly, we’d be most unlikely to “catch” it in the brief sliver of time when it was still embodied in biological form.

I’m interested in this question of whether what is called artificial general intelligence is possible and if so, what form would it take. What bothered me here was equating AI evolving with creating better versions of itself. That’s not evolution; that’s merely improvement.

There’s a real argument to be made that fundamentally an algorithmic process can’t get outside of itself to ever be better than it was originally programmed to be. As argued in this paper, there may be fundamental limits on artificial general intelligence as long as we try to create algorithms limited to a particular problem space

We show that it is impossible to predefine a list of such uses. Therefore, they cannot be treated algorithmically. This means that “AI agents” and organisms differ in their ability to leverage new affordances. Only organisms can do this. This implies that true AGI is not achievable in the current algorithmic frame of AI research. It also has important consequences for the theory of evolution. We argue that organismic agency is strictly required for truly open-ended evolution through radical emergence.

Real evolution in the natural world demonstrates, I think, that there’s no fundamental limit as long as we build in variation so that novel forms of the algorithm are tried and can be selected for against a real ecology independent of the algorithm.

So remember, evolution needs both pre-existing variation and selection of the best adapted variants. You can’t evolve, you can express differences that the world will choose from.

On the other hand, we can see this going on right now.

Ed Yong is one of our best working science writers. This article so clearly lays out how evolution occurs all the time, right before our eyes. The story is that there is a gene for brittle tusks being selected for in the population because tuskless elephants have a survival advantage in an ecology with ivory poachers.

African Elephants Evolved Tusklessness Amazingly Fast

Campbell-Staton’s team has “done a convincing job showing that the Gorongosa elephants have evolved in response to poaching,” Kiyoko Gotanda, an evolutionary biologist at Brock University, told me. Usually, evolution is a slow process, but it can proceed with blinding speed.

I’ll give Dr. Gotanda some leeway here because he said the elephants “have evolved” which is a passive construction, since obviously the elephants didn’t actually do anything to evolve. Well, actually what they had was a pre-existing genetic variation that caused loss of tusks. Had that gene not been there, no selection could have occurred. It’s the part of evolution often forgotten. Variation is extremely valuable to a species because it allows for very rapid adaptation to a changing ecology.

Interesting to see the range of responses to the Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement of his aspiration to build a virtual world. This is the best of the interviews I read. As far as I can tell the only achievement that Facebook has is it’s algorithm that stole social interaction from the distributed net and concentrated it in a walled garden. Contrast that with Apple or Microsoft’s or Google’s embodiment of a vision in shipped products evolved to meet the challenges of advancing technology. It seems to me that the Facebook founder knows his time on stage will draw to a close as his users age and his only move will be to acquire the next platform (Instagram, What’s App).

You have to be in awe of what Apple has become from Apple II to Mac to iPhone to iPad to Watch. Never inventing the future mind you, just iterating to create a better, more expensive, more profitable experience. And kudo’s to Microsoft to emerging from the PC era to the cloud, continuing to dominate business software. My company’s IT infrastructure is almost entirely built on Microsoft products from email to Teams to Sharepoint.

Tech visions don’t always fail, but they do turn out to take unexpected turns and end up in places you wouldn’t expect. I loved my Palm Pilot, never got along with the Blackberry I had for a couple of years, enjoyed the Newton, but preferred the Palm Pilot. But we ended up with iPhones in the end. And that’s been the end of the chain for a long time now. A glass slab.

You can talk all you want about the vision. The lesson of Deciding Better is that you have only the Now in which to act. You can’t bring about the future, you can only do things in the present. Of course, those actions make some futures more likely and others less likely or maybe even impossible. But you can’t will the future into reality. I’ve found that it’s a common illusion among CEOs actually. They get disconnected from the real work of creating in the now and start to believe that their vision is what has brought the current reality into being.

Wow me with the first step toward this future and I’ll believe. So far all I can tell the VR rigs are good for is playing Fruit Ninja in 3-D or taking calming immersive journeys. Sometimes I wonder whether Tim Cook’s frequent enthusiasms about augmented reality isn’t trolling competitors like Zuckerberg. But no, Apple has not only shipped “Spatial Audio”, they are using it and integrating it into daily use for music and conferencing. I’ve seen QR-coded exhibits where you can get an AR overlay for the phone. My car has a heads up display that alerts me to speed limit changes. These are real steps toward a future where there is more than our mind’s semantic tags on what we see, but an extension of what we can know spatially integrated into the world as we move through it.

As some one once said, “Real artists ship”

I’m not very interested in the Nikon Z9 announced today, way too much camera. But the NIKKOR Z 24-120mm f/4 lens is the Z mount version of my carry around lens I used for the D800 and D850 when I went full frame. That was a really nice lens after I sent it to Nikon for adjustment. I use the SL2 on occasion but it’s heavy and the primes I have are big and heavy. It only comes out for events, never travel.

Apple reported earnings today. For some reason I was looking at some information on the industrial side of computing like Wind River and other real time operating systems and it struck me how close Apple stays to its original vision and remains a consumer device company that sells a software, hardware and service package to consumers. Unique really. But with these latest generation SoCs, aren’t advanced robotics, intelligent control systems with visual input and other industrial uses in reach? All are like the automous vehicle market, but the prospective Apple Car is a consumer package. Seems like these chips would be very capable of doing much more, starting in robotics.

For the first time I’m dipping into dynamic web content. I’ve never edited my web posts, but I see maybe I should be updating and expanding earlier posts. Maybe not touching old blog posts is a philosophical line like cropping photos.

I was skeptical of using baking soda to polish scratched eyeglasses

Mix a couple of tablespoons of baking soda with a small amount of water to create a thick paste, Zavaleta says. Then grab a clean microfiber cloth (i.e. not the one you just used) and gently rub the solution onto the lenses.

My wife tried it and was really pleased with the result. I was told by a Zeiss microscope salesman many years ago to use a facial tissue and condensation from the breathe. The tissues are made to be very soft and non-abrasive and the condensation is close to distilled water. My glasses remain unscratched for my years. Also, I have them on from when I get up in the morning until I’m ready to sleep at night.

I dropped my Medium subscription. I used to follow links and get stopped by their paywall. Now Medium seems mostly clickbait. I have no substack subscriptions. I don’t think hiding behind a paywall based on internet fame is a sustainable business model.

I’m working in public here on the Zettelblogging method and there’s much to learn. While I was excited about using the RSS feed from the site as an archive, it turns out that the original Drafts document is just cleaner. But I now have a Drafts action that posts, sends a markdown copy to DEVONthink and archives the file in Drafts.

As I’ve started dividing up each days notes and bringing them into Tinderbox, I’ve begun to realize that posting a big end of day draft with topical headings looks like an imitation of a calendar structure but doesn’t help find older posts. I’ve looked at current and historical linkblog examples and there’s really no reason not to publish short notes like this as their own posts.

This post for example now is part of the breadcrumb trail in the development of the method.

As I’ve been pulling notes into Tinderbox, I realized that my note taking style is much better aligned with the Bullet Journal school than the Zettelkasten school. My notes have always tended to be telegraphic and aids to memory, not finished writing that could be understood by some one else or even by myself years later. I’m capturing daily notes and links in Drafts, then editing them into a post like this for publication.

Since this is a blogging method, my current thought is that my Tinderbox files can be populated by notes that have been published, but then summarized and synthesized in my usual note taking style. Those summaries then form the basis of new notes to be published in what should be a virtuous cycle of notes resulting in posts that result in notes and more posts.

Since this is casual blogging, I don’t care about finishing a full exposition. This is all work in progress and publishable when I’m done with the idea for the day.

Like now.

I finally rewatched all of the first four seasons of Money Heist on Netflix so I can finally start the new episodes that dropped a few months ago. It was so long since the first watching that I wanted to re-experience the story before embarking on what will be the end of the story released in December as Season 5, part 2.

The Spanish phenomenon has been one of the most polarising shows of the past five years, transcending the language barrier and entertaining tens of millions of non-Spanish speakers from around the world. While we still wait for the viewing figures from part 5, we do however know that part 4 ensured Money Heist became the most-watched non-English title ever when over 65 million households tuned in to watch within the first month.

I got the new Mac Book Pro set up with my external monitors and drive with an old USB-C dock I had. I’ll be switching to a newer Thunderbolt dock soon.

In appreciation of the greatest achievements in Western Culture: J.S. Bach: Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello

The suites, which were composed ca 1720 but remained in obscurity until a young Pablo Casals rediscovered them in a secondhand sheet music store in Barcelona in 1890, contain some of the most joyous, moving, and profound music in the Western classical music canon.

The many recordings I’ve heard are individual looks into the performer’s essence.

The Mac Book Pro arrived today, got my apps and data migrated from the Mac mini so it’s now my single Mac for use at the desk and around. Initial impression is that its solid, big and very fast.

Looking at ways of scripting the Zettelblogging process, but I’ve begun building a bit in Tinderbox, but convinced I’ll probably keep the output for the site in Ulysses.

Another photographer who pre-visualizes in camera is Phil Penman. He was using a Leica SL, which is the big , heavy mirrorless but switched to the rangefinder M, but using the screen at the back or a Visoflex accessory electronic view finder so that he sees what the camera will record. I’ve used the display on my M a good bit, but don’t really like focusing using the peaking function which detects image edges by contrast.

Tax on unrealized capital gains that’s been proposed seems to me to be just a way to redistrubute some money from a dozen extraordinarily wealthy stock holders to the Federal Government which aims to further redistribute to people. I’m not really convinced that’s a public good, which should be the function of government.

On the other hand, many Americans are used to paying taxes on unrealized gains when they pay real estate taxes to their local government. Your house is appraised by the government and every year they take a small percentage of that appraised value for the public good to provide services like sewer, schools and local roads. A wealth tax like that which included private businesses, stock holdings, bonds, real estate, art and other wealth seems more reasonable as a way to provide for the public good other than just taxing income rather than investment and ownership gains. There’s also an argument that a Value Added Tax, used through much of the rest of the word, is a better way to tax commerce to provide for the public good.

What if you created a monster?

Dave Winer writes

Re Facebook and hate speech, every online system is a haven for all kinds of speech. No one knows how to control it, and esp not at the scale that Facebook operates.

It’s not that Facebook needs to control it. The hate and lies on the internet reflect the bad impulses that people have. We’re socialized to moderate these behaviors and use our impulses for good to keep control. The internet environment is permissive and the evil that people harbor comes out.

We don’t hold manufacturers of printers responsible for what’s printed and we don’t hold phone carriers responsible for what’s said on their networks. In fact, for the most part, no one criticizes the internet infrastructure for enabling this bad behavior.

The difference is that Facebook, Twitter and other platforms employ algorithms that amplify bad behavior because content that gets attention is good for selling advertising. The algorithms may be independent of moral values and only distinguish activity, but they create an environment where hate and lies thrive.

Sure it’s an unintended consequence, but if you own the machine that’s doing harm, even though you never wanted that outcome, its sensible that you’ll be held responsible for the results of your attention driven system full of hate and lies.

From a simple moral perspective, if I created a monster that caused harm, I’d pull the plug or at least take action to moderate the injury even if it cost money. We couldn’t sell a drug which caused that kind of injury along with the good, but of course pharmaceuticals is a highly regulated industry for just that reason.

From casual blogging to knowledge management

I’ve got a quick way to do casual blogging that works so well, it has me posting near daily. The key is to send anything I see of interest over to Drafts via the share sheet. If I have some text selected, Drafts capture it as a Markdown link plus a pull quote. I used to do that with a bookmarklet and MarsEdit. Since that fine app is Mac only, it hasn’t been a practical blogging aid for a while. This works.

After I’ve edited the collection as a Journal post for the day in Drafts, I just copy it over to the WordPress app on iOS or the web editor on the Mac. Works the same either way. I’ll probably use a Drafts action for this soon just to save a few clicks.

I’ve been contemplating the next step which would be to use these daily notes to help curate and synthesize information over time. These mixed, short journal style entries are easy and fun, but lost in the stream of posts very quickly. I had started archiving them to DEVONthink using a Drafts action, but I discovered today that’s entirely unnecessary. I’ve had an RSS feed of On Deciding . . . Better in a database for a while. To my surprise, when I switched to this pasting of Markdown into the WordPress app, the RSS feed in DEVONthink is now just the Markdown file. So I get an archive of published drafts for free!

Now that I’m synthesizing some notes from the journal, I figured I need a name for the process. The note taking world seems quite taken by the Zettelkasten method, but most of the discussions I read miss the point of the method. It’s not about linking notes, it’s about writing ideas in your own words gleaned from research and then creating higher level topical notes based on and linked to the evidence and other relevant concepts. So it is Hypertextual in some sense, but its about synthesis. But it was created in an academic world of taxonomy, I think, where enlightenment thought promised to unify knowledge, whereas in my post-modernist, ecological frame knowledge is best framed as just densely interconnected.

In my casual blogging method, I’m starting with small summaries to begin with. Here, for example, I’m bringing together concepts of casual blogging, Zettelkasten, and the ecology of knowledge. The job, it seems to me, is to spend some time synthesizing those ideas from this kind of casual journaling.

Why Zettelblogging? Well a Zettel is just a note. Luhrmann used index cards, thus Zettelkasten or note-cards. I’m using the blog as the container, with the same idea of collection and curation of ideas. The synthesis could just resurface in more journaling, with curation being behind the scenes in this author’s head and private notes. But blogging implies publication, so at some point, presumably those ideas become blog posts of their own to represent some higher level of organization than just the daily note.

So far, the only tool I have at my disposal seems to be Tinderbox for the analysis and synthesis part. Drafts and Ulysses both have stronger support for bidirectional editing of WordPress posts through the API. Actually, MarsEdit does this very well too. So it may be that writing gets done in one of those apps based on the Tinderbox knowledge management. Let’s put this into action and see where it leads. This is, after all, casual blogging and working in public.

Tinderbox is not so complicated

Just few thoughts on TInderbox, then. I’ve been using it for a very long time and like by blogging, I’m a casual user. The potential power inherent in the software leads to many overcomplicating things with multiple prototypes and actions. I don’t have time.

For me, Tinderbox is a Hypertext Notes app that provides me with multiple views of the document. I’m a visual thinker and love moving concepts around in maps. But because I’ve lived in organizational systems of topical folders my whole life, I also like to sort by topic to enable focus. Tinderbox lets me easily switch back and forth. And because we’ve laid hypertextual links on the world as an express lane from one note to another, I create those links to be able to create connections across topics.

Those powerful tools are also quite simple and familiar. Notes have attributes, which is just metadata that’s useful to attatch to text. Like a URL or reference to a file on the computer. Then there are Actions to change or otherwise use that metadata.

As a tool for idea manipulation, I’m working on taking these daily journal Markdown files with their free associations across topics and using the Explode function in Tinderbox to create individual notes divided by the headlines or horizontal rules I used to organize the page. From there it’s a matter of topical sorting and starting to create topic level notes to synthesize more ideas. It doesn’t use much of Tinderbox’s potential power, but then that’s also how I use Word and Excel. Document creation, some graphs, often a Pivot Table.

The commercialization of Earth orbit begins: Orbital Reef | Orbital Reef

Orbital Reef will be the premier mixed-use space station in low Earth orbit for commerce, research, and tourism by the end of this decade.

Free of national control and regulation. Unlimited void to dump waste heat. Unlimited solar power unimpressed by weather. Having the government fund the development of the launch vehicles was a boon. We’ll be manufacturing and housing server farms in space pretty soon.

On the other hand, my industry, pharmaceutical companies and biotechs continue to be free of any market limits on what we charge. And it looks like it won’t change. How PhRMA is trying to thwart Democrats’ effort to lower drug prices – The Washington Post

Brian Newell, a PhRMA spokesman, said only that the trade group has had “constructive engagement with various policymakers” in an effort to “lower costs for patients, while protecting choice, access and future innovation.”

What drug companies charge is only limited by social pressure based on their profits. When profits grow too large, there’s pressure to play ball from multiple stakeholders including insurers and the government. But as long as the R&D spend continues and new treatments appear, it’s a matter of what you can charge, not what anything actually costs or is actually worth.

I have no real solution for the problem. Government negotiation is just shifting the social pressure from public opinion to government agencies that can only look at the same profit vs R&D spend metrics. Pricing based on some notion of added health or clinical benefit is just not how we’ve ever priced medical care- The Neurologist who diagnoses dementia but can’t offer treatment will be compensated more than Walgreens tech that administers the life saving COVID vaccine. Prices can’t be based just on health outcome. In the end there’s some overall national budget for healthcare and it gets divided up between administration,providers, capital costs and drugs. Balancing that is hard and I don’t know how to reduce that to the price charged for a new drug with either a bigger or smaller benefit than what has come before.

I’ve learned to value doing hard things. Some times the hard thing is just a strength training session and sometimes the hard think is controlling anger and frustration. But recognize that these things are hard and look for more hard things to do.

Cycling

I knew about the pandemic boon in cycling. The shops were backed up weeks for repairs and everyone got their bikes out of the garage to get out and ride. Supply chain disruptions caused shortages in availability of new bikes and parts for repair. Things are still nowhere near normal.

I hadn’t thought about the pandemic fueling a running boom. Shut out of gyms, I guess it’s an easy available form of fitness. I hadn’t really noticed more runners, just more bikes and few cars.

Cycling is much more group oriented than running. Strava is how I track my local cyclists and some well known current and retired racers. Runners do the same, but I think it’s a bigger change for runners: How Strava Shapes Our Running Stories – Outside Online

Now that the once-private, lonesome pursuit of long-distance running is an increasingly public exercise, there’s more incentive than ever to chronicle our successes and failures for an expectant readership.

This dovetails with my recent thoughts about the return of blogging. It’s a challenge to make sure the social performance doesn’t become more important than the activity itself. The social media is incentivized exactly the opposite way- the want to drive attention not the underlying activity.

Blogging

I’ve been working on how to process these Journal posts in Tinderbox. I’m writing a lot, but its fragmented. My idea is to use a Zettelkasten style of summary notes as I flesh ideas out here. That doesn’t mean reusing the text or even linking back to these daily Journal pages. I think it means curating summaries of the various topics I return to here time and again.

Dune

I haven’t yet seen the Dune movie. I’m conflicted about whether to wait to see it in a theater or have a first look at home. But as mentioned, I’ve reread the original trilogy and I’m encouraged about early reports about how its been brought to life on the screen.

It’s hard for me to understand why the investment was made to shoot only the first half of the story and then try to fund the second. Isn’t it way more economical to shoot both even if you only do the the CGI and post on half? The timing locations for the second half has to be the same. It’s just the time for shooting. Actors may not be available or willing, there are the props and costumes to be stored.

I liked this:
What Dune Reveals about Reproductive Control and Eugenics – Scientific American

One important aspect of Herbert’s universe has remained unexamined: the biology, sociology and ethics of reproduction as depicted in the novel.

The novel was widely recognized as a environmental state when published in 1965, following the birth of the environmental movement around the time of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. But it’s true that there are strong themes concerning eugenics and fate is determined by genes and inheritance. The whole theme of insurgents fighting occupying forces predated the Vietnam War itself, although once the book was published it coincided with both the escalation of the War and the protest movement.

I can’t figure out where the Arabist themes came from other than the Lawrence of Arabia film (1962), but if desertification is the ecological disaster, then I guess you need a desert people to own the natural world.

MacBook Pro On the Way: Single Mac Advantages

My 14″ MacBook Pro arrives Tuesday. I’m going to try migrating my workstation Mac Mini over. Here’s the guide I’m using from The Eclectic Light Company – “Macs, painting, and more” If you’ve never seen the site, have a look. Truly Eclectic.

I’m optimistic that I’ll be using Tinderbox for processing the notes flowing through the blog. One of the old fashioned aspects of the app is it’s lack of sync and iOS support. While the Tinderbox XML files can be stored in an iCloud or Dropbox folder just fine, if you work on a file with one computer you need to close the file before accessing it elsewhere. This limits my use to the workstation Mac mini.

The other app I depend on is Capture One for photography and it too is a single workstation program of the old school. They’re working, it seems on a cloud based storage system that will enable remote editing and iPad editing. DEVONthink successfully navigated this gulf and I hope Capture One does as well.

But using a single laptop for Mac usage will let me run both of the on the laptop and get away from the desk for editing Tinderbox files and images.

Is there really any limit to what any individual can accomplish? It seems that the single determinant is motivation to always being a better version of oneself. What’s the drive that pushes one to try harder next time? It can’t be based on what others think, only on having a better and better opinion of oneself. Pride and self esteem based on doing the work, not based on what others recognize.