"Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist."
My wife: “I’m going to remember to treat work like a video game today, and not dwell on outcomes.” Me: “Beat the boss!” My wife: “I am the boss!” Me: “Yes, and the battle against your own mind is the battle of battles.” Twitter icon
Oliver
I read from Stanislaw Lem’s wonderful work, Golem XIV, featuring lectures given by a sentient military supercomputer.
Oliver
Reading Lem’s GOLEM this morning, with an intelligent computer lecturing humans on how we are deficient for having no sense of our insides, I realized that it’s the same for our minds: imagine if you could actually see the structure of your cognition.
Oliver
I’ve never got it when people say “that’s just semantics.” Semantics is the study of meaning in language; what if you told someone trying to fix your puncture that they were about to remove the wrong wheel, and they said: “That’s just mechanics!”
Oliver
“On some grave questions, there is no difference to be split; one does not look for a synthesis between verity and falsehood; the sun does not rise in the east one day and in the west the next.” — Christopher Hitchens
Oliver
I read the introductions to Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib and Dream Machines: two foresighted books published together in 1974.
Oliver
Paraphrasing: Today, human minds are simultaneously the booty, the battlefield and the bombs. — Daniel Schmachtenberger, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=db-Xn2gzGxU
Oliver
An advantage of the Web that I don’t often hear mentioned: little hierarchy. We can form links between sites practically as we like, with no forced universal folder or category structure.
Oliver
The computing world is based on one principal system of conventions — the simulation of hierarchy and the simulation of paper. — Ted Nelson Twitter icon
Oliver
In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. — Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
Oliver
