I believe that when people are in high contact with things that look to the uninformed like serendipity, it's a sign of something in them as a sensory organ, and something they are tapped into in the information environment... though perhaps we don't have good enough language to label it yet.

Whatever a "sense of smell" is for information (and surprise, and comedy, and aliveness...), this confirmed to me that Stewart Brand totally has it.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47737238

Points: 2

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I don't think this is trite, I think there is something in this that is in contact with "living structure" (in the Christopher Alexander sense[1]), and much exists outside the edges of the text.

To those who dislike this, I am genuinely curious: Would you say you dislike metaphor? Do you tend to feel disconnected and lacking resonance with poetic writing?

[1]: https://dorian.substack.com/p/at-any-given-moment-in-a-proce...

EDIT: I experience this writing as giving me many quiet A's, or perhaps a smell of A's in a given direction of thought. I interpret others here as getting either B's or U's, in the sense of this A/B/U system: https://openresearchinstitute.org/onboarding/A_B_U.html

If that comes to pass, we'll be rediscovering the same principles that biological evolution stumbled upon: the benefits of the imperfect "branch" or "successive limited comparison" approach of agentic behaviour, which perhaps favours heuristics (that clearly sometimes fail), interaction between imperfect collaborators with non-overlapping biases, etc etc

https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/massed-muddler-intel...

> Lindblom’s paper identifies two patterns of agentic behavior, “root” (or rational-comprehensive) and “branch” (or successive limited comparisons), and argues that in complicated messy circumstances requiring coordinated action at scale, the way actually effective humans operate is the branch method, which looks like “muddling through” but gradually gets there, where the root method fails entirely.

Not making light of this, but I imagine there is another story of the person who had some strange scented product that led the flight attendants to play it safe and phone it in. There may very be someone whose strong cologne or forgetfulness to leave a chemical at home resulted in 2 deaths :(

Bonus that now the issues aren't vendor locked either

https://github.com/git-bug/git-bug/blob/trunk/doc/feature-ma...

I'm not sure that sounds like such a bad world tbh. I just don't like how it gets there

i think i need more patience -- i seem to fall into a certain tone due to my low expectations, and it's likely a self-fulfilling process which i am complicit in

OP comment is not clever

and then, because any supportive response to all that window smashing is informative as collective intelligence...

and then, bc that all validates that the order that all these clever rules were upholding is illegitimate.

It's how a very stupid thing stands in for a million smart and well-understood things that everyone is also trying to say.

It grows and grows and eventually slows or grows too much and dies (cancer), but kinda sheds its top-heavy structure as its regrown anew from the best parts that survived the balanced cancer of growth?

Just forks and forks and restarts. It's not the individual piece of softwares job (or its community's) to manage growing in the larger sense, just to eventually leave and pass on its best parts to the next thing

i want to be more appreciative every day for my health post-covid... not everyone was so lucky, and I can only imagine the gut-punch it is to know everyone went through a thing, but you got singled out for some perpetual daily punishment :'(