Charles Rosenbauer

Art is memetic infrastructure

I've been telling the @AvalonInst people to get a copy of the Suda. A Byzantine encyclopedia with 30k entries. In terms of facts about the ancient world, references to obscure historical figures, brief excerpts of lost texts, the Suda is arguably the largest single source of information. You can buy it in print, but it's all in Byzantine Greek though.

Who in San Francisco is interested in learning Ancient Greek? I found one of the best teachers in the world. Harvard and Oxford background, but he went rogue and quit. Coolest guy. Reasonable price. DM me if interested.

@michaelcurzi Where are the modern people with small pet monkeys? We have clearly regressed.

I'm listening to Plutarch & he starts the life of Pericles with a basically unrelated ramble about how certain women buy 'puppies and young monkeys' instead of having children. Truly nothing is new under the sun

@PabloPeniche What about a modern version of Plutarch's Parallel Lives? Biographies of dozens of historical figures from the past 500-1000 years, pairing people with similar arcs across different time periods.

We should make a sci-fi show version of Plutarch’s Lives.

❌"At the intersection of art and technology" ✅"Innovative artistry" Technology refers to that which already exists. There are ways to creatively utilize it, sure. But tech is an object or tool or medium. We've got plenty of rooms full of screens and immersive experiences. Prompt engineering gurus with newsletters. Robot arms programmed to execute Buddhist sand paintings. The really impressive stuff includes innovation as part of the creative process. (Yes, this is hard.)

this book is just hegelian neoliberalism

Apparently in the fantasy novel that California takes its name from, the Amazonian queen of the island of California joins forces with an Islamic attack on Christians, and the "Calif" part of California may actually be a reference to the Caliph.

sometimes you meet someone who just cannot take a good photo, they look fine in person but the camera always makes them look like a gremlin sometimes it's because the camera has actually captured their soul

why is all software so horrifically bad

@inerati youtu.be/MdmQUlD7P40

a game of minesweeper with someone's soul

It's crazy how easily you can derive from first principles the relationship between the size of seeds and their pickiness to soil conditions.

My self-driving electric car is driving me through a desert city full of semiconductor companies.

If you understand the Smale Horseshoe map, you have a really useful and interesting intuitive framework for understanding chaos theory in general.

get this beautiful book!!! and read my chapter on the exploding complexity of chip design & fabrication

@jusuf26774430 Everything needs some kind of telos, a disconnected fantasy world has little value.

Anything that doesn’t involve math just ends up being a waste of money and time

The difficulty of translating Christianity into Iriquoian languages youtu.be/vTLy_xHkCqU

@IQshredded America shields its CVS laundry detergent more than Europe shields its great art.

It’s crazy how European museums don’t have everything behind glass and bars including 500 year old original paintings because they still have a somewhat functioning society

@amaldorai @mualphaxi This is already how gate layout has been done for decades. Large functional modules are recognizable blocks, but zoom inside the blocks and it's much more randomly organized. SRAM is a notable exception, those will continue to be giant rectangles for the foreseeable future.

@mualphaxi I expect that we are in the twilight of aesthetically beautiful silicon designs. Just like RF antennas have become asymmetric through computer-aided design, the same will happen to silicon with AI-discovered optima that humans could not have conceived. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_a…

I have been dreaming of this day for a long time. Arena is now a book publisher, and our first volume, "Silicon" is open for preorders. It's quite unlike anything you've seen: a coffee table book capturing the ecstatic beauty of silicon technology. arenamag.com/silicon

I know Silicon Valley startups don't want to hear this..... But the combination of someone in the trades with deep domain expertise and Claude Code will run circles around your generic software. I talked to Cory LaChance this morning, a mechanical engineer in industrial piping construction in Houston. He normally works with chemical plants and refineries, but now he also works with the terminal He reached out in a DM a few days ago and I was so fired up by his story, I asked him if we could record the conversation and share it. He built a full application that industrial contractors are using every day. It reads piping isometric drawings and automatically extracts every weld count, every material spec, every commodity code. Work that took 10 minutes per drawing now takes 60 seconds. It can do 100 drawings in five minutes, saving days of time. His co-workers are all mind blown, and when he talks to them, it's like they are speaking different languages. His fabrication shop uses it daily, and he built the entire thing in 8 weeks. During those 8 weeks he also had to learn everything about Claude Code, the terminal, VS Code, everything. My favorite quote from him was when he said, "I literally did this with zero outside help other than the AI. My favorite tools are screenshots, step by step instructions and asking Claude to explain things like I'm five." Every trades worker with deep expertise and a willingness to sit down with Claude Code for a few weekends is now a potential software founder. I can't wait to meet more people like Cory.

@sudoredj well at least greater than pmarca