Dan Allison

BOOK LAUNCH 🎉! My new book of drawings is now available for purchase. It includes over 250 of the 680+ drawings I've posted here on twitter over the past 2 years. Link is in the replies, plus some example drawings and some kind words that people have shared about my drawings.

You are loved. You are free. Goodnight.

Friends, I'm opening a spiritual center in Boulder! It's called Nameless Mountain, and it's focused on spiritual maturity rather than enlightenment. We're trying to raise $50,000 to cover this year's expenses. Please help build this with us by donating or becoming a member: givebutter.com/nameless-mount…

An important thing to note about the three books is that they all have lots of exercises that give you experiential knowledge, not just intellectual knowledge.

This one is especially good also qualiacomputing.com/2022/12/28/car…

Perception is learned, not innate. As a kid, before you learn to speak, you learn to see. You learn to see what the people around you see, just like you learn to speak the language that the people around you speak. The skill becomes so ingrained that it feels like you’re just passively receiving sensory data, same as how you can’t switch off your immediate recognition of the meaning of words in the language(s) you speak. But one very important difference between perception and language is that, with perception, we don’t have a clear sense of how a different perception system could possibly exist or what it would be like if it did. With language, it’s easy for us to recognize that there are different languages than the ones we learn as children. We might even decide to learn one of those different languages ourselves. It’s not really clear how we would go about learning a different perception system. The synthesis of these three books is the best resource that I know of for getting a sense of what it would be like to learn a different perception system. Each book alone is not going to do it. Even two together isn’t enough. You have to synthesize all three. (I’m not claiming to have succeeded at this, only that this is the best resource I’ve found so far.)

You are loved. You are free. Goodnight.

But if the security mechanisms are too oppressive or too easily corruptible, the cure can end up worse than the disease. You need a balance of power across multiple dimensions.

The collective body needs a functioning immune system in order to stay alive.

One thing I’ve learned while working on @ibis_coord that seems kinda obvious in hindsight is that most coordination problems are bottlenecked on security. The actual mechanics of coordination are the easy part and tend to happen naturally once you solve the security problem.

You are loved. You are free. Goodnight.

@EmpyriaMirai @hyprturing I’m imagining the doors at the grocery store annoying everyone with repeated jokes about not being able to open, calling everyone Dave.

@hyprturing yes, haha, YES!

i think chips with burnt-in LLMs that run at a very low power will probably result in much of the world around us being unneccesarily intelligent. cheaper to throw that chip and some flash with a readme into an automatic door opener than develop firmware for it.

This but without assuming that the social group is a business

oscillon

You are loved. You are free. Goodnight.

Sunflowers, honeycombs, river networks, string art — all just math wearing a disguise. Beautiful poster series by Megan Emma Moree.

It causes me to doubt my own judgment a lot. I feel like I’m going crazy.

I really don’t like this feeling of confusion i get when there’s something that seems like a really big deal, but then the general response from most people is just like 🤷‍♂️

You are loved. You are free. Goodnight.