𝐌𝐚𝐭𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐰 𝐋𝐞𝐕𝐚𝐧

The root failure of the modern software stack is duplicated context. Every layer reconstructs reality from fragments, until screenshots become a disconnected sign language between systems. We built Shrine, a namespace OS, around a different premise: every interaction should operate on the same underlying reality.

@TossitRambles @urbit god tier would've been ~master-bottec but ty

@urbit god tier ID

You can feel it slipping away, and yet it also feels like you are downing in a digital flood. More songs than you can ever listen to at the tip of your fingers--and stuck behind a monthly subscription. More movies than you can watch--yet if you try to connect your computer to your TV to watch them with friends, you get an error thanks to DRM controls from your streaming service. More followers, connections, or friend requests than ever before--but you doubt if they are real, or even if they are human, could truly become a friend. You've felt it. An expansion of your digital life happening as it also seems to slip through your fingers and out of your control. What if we could fix that?

@sigilante @wmartianltdco It's also just a really bad time to be a seller.

@wmartianltdco Several categories: 1. Stuff you've just learned to live with that doesn't market well. 2. Accrued slowly-obsolescing material (raising kids is REALLY bad for this). 3. Unpleasant discoveries that were masked inadvertently. Not Boomer hoarder tier, but it feels lighter to clear.

Getting ready to sell the house, this is my life right now

@sigilante I've been using the video file marks for blob storage development, thanks.

A Martian revival: the %yard desk has been updated for 408k. github.com/urbit/yard This maintains useful userspace libraries and in particular dozens of file marks, now ready to go in the new era. It's also a source for classic Urbit helper files like schooner & etch.

@theodorvaryag Nethack.telnet.io iirc

does nobody remember MUDs or what

A pasture grazed by cattle alone is a good pasture. A pasture grazed by cattle and sheep, together, is something else entirely. The cattle take the long grass, the coarse stems, the rougher patches. The sheep follow behind and clean up what the cattle ignored: the shorter regrowth, the wildflowers, the species the cattle wouldn't touch. The pasture gets grazed at two heights, by two different mouths, on two different patterns. Twice the use. Twice the work. None of the waste. Add a goat and the bramble line goes. Add a pig on the woodland edge and the parasite cycles break. Add a few geese and the weeds you didn't even know you had quietly disappear. The result is consistently the highest-biodiversity, highest-productivity, lowest-input agricultural system on earth. Higher protein per acre than arable. More carbon in the soil. More birds. More wildflowers. Less disease. Less input. Each species breaks the parasite cycle of the others. Each one prefers the plants the others avoid. The system tunes itself. This is not innovative. It is what almost every functional agricultural society on earth has done forever. Roman estates. Medieval manors. Mongolian camps. Welsh hill farms. The single-species, single-field, single-product model that replaced it is about a hundred years old and is running out of steam on every metric you can measure. The fix is older than the problem. It is a Welsh farm with cattle on the lower pasture, sheep on the upper, a goat on the bramble line, and a couple of geese in the orchard. The farmer would explain it in four minutes if you asked. The policy paper has not asked.

The problem I had for the first 31 years of my life as a protestant was everyone claiming to teach the “clear teaching of the Scriptures” taught vastly different things on every conceivable topic. The solution I found, very much thanks to the Church Fathers, is that Christians had always believed the Catholic Faith, that it was very much in Scripture, and once I understood it, so many parts of Scripture that had been confusing or elusive for so long suddenly began making sense. But yes, if you reduce everything to everyone reading the Bible “for themselves” (ironically, something we NEVER see in Scripture), then it is natural to conclude that this intrinsically anti-scriptural, rebellious act (reading the Bible as if Christ never established a teaching office in His Church, first in the Apostles and later in their successors) would naturally lead you away from that Church—particularly if you are encouraged to do so by those who already have.

When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.

Imagine drinking some ale with the boys at the local tavern and the bard starts playing this banger

One of my best friends worked at a Trump golf course as a caddy in high school. It was a good job as a high schooler. I vividly remember him coming home after a shift one day and proudly pulling out a crisp $100 bill: "Trump tipped me this!" It was a lot different back then.

@Voltropy @jlehman_ I often run volt sessions that grow beyond the 128k context token limit and am unable to compact the session. Besides running compact manually more zealously, is there something that can be done automatically when the threshold is approaching?

@sigilante @satisfiesvalues Pros/cons of such?

@ColonelUpdate @satisfiesvalues The main utility I find is getting thunks/closures/lambdas as first-class citizens instead of the gate-building patterns in Nock.

𝕎𝔼 ℍ𝔸𝕍𝔼 𝔸ℂℍ𝕀𝔼𝕍𝔼𝔻 ℂℝ𝕀𝕋𝕀ℂ𝔸𝕃 𝕄𝔸𝕊𝕊 The Gallowglass PLAN language is being released as a self-compiling alpha today. github.com/sigilante/gall…

Consider the lilies of the field. They hustle not, neither do they grind

There’s a cool feature in Latin, the gerundive, which is a verbal adjective implying that something should/must happen. A few of them survive into English words: If someone should be revered, they are “reverend”. If something must be cut away, it is a “dividend”. My favorite: if a story is so good that it simply must be read by everyone, it is “legend”! Latin reverendus/a, dividendum, and legenda. Pretty cool that what is sometimes a difficult concept for Latin learners is actually present in English, albeit rarely. Do let me know if there are any good ones I’ve missed.

Your medieval peasant ancestor had 80 to 100 days off per year It was not an employee benefit, but religious mandate The liturgical calendar gave labourers saints days, holy days, the great feasts Lords could not override them Then secularisation came and the market filled the space You now negotiate 20 days from an employer and call it a benefit We didn't free the worker from the Church But the market from God's calendar

“Today we commemorate St. Simon of Trent, Martyr. Murdered by Jews in Trent (now Trento in northern Italy), St. Simon was not quite three years old when he died. Jews in the city of Trent kidnapped and murdered St. Simon via exsanguination as part of their religious rituals connected to the Jewish Passover. His body was discovered by a Christian servant who reported the matter to the local authorities. Subsequent to a papal investigation, fifteen Jews were sentenced to death and burned at the stake for the murder. St. Simon serves as a reminder that God’s children will always be hated and attacked by those who have rejected God and serve another master.”

Why were churches full when “no one understood the Mass”?