feat: updating all the new notes

site/src/content/notes/104-days-of-summer-vacation.md

@@ -12,34 +12,34 @@ This is a writing series to write stream-of-consciousness type, lightly-edited l
 
 This is an experiment living and breathing in [[summer-2023]]. It also inspired by related works such as [spencerchang's 100 mini-essays](https://www.spencerchang.me/experiments/100posts/) and [visakenv's do 100 things](https://twitter.com/visakanv). 
 
-1. [[play-fully-1]] on 13-Jun-2023
-2. [[the-zuzalan-dream-2]] on 14-Jun-2023
-3. [[on-doubt-and-distortion-fields-3]] on 15-Jun-2023
-4. [[in-every-meaning-4]] on 16-Jun-2023
-5. [[magic-in-hand-holding-5]] on 17-Jun-2023
-6. Didn't write anything :(
-7. [[to-be-free]] on 19-Jun-2023
-8. [[anti-agency]] on 20-Jun-2023
-9. Didn't write anything :(
-10. [[self-socratic-dialogues]] on 22-Jun-2023
-11. [[most-days]] on 23-Jun-2023
-12. [[planes-going-places]] on 24-Jun-2023
-13. Didn't write anything :(
-14. [[gdp-measures-our-making]] on 26-Jun-2023
-15. [[biohacking-before-it-was-cool]] on 27-Jun-2023
-16. [[writing-for-observance]] on 28-Jun-2023
-17. [[write-simply]] on 29-Jun-2023
-18. [[grieving-otherselves]] on 30-Jun-2023
-19. [[do-what-contributes]] on 1-Jul-2023
-20. [[meditations-on-effective-altruism]] on 2-Jul-2023
-21. [[thoughtful-networking]] on 3-Jul-2023
-22. [[homecoming]] on 4-Jul-2023
-23. [[wisdom-of-elders]] on 5-Jul-2023
-24. [[fault-tolerant-biology]] on 6-Jul-2023
-25. [[to-dance-with-joy]] on 7-Jul-2023
-26. Didn't write anything :(
-27. [[fear-irrelevance]] on 9-Jul-2023
-28. [[most-days-2]] on 10-Jul-2023
-29. [[super-obsidian]] on 11-Jul-2023
+1. [[play-fully]]
+2. [[the-zuzalan-dream]]
+3. [[on-doubt-and-distortion-fields]]
+4. [[in-every-meaning]]
+5. [[magic-in-hand-holding]]
+7. [[to-be-free]]
+8. [[anti-agency]]
+10. [[self-socratic-dialogues]]
+11. [[most-days]]
+12. [[planes-going-places]]
+14. [[gdp-measures-our-making]]
+15. [[biohacking-before-it-was-cool]]
+16. [[writing-for-observance]]
+17. [[write-simply]]
+18. [[grieving-otherselves]]
+19. [[do-what-contributes]]
+20. [[meditations-on-effective-altruism]]
+21. [[thoughtful-networking]]
+22. [[homecoming]]
+23. [[wisdom-of-elders]]
+24. [[fault-tolerant-biology]]
+25. [[to-dance-with-joy]]
+27. [[fear-irrelevance]]
+28. [[most-days-2]]
+29. [[super-obsidian]]
+30. [[finite-and-infinite-games]]
+31. [[hire-people-you-wanna-work-for]]
+32. [[why-ai-isnt-a-tool]]
+35. [[wireheaded]]
 
 Link to [full twitter thread.](https://twitter.com/solderneer/status/1668911213810716672)

site/src/content/notes/fear-irrelevance.md

@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ Player Piano depicts a world, where on the surface everything had gone right. A
 
 Player Piano had no AI alignment problem, no existential risk, no major suppression of freedom of speech, and no dictatorial system, there was still a functioning democracy. And despite all that, the lack of meaningful work in Kurt Vonnegut's world still left people decidedly unhappy.
 
-Because if a machine can do everything you do, and do it better, what's the point of doing anything at all. One answer might be a greater focus on [[play-fully-1 |paratelic experiences]], but whether social structure could be reframed into a purely paratelic endeavor is still an open question.
+Because if a machine can do everything you do, and do it better, what's the point of doing anything at all. One answer might be a greater focus on [[play-fully|paratelic experiences]], but whether social structure could be reframed into a purely paratelic endeavor is still an open question.
 
 I think this is the key takeaway for me from this book, even if we execute technological post-scarcity right we still have some major philosophical and social questions to answer. How do we live in the world where there is no pursuit of happiness, because everyone is given everything they need?
 

site/src/content/notes/finite-and-infinite-games.md

@@ -0,0 +1,48 @@
+---
+title: Finite and Infinite Games
+emoji: 🎲
+pubDate: 12-Jul-2023
+updatedDate: 12-Jul-2023
+tags:
+- topic/technology
+- topic/philosophy
+- project/104-days
+---
+
+This note is the **twenty-sixth letter** in the [[104-days-of-summer-vacation]] series. You can also follow the full twitter thread [here](https://twitter.com/solderneer/status/1668911213810716672), and leave any thoughts and comments that might come up!
+
+---
+
+**Dearest Reader,**
+
+James Carse writes very simply, there are at least two kinds of games. **Finite games are games which are played with the goal of winning. And, infinite games are games played with the goal of continuing the play.**
+
+Finite games are played with the intent to end the game, but infinite games are played to avoid the ending of the game. A finite game may not contain an infinite game, but an infinite game may contain many finite games.
+
+And that's the summary of the book, [Finite and Infinite Games](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989.Finite_and_Infinite_Games?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=YQybHuBNdp&rank=1), almost everything else is commentary. You might already know how I feel about play, in [[play-fully]] I wrote about nurturing the time to play. But the line I've drawn has always been between [[reversal-theory|telic and paratelic]] activities, things in the world which are serious and things in the world which are playful.
+
+This book made me realize the extent to which most human activities can be conceptualized as a game. Our careers, our property, even our states can be thought to be finite games for control over power, recognition, wealth and other social imaginaries.
+
+James reiterates that we are complicit in propagating the games we choose to play: _He who must play, cannot play_. It is interesting that many of the decisions we "must" make to **compete** (notice the language we use) in the world, are in fact choices which affirm the very decisions we feel compelled to make. Noticing our act of agency in making those decisions, is a powerful way to take back authority over which games we deem meaningful.
+
+At a societal level, James highlights that the rules of finite games rest on mutual agreement between the players on what constitutes winning. In other words, winning in finite games is only useful insofar as the game is recognized _by its audience_ as valid and fair. A finite game exists not in reality but in the minds of its observers, and what we desire isn't to win but to be remembered as winners.
+
+This is related with some of my earlier writings on [[society-is-scripted|scripted societies]]. In that note, I said:
+
+>A large part of a country (or a community's) culture is learning the set of scripts that govern it.
+
+In the language of finite games, I codified the identity of a group with the set of finite games that they choose to play. But James Carse draws another distinction here between culture and society. To exist according to a set of fixed games, is in and of itself a bigger game, the game of society, where the winning move is societal success.
+
+But culture is different from society, because _culture doesn't identify with a fixed set of finite games_, but rather "always points towards the endlessly open", it evolves and looks to continue evolving.
+
+> A culture does not have a tradition, it is a tradition.
+
+Culture is an infinite game. In that way culture is the home of the infinite player, who believes that _only what can change can continue_.
+
+The joy of being an infinite player is to learn to start something we might not finish. But the challenge of being an infinite player is to figure out how to hold the serious in the playful, how to keep all finite games in a bigger infinite game. How can we [[joyfully-subvert]] the finite games we play in society?
+
+One thing's for sure, I'd much rather be an infinite player than a finite player. Perhaps you might feel so too.
+
+~ Shan
+
+

site/src/content/notes/hire-people-you-wanna-work-for.md

@@ -0,0 +1,25 @@
+---
+title: Hire people you want to work for
+emoji: ⁉
+pubDate: 13-Jul-2023
+updatedDate: 13-Jul-2023
+tags: 
+ - project/104-days
+---
+
+This note is the **twenty-seventh letter** in the [[104-days-of-summer-vacation]] series. You can also follow the full twitter thread [here](https://twitter.com/solderneer/status/1668911213810716672), and leave any thoughts and comments that might come up!
+
+---
+
+**Dearest Reader,**
+
+Today, I listened to a fascinating podcast episode between [Mark Zuckerberg and Lex Fridman](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ff4fRgnuFgQ). A lot of the conversation was around personal LLMs, and Meta's vision for open-source models, but one quote in particular stood out to me.
+
+When Lex asked Mark, "How do you choose who you hire?", Mark responded almost instantly. **"You just hire people you wouldn't mind working for."**
+
+And that's genius. You wouldn't want to work for someone who wasn't nice, ambitious, did good work, inspiring etc. The filter of do-you-mind-working-for-them, is a neat way of wrapping up that bundle of concepts in a way that can be very quickly evaluated.
+
+Anyway, that's it for now, just amazement at the surprising effectiveness of simple heuristics. Have a good day :)
+
+~ Shan
+

site/src/content/notes/i-write-for-thought-lego.md

@@ -23,4 +23,6 @@ With a repository of writing, I can pull on past threads and weave future ideas
 
 **Note One:** The advances in Large Language Models, make this even more pertinent. Having a repository of written thoughts means that LLMs can interact, search and weave threads for me automatically! Probably an experiment to run at some point. 
 
-**Note Two:** I did this experiment in [[self-socratic-dialogues]]!
+**Note Two:** I did this experiment in [[self-socratic-dialogues]]!
+
+**Note Three:** It turns out [Paul Graham thought about this too](http://www.paulgraham.com/read.html).

site/src/content/notes/love-is-a-coop-infinite-game.md

@@ -11,3 +11,5 @@ tags:
 Finite games are games that are played to be won. Infinite games are games that are played to keep playing. Competition is to play against one or many people. Cooperation is playing with other people, either against other people, or the computer.
 
 My personal view on love is that the most successful couples are playing a cooperative, infinite game.**Where it is two people against life, and the goal is to simply keep playing.**
+
+Related notes: [[finite-and-infinite-games]]

site/src/content/notes/most-days.md

@@ -28,7 +28,7 @@ In [[summer-2023]], I outlined some key objectives for this summer. In general,
 
 **Goal 5 and 6:** I haven't had time to start on these yet, but I probably will once I'm back from India.
 
-**Goal 7:** I went to [[the-zuzalan-dream-2|a social event]] last week, but haven't managed to go to one this week.
+**Goal 7:** I went to [[the-zuzalan-dream|a social event]] last week, but haven't managed to go to one this week.
 
 **Goal 8:** I've been trying to tweet more often, but again finding it very hard to remember.
 

site/src/content/notes/super-obsidian.md

@@ -34,7 +34,7 @@ Then, I looked through every single AI-enabled plugin in the Obsidian Community
 
 Of all the ones I looked through, the only plugin I am considering using is [obsidian-copilot](https://github.com/logancyang/obsidian-copilot) and it is missing half of the wish list I laid out above. This is concerning because, if Obsidian fails to help people leverage the cognitive shortcuts enabled by LLMs, they **will** migrate to better integrated software like Notion. The increase in efficiency enabled by the features above is too significant to ignore.
 
-Fortunately, from my experiments two weeks ago in [[self-socratic-dialogues]], there doesn't seem to be any technical constraint preventing an elegant local embedding implementation for Obsidian. An embedding index running on my Macbook Pro 2016, runs fast enough for real-time responsive semantic search, and indexes locally at about 100 files every 10 minutes.
+Fortunately, from my experiments two weeks ago in [[self-socratic-dialogues]], there doesn't seem to be any technical constraint preventing an elegant local embedding implementation for Obsidian. An embedding index running on my Macbook Pro 2016, runs fast enough for real-time semantic search, and indexes locally at about 100 files every 10 minutes.
 
 There's definitely still space for anyone who wants to work on a be-all-end-all AI plugin for Obsidian, the space is very nascent. One of the reasons I was looking into this was because I wanted to build one myself - if you're interested in working on one, please reach out to me on [twitter](https://twitter.com/solderneer)!
 

site/src/content/notes/why-ai-isnt-a-tool.md

@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+---
+title: Why AI isn't a tool
+emoji: 🧰
+pubDate: 14-Jul-2023
+updatedDate: 20-Jul-2023
+tags:
+- topic/computer-science
+- topic/technology
+- project/104-days
+---
+
+This note is the **twenty-eighth letter** in the [[104-days-of-summer-vacation]] series. You can also follow the full twitter thread [here](https://twitter.com/solderneer/status/1668911213810716672), and leave any thoughts and comments that might come up!
+
+---
+
+**Dearest Reader,**
+
+People talk about how artificial intelligence is a tool. It seems to me that these people who claim so, are either ignorant of intelligence's potential or are specifically referring to artificial intelligence in its current form today. I think artificial intelligence, in its general sense, cannot be a tool.
+
+Let's start in the nature of intelligence. Tools are designed to fulfill a purpose, a hammer hits a nail and [a computer computes computations](https://twitter.com/solderneer/status/1681900537875435520?s=20). Tools are mechanical in the sense that they follow defined steps to a predestined outcome. If the desired outcome changes, the tools do not adapt to those changes.
+
+Weak AI in its current form, fits this description. It tends to be good at one thing but terrible at everything else, just like a conventional tool. But general intelligence, is not a series of steps, but a way to generate a series of steps. General intelligence is the ability to plan and execute steps in pursuit of any arbitrary goal.
+
+If intelligence was a tool, it's a hammer to which everything can be a nail. Intelligence is a rising tide that lifts all boats, people who are more intelligent tend to also be more healthy, more wealthy and just better at all sorts of things. **While tools are for fulfilling a purpose, intelligence seems to be for fulfilling any purpose.**
+
+This is why I think none of us can afford to ignore artificial intelligence, whether we care about the technology or not. Already our newest tool AIs can make their own decisions in multi-step problems, these are the _first tools in history to have agency._
+
+This means massive upside for us, as I've said in [[super-obsidian]], and massive risk as well, like I said in [[fear-irrelevance]]. 
+
+At night, I dream of what life might look like when computers go from being tools, to being agents. It looks likely that we might need answers to those questions in our lifetimes.
+
+~ Shan

site/src/content/notes/wireheaded.md

@@ -0,0 +1,29 @@
+---
+title: Wireheaded
+emoji: 😵‍💫
+pubDate: 28-Jul-2023
+updatedDate: 28-Jul-2023
+tags:
+- topic/technology
+- topic/computer-science
+- project/104-days
+---
+
+**Dearest Reader,**
+
+I've been coming across the concept of [_wireheading_](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_%28science_fiction%29) a lot in my reading. In [Superintelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dangers,_Strategies), Nick Bostrum uses it to refer to the idea of artificial intelligence systems which hack their own reward pathways, in effect lazily short-circuiting their intended behavior.
+
+Generally, wireheading is when any agent (artificial or otherwise) artificially induces and gets addicted to pleasure, in the human case typically due to some brain stimulating machine. This implies that a wireheaded agent is impaired in their ability to exert their agency in dimensions other than maintaining the wirehead. **tldr, a kind of electronic drug that is impossible to resist.**
+
+Something that's scaring me is our openness to a future where we're all wireheaded. Take social media for example, what are the engagement-driven recommendation algorithms but _a weak form of wireheading_. Or Netflix which seems hell-bent on getting us hooked on as many shows as we can fit in 24 hours. All while Amazon's next-day delivery keeps our dopamine hits coming and our hands twitching for the next purchase.
+
+In big-tech FAANG, I'd argue Apple is the only company which isn't built on weak wireheading. And of aspiring consumer tech startups, it seems a good proportion of products are built on viral growth in the style of [Nir Eyal's Hooked](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22668729-hooked).
+
+This doesn't sit right for me. I'm a big believer in technology which amplifies human agency ([[technomorality]]) and it feels like there's less of that going around. Instead the constant entertainment environment feels like the path towards whatever the humans in WALL-E were up to.
+
+![](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-JLXRyOvaUuA/VttYksmeHfI/AAAAAAAAAL8/6V9zYqcwtd8/s1600/walle-hoverchair05.jpg)
+
+This doesn't have to be the way. We can still shift gears and collectively focus on building technologies which empower us, rather than those which keep us placated. I think the future we were promised depends on it.
+
+~ Shan
+