Hypnagogia briefly occurs between wakefulness and sleep. A hypnagogic state can be achieved by purposefully waking yourself during this period and can result in a heightened state of creativity.
Notable practitioners include Salvador Dali, Benjamin Franklin, and Albert Einstein.
Composer Giuseppe Tartini wrote a violin sonata known as the Devil’s Trill after an experience where he listened to the devil play in a dreamlike state. It’s one of the most technically difficult pieces to play for violin.
A simple way to count the number of words written in org-roam notes is to use the following bash script.
cat *.org | wc -w
Assuming your note file names include a date prefix (mine is yyyy-mm-dd--{suffix}), you can count the number of words per year, month, or day using a * after the prefix.
Centralized systems are criticized for making unilateral decisions about what people can see and not see within their privately controlled network. This leads to strong anti-censorship sentiment and desire for censorship free content where anyone can say anything. However, look no further than your spam folder for a glimpse of what a truly decentralized and censorship free content network could look like.
For example, the killer app for cryptocurrency was facilitating illegal transactions, but now the killer app DeFi. This increasingly mainstream surge is driven by the promise of making money and when bad actors get in the way, there is strong interest in removing them.
One issue with decentralized systems is that, from the onset, such systems are most appealing to outcasts of other systems. These outcast groups are more extreme (political views, illicit activity) than those using mainstream systems. This can be an impediment to development and growth of a network.
An example of this is free speech absolutists who are banned from a centralized system like Twitter for harmful content. They naturally flock to a decentralized system to evade censorship (like Mastodon) thereby flooding the new decentralized system with content that repels mainstream users and hinders adoption (Mastodon has unfortunately found a niche with the far-right).
After meeting in person with my teammates for work, I realized it’s far easier to joke around and riff in person rather than on Zoom. For this group of people, my primary means of communication was Zoom for the past 6 months and the effects were noticeable.
It has something to do with removing latency and improved feedback with body language. Everyone can hear even if there are overlapping voices. Jokes are more responsive.
In anticipation of a wave of cases due to the COVID-19 omicron variant, NYC requires private employers with 100 or more employees to mandate vaccination for in-person workers. Every worker must have their first vaccine does by December 27, 2021.
This is a sweeping mandate is the most ambitious to date. However, the next NYC Mayor takes over in January so it’s anyone’s guess if it will stay.
After looking into linting prose in Emacs, I found a way to roll your own prose linter setup using vale (an extensible prose linter), efm-langserver (a generic language server), and eglot (a language server mode for Emacs).
Configure efm-langserver
In /${HOME}/.config/efm-langserver/config.yaml add the following setup for linting with vale. (This was difficult to figure out because of the non-existent documentation, but I found someone else’s efm-langserver config for vale).
version:2root-markers:- .git/log-file:/{SOME PATH FOR LOGS}/efm.loglog-level:1tools:vale:&vale-lintprefix:valelint-command:'vale --output line ${INPUT}'lint-stdin:falselint-ignore-exit-code:truelint-formats:- '%f:%l:%c:%m'languages:org:- <<:*vale-lint
Configure Emacs
In your Emacs init.el, configure eglot to use efm-langserver when using org-mode. Vale has support for org-mode files as of v2.2.
When there is no formal structure in a group of people that interact over any significant amount of time, informal structures appear. Informal structures are communication channels through networks of friends in the group that share similar beliefs and traits that give rise to influence. This is the nature of elites—a small group of insiders that exhibits informal influence over a larger group because they know how decisions are made.
In-group favoritism shows that elites (the in-group) will give preferential treatment to other members of the in-group.
All bridges are weak ties, for elites that means they can have a wide reach if they also maintain a large number of acquaintances (such as a following on social media).
Use a theme like doom-plain-dark or doom-plain-light for fewer colors and visual cues that can be distracting.
Change links styles to remove bold (it’s already underlined).
Hide markup characters like ~/emphasis/ by enabling org-hide-emphasis-markers to reduce the number of sigils like brackets, parenthesis, tick marks, etc.
Use a different font for writing than for coding
I personally prefer monospace fonts for writing because it pairs well with org-mode headings and gives it a typewriter look and feel.
I don’t like to use the same font for writing as I do for coding. Mainly because it needs to look good larger than what I code in (Cascadia Code) and having a separation between writing and coding makes it easier to concentrate (“I’m in writing mode now”).
Monotype Bembo (used by Edward Tufte, similar to Georgia or a Garamond to give it a journal-y feel)
Transparency
You can add a little extra flair by adding transparency to the background. Eval the following elisp expression using M-:, (set-frame-parameter (selected-frame) 'alpha 80).
Some of the downsides of informal structures in an unstructured group are:
Decision making: people will listen to others because they like them, not because it is a good idea or significant
Accountability and responsibility: the informal group has no formal responsibility to the wider group. Their influence is not based on what they do and so they can not be compelled to act in the best interest of the entire group.
When rules are implicit, only those who know how decisions are made can participate. The only way one can know how decisions are made are to spend enough time cultivating friendships with the elites that establish the informal structures of the group. Therefore, informal structures are exclusionary (one must be a member of the elite) and have other negative consequences.
Formal structures counteract these issues by making decision making explicit. Everyone now has the opportunity to participate because it’s more clear how to do that.
An elite individual is an oxymoron. The nature of an elite is membership to a group that exhibits informal influence or control over a larger group. This is often misused in politics “candidate x is an elite”. Regardless of how well known an individual is they can never be an elite.
A commonly cited reason for Web3 is that centralized systems (government, banking) are broken and decentralized systems are the way forward (blockchains, cryptocurrencies). The problem is that fully decentralized systems have all sorts of issues in the same way that, for example, truly free markets do—exploitation, theft, perverse incentives, and so on. As such, engineering solutions can only go so far and are doomed to rediscover the need for hierarchical regulation to make it work.
A problem with Twitter’s advertising business is that it’s product is used for text-based information (tied to the physical world like work or current events). Users are more engaged and combative on Twitter, making it a poor fit for direct response advertising (users are probably more annoyed by it too).
Contrast that to Instagram, images and short videos that are highly produced to show your best self. Users are taking a break from something else to look at it and the aspirational content makes it a great fit for direct response advertising.
A commonly cited success story of NFTs is CryptoPunks. They were 10,000 uniquely generated pixel art avatars released on the blockchain for free. They’ve since become a hugely sought after item with market prices greater than $7MM.
I didn’t understand what’s going on until hearing Kevin Rose and Aftab Hossain talk about collecting them—these are Star Wars action figure collectors sharing their passion for buying the digital equivalent of a Rocket Firing Boba Fett.
It’s far more endearing to think of NFT enthusiasts as Star Wars action figure collectors.
Zettelkasten notes become more useful the better links you make between them. That’s because you want to find connections to things you did not expect, not what you already know (otherwise you would have gone directly there to begin with).
To improve links, every note should have links to a more specific idea, a more general idea, and a related topic.
A good test of the quality of the links between notes is to see how often you search directly for a note vs follow a backlink.
I came across the idea of a hyperfine village from Lisa Hardy. It’s a novel way to organize your ideas into a metaphorical “village” so you can more easily recall them in context later. Rather than search or rote memory to recall an idea later, you can go for a stroll in your village.
Hyperfine village might include:
The Cabin: journal, wardrobe, home-related things.
The Lab: experiments, work-in-progress
The Museum: finished works for archive
The Office: task lists and project management
The Library: books read or reading
The Garden: notes and ideas
The Planetarium: visions of the future
The Gazebo: community and people
This can be extended or changed as needed similar to how you might use a “mind palace” to assist with memory.
Zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive argument of knowledge (zk-SNARK) can verify that another party is in possession of information without the other party needing to reveal that information or leak parts of it. This is useful because it provides a way of doing private transactions in public.
In a distributed, trust-less system like a cryptocurrency, zk-SNARKs can be used to make private transactions that are verifiable and stored on the blockchain (Zcash already does this, but for the most part blockchains are anonymous, not private). That means privacy conscious parties can benefit from using a blockchain while maintaining privacy at the transaction level and decreasing the chances of being de-anonymized at the transaction history level.
What is this used for?
Extrapolating a bit, there are interesting things you can do using zk-SNARKs with blockchains. You could verify an account balance by checking if it has enough available funds without leaking the balance or the account. You could verify the possession of a certificate or license without revealing any information about the certificate itself (like checking an ID without having to look at it). You could pay taxes without revealing your assets. You could automate verification of things like lottery tickets or possessing a certain NFT.
Blockchains are transparent ledgers in that anyone with a copy of the blockchain can see every transaction. This is necessary due to the way blocks are validated. However, even though transactions are anonymous they are still public and can be used to associate wallet addresses with someone’s identity.
