Callum

design + code @vana | folly ~ persist | mise en schema

[Callum @callumflack]

The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure.
— James Joyce

[𝕻𝖎𝖈𝖔⟣ @pico]

the world is magic if you pay attention

[Callum @callumflack]

@LapsusLima Somehow I missed this… Sending thinkings soon…

[Callum @callumflack]

@LilaShroff

[Callum @callumflack]

this kind spirit guide shines on me

[Callum @callumflack]

@LapsusLima I’d call this win-win 🪩

[Peacock Angel of History @LapsusLima]

That’s exactly where my mind was going. “What is forbidden?” struck me as a local answer to a more general question. Your language of scope and friction gets at the same thing from the engineering side.

This is exciting.

One more thing: we both seem to be circling that resistance may be the most general category of the four. Datum gives orientation, joint gives binding, sequence gives continuation—but resistance determines the shape of the possibility space.

Which raises an interesting possibility. Look:

Datum: where am I?
Joint: what connects?
Sequence: what follows?
Resistance: what shapes the space in which any of these questions can arise?

If that’s right, resistance starts to look oddly fundamental. The others all describe <relations within a space>; resistance describes <the conditions under which the space acquires shape at all>.

The implications are riveting.

[Callum @callumflack]

@LapsusLima I'm super keen to follow this train of thought. I've got like all these notes about it and I never have time to read &amp; synthesise. I'll scrape together a a doc and throw it over.

[Callum @callumflack]

Hmmmm 👀: resistance describes <the conditions under which the space acquires shape at all>

I have so many notes on this in the past two months. This is great!

"Shaping" + "framing" kind of alludes to this, But I had not thought of it as constraint/resistance. It's almost too simplistic. Resistance defines a shape within space. It's "where the rubber makes the road" lol. I feel so dumb.

There is another angle here which is that language itself, whether speaking or written, the friction of it is what enables conceptual thought. The struggle for the right word is a lock within the shape of the next malloc ("memory allocation")

This is rich. I love it.

(By the way, that's why I love that when the English are dancing they would say they're "throwing shapes". I know that's a tangent into gesture, but hey, I use my hands to think too… I block the thought in front of myself in the imagined thoughtspace…)

[Callum @callumflack]

OK, neat. Re “what is forbidden?” v “what cannot pass?” this is a example of a solid principle for prompting (excuse my code bias): attempting to cover the greater surface area before managing specifics is the way. Same way as people must compress idioms toward wholistic mantras, LLMs need the same directive.

Everything I've learned about working with agents is about naming scope and using friction to constrain & direct toward completion proofs (ie. avoiding "complete but not produced", thus completion needs to be renamed to "holding proofs" in my prior sentence!). So what you wrote is weirdly and generally resonating to what I've been doing with this tiny harness: https://t.co/xspQ85S6uD

Ofc we both know that code is merely a controlled language for asserting against some "pointing" activity. Code is just the first port-of-call in my bias, but probably leads the ay for how people interact with this new substrate.

Deacon's ideas from incomplete nature come to mind. Will stop here tho!

[Callum @callumflack]

@JakeOrthwein This is really good. Thank you.

[Callum @callumflack]

@swyx mullet factory — very good

[Callum @callumflack]

This actually means I agree with you! I simply think that knowhow is the innate thing a person "get gud" at thru practice, friction, repeated failure, embodiment, history, virtue, etc.
And taste is social attribution made from outside of perception/encounter of some objectified knowhow. It is a name for perceived discrimination, not the faculty itself.

Other articles about taste as social desire that might resonate:
https://t.co/CJvrrrMjki
https://t.co/hJFH54ghsj

[Callum @callumflack]

Knowhow is "cultivated" ie. learned by people through practice. It gets embodied as libraries of intuition (fingerspitzengefühl). This is not taste.*
Taste is social attribution by others from outside ("wow, she has great taste…I want that"). Taste is the social shadow cast by knowhow.
Revealed preference is measurable and anything measured can be emulated by AI (by a person choosing to direct AI to do so, it doesnt choose to do it itself)
"…once people see it, they all naturally gravitate towards it" — this is desire and, yes, this is very much related to taste. The desires of the crowd are indeed random. They don't lead to personal acquisition of knowhow.

*my old article makes this mistake: https://t.co/on2fGa3ymh

[Callum @callumflack]

Forgot: Anatomy of a Fall. Probably the best recent film I've seen,alongside Aftersun. Highly recommended.

[Callum @callumflack]

Fave films this year (parts 1 &amp; 2)

[Callum @callumflack]

@guinnesschen Request: pinned chats per project

[Callum @callumflack]

@chaven @dzabel_ala If I were to summarise what gets me about Girard using Shakespeare's prosody, it'd be "obvious, all to obvious"

[Callum @callumflack]

“The maturity of a science can be measured by its ability to ask elementary questions.” Girard

Idiom: it’s as plain as the nose on your face

[Callum @callumflack]

@chaven @dzabel_ala It's terrific, thank you Cynthia! I have a bunch of his books that were difficult to get into as a dilettante reader wanting the gist. Yours serves as a crucial overview and entrypoint to focussed choice. I have really enjoyed the Shakespeare series.

[Callum @callumflack]

@dzabel_ala All Desire is a Desire for Being by @chaven — portable and highly recommended

[Callum @callumflack]

Boom

https://t.co/zeKzuzK76K

[Callum @callumflack]

The sentence has no author. The world will be Tlon. (Or Hamlet's ghost).

Language runs forward under constraint. Coherence appears after the fact.

No one authors Tlon locally. Everyone advances it one plausible token, citation, interface, policy, law, code & shared idiom at a time.

The improv stage, the transformer, the inner monologue — same loop, three settings, three constrainers. But only one compressor. The thinker is the compressor.

The sentence is not in mind before the thinker runs language. Words appear from outside. The thought is being negotiated by the language under the constraint that each next move must keep things compressible, must not stop the rolling juggernaut of just-in-time makes-sense-ness. The wetware struggles and the struggle is the compression.

Pause, stop. Makes enough sense, you-know-what-I-mean? (Can you help me understand what I said? I was not the author, the language just came through me, "I" has no idea, so we must agree or delete that sentence to claim authorship. So, let me ask, was that pattern of shape I threw at you interesting to you?).

Ficciones stumble into names. Friction takes those names into being. Names pointed at socialise the schema. Eventually, generative phenomena collapse under naming. The world becomes Tlon when compression replaces encounter: "Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels."

[Callum @callumflack]

Example of a compressor running forward one token at a time, rewarded by the compression-progress its output produces in another compressor running forward, in parallel interplay w others doing same

The improv stage, the transformer, the inner monologue: same loop, 3 scenes

[Callum @callumflack]

But JLB, I query you. Language might be chess, but Angels bring the names (just like Cassirer said)

Angels &gt; “momentary gods” &gt; naming

[Callum @callumflack]

[wordplay] “The only simplicity to be trusted is the simplicity on the far side of complexity” — A.N. Whitehead