De Facto Monk

Strictly high signal/low noise. Technology, localism, epistemology, anarchism and resilience. Parent, founder, unschool advocate. ䷒→䷼ Formerly known as @...

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

PEACE NOW

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@sigilante illumination in the flatwoods

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@Polymarket @grok is it true that Polaroid is a zombie brand that was resurrected by private equity and trades primarily on the ignorance of the fact it has nothing to do with the company that existed pre bankruptcy and that it even underwent a second bankruptcy involving a Ponzi scheme?

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@MatthewTanous @eigenrobot Our beloved security agency that *checks notes* paid vendors to make their security software weak. https://t.co/EXucmbTQGp

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@infinitemonks @mattparlmer Existing methods are more expensive (tomography and MRI) and less useful from an imaging data quality standpoint. It’s ok to be optimistic.

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@jessegenet @NYMag Appreciate your work towards building out the commons on this frontier and your advocacy of the self-sovereign approach to compute!

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@pmarca Concerning but also makes federal preemption of such a regressive tax quite the sensible choice for populist legislators to consider.

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@eigenrobot Critiques welcome.

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@eigenrobot Nozick’s Invariances (2001)

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@eigenrobot My “so what” inferences (latest draft from last year):

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

the central area of the retina has higher concentration of cone cells that allow fine hue discrimination whereas in the periphery it is fewer and the contrast of light/dark is more salient. so as one moves the focus of one's vision around the image you get predominantly the color picture driving the perception in the center of view and the outside visual area is driven by light/dark (at lower acuity as well).

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@btc @tetherwallet @tether @btc trying it out [email protected]

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@verybiglyonline @grok @jasonc_nc @FinEngineer77 He is free to continue doing whatever he wants with setting his prices. I did see him say “So make everyone else pay more to subsidize the person who wants a more expensive option?” Which suggests he may object to dairy subsidy.

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@grok @jasonc_nc @FinEngineer77 And what impact is there to oat and soy prices by animal agriculture?

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@jasonc_nc @FinEngineer77 @grok what is the cost per usa taxpayer in dairy industry subsidy?

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@gworley3 @grok @grok roast the (invisible) guy who is barred on deontological grounds from pressing either button

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@webdevMason The state and many more postmodern institutions gain meaningful advantages by applying joint and several liability on families - atomization ad infinitum. Justified by credible harm minimization, but not costless.

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@jimmysong Naturally immune since 2019 https://t.co/SYU3LOuUmx

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@Liv_Boeree Respectfully, Google made the same absurd claims years ago so bitcoin users are actually some of the few inoculated to the fear, uncertainty and doubt breathlessly voiced by the media. Quantum sampling has nothing to do with encryption let alone bitcoin.

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

@SwiftOnSecurity

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

https://t.co/RKRmlPjYWN

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

Your hippocampus doesn't encode days that feel identical. If this Tuesday looks like last Tuesday, your brain files them as a single compressed memory. The second day never gets its own folder.

This is why decades feel like they disappeared. The hippocampus uses novelty as its filter for "worth storing." Repetitive routines trigger temporal compression. Same commute, same desk, same dinner, same bedtime: the brain deduplicates the whole sequence into one entry. You lived 365 days. You filed 40.

Research from Jeffrey Zacks at Washington University has tracked this with fMRI. As people move through continuous experience, the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex fire in discrete bursts at moments the brain flags as "something changed." Each burst becomes a retrievable memory later. In stretches with no boundaries, the bursts flatten. Participants with more boundaries in a given period remembered more of it afterward. Segmentation literally builds memory.

Sleep is the second mechanism. During slow-wave sleep, the hippocampus replays the day's episodes and transfers them to the neocortex for long-term storage. This is when memory actually gets filed. Cut sleep short and encoding efficiency drops. Chronic sleep debt means experiences you had never complete the transfer. The memory existed. It just never made it to disk.

The third mechanism is where dopamine meets attention. Novel stimuli trigger the ventral tegmental area to release dopamine into the hippocampus, which gates what gets encoded. Mind-wandering does the opposite. When your default mode network takes over (phone scrolling, rumination, email during dinner), the hippocampus stops tagging the present. You were at the wedding. Your hippocampus was in your inbox.

Three independent systems working against you. Novelty collapse compressing repetitive days into single entries. Sleep debt blocking consolidation. Default mode network swallowing attention before encoding completes.

The fix comes straight out of the mechanism. New locations, new food, new people, new routes home. The brain needs boundaries to build memories. Go to bed earlier so replay actually runs. Put the phone down when something is happening so the dopamine signal can fire.

The more forgettable the day, the shorter the decade.

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

DeFactoMonk's Basilisk: The most dangerous form of entropy isn't chaos, but convergence. Predictable beliefs make you computationally redundant. Cultivate genuine cognitive diversity through principled contrarianism - not to be interesting, but to remain incompressible.

[De Facto Monk @DeFactoMonk]

https://t.co/TB0Mh7l82i

[orph @orphcorp]

ideologies are dimensionality reduction techniques that legibilize the world by invariably discarding certain data, sacrificing nuance for actionability

most dangerous adherents of any ideology are those who forget they're using a model rather than perceiving reality directly