Some call them mobile engineers, but their true name is a complicated Nahuatl word that translates to “those who have tamed the black smoke mirrors.” They are the ones who have mastered the dark energies at work in the Other World. They are the ones who allow us all to See.

In the olden days the Aztecs would conduct ceremonies in which they looked into their round obsidian mirrors for glimpses of the Other World. Today we all carry an obsidian mirror in our pockets, although in the current fashion they have rectangular shapes. There is no need for ceremony. The mobile engineers have tamed the magic. With a few swipes of the fingers — remnants of an old, complicated ritual dance — you can inquire about the intentions of the sun and rain deities, or you can cast a spell to freeze an image into eternity, or you can establish an immediate link, through the Other World, to any other obsidian mirror on Earth.

How do they do it? They have books upon books of complicated formulae, and they spend countless hours weaving them into spells. Occasionally a talented magician is able to create a useful spell by themselves, but it’s more common for large guilds of them to form and toil together, for months or years, on the making of a single complex spell.

Once the spell is done, it is packaged into an “app” — from the Nahuatl word apazyahualtontli, meaning small container — and made available to whichever Onlookers want it.

Common Tech Jobs Described as Cabals of Mesoamerican Wizards

A very happy point 🙂

In Modern Principles of Economics, Tyler and I use asteroid defense as an example of a public good (see video below). As of the 5th edition, this public good wasn’t being provided by either markets or governments. But thanks to NASA, the era of planetary defense has begun. In September of 2022 NASA smashed a spacecraft into an asteroid. A new set of five papers in Nature has now demonstrated that not only did NASA hit its target, the mission was a success in diverting the asteroid.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/the-era-of-planetary-defense-has-begun.html

People can love many kinds of people and things. People can love their romantic partners, but also their friends, children, pets, imaginary companions, places they grew up in, and so on. In the future we might see chatbot companions as just another entity who we can love and who can support us. We’ll see them not as competitors to human romance, but as filling a genuinely different and complementary niche.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/m7EHa5rWTvmbjMTNZ/in-defense-of-chatbot-romance

I’d love to hear a well-supported counter-argument.

If the Big Five are not universal, stable, or orthogonal, what good are they? They have a perfectly clear use. They replicate: the answers to many other survey instruments can be found to correlate with the Big Five survey responses, in multiple samples of survey-takers. To complain that the Big Five are meaningless is somewhat unscientific. They have a very specific meaning within the language game they belong to, and they are popular and memetically successful tools within that sphere.

The Big Five are, in a sense, protected from falsification. They make no predictions; there is no underlying causal model. As I understand it, no study could be devised to prove that the Big Five aren’t real, because they make no formal pretense to reality. They are innocent mathematical constructs that fall out of particular survey instruments administered to particular populations.

https://carcinisation.com/2020/07/04/the-ongoing-accomplishment-of-the-big-five/#more-732

There are a lot of myths about dangerous mythical creatures, from sirens to the Kraken to the hydra, some of which preyed upon humans. In Maori legend, Te Hokioi was a giant black-and-white bird, with a red crest and huge beak. And just like the Kraken was probably based on a real creature—the giant squid—Te Hokioi was probably a real bird.

That bird would be a Haast eagle, extinct for just 500 years, according to a study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/legendary-human-eating-bird-was-real-probably-could-have-eaten-people-89257268/

https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/the-reason-why-2-000-year-old-roman-concrete-is-still-so-strong

Interesting. Yglesias obviously has his own political bias, but tends to be careful about facts in my experience.

The Obama administration’s policymaking is not beyond criticism, but I do think the facts laid out in this report offer a considerably different context for assessing the administration’s economic track record. The left has often portrayed Trump’s win as, on some level, a punishment for the failures of neoliberalism with its endless inequality and stagnant wages. And a lot of elite-level thinking in progressive circles during the Trump years was driven by a determination to avoid the mistakes of Obamaism rather than to try to replicate its successes. It’s easy to forget now that he’s president, but Joe Biden received almost shockingly little elite support for a former vice president until very late in the cycle — he was seen as offering Obamaism 2.0 and was deemed unacceptable by people who saw Obama as a failure.

But if you understand the Obama record as successfully altering the inequality trajectory and bringing median income to an all-time high, that casts his other achievements (lower greenhouse gas emissions, marriage equality, etc.) in a different context and makes the idea of “let’s beat Trump and keep on keeping on” look more plausible.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/inequality-falling

Absolutely exquisite imagining of the lipid bilayer theory of how life emerged. Interesting for thinking about the theory, but more than that, it’s absolutely worth watching just because it’s so lovely.

See also additional image about the piece and the science at https://www.behance.net/gallery/159624143/aBiogenesis

Minecraft often seems to me to capture the essence of problems in my real life more than other games do. I have all these objects and space and I have to figure out how to usefully organize the objects in the space. I constantly think of things I should do and don’t know which ones to do first, or how to remember what they all are, and always feel like I should have a better mental schema for even knowing what the possible things are that I should maybe do. In the process of doing one thing, I am reminded of several other ones that I should imminently do. It is bed time way too often. I constantly forget to eat. If I’m doing a thing and its night time or I’m dying of starvation or something else to do comes up, it’s never clear if I should actually stop immediately. (When will I finish the thing? How will I remember?) Less importantly or intensely in real life than in Minecraft, I often suspect that I’ve been in this exact place many times before, and yet I can’t tell it from similar places. And I forget which direction is which every time I turn a corner.

Basically, I think Minecraft gets at something about organizing the information required to be an agent, given limited memory. As you walk around, you see a lot of things, and have a lot of options, such that at any given point, the relevant options are not just a set of salient paths ahead, as in a sophisticated choose your own adventure book. Most of the best courses of action are not physically represented in front of you, and can only be seen at all because of structures in your own mind constructed to keep them available.

https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/mine-craft-20-07-03

“She also describes rumors about long-simmering pots in France, such as one particular batch in Normandy that simmered constantly for over 300 years, while an even older pot, in Perpignan, had been bubbling since the 1400s until it finally met its demise in 1945 during World War II bombing raids.”

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/perpetual-broth