Think of the flow of thoughts in your mind as a social media feed. Throughout your life, you have “subscribed” to different things without noticing. Now their posts keep showing up in your feed, and you don’t know from where. Some are true & interesting, but many are unhelpful or simply untrue.
Practical Meditation by Giovanni Dienstmann
“You know nothing of future time,” pronounced Deep Thought, “and yet in my teeming circuitry I can navigate the infinite delta streams of future probability and see that there must one day come a computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate, but which it will be my fate eventually to design.”
Fook was losing patience. He pushed his notebook aside and muttered, “I think this is getting needlessly messianic.”
HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY by Douglas Adams
This image was once used to illustrate the subject areas for our WordPress-Cupertino Meetup group. Its many Layers of Complexity, before full-site editing (FSE), was introduced in version 5.
Now, knowledge of such complexity need not bother the minds of today. Intelligence has been made artificial.
Rendering engines translate HTML data into text & images.
Advancements in technology aim to create more efficient, organized, and sustainable systems, pushing back against the natural tendency of systems to degrade over time.
ChatGPT
“Ignorance has been our king. Since the death of empire, he sits unchallenged on the throne of Man. His dynasty is age-old. His right to rule is now considered legitimate. Past sages have affirmed it. They did nothing to unseat him.
“Tomorrow, a new prince shall rule. Men of understanding, men of science shall stand behind his throne, and the universe will come to know his might. His name is Truth. His empire shall encompass the Earth. And the mastery of Man over the Earth shall be renewed. A century from now, men will fly through the air in mechanical birds. Metal carriages will race along roads of man-made stone. There will be buildings of thirty stories, ships that go under the sea, machines to perform all works.
“And how will this come to pass?”
He paused and lowered his voice. “In the same way all change comes to pass, I fear. And I am sorry it is so. It will come to pass by violence and upheaval, by flame and by fury, for no change comes calmly over the world.”
A Canticle For Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1959)
Elon Musk’s Business Development Algorithm (unquestioned by Simpletons)
People often misjudge their abilities. Those with less than average abilities overestimate their true abilities. Those with higher don’t realize how much higher. Stupid people are too stupid to know how stupid they are. Some smart people wrongly assume that most others can do what they can.
We are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events.
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman
The WordPress Cupertino Meetup is still going strong (not true – barely limping by) and what you see above illustrates the user interface for website developers starting to use the new block-based page editor, now integrated into core.
Few of you might find this interesting.
The tiny portrait is of Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress.