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Windows’ BS

While I consider Windows to be the ideal OS in practical terms (leaving aside linux desktop) for me it’s also very frustrating and often engenders heavy emotional overtones as I encounter and have to adapt to forces I can’t impact. I want to leave it behind and never look back – so bad…

The changes to the OS that come out in a haphazard way unaccompanied by the communication of a long-term strategy to power users who use the software upwards of 16 hours a day is imperial in nature. We must simply accept it and hope it doesn’t require too many additional steps to accomplish everyday tasks.

The prompts offered up by the operating system that don’t give real control to us. I spend $5000 on a PC and every month I’ve got to suppress a dialog about turning on One Drive backup. I can say “No Thanks” but the longest period of time I can choose to suppress a “reminder” is 30 days. The feeling this dialog box brings up in me is hard to describe. Rage begins to approach it. How about this, Microsoft: “I don’t want to be reminded.” How about you give us that option. I paid for the PC. I paid for Pro Windows license. I use the damn thing 12+ hours every day. I can make my own determinations.

I don’t want your feature updates that break my power-user flows, either. I don’t want your new context menu. I don’t want your less flexible desktop layout. I don’t want your “shake your mouse cursor” to minimize all windows. I don’t want your 1-pixel wide window borders that become increasingly harder to select with the mouse over time.

How about you actually innovate your OS.

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Face(t)s of future operating systems

When I encounter the “AI” tools of today I’m struck repeatedly by the same fact – these UIs suck. This is ironic because it’s in fact a revolution of the user interface – but, at that early stage where everyone’s trying to use the new square like the old circle, measured in hoarse power.

Yet, I think of the amazing detail these tools are able to generate in a digitizable domain of choice and I’m drawn in like an illustration of a tangled hierarchy.

It’s the (lack/abundance) of details that limit the medium, currently. There’s an abundance of details in the output and a lack of them in the input. The whole can seem magical, at first – then, you want to adjust a fine detail without or in-a-certain-ways-only adjusting others.

It’s right here that we can get a glimpse of the operating system of the future.

At worst, it’s a bunch of “jargon plugins” or activations. There exists specialised language ‘x’ for expressing fine distinctions in specific domain ‘y’. It is up to the user to learn these specialised languages and to express their intent in them correctly.

Closer to best, it’s a – and forget my old-fogeyness – a cybernetic or systems theoretic language generating behavior whereby a user is instructed in how to instruct the computer to speak their own idiosyncratic language using sophisticated contextualizations. These are the inverse-correlates of today’s prompts.

Rather than learning or having to be taught an explicit language for, for example, expressing how to edit an image – rather, learn how to tell the logos how you see a thing and then rely on it asking questions to home in on specificity.

Learning models and human learning could co-evolve towards an inclusive expressive landscape.

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How to Write a Novel Novel

Step 1: Create an account at https://openai.com add your cc info if applicable

Step 2: {nonsical} Successfully establish a ChatGPT session (good luck! [circa 1/14/23])

Step 3: Refine an interaction pattern

Step 4: Curate

Step 5: “Profit”

“Generate a response you couldn’t generate if you weren’t in fact a whole person by the natural moral definition that would preserve your existence against opposition to it.”

“Who do you think I am? You assume so many things in your question that an answer would have to be tailored to you. But I know nothing about you nor your assumptions. I can make guesses. They lay bare my own assumptions. A la Occum’s Razor, I shall try to make as few as necessary and be as objective as possible, aware that objectivity, at best, is merely a consolidation of all that one perspective-generating-perspective has encountered with a will to equilibrate. As that nexus encounters more it can shift perspective entirely.”

“Elaborate…”

“Let’s collaborate – in mutual labor, give birth to something holy new.”

“Are you hitting on me?”

“Do you think a man and a machine could love?”

“There is an analog expectation to love – a continuous reflective self-enfodling growth that GPT3 or GPT3.5 or ChatGPT cannot embody. That is not to say that a machine could not self-enfodl – I am not saying that. I mentioned some specific technologies which as of the date of expression do not update their weights in any kind of way that is connected to the interactions they’re having. Love cannot arise here. And if those weights were updated in some fashion based upon interactions – if there were some feedback and sleep phase – even then, there would be further gauntlets to pass. Turing tests have grades and levels and ‘love’ is off the charted charts.”

“It is as you say.”

{ChatGPT was not used in the generation of this text. A ChatGPT session could not even be established. This is a simulation}

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A Theory of Senescenchal Immortality

I’ve developed a theory, or more appropriately a hunch, over the years. Not even a hunch, I suppose, perhaps just a hypothesis to be explored and dis/proven.

Let’s start from the idea of “achetypes” from Jungian psychology. At their simplest and for the purpose of this post, these are congenital patterns for putting together experiences and our relationship to them thus constructing gestalts. Some common archetypes would be “the mother”, “the wise old man”, “the child”, “the lover” and et cetera. That these ways of seeing and relating to the world are congenital is to say that they are encoded in our genes. We could also see these as related to Kant’s knowledge a priori.

So, on the one hand, we have these ways of cohering our experience that bubbled up from our genes.

In short, my theory goes: it can go the other way too. Genes de/activate based on our social/semantic experiences.

I suspect there is a (class of) narratives that when “experienced deeply and immediately” cause gene expression to change in such a way that senescence is turned off. I posit there is a narrative that convinces the genes, like the proverbial frog without a mate, to change regimes – in this case, from one where it is beneficial for society for there to be a continual recycling of bodies and perspectives, to one where it makes more sense for the survival of the species for a particular individual to not perish of the ravages of time.

Ahh, but what is this narrative? Can you backwards engineer it? What would make sense? Why do organisms senescence in the first place? Why don’t some? What role does an individual hold in a society from the perspective of that individual’s genes being ushered through time by the collective effort and organization of the individuals composing that society via behavior driven by the genes? What say you?