Exactly. Since we're telling stories, a friend recently accused me of "changing my argument". We had a multi-episode argument, lasting about a year, about domestic cats and their impact on the world (across scopes). Each time the topic broached, I tried a different tack, ranging from biosphere scales to the impoverished studies that don't distinguish between neutered versus fertile strays to kill versus no kill shelters. Etc. Each time, they kept repeating their old saw that cats kill things and cat owners should lock 'em up!
I used to winkingly insult people by calling them "linear thinkers". I stopped doing that because, well, I got the feeling they didn't know what linearity meant. So ... IDK ... pearls before swine? It's like accusing someone of reductionist thinking ... or recognizing that high functioning autism is a low key super power, a feature not a bug. "There are more things in heaven and earth ..." p.s. I accidentally clicked on Consensus.app instead of CoPilot last night trying to find out what TV series Ally Walker starred in. Consensus gave me the best possible answer ... paraphrased like "WTF are you doing? I'm a science AI you moron." That made my day. On 1/26/26 11:04 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
I once wrote a source code analysis tool that had a feature my colleagues regarded with skepticism. (Because parsers are typically recursive descent.) The idea was to treat a code’s AST as an undirected graph instead of a tree. That way you could find the interesting or relevant bit, and then climb back up to understand surrounding context. It always annoyed me when authors expected me to read in a linear fashion. It’s a part of the appeal of LLMs to me too -- to retrieve knowledge without the opinions of the authors. Computer programs (or manuscripts) should be modular to the extent possible. *From: *Friam <[email protected]> on behalf of glen <[email protected]> *Date: *Monday, January 26, 2026 at 10:34 AM *To: *[email protected] <[email protected]> *Subject: *[FRIAM] efficacy? effectiveness? Text is King https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king <https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king> The post is good. But I'd argue not great. There's some missing category to which "text" and "books" etc. belong. And the reason "Text is King" despite any decline in "reading" is because that deeper category is the reason it all matters. He starts to get at it when talking about memory and recording, especially "the billionth stream of 'Golden' is exactly the same as the first". I don't really have a name for the category. I've heard it called "effective" in the sense of an "effective procedure". There's FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, & reusable) ... and the "+" in FAIR+, including computable. The oft-abused "algorithmic". Etc. *This* is what keeps me coming back to *things like* text. But I no longer read books, really, wiggling about whatever "read" means. I still buy/download them. And I read parts. But I almost always have to re-slice the thing, reading the parts in a different order, some parts re-read multiple times, others once or never. I'm just no longer willing/able to be a thrall to the writer's design. So his identification of "text" with books seems pretty flawed. Still worth the read ... >8^D
-- ¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
