Yeah, Doug was on my mind when I posted. And I did use asemantic purposefully,
as a direct reference to the idea that meaning comes from hairball feedback
like you get in meat space. It's less about ineffable and more about the
arrogance of effing in the first place. So many words. Too many words.
Meaningless words. I'm almost done with words.
On 2/4/26 10:18 AM, Steve Smith wrote:
Ahh, the *a$$holery*!
I still distinctly remember that inflection point on this list when our (in)famous Doug
went off with that observation. He retreated to his Parrot Farm significantly after that
moment. I don't remember if Nick made his visit to "meet the parrots" before
or after that, it was somewhat after Doug's famous chide of Nick (and others) whose
hashtag would have been #swirlies, had there been hashtags in those days (circa 2008?).
Doug's abrasive nature was an enriching (though not always supportive) component, now
faded. Another listmember fondly reminisced recently *FFing Doug Roberts!*... it made
me smile.
I never met Hywel, but I know he is venerated for qualities I never experienced directly
(did he actually ever post here, or just hold court on Friday Mornings?). The
"grande old man" I miss most clearly from the chorus is Mike Agar... There
are probably other significant Lacunae in my apprehension of the full milieu here. Some
absent, latent, deprecated voices here I still encounter elsewhere (in-person mostly) but
I still hear echoes or ghost-commentary from them when I read here.
We've lost a few others (e.g. Carl Tollander) along the way, the texture of the
weave shifts every time another spool of thread runs out.
I feel as if I personally have *met* (in person or via offline e-mail) a *lot* of this
motley crew (those who post, not lurk only) and those images (faces, body languages,
vocal intonations) carry a lot for me. If you were *all* as disembodied as *some* of you
are, I'd probably feel the "lack of feedback in (a)semantic spaces such as
this" yet more.
sideboard-vignette - Glen's use of "asemantic" here is one aspect of the richness I experience here (when I pay a little attention).
I wanted to pass it off as a typo, but then I reminded myself that "it IS glen!" so I went looking. I don't know that I "nailed
it" but this use of "asemantic" reminds me of the open-ended rambles (asemantic?) here on the general topic of "effing the
ineffable"? Perhaps "asemantic" is one product or condition of the very attempt to "eff the ineffable"?
I've been a Complexity Science groupie since well before the term was in common
parlance... My minor contributions/engagements in adjacent fields help me
appreciate a broad range of the domain, but it has exploded since the first
days of my engagement with Doyne and Norm and others over the Poincare Sections
they were printing out on our high speed 1200dpi laser-printers... whole
sheaves of them to mentally reconstruct the equivalent of a CAT scan? I'd
only recently worked the problem of making it possible to shove 512x512 BW
image from the backend of our CRAY supercomputers to (a very few) desktop
monitors at 2-5 fps... Then came the whole class of desktop scientific
workstations which offered 1Kx1K 30-60fps bitmap graphics. Sun, Apollo, NeXT,
etc. and that type (printed and film images) of engagement tapered off... but
CNLS and SFI had formed formally and the torch was officially alight.
The point of this ramble down memory lane is just *how much* the field has
elaborated and how much of the proto-Complexity Science (e.g. Poincare,
Lorentz, Weiner, Von Neumann, Turing, Feynman, Fredkin, et al) then came into
my awareness (still does). The field turned out to be much larger than it
was declared to be... I suppose I'm blathering to the choir here... maybe
there is no longer any clear melodies or singular voices left, it is just
musical cacophany?
Dead Stack -> Dead Pool -> Nitrophilic Blooms -> Hypoxia?
FWIW, I DO think the current water we are all swimming in (technical,
socio-economic-political, etc) is highly enriched. For better and worse, like
the excess nitrates and phosphates downstream from agriculture, and we are left
like fish gasping at the surface for a bit of extra oxygen?
I feel like these disembodied comms are the root of the problem. Granted, FriAM
has been much less toxic than some of the other fora I've participated in (and
WAY less than those I don't participate in). But even here, we've seen our
share. So I think I'm retreating to meat space for the most part.
I've long lamented the lack of feedback mechanisms in asemantic spaces like
this. The multiscale, intense, fast and slow composition of feedback(s) are
defining. Degrade those and the definition degrades. I recently failed to
remember an aphorism on the fly at the pub. But it nagged enough to make me
look it up later:
"Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self esteem, first make sure
you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes." - Notorious d.e.b.
I think I'm simply tired of trying to estimate the assholery. It's so much
easier with more feedback.
On 2/3/26 4:45 PM, Jon Zingale wrote:
I know I came to this group in what appears to be its twilight. The in-person
meetups are weirdly sad. I feel pressed to ask if it is the case that everyone
is either:
1. on vacation/ too busy
2. too depressed / failing to find inspiration
3. moved on to greener forums
4. preferring the company of LLMs
...
N. waiting for someone frail to post
Sometimes I trawl reddit or whatever discord, but I cannot help but feel like
beacons of inspiration are becoming fewer and further between. This group has
managed to inspire me, keep my interest, for over a decade. In that time, I
pushed myself to understand perspectives that I would never have dreamed
existed. I hope there is still something to talk about.
--
¡sıɹƎ ןıɐH ⊥ ɐןןǝdoɹ ǝ uǝןƃ
ὅτε oi μὲν ἄλλοι κύνες τοὺς ἐχϑροὺς δάκνουσιν, ἐγὰ δὲ τοὺς φίλους, ἵνα σώσω.
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--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
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