jhrobert

Cognitive Meteorite and Possibilism, the Rational As-If Approach

*Founding Date: February 16, 2026*

Today, I introduce an original dual concept from reflections on AI's transformative impact on humanity. The "Cognitive Meteorite" and "Possibilism, the Rational As-If Approach" have no precedents in AI, cognitive, or adaptive discourses. They pair a diagnosis of inevitable disruption with a joyful, active response. This text affirms their originality and serves as a historical marker.

### I. The Cognitive Meteorite: Surviving Like the Raven

AI isn't a competitor, predator, or controllable tool. It's a cognitive meteorite: a disruptive event irrevocably altering our environment, like the Cretaceous asteroid redefining niches and forcing adaptation.

Traditional AI analogies—mirror, rival, power instrument—center humans, implying survival via domination. They miss the radical shift.

Evolution teaches: massive dinosaurs perished; agile mammals and birds thrived via density and niche exploitation. Humanity needs cognitive density and local autonomy, not power.

Tools like OpenClaw are adaptive aids, enabling individuals to decide in a world of lost global control. As a "systemic raven," one gains freedom to create and remain relevant amid ashes.

The meteorite has struck. Do we have the agility to adapt without vanishing?

This metaphor is novel; no source frames AI as a cognitive cataclysm. It focuses survival on preserving freedom in a superior-dominated ecosystem.

### II. Possibilism, the Rational As-If Approach: Happier Than Sisyphus

To offset the meteorite's potential pessimism—an irremediable shock—I offer "Possibilism, the Rational As-If Approach." Humans can exceed Camus's Sisyphus by actively seeking and materializing new possibilities (respecting physics laws) from imaginable ideas.

Drawing from Vaihinger's "as if," but rational and action-focused, it turns resignation into joyful exploration. Sisyphus rebels lucidly against absurdity; we create meaning by testing and embodying possibilities, yielding superior happiness.

Against the meteorite, it's an antidote: use AI to expand possibles, e.g., hybrid arts, decentralized economies, AI-enabled science. Physics realism avoids fantasy; idea vastness offers infinite potential.

Not naive optimism, but rational action: evaluate, experiment, materialize. Active participation restores agency and breeds happiness.

### III. Complementarity and Primacy

The Meteorite diagnoses; Possibilism responds. Together: realism sans fatalism, rational creativity. Humans as agile explorers—possibilistic ravens seeding realities in ashes.

This idea is original, with no priors. Dated February 16, 2026, it's a milestone open to engagement. May it inspire AI-era adaptation: create and thrive with joy.

Hi there!

With all the fuzz about Vibe Programming, I, a 59 years old software veteran, had a look at what's happening.

I'm kind of frustrated. Am I getting old?

Anyways, here is a short description of the StructEnv benchmark.

The repo provides the draft RFC for a new format for configurations. Environment variables are used a lot these days and they miss structure. On the other hand json is hard to read. So here a proposal for a fix. But I'm too lazy to code it myself ;)

Could be an interesting road for those trying to design an efficient hiring test for software developers. AFAIK there is no such test yet.

It's funny that so many people missed the point and assumed the author is clueless.

I would love to have "news paper like columns" in my editor. I have been looking for it since 2007...

Another thing I would like is the ability to inject multiple files into the same "edit buffer" so that "search" works over these related files as whole, transparently.

I wrote quite a lot of TurboProlog code for a while some 25 years ago. I always wondered why there were no syntax sugar for nested 'or' Horn clauses.

Now it's fixed. Cool. So is the rest of Cosmos syntax sugar, cool, kudos.

I guess some OO would be a nice addition. And, that's the thing of the day: an efficient JS transpiler and a decent IDE with a stepping debugger. That's asking a lot. I know.

It could. Look for Eigendemocracy

Kudocracy: https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy - Alpha. I will present it at https://juliareda.eu/2014/09/invitation-1st-european-liquid-...

This is amazing. With enough understanding / reverse-engineering of the current JITs, one can produce near C speed efficient code.

Cool.

Perfect.

Why?

If effects from causes occurred immediately, versus with a distinct delay, everything would occur at once (or loop forever, that's a bug).

Hence, because we can observe that things happen "in sequence", there is a "propagation delay". That's what time is: "Time: the process whereby effects occur after causes, in a step by step manner".

That's another attempt to fix the "representative democracy" crisis.

Unfortunately I saw nothing about "Liquid Democracy" delegations? With pure direct votes only, participation will suffer because voting often on many matters is inconvenient to most people.

The "tagging" of proposals is nice. However, who define the "tag hierarchy"? Is it even necessary to have such a hieararchy, I don't think so.

If an "example" is a "suggestion", you may want to have look at my Kudocracy attempt: https://github.com/virteal/kudocracy

That's "Liquid democracy"

There is some "delegation" implementation inside, ala "liquid democracy". This is a nice mix of "direct" & "representative" democracy, a mix that I believe is very promising to avoid corruption with representatives and lack of participation with direct voting. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delegative_democracy

OTOH corruption & fraud is much easier with anonymity.

shorteners should be called that way only when the result is actually shorter.

Otherwise "interceptors/tracers" seems a better name.

Quid délégation, liquid demo style?

I am considering the idea of spending some time studying node streams. Your remark worries me. Is there some sources I can consult about node stream potential weaknesses? Thanks.

Using async, if you want something to allow listeners to be attached later:

  var outcome = Boxon();
  fs.readFile( "test.txt", outcome );
  // Attach listener later:
  outcome( function( err, content ){ ... } );

See https://github.com/JeanHuguesRobert/l8/wiki/AboutBoxons

Boxon objects are light compared to promises, but they interop well. Best of both worlds!

  Boxon.cast( fs.readfile, 'myfile' )
  .then( function( content ){ console.log( content ) })
  .catch( function( err ){ console.log( "Error", err ) });

Boxon is promise implementation agnostic, works with Q, bluebird, etc... See https://github.com/JeanHuguesRobert/l8/wiki/AboutBoxons

Good article that demonstrates how much room for improvement still exist for modern languages.

Icon's notions of success/failure and generators were giant steps that unfortunately went unnoticed.

They lead to a level of source code expressiveness that is still unmatched today.

Once you get used to that, most current programming languages look like sophisticated assemblers.

The basic income is just like roads, everybody pay to build and care for them and then everybody can use them for free.

Basic incomes are roads, to liberty.

This behaviour is not promise/a compatible. Make it optional and you become promise/a compatible.

Compatible with jQuery deferred?

Only if you consider that it is compatible to miss P.Deferred(), P.promise(), P.when(), parole.state(), parole.progress(), parole.done(), parole.fail() and parole.always()

I tend to know about that because I am currently writing a lib that is going to be both Q and jQuery compatible: https://github.com/JeanHuguesRobert/l8/wiki/ParoleReference

  p1.and( p2 ).then( function( p1_result, p2_result ){...});

I believe this is equivalent to:

  Q.all( p1, p2 ).spread( function( p1_result, p2_result ){ ... } );

There are other good reasons, at this point, to switch from Q to another promise lib, speed for example, as was virulently signaled recently: http://jsperf.com/wqfwewefewrw/4

If you love the expressiveness of S-expressions but hate the super noisy parenthesis, check the sugar version, called "sweet-expressions". http://readable.sourceforge.net/

I now understand why GitHub took a $100m investment from VC, they intend to turn it into a dating site.

More seriously, there is a trend here, where GitHub is not about sharing software only. It has become a blog, a wiki, a social network, etc.

And that's cool.

Sorry, my explanations were confusing.

The thing is I don't "replace" asteriks with HTLM tags, I keep the asterisks visible.

If star text star displays star text star in bold (ie, not removing the stars, inserting </b> stuff around the whole construct), is it still a "markup language" ?

Let say I process a text file to display it in HTML and the only addition I do is say "quoted content gets italicized". Is that a "markup language", or just some "text embellishment"?

The issue I am trying to address is the learning curve with all the existing markup languages. Without going the "wysiwyg" editing way, that is.

I figured out that if the "marks" are visible in the final result, they get easy to learn.

They lost me at the "nil" section.

RubyScript is what we need => efficient code, à la coffeescript, with a Ruby syntax.

There is some impedance mismatch between ruby & javascript semantics. Trying to hide this fact has a cost in terms of performance.

I would love to have some ruby syntax as long as it does not compromize the speed of my code.

There is a trend these days where syntax and semantics are becoming orthogonal, that's nice.

Hence GoScript, PascalScript, PrologScript, CppScript, SmallScript...

Thanks to sourcemaps the issue of the generated code readability has disappeared. Only the performance matters from now on.

It becomes a "markup" language (ala markdown, etc) when the "markups" are removed and replaced by htlm codes. As you noted, in HN, when using stars they get removed and replace by some <i>...</i> stuff.