superb-owl

I once had an LSD-induced episode of psychosis where I thought my entire existence was a 2 minute loop on display in some higher dimensional art exhibit. Sounds silly but it was horrifying

To call Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching a translation is misleading—she knew little Chinese. Le Guin leaned heavily on existing translations, alongside her intuition for Taoist philosophy.

From the her postscript:

> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.

For the interested, the original paperback contains diligent notes about her sources and word choices.

I also reference Le Guin's rendition a bunch here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/taoism-minus-the-nonsense

Build or join a local community!

I’ve been working with https://fractal.boston/ and adjacent communities for the last year and my loneliness has been cured. I now have the opposite problem where I don’t get enough time to myself!

I’ve been helping build https://fractal.boston/ for about a year now and it’s been a massively rewarding experience

Like the author, I highly recommend _building_ rather than simply joining a community. If you’re joining an already established scene, get involved! Host events, and bring in new members, establish new norms

Just learned you don’t have to go full grayscale! You can put the filter on 80% and still get the color semantics while also being less stimulated

Thanks to whoever added this

Some seem to think this organization was “anti free speech”. Thing is, if you believe in free speech, famously, you have to agree to let people disagree with you!

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.“

The federal government putting its thumbs on the scales in debates about what can and should be broadcast (on both traditional and social media) should worry anyone who cares about free speech.

This is not a good rabbit hole

Lots of hate here, but I think this is clever and some iteration of it will sell well

I get that folks are worried about what AI-generated art will do to kids sense of creativity. Will they still learn to draw? Play instruments? Write stories?

But I genuinely believe that tech like this will only whet their imaginations. I would have had so much fun with this as an 8 year old, and would have spent hours just in my head, dreaming up ways to use my limited stickers.

Ofc parents will still need to encourage them to pick up hard skills (as has always been the case). But having an AI companion will mean they start seeing rewards for their efforts much faster. A shallower learning curve will prove to be a very good thing for most.

Always has been

The title seems a little click-baity and basically wrong. Gabor transforms, wavelet transforms, etc are all generalizations of the fourier transform, which give you a spectrum analysis at each point in time

The content is generally good but I'd argue that the ear is indeed doing very Fourier-y things.

Probably true. Most mass-appeal science communication is bullshit.

But TBKTS helped to bring "somatics"--the idea that physical and psychological issues are often interwoven--to the mainstream. There is very clear evidence that this is true [1], and underappreciated by a medical field that has a heavy bias toward specialists over generalists. How many people are experts in both gastroenterology and trauma? And yet we all know intuitively that stress and stomach problems go together.

I'll always appreciate TBKTS for this, despite its flaws.

[1] https://superbowl.substack.com/p/energy-healing-minus-the-no...

All I want is a 4-5 inch phone :( bring back the mini!

Honestly the fact that we don’t have a sovereign wealth fund invested in US equities is just silly. I get that you don’t want too much central interference in the economy but it feels like leaving money on the table

As with most cognitive biases, there's an inverse to this, where we ignore low-probability high-impact scenarios. E.g. people drive drunk or without a seatbelt, because it'll *probably* be fine. And they repeatedly have that assumption confirmed--until one day it isn't.

I had one friend who would leave his bike chained partially blocking a fire exit, because "what are the odds the fire inspector will come today?" But the fire inspector comes once a year, and if your bike is chained there 99% of the time, odds are you're going to get a fine. He couldn't see the logic. He got fined.

related: https://x.com/mxslk/status/1940832698366619681

There's a middle ground between claiming you have a final answer, and ignoring the question entirely.

The best spiritual disciplines provide a _framework_ for exploring existential questions.

If I were King of America, the first thing I'd do is start enforcing standard protocols for things like auth, messaging, data export/migration, etc. Mostly relying on industry to decide _what_ the protocols should be, but making sure everyone adheres to them.

Data interoperability would make our digital lives so much better.

Subtitle makes it clear that this is a correlation, but the title (falsely) implies causation. Obviously lonely people are going to flock toward a technology that provides pseudo social interaction

I had great plans to feed Erowid's database through Claude to get a better classification of drug phenomenology. Sadly they have explicitly disallowed the feeding of Erowid reports into LLMs: https://erowid.org/experiences/email_warning.php

I appreciate the stand they're taking, but the potential for greater understanding and harm reduction seems to outweigh any potential downsides of putting public webpages into an LLM.

> However, the average ketamine “user” consumes 500-1000mg of ketamine per day

This is an outrageous claim with no citation. I'm a regular user, and this is roughly what I consume per month, if I'm going hard

You're looking for the Bell Experiment: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_test

It proves there's no "local hidden variable"--the state is indeterminate until they are measured. It's proven through some pretty simple probability theory, and is (relatively) easy to follow. There's a great video of Leonard Susskind explaining it somewhere

Glad you asked! _Facing the Dragon_ by Robert Moore

https://superbowl.substack.com/p/book-review-facing-the-drag...

I tried to gaslight myself into romantically loving a wonderful, kind person--the kind of person I should want to marry. It didn't work and just ended up hurting both of us. Ymmv

Neat! I've never heard that one, will definitely add it to my vocab

What a beautiful quote! And it does a great job capturing the thought you've put into building this community

A Life of One's Own is incredible, and is one of two books I credit with changing my life.

I reviewed it partially here: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/how-to-enjoy-things

The pattern here with Wells Fargo is interesting (you may recall they got into a ton of trouble by setting aggressive sales targets, causing employees to defraud customers).

There’s clearly a huge disconnect between the numeric targets they set and the resulting behavior of employees. That’s always a hazard, but I wonder why it’s such a pattern at WF

See also: https://superbowl.substack.com/p/beware-the-variable-maximiz...

I've been working on translating and summarizing some of Grothendieck's esoteric writing from his later years. It's...pretty bananas. But some fascinating stuff--clearly brilliant and a little crazy.

https://github.com/superb-owl/grothendieck

There’s a new model on the way, with better specs: Jelly Max

I have an original Jelly and I love it. Highly recommend getting a tiny smartphone if you want to minimize your screen time

I disagree with the slippery slope argument here.

Waits won because they were clearly intending to impersonate his voice, while singing his song. Not because a random guy on the radio sounded like him.

Ditto for SJ--there was a clear intent to reproduce her specific voice, based on her role in "Her".