Pinned
I'm starting to feel that I'm less afraid of any particular ideology, but rather, I most fear the distance *between* ideologies. It feels more "towards life" to rage against the larger social neglect which breeds that distance.
⿻ patcon (is in Toronto) 🦋 @patcon.bsky.social
@patcon_
& this is the wonder that keeps the stars apart. #plurality @CivicTechTO Metagov.org ORI @g0vtw @UsePolis contrbtr. past: biochmst @enviroDGI @HyphaCoop
- Funny, for like 10 yrs, my biochem bkgrnd led me to conceptualize my role in community organizing as that of an astrocyte, doing maintenance work & happily supporting people through transition states & uncertainty, like a psychopomp for those moving between stable life phases :)Astrocytes make up nearly half the cells in the brain. Like neurons, they have electrical properties, but they do not spike. Moreover, the average cortical neuron spends most of its time "silent". Spiking matters, but it is not the whole story.
- Prototyping an interactive visualizer of @CynthiaRudin Lab's PaCMAP dimensional reduction algo, running pretty fast using WebGPU :) patcon.github.io/pacmap-webgpu/
- Current status: Thinking about Lakoff's Metaphors We Live By, and how it might be neat to understand Metaphors LLMs Live By. Maybe all the silly phrases they [ab]use are like the metaphors that make sense to them? Like... what is it for something to be "load-bearing" in geometry?
- @doriantaylor I've worked on collective intelligence tools involving dimensional reduction (e.g. polis) for maybe a decade. Been very interested lately in running valence data thru the PaCMAP algorithm, which seems to "sever the furthest concerns" in a network of concerns.State-of-the-art dimensional reduction methods sure are starting to look a lot like Christopher Alexander's design philosophy of severing as few "design concerns" as possible...! dorian.substack.com/p/at-any-given… arxiv.org/html/2601.2017… h/t @doriantaylor @TakanoriFW @leland_mcinnes
