Posts

Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr. interviewed by Nima Alkhorshid

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He's refreshingly positive. He thinks there are no great obstacles to a global "economic communications system" and a trans-national global reserve currency ( 32:55 ). All it needs are the central banks to stop toeing the IMF/World Bank/BIS line. I think once you have a half decent telecommunications system you won't even need a notion of a global reserve currency. That is what Britain and the US are fighting. See Kim Iversen interview with Richard Grove  and American Life . It's strange that the title of the Spanish translation of Hernan Diaz's novel Trust is Fortuna . His first language is Spanish but he writes in English. See this interview in El Pais with Diaz:  The inventor of capitalist realism is an Argentine who writes in English . The English and Spanish together can really fuck up some words!  Subscribe to Dialogue Works .  On PIX see Fabiola on The House Fire at Lago Amanã . 

American Life

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  Subscribe to GrowTree Organics . Subscribe to Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't . Video on Chalk: Life building mountains rather than skyscrapers:   See  Susan Stepney - Life as a Cyber-bio-physical System .  Subscribe to Rachel Philips .

Kim Iversen interview with Richard Grove

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This is interesting, but it is a bit depressing. If even one quarter of this is true, you can see why people might find it difficult to establish a secure, reliable telecommunications system. Richard Grove is a part of the Grand Theft World podcast . Subscribe to Kim Iversen .  See also  Angela Collier's Book Chat with Alan Melikdjanian . 

Susan Stepney - Life as a Cyber-bio-physical System

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This is interesting. See  Martyna Marciniak  and  Semantic Closure . I found this talk whilst looking for Robert Rosen's posthumously published 1991 book Life Itself - A Comprehensive Enquiry into the Nature, Origin and Fabrication of Life . Here is a well-written review by Sarah Voss. See also Robert Rosen’s Relational Biology Theory and His Emphasis on Non-Algorithmic Approaches to Living Systems by Patricia A. Lane. It's quite sane, but I think I could help with the meta-dynamics of open systems ( 31:20 ) In short, the meta-dynamics of the open system is effectively the embodiment of the organisms' own cognitive system in its environment, so it's a shared interlocking and interdependent phase space. That is why I have so much trouble with the ideas of Levin and his followers who plug living tissue into a neural network and then select for certain behaviour they think will attract funding or attention or something, and it's invariably in very poor taste. See als...

Angela Collier's Book Chat with Alan Melikdjanian

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It's a really great discussion about the novel Trust by Hernan Diaz . It sounds good, but really complicated. I can imagine needing to write notes to be able to figure out what I'm supposed to be reading and if I was doing that I might as well be trying to explain quantum mechanics or something. However, this does remind me a bit of The Blazing World by Siri Hustvedt, which I really enjoyed. Apparently (though not to me, I only just read this in another review ) the title is a reference to Margaret Cavendish 's novel  The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World . Subscribe to Angela Collier .

Lexi Groves - The gpg.fail aftermath: On responsible disclosure, GPG, and the state of security in 2026

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Great talk about open source and FSF politics. See  https://gpg.fail/  and  To sign or not to sign: Practical vulnerabilities in GPG & friends .  19:50 Janitors that are too important to waste their time doing anything better than they already do it. That's not to say that rewriting  garbage in rust is a better thing to do! Don't write garbage! See  Sukyoung Ryu - Programming Language Research for Technical and Social Good (KAIST) .  Talk from December last year: Subscribe to  media.ccc.de . 

Martyna Marciniak

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This is really interesting. She explains how, through self-reference, she became the Pope. At least that's how I imagine López-Díaz and Gershenson would put it (see Semantic Closure ). See  Emanuele Tesauro's ' Il cannocchiale aristotelico ' : 15:33  What she is referring to by the phrase pre-optical notions of vision is, I think, ideas such as that of  Extramission , which seems to have been entertained by Euclid in his Optics ! I think the quote of Stanisław Lem she is referring to at  30:00 is this passage from Summa Technologiae , specifically the chapter Intelligence: An Accident or a Necessity? : When it comes to changes that would knock an organism out of its environmental equilibrium by “programming” some unforeseeable instincts into it, the answer of the “first-order regulator” turns out to be unsatisfactory—which results in a crisis. On one hand, the mortality of non-adapted organisms suddenly increases, while at the same time, selection pressure privileg...

The Scorpions - The Zoo

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It's Friday! Subscribe to The Scorpions . 

Semantic Closure

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See Closing the Loop: How Semantic Closure Enables Open-Ended Evolution?  by Amahury J. López-Díaz and Carlos Gershenson.   I found this sentence quite striking: "This manuscript explores the evolutionary emergence of semantic closure—the self-referential mechanism through which symbols actively construct and interpret their own functional contexts, ..." The paper has apparently been accepted for publication in the Royal Society's journal Interface . One wonders what these little symbols could be getting up to while mathematical biologists aren't paying attention, ... I suppose we should ask Steven Wolfram . See  Martin Elsman - Deriving a Kronecker-Free Functional Quantum Simulator . That talk Samson Abramsky gave in 2012 was really thought-provoking:   In particular A computable expression of closure to efficient causation by Matteo Mossio, Giuseppe Longo and John Stewart. The question about self-representation in total functional programming is an interestin...

Martin Elsman - Deriving a Kronecker-Free Functional Quantum Simulator

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See the paper Deriving a Kronecker-Free Functional Quantum Simulator .    17:22  How hard it is to find comprehensible surveys in this field. Reply by Samson Abramsky.   There was also a talk by Martin at ICFP 2026 ( 7:41:22 ) but they forgot to charge the microphone or something. However it's audible from 7:55:13 . Samson Abramsky on Quantum Monads 8:00  On relations and graph isomorphisms: the Heisenberg-Weyl algebra is a special case of generic graph rewriting.  See The algebras of graph rewriting by Nicolas Behr, Vincent Danos, Ilias Garnier and Tobias Heindel. I wonder how much proof theory can fit into this framework of isomorphism classes of graph-rewriting systems. See for example Sequent calculi for a unity of logic by Norihiro Yamada..: "Classical logic is the logic that permits unrestricted premise consumptions and reasoning do-overs , and is unaware of either".  See  The Sheaf-Theoretic Structure Of Non-Locality and Contextuality ...