xcvr is coming along nicely and will probably be ready for beta release in a few weeks!
i coded a few of the endpoints that i was planning on doing last week, and I hope that they’re alright now though i didn’t yet set up the frontend for them. i also got the app password auth working for signets, and just after that i got the jetstream integration too. so at this point, i basically have every system on the backend there in some initial state, although i might need to make a few small changes to lrc so that it can create the signets. & one final thing which might take a day or two is allowing for subscription to a channels signet stream, this will make a lot of things nicer, but it’s not technically necessary.
i’m on vacation so idk how much in depth i’ll get on any philosophical musings this week, but one thing that i have been thinking about which perhaps ties in to this and which perhaps doesn’t at all, is the physicality of information. i think that math brain really likes information to be this abstract thing independent of the world, and computers and all that crap promote like a commodity fetishism of information which make it as if bits and boops are these pristine eternal things, but, surprise! i think it’s not so much like this really.
as an aside, i much prefer french’s word for computer science major, “informatique,” the mathematics of information.
it’s a bit hard to describe the view that i disagree with because it’s a bit incoherent. but i think it fails on two levels. suppose the information we want to preserve is a flower. we can press it, but eventually it goes bad, we can draw it, but the drawing will eventually get smudged. if we paint it the pigments go bad, and if we digitally photograph it, the bits will rot. ultimately there is no transcendent information register that can be accessed with a strong enough computer that we can store a representation of the flower in. it will be forgotten.
i think this is not a very interesting thought, everyone gets it whether or not it’s how we act. i do think that someone smarter than me right now could make some sort of comparison to commodity fetishism where the internet as information marketplace inscribes in our actions the false belief of the transcendent info register. or perhaps it comes from our minds, which appear to ourselves even more transcendent, idk.
what i think is a bit more interesting are the ways how information and time intersect. since information is this physical thing, then that means in order for awareness of an event to propagate, a lot of physical things must occur. when i think of how i used to conceptualize propaganda in authoritarianism, like when you read 1984 in high school, or when you learn about nazi germany etc… a lot of time is spent discussing the internal nature of the ideas being disseminated. like in 1984, doublethink, or the vocabulary etc… and in nazi germany like hitler’s speeches and comparing them to trump or whatever. there may be a place for these very idealist ways of looking at things, certainly this contributes, but i find that when you think of information as a physical thing, now all of a sudden concepts like informational logistics come into play.
i really liked the film nickel boys for this reason. the pov camera was a bit of a red herring in my view, necessary for the storytelling, but the essential aspect of it to me was how precisely it detailed all of the mechanisms which stymied the propogation of information out of the school. i think the liberal reaction to catastrophic evil is “how could x have happened in this world, i thought we were past that barbarism…”; the (cute)accelerationist reponse: “everything that counts takes place before anyone can ask what happened?”
i think just having an idea is not enough, you need to be able to metabolize the time to make it into something physical, and then you need to construct, use, or hijack supply lines in order to get it out there.
i think the more i program, the more stupid libertarian ideas get into my head. it’s addicting being able to speak and create something from the ground to the sky. maybe i should go out into the desert and build a perfect city with my eyes closed, ZERO FEEDBACK style. oh, as an aside, i listen to hard fork podcast haha maybe its this nyt slop which puts the dumb ideas in my head and not the act of programming, but anyway they had the founder of like gumroad on after he got kicked out of DOGE and he said something like, “i wasn’t that interested in it guys i’m totally normal i just don’t value my time much, i just wanted to try it out…” and i just don’t believe that you can be a not just a successful software engineer, but also a successful capitalist without technocapital programming you to think in terms of tet, it’s native tongue… do they think we’re stupid? (yes)
anyway, i think that also programming, even more than the internet creates this false belief in the transcendence of ideas and the idea that you can & should refactor society or just a small subset—the city, the house, the life—to be more efficient and elegant.
so where does this leave us?
i think building community on the internet is a bit tough because you are grape & the space is very stratified, and i think stratification is opposes the propogation of information. so xcvr of course to me is about destratifying the social space and allowing for easier initialization of informational logistics. idk if i have much else to say. the other thing is that i hope to release soon so that i don’t have to live in this fake transcendent limbo where my ideas pretend to matter, and instead i get into the icky goopy REAL WORLD where i tend to n flowers.
rotpolitics right this second! -rachel