🌀🗞 The FLUX Review, Ep. 135
February 29th, 2024
Episode 135 — February 29th, 2024 — Available at read.fluxcollective.org/p/135
Contributors to this issue: Neel Mehta, Boris Smus, Dimitri Glazkov, Erika Rice Scherpelz, Stefano Mazzocchi, MK
Additional insights from: Ade Oshineye, Ben Mathes, Justin Quimby, Alex Komoroske, Robinson Eaton, Spencer Pitman, Julka Almquist, Scott Schaffter, Lisie Lillianfeld, Samuel Arbesman, Dart Lindsley, Jon Lebensold, Melanie Kahl
We’re a ragtag band of systems thinkers who have been dedicating our early mornings to finding new lenses to help you make sense of the complex world we live in. This newsletter is a collection of patterns we’ve noticed in recent weeks.
“Life is far more interesting than it needs to be, because the forces that guide it are not merely practical.”
— David Rothenberg
📝 Editor’s note: Happy leap day! (The last February 29th to fall on a Thursday, our usual publication day, was back in 1996… so it’ll be a while till our next leap day edition!)
🏋️🏃🧠 The Epistemic Gym
Mens sana in corpore sano is an ancient principle: a healthy mind requires a healthy body. We exercise our bodies because they’re more than mere vehicles for our thinkware. There is also value in exercising the mind directly. Just as exercise is most effective when personally enjoyable, we can thoughtfully consider what routines are available in our personal epistemic gym.
Many readers of this newsletter likely consider reading part of their epistemic gym. For those of us in FLUX, we’ve come to find that writing this newsletter is even more of a workout. It gives us a routine to keep our minds flexible and exercised, healthier, more balanced, and prepared for whatever life throws at us. In this essay, we want to show how a regular commitment to structured writing can be a powerful form of mental exercise. (Although we think the newsletter also brings some value to the readers 😉)
The FLUX newsletter started during the COVID-19 pandemic when we needed thoughtful community to help us work through the disorientation and helplessness of systemic calamity. It quickly morphed into something different: a way to think with others, exchange ideas, and tickle each other’s curiosity. “Have you seen this?” “Oh, yes, this book also mentions this.” “That video game touched on this subject.” “Oh, here’s a blog post that, if you squint, seems resonant.”
The structure of the articles in the newsletter captures the structure of the FLUX space. Like various types of gym equipment, the newsletter pieces are our tools for exercising our minds in various ways.
The main article is our dance practice, a collaborative mix of creativity and structure that starts when one of us riffs, very broadly, on a topic that emerged during a conversation or a personal meandering thought. Others edit and riff some more. This is entirely uncoordinated. We don’t maintain ownership. The article becomes a collective process driven by resonation with the subject and the challenge alone. “Hmm, let me try this on, how does it feel?” “I’d change this a bit, does it feel different?”
Weirdly and counter-intuitively, this asynchronous polishing dance eventually generates a coherent final product good enough to be sent out into the world to catalyze more resonance and leave more question-shaped holes in people’s minds.
Signposts are collected from the many “Did you see this?” pointers we share in Discord. They are foundational parts of our epistemic stretching routine. We select them for their ability to surprise us, stimulate us, or indicate a phase transition in our ability to think about the future. They are not merely informative or newsworthy, they are generally outside the curve of our expectations.
The Worth Your Time and Book for Your Shelf sections are our distance running. They point to long-form content that takes time to digest and process. Their worth comes from providing insights with more nuance than fits in a shorter form. Just like we can’t get many benefits from jogging for a minute, we believe we can’t stretch our sensemaking without our ability to stay with it, even when it hurts, and our attention deficit comes to distract us.
The Lens of the Week is similar in spirit to the main article but focuses on different ways of sensemaking. A lens is akin to an epistemic yoga pose, a targeted way to stretch and exercise our minds. Some lenses feel comfortable and effortless. Others are difficult and require elasticity, balance, or sensemaking sense we don’t yet possess. Some are weird and beyond our current reach (yes, even for the authors!), although we recognize their potential value.
The Postcard from the future is a way to use the sense we are making in the present and extrapolate it into the future. With clear cyberpunk influences, we focus on the extremes of what’s possible if we play the current trends out. It’s our pickup basketball in which we get to paint a picture of what could be in ways that might trigger new insights.
FLUX is our epistemic gym. We engage with it daily through writing, Discord, and synchronous conversations. The newsletter is the semi-solidified outcome of our sense-making exercise. We share it with you in the hope of enticing others into exercising our collective minds to gain the flexibility, elasticity, strength, and health that can help us navigate an increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.
🛣️🚩 Signposts
Clues that point to where our changing world might lead us.
🚏🦀 The White House is encouraging programmers to use memory-safe languages
A new report out of the White House Office of the National Cyber Director encourages developers to use memory-safe programming languages like Rust while phasing out the use of C and C++. The report argued that using memory-safe languages (a group that also includes Java, C#, Go, and Swift) “can prevent entire classes of vulnerabilities from entering the digital ecosystem.”
🚏🍟 A fast food chain briefly flirted with “surge pricing” for its food
The Wendy’s CEO announced in an earnings call that the company would start experimenting with “dynamic pricing,” implemented with digital menu boards in stores that could change prices throughout the day. However, after swift backlash, the CEO walked back the announcement, saying that they wouldn’t increase prices at busy times. Instead, he said the digital boards would only offer discounts at slower times of the day (which may achieve a similar end goal).
🚏🌭 Ghost kitchens are using AI-generated food pictures on food delivery apps
Some ghost kitchens — vendors who sell food on delivery apps without having an actual storefront, often using made-up brand names — have been spotted using AI-generated pictures of food on their DoorDash and Grubhub listings. The food often looks enticing but doesn’t at all resemble what the restaurant actually sells. Said one journalist:
“AI-generated images of food that people can order and eat finally brings us to a shockingly literal manifestation of Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra. Baudrillard would say the Spicy Philly Cheese from Philly Cheez is ‘never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’”
🚏🧯 America’s main nuclear weapons facility had to evacuate due to Texas wildfires
The Pantex plant in far northern Texas is the US’s main facility for the assembly and disassembly of its atomic bombs. On Tuesday night, the plant had to evacuate its “non-essential personnel” due to raging wildfires in the area — caused in part by abnormally warm temperatures.
📖⏳ Worth your time
Some especially insightful pieces we’ve read, watched, and listened to recently.
Is AI Actually Useful? (Patrick Boyle) — Analyzes a recent study of consultants using LLMs to help make business recommendations. Some key findings: LLMs helped lower-skilled workers more than it helped higher-skilled workers (at least for the tasks that LLMs were good at), thus closing the gap somewhat; LLMs yielded generally better outputs, but they had less variance and creativity than human-only work; and LLMs hurt workers when used for tasks AI was bad at — though the harm was reduced if workers were trained on AI use beforehand.
Metrics, Cowardice, and Mistrust (Ivan Vendrov) — Describes a feedback loop in which making the wrong call based on intuition or delegating to someone who does the same, can harm your career at a corporate job. The author argues that this results in a “CYA” mentality, which causes an over-reliance on metrics at the expense of velocity, trust, and good outcomes.
We Are Entering a Maker Renaissance (Dimitri Glazkov) — FLUX’s own Dimitri observes that, at some point in every new technological S-curve, the platform becomes ready enough that tinkerers can come in and begin playing with the technology, thus answering the question of “what is this thing actually good for?” by building to learn with really tight feedback loops. Generative AI’s maker era is upon us.
Why Julius Caesar’s Year of Confusion Was the Longest Year in History (BBC) — Details how Caesar reformed the hopelessly messy Roman calendar, oversaw a year with 445 days to bring the calendar back in line with the Sun, introduced leap days, and fell victim to the classic off-by-one error in counting years (until Augustus fixed the error some years later).
🔍📆 Lens of the week
Introducing new ways to see the world and new tools to add to your mental arsenal.
This week’s lens: Crystallized Imagination.
In the book Why Information Grows, Cesar Hidalgo introduces a curious and poetic term for objects we create through our interactions. These objects act as a way to capture and share information as crystallized imagination.
To get a sense of the term, look at the device you’re using to read this sentence. It is likely a laptop, a display, or a phone. Each of these concentrates a tremendous amount of information into the crystal of a useful product. To get the scale of the information involved, imagine how much knowledge and practice it takes to convert raw materials into the sleek shell of a phone, ensuring that it works reliably and simply in your hands. Consider how much know-how wrangling pixels it takes to bring the clear and crisp letters that convey a message. And that doesn’t even touch on the magic of electricity or the marvel of near-instantaneous transmission of data worldwide.
This feels ordinary and commonplace, yet it all began as imagination. Every single bit of information that comprises any device we use – from a simple hammer to the latest AR headset – began with an idea that didn’t exist before. Crystallized imagination evokes the well-deserved sense of awe (and sometimes, horror) toward the things we humans were able to turn from thoughts to reality.
Yet the transmission could be better. Crystallized imagination shows how information becomes frozen and compressed as it becomes more commonplace. You don’t need to know how to mine lithium to make a phone call, even though that know-how would be necessary to create a phone. Nor can you directly improve the efficiency of my phone’s battery even if you do have the know-how. The simpler and more streamlined the technology, the more crystallized the imagination.
Conversely, less polished products, like tools with steep learning curves, leave some imagination uncrystallized, leaving more space for discovering new ideas. This gives the products’ users more agency to shape it into something uniquely theirs… or perhaps even build new crystals of imagination on top of them.
© 2024 The FLUX Collective. All rights reserved. Questions? Contact flux-collective@googlegroups.com.
Reading FLUX was a major inspiration for me to start my own newsletter. It's been always a good read and prompt-for-thoughts, bit it also looked like a lot of fun to *write*. Thank you!