Namra Patel

on the atlas — 6

• The DALL·E 2 prompt book1 savers
• You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin1 savers
• June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine6 savers
• Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s — cdixon3 savers
• How the revolutionary fails small but wins big1 savers
• moral-fn.pdf10 savers

highlights — 32

• To make dissident ideas more fashionable, it is not necessary to “water them down.” Just the opposite—it is necessary to make them more daring, more frightening and beautiful, more audacious and transgressive, more surprising and delightful. The strategy of the dark elf is to seduce the ruling high elves into losing faith in their own prestigious institutions—by showing them something that attracts them more—by painting a picture of an amazing and totally different future as a work of art.

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• The Soviet empire was not overthrown by any centrifugal, secessionist force. Earlier rebellions in the outer provinces were suppressed easily. The Soviet empire was overthrown by its own leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, who had the same job as Stalin—and by the cadre of young officials who had come up with Gorbachev. The path to the future did not run through the workers and peasants; it ran through this small elite. Once this elite was corrupted with Western doctrines, once it lost its unswerving faith in the socialist future, it and the regime it powered were doomed.

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• Regimes are overthrown in two ways: by others, or by themselves. Today’s global elites are invulnerable to any external coercive power and can coerce any internal coercive power. Like the USSR, they can only overthrow themselves.

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• The only culture war that matters is the culture war between the dark elves and the high elves. This war is not fought with bombs and bullets, or even laws and judges. This war is fought with books and films and plays and poems. It is still a savage war!

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• The culture war of the dark elves

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• (One reason to anonymously shitpost today, keeping one’s credentials the darkest of secrets, is that the same credentials which can hang you today can also prove to a future regime when you came to your senses. Earlier, obviously, is better.)

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• Hobbits do not need to be in charge. Hobbits do not want to rule the world, should not want to rule the world, and could not rule the world. Hobbits do not even need to be governed by hobbits—they just need to be governed as hobbits.

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• The problem is that elves do not want to be ruled by hobbits, and hobbits do not want to rule elves. Even if the hobbits were not hobbits and so could spontaneously organize a hobbit revolution, this contradiction would prevent victory.

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• America is a political marriage of blue-state elves and red-state hobbits. The elves are terrified of the hobbits’ pitchforks. They can only survive by ruling the hobbits with an iron hand—or at least, by inundating the hobbits’ brains with pro-elf propaganda—or better yet, both.

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• “our constitution,” per John Adams, “was made only for a moral and religious people.” Does not Pres. Adams’ data point argue strongly for a new constitutional thinking?

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• abortion tourism as a whole will blossom

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• In a situation of weakness, the only possible reversal must come from strategy rather than struggle.

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• Winning a battle in the culture war—as in today’s Current Thing, the repeal of Roe v. Wade—is not like leaving your abusive husband. It is certainly not like finding a new husband. No—it is like hitting your husband back.

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• While not forgetting the fact that for the two centuries before 1980 or so, red—the color of anger—was the color of the left.

  You can only lose the culture war - by Curtis Yarvin

• He briefly flirted with the idea of being a science writer and decided to major in astronomy and physics. But he frequently skipped class, and he had to retake several courses. “I was just generally lost,” he said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what I was good at.”

  June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine

• Moreover, as he later realized, “I wanted to be someone who writes great poetry,” he said. “I didn’t want to write great poetry.” Now he sees that version of himself as almost a complete stranger.

  June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine

• When he was 16 years old and in the middle of his first year in high school (which lasts for three years in South Korea), he decided to drop out to write poetry. He was something of a romantic. “I could literally physically cry after listening to good music,” he said. He wrote about nature and about his own experiences. He planned to complete his masterpiece in the two years before he’d have to attend university. “So that didn’t happen,” he laughed.

  June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine

• On any given day, Huh does about three hours of focused work. He might think about a math problem, or prepare to lecture a classroom of students, or schedule doctor’s appointments for his two sons. “Then I’m exhausted,” he said. “Doing something that’s valuable, meaningful, creative” — or a task that he doesn’t particularly want to do, like scheduling those appointments — “takes away a lot of your energy.” To hear him tell it, he doesn’t usually have much control over what he decides to focus on in those three hours. For a few months in the spring of 2019, all he did was read. He felt an urge …

  June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine

• Cynics sound smart but optimists build the future.

  Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s — cdixon

• In retrospect, there was a convergence of three powerful trends: social media (by then that word was replacing web 2), cloud computing (which would enable the apps to scale server side), and the rise of smartphones. Independent product design spaces are multiplicative: even if social, cloud, and mobile each improved linearly, the combination could improve exponentially.

  Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s — cdixon

• What if you took this feature and that feature and combined them? What if you applied this design pattern to a different context? What original product concepts would be invented next? This is what got people so excited. In contrast, the “serious stuff,” security appliances and such, seemed much more limited in their possibilities.

  Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s — cdixon

• A prominent research firm published a study asking Americans if they'd adopt broadband and the majority said no. Email was the most popular internet use case and they didn’t see the need to make it faster. The National Academy of Sciences ranked the internet 13th in its list of great inventions over the last 100 years, beneath radio and telephones. The mainstream consensus was that the internet was a cool invention, but had limited use cases, and probably wasn't a good place to build a business.

  Toys, Secrets, and Cycles: Lessons from the 2000s — cdixon

• he fails to mention that most academic cryptography isn’t really crypto-for-security or crypto-for-privacy: it is, one could say, crypto-for-crypto —meaning that it doesn’t ostensibly benefit commerce or privacy, and it’s quite speculative if it will ever evolve to do either.

  moral-fn.pdf

• Here the author distinguishes between pragmatic crypto —which is about trying to use cryptography to retain our predigital privacy—and cypherpunk crypto —the grander hope of using cryptography to precipitate sweeping social or political reforms. The author suggests that crypto-for-security has done well, but crypto-for-privacy has fared badly.

  moral-fn.pdf

• Conclusion to part 2. A 2013 essay by Arvind Narayanan suggests a simple taxonomy for cryptographic work: 100 there’s crypto-for-security and crypto-for- privacy. Crypto-for-security is crypto for commercial purposes. It’s the crypto in TLS, payment cards, and cell phones. Crypto-for-privacy has social or political aims.

  moral-fn.pdf

• The collectivist error. Communism doesn't differentiate between shareable things & unshareable things. Common laundries work but common kitchens won’t: “Cooking is an art; it has in it personality." While some things can't help but be public, others must remain private.

  How the revolutionary fails small but wins big

• We typically think ofmending and ending as two sides of the same coin, but Chesterton says they are “opposite things.” He writes: “You mend a thing because you like it; you end a thing because you don't.” Mending is an act of love; ending is a cold goodbye.

  How the revolutionary fails small but wins big

• Similarly, Edward Snowden writes: 72 In words from history, let us speak no more of faith in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of cryptography.

  moral-fn.pdf

• Conspiracies are like graphs, the conspirators nodes, the pairwise relations among them, the edges. Instead of removing nodes or disrupting links, you can weaken any conspiracy by suffusing it in an ever-present threat of leaks. The more unjust the conspiracy, the more likely leaks will occur, and the more damage they will do. As elites become fearful to conspire, they do so reservedly. The conspiratorial creature’s blood thickens and it dies. 70 It is a fascinating vision.

  moral-fn.pdf

• I suspect that many of you see no real connection between social, political, and ethical values and what you work on. You don’t build bombs, experiment on people, or destroy the environment. You don’t spy on populations. You hack math and write papers. This doesn’t sound ethically laden. I want to show you that it is.

  moral-fn.pdf

• It says that your moral duties extend beyond the imperative that you personally do no harm: you have to try to promote the social good, too.

  moral-fn.pdf

• Ultimately, I think the post-war turn towards social responsibility in science and engineering was less a turn than a sideways glance.

  moral-fn.pdf