Shortform #60 Back From Vacation

All of Wednesday [28 July] was spent travelling, as there were significant delays to my flight thanks to thunderstorms occurring on the flight path. Made it home safely though, but spending most of the day in airports or on airplanes is not the most fun sort of day.

I had an extremely good time on vacation in and around Madison, Wisconsin! What a lovely, pleasant, and beautiful place, I'll be happy to visit again one day.

Today I unpacked, rested, applied for a really cool job, and generally recombobulated (fun fact: the Milwaukee airport has an official "Recombobulation Zone" immediately after the security screening area; I haven't noticed other airports give this kind of zone a name before, but I like that the Milwaukee airport did). I have weekend plans for a family member's wedding shower and am looking forward to that! Monday it's back to the job hunting grindstone, for I am eager to be employed once more and reap all the benefits which accompany employment. Seattle beckons! As do a number of other things.

Hammertime Intermission for my group runs from 29 July - 1 August, we resume with Day 11 - Bug Hunt 2 on Monday 2 August. I personally will use the intermission to finish up the last few lessons from phase 1 I didn't make time for while on vacation, redo a few things, reflect, and so on.

I have written ~60 ish shortform posts now. This has been a great and enriching experience for me. I have way more confidence in writing publicly, noticed increased confidence generally, am more coherent, am generally more productive, and am having fun. I will continue doing these shortforms and writing publicly, there's much more growth to come! And so much to write about.

A non-exhaustive list of topics that are on my mind semi-regularly or regularly:

• The use of tools by humans and the impact thereof
• Software licensing schemes and philosophies, aka: what governs the mediation of the world we experience and all the impacts thereof, especially regarding future technologies that will literally change the machinery of human beingness and alter what experiences are possible.
• Do beliefs I have about X make sense, pay rent, and/or check out aka are they true?
• Cohering my thinking on X subject by reading deeply on it and writing about it
• Plunging through my archives (I've read a tremendous amount of things and saved much for offline use) and writing brief summaries about most of what's there or longer summaries or other types of writings to increase the legibility of my thoughts, development, idea lineages, increase coherency, and so on.
• Values, AI, and alignment problems
• Actually achieving human immortality
• How to build a value / moral aligned society to last over the long term especially while distributed across the vast distances of space and with immortal humans. Aka exploring the ultimate goal of political philosophy
• Contemplative traditions, philosophies, theologies, experiences, etc.
• Taking ideas seriously and doing things about them

Helpful things I reread on a regular basis lately:
My Fear Heuristic
Four Components of Audacity

What I'll be rereading, taking notes on, and carefully evaluating: Liber Augmen
You should go read that book (very strong endorse).

Be well!
Cheers,
Willa