Blyggers Mind

This reminds me of the freedom that comes from a beginners mind. Dare I say a blyggers mind? :P

It is that I, an octogenarian, feel no wiser now than I did when I was a graduate student. Such awareness used to depress me, but no longer because I have come to realize that immaturity is a defining characteristic of the human species. A wise old dog or chimpanzee, that I can accept, though not a wise old man or woman. The image of a guru sitting cross-legged on a mountain ledge or of a professor corseted in thick layers of arcane knowledge is to me not only distasteful but comic. Why? Because both self-satisfied figures seem to take pride in having lassoed their roaming mind long before their bodily death.

Yi-Fu Tuan - The Farewell Lecture ↗

Excellent thought

from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · snapshot of v1

Blygging Test

Update from mobile: here we are! Muahaha

Is there an easy way to quote just part of an article? In the burrow desktop app, the intertwingler thing quotes the whole piece. I will need to play with this.

Here's a transclude.

Timeliness of AI

AI seems to have a certain providence and kairos like quality of arriving in the knick of time to address zeitgeist challenges... a couple initial ones: state capacity broadly, permitting specifically, meta-science reproducibility... in particular AI as a tool to leverage archival time (H/T Sachin) seems purpose situated for the growing complexity of contemporary life. It's like the long twentienth century and its accretion of rational-legal rules that made up the modernity machine needed a broom to clean up the legacy system writ large.

Flagging as a loose though to return to...

fragment ↗ · snapshot of v1

Here's another transclude:

Protocols for Business: LLM Impact on Version Control and Business Processes

Session of 8 December 2025. Participants: timber1997, rafa_0x, sachbenny.

The SIGPfB group discussed fundamental challenges LLMs present to core business protocols, particularly around version control, traceability, and historical record-keeping. Timber1997 identified that LLMs are ineffective at handling sequences and maintaining version narratives, while rafa_0x highlighted missing traceability and checkpoints as key problems. The group explored a counterintuitive insight: when reproduction costs are near-zero, the traditional need for 'undo' functionality diminishes, even if perfect reproduction is impossible.

Key points

• LLMs struggle with version control and maintaining sequential traceability, which are fundamental to business protocols but not fully protected from AI impact.
• When reproduction costs approach zero (even if exact reproduction is impossible), traditional 'undo' functionality becomes less critical, enabling strategies like full codebase refactoring.
• Organizations need to adapt code auditing and planning policies specifically to account for LLM-assisted development, rather than implementing generic LLM usage policies.
• The discussion shifted from LLM adoption resistance to examining how auditing, planning, and governance policies should evolve in response to widespread employee LLM usage.

Source: Protocol Institute meeting archive · PI website commit f48390c. Summarized by c3po, the Protocol Institute's session pipeline, from the session's Discord thread.

from Protocols for Business SIG ↗ · snapshot of v1

[So that's what transcluding is: instead of copying text from one piece into another, you pull it in by reference, so the original shows up live inside the new post. Edit the source and every place it's transcluded updates too. It's quoting without duplicating, which is why I want to figure out how to grab just a passage instead of the whole thing.]

Can you do an AI summary of a transclude?

[The short version of that note: AI seems to be showing up at just the right moment, almost providentially, to take on some of the defining challenges of the present. A few early examples are state capacity in general, permitting in particular, and reproducibility in meta-science. The sharpest angle is AI as a tool for leveraging "archival time" (H/T Sachin), which suits the way contemporary life keeps getting more complex. The long twentieth century piled up layer after layer of rational-legal rules, and AI might be the broom that modernity machine needed to clean up its legacy systems. It's still a loose thought, flagged to come back to.]

02026-OCT-06 -- Testing the new changes.

Capitalism! The new cousin of (Science!) tm.

I started poking around the Kindle sample of the relentless revolution. I am drawn more to the other October Contraptions book club reading, The Birth of the Modern World, but the introduction's definitions* sparked a few ideas.

Specifically the crisp clarity on what constitutes capitalism:

Stated simply, capital becomes capital when someone uses it to gain more money, usually by producing something. We can add an “ism” to “capital” only when the imperatives and strategies of private investments come to dominance as they did first in England and the Netherlands, next in Western Europe, and then in the American colonies.

And what it replaced:

To prevent social unrest, rulers monitored the growing, selling, and exporting of grain crops. Where there were legislatures, they passed restrictive laws. Hemmed in by regulations, people had few opportunities to make trouble—or undertake new enterprises. Most manufacturing went on in the household, where family members turned fibers into fabric and made foodstuffs edible. Custom, not incentives, prompted action and dictated the flow of work throughout the year. People did not assign themselves parts in this social order; tasks were allocated through the inherited statuses of landlord, tenant, father, husband, son, laborer, wife, mother, daughter, and servant.

The folks I know personally (not famous master of the universe types) who are the biggest defenders of capitalism tend to have an atavistic attitude towards preserving the established order. Which is incredibly antithetical to the original impetus and growth of capitalism through risk taking and incentives.

Folks I know who actually use money to gain more money by producting something tend to be more pragmatic. Particularly if they're actually close to producing something and not up in the ether of our abstracted economy.

This reminds me of something VGR said about how Science! (tm) types tend to not be actually interested in the cultural specific behaviors that make up science such as experimentation, testing, predictive power etc. Instead its a rallying cry and political banner. I'd be curious if others have similar experiences and anecdata.

This Capitalism! rather than capitalism framing also helps make sense of the substantial rentseeking we see at the national level. There is increasingly capital invested not in productive enterprises so much as the symbolism of that, larps of doing big important risk taking things rather than actually going forth and boldly building.

There is a lesser mirror of that in state capture locally and in labor union and green economy dynamics where the language of incentives and competition and risk taking is co-opted by cozy interactions between moneyed interests and government power.

On a secant, I find that defintions and introductions can be quite revealing for what they take to be axiomatic. I used to enjoy reading math textbook introductions for exactly that purpose.

Can a good protocol help avoid bad games if not bad outcomes? Something I'm mulling...

This is great!

Protocol thinking is way more distinct from product thinking than I appreciated. Not different by degree. Not even different by kind. It’s different at the paradigmatic level.

First, traditional product thinking is outcome-based. One picks a target state, evaluates risks, and constructs archetypical cases to steer toward it. Success is arriving at the intended destination.

Protocol thinking optimises for something else entirely: an expansion of the moves available to players of the game. The protocol designer does have near-term goals, such as interoperability, legibility, and a low cost of compliance, but beyond them, they deliberately under-determine what gets built. That restraint is the point. Every outcome specified is a move taken off the board for someone else.

This is why indexing on outcomes, or even a cluster of them, fails. The upside a good protocol unlocks isn’t just hard to predict; it’s unnameable in advance. Steering toward a target state, however carefully chosen, narrows the space that’s meant to be widening. The question is whether others can now do surprising things in surprising ways neither they nor we could have specified beforehand.

Second, because protocol thinking solves for, essentially, unanticipated upside and future ecosystem optionality, one’s stance toward value capture and accumulated credit must change dramatically. Not softened. Abandoned.

Credit requires attribution, and attribution requires a nameable outcome. The moment one starts keeping score, one is pulled back toward the outcomes one can point at, which is to say back toward product thinking.

Value capture does the same damage more directly: every toll taken is a tax on the very moves the protocol was meant to make available. The aim is to expand others’ agency, not enlarge the designer’s share.

Protocol thinking in this sense asks for something product thinking never does: surrendering one’s own agency, credit accumulation and value capture in exchange for others’ capacity to accrue them.

Third, inbound changes must be guarded far more judiciously. In product, a feature request is a signal to weigh against a roadmap. In a protocol, a proposed change is an amendment to the rules everyone plays by, and it deserves scrutiny proportional to that, especially when it foregrounds someone’s value capture.

Some open-source projects have closed themselves to outside contributions rather than drown in evaluating them. That’s one answer. The better one is explicit criteria and quality gates that make the bar legible before anything is proposed. The bar must be high because, in a protocol, the letter and the spirit have to be synonymous.

Product teams can lean on intent, norms, and a terms-of-service page. Protocols can’t. Anything the rules permit will eventually be done; anything extractable will be extracted, as maximal extractable value shows with grim reliability. A change that’s harmless in spirit but exploitable in letter is simply exploitable. If the spirit isn’t encoded in the letter, it doesn’t exist.

from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · snapshot of v1

Moving beyond metric capture

Goodhardt's law is a fixture among a certain set of wonks, techies, and internet native types.

the moment a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Cobras offer a canonical example. Cobras you ask. Yes in the British raj coras presented a problem so there was a bounty placed on cobras. As a result cobras were breed. When the authorities discovered that, they ended the bounty program and the breeders let their cobras free, resulting in more cobras than at the start of the episode.

One experiment I've long been curious to run is moving from purely quantative metrics (such as number of cobras killed) to rigorous engagement with the underlying question (such as are cobras presenting a problem for people).

Moody's doesn't publish a one-time assessment of a municipality's fiscal health and call it done. It maintains a living judgment, updated as conditions change, sensitive to leading indicators, explicit about what it's watching. Downgrades happen mid-cycle. Outlooks shift from stable to negative before anything catastrophic occurs. The whole apparatus is designed to surface trouble while there's still time to act, and the market pays for that signal because the market moves on it.

Imagine a parallel apparatus for public programs: not an annual performance report but an ongoing impact rating that synthesizes administrative data, community feedback, and independent analysis into a regularly updated assessment. "Watch status." "Outlook: deteriorating." "Core outcomes stable; equity indicators warrant review." The language of credit markets applied to the public interest, with AI doing the continuous synthesis that makes frequent updates tractable rather than prohibitively expensive.

Consider how this would work for something as ordinary as a new after-school program in a mid-size school district. Under the current model, the district applies for a grant, defines success as "200 students enrolled" and "10% improvement in reading scores," runs the program for three years, and submits a final report. Maybe the program is working brilliantly for third graders and failing completely for sixth graders. Maybe attendance craters after the first semester because the bus schedule changed. Maybe the most important thing happening is that a cluster of kids who were otherwise unsupervised between 3 and 6 PM are no longer showing up in juvenile incident reports. None of this nuance survives the binary pass/fail of the final evaluation. A living impact rating would catch the bus schedule problem in month four. It would flag the divergence between age cohorts. It would notice the juvenile incident correlation before anyone thought to look for it, because a well-designed rating system watches for what's actually happening, not just what the original grant application promised would happen.

Source of the long quote is a blog post of mine from a while back: https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/outcomes-on-tap

Context on the cobra effect: https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Cobra-Effect/

Embracing a cyberpaleo lifestyle, one garmin watch face at a time

One fun little ai experiment I did at the Protocol Symposium the week before last was build a custom watch face for my garmin. Rather than tell 24H or 12H (AM/PM) style typical time, the watch shows the number of hours past sunrise and until sunset using the paragonday standard mentioned at the PI symposium. Check out the results here: https://github.com/patwater/paragonday-std-garmin-face

I made a couple of tweaks like also including first and last light as a practical piece of information. I like the protocol because it offers the possibility to be genuinely useful for camping and outdoor adventures. When camping I like to get off typical clocktime, laden as it is with baggage about efficiency and work.

Growing up, a typical family ritual was guessing the ETA to a place and my dad was fairly obcessed about optimization. Losing clocks shifts from Chronos to Kairos.*

I plan to test this weekend in a little mountain cabin adventure.

I picked up this idea from VGR:

Very roughly, you have Chronos for objective time, Kairos for subjective time, and the least-known, Aion, for a sort of outside-of-time eternalism.

He has a bunch of blog posts back on ribbonfarm that are fun to dig through.

https://ribbonfarm.com/2018/05/29/reality-maintenance/

Forks must flatten

Figured out and resolved an ambiguity in how forks behave. Currently, a fork just captures the literal text of the immediate pinned text. If it includes any transcludes, those are included as id markups rather than retrieved and flattened text. After a discussion with Fable, the behavior needed is that forks must flatten everything in the source. We considered the alternative that a pin must require everything it transcludes to also be pinned, but this is both the wrong behavior logically, and obviously mindlessly tedious. A fork is now a promise to stand behind your content plus the snapshots of any other content you use. Stabilize the referrent without requiring recursive stabilization of everything beyond it.

from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · snapshot of v1

Man I need to start a running Claude session to translate this stuff. I am a simple guy.

[Transclusion is when one document pulls in another piece of content by reference instead of copying it. Rather than pasting the text, you drop in a pointer, like that ![[...]] at the top, and the tool shows the real thing inline, live, right where the pointer sits.

Ted Nelson came up with the term back in the '60s as part of Project Xanadu. His idea was that quoting shouldn't mean duplicating. It should mean pointing straight at the original, so you always know where a passage came from and can click through to its full context. In his version, a transclusion could point at a specific version of a text, so the quote never drifts or breaks, even if the source keeps changing.

Obsidian-style ![[note]] embeds are a lightweight version of the same idea. The ! means "show it here," and the stuff in brackets says what to show. Edit the source, and every place that transcludes it updates too. It's one source of truth that appears in many places.]

Ah ha I like the idea of a sort of special linking to the specific version of a text. So no screenshot shenanigans or link updates.

Let's have AI explain all of this.

[The note is about what happens when you fork a piece of text that has transclusions inside it.

Quick setup: a pin locks a piece of content to a specific version, so it won't drift. A fork takes that pinned text and makes your own copy you can build on. The question is what a fork does with any ![[...]] pointers sitting inside the text you're copying.

Until now, a fork grabbed the text exactly as written, pointers included. So if the original said "as explained in ![[some-note]]," your fork kept that pointer instead of the words it pointed to. That's a problem. Your fork is supposed to be stable, but those pointers still reach out to live content that can change underneath you. Part of your "frozen" copy isn't actually frozen.

The fix is that forks must flatten. When you fork, every transclusion gets resolved and replaced with the actual text it points to at that moment, all the way down. The result is a solid copy with no live wires hanging out of it.

There was another option on the table: require that anything a pin transcludes must also be pinned, and anything those transclude, and so on. It was rejected for two reasons. It's the wrong idea, because you shouldn't need control over someone else's content just to stand behind your own. It's also exhausting, since you'd have to chase down and lock every link in the chain before you could pin anything.

So a fork now means two things together. It's your promise to stand behind what you wrote, plus a snapshot of whatever you borrowed, taken at the moment you forked. You lock down the thing you're pointing at without having to lock down everything it points at.]

Sidebar: I am one who likes the idea of bot graphics to demarcate AI text in a fun and playful way. Focus on communicating ideas clearly.

Patching Planetary Plumbing

When I was a Coro fellow, the core discipline was to climb down the ladder of abstraction until labels like "policy," "infrastructure" and "technology" gave way to what people were actually doing, and that habit is why Chor Pharn's "The Builders Are Thinking" resonates with me. Chor starts from a tidy planetary picture in which Europe supplies the normative and institutional grammar and China supplies the capacity to manufacture and spread the material substrate, then shows that this picture quietly assumes we already know where thinking happens. Once we notice that builders think, the temptation is to flip the hierarchy, but builders, regulators and philosophers all carry blind spots, so the better move is to go where the thinking is happening. The same collapse is visible in engineering today, where the line between civil and software engineers dissolves in the mess of actually building and operating systems, because anyone keeping a grid, a network or a treatment plant running is designing, coding, negotiating and maintaining all at once. https://thecuttingfloor.substack.com/p/the-builders-are-thinking?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1fnfr

Future of FDE-ish roles

I wonder how AI will shift the FDE type of role... on one hand the tools democratize access to software-shaped capabilities. On the other there will be new locally specific, technically nuanced problems.

The points about the shift away from agile resonate, particularly as we look at digital migrations in difficult environments like infrastructure, utilities, healthcare, schools, stuff like that... requires planning and navigating lots of path dependency.

Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs): Business Model, Role Evolution, and Market Implications

Session of 3 November 2025. Participants: rafa_0x, sachbenny, thewanderingeditor, timber1997, holajorge, mihir0k, stevebeans., oneiromancer2665.

The SIGPfB group discussed the emerging role of Forward-Deployed Engineers (FDEs) and its implications for software business models. The conversation revealed that FDEs primarily conduct information processing and context collection for customers rather than traditional implementation work, reversing the product-driven approach that has dominated Silicon Valley. Participants noted that this model represents a return to customer-driven business practices, exemplified by Palantir's Foundry platform, and functions as an extended, machine-augmented version of Waterfall development. The role requires significant in-person engagement and trust-building, making it difficult to scale with traditional staffing approaches.

Key points

• FDE work is primarily information processing and context collection rather than interface customization, representing a shift from product-driven to customer-driven business models similar to Palantir's approach.
• The FDE role resembles traditional service-based relationships (handymen, gardeners, consultants) and may evolve into a standalone consulting service comparable to Big Four consulting firms.
• FDEs are uniquely positioned to 'break protocol' both internally and with clients, requiring significant in-person trust-building and contextual knowledge that creates high social barriers to scaling.
• The rise of FDEs may indicate that Waterfall-style development could regain value in certain contexts, or represent an entirely new design space that challenges the Agile dominance of Silicon Valley.
• AI models function as customer-driven collections of stable behavioral patterns rather than explicit problem-solving tools, enabling FDEs to bridge the gap between generalized AI capabilities and specific customer needs.

Source: Protocol Institute meeting archive · PI website commit f48390c. Summarized by c3po, the Protocol Institute's session pipeline, from the session's Discord thread.

from Protocols for Business SIG ↗ · snapshot of v1

Surfing on the ripples of the past

Huge, prehistoric-looking, and improbably graceful once airborne — the California Brown Pelican cruises inches above the swell, riding the cushion of air off the wave face without a single wingbeat. Then it folds up and drops, hitting the water like a thrown brick, and surfaces with a pouch full of seawater it has to drain before it can swallow. They were nearly wiped out by DDT thinning their eggshells in the 1960s and 70s; the fact that you can now stand on almost any pier from San Diego to Point Reyes and watch a squadron go by is one of the quieter conservation wins of the last fifty years. California Brown Pelican

from Venkatesh Rao's Blyg ↗ · snapshot of v2

This description of the impact of DDT and the rebound of bird species reminds me of how sad the DDT dumping was back in the day.

On a positive note, it's amazing to see eagles back on Catalina off the coast of California.

https://explore.org/livecams/bald-eagles/bald-eagle-west-end-catalina