hypertexthero

Here are some books that have helped me:

https://hypertexthero.com/books-for-thinking-and-learning/

:(

So many thoughts and memories...here are some:

First time watching Star Trek in Tunisia in the early 1990s. It was a very hot summer, and the air-conditioned basement of my friend’s folks contained every episode of The Original Series and The Next Generation, and a computer with games like Rogue, as well as American junk food like sour cream and onion chips and cherry-vanilla ice cream, so we spent quite a bit of time there :D

Star Trek TNG’s optimistic view of humanity overcoming its primitive base instincts.

Videogames and VR as nascent versions of the holodeck.

Facepalm, [PicardTips](https://mastodon.social/@[email protected]), etc.

Quotes, conversations, monologues, including [Data’s about death](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ik8i-Ev__s4), with the butterfly.

Background [hum](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYTthcDCTtE&t=59s) of the Enterprise, Ressikan Flute in [The Inner Light](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_(Star_Trek:_Th...).

“[More familiarity with our own mythology may help us relate to theirs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWZeB4gFMQA).”

Jokingly speaking in stentorian English, like a captain, while riding on a boat. A young person asks me where I learned to speak like that. Answer: Watching Jean-Luc Picard in TNG, and reading some VVilliam The Spear Shaker!

https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/download/

> “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.”

> “Seize the time... Live now! Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again.”

Goodbye, Captain.

Thank you.

<3

Good article.

Bridge of Waves: What music is and how listening to it changes the world, by W.A. Mathieu, is a sound book about how music is possible.

And if interested in underground in general, I can recommend Underland by Robert Macfarlane.

Going to fire up Death Stranding 2: On The Beach

Thanks for this summary. Very useful and informative.

After the 2026 heat wave in Europe and elsewhere, and expectations of things getting hotter with global warming and El Niño, it’s already past the time to prepare, but better late than never.

Will governments have to subsidize solar/inverter/battery/heat pump systems to keep people going?

What are people doing to get ready for a “hot house Earth” future around the world?

Paul Lockart paper shows Not Found, so here’s an Internet Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20170514160142/https://maa.org/e...

The paper shows a dotted line dividing the triangles and showing the areas to be equal, which makes things clearer.

> As long as there is the desire to gain, to achieve, to become, at whatever level, there is inevitably anxiety, sorrow, fear. The ambition to be rich, to be this or that, drops away only when we see the rottenness, the corruptive nature of ambition itself. The moment we see that the desire for power in any form — for the power of a prime minister, of a judge, of a priest, of a guru — is fundamentally evil, we no longer have the desire to be powerful. But we don't see that ambition is corrupting, that the desire for power is evil; on the contrary, we say that we shall use power for good — which is all nonsense. A wrong means can never be used towards a right end. If the means is evil, the end will also be evil. Good is not the opposite of evil; it comes into being only when that which is evil has utterly ceased. > > So, if we don't understand the whole significance of desire, with its results, its by-products, merely to try to get rid of desire has no meaning.

—Jiddu Krishnamurti, Think on These Things

> If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?

> This can be navigated, of course, but it is truly perilous: our writing is an important vessel for building trust — and that trust can be quickly eroded if we are not speaking with our own voice.

From https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers

Be careful not to [give up your own voice][1] to the [machine][2].

[1]: https://bookshop.org/p/books/you-are-not-a-gadget-jaron-lani...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh20cMEgvqc

See also Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

It is very interesting data and looks good.

Thank you for posting it.

Go a bit further and use pencil or charcoal so you can smell the wood and lead and feel the texture of the drawing surface, helping your brain make more connections.

It also allows you to make more mistakes, which can lead to surprising directions.

And the team who makes the most mistakes usually *wins*!

See also:

The Hand - How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture By Frank R. Wilson

Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain by Betty Edwards

Wooden: A Lifetime of Observations and Reflections On and Off the Court by John Wood

You Matter More Than You Think by Karen O’Brien with illustrations by Tone Bjordam

Try circles instead of a square.

Not 1 and 0, but infinity.

You matter more than you think.

Very good book:

https://www.youmattermorethanyouthink.com/

Ditto!

Love reading and writing on paper, but do read and write quite a bit on computer screens, too. Phone screens are too small and uncomfortable for me.

No TV at home, either. And even videogames, which I love, have held less and less interest unless they have good coop modes, an unusual mechanic, or excellent sound and story.

Leaning more and more towards playing music, which has felt like a present from the gods.

Having read McLuhan — https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-ASW-848 — and Lanier (You Are Not A Gadget), I worry about the future, but am hopeful young people will indeed rebel.

Making a strict hour and a half of no-interruption a day has worked well for me. Learned this from John Cleese (feel free to ignore the word “management” in the title of the video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb5oIIPO62g

Still occasionally get interrupted because of life, of course, but marking off an hour and a half and closing a door and putting all chores/calls on silent during that time is very helpful. And I understand that for many it is simply not possible. Private space is a luxury in much of the world.

A sense of play and no obligation also helps. For more on this I recommend Rubin’s The Creative Act.

Ditto.

I use Macs for work and PC for games, and this little box seems a good opportunity to play The Legend of Linux on a desktop or a couch, and make it true.

> These tests blew me away.

Made me laugh : )

Guitars certainly have a more intimate connection between the touch of fingers and the sound, including the bending of the tone, one of Hendrix’s virtuosities.

Keyboards can approach that with polyphonic touch keys like the Hydrasynth (lean into keys, pressing them harder, for bending the tone in a configured patch), sustain pedals, and pitch bend/modulation controls, but not the nuanced touch of skin on a vibrating string.

I think synth guitars exist, too, but don’t know anything about them. The pedalboards are enough, maybe :)

Hmmm, I disagree, having played electric and acoustic guitars for over two decades and begun learning piano and synths for the first time in 2025.

For one, you can’t easily play two melodies simultaneously across several octaves, using both of your hands, with an electric guitar.

Stringed electronic instruments do have their advantages, but so do the others. Each music making thing has its place in the spectrum.

Two books that have helped me greatly in my musical life, in case people haven’t heard of them, are The Listening Book, and Bridge of Waves, by W.A. Mathieu.

This brings to mind this question:

Should HN allow links to sites that break the back button, like all Meta sites (Ig, Fb, etc)?

My favorite part of the video is when Stéphane “makes a mistake” and shows it, like enlightened people, such as Cliff Stoll — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yUZTTLpDtk — do :)

Potentially unrelated tangent thought:

The Man Who Listens to Horses (1997) is an excellent book by Monty Roberts about learning the language of horses and observing and listening to animals: https://www.biblio.com/search.php?stage=1&title=The+Man+Who+...

Video demonstration of the above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYtTz9GtAT4