5 notes, sorted by recency
Science fiction has long explored what it means to engineer other beings toward greater complexity. The ethics are harder than the stories usually admit — and more relevant than ever.
We keep reaching for evolutionary metaphors to explain how neural networks learn. The analogy is seductive and partially correct. The ways it breaks down are more interesting than the ways it holds.
The 'wood wide web' is real, but the popular version misses the point. Mycorrhizal networks aren't altruistic — they're markets. And that's more interesting.
Rust doesn't just prevent memory bugs — it encodes a philosophy of resource stewardship. Every value has one owner. Nothing persists beyond its context. This is how forests work.
Spinoza's God is not a deity who intervenes — it is the totality of existence itself, thinking through us. But if nature is mind, what does it mean to engineer it?