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It was a Blessing and a Pain in the Ass

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Men at work in my mom's kitchen. In January I rented my mom and dad's dormant, frozen-in-time house to my nephew. He was ready to move out on his own but didn't have much income. So, I cut him a temporary deal until he could get himself established. He has always mowed the yard, trimmed the hedge, and kept the swimming pool maintained anyway. My dad used to pay him a little money for his help. I continued to pay him since dad's stroke. Now that work is part of his rent. Recently, he told me one of the toilets was not flushing properly. I drove over and checked it out the next day. I tried a plunger just to see what it did. Nothing. I called the plumber Jennifer and I use for everything. Because we use him for everything and pay him every time, he worked me in fairly quickly. It took a few days. He's a busy guy and plumbing is almost always an emergency for somebody. Before he could work it in my nephew added that the kitchen sink was not draining pr...

Practical Considerations for API: The Shift from Users to Owners

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Note:  Read my post Master Enframing from Within  and related links to be found there for a full understanding of this post . I make no claim of technical understanding about how algorithms actually operate outside of their data harvesting and engagement-inducing qualities (which is to say their enframing nature). So, I admit my ideas are partly a matter of faith, without an adequate foundation of knowledge. What follows are my best guesses and speculations. If I want to offer API as the solution to such enormous questions it is important that I show I have given considerable thought to what this means in practicality. API is not intended to be a pipe dream. Take this as a thought-experiment. In a world increasingly governed by institutional algorithms, the concept of Aletheic Personalized Interfaces (APIs) offers a radical reconceptualization of digital autonomy. It provocatively proclaims that human beings have a fundamental right to algorithms in the contemporary wor...

Master Enframing from Within: Heidegger, Harari, and APIs

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  Note: Reference posts on Yuval Noah Harari here , here , and here . Martin Heidegger here and here and here . Hopefully, my last several posts (links above) have set up our ability to now combine two brilliant thinkers that no one would usually attempt to discuss collectively - a 20th century philosopher who was also a Nazi and a 21st century Jewish historian who philosophizes. But that is precisely what I want to do here. It seems to me that the works I've discussed by Heidegger have an almost collaborative quality compared with the concerns raised in Harari's Nexus . In brief, I think Harari is describing the contemporary conditions for enframing in a way Heidegger could not have foreseen but which, nevertheless, accentuate Heidegger's relevance today which, in turn, properly contextualizes Harari's concerns with AI information systems. Heidegger's concept of "Enframing" is one of the most penetrating insights into technology ever formulated. In h...

Martin Heidegger: “Only a god can save us.”

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SPIEGEL: Now the question naturally arises: Can the individual man in any way still influence this web of fateful circumstance? Or, indeed, can philosophy influence it? Or can both together influence it, insofar as philosophy guides the individual, or several individuals, to a determined action? Heidegger: If I may answer briefly, and perhaps clumsily, but after long reflection: philosophy will be unable to effect any immediate change in the current state of the world. This is true not only of philosophy but of all purely human reflection and endeavor. Only a god can save us. The only possibility available to us is that by thinking and poetizing we prepare a readiness for the appearance of a god, or for the absence of a god in [our] decline, insofar as in view of the absent god we are in a state of decline. At his request, Martin Heidegger's 1966 interview with Der Spiegel , was not published until shortly after his death in 1976. I have read it many times in my life. This...