Yay! my notes are posting again. I've typed up several over the past few weeks/months but nothing went through my browser-based client; I was doing some ghetto-ass copy and pasting to my phone to post on primal. turns out I just had to clear the cookies for nostrudel on my browser. I only did this because yesterday it wouldn't even load my feed. Ah well, all's well that ends well.

Bridgewater is fully out of China? If it hadn't been for Dalio's ego they might have done so before losing however many billions they ended up losing. Dalio learned that you can't trust communists, wow, genius, after he had been gagging on CCP talking points for decades. This episode teaches us all we need to learn: don't trust capitalists or oligarchs, especially those who fancy themselves intellectuals.

Was watching "Ballerina" the other day just for some whatever slop "content" (didn't finish it). I have watched some of the John Wick movies but the brutality of the "action" never did anything for me, even as a huge fan of 80s and 90s action blockbusters, and this was just more of the same except with an even more physically frail protagonist? Yeah, whatever. Somehow, I still got something really valuable out of the experience. In one scene they show the outside of an old movie theatre with the title "Andrei Rublev dir. Tarkovsky" on the marquee. I was vaguely aware of both Tarkovsky and Rublev, so I was like, fuck it, I'll watch that instead, and it was an amazing decision. Art cannot exist solely to generate profit. And that's not to promote authoritarian soviet-style socialism either; they banned and then heavily censored the film. Without the immediately necessary impetus of protesting the repressive state apparatus, art (and religion for that matter) cannot truly exist, and without them generating that spiritual drive, people lose faith in institutions writ large. Have a lot more to say on this and related matters but this is already a rant in a void that could go in a million different directions, and my ADHD can't be bothered

The other day, my favourite quote from the French surrealist poem "Les Chants de Maldoror" popped into my head randomly, and I realised that it suddenly made sense to me in terms of the epistemological framework that I'm trying to flesh out in order to better situate myself in this crazy world, and of course it has to do with Bitcoin! "O mathématiques saintes, pussiez-vous, par votre commerce perpétuelle, me consoler le reste de mes jours, entre le méchanceté de l'homme et l'injustice du Grand Tout" I think the most straightforward reading of it, the cry into the void full of desire for the objective certainty of mathematics to intervene in the difficult task of reconciling the sublimity of modern rationality and all its ingenuity with the brutality and pettiness of humanity, holds up well, and actually points to Bitcoin being the technology which will answer the still unresolved conundrum of modern life. Of course there's always the spectre of "quantum" uncertainty in the future, but as it stands today, Bitcoin is the mathematical trading post at the crossroads between humanity's legacy of brutal cruelty and the godhead of universal value.