Top all-time · #1838
Venkatesh Rao
Personal blog · studio.ribbonfarm.comphilosophycultureai
Venkatesh Rao writes Contraptions, a personal blog at studio.ribbonfarm.com about philosophy, culture and ai. Since 2021, 40 different Hacker News readers have linked it 62 times, most often “AI – A Camera, Not an Engine”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-31, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (13) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Venkatesh Rao's essays on technology, culture, time and attention, which HN readers cite as analysis for AI, social media, the Great Weirding and kairos vs chronos. Commenters praise them as convincing and persuasive.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called a convincing argument, a fascinating series of essays, an interesting discussion, and a novel and persuasive argument; one commenter calls the Meccano vs
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 13 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Janky, wobbly models of everything from philosophy to technology and everything in-between. Click to read Contraptions, by Venkatesh Rao, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Most-linked posts?
- AI – A Camera, Not an Engine4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-12-09
- The Dawn of Mediocre Computing3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-12-03
- The Physics of Intelligence3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-04-08
- One Tenth of a Second3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-07-29
- The New Systems of Survival3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-08-11
- /p/against-waldenponding2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-01-02
- Monolith2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-05-18
- Coordination Headwinds2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-11-01
- The Great Weirding2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-25
- Derangements2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-02-10
What Hacker News says?
Don't think of them as "computer-generated" any more than your phone's heavily processed pictures are "computer-generated", or JWST's false color, IR-to-visible pictures are "computer-generated". This article makes a convincing argument: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/a-camera-not-an-engine
Comment linking /p/a-camera-not-an-engine
on “Sora: Creating video from text”Submitted One Tenth of a Second as a story · 210 points
HN discussionAgree and it's hard to find cohesive takes which stitch together all these events in a way that make sense, i.e. the analysis includes enough tech-awareness to believe it. The only stuff I've found which felt in the ballpark of spot-on were: 1) https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-great-weirding This was a fascinating series of essays that generally walks through why, after "Harambe" in 2016 or whenever, things seeme…
Comment linking /p/the-great-weirding
on “As the Pandemic Recedes, Millions of Workers Are Saying 'I Quit'”Submitted Beyond Hyperanthropomorphism as a story · 70 points
HN discussionChain of thought reminds me of "muddling through", which immediately clicks with my intuition of the right approach to approximations of intelligence: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/massed-muddler-intelligence#...
Comment linking /p/massed-muddler-intelligence
on “How Chain-of-Thought Reasoning Helps Neural Networks Compute”Submitted Getting to Gnome Mode as a story · 59 points
HN discussionRibbonfarm's take on kairos vs chronos: "internal and external clocks [...] individual time and social time, sensed time and read time [...] Bergsonian vs Einsteinian time." And now things that used be synchronized are becoming async, chronological time is bleeding into kairological time. https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/stream-time
Comment linking /p/stream-time
on “Kairos”Submitted Remystifying Supply Chains as a story · 45 points
HN discussionWell, the thing about the long-term philosophical dialogue generally is that it moves extremely slowly - and the discussion of technology isn't an exception. The concepts are well-grounded and thoroughly debated but they resist change. One could argue that, like the Catholic Church, philosophers are still on the fence about Galileo and this Ribbonfarm article [1] gives an interesting discussion how the rise of instr…
Comment linking /p/one-tenth-of-a-second
on “Alien intelligence and the concept of technology”Submitted Lands of Lorecraft as a story · 43 points
HN discussionvgr's waldenponding is about the "And I mourn what we don’t get to hear from them." An ineffable game happens that one's retreat diminishes. https://www.econtalk.org/venkatesh-rao-on-waldenponding/ https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding-ii
Comment linking /p/against-waldenponding-ii
on “I wish you the best in the Offline”Submitted What entrepreneurs can learn from regular people (2016) as a story · 37 points
HN discussionThe title reminded me of this article, that claims that the new culture war is weird vs normal: https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-new-systems-of-survival
Comment linking /p/the-new-systems-of-survival
on “The new culture war is real vs. bogus”Submitted Text Is All You Need as a story · 15 points
HN discussionThis is something I think we as a society have not fully grappled with: > “I am pretty sure that we did not know that we humans much prefer personal attention to personal privacy. Until we invented the technology of social media, we thought we naturally favored privacy over attention, but we were also wrong about that. We found out that when given a choice people prefer to reveal themselves to get personal attention…
Comment linking /p/against-waldenponding
on “Things we didn't know about ourselves”Submitted The Dawn of Mediocre Computing as a story · 10 points
HN discussion> https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding > Premise: FOMO is good. Being plugged in is good. There is valuable info at all levels from twitter gossip to philosophy books. You should stay plugged in. You can manage anxiety and beat the House without resorting to shaming social platforms into managing attention for you. That's a terrible yielding of agency. > What the "unplug for self-care" crowd doesn't…
Comment linking /p/against-waldenponding
on “Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?”Submitted Contraption Theory as a story · 4 points
HN discussionGiving up or blocking social media is much less interesting than being self-aware and looking for ways to get your social media dopamine from things that feel genuinely constructive or interesting. I found “Against Waldenponding” ( https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/against-waldenponding ) to be, if not 100% correct and credible, at least a very novel and persuasive argument that you probably owe it to yourself to be o…
Comment linking /p/against-waldenponding
on “Ask HN: How do you avoid dopamine addiction on social media?”Submitted Graph Minds as a story · 3 points
HN discussionGreat read on Meccano vs Lego: >I’ve come up with a theory connecting three big zeitgeist things: the end of the zero-interest world, the ongoing AI panic, and the meaning crisis. I think it also connects all three to the climate crisis, but I’ll leave that topic aside for this essay since it’s too big. https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/truth-in-inconvenience
Comment linking /p/truth-in-inconvenience
on “World’s last dedicated Meccano factory to close in France”Submitted The New Systems of Survival as a story · 2 points
HN discussion(Hello, git rebase ‘d into this account are [the personality behind] vinnyvichy and once&future spectral_vinnys, who have been vitiated) Seems like Braverman in the wikipage, as well as Arnold Kling, are in the Guardian* cluster? I think that could be a rather better dichotomy for our present context than left/right. NYT in your earlier example, is fully in the Guardian camp., e.g… Dan Williams is (considerably?) ha…
Comment linking /p/the-new-systems-of-survival
on “Is "luxury beliefs" a useful category?”Submitted Striver, Seeker, Icon, Leader as a story · 2 points
HN discussionFYI vgr of Ribbonfarm has a significant body of work expanding on the OODA loop, including a book "Tempo". https://studio.ribbonfarm.com/p/the-use-and-misuse-of-the-oo... If I were to summarize it to a 5 year old I'd use the analogy of rhythm games like taiko drum master. Once you make a mistake your timing is thrown completely off and everything going forward is wrong unless you can get your timing back. OODA is wa…
Comment linking /p/the-use-and-misuse-of-the-ooda-loop
on “OODA Loop”Submitted Monolith as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted One Tenth of a Second. (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Does Reality Have a Surprising _Lack_ of Detail? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Massed Muddler Intelligence as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Superhistory, Not Superintelligence (2021) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
