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Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

patternproject.substack.com

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Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#291

Related: Hypercard was inspired by an LSD trip which Bill explains in an interview ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bdJKjBHCh18 )

Related: Hypercard '200 Points of Light' demonstration (concept from 1990): https://youtu.be/H5-T_S50Sr4

This demo is a lot like Gelernter's Lifestreams.

https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/freeman/lifestreams.html

Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Laws encode a kind of social reasoning (the balancing of risk, ethics, societal impacts, etc) and choosing to follow the law in most situations can be a moral stance (a matter of principle).

It was legal to own humans. Don't conflate laws and morality, they're completely different.

Laws in theory encode the morality of the people. The people who believed it was moral to own humans encoded their morality into their legal system.

Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had remarkably similar bad trips, unfortunately I didn't make it out as unscathed. I tell people: I had both the best day of my life, and the worst day of my life on psychedelics.

Interestingly, In 2006 I had both the best and worst night of my life (up to that point, this was pre-fatherhood) while on acid... but the acid wasn't really the primary factor in either direction.. Some of the best raves of the late 90s and early 2000s were at The State Palace Theater in New Orleans.. At the last party thrown there, I was invited to play first on the main stage, biggest soundsystem and crowd I ever…

> I would be interested to hear about your experiences.

Sure, I've written a bit about one of the more damaging trips I've had before on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22993060

Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#294
post #274
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t imagine discussing use and possession of Schedule 1 substances on a non-e2ee, logged-in-cleartext-forever platform. You’re opening yourself up to blackmail by hundreds of different parties. It is blatantly irresponsible to host such communities on Discord. Possession and use are federal felonies .

1: I'm not in the USA 2: people don't really care that much 3: It's so easy to protect your identity 4: you can talk about things without incriminating yourself

3 is untrue. Discord blocks or requires tons more verification steps for most VPNs and blocks VoIP numbers.

I have been trying to use Discord anonymously for a long time. Antispam and anti-logging are high priorities of theirs, and they invest significant resources into ensuring you can’t easily make disposable accounts.

Not only is it not “so easy”, it’s not easy at all - it’s extremely difficult and becoming moreso all of the time.

Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#295
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can’t imagine discussing use and possession of Schedule 1 substances on a non-e2ee, logged-in-cleartext-forever platform. You’re opening yourself up to blackmail by hundreds of different parties. It is blatantly irresponsible to host such communities on Discord. Possession and use are federal felonies .

Well, don't join any of those discords lest your imagination be disappointed I suppose. Most of the world is not so paranoid. Particularly psychedelic users who don't see the substances as a problem.

It’s not paranoia to point out that the War On Drugs exists in the USA and that the US has imprisoned four million people resulting from same.

Also, paranoia has a definition - can we please stop colloquially using it to mean “anxiety”? Paranoia means delusions.

Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#296
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: the cost of the ketamine in that $2000 treatment is about $1. Even factoring in trained staff to monitor, you’re up to a few hundred bucks for the hour. It’s mostly just the failings of the US medical establishment, and, of course, arbitrarily constrained supply that results in gouging. Just go buy $100 in street ketamine (still marked up 100x, fwiw, also because laws) from someone reputable, test it for fe…

You're much safer and cheaper buying Ketamine from the darknet via a reputable vendor. You get to decide whether you want racemic or S-Ketamine, and your money is held in escrow until you've got the product and release the funds to the vendor.

Is that not precisely what I recommended?

Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All myths contain a seed of truth. I can accept that living in Libya sucks while also accepting that our culture mythologizes order. I'm not sure how to see the world in such black and white terms - that acknowledging one invalidates the other.

But your original commentary paints the world's entire cultural backdrop as myth driven. There was no representation of this subtlety you now acknowledge must be addressed.

I'm sensing a certain uneasiness with the disorder of simultaneously truths. If anything, what you bring is a good example for the value of order manifest in rationality.

It's not a hypocrisy. Both are true. If that doesn't make sense, then remember curiosity is the cure to confusion.

Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#298
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't every medicine a drug, since a drug with medical application in the right dose is just called medicine?

No.

Guess we have different definitions then. In the usage I got to know, every medicine (besides placebos and household remedies) are drugs. This was supposed to be a nitpick and a rhetorical question. Care to elaborate how your definition differs? Do you think yours is general for english/US?

Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#299
post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this what the years-long studies and rigorous state examination is for? How would they selecting medication, when they wouldn't know the mechanism of action?

Congrats, you just described mental healthcare. And a bunchhhhh of other things.

You have state examination for other professions? We only have them for medical professions, laywers, criminal-related professions and teachers.

I think in most cases were the patient thinks he is smarter than the doctor, the latter already knows the argument, but also why it is wrong/more complicated. When something is understoodable by laymen, the doctor will be fine to understand it and better suited to judge it.

Re: Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface

#300
post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was legal to own humans. Don't conflate laws and morality, they're completely different.

Laws in theory encode the morality of the people. The people who believed it was moral to own humans encoded their morality into their legal system.

Indeed, in the most general sense (and probably more so in democracies) laws represent the codification of what society as a whole deems acceptable and what should happen when someone breaches that code.
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