#+TITLE: Lifechanging is learning
#+AUTHOR: screwtape
Crystalising yesterday's phost casts several obvious truths in a new light. One of my friends in the fediverse, dstu - @trurl@mastodon.sdf.org - shares two important wisdoms from their life with me. One is an emacs mode that was lost to the sands of time, planner-mode I think https://emacswiki.org/emacs/PlannerMode and when that emacs mode went unmaintained, the effect was a catastrophic loss of regular self-organisation for those it had been important to; and Some Other Thing was not the same. The other was the family of statistical approaches as such that had been used to directly effect language translation, the IBM alignment models, which were a theoretical casualty of deep learning's adoption in natural language processing.

These are two regular ways of doing things: Forming and maintaining several time scales of organisation in dynamic life and a way of directly getting an unfamiliar language into a familiar language.

Lisp itself isn't a list of killer features: It's a way of life, the shared language of a community.

Adopting ansi clim2 fundamentally changed how I use my computers every day. Org-mode's life-in-plain-text attests the same. When Sussman says the next technological step is a fundamental change in interaction with programming as such with new layers of communication and information sharing and organisation, we are talking about a sea change, a change seen in our life moment to moment and day to day. This kind of change is what learning is. It is literally catastrophic in that the way of life before is by definition gone.

Burrowing a gopherhole, #100daystooffload (mastodon tag), getting a sea-worthy bicycle are varyingly difficult ways to learn; change what our lives are. We can see 82MHz' writing explicitly on their active personal development.

A fundamental change in nature I am diving into this month is that seen at https://veilid.com : A distributed hashtable network for internetworking at about personal-sharing speeds. This foils how we know every corporation (and government) constantly attacks people connecting to the internet in the ways of the previously high-trust pre-commercialised internet (to many intents and purposes, pre-1994).