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Diego Camba #7 - The Limits of Identity

Each and every era has some interesting boundaries.

And the thing that you are offered always has a shape.

[excerpt from a convo on El Salvador]

A thought: Honestly, El Salvador is one of the main strategic types this century. (Strategic type, as in Starcraft’s Zerg, Protoss, Terran -style types)

- Caesar (beloved)
- Bitcoin treasury (in-house)
- Christian Nationalist (i.e. “builder” civ structure)
- Non-Anglo (i.e. no inherent historic loyalty to the Anglo / American imperial structure)
- High-tech (drones, data centers, social media)
- Army composed of men who have lost family members to chaotic gang violence
- Ability to operate abroad (Haiti) and reason to do so (provides good practice)

Diego Camba #8 - Catalan Independence

How far down the fractal chain does "self-determination" go ?

Where do we stop ?

For that matter, how about "freedom" ?

Freedom is directly opposed to social bonds.

My freedom to follow my desires, if I follow it without limit, conflicts with other people's ability to rely on me.

A tiger stands at the pinnacle of freedom. He / she does not even have the social bonds of a lion's pride.

A long-term hermit, truly asocial, who lives on top of a mountain or deep in a forest or in a shack by a lake probably experiences something similar to the mental state of a tiger.

All societies must impose limits to freedom, or they cease to exist - we do not have the reproductive cycle of tigers, who can raise their young by themselves without support.

But societies that impose limits that are too high also crush the life, the spark, the ability to adapt out of their populace.

The answer, as usual, is "the truth lies within the tension of opposites".

Enjoyed catching up with Henrik Feldt this morning.

Henrik is the founder of Aient, an Agentic SRE platform.

We discussed:
- AI-powered development
- How to make software pathways provable in order to allow reliable multi-agent development and confirmation
- The similarity of this with the idea of mathematical provability

Most observability platforms detect and report problems. You then examine them (probably with an AI agent looking at the logs), plan a fix, and deploy it.

Aient has added autonomous repair into the loop.

His description makes me think of an immune system, but for software systems. It feels like a strange step towards the world of Neuromancer and ICE hacking, by a side door.

The second aspect of Aient is the ability to offload agents into external sandboxes. This means that you can run 50 agents on your dev machine instead of 5, and they gain interesting upgrades, such as the ability to rehearse production cutovers inside those sandboxes.

Very thought-provoking.

I still have in my possession a Soviet tea glass whose minuscule price, fifteen kopecks, is actually molded into its base. A rather more luxurious item, a Soviet ice bucket, has its (considerable) price of one hundred forty roubles (about two weeks’ pay) stamped into the metal. Nobody expected these things to change. A basic loaf was thirteen kopecks, so cheap that it cost less than pigswill, so farmers bought bread to feed to their hogs. Soviet power offered certainty and stability in every direction in return for quietude about a lunatic system. Who are we now to say that people were not content with that system, in our world where inflation roars and stamps about and there is no such thing as a secure job?

-
Peter Hitchens, (2026) 'Fireworks in Daylight', in "The Lamp Magazine" (Issue 36)
https://thelampmagazine.com/issues/issue-36/fireworks-in-daylight