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vgr's profile
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao
@vgr

Tweets

Venkatesh Rao

@vgr

This is my conversational account. For my work follow @ribbonfarm, @breaking_smart, @artofgig. Tweets are 90% vacuous views, apathetically held. Mediocritopian.

Los Angeles, CA
venkateshrao.com
Joined August 2007

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    1. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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      I have decided that "post truth" can be translated into "curved zeitgeist". Now I just have to map the rest of relativity theory to blogging and collect my igNobel prize.

      1 reply 0 retweets 28 likes
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    2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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      Special theory of relativistic blogging: the speed of the stream is constant for all observers and equal to the maximal-FOMO rate of content consumption.

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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    3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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      The velocity of a frame is a velocity of the context stream. So twitter is a faster moving stream than my blog.

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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    4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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      "tldr" "ELI5" etc are compression imperatives that are like Lorenz contraction. Don't @ me.

      1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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    5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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      Textual *density* (in informational terms) is what determines the mass of a piece of text on the internet. It warps stream space-time around it. So a "trending topic" is really like gravitational lensing. Your feed will be distorted by it.

      1 reply 2 retweets 7 likes
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    6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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      Sometimes you'll see 2 images of a meme: via the left wing and right wing max-FOMO outrage-response paths for example. You'll see double or triple in your stream depending on the amount of lensing going on.

      1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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    7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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      Okay I'll show myself out now

      1 reply 0 retweets 1 like
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      Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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      ps obviously my ultimate goal is to reduce ribbonfarm to a black hole

      2:34 PM - 11 Feb 2019
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      • W Arrian
      2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
        1. New conversation
        2. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Robert Yang

          Okay, I'm not done yet. Content lives in a discrete symbol space, relativity is continuous space, so you have to modify ideas of spatial curvature to reflect discrete structures. This tweet on game level design (ht @visakanv gets at the idea)https://twitter.com/radiatoryang/status/765976617378349056 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Robert Yang @radiatoryang
          when I lecture on level design, I do a 30 min lecture about level layouts; I put it into a diagram, hope it's useful pic.twitter.com/Amw4j4RVxn
          1 reply 0 retweets 6 likes
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        3. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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          Not really kidding about this... my old mental model of ribbonfarm was a flat map, this was the last version:https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/09/08/the-greater-ribbonfarm-cultural-region-2015/ …

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        4. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          The map I'm developing now situates ribbonfarm at the mouth of a wormhole that I think of as the 'great weirding' wormhole to the future. The mouth is 3 piece-wise locally flat map areas around the mouth.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1088566620241375232 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Planning sketches for new ribbonfarm map, which is conceptually the triangular mouth of the Great Weirding wormhole. The triangle uses my goat-crow-rat triangle as scaffolding. pic.twitter.com/jPxLxQ4RV7
          1 reply 0 retweets 11 likes
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        5. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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          The limit of solipsism is what a friend of mine called "vanishing past your own event horizon". Late style is vanishing past your own event horizon in writing. Elderblogging is hopefully a wormhole into a continued infinite game instead.

          1 reply 0 retweets 7 likes
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        6. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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          If I degenerate into complete incomprehensibility in the next couple of years, you'll know I've gone blackhole. But if I start making sense again, it was a wormhole. Only way to figure out which it is is to dive in :D

          2 replies 0 retweets 15 likes
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        7. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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          I might owe an unconscious debt to Scott McCloud's idea of a "picture plane", which is also a triangle, for my current conceptualization of the space in which textual content "lives" http://scottmccloud.com/4-inventions/triangle/11.html …pic.twitter.com/aaOuPmESUU

          2 replies 0 retweets 12 likes
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        8. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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          McCloud's triangle has vertices of abstraction, resemblance, and meaning. Mine has vertices of domestic, public, and frontier spaces.https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/06/27/been-there-done-that/ …

          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        9. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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          Venkatesh Rao Retweeted Venkatesh Rao

          If you want to grok where I'm going with this thread and the previous one on frenet-serret equations without the nerdy pop-math/pop-science analogies, it's really just getting at the form-content coupling that's created by the internet.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1095071402367971328 …

          Venkatesh Rao added,

          Venkatesh Rao @vgr
          Sometimes the universe gives you a sign that you're on the right path. I was wondering how to apply metaphor of frenet-serret formulas (coordinate-free ways of describing curves) to twitter and blog threads, and look what I found on the wiki page: RIBBONS! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frenet%E2%80%93Serret_formulas … pic.twitter.com/99ba2nJLmR
          Show this thread
          1 reply 0 retweets 5 likes
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        10. Venkatesh Rao‏ @vgr 11 Feb 2019
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          One of the deeper mistakes I made in my brief career as a product manager of web products is to not fully realize the extent to which the web's form is shaped by the content it invites, in a chicken-egg evolution. The medium is the message AND the message is the medium.

          0 replies 2 retweets 16 likes
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        11. End of conversation
        1. Arrian‏ @__a__chimera__ 11 Feb 2019
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          Replying to @vgr

          Like where you're going. Increase in velocity (kinetic energy) of your scalar (viral tweets due to textual density) adds mass to your threads. Increased mass in your twitterspace increases probability of blackhole manifestion elsewhere. Ribbonfarm becomes gateway to the wormhole.

          0 replies 0 retweets 1 like
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