In the mid 2000s I had a setup where some children's walkie talkie "spy watches" could be used to issue commands to a completely DIY, relay based smart home system.
I know roulette is random enough but here is a fun book by some physics whizzes who tried to make money off the game.
The Eudaemonic Pie is a non-fiction book about gambling by American author Thomas A. Bass. The book was initially published in April 1985 by Houghton Mifflin.
The book focuses on a group of University of California, Santa Cruz, physics graduate students (known as the Eudaemons) who in the late 1970s and early 1980s designed and employed miniaturized computers, hidden in specially modified platform soled shoes, to help predict the outcome of casino roulette games. The players knew, presumably from the earlier work of Shannon and Thorp, that by capturing the state of the ball and wheel and taking into account peculiarities of the particular wheels being played they could increase their odds of selecting a winning number to gain a 44 percent advantage over the casinos.
It literally has to be compromised to work. If the roulette machinery was perfect, you would be able to predict the outcome with Newtonian physics at the start of the spin. It has to have irregularities and asymmetries to trigger chaotic behaviour – and those same irregularities and asymmetries make the outcome biased!
I mean enforcing the laws on the books would be a good start. Corruption quickly breeds more and more corruption if it isn't rooted out and punished. Everyone who isn't corrupt starts losing and the benefits of not being corrupt evaporate
> “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre
amazon sells a kindle version for ~$6. looks like deadtree copies retail under $10 online (or ~$17 from PRH). IA has it but it's covered under their stupid pseudo-library false scarcity bargain so you might have to get in line. if you're okay with physical, i bet your local library has it.
otherwise... can't check from work, but perhaps anna's archive/slsk has you covered?
Not really to be honest because the framework under which Venkatesh Rao talks about power talk is a bit different than how most sociologists see power talk.
Sociologists focus on tone, Rao focuses on the content.
In The Gervais Principle information is a currency and treated as negotiation leverage. You never give it for free, unless strictly in the boundaries of your job. Thus, under this lens, you collect as much information and never give it away for free.
Suppose you're a software engineer and a service you work on is slow.
There's two ways you can go about it:
"Our API has a 300ms+ latency, I have some ideas on how to fix it" -> giving information, and work for free. You're in the loser/clueless category.
Which of those depends on your awareness: are you aware of the political game and ignore it and focus on the craft? Loser. Are you not aware of the political game and try to do "what's best for the team/company"? You're clueless.
Then there's the sociopath's version:
"We may have a performance issues affecting reliability. Before we go deeper, we should decide who owns performance optimization."
This is power talk. Even if you don't own the performance optimization you still:
- communicated that you hold information others don't
- you're setting the tone and direction of the meeting
At this point somebody may raise the point of "which performance issues?" and here the hard part begins, how do you navigate and play the game? Are you prepared to motivate why ownership comes before information?
In the end, probably the best way to learn power talk in the context of the Gervais principle is to experiment, observe and study. Because no other sociologists has focused on it with Rao's angle.
Emacs would be a pretty badass "OS" for LLM agents to use... has anyone explored and written something up on that yet? Perhaps emacs commands would give agents even more power than just shell commands ?
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