Hello again! We’ve talked before about “programmable attention”, how attention is your scarcest resource, and why curating your attention is important. Today we’ll talk about easy ways to avoid having your attention captured, thus giving you more of it. Use An Ad-Blocker This is by far my top recommendation. If…

Welcome to the Myosotis Distribution Guide! Your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to compose a meaningful post, distill it into Markdown, and distribute it on multiple platforms. Step 1: Compose With the Medium of Your Choice Choose the medium that feels the most natural to you, and just write. If the method of composition is a…

Hello again! My writing will continue at the official Myosotis Research website, http://myosot.is . Apologies in advance, as the website is under heavy construction! I still plan to use Medium and Substack as syndication methods, but establishing a canonical blog site for Myosotis is more important right now. I also need to work on writing for a larger audience, as evinced by my embarrassingly bad article “Going Dark For a Week” last week (and my usage of the word ‘evinced’).

Hello reader. After a weird dive into prime numbers and the nature of meaning, I am back to my old shit and writing about my hunt for a description of “programmable attention”. “Programmable Attention” might be the same thing as our shared understanding of attention. I need to investigate this further, but it’s possible that there’s only limited similarities between human attention, machine attention, and hybrid machine-human attention (and human-machine attention, for what it’s worth).

Hi, good morning. Today I will make the argument that one is a prime number. This article should probably be read as a satire rather than as an argument of fact. One is a Prime Number As per Wikipedia, a prime number is “a positive integer … with no divisors other than 1 and itself.”…

Q: What do you call two banana peels? A: A pair of slippers. Boo! Lame. This is the kind of joke that you read on a Laffy Taffy wrapper that makes you wish you had bought Fun Dip. Groan-inducing. What if there was a way to spice this joke up…

I want to explain my general motivation for my work on “programmable attention”, and my project “Myosotis”. We live in an increasingly digital world. New systems and interfaces have been developed that help us to know more and live more empowered lives. …

🚨 IMPORTANT UPDATE: The bounty originally described in this article has been claimed In 2009, DARPA celebrated the 40th anniversary of the internet by hosting a balloon hunt. …

The idea of programmable attention has caught my attention. I could write a lot more about it, but I am going to avoid biting off more than I can chew right now. Andy Matuschak mentions it here, and Ben Kuhn mentions the idea in his excellent essay “Attention is your scarcest resource”. Attention is used heavily in modern models of reading and learning.