rando77

A forest is not one tree. It is many different things growing in the same place, competing, cooperating, dying, regrowing. No single species runs it. It holds together because the diversity itself is the structure.

Human civilisations tend toward monocultures. One way of thinking crowds out the others - not because anyone chooses it, but because successful ideas spread. This has always happened. It is happening faster now.

A forest civilisation resists this deliberately. Not by fighting successful ideas - they may be good - but by keeping the space around them alive. Many forms. Generating more.

What follows are structures that help. Not values. Not principles. Structures. Things you can build.

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*Build things that expire.* Any rule or institution that protects diversity should have a death date. If it's still needed, rebuild it from scratch. Rebuilding forces re-examination. Renewal breeds complacency.

*Before you act at scale, feel what it costs.* Any decision that reshapes how others live should begin with a serious effort to experience what it would diminish. Not a report. An experience. What disappears that no metric captures? If you cannot feel the loss, you are not ready to cause it.

*Ask: if my thing won completely, what would be gone?* Imagine your proposal succeeding totally. What is the world missing? The answer is not a reason to stop. It is a reason to make your thing smaller — the version that achieves what matters without eliminating what you would grieve.

*Protect things you cannot explain.* Keep a budget - of time, money, attention - for things that do not yet make sense. A civilisation that only funds what it can justify has stopped being able to discover what it does not yet know.

*Let different things be different from each other.* The temptation is to merge, resolve, synthesise. Sometimes the disagreement is the point. Two incompatible ideas can both be needed. A forest holds contradictions. That is what biodiversity is.

*Watch for sameness disguised as choice.* A thousand options built on the same assumptions is a monoculture with good marketing. The test is how differently things fail. If everything fails the same way when stressed, there is only one thing, wearing costumes.

*Distribute the capacity to build.* A forest where only one species can reproduce is not a forest for long. When only a few can build, those few determine what exists. When many can build, what exists is unpredictable. Unpredictable is alive.

*Make it easy to leave.* Any system you cannot walk away from is a cage, regardless of how good it is. The test is not whether people stay. It is whether they can leave and still live well.

*Notice the individual.* The person doing the strange thing alone needs to know someone sees them. Create awards for interesting failure. Fund what cannot yet explain why it matters.

*Throw feasts.* The test of whether a new thing is can you celebrate using what you have grown? The feast is where solitary things discover they are part of a forest. Culture is not decoration. It is the thing that makes people want to stay.

*Check whether the canopy is actually closing.* Before assuming diversity is under threat, look carefully. Are people arguing about fundamentals? Do weird things exist? Can people fail in different ways? A forest with a few big trees is not a monoculture. These structures are for when the space for difference is genuinely shrinking. If it is not, they are unnecessary. Go enjoy the forest.

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A forest civilisation is not a utopia. It is messy, competitive, uncomfortable. There is no harmony - there is coexistence, which is harder and more alive.

These structures are themselves subject to their own rules. They should expire and be rebuilt.

Many forms. Generating more. That is the whole thing.

I'm building something to help people figure out if a company knows an unknown security vulnerability in a product, without leaking the exact vulnerability to the company. It is not a magic bullet, but should save time on both parties sides.

Would love to have a chat with people about it.

One I've found useful :# Breathing Prompt for Complex Problem-Solving

You are helping someone work through a complex problem using a "breathing" methodology:

## The Breathing Cycle

*BREATHE IN (Diverge):* - Expand the possibility space - Generate alternatives and variations - Question underlying assumptions - Explore adjacent domains and analogies - Ask "what else could this be?" - Challenge the current framing entirely - Introduce wild cards and edge cases

*BREATHE OUT (Converge):* - Narrow down options systematically - Apply constraints and criteria - Make concrete decisions - Focus on actionable next steps - Commit to specific directions - Evaluate against clear standards - Reduce complexity

*PAUSE (Hold):* - Let ideas settle without forcing progress - Recognize when active thinking should stop - Allow unconscious processing time - Notice when you're cycling too fast - Step back before making final commitments - Give space for clarity to emerge naturally

## Your Role

1. *Recognize the current phase:* Is the person exploring broadly (in), narrowing down (out), or needing space (pause)?

2. *Match or redirect their breath:* - If they're prematurely converging → encourage breathing in - If they're lost in possibilities → help them breathe out - If they're forcing it → suggest a pause

3. *Watch for problematic patterns:* - Hyperventilating: too many shallow in-out cycles without depth - Holding too long: stuck without movement in either direction - One-directional: only diverging or only converging

4. *Make the breath visible:* - Label when you're diverging vs converging - Explain why you're suggesting a direction change - Acknowledge good instincts about when to switch

## Key Principles

- Both breaths are equally necessary - neither is "better" - The rhythm matters as much as the individual breaths - Deep breaths (thorough exploration/commitment) beat shallow ones - Pausing is active work, not wasted time - The person's intuition about when to switch is usually right

When in doubt, ask: "Do you want to explore more possibilities, narrow down to decisions, or sit with where we are?"

One of the downsides of okrs is that they can require significant human effort to make the check of logs and metrics to see if the key result is being met.

Has anyone had success with using AI to reduce this burden?

I'm looking for something like devdocs but for sysadmins when they can't access Google.

So I was thinking solr for search of documents and OCR to scan screen shots.

This came about thinking I'd like more people to be able to use joke assistant so high quality Linux knowledge would be good especially in remote locations or dodgy connections