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gwillen comments on The Fundamental Question - Less Wrong
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3 priorities, in no particular order: support myself, become more capable, enhance rationality by publishing "seed exoshell" software.
An exoshell, as I understand it, is the software that you think with, in much the same way that you think with a piece of paper or a whiteboard. Current exoshell-ish software might include emacs ("emacs as operating system") or unix shell scripting ("go away or I will replace you with a small shell script"). Piotr Wozniak clearly uses SuperMemo as an exoshell. Mark Hurst's "Bit Literacy" annoys me more than fingernails on a chalkboard, but I think he's talking about his exoshell and life with an exoshell. Quicksilver, Maple, Mathematica, Matlab might also be candidates.
One of the problems with present exoshell-ish software is the long learning process before you get to "fully hackable". The gurus (e.g. RMS, Wozniak) achieved their close integration by gradually growing from a simpler, fully hackable version.
Has there been a 'what is your exoshell' thread on LW yet? Would it be appropriate to have one? In the purest definition, mine is pretty small (a thousand lines of Perl or so), but if you include 'software you communicate with', which I think I do, it grows rather large, to include most of what's running on my server.