The cursor-mirror skill and cursor_mirror.py script lets you search through and inschpekt all of your chat histories, all of the thinking bubbles and prompts, all of the context assembly, all of the tool and mcp calls and parameters, and analyze what it did, even after cursor has summarized and pruned and "forgotten" it -- it's all still there in the chat log and sqlite databases.
cursor-mirror skill and reverse engineered cursor schemas:
The German Toilet of AI
"The structure of the toilet reflects how a culture examines itself." — Slavoj Zizek
German toilets have a shelf. You can inspect what you've produced before flushing. French toilets rush everything away immediately. American toilets sit ambivalently between.
cursor-mirror is the German toilet of AI.
Most AI systems are French toilets — thoughts disappear instantly, no inspection possible. cursor-mirror provides hermeneutic self-examination: the ability to interpret and understand your own outputs.
What context was assembled?
What reasoning happened in thinking blocks?
What tools were called and why?
What files were read, written, modified?
This matters for:
Debugging — Why did it do that?
Learning — What patterns work?
Trust — Is this skill behaving as declared?
Optimization — What's eating my tokens?
See: Skill Ecosystem for how cursor-mirror enables skill curation.
>Žižek on toilets. Slavoj Žižek during an architecture congress in Pamplona, Spain.
>The German toilets, the old kind -- now they are disappearing, but you still find them. It's the opposite. The hole is in front, so that when you produce excrement, they are displayed in the back, they don't disappear in water. This is the German ritual, you know? Use it every morning. Sniff, inspect your shits for traces of illness. It's high Hermeneutic. I think the original meaning of Hermeneutic may be this.
>Hermeneutics (/ˌhɜːrməˈnjuːtɪks/)[1] is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts. Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods we resort to when immediate comprehension fails. Rather, hermeneutics is the art of understanding and of making oneself understood.
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Here's an example cursor-mirror analysis of an experiment with 23 runs with four agents playing several turns of Fluxx per run (1 run = 1 completion call), 1045+ events, 731 tool calls, 24 files created, 32 images generated, 24 custom Fluxx cards created:
Cursor Mirror Analysis: Amsterdam Fluxx Championship -- Deep comprehensive scan of the entire FAFO tournament development:
Just an update re German toilets: No toilet set up in the last 30 years (I know of) uses a shelf anymore. This reduces water usage by about 50% per flush.
>UniPress ported and sold a commercial version of the "Extended Amsterdam Compiler Kit" for Andrew Tanenbaum for many CPUs and versions of Unix (like they also ported and sold his Unix version of Emacs for James Gosling), so Emacs might have been compiled with ACK on the Cray, but I don't recall.
>During the late 80's and early 90's, UniPress's Enhanced ACK cost $9,995 for a full source license, $995 for an educational source license, with front ends for C, Pascal, BASIC, Modula-2, Occam, and Fortran, and backends for VAX, 68020, NS32000, Sparc, 80368, and others, on many contemporary versions of Unix.
>Rehmi Post at UniPress also made a back-end for ACK that compiled C to PostScript for the NeWS window system and PostScript printers, called "c2ps", which cost $2,995 for binaries or $14,995 for sources.
>Independently Arthur van Hoff wrote a different C to PostScript compiler called "PdB" at the Turing Institute, not related to c2ps. It was a much simpler, more powerful, more direct compiler written from scratch, and it supported object oriented PostScript programming in NeWS, subclassing PostScript from C or C from PostScript. I can't remember how much Turing sold it for, but I think it was less than c2ps.
My goodness, this is hard to imagine from today when open source has driven the price of software (code itself) to nil. And that's the price from decades ago. While I'm glad I don't have to pay 15K for a C to PostScript compiler, as someone who might have written similar software if I'd lived back in those days - I can imagine an alternate timeline where I'd be getting paid to write such tools instead of doing it as a hobby project.
> NeScheme.txt
Nice rabbit hole about LispScript, what a cool idea. I've been re-studying Scheme recently, its history and variants like s7, and was appreciating its elegance and smallness as a language, how relevant it still is. One of the books I'm reading uses Scheme for algorithmic music composition. (Notes from the Metalevel: An Introduction to Computer Composition)
>"Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and Ecommerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list."
>While in high school, he saw output from one of the guess the animal pseudo-artificial intelligence (AI) games then popular. He considered implementing a version of the program in BASIC, but once at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), instead he implemented it in several dialects of Lisp, including Maclisp.
Kent Pitman's Lisp Eliza from MIT-AI's ITS History Project (sites.google.com)
He wants robotic doggirls that are unquestioningly loyal and give their love unconditionally, instead of being independent and withholding it like robotic catgirls. Then it's not technically enslavement!
https://stallman.org/saint.html
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