3 Matching Annotations
- Feb 2024
-
Local file Local file
-
As Thoreau said, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”;and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed,Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?
another variation of Thoreau on tools... source?
It's Walden. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/b10mJsGoEe6rgteMdxbwKQ)
Joy may have more profitably quoted the earlier Walden piece from p.41: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools."
There also seems to be the idea of our slow evolution into cybernetic or Borg-like beings hiding not only in Joy's argument, but in Thoreau's. If we integrate so closely with our tools, where do they stop and we end and vice versa?
Compare this with the infamous problem of the ship of Theseus.
-
- Aug 2022
-
science-in-the-digital-era.khinsen.net science-in-the-digital-era.khinsen.net
-
What I find surprising in the frequent heated debates is that the nature of the type system is rarely even discussed. People talk about static vs. dynamic types as if there were only one static and one dynamic type system.
Good point.
We can go further. Suppose I have a project written in TypeScript, and your affinity for TypeScript is well-known. Only—surprise!—I'm actually using TypeScript 1.x from n years ago. Are you still happy?
-
-
en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
-
Quine's book Word and Object (p. 3f) made famous Neurath's analogy which compares the holistic nature of language and consequently scientific verification with the construction of a boat which is already at sea (cf. Ship of Theseus): .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
-