35 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
    1. (alternate phrasing for Chomskyites: technology increases the efficiency of manufacturing consent in the same way it increases the efficiency of manufacturing everything else)

      Phrasing

  2. duncanreyburn.substack.com duncanreyburn.substack.com
    1. As Barfield says, “the full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.”

      Phrasing

  3. Jan 2023
    1. In our century the fires of mass slaughter have burned low—perhaps from genuine spiritual advance, but perhaps from a general decline in the passion and energy of humanity. When peace is just apathy, avarice and accidie, peace is not a symptom of health. The peace of decline is the peace of death.

      Peace is just apathy. So Curtis, how do I get into the new Regime, what does the new regime stand for. What explosive power is behind it. Who are its members? Let's get answers to these questions

    1. . So power and those who love power will crush you, and your old principles, like a bug.

      Power is a meta phenomenon, it removes the concept of the individual..... or something like that.

    2. Borgesian

      Phrasing

    1. Maybe it’s that we’re all dopamine junkies at heart and ascending the information chain keeps it pumping more intensely [citation needed].

      Chain, more like anjoying a little circlekerk

    1. onrushing subhuman future being manufactured for us will only accelerate.

      I love this dude's phrasing

    2. without the ability to compel datacenters and compute to serve us in this way

      That's an interesting phrase, "Compel datacenters and compute to serve us".

    3. ridding China of crypto holdings and mining meant strangling a rival to the Party’s social credit system in its crib.

      LOL

  4. Dec 2022
    1. Many wonders must be seen to be believed, and a far greater number must be believed before they can be seen.

      Phrasing

    1. It is as though Sergio Leone had gotten hold of the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut and suffused it with a major dose of Phillip K. Dick. And the series pursues questions that Dick, over the course of his literary career, doggedly forced his gradually expanding public to confront. 

      Phrasing

  5. Nov 2022
    1. A long time ago, in a data center far, far away, an ancient group of powerful beings known as sysadmins used to deploy infrastructure manually. Every server, every route table entry, every database configuration, and every load balancer was created and managed by hand. It was a dark and fearful age: fear of downtime, fear of accidental misconfiguration, fear of slow and fragile deployments, and fear of what would happen if the sysadmins fell to the dark side (i.e. took a vacation). The good news is that thanks to the DevOps Rebel Alliance, we now have a better way to do things: Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC).

      Phrasing

  6. Oct 2022
    1. provocative take on twenty-first-century attitudes about safety, privacy, celebrity culture, ethics, justice, and rational thought itself.

      Phrasing

    1. you are being formatted by them. You will be assimilated. ♠

      Phrasing bro seriously phrasing. You are being formatte. WTF is that supposed to mean. Are some of the ARG's real. How does this plug into the deep state. The NSA and friends can track the flow of ideas therefore should know what is going on, don't they know what is going on. PLEASE tell me they know what is going on.....

    2. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

      Phrasing

    3. “Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes,” wrote C. S. Lewis.

      Phrasing

    4. To be a consumer of digital media is to find yourself increasingly “trapped in an audience,” as Charlie Warzel puts it

      Phrasing

    5. “information ecosystem,”

      Phrasing

  7. Sep 2022
    1. Can you consider the possibility that, beneath the curtain of your conditioned ignorance, and under the noise of hyperactive ego, there is a silent Being at the core of yourself; that this is your true self; that this Being is divine; and that it offers an endless spring of joy, peace, and enchantment?  

      Phasing

    1. helping to overcome the atomizing isolation and loneliness of liquid modernity.

      Phrasing

    2. he cable of institutional Christianity was corroded by science and cultural entropy;

      Phrasing

    1. what can be coomercialized for a social good can be weaponized for social control.

      Based and Phrasing

    2. Data is the new oil, the ethereal residue of human life.

      Phrasing

    3. It isn't a little robot friend, it's a digital homunculus mirroring your face.

      Phrasing bro, phrasing

  8. Feb 2022
    1. We need to getour thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we canlook at them. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into alinear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical readerinstantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to callextremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print,perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extremeprofessionalism, it is not: A real professional would wait until it wastime for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time.While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the rightwords during writing requires much more floating attention.

      Proofreading while rewriting, structuring, or doing the thinking or creative parts of writing is a form of bikeshedding. It is easy to focus on the small and picayune fixes when writing, but this distracts from the more important parts of the work which really need one's attention to be successful.

      Get your ideas down on paper and only afterwards work on proofreading at the end. Switching contexts from thinking and creativity to spelling, small bits of grammar, and typography can be taxing from the perspective of trying to multi-task.


      Link: Draft #4 and using Webster's 1913 dictionary for choosing better words/verbiage as a discrete step within the rewrite.


      Linked to above: Are there other dictionaries, thesauruses, books of quotations, or individual commonplace books, waste books that can serve as resources for finding better words, phrases, or phrasing when writing? Imagine searching through Thoreau's commonplace book for finding interesting turns of phrase. Naturally searching through one's own commonplace book is a great place to start, if you're saving those sorts of things, especially from fiction.

      Link this to Robin Sloan's AI talk and using artificial intelligence and corpuses of literature to generate writing.

  9. Nov 2020
  10. Oct 2020
  11. Dec 2017
    1. Among the potential benefits are receiving a helpful treatment

      Not sure how to fix it, but it doesn't seem right.

  12. Sep 2013
    1. For they are themselves so stupid and conceive others to be so dull that, although the speeches which they compose are worse than those which some laymen improvise, nevertheless they promise to make their students such clever orators that they will not overlook any of the possibilities which a subject affords

      Such loaded words in this phrase. Not just to the point, but very brutal diction. I also get a tone of sarcasm in the phrase "such clever orators." I might be the only one.