192 Matching Annotations
  1. Oct 2024
  2. Sep 2024
    1. Opponents often state that this technology will be used primarily to enforce digital rights management policies (imposed restrictions to the owner) and not to increase computer security.
  3. Jun 2024
    1. A very interesting example of just this issue was raised when they had the Treasures of Heaven exhibition at the British Museum, and they brought together numerous relics and the beautiful reliquaries within which they were set, and icons from Byzantium and elsewhere in the eastern parts of Europe and put them on display. Now, the visitors included people of the Eastern Orthodox faith, and, in that faith, the proper way in which to venerate an icon is to kneel before it, to pray before it and to kiss it.Now, was the British Museum going to allow visitors to kiss this exhibition, the items in this exhibition? Or actually, shouldn't the British Museum have obliged everyone to do so? Merely viewing such icons from a distance and not engaging in that sensory interaction with them would be to defeat their sensory presence, their way of being in the world. And so, I would love to see more experimentation with historically appropriate manners of viewing.

      challenging authority of museum as established preserver of cultural history/heritage

    1. a lot of these objects were not meant to be put in a museum. A lot of them were in people's homes, in their cabinet of curiosities, or in the place where only men would be able to gaze at them, or in churches or in other different formats. And then now that they're in a museum setting with general visitors, what is the museum's responsibility in how we are talking about this, how we're choosing to display them, how we're choosing to talk about them in the labels, in the catalogs, in the exhibitions? Because all of that is adding to the art historical knowledge.

      BANGER!!!

  4. Apr 2024
    1. One of his most effective tools is what we might call the Trump Two-Step, in which the former president says something outrageous, backs away from it in the face of criticism, and then fully embraces it. The goal here is to create a veneer of deniability. It doesn’t even need to be plausible; it just needs to muddy the waters a bit.

      Some of the first part of the Trump Two-Step sounds like the idea of "Schrödinger's douchebag".

  5. Mar 2024
  6. Feb 2024
  7. Dec 2023
    1. normal crisis in the system for most people is degrowth like 00:22:22 most people's living standards don't rise that's so it's it's divorced from the experience that that most people have in in in the UK you know where we're where we're speaking from wages at 00:22:36 the same level they were in 2005 rents aren't bills aren't your groceries aren't but your pay is so um you know most people have been experiencing 00:22:49 degrowth that's the comms reason why it's bad
      • for: degrowth - criticism - bad communication, suggestion - growth and degrowth simultaneously

      • suggestion

        • evolution / transition / transformation are better terms as it indicates something is dying at the same time diverging is being born
        • it is highly misleading to think one dimensionally as there are many things that have to degrow and many things that have to grow simultaneously
          • degrowth of carbon emissions, which implies pragmatically in the short time scale noe available a significant degrowth of fossil fuels
        • growth of a new energy system to replace much of it
        • degrowth of unnecessary and harmful consumption accompanied
          • growth of holistic network of root level wellbeing activities and the low carbon infrastructure to support it
    2. there are sort of 00:17:41 two broad um programs or ideas that deal with this or that try to engage with this issue they have pockets of support 00:17:52 one is the idea of a green New Deal or a global Green New Deal and the other one is degrowth and and I don't think that either of those work for different reasons
      • for: quote, climate futures - both green new deal and regrowth don't work, green new deal - criticism, degrowth - criticism
  8. Nov 2023
    1. It does provide an answer. The issue is that the Google form validates that the user has input a valid looking URL. So he needs to input an arbitrary, but valid URL, and then add that to /etc/hosts so his browser will resolve it to the address of his devserver. The question and answer are both fine as is and don't require any critique or clarification.

      The critical comment this was apparently in reply to was apparently deleted

    1. frontier model'

      a term sourced from the industry itself to 'protect' other foundational models from this very same legislation.

    2. https://web.archive.org/web/20231125082820/http://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/2023/11/eu-ai-legislation-is-firming-up-ill-add.html

      Donald on the AI act. I wonder if he's read it. The premise seems to be that regulating a market is bad for innovation, and that you shouldn't regulate your own market when others aren't doing that for theirs and therefore then will out-innovate you. The underlying assumption seems that adhering to civic rights is tying your hands in innovation, and settting market rules is bad because innovation is a wild west. I call bs.

    3. We had a taste of all this when Italy banned ChatGPT. They relented when they saw the consequences.

      Donald being disingenous here. Italy never banned ChatGPT, it was disallowing OpenAI to operate as it wasn't responding to GDPR related issues (not providing a contact person for the DPA to interact with being one of them, the other absence of age check, no justification for presence of personal data in training data). The trigger was a security breach where paying user's financial info and their stored prompts/answers were leaking into/accessible in other user accounts. Once OpenAI communicated (not meaning the other GDPR issues were solved, just that they communicated) the restriction was lifted. It was a matter of a few weeks. Otherwise known as the 'pinch and peep' method. If you can't get a response, you pinch them until they peep. Italy stopped pinching as soon as OpenAI peeped.

    4. Certainly not for the US, and as for China,

      This is the actual point of the laws under discussion. Not the EU having to 'speak for the whole world', but to not have the USA or China speak for the EU. It's a geopolitical issue, and the EU's proposition starts in a very different place than the other two mentioned. Which is the key thing.

    5. At only 5.8% of the world’s population, there is the illusion that it speaks for the whole world.

      The AI act defines market access condtions for products. The EU is the biggest market, and as such its acts do regularly have a normative impact outside it. The AI sector is clamoring for 'safety' and 'guard rails' (or was it pulling up the ladder, I might be confused), this is the only act that actually starts from the premise, if not formulated by the industry itself (which likely is the actual problem felt).

    6. Unlike common law, such as exists in England, US, Canada and Australia, where things are less codified

      Do you spot the pattern Donald in that list of countries? And then has the gall to write in the next sentence about the EU "having the illusion to speak for the whole world". Common law is problematic as can't at all be geared to the complexity of many current areas. And the constitutional primacy of statutory law in the countries mentioned means it's limited as otherwise cohesion is lost. Statutory law can be changed and routinely is. All EU directives have a periodical review and change process built in, all regulations have mechanism in the law to monitor and review their working with an eye to change.

    7. One problem with EU law is its fixity.

      oh dear. Actually wrt the entire framework it is rather future proof as it isn't built on specific technologies or naming products etc. It is all about types of use and areas of consequences.

    8. It hauls in the Digital Services Act (DSA), Digital Markets Act (DMA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), as well as the new regulation on political advertising, as well as the Platform Work Directive (PWD) – are you breathless while reading that sentence? It could become an octopus with tentacles that reach out into all sorts areas making it impossible to interpret and police.

      Silly remark. The EU is legislatiing a framework for a digital and data single market. It is adding digital products and data to the freedom of movement of people, products and capital. And is he really denouncing 'complexity' here, given his field of expertise which is riddled with it? There's a long list of other regulations that should be added to them. Missing here e.g. is the DGA and DA as well as the forming of data spaces which aim to provide more data in a responsible fashion, also to AI products and their development. Unlike a lot of other EU regs, this whole set is remarkably consistent, in aiming at a level playing field, strengthening rights and values, and maximising socio-economic use value. It regulates the market, and I suspect that is actually what grates. Innovation isn't helped by unregulated markets, but that is the presumption here it seems.

    9. By looking for deeper universal targets they may make the same mistake as they did over consent and lose millions of hours of lost productivity as we all have to deal with ‘manage cookies’ pop-ups and no one ever reads consent forms.

      the cookies pop-ups are not required by law at all, nor are consentforms as they appear on the web. Adtech companies came up with them (and various versions being slapped down by the courts) to keep on tracking you despite the GDPR. Also the web isn't the only place the GDPR aims at, so keeping them up as examples of 'looking for deeper universal targets' is a category error. The pop-ups and darkpattern consent forms are because adtech companies don't want to admit adtech is illegal. The actual problem is the limited speed at which the courts are making that clear to them.

    10. Rather than focus on actual applications, they have an eye on general purpose AI and foundational models.

      yes, adding in foundational models at a late stage is caused by the industry itself being opaque about them while they became highly visible through ChatGPT style stuff. The AIR is only about market access of products, with putting obligations on producers, distributors, users and users of outputs. It's not much different from how other types of products are required to fulfill certain things before being sold in the EU. It's literally a CE mark for AI products.

    11. the ban on biometric data

      No such ban in the AI Act. Several use cases of biometric data are considered high risk, face recognition in public spaces is banned (for the purpose of identification, not for e.g. age recognition). Biometric verification and authentication, or biometrics based systems wrt cybersecurity or personal data protection are not in scope.

  9. Sep 2023
    1. Ms. Boles couldhave researched a bit further on the motivational tools and incentives being used atother law schools as a takeaway or chart in the article or delved more deeply into thepsychological literature on incentivization or motivational approaches in law schools orhigher education

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  10. Jul 2023
    1. Dostoyevsky’s detractors have faulted him for erratic, even sloppy, prose and what Nabokov, the most famous of the un-fans, calls his “gothic rodomontade.”
  11. May 2023
    1. A flaw can become entrenched as a de facto standard. Any implementation of the protocol is required to replicate the aberrant behavior, or it is not interoperable. This is both a consequence of applying the robustness principle, and a product of a natural reluctance to avoid fatal error conditions. Ensuring interoperability in this environment is often referred to as aiming to be "bug for bug compatible".
  12. Apr 2023
    1. The "validity" such an argument has(if that is the right word) is presumptive and provisional in nature.5 It is frail, andsubject to default.Even so, such presumptively based arguments can be very useful and important in cases where action must be taken, but firm evidence is not presently available. Examples would be in planning, where the future holds many uncertainties,or in practical deliberation, where prudent action often requires acting on provisional hunches and guesswork, always subject to revision, as better informationcomes in.
      • Provisional Validity is useful
      • Provisional Validity for Statements Goal
      • Criticism Contests Provisional Validity.
    2. According to the pragma-dialectical theory of vanEemeren and Grootendorst, Blair noted, "sufficiency is a function of appropriatelymeeting the critics' challenges to premises and inferences" (p. 3 32) . Blair alsonoted that this means that an argument can rightly be said to be sufficient for itsconclusion in this sense when it meets its burden of proof3 relying on "what maybe presumed without or accepted without further question" (p. 333)
      • Argument Generative Statement Based on proof.
      • Critical Statement test Burden of Proof and Generative Efficiency.
      • Meeting and Satisfying Criticism is part of Generative Process.
      • Pragma-Dialectical Theory
    3. What has been shown, instead, is that each of these types of argumentationis tentative and inconclusive-open to critical questioning-while still being strongenough, in many cases, to have some degree of bindingness or logical correctnessin transferring acceptance from the premises to the conclusion. However, thebindingness is not of an unconditional or absolute kind-like deductive validity.Instead, it is a kind of tentative or provisional acceptance that is involved, (i.e.,"Now I have accepted these premises, I am bound to tentatively accept the conclusion, for the sake of argument or discussion,
      • Informal Arguments
      • Tentative or Plausible Reasoning Structure rather than definitive. Bound to evidential contestation.
  13. Mar 2023
    1. In literature genetic criticism studies the development of a work from reading notesand drafts; this approach is most feasible after the mid-19th century, once national librariesstarted amassing the working papers of authors, either by bequest or by purchase.5

      National libraries began to more commonly acquire the working papers (nachlass) of authors and researchers after the mid-19th century.

    1. In the long inscription of Regnal Year 11 on theeast wall of the first court of his great temple atMedinet Habu Rameses III is described (p. 80) asa "bull . . . able to bellow." In his note on thetext introducing this inscription Wilson (p. 71)"remarks with regret that it was designed chieflyas a space filler." The reader, as he works throughthe fourteen hundred columns of texts translatedin this volume, cannot fail to be struck by the un-conscious accuracy of the first statement and theextent to which the second can be applied to mostof the texts translated here.

      What a searing insult carefully couched here!

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    1. Review: [Untitled] Roman und Satire im 18. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Poetik by Jörg Schönert Review by: J. D. Workman Monatshefte, Vol. 62, No. 4 (Winter, 1970), pp. 420-421 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30156502

      ...form of the period for which there are no classical "rules." Schinert musters his evidence in an interesting and generally very lucid manner, although at times he may seem somewhat overzealous, if not indeed repetitious, in assembling all the data: at times one detects the faint odor of the Zettelkasten...

      faint odor! ha! and in an English language document.

  14. Feb 2023
    1. Together we seek the best outcome for all people who use the web across many devices.

      The best possible outcome for everyone likely includes a world where MS open sourced (at least as much as they could have of) Trident/EdgeHTML—even if the plan still involved abandoning it.

  15. Nov 2022
  16. learn-ap-southeast-2-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com learn-ap-southeast-2-prod-fleet01-xythos.content.blackboardcdn.com
    1. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who’scredited with the first use of the term marginalia, in 1819, coined the term as literarycriticism and to spark public dialogue.6

      6 Coleridge, S. T. (1819). Character of Sir Thomas Brown as a writer.Blackwood’s Magazine 6(32), 197.

    1. Blake, Vernon. Relation in Art: Being a Suggested Scheme of Art Criticism, with Which Is Incorporated a Sketch of a Hypothetic Philosophy of Relation. Oxford University Press, H. Milford, 1925. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Relation_in_Art/BcAgAAAAMAAJ?hl=en

      Suggested by

      "Relation in Art" by Vernon Blake (1925), because it put art criticism on a quasi-scientific footing, articulated what was great about the art of all epochs (including the Greeks), and intelligently criticised the decline of art in the 20th century.

      — Codex OS (@codexeditor) November 5, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
    1. Can we all agree that Zettelkasten note-taking is probably WAY more complexity than we need as creators?<br><br>Here's how to take the best parts & leave the rest to the academics pic.twitter.com/LFnAeBkbpG

      — ⚡️ Ev Chapman 🚢 | Creative Entrepreneur (@evielync) February 21, 2022
      <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
  17. Sep 2022
    1. Sometimes it will be enoughto have analysed the text mentally : it is not alwaysnecessary to put down in black and white the wholecontents of a document ; in such cases we simplyenter the points of which we intend to make use.But against the ever-present danger oi substitutingone's personal impressions for the text there is onlyone real safeguard ; it should be made an invariablerule never on any account to make an extract froma document, or a partial analysis of it, without

      having first made a comprehensive analysis of it mentally, if not on paper.

  18. Jul 2022
    1. AuthorW.H. Auden demystified both literature and criticismwhen he said, “Here is a verbal contraption. How doesit work?”

      Auden himself kept a commomplace book of his own notes which was published as A Certain World: A Commonplace Book #, so we can read some of his notes! :)

    1. if it is the right of the people to “alter or abolish” thegovernment, then surely it is their right to criticize it.

      Now he gets to it... :)

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    1. Perhaps the most widely recognized failing of peer review is its inability to ensure the identification of high-quality work.

      stakesinscience

  19. Jun 2022
    1. send off your draft or beta orproposal for feedback. Share this Intermediate Packet with a friend,family member, colleague, or collaborator; tell them that it’s still awork-in-process and ask them to send you their thoughts on it. Thenext time you sit down to work on it again, you’ll have their input andsuggestions to add to the mix of material you’re working with.

      A major benefit of working in public is that it invites immediate feedback (hopefully positive, constructive criticism) from anyone who might be reading it including pre-built audiences, whether this is through social media or in a classroom setting utilizing discussion or social annotation methods.

      This feedback along the way may help to further find flaws in arguments, additional examples of patterns, or links to ideas one may not have considered by themselves.

      Sadly, depending on your reader's context and understanding of your work, there are the attendant dangers of context collapse which may provide or elicit the wrong sorts of feedback, not to mention general abuse.

  20. Apr 2022
    1. Every work of art can be read, according to Eco, in three distinct ways: the moral, the allegorical and the anagogical.

      Umberto Eco indicates that every work of art can be read in one of three ways: - moral, - allegorical - anagogical

      Compare this to early Christianities which had various different readings of the scriptures.

      Relate this also to the idea of Heraclitus and the not stepping into the same river twice as a viewer can view a work multiple times in different physical and personal contexts which will change their mood and interpretation of the work.

    1. ReconfigBehSci. (2020, November 25). We didn’t have explicit discussion of Red Team process at our SciBeh workshop, but I suspect it’s an extremely useful way to manage criticism- simply because the recipient is inviting it [Tweet]. @SciBeh. https://twitter.com/SciBeh/status/1331558570668806147

    1. as in much of his published work, Barthes doesn’t just performcritique; he works to unsettle the performance of critique throughperformance, especially via his creative engagement with thefragmental text – an engagement, as I have argued above, which isvery much shaped by his own card index use.
    2. Writing onstructuralism, Barthes (1972b) states that ‘the goal of all structuralistactivity, whether reflexive or poetic, is to reconstruct an “object” insuch a way as to manifest thereby the rules of functioning (the“functions”) of this object’
    1. “Adversaria” was an actor’s term for reading notes, which highlighted the factthat reading notes stood in relationship to another text (without any connota-tion of that relationship being adversarial).45

      Do all these sentences in this paragraph have any cohesion? The author seems to be rambling a bit to put all of these ideas together. Makes me wonder at what their note collection looks like and how they're using it. This paragraph is a particularly awkward stringing together of what might be disparate, but vaguely related zettels. ("You can see where one card ends and the next begins...)

    2. Genetic criti-cism seeks to reconstruct the creative process of great authors by examining thesuccession of working papers from reading notes to drafts and editorial changes.
    3. The study of personal papers was pioneered by a school of literary criticism (“ge-netic criticism”) that focused on famous authors of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies who often deposited their papers in national libraries.
  21. Mar 2022
    1. நீங்கள் எழுத்தாளர்களிடம் உரையாடுவதென்பது இரண்டு காரணங்களுக்காகவே தேவையானது. ஒன்று, இங்கே ஓர் அறிவியக்கம் நிகழவேண்டும் என்றால் அதற்குரிய பொது உரையாடல் நடந்துகொண்டிருக்கவேண்டும். நீங்கள் அதில் பங்கெடுக்கையில் அது உயிருடன் இருக்க தேவையான ஒன்றைச் செய்கிறீர்கள். இரண்டு, உங்கள் அகவுலகை செம்மை செய்துகொள்ள நீங்கள் வெளிப்பட்டும் ஆகவேண்டும். உள்ளே செல்லும் சொற்கள் திரும்பி வருகையிலேயே அவை நம்முடையவை. இலக்கியம் பற்றிப் பேசுவதும் எழுதுவதும் இலக்கியத்தை ஆழமாக அறியும் வழி. மூன்றாவதுதான் எழுத்தாளர் அடையும் ஊக்கம்.

      Reader's benefit in writing Literary critic Letter to writer/author

  22. Feb 2022
    1. “I had [...]during many years followed a golden rule, namely, that whenever apublished fact, a new observation or thought came across me, whichwas opposed to my general results, to make a memorandum of itwithout fail and at once; for I had found by experience that such factsand thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory thanfavorable ones. Owing to this habit, very few objections were raisedagainst my views, which I had not at least noticed and attempted toanswer.” (Darwin 1958, 123)

      Charles Darwin fought confirmation bias by writing down contrary arguments and criticisms and addressing them.

    1. Amid seemingly intractable problems here on Earth, a vision of the future can resemble a life raft, and in the absence of viable alternatives, substanceless promises of space travel, crypto-utopias, and eternal life in the cloud may become the only things to look forward to.

      Is that a bad thing, to have something to look forward to? It implies that new technological inventions are the only way to make progress, but it is undeniably progress. Not everyone will hold this view, and no one should force it upon you. So why are people constantly criticing "techno-utopia" views instead of creating and moving towards their own visions of the future?

    2. as if he could see his own bright future unfolding before him.

      He did see a bright potential before him, and that's precisely why he had a change at succeeding. I don't like the latent criticism about innovation in this article, it feels mostly like envy to me.

    1. The hermeneutic circle (German: hermeneutischer Zirkel) describes the process of understanding a text hermeneutically. It refers to the idea that one's understanding of the text as a whole is established by reference to the individual parts and one's understanding of each individual part by reference to the whole. Neither the whole text nor any individual part can be understood without reference to one another, and hence, it is a circle. However, this circular character of interpretation does not make it impossible to interpret a text; rather, it stresses that the meaning of a text must be found within its cultural, historical, and literary context.

      The hermeneutic circle is the idea that understanding a text in whole is underpinned by understanding its constituent parts and understanding the individual parts is underpinned by understanding the whole thereby making a circle of understanding. This understanding of a text is going to be heavily influenced by a text's cultural, historical, literary, and other contexts.

  23. Jan 2022
    1. This thesis frequently encounters a strong opposition arising from the idea that such analyses violently and considerably reduce the richness of the life of mind or spiri
    2. A view of this kind worries materialists (or 'physicalists') who are skeptical of the existence of imma-terial Cartesian egos.

      In philosophy, physicalism is the metaphysical thesis that "everything is physical", that there is "nothing over and above" the physical, or that everything supervenes on the physical.

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    1. they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.

      This is why active reading and studying are important. One can take notes and simply regurgitate them and seem wise, but having truly consumed and made a text one's own is the key.


      This is somewhat similar to the criticism of the zettelkasten as seen in https://hyp.is/cqT1mG0sEeyMMRNCE79Ozw/takingnotenow.blogspot.com/2007/12/critique-of-zettelksten.html

      One's note cards do not equal wisdom.

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  24. Dec 2021
    1. It is impossible to think without writing; at least it is impossible in any sophisticated or networked (anschlußfähig) fashion.

      The sentiment that it is impossible to think without writing is patently wrong. While it's an excellent tool, it takes an overly textual perspective and completely ignores the value of orality an memory in prehistory.

      Modern culture has lost so many of our valuable cultural resources that we have completely forgotten that they even existed.

      Oral cultures certainly had networked thought, Luhmann and others simply can't imagine how it may have worked. We're also blinded by the imagined size of societies in pre-agricultural contexts. The size and scope of cities and city networks makes the history of writing have an outsized appearance.

      Further, we don't have solid records of these older netowrks, a major drawback of oral cultures which aren't properly maintained, but this doesn't mean that they didn not exist.

  25. Oct 2021
    1. getHeroes(): void { this.heroes = this.heroService.getHeroes(); }

      Never ever name .getSomething a method that does not return anything, but sets a property to that something. This is always .setSomething

    1. To ease the burden of developing and maintaining these codebases, we created shared libraries to make common transforms and functionality, such as HTTP request handling, across our destinations easier and more uniform.For example, if we want the name of a user from an event, event.name() can be called in any destination’s code. The shared library checks the event for the property key name and Name. If those don’t exist, it checks for a first name, checking the properties firstName, first_name, and FirstName. It does the same for the last name, checking the cases and combining the two to form the full name.

      If this problem was solved by means of inheritance, then all these and future complexities would vanish.

      Each event should belong to an Event<destination> class. This way, the .name() method would know how to return the name of the user directly, without any guessing.

    2. Testing and deploying changes to these shared libraries impacted all of our destinations.

      Again, with event classes, no added complexities here, either.

    3. While we did have auto-scaling implemented, each service had a distinct blend of required CPU and memory resources, which made tuning the auto-scaling configuration more art than science.

      Why? I miss more details here.

      As a side note, the other day I saw an interesting rule of thumb about elasticity. Grow to double, shrink to one fourth. Which is a strategy based on two thresholds instead of one. With one threshold only, it would grow and shrink repeatedly if the load was oscillating close to the threshold.

    4. a small change that should have only taken an hour or two

      There's not such a thing!

      This is the typical statement of a developer, about to walk the happiest path in heaven. But when you get up to start walking that path, everything in hell gets in the way.

    5. It felt like magic.

      Oh, the power of mocking external I/O. This is a lesson any developer learns the first day you have to wait a couple of minutes to run a test suite.

      Why is it so difficult to maintain an even level of depth and awe in a tech article? It happens to me too, when I post something to my blog.

    1. It felt like magic.

      Oh, the power of mocking external I/O. This is a lesson any developer learns the first day you have to wait a couple of minutes to run a test suite.

      Why is it so difficult to maintain an even level of depth and awe in a tech article? It happens to me too, when I post something to my blog.

    2. a small change that should have only taken an hour or two

      There's not such a thing!

      This is the typical statement of a developer, about to walk the happiest path in heaven. But when you get up to start walking that path, everything in hell gets in the way.

    3. Testing and deploying changes to these shared libraries impacted all of our destinations.

      Again, with event classes, no added complexities here, neither.

    4. For example, if we want the name of a user from an event, event.name() can be called in any destination’s code. The shared library checks the event for the property key name and Name. If those don’t exist, it checks for a first name, checking the properties firstName, first_name, and FirstName. It does the same for the last name, checking the cases and combining the two to form the full name.

      If this problem was solved by means of inheritance, then all these and future complexities would vanish. Each event should belong to an Event<destination> class. This way, the .name() method would know how to return the name of the user directly, without any guessing.

  26. Sep 2021
    1. The press is full of reports that President Biden screwed up the pullout from Afghanistan. But none of the people saying he did it wrong say what he should have done instead.

      I've noticed this phenomenon as well. When criticizing public policy, writers should be required to write down their alternate plans and then go at least one or two levels deep as to the knock on effects that their decisions are likely to have.

      It's easy to criticize, but it's much harder to do the actual work and thinking to actually do something else.

    1. Our results cast a rather pessimistic light on dem-ocratic representation in Congress. Although seniorstaffers responsible for advising Representatives andSenators overwhelminglyreport they would like tobase their decisions and recommendations on con-stituent opinion, in practice these staffers have only alimited understanding ofconstituent preferencesacross important policy issues.

      I have not taken a government class in over six years so this article was kind of difficult to read. As the results are stated, I understand how the conclusion came to be, but I do not understand what they mean. How can staffers have any influence on policies if they only have a limited understanding of consituent preferences? I know I'm not totally educated on this topic, but it seems like an important factor after reading this article.

  27. Aug 2021
    1. Reading should never be merely passive and consist in the mere absorption or copying of information. It should be critical and engage the material reflectively, being guided by questions such as "Why is this important?" "How does this fit in?" "Is it true?" "Why is the author saying what she is saying?" etc.
  28. Jul 2021
    1. How should thinkers respond to monstrous lies? Should we mostly ignore the critics as Matsuda has, as I have? Because restating facts over and over again gets old. Reciting your own work over and over again to critics who either haven’t read what they are criticizing or are purposefully distorting it gets old. And talking with people who have created a monologue with two points of view, theirs and what they impute to you, gets old.

      Too many Republicans just aren't doing the work. They're spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt in order to attempt to win their arguments. They're going to be painfully disappointed should they "win".

    2. Over the past few months, I have seldom stopped to answer the critiques of critical race theory or of my own work, because the more I’ve studied these critiques, the more I’ve concluded that these critics aren’t arguing against me. They aren’t arguing against anti-racist thinkers. They aren’t arguing against critical race theorists. These critics are arguing against themselves.

      How does this compare with the idea of sealioning?

      Could the versions of argument be broken down into sub categories based on who is participating in the argument? Perhaps the way that IndieWeb has broken down syndication into sub-categories based on which direction the syndication is going: POSSE, PESOS, etc.?

  29. Jun 2021
    1. “Criticism is a marker of respect and an acknowledgement that others see in us the ability to learn.” they noted.

      quote from Catherine D’Ignazio, Assistant Professor, Emerson College, and Lauren Klein, Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology, authors of Data Feminism.

    1. I’ve long been frustrated with the “distance” between criticism and reading itself. Most critical energy is expended in big-picture work — situating texts in history, talking about broad themes — all of which is useful but hardly touches the excitement of actual reading, a process of discovery that happens in time, moment by moment, line by line.

      An interesting critique on criticism.

  30. May 2021
    1. it makes a difference whether the argument made before Congress is “Facebook is bad, cannot reform itself, and is guided by people who know what they’re doing but are doing int anyway—and the company needs to be broken up immediately” or if the argument is “Facebook means well, but it sure would be nice if they could send out fewer notifications and maybe stop recommending so much conspiratorial content.”

      Note the dramatic difference between these spaces and the potential ability for things to get better.

    2. But “humane technology” is precisely the sort of pleasant sounding but ultimately meaningless idea that we must be watchful for at all times. To be clear, Harris is hardly the first critic to argue for some alternative type of technology, past critics have argued for: “democratic technics,” “appropriate technology,” “convivial tools,” “liberatory technology,” “holistic technology,” and the list could go on.

      A reasonable summary list of alternatives. Note how dreadful and unmemorable most of these names are. Most noticeable in this list is that I don't think that anyone actually built any actual tools that accomplish any of these theoretical things.

      It also makes more noticeable that the Center for Humane Technology seems to be theoretically arguing against something instead of "for" something.

    3. Big tech can patiently sit through some zingers about their business model, as long as the person delivering those one-liners comes around to repeating big tech’s latest Sinophobic talking point while repeating the “they meant well” myth.
  31. Apr 2021
    1. Adam Finn. ‘There Are Some News Outlets & Politicians Incorrectly Reporting and Criticising Respectively MHRA for Advising against Use of OxAZ in under 30s. Neither MHRA nor EMA Have Done This. JCVI Have Expressed a Preference for Alternative Vaccines for Healthy under 30s in the UK Context’. Tweet. @adamhfinn (blog), 8 April 2021. https://twitter.com/adamhfinn/status/1380031766703058944.

  32. Mar 2021
  33. Feb 2021
    1. <small><cite class='h-cite via'> <span class='p-author h-card'>tantek</span> in #meta 2021-02-21 (<time class='dt-published'>02/22/2021 08:49:58</time>)</cite></small>

    1. Repeating in his amorous fits, “Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!”

      This part is funny for many reasons....isn't it reasonable to assume that Celia shits if he (Strephon) shits. It's crazy that this is a discovery worth mentioning. Also, Swift is making fun of and criticizing the imperfections of women, who have, at least, an outward appearance of perfection once they've gone through all of these primping processes. At the same time, it makes me wonder--what do the men look and smell like not ever bothering with any of these transitions?

    1. please, for the love of god do NOT use Mint as a source of inspiration for a derivative distro. If you like Cinnamon or Mate, fine, but holy CHRIST do not let your infrastructure get as criminally sloppy as Mint's. No unholy mixing of Debian and Ubuntu debs into some kind of Frankenbuntu, no namespace collisions, no ... well, no being Mint in general, please!Ideally, I really, really hope you'll continue to support Ubuntu as a primary platform, regardless of what you do with Pop!_OS. But hooboy, do not turn into another Mint, please.
  34. Jan 2021
    1. And for the downvoters.... bypassing CORS is exactly what is shown for those simply learning the front end. https://codecraft.tv/courses/angular/http/http-with-promises/
  35. Dec 2020
  36. Oct 2020
    1. When giving negative feedback, teachers can use the positive sandwich approach—starting and ending with a positive comment

      Compare and contrast to what Claude Steele calls the "Tom Ostrom strategy" - framing feedback in terms of "I have high standards; here is my feedback; I believe you can reach my high standards by taking this feedback."

    1. But presenting a library author as a "snake oil" merchant and those who show enthusiasm for that library as fools for falling "hook, line and sinker" for his lies is pretty insulting and not particularly constructive.
    1. ‘I stood like one Thunderstruck, or as if I had seen an Apparition.’ If that isn’t as much as to say: ‘Expect the sudden appearance of Mr. Franklin Blake’–there’s no meaning in the English language!” said Betteredge, closing the book with a bang, and getting one of his hands free at last to take the hand which I offered him.

      This is hysterical. I love how Betteredge takes obtuse passages of Crusoe as gospel--full of premonitions, and spiritual wisdom. Betteredge's Christianess may be questionable, but certainly not his Crusoeness. I love Collins use of pop culture in critiquing popular modes of religious thinking.

  37. Sep 2020
    1. This absolute self-dependence is a great virtue in a man. In a woman it has a serious drawback of morally separating her from the mass of her sex, and so exposing her to misconstruction by the general opinion.

      So much of the sexism portrayed by the narrators seems so on the nose, and inverted by the actions of the women in the novel. Rachel is strong, assertive, and segacious. Lady Verinder, kept her agency, and did not bend under the scrutiny of Mr. Cuff, Penelope was right about Rachel's feelings for Franklin, whereas Betteredge was none the wiser. And Rosanna, though tragically, also maintained her agency. I wonder if this was Collins's intent, is he making a critique?

    2. There, again, lay the illuminated manuscript on a table. Mr. Luker’s attention was absorbed, as Mr. Godfrey’s attention had been absorbed, by this beautiful work of Indian art. He too was aroused from his studies by a tawny naked arm round his throat, by a bandage over his eyes, and by a gag in his mouth.

      It's rewarding to see the Indians use the characters own Orientalism as a trap. Especially in the midst of what is possibly the most racist bit of narration yet. I wonder if Collins meant this as a sly critique of Orientalism, I also wonder if the frequent use of 'Christian' in place of kind, or decent (or good, etc.), wasn't so on the nose, as to be satirical. Especially, in a story, which by it's very nature, makes us curious to the true nature of its characters.

  38. Aug 2020
  39. Jul 2020
    1. So when Avdi took to air some of those grievances on Twitter, the natural thing happened that always happens when you feel your work is attacked: The core contributor group got defensive! That’s a mischaracterization! Where are the completed bug reports!? You know the drill, if you’ve ever worked on something, poured your heart into it, and then seen it criticized online. There’s that immediate, knee-jerk reaction of a sting. But it doesn’t have to sting.
  40. Jun 2020
  41. May 2020
    1. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being critiqued.
    1. I hasten to add that my own liking for this movie, as with Lucy, has nothing to do with academic enlightenment and is strictly and exclusively a matter of fun (without scare quotes, and speaking in terms of both erotics and aesthetics, at least insofar as anyone can separate these two forms of sexiness).

      I love how Rosenbaum categorizes aesthetics as a form of sexiness. Yes.

    1. assessed prospectively in men and women smokers before and then day-by-day

      No control group? This study tells me literally nothing. It just demonstrates that the effects of tobacco are not the same as nicotine. That was already obvious.

    1. Analyses linking Pentecostalism to the pursuit of personal gain through the breakdown of social relationships are problematic on at least two fronts. First, the vast majority of these studies are based largely, if not exclusively, on sermons and interviews with church leaders. While these are certainly an important part of any anthropological discussion of Pentecostal ritual life, in the absence of a robust ethnographic engagement with those who spend their time listening to these messages, it is impossible to determine the extent to which believers are putting their leaders' words into practice (see Engelke 2010).

      The author also harshly criticizes non-ethnographic qualitative studies solely based on sermons and interviews that try to argue for a individualizing, socially corrosive prosperity Pentecostalism without data that actually documents sociality.

  42. Apr 2020
    1. The pattern of Hollywood is to balance the independent woman with the female stereotype so that the net sum of progressivism remains zero.

      Compare the line of reasoning in this essay with Bordwell's observation that Hollywood movies strive to present the perfect balance between left and right, so as to upset no one, to flatter everyone, and to sell tickets.

  43. Mar 2020
    1. I enjoy dissent and debate among commenters, and criticism of my views is also always welcome; you are even free to call me an assclown, a dupe, a partisan ignoramus — whatever you like, as long as you don't insult other commenters.
    1. I've been meaning to remind readers that I do read the comments. Some time ago, one disappointed commenter mused that others' reflections seemed to go (as I recall) "into a void," because I remained silent to each. Perhaps I was ignoring readers' remarks? I assure you that is not the case. I read them all — although on this site, for some reason, "all" means somewhat sparse — and I find them nearly all remarkable in their perceptiveness. I especially welcome, and enjoy, intelligent disagreement. I choose not to respond, however, only because of my editorial philosophy, which holds that the comment section is, rightfully, for commenters — and commenters alone. I've already had my say, and it seems to me rather rude to take another whack in reply. Whenever I'm so substantively shaky or incoherent as to make my case unpersuasively the first time around, I figure I should live with the consequences. And whenever I find criticism flawed, I figure readers — perceptive as they are — will see the flaw as well, therefore there's no need for me to rub it in. So, I beg you not to take my silence personally.
  44. Jan 2020
    1. compared gene drives to the atomic bomb and accused researchers of using malaria as a Trojan horse to cover up the development of agricultural gene drives for corporate profit
    2. Their financial interest in the intellectual property and their regulatory interest in making sure these products were able to come to market got conflated with the science, so nobody was willing to trust the kind of research they were doing. The end result was that all G.M.O. research got tainted.”

      This speaks volumes of keeping regulatory bodies highly circumspect of lobbyists from the regulated organizations especially when they are near monopolistic.

    3. the technology was controlled primarily by the global agricultural giant Monsanto
    1. In contrast, both blue and red lights affected cortisol levels

      No control group? Being awake for 27 hours will do that. They need to use either no light and/or sleeping subjects as controls..So far I've only read the abstract, so it's possible that they address this further down.

  45. Nov 2019
    1. fiber

      There are two additional types of meals that will be needed to clarify this issue. That is, one with a high-fat high-fiber meal, and another with a low-fiber high-carbohydrate meal. Nonetheless, one could argue that, in practice, carbohydrates correlate with fiber.

  46. Apr 2019
  47. Mar 2019
  48. Sep 2018
    1. Perpetual progress is a strong statement of the transhumanist commitment to seek “more intelligence, wisdom, and effectiveness, an open-ended lifespan, and the removal of political, cultural, biological, and psychological limits to continuing development. Perpetually overcoming constraints on our progress and possibilities as individuals, as organizations, and as a species. Growing in healthy directions without bound.”

      The author further identify the true meaning of transhumanism as it is now focusing more of a mesh making all humans quite uniform, taking away culture and amplifying the idea of the collective being a single organism. The authors are more so repeating themselves as it is similar to previous points. The repetition may be there to reinforce the claim of the collective being a single organism. It is rather interesting that it diverse from promoting individualism where people gets to have their own culture and political ideologies, the author is effectively saying that humans should not have a mind of their own but interlinked with others to move within a direction with efficiency.

  49. Aug 2018
  50. Jun 2018
    1. Aldous Huxley warned of a world in which we’d arrange sexual intercourse as we make dates for coffee, with the same politeness and obligation. That now seems like an impossibly beautiful idyll.

      It struck me as a beautiful idyll when I read Brave New World. At the time, I was probably in my late teens, a sex child at his peak.

  51. Sep 2017
    1. More recently, some feminist criticism has turned away from describing female subjectivity as normatively governed by a will to resist. In looking to describe modes of female subjectivity outside a subversion/complicity duality and identify how women attached significance to inhabiting norms, as Charlotte Lucas did, this critical approach broadens our understanding of the multiple forms that subjectivity and agency take in the early novel.

      Interesting, especially since the majority of the article seemed to do what recent feminist criticism "has turned away against"

  52. Mar 2017
    1. the multilayered nature of interaction and language use, in all their complexity and as a network of interdependencies among all the elements in the setting, not only at the social level, but also at the physical and symbolic level

      Does this map to literary theory in any way?...

    1. Man kann es aber auch schade finden, dass in "PussyTerror TV" der rote Haltungsfaden fehlt.

      Sobald also Kebekus über Sachen herzieht, die Rützel nicht gut findet, fehlt Kebekus der rote Faden. Was erdreistet sich diese Kebekus eigentlich, ihren eigenen Humor zu haben, anstatt komplett auf Mainstream-Propaganda-Linie einzuschwenken? Frau Rützel, ihr Verständnis von Meinungsvielfalt ist wirklich bemerkenswert!

  53. Feb 2017
    1. How can we distinguish among the amusing eccentrics, the honestly misguided, the avaricious litigants, and the serious skeptics questioning a premature consensus?

      "True criticism is a liberal and humane art. It is the offspring of good sense and refined taste. It aims at acquiring a just discernment of the real merit of authors." - Blair

    1. when tion, which, without their aid, might have passed every one erects himself into a judge, and when unobserved; and which, though of a delicate na-we can hardly mingle in polite society without ture, frequently exert a powerful influence on bearing some share in such discussions;

      This sounds a lot like current complaints of the interwebs, particularly social media. Everyone's a critic!

    2. But this is the criticism of pedants only. True criticism is a lib-eral and humane art.

      This is still a complaint I hear a lot regarding academia--that we have fallen into criticism as a mode of deconstruction and not of information-gathering or improvement. I have always found that it sounds a little like an old man muttering "in my day, we weren't so negative about the canon!" and then being super angry and offended when you tell him his novel is pretty racist. I can take the point that criticism should not be solely destructive to the point of belittling otherwise valuable texts for the attention one gets for criticizing the popular, but it seems suspicious to say "criticism should only do this thing that I* want it to do!"

      *This mental image might exist because I have found that it is mostly older (white) male academics who don't like their students criticizing the canon. That's just my personal experience, though.

  54. Jan 2017
    1. No, I will not release this on F-Droid. I actually looked into it and ended up wasting quite a bit of time jumping through the hoops of their submission process before realizing it was blocked by a conflict of interest. It's not for lack of trying.Pale Moon may meet the requirements of Open Source distribution through it, but F-Droid doesn't meet the requirements of proper developer control over my own product to distribute through them. F-Droid is simply not for Pale Moon since:I cannot sign my own packages (all developers there have to allow F-Droid to sign their software and publish it with F-Droid's signature)I cannot control the build environment used to build the binaries (they build the program on their server)I cannot test the binaries before releaseIf there is a problem with the binaries (either by accident or on purpose), it will immediately reflect on me while it would be F-Droid's fault. This puts F-Droid in a position of power over software developers that I am not comfortable with (nor should any other app developer be).They don't accept pre-built APKs (with the single exception of MozCo's builds of Mozilla Firefox, because, well, I guess they are in some sort of agreement there - who knows why they have this one very notable exception...).F-Droid operators are also not happy about the prerequisites for building Pale Moon since it has a lot of dependencies and is very complex to build. I can't go and redesign the build requirements just to satisfy their needs for building on their side (which I don't want to begin with)At least some of the operators there seem to think MPL or FOSS = Public Domain... They are explicitly forbidden to build Pale Moon with official name and branding from source, as a result.More details in the pull request discussion: https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/merge_requests/260
  55. Dec 2016
    1. Responding to criticism:

      • Acknowledge each point.
      • Explain how you agree, and what you intend to do to improve, or
      • explain why you object to that point.

      They might give you additional useful opinions. They might not respond at all. If you get a response that is antagonistic, it's time to let it drop.

    2. A good critic who pans your work should be doing it as a service to your potential audience while giving you honest feedback that you can use to improve (or move on to something else).

      Sometimes the problem isn’t with what you’re doing but how it is perceived by others, and even here the critic can show you how to tune your message so what people hear is what you intend to say.

  56. Oct 2016
    1. Had this model failed to identify a bug, we could subsequently haveenriched the sketched specifications.

      This works backwards, saying, well, we know there's a bug, and we will change the sketched spec until MOLLY is able to find one...

  57. Jul 2016
    1. p. 6

      Retrieval methods designed for small databases decline rapidly in effectiveness as collections grow...

      This is an interesting point that is missed in the Distant reading controversies: its all very well to say that you prefer close reading, but close reading doesn't scale--or rather the methodologies used to decide what to close read were developed when big data didn't exist. How to you combine that when you can read everything. I.e. You close read Dickins because he's what survived the 19th C as being worth reading. But now, if we could recover everything from the 19th C how do you justify methodologically not looking more widely?

  58. Jun 2016
    1. No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission

      Fish, Stanley. 1988. “Guest Column: No Bias, No Merit: The Case against Blind Submission.” PMLA 103 (5): 739–48. http://www.jstor.org/stable/462513.

      An interesting essay in the context I'm reading it (alongside Foucault's What is an author in preparation for a discussion of scientific authorship.

      Among the interesting things about it are the way it encapsulates a distinction between the humanities and sciences in method (though Fish doesn't see it and it comes back to bite him in the Sokol affair). What Frye thinks is important because he is an author-function in Foucault's terms, I.e. a discourse initiator to whom we return for new insight.

      Fish cites Peters and Ceci 1982 on peer review, and sides with those who argue that ethos should count in review of science as well.

      Also interesting for an illustration of how much the field changed, from new criticism in the 1970s (when the first draft was written) until "now" i.e. 1989 when political criticism is the norm.

    2. But perhaps the greatest change is the one that renders the key opposition of the essay-between the timeless realm of literature and the pressures and exigencies of politics-inaccurate as a description of the assumptions prevailing in the profession. There are of course those who still believe that literature is defined by its independence of social and political contexts (a "concrete universal" in Wimsatt's terms), but today the most influential and up-to-date voices are those that proclaim exactly the reverse and ar- gue that the thesis of literary autonomy is itself a political one, part and parcel of an effort by the con- servative forces in society to protect traditional values from oppositional discourse. Rather than reflecting, as Ransom would have it, an "order of existence" purer than that which one finds in "actual life," lit- erature in this new (historicist) vision directly and vigorously "participates in historical processes and in the political management of reality" (Howard 25). Moreover, as Louis Montrose observes, if litera- ture is reconceived as a social rather than a merely aesthetic practice, literary criticism, in order to be true to its object, must be rearticulated as a social practice too and no longer be regarded as a merely academic or professional exercise (11-12

      How much literary criticism changed between 1979, 1982, and 1988! From ontological wholes to politicised

    3. Everyone is aware of that risk, although it is usually not acknowledged with the explicitness that one finds in the opening sentence of Raymond Waddington's essay on books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost. "Few of us today," Waddington writes, "could risk echoing C. S. Lewis's condemnation of the concluding books of Paradise Lost as an 'untransmuted lump of futurity"' (9). The nature of the risk that Wad- dington is about not to take is made clear in the very next sentence, where we learn that a generation of critics has been busily demonstrating the subtlety and complexity of these books and establishing the fact that they are the product of a controlled poetic design. What this means is that the kind of thing that one can now say about them is constrained in advance, for, given the present state of the art, the critic who is concerned with maintaining his or her professional credentials is obliged to say something that makes them better. Indeed, the safest thing the critic can say (and Waddington proceeds in this es- say to say it) is that, while there is now a general recognition of the excellence of these books, it is still the case that they are faulted for some deficiency that is in fact, if properly understood, a virtue. Of course, this rule (actually a rule of thumb) does not hold across the board. When Waddington observes that "few of us today could risk," he is acknowledging, ever so obliquely, that there are some of us who could. Who are they, and how did they achieve their special status? Well, obviously C. S. Lewis was once one (although it may not have been a risk for him, and if it wasn't why wasn't it?), and if he had not already died in 1972, when Waddington was writing, presumably he could have been one again. That is, Lewis's status as an authority on Renaissance literature was such that he could offer readings with- out courting the risk facing others who might go against the professional grain, the risk of not being listened to, of remaining unpublished, of being unattended to, the risk of producing something that was by definition-a definition derived from prevailing institutional conditions-without me

      on the necessity of discovering virtue in literary work as a professional convention of our discipline.

      This is a really interesting and useful passage for my first year lectures

  59. screen.oxfordjournals.org screen.oxfordjournals.org
    1. verningthis function is the belief that there must be - at a particular levelof an author's thought, of his conscious or unconscious desire — apoint where contradictions are resolved, where the incompatibleelements can be shown to relate to one another or to cohere arounda fundamental and originating contradiction. Fin

      This is not true (in theory) of scientific authorship. We don't judge the coherence of the oeuvre.

      Again it conflict with Fish's view of literary criticism

    2. In literary criticism, for example, the traditional methods fordefining an author - or, rather, for determining the configurationof the author from existing texts - derive in large part from thoseused in the Christian tradition to authenticate (or to reject) theparticular texts in its possession. Modern criticism, in its desireto 'recover' the author from a work, employs devices stronglyreminiscent of Christian exegesis w

      Relationship of literary criticism to exegesis

    3. as been under-stood that the task of criticism is not to re-establish the ties betweenan author and his work or to reconstitute an author's thought andexperience through his works and, further, that criticism shouldconcern itself with the structures of a work, its architectonic forms,which are studied for their intrinsic and internal relationships. Y

      Thinking of new criticism here

  60. Mar 2016
    1. End-to-end encryption is coming shortly to clients for both 1:1 and group chats to protect user data stored on servers, using the Olm cryptographic ratchet implementation.

      This would also answer another point of criticism for the redecentralize interview.

  61. Jan 2016
    1. Meanwhile, in almost exactly the same decades that the Internet arose and eventually evolved social computing, literary scholarship followed similar principles of decentralization to evolve cultural criticism.7

      Wow. This is the most interesting statement that I've read in a while. Wish I could pin an annotation...

      Really helps me justify my career arc, turning from literary criticism as a career to software "development."

  62. Nov 2015
    1. RAJ: Paul, you are who you are, what you are, and where you are at this very moment. You cannot do more than you can do. Do not waste your time in self-criticism or self-doubt. As you shall see, it is totally unnecessary. There has been no requirement for you to be something that you are not able to be. What you have needed to learn in order to fulfill your place has been accomplished. You have done well.

      You cannot do more than you can do. Do not waste your time in self-criticism. There has been no requirement for yo to be something that you are not.

      Here is another of Paul's mistaken beliefs - that he has failed to meet requirements. We all do this.

  63. Oct 2015
    1. You must learn to flow. You must learn that you are not self-directed in the sense of being a puppet with no strings attached, three-dimensionally speaking. From this standpoint, you will always seem to be a puppet with strings attached, and you will not have hold of the controls. From the standpoint of being as Conscious Being, as Fourth-dimensional Man, the concept of strings and controls is irrelevant. I point this out because, after having a wonderful, productive period of meditation, you spontaneously, immediately and without questioning, were criticizing yourself because you did not do exactly what I had told you to do. The fact is that there is no justifiable reason to be found for self-criticism. Watch for this in your experience, and don’t continue in this habit.

      Paul is criticizing himself and sabotaging the success of his immediately prior meditation success.

      This is common behavior on the journey of awakening and Raj suggests that he stops doing it.

    1. No joke is funny unless you see the point of it, and sometimes a point has to be explained.

      Sounds logical, in the abstract. But the explanation is often known to “kill the joke”, to decrease the humour potential. In some cases, it transforms the explainee into the butt of a new joke. Something similar has been said about hermeneutics and æsthetics. The explanation itself may be a new form of art, but it runs the risk of first destroying the original creation.

  64. Aug 2015
  65. Feb 2015
  66. Feb 2014
    1. U.S. property policy remains largely fixed in its establishe d mindset of defending intellectual property rights for their own sake, instead of as a means to encourage innovation.
  67. Sep 2013
    1. but that those discourses are better and more profitable which denounce our present mistakes than those which praise our past deeds, and those which counsel us what we ought to do than those which recount ancient history