How exactly certain strings of words, or memes are as effective as bioengineered viruses, while others aren’t.

There’s a thought that’s haunted me for years: we’re doing all this research in psychology, but are we learning anything? We run these studies and publish these papers and…then what? The stack of papers just gets taller?

Because, If we can’t tell a story about something, it’s as if it didn’t happen.

Without a narrative schema to anchor it, the pandemic all but vanished from public discourse soon after it ended.

You can’t tweet your way to self-respect.

We have lost our prerogative to enact change.

Interoperability is more important than features.

Mediocrity is the only source of advantage.

The universe is deeply lazy. The universe is mediocre. The universe is functionally unfixed self-perpetuation, always in optionality-driven perpetual beta, Always Already Player 0.1.

desktop picture phones

Any real political response will require more than introducing new tech. For example, consider all the institutional support needed to manage a currency in your country. And then remember that a person’s identity is infinitely more complex than any financial abstraction.

Data must have some sense of authenticity to be useful, it must have some contextual meaning to be shared, and it must leave room for error if it is to be alive.

Consent is the latest fashion.

Data processing is the lifeblood of large bureaucracies.

As Dr. Phil always says: how’s that working out for you?

Next to his 18th-century beast, 21st-century democracy is a sea-cucumber. Once a wild animal, it has since evolved into a sessile quasi-vegetable without will or capacity. Any vegetable has a farmer. To empower it is to empower its farmer. Its voice is the voice of that farmer. This hollow and passive ventriloquism is the last stage of many a regime.

A country is a role-playing game.

It's an experimental workshop as much as it is a public service, the overarching goal is to elevate the more human, non-commercial sides of the Internet

In the end, in both these examples, the essence of both the water vapor and the water in the river never changes only its expression changes because of the environment in which it finds itself is different.

Unless we know why someone made a decision, we can’t safely change it or conclude that they were wrong.

ontology is mutated

From antiquity until the mid-twentieth century, women have interacted with the sacred through the medium of the household and childbirth. There is the brick and beam that constitutes a house, then there is the metaphysical overlay which conjures a home. There is the bare broodnest, and then there is a blanket of gossamer moss— myths, songs, and spells that provide raiment for oneiromantic rituals and bind souls to human hearts. This is man’s covenant with Pandora. When this vessel of domestic sorcery is broken, due to widowhood, divorce, or abandonment, she spills her curse out into the world in the form of witchcraft.

Schumann

Glossary of some important musical terms

Usually, these dogmas are communicated through subtle language games—“trust the Science,” “follow the data,” “improve the human condition,” and so forth.

sperg-bor

We have the responsibility to maintain a healthy environment for everyone to learn, build, create, and connect.

but the millions that channel made probably help to dry some tears.

Rhythmic Phrasing

Life emerged from an out-of-equilibrium thermodynamic process known as dissipative adaptation

SOUND SUPPORT PHRASINGThe last performance directive to cover is quite important, and one that is often overlooked~ that of sound support phrasing ~ the direction as when to start and when to stop produc-ing a sound irrelative to pitch change.Whether the sound is produced by blowing, plucking, scrapping or hitting, there is a pointwhen the performer needs to take a breath, raise the arm, or move the bow toa starting posi-tion; all affect the phrase qualicy ofa melody. There are two considerations the composermust make; (1) how long the sound production can last depending on the tempo of theperformance and the abilities of the performer, and (2) how will the pause ro take a breathor raise a bow affect the phrasing of the melody. Careful preplanning is required to assure asuccessful interpretation of your melody.

ARTICULATIONS AND EFFECTSThis subject is beyond the scope of this book ~ one really should refer to an orchestrationor arranging text for this, bur to provide a quick access and a review, the following descrip-tions of articulations are included.ARTICULATIONSIchasbeenstatedthatforajazzperformance,onlytwoarticulationsareneeded:staccatoandtenuto-thereisnoneedtobesospartan.To review:Staccato and tenuto refer to note length ~ how long the pitch is held - with no change in vol-ume or emphasis.

(like diplomats) are professional networkers, forced into elaborate mnemotechnic encodings.

cadential melodic gestures in his solo. Thesepatterns usually accomplish two objectives: (1) they provide a logical phrase conclusionand (2) they foreshadow the arrival of the next phrase

The use of dynamics, legato, and especially articulation can substantially improve the overallpresentation of melodic lines. Generally, the use of dynamics should roughly follow thecontour of the melodic lines. Rising lines are typically played with a slight crescendo anddescending lines with a slight diminuendo. Additionally, melodic lines should be playedalmost legato with barely perceptible note detachment. Carefully distributed articulations(dynamic accents, staccato, tenuto, marcato, etc.) are also an essential component ofphrasing.

Every 10 minutes on his game boy is another shovel of dirt he throws out of the deep hole he lives in.

We think too much and feel too little.

The kingdom of God is in man. Phones crowd it out. A phone is a sterilizing meme package. Thousands of cultures are amusing themselves to zero.

“Google Search, what many consider an indispensable tool of modern life, is dead or dying.”

“There is very little left to conserve, but that in turn means there’s everything to build.”

The iron core of this book is sex role realism.

— the treatment of women as “Meat Lego,” to be manipulated by the demands of “bio-libertarianism” in the service of ever-more atomization.

even in this age of liquid modernity

We are not doing the effective thing with our lives, we are drifting, we are being hoodwinked and bamboozled and misled by those who trade upon the old traditions.

"moral progress has not kept pace with material advance."

"the abolition of distance"

If you can build something as big as Amazon Web Services with a stack based on a simple service call, or whole social networks and customer service suites based on simple browser-to-browser communication, or a robust way of delivering and managing software based on a little process isolation code, then just imagine how big a thing you could build – bear with me here – if you had the goddamn Singularity as your starting point?

(alternate phrasing for Chomskyites: technology increases the efficiency of manufacturing consent in the same way it increases the efficiency of manufacturing everything else)

Ennobling

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

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.

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

Borgesian

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

onrushing subhuman future being manufactured for us will only accelerate.

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

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

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

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. 

Reducing ourselves to one another’s pets is not.

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).

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

Techno-optimism

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

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.

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

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

“information ecosystem,”

Spiritual Speciation

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?  

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

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

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

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

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

trying to save me from the death march of my race.

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.

Statistics

You will want to report this as follows:

Example: Reporting the results of ANOVA

Among the potential benefits are receiving a helpful treatment

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