2,645 Matching Annotations
  1. Jul 2021
    1. Most Stories are the Same. Kurt Vonnegut once said that there are only six types of story. The fundamental constraints of the medium (and to a lesser extent, audience preferences) lead to the same story being told, over and over again.

      Yeah, I don't buy that this is inevitable so much as Save The Cat beat sheet conservatism.

    2. The 2000s-era teen/adult comedy has died out, despite immense popularity. Why?2 Adult comedy thrives on irreverence. Over the past decade, we’ve become touchy about what’s okay to say or laugh at.

      This is making the case that edgelord shit is what people want, but corporations used to fund it and don't now. Citation needed, to say the least.

    1. We may still know nothing of the work’s original social and cultural meaning, but that does not matter, for we have fit it into our own aesthetic world and conferred our own meaning upon it.

      Nope, still matters

    2. The idea of training one’s taste may seem alien, even repugnant. Perhaps beauty should be recognizable in any circumstances. But one’s own experience will generally tell against this claim.

      This is a whole argument, and it's been made, and it's being half-assedly rebutted

    3. For the purposes of this essay, there is such a thing as great art.

      Beg the question

    4. “Kenneth Clark was saying the other day…that people who look at old masters fall into three groups: those who see what it is without being told; those who see it when you tell them; and those who can’t see it whatever you do.” This remark, cold and hard as it is, seems largely correct. Ask anyone who has taught literature or art history at the college level: the professor will recognize these three groups—the sensitive, the teachable, and the dull. It is not necessarily a matter of intellect. I once heard a brilliant economist talk about a novel: he noticed everything in it but the art. It is a matter of taste.

      I don't think I buy this

    1. The final benefit is that compression and dense-packing in columnar databases free up space — space that may be used to sort and index data within the columns. In other words, columnar databases have higher sorting and indexing efficiency, which comes more as a side benefit of having some leftover space from strong compression. It is also, in fact, mutually beneficial: researchers who study columnar databases point out that sorted data compress better than unsorted data, because sorting lowers entropy.

      I should learn what "indexing efficiency" means in this context

    1. The first action a chef will take is often to set a pan on the stove and start heating it. That pan isn’t just a pan. It is also a placeholder reminding him that a dish is in process.

      Uh....

    1. One of the first material scientists I spoke to about making things that last for thousands of years offered a compelling insight: “Everything is burning, just at different rates.” What he means is that what we perceive as aging is actually oxidisation, like rusting. When we imagine materials that may last for thousands of years, most people think of stone or precious metals like gold – because they don't oxidise readily. But even bodies can be preserved for millennia if stored in the right chemical environment, as the mummies of Egypt demonstrate.

      A fascinating take on "everyone is dying"

    1. bio-concrete. This is where bacteria called Bacillus pasteurii is actually encapsulated and added to the concrete, along with a form of starch that serves as its food. The bacteria stay dormant in the concrete until a crack forms and air gets in. This change wakes the bacteria up, and they begin to eat, grow and reproduce. In doing so, they excrete calcite, which bonds to the concrete, fills the crack and seals it up. So in essence, this type of concrete structure is capable of self-repair.

      ....whereas bioconcrete leaves that potential dormant. (how long can that bacteria live like that?)

    2. Bio-cement is formed by taking sand, or other forms of aggregate, and then adding bacteria and urea, a component of urine. The urea triggers the bacteria to secrete calcite – a form of calcium carbonate – binding the mixture together into a solid material similar to limestone.

      So biocement creates the calcite as part of production...

    1. Sand mining caused a bridge to collapse in Taiwan in 2000, and another the following year in Portugal just as a bus was passing over it, killing 70 people.

      "Sand mining" sounds paradoxical prima facie

    2. And then there’s Singapore, a world leader in land reclamation. To create more space for its nearly six million residents, the jam-packed city-state has built out its territory with an additional 50 sq miles (130 sq km) of land over the past 40 years, almost all of it with sand imported from other countries. The collateral environmental damage has been so extreme that neighbouring Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all restricted exports of sand to Singapore.

      You know, given that I've heard about three things about Singapore ever, this seems notable

    3. Desert sand is largely useless to us. The overwhelming bulk of the sand we harvest goes to make concrete, and for that purpose, desert sand grains are the wrong shape. Eroded by wind rather than water, they are too smooth and rounded to lock together to form stable concrete. 

      Desert sand can't be used for concrete? Huh

    1. Archaeologically-speaking, clothes have not been very hard-wearing for much of human history, says Zalasiewicz. "But as soon as plastic came along, we suddenly have super durable techno-fur, as it were – detachable techno-fur."

      Is it thus desirable or undesirable to be buried in an unnatural shroud?

    2. At first the car will simply rust but, as iron dissolves well in anoxic water, once the oxygen level decreases its metal components will begin to dissolve. Or perhaps a part of the chassis will mineralise, reacting with sulphides to form pyrite. The iron in steel beams or embedded in reinforced concrete, kitchen implements, or even tiny quantities of iron in the speaker of a mobile phone will all acquire a glittering sheen. Even whole rooms – a food court kitchen fitted with stainless steel worktops – might be transformed into fool’s gold.

      If I were writing something about time distortion, I would include this detail

    1. Actual photo of actual women in the 1890s doing minimal not-really skirt hiking to walk up steps. Note how all they’re doing is holding their long skirts neatly to one side, out of the way of their feet.

      I regret reading this piece because it's now going to bother me forever when I notice it.

    1. here's a small GIF animation of my Ian Knot to prove that it really is the world's fastest.

      I gotta tell you, I am convinced...

    1. A coherent and articulated thought does not produce itself automatically, but the process is significantly simplified when all the parts are on the table.

      Cut the work down to size. I like this

    1. An open protocol for per-user storage on the Web

      This is very, very cool -- but I wonder if it's the right level of abstraction? I wouldn't know, I'm not that much of a webdev.

    1. Fire mindset An approach to circumventing mental blocks by deliberately interpreting everything as fuel for your own progress. "Transform it into something useful" If the outcome is not what you wanted, ask if it still serves your purposes in some way. I have surprised myself many times at how often this is the case.

      Fire consumes. Am I meant to burn through the world? And yet this idea of seeking transformation is clearly useful.

    1. For some things, however, that artificiality is what people respond to. A cherry flavour almost never tastes like fresh cherries, which are quite mild and defined by the texture of the fruit. Instead it has strong notes of almond, of Maraschino cherries from a jar, and if you leave that out, Wright has found, a client will come back and tell you, that’s the flavour they want.

      How similar is the real flavor of cherries and plums?

    2. The flavourist comes up with a first draft at their desk, then puts on a white coat and hits the lab bench, mixing oils, essences, extracts, and synthetic molecules. Wright, who is known for her pear flavours, can reel off the ingredients. There’s a bubblegum, almost banana-tasting molecule called isoamyl acetate, and another molecule called ethyl decadienoate, which has a strong pear taste but that can get a little acrylic.

      This seems like a great excerpt for something sci-fi

    1. veryone from Bill Maher to Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson

      I love the idea that this is supposed to represent some broad spectrum

    2. Over the course of these communications, Weinstein asked if he could nail down the name and contact number of the person with whom he was interacting. “I said, ‘Look, I need to know who you are first, whether you’re real, what your real first and last names are, what your phone number is, and so on,” Weinstein recounts. “But on asking what ‘Christopher’s’ real name and email was, they wouldn’t even go that far.”

      Oh my God, why would they ever hand that over? Throw some poor employee to the wolves?

  2. www.ultra-com.org www.ultra-com.org
    1. Engineering, programming, agriculture (like, actual agriculture, not your shitty organic garden), construction, metallurgy and math—basically a list of things the left is currently allergic to—are all absolutely foundational. Only with actual skills, often gained through work, does the abstract knowledge of these chokepoints become relevant, since sabotage and occupation can then be paired with attempts to build territories. This knowledge also serves to temper our enthusiasm, as most of us must simply recognize that not much is happening and we are quite far from the levers of power. It is necessary, then, to make more friends.

      I am so, so pessimistic about the ability to construct an alternate world, I am choking on my own pessimism like someone passed out in vomit

    2. one of the reasons that places like China and Vietnam became ideal locations for factories was precisely the high literacy rates and glut of mid-level engineers they had inherited from the socialist period.

      This is not a narrative one hears told

    3. discovering what can and cannot be severed from global production networks requires a process of experimentation carried out by those who have gained some knowledge of how these technologies operate.

      Is my technology knowledge useful to this? Could it be?

    4. Expensive redundancies are built into these networks, for example, to ensure that when strikes do happen at one link in the chain, there are back-up channels to keep production flowing downstream.

      was this written before the pandemic and PPE shortage, or

    5. On a technological level, it’s surprisingly reasonable.

      Excepting climate?

    6. The actual knowledge required to make a car, a computer, even a hunk of steel, grows more rarefied, itself an expensive commodity rationed to smaller and smaller shares of the population, often pieced apart and distributed so widely that no single engineer or programmer actually knows the entirety of the process, which can only be synthesized at the social level through coordination between many firms via the market. The process is abstracted—not in thought, but materially or “objectively,” by its literal piecing-apart and recomposition in the market, with the mechanism of money as an abstract universal equivalent.

      I need to come back to this and think about what it means. What does a product made by a single community look like?

    7. The excess workers are a net cost. In some cases this cost is made up for at the expense of wealthier workers, whose consumption of services pays the bill for poorer workers. In other cases the state takes up the cost in the form of welfare, stimulus spending, prisons or simply through an array of social programs mashed together in an attempt to pay the diffused costs of slow-motion societal collapse. In all these instances, this general cost takes the form of second-hand rents charged on productive work.

      I'm not sure how to consider this from my crude econ perspective

    8. The trend is often met with optimism by the highly-skilled, who guarantee that the “second machine age” will create as many jobs as it eliminated, just as previous bouts of mechanization replaced farm work with manufacturing and manufacturing with services. These are often the dreams of people living within today’s Silicon bubble economies, part of the small fraction of the population actually employed in high-end services, STEM fields or, god forbid, “the arts.”

      Farm work "replaced" would be news to farmworkers, naturally (I cognitively know they're less employed at scale, but ...)

    9. The flyknits represent the largest mechanization of the notoriously labor-intensive footwear industry in decades. According to a research report by Deutsche Bank, “the technology reduces labor costs by up to 50% and cuts material usage by up to 20%, resulting in .25% higher margins.”

      Wow, I'd really thought it was just marketing idiocy

    10. These cities are attractive because they have immense, thriving markets in bullshit—and bullshitting is one of the few skills that hasn’t yet been fully automated.

      The spirit of "bullshit" in this sentence deserves scrutiny

    1. So the YIMBY solution to the yuppie invasion isn't - or shouldn't be - just to build market-rate housing anywhere and everywhere. It's more like the following:A) Build market-rate housing that appeals specifically to yuppies, clustered in specific neighborhoods away from long-time working-class residential areas.B) Instead of tearing down existing housing to build market-rate housing, replace parking lots and warehouses and other inefficient commercial space with new market-rate housing.In other words, YIMBYism is about yuppie diversion. It uses market-rate housing to catch and divert yuppies before they can ever invade normal folks' neighborhoods.

      "Yuppie diversion" is a phrase that's gonna pop into my head forever more

    2. Knowledge-based industries like tech, medicine, and finance are much more important - for simplicity's sake I'll refer to all of these as "tech".

      Like the murderer who doesn't want to be lumped in with the bestialist, I am put out.

    1. the details of this section are, as all details about Milo Yiannopoulos are, simultaneously woefully tedious and infuriatingly grisly.

      Only a Victorian studies scholar can swing a triply adverbed sentence like a baseball bat. (I love it)

    2. That the phantom authority in question is simply good sense — that it makes sense to refer to trans women as “she” because, well, we look, speak, act, dress, and identify as women, and many of us have estrogen rather than testosterone in our bodies — can be ignored in favor of the paranoid fear that someone else is coming to dispossess us of our language.

      I don't know that I'd like to cede this "sense" argument. It makes "sense" to label me a "Miss <Surname>" because I am unmarried. However, this makes my skin crawl and people should not do that, and I am surprisedly comfortable with the idea that someone should come dispossess them of the language with which they do it, at least where I'm concerned.

    3. Why is Reed not writing manifestos in defense of maiden names? For the same reason that any bully weaponizes referential speech by making up names, repeating cruel epithets, etc. Misgendering and deadnaming are modes of abuse, designed to humiliate and hurt trans people.

      The first time I've seen misgendering explained as "weaponized referential speech" which is quite a lightbulb moment

    1. Tips for using RSS wisely Beware the hoarder instinct. No algorithm can save you from hoarding feeds "just in case", then being overwhelmed. The only cure is to ruthlessly Marie Kondo that crap – if a feed doesn't consistently enrich your life, cut it. Some feeds only give you the excerpt of a post, with a link to see the full post at their site. Don't follow those: they break you out of the RSS reading experience, and trick you into losing time on their site. (This is a harsh rule: I used to follow Quanta Magazine's feed, but they switched from full-text to excerpts, so I unsubscribed.) Don't follow feeds that update more than once a day. Go for daily digests, or better yet, weekly digests.

      This advice is terrible, in my view, but really doesn't belong in a piece trying to explain RSS to people who don't know what it is. RSS is a tool that people should try to use the way they use the Internet -- at least to start. If you check Lifehacker 5 times a day, following Lifehacker's excerpts-only feed still has value!

    1. Regarding State Street in Springfield, Massachusetts: In the past I have offered to either (a) assist the city—pro-bono—in coming up with a design to address the dangerous crossing or (b) serve as a pro-bono expert witness for the family of the next victim of this deadly design. That offer still stands, although if it comes to (b), the willful inaction in the face of ample evidence that action is warranted makes Springfield grossly negligent, a finding that should cost the city millions. This letter from the public works director will be Exhibit A. There are many more equally powerful exhibits.

      Wow, what a paragraph

    2. Even so, I’ve had my license challenged for speaking out against bad practices in the past. I’m willing to face that scrutiny, if it comes to that, because I believe it is immoral for members of the engineering profession to use their position of authority to assert engineering values over human values, to thwart the will of elected officials and the public when it comes to how their communities are designed.

      Luckily, techies face no such threat from challenging tech and can/must do so loudly.

    3. In this paragraph, it is asserted that the signalized intersection must be designed to prioritize the volume of traffic. Everything builds off of that assertion. The volume must be accommodated, ergo the signal sequence must be long, ergo pedestrians must wait a long time to cross, ergo pedestrians will not wait—they will put their lives in danger anyway—and the HAWK system would be useless.If instead human values were prioritized over the values of the engineer, this entire line of thinking would be turned around. We want humans to be safe, ergo the crossing signal sequence must be short, ergo traffic volume on this street will be reduced. This is perfectly acceptable reasoning yet it’s never presented to elected officials as their choice. Yet, it is their choice.

      The danger of optimization-thinking; learning how to optimize doesn't teach you how to reevaluate your objective function.

    1. Gentrification in places like SoDo and industrial Ballard, where breweries and retail storefronts are overtaking traditional industrial businesses

      I thought gentrification was defined by pushing out people, not shifting land use

    1. This ethos has consequences. In 1950, U.S. farm land peaked at 1.2 billion acres. Today, there’s less than 900 million acres. Much of this land has been lost to sprawling development patterns, whereby low-density housing oozes outwards from an urban periphery into previously undeveloped rural land.

      "Undeveloped" rural land was already typically deforested and dewilded, though.

    1. That means everything bought online and shipped directly from a Chinese warehouse comes in duty free. The Customs and Border Patrol can close parts of this loophole, but ultimately Congress should get rid of it. There’s just no reason to have one set of import rules for stuff that’s bought online and a different set for everything else.

      I would have liked to see numbers in how much those taxes and duties end up being for typical stuff you'd buy. Also, what else are they skipping? There was that thing about lead levels in stuff from Forever 21 -- I'm dead sure those tests aren't run for this kind of thing...

    1. “Don’t get me wrong” is usually a tell — a kind of backpedaling that sets off an internal alarm and suggests I’m a) reading a hyperbolic argument (which, admittedly, describes the majority of online writing these days) or b) that the writer is just lazy.

      It's a conversational way of beginning a paragraph that acknowledges limits to an argument!

    1. To summarise, we went from modernism—”Make it new!” Let’s shape History!—to postmodernism—everything sucks! Nothing really matters!—to metamodernism: maybe things are not this black-and-white? Maybe there’s a middle ground?

      I question this understanding of postmodernism, to say the least.

    1. To diffuse the heat and avoid overcooking the bulbs on the edge, line the slow cooker well withwashed thimbleberry leaves, soaked corn husks, or crumpled parchment paper.

      I would love to try camas some day! A lot of native foods seem alien to my wimpy palate, but I get along with root vegetables and such well enough.

    1. Star backgrounds are one of the most significant things on the web for me. When they started to disappear it was the first sign that the web was changing.

      I need to excerpt this on my site.

    2. Cyberspace is star backgrounds with blue underlined links on them.

      I will never let go of this quote. It lived in my heart even before I had read it.

    1. Laurel Schwulst (born 1988) is an American artist, educator, and writer. Schwulst is recognized for her internet art, her interactive design work, her websites, her writing about the internet[1], and her innovative teaching methods.[2]

      This is the coolest personal bio I've ever seen?? Of course knocking off the Wikipedia look creates a cool artistic effect! How had we not thought of it before? So smart!!!!

  3. Jun 2021
    1. It could be, though, that academia is not a cult itself, but rather was a cult for me, because like many of the women Montell writes about, I joined because I hoped it would protect me from capitalism. The student health center was my socialized medicine, and tenure a Scandinavian safety net. In exchange, I willingly participated in language that demoted all other career and life paths. A “job” was an academic one, and all others were “alt-ac” (alternatives to academia). I kept my doubts to myself lest I wanted to hear the thought-terminating cliché: “good people get jobs.”

      Yes!! Wow!!! I have read this attitude before and never been able to distill what was going on

    2. In the absence of robust social welfare programs, many turn to tightly knit groups that seem to provide an alternative space that can save them from the worst ravages of the market: “America’s laissez-faire atmosphere makes people feel all on their own.”

      Interestingly true even among groups that are very, uh, laissez-faire towards outsiders

    3. Their respective paths to the dark side though, Montell tell us, often begin with increased levels of esoteric terminology and choice epithets for outsiders. “Language,” she explains, “can do so much to squash independent thinking, obscure truths, encourage confirmation bias, and emotionally charge experiences such that no other way of life seems possible.”

      I don't buy this. Maybe those are the first symptoms, but that's different from the first causes

    4. Montell says it is language that can best clue us in as to whether an organization we have joined is a cult or is at least engaging in cultlike behavior to extract resources out of its members.

      This is plausible but is a different claim

    5. “The most compelling techniques” espoused by cults have had “little to do with drugs, sex, shaved heads, remote communes, drapey kaftans, or ‘Kool-Aid,’” says Montell.

      Are you sure?

    1. if you suspect that your fate is tied up with that of other human beings and the planet we live on, as the pandemic harshly reminded us, you just might want to think of yourself as a universal owner. If you do, you’ll know to switch banks, to bother your pension fund to apply ethical exclusions to its bond portfolio and to vote against the directors of problematic companies (especially banks and insurance companies), and tell everyone you know to do the same.

      Switch banks to what? Aren't the 'ethical exclusions' of a bond portfolio exactly an ESG fund in a bond market instead of stocks? Shouldn't I just be able to put my money in a fund that would use its larger influence to vote with an ESG angle?

      I wish this were easier. I don't want to think about investing.

    1. Why do we associate white with wedding gowns? And how long has this tradition existed?

      The article answers: because it was first associated with purity/chastity/virginity and then with luxurious expense (given the impracticality of the color).

      On the one hand, screw all of that. On the other hand, what would it look like to wear something festive enough to be special and yet practical for reuse? Wedding suits were a thing there for a while -- but when in my life am I ever gonna have to wear a suit?

    1. In July, police began investigating a hate crime. The crime in question? A defacement of a statue commemorating SS Troops from World War II. In layman’s terms: Someone defaced a memorial to Nazis. A memorial that has been standing proudly in the middle of Oakville for decades. 

      A neat example for those who seem to be very into the idea of "not erasing history".

    1. Technique became universally totalitarian in modern society as rationalistic proceduralism imposed an artificial value system of measuring and organizing everything quantitatively rather than qualitatively. Like cancer in a living organism, the systematization of technique pervades every cell of our modern technical and technological society. The subtle illusion of this invasive methodology of technique is that people view technology as the liberator of mankind, the operational instrument that sets them free from natural function. Quite the contrary, says Ellul, “technique enslaves people, while proffering them the mere illusion of freedom, all the while tyrannically conforming them to the demands of the technological society with its complex of artificial operational objectives.”

      Sounds familiar

    2. Ellul’s issue was not with technological machines but with a society necessarily caught up in efficient methodological techniques. Technology, then, is but an expression and by-product of the underlying reliance on technique, on the proceduralization whereby everything is organized and managed to function most efficiently, and directed toward the most expedient end of the highest productivity.

      What does it look like when we use the trappings of technology counter to the goals of technique?

    3. Technique obeys a specific rationality. The characteristics of technical progress are self-augmentation, automization, absence of limits, casual progression, a tendency toward acceleration, disparity, and ambivalence. Nevertheless, technique is lacking in one of the essential characteristics found in any organized ensemble, reaction. It is not yet able to control its errors and dysfunctions, to react on its source and modify itself. However, we may now be in the presence of the progressive elaboration of such a reactive capability.

      From 2021: ha

    4. This technical milieu involves, on the human side, a complete re-examination of ancient modes of behavior, or physiological capacities

      An accepting mode is forbidden

    5. Technique now constitutes a fabric of its own, replacing nature. Technique is the complex and complete milieu in which human beings must live, and in relation to which they must define themselves. It is a universal mediator, producing a generalised mediation, totalizing and aspiring to totality.

      Being defined in relation to technique is bleak

    1. The link-anchor is thus a pernicious idea, based on the notion of small numbers of links to eligible locations which must be individually prepared.

      I mean, it ain't wrong.

    1. Inter features a tall x-height to aid in readability of mixed-case and lower-case text. Several OpenType features are provided as well, like contextual alternates that adjusts punctuation depending on the shape of surrounding glyphs, slashed zero for when you need to disambiguate "0" from "o", tabular numbers, etc.

      The overall impression is Apple-ish, polished. I would expect to see this only with the most tasteful of photographic elements. I don't know if it's too contemporary for the style of my projects, but I'll bet people can do cool stuff with it!

    1. David Nutt isn’t the UK drug czar anymore. He got fired after he refused to retract a speech in which he stated that cannabis and other “recreational” drugs are less dangerous than legal drugs, particularly alcohol and tobacco. I think it was the comparison with alcohol that really did it. After all, booze is one of the most concentrated industries in the world, with just a few companies producing nearly all the beer and spirits we drink. What’s more, Nutt had made a particular enemy of the booze industry. It’s been long understood that the UK alcohol industry’s profitability was entirely dependent on unsafe binge drinking. If everyone in Britain “enjoyed responsibly” as the industry’s ads urged, they would no longer be in profit.

      Is there a way to tax alcohol that could make it less profitable?

    2. Consider the tale of David Nutt, an eminent neuropsychopharmacologist who served as the “drug czar” to the British government in 2008. Nutt was in charge of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, the body that sets out the rules for which drugs should be made illegal and under what circumstances. As part of a review of drug rules, Nutt convened an expert panel and asked them to classify an array of substances, ranking each one based on how harmful it was to its users, to their families, and to wider society. He used this quantitative data to group drugs into three categories: drugs that would be considered very dangerous irrespective of how you ranked harms to society, family, and self; drugs that would be considered not very dangerous irrespective of how you ranked harms to society, family, and self; and drugs whose danger-rating would change substantially based on how you ranked harms to society, family, and self. Nutt then took his categories to the UK Parliament and asked them to tell him how they prioritized these different forms of harm: the question of whether we want to protect individuals, families, or society is a political one, irreducibly qualitative, without an empirical solution. However, once those subjective political priorities have been established, there is an empirical solution to how drugs should be classified in light of these priorities.

      This is inspiring. I wish more projects were so clear in their scope.

    1. Today, the Big Six publishers are the Big Four, because Random House, the largest publisher in the world, gobbled up Penguin and Simon & Schuster. When RH, S&S and Penguin were three companies, it was illegal for them to collude on pricing. But after their mergers, the three former CEOs – now presidents of divisions within an unimaginably giant company – can meet in a board room and plan exactly the same price-fixing strategy, and that isn't illegal under "consumer welfare" antitrust – it's "efficient."

      I feel uneasy that someone somewhere thinks the problem was that collusion had been illegal at all...

    1. As Ellul saw it, technique colonized realms of life to which it did not properly belong. The key, then, is to recognize where and when it is appropriate to allow technique (or quantification or optimization) a place and where and when it would be good to circumscribe its scope. In order to do so we must have before us a clear sense of the good we seek. But, as Ellul warned, technique becomes a problem precisely when it becomes and end in itself. This may happen because we ourselves lose sight of the ends we were originally seeking or because the focus on technique itself gradually blinds us to those ends. It would seem that when a framework within which questions of the good can be meaningfully taken up is unavailable, then quantification rushes in to fill the axial vacuum.

      Similarly with market efficiency

    1. It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the internet.

      So they implemented StackSort with a layer of neural obfuscation

    1. My hobbies include playing guitar, learning French, reading, and passing credit checks. I love credit checks. Ohh I love credit checks so so much. I actually love them so much that maybe we shouldn’t do one. I wouldn’t want to overwhelm you with how much I love them.

      I will tolerate no slander of McSweeney's writing ever again. This makes me want to laugh, but in a way that makes me feel like I have pus in my chest, which is an Accurate Reflection of the Contemporary Condition.

    1.      In the play, the father is a traveling salesman.      In life, my father never left us. Not even for a night.

      This story (piece? I haven't the faintest idea whether it's fiction, which I mean as praise) is economical. Emotional without feeling manipulative.

    1. Baba Yaga’s Garden

      This is really excellent but I feel like the artist needs to answer the most important question this art raises:

      are they dating

    1. Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy (Russian: Ядерные взрывы для народного хозяйства, romanized: Yadernyye vzryvy dlya narodnogo khozyaystva; sometimes referred to as Program #7[1]) was a Soviet program to investigate peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs).

      If I needed a band name, "Nuclear Explosions for the National _" would be it. ("for National Agriculture"? "for National Ergonomics"? "for the National Spirit")

    1. America’s hatred towards the poor and the working class are laid bare in these naked feuds. In 2000, 42 units of federally-subsidized housing for teachers who could no longer afford to live in San Francisco was overthrown by homeowners in the Sunset District who in a fit of cruel hysteria claimed that “[the teachers] don’t even do a good job educating our kids,” and that the project was a slippery slope to public housing tower blocks that would usher in “rampant crime.”

      ...name and shame, name and shame!!

    2. In fact, one study featured in a paper on neighborhood early warning systems for gentrification cites historic architecture as one of five predictors of gentrification in the DC area.

      Analyzing data for the DC area, they identified the following five predictors of future gentrification (defined as sales prices that are above the DC average) in low-priced areas: (1) adjacency to higher-priced areas, (2) good access to the Metro subway system, (3) historic architecture, (4) large housing units, and (5) more than 50 percent appreciation in sales prices between 1994 and 2000.

      5 seems rather too causal, but the rest tracks.

    1. A new way to connect with readers.Break the fourth wall and speak directly to your readers using Author Notes. Readers can also share what they think by giving episodes they like a Thumbs Up and by using Faves to vote for a story they enjoy most each week.

      Is anyone else fascinated by the attempted coopting of fanfic culture here? And yet at the same time stuff like this and Wattpad monetization seem important to getting financial support into a new flourishing of serial fiction. How does this compare to experiments with Substack fiction?

    1. And in 1984, while living on the Mendocino coast of California, he fell in love. With mushrooms. "Outside my cabin were these beautiful mushrooms," he says. "And it was as if these mushrooms looked at me and said, 'Taylor, go out and tell the world how beautiful we are.' And I said, 'OK, I'll do it.' " Lockwood bought camera gear and became passionate about photographing mushrooms. One of his images is even on a U.S. postage stamp. He says sometimes he would dig a hole next to a mushroom for his camera so he could get just the right angle. "I wanted to see them just as a frog would," he says.

      "Taylor Lockwood, a 74-year-old mushroom enthusiast and professional photographer." Fantastic.

    1. Identity issues, far from posing any genuinely liberatory demands, are weaponized time and again against genuine dissent and criticism.

      I love claiming something is happening without providing examples that risk disagreement, it definitely makes my arguments good and solid

    2. But the concepts that fuel the ascendant ideology come more from the HR department than the grassroots. As in the 1960s they are produced and amplified mainly by the offspring of prosperous elites, for whom genuine exploitation is often involved only as a background abstraction giving a feeling of moral heft to what amounts to office politics.

      [citation needed]

    3. It helps explain why the current movement tends to accept, echo, and appeal to the general logic of the administrative power structure, rather than genuinely criticizing or resisting it.

      The thing that drives me mad is the "your complaints are just noise within the system, my complaints are valid and radical"

    4. These exaggerated rejections of the system ensured their failure by depriving themselves of the resources of rationality and argument necessary for reform

      I don't think this adequately recognizes the extent to which people in these movements explicitly claim reform is death/stasis, and only revolution is worth working toward.

    5. The protests of the New Left began with the recognition of the failures of an over-administered society. The young activists, Adorno’s former assistant Jürgen Habermas wrote in his 1967 book, Toward a Rational Society, sense acutely that something is wrong: “They have become sensitive to the costs for individual development of a society dominated by competition for status and achievement and by the bureaucratization of all regions of life.” Coming predominantly from the upper economic strata of the society, students were uniquely positioned to see the inhumanity of increased bureaucratic control, atomization, and competition that began to colonize every facet of life. They saw more clearly than their prospering parents the hypocrisy of Western institutions using the veneer of “neutrality” and bureaucratic disinterestedness to enable atrocities in the developing world and whitewash historical wrongs. But they also knew nothing else.  So their struggle to find a way outside of it tended to dissolve into fantasy and a rejection of the whole system, root and branch.

      Haha... well... that doesn't sound.... unfamiliar.

    6. Far from being “anti-science” or “anti-Enlightenment”—as Horkheimer and Adorno are sometimes interpreted by commentators both sympathetic and unsympathetic—they were concerned with showing how the Enlightenment fell short of its self-understanding. “On their way towards modern science,” they wrote, “human beings have discarded meaning.” The Enlightenment elevated instrumental calculation and technology as goods in themselves, leaving behind a dangerous ideological vacuum. According to Adorno and Horkheimer’s harrowing account of modernity, reason stopped serving human needs and started generating its own kinds of nightmarish absurdities.

      "goods in themselves" is a category we should be very sparing with

    1. The reason that so many of these “websites as the new emergent artform” sites disappeared is because advertising campaigns aren’t really preserved. In many ways what made Flash the most popular is also what ended up being the least preserved.

      This is fascinating. Is it also linked to the relatively evanescent nature of that which was advertised? Cf. art deco poster art

    2. You could make a game targeting the Wii because of the Flash Player. This was pretty amazing to a lot of people because now anybody and everybody could make games for the Nintendo Wii, bypassing Nintendo’s very strict development process. Your hobbyist work could be on a Nintendo. All the player had to do was open the Wii browser, and go to one of these Wii specific portals, or the URL you gave them. The community around this even went so far as to release libraries that let the Flash Player interface with the (at the time new and very exciting) WiiMote. Sites like the WiimoteProject.com, and WiiFlash.org served as Wii specific development resources for people. With just a simple bit of ActionScript you could have access to all the buttons and features for the WiiMote AND the end result ran in the browser. It just worked and was accessible to everyone. This was Flash in a nutshell. Because it was easy to run it everywhere, anyone could make things for that once inaccessible platform as long as it had a browser. No approval process. No strict store standards. No licensing agreements to gain access to anything… Just that creative freedom and sharing.

      Wow, imagine this today

    3. Websites certainly were more culturally relevant.

      "Websites" vs. "web content"...

    4. A lot of pioneering took place here in terms of setting standards for the modern web. Flash is often unfairly equated to being unusable or disability unfriendly, but it had support for things like screen-readers, bookmarking and parsing pages, Google could even search them at one point… The issue was often unfamiliarity with what it could do and how it could be used.

      Damn, how has it been so slandered?

    5. I find that change in how we perceive Flash, and what we remember about it really interesting. In these “professional” communities (among the big brand agencies making The Flash Website), games were almost an afterthought. Flash’s production use, and popular industry use, were these popular, rockstar designer, high end and experimental online experiences. It was at this point too that a lot of pioneering for accessibility was taking place. Ideas for how to merge immersion and accessibility were being explored. I do not exaggerate when I say that these were hugely influential websites. People became famous from making them. They would make or break careers. They were talked about and excitedly shared the same way you would share and talk about games today.

      A cringey example for various retroactive reasons, but does anyone remember J. K. Rowling's old website?

    1. Outcome maximalization across sports has created "smarter" games with less variety and more all-or-nothing play. The fixation with quantifiable success can lead to a collective flattening of the human experience. Perhaps we need to include more randomness in the game. Each home field or home court should have distinctive features, different playing surfaces, or outdoor elements.

      Are the things we think we want flat?

    1. Feemasons have historically celebrated two feasts of Saint John: the feast of John the Baptist on 24 June, and that of John the Evangelist on 27 December, roughly marking midsummer and midwinter. Several important masonic events have taken place on those days, including the first meeting of the Grand Lodge on 24 June 1717 and the union of the two English Grand Lodges in London on 27 December 1813.

      The freemasons celebrate the saints John--who knew?

    1. yes, of course you can give the path name component any valid name, such as "💩": https://www.netmeister.org/blog/urls/💩

      This... merits... experimentation

    2. The other edge condition is that RFC3986 does not specify a maximum value on the port number (which per RFC1340 / RFC6335 is in the range of 0 - 65535) or how e.g., zero-padding is handled, as that of course depends on the client processing the URL. Which makes this a valid URL: https://www.netmeister.org:0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000443/blog/urls.html

      Hahaha sick

    3. or even a fully decimal address: http://172.217.78 http://1.1 http://2790524771

      Every time things with computers resolve to really big integers I feel angry inside

    4. your username and password cannot contain a ":" or "@", but all sorts of other characters otherwise illegal in the hostname component, making this is a valid URL: https://!$%:)(*&^@www.netmeister.org/blog/urls.html

      This is probably gonna be my new trivia to break people's minds

    5. And of course there is plenty of room for abuse here: imagine a URL like http://accounts.google.com:signin@evil.example.com, which may trick a user into thinking that the site they're connecting to is trustworthy. Phishers gonna phish.

      Can you do silly things with this using just nginx, I wonder?

    1. I learned PHP to make changes to the site. I hardened the server to make it less vulnerable to attacks. I decided I wanted to get into Computer Science because of jred.

      I always wish I could ask people this kind of thing. Are you in it because of an abstract affinity? Are you in it because of something you cared about? Are you in it because of career ambitions? There isn't a right/wrong answer, I feel that strongly, but it explains so much about people...

    2. We make posts on a 5 apps, half of which are screenshots from the another of those apps.

      One of the things that's most poignant and frustrating to me about this is that IME the closest things I've found are in niche Facebook groups, but that's the opposite of where I want to spend my time! TikTok too -- there is no user-controlled organization, it just knows to show me the foraging content, but I can't branch out without the algorithm controlling that.

    1. Narcotizing dysfunction is a theory that as mass media inundates people on a particular issue, they become apathetic to it, substituting knowledge for action.

      Correct posture towards an issue substituting for responsibility of doing something

    1. The artist deals with what cannot be said in words.The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.

      I need to think more about this. What other media could say such a thing?

    2. Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.

      Pithy!

    3. Method and results much resemble those of a scientist who feeds large doses of a purified and concentrated food additive to mice, in order to predict what may happen to people who eat it in small quantities for a long time. The outcome seems almost inevitably to be cancer. So does the outcome of extrapolation. Strictly extrapolative works of science fiction generally arrive about where the Club of Rome arrives: somewhere between the gradual extinction of human liberty and the total extinction of terrestrial life.This may explain why many people who do not read science fiction describe it as “escapist,” but when questioned further, admit they do not read it because “it’s so depressing.”

      How much do we live in ignorance of the cruelties of the presence? How much more to the future's?

    1. many officials, including his own India secretary, Leo Amery, an arch-imperialist who crushed wartime Indian anticolonial rebellion ruthlessly, found Churchill’s racist defenses of his decision — that Indians breed like rabbits, that if the famine was so bad why was Gandhi still alive, that the starvation of Bengalis mattered less than starvation of “sturdy” Greeks — remarkable. 

      Jesus

    2. His defiance of his times is evident in the contrarian phrasing of his statement to the Peel Commission on Palestine in 1937: “I do not admit … that a great wrong has been done” to Native Americans and Australian Aboriginals by their replacement by “a stronger race.”

      I need to read more about colonial treatment of Australian Aboriginals

    3. Whether these views were “of” his time is a misleading and impossible question: In every time, including ours, multiple value systems are in contest.

      Cf. views on slavery "everyone" held scoped to a very white "everyone"

    1. Impressively, the color red is never used in the cockpit except for high-level warnings — that’s how much thought the industry has given to these standards.

      Excerpted from the piece about medication systems leading to an overdose

    1. the coercive apparatus doesn't have to be the secret police knocking at the door

      Actually I'm gonna go ahead and say that there are some meaningful and salient differences between state coercion and social pressure, thanks

    2. For fear of losing a job, or of losing an admission to school, or of losing the right to live in the country of your birth, or merely of social ostracism, many of today's best minds in so-called free, democratic states have stopped trying to say what they think and feel and have fallen silent.

      The silent majority... If 12 million Americans believe we're ruled by lizard people, is that a context in which it's okay to say there should not be consequences like these to speech?

    1. I saw a TikTok the other day of a 60-something woman talking about how differently she was treated after a facelift.

      ... not gonna link?

    2. It wasn’t until my mid-twenties that I started wondering whether these practices were making me love or hate myself.

      Jesus Christ. Mid-twenties???

    1. no assignment can receive a grade of less than 50%, even if it was never turned in,

      lolwut

    2. The teacher email I mentioned above was from one of the conference threads, but the emails sent to me personally from counselors and administrators have overwhelmingly broken down along these lines: such-and-such a student is feeling stressed, so please excuse her from this set of assignments.  This other student gets nervous about taking tests or giving presentations or working in groups, so please excuse him from work of those types. 

      As a former Haver Of Breakdown, this wording.... rankles.

    3. Most teachers seem to take it as a given that of course half the class is going to wander in half an hour late during first period—​it’s so early, you know!—​and during fourth period, because you know how long those lines can get at the lunch places the kids all go to, halfway across town.  I’ve sometimes even had to remind myself that, hey, wait, when I was in school, class started when the bell rang because everyone was there! 

      Are the kids who are showing up late really tuned in enough when they're there to get more out of that half hour, though?

    1. Former council member Bruce Harrell, who’s leading (after “undecided”) in recent polls, has really embraced the idea that private donations will help solve the city’s biggest problems, including not just homelessness but transportation infrastructure.

      🤨

    1. High technology requires much more tacit knowledge than the American system usually admits. The understanding of how to mass produce a car or solar panel is not stored in a book or patent filing; it exists in the brains and bodies of workers, foremen, and engineers on the line. That’s why the places where engineers, designers, and workers come together—whether in Detroit, Silicon Valley, or Shenzhen—have always been the fount of progress.

      Tacit knowledge; skilled but uneducated

    2. R&D might seem like an unfathomably boring topic, akin to arguing about medical data or grant approvals, but it revolves around some of the most profound—and unanswered—questions of industrial civilization: Why do some technologies get developed instead of others? Why do some countries become richer faster than others? How can we materially improve people’s lives as fast as possible—and can the government do anything to help? Above all, where does economic growth come from? This is what we’re fighting about when we fight about R&D.

      I dunno about question number two there but this is still a great quote.

    1. people would spend hours in them.

      Children would spend hours in them, though, right?

    2. There’s no reason that software needs to be this indifferent space meant only to maximize output

      Your software should have its edges sanded down so that interchangeable user-cogs may enact their roles within it! The market demands it!

    3. To me, desktop pets are kind of like this surviving relic from a time when computers were viewed more as our own “personal spaces” and not so much as something we rent from corporation’s like Apple or Microsoft.

      At work, my coworkers don't seem to understand why I find it creepy if they leave the default wallpaper in place

    4. Windows 2000 and Windows XP had thriving communities that specialized in creating themes for these OS’s. People would change everything from the default cursors, screensavers, wallpapers, and even the bootup screen for the OS. They would share all that. It was ridiculously popular, and kind of the era where desktop pets really came into their own.

      I remember being so desperately jealous of these...

    1. Social housing, by contrast, could have units set aside for market-rate, poor people, and middle-income folks. This would provide new housing supply where it is most needed: across the whole income spectrum, from poor to rich.

      Integration of poor and rich is something that you absolutely positively have to work for in a society that allows education to be funded and managed by zip code. You have to!

    2. Rents should be controlled, which will provide more neighborhood stability, and again level the playing field with owners — after all, the 30-year mortgage functions just like rent control for the middle and upper-middle class.

      I have heard so many conflicting things about rent control at this point I don't know which way to look.

    3. First, renters ought to get equal policy priority with owners. Rental vouchers ought to be boosted to something like what homeowners get in terms of subsidy, while the worst ownership subsidies like the mortgage interest deduction (almost all of which is claimed by the rich, and mainly produces pointlessly larger homes at the top end) should be removed

      Amen!

    4. Buying a house ought to be roughly analogous to buying a car — a thing that (with rare exceptions) decreases in value over time, because it wears out. Indeed, that is how it works in countries like Japan.

      I would love to ambush politicians with the question "why should we expect the values of all houses to increase on balance".

    1. The humanities PhD is still a vocational degree to prepare students for a career teaching in academia, and there are no jobs. Do not get a PhD in history.

      I appreciate this kind of thing because in retrospect I'm furious I didn't hear more of it.

      If you're smart enough and confident enough, people are happy to watch you get into a human catapult pointed at a wall.

    1. Saint John's Fires, explained the monk of Winchcombe, were to drive away dragons, which were abroad on St. John's Eve, poisoning springs and wells.

      I would love to read more about how wells were talked about -- holy, poisoned...

    2. In England, the earliest reference to this custom occurs on in the 13th century AD,[17] in the Liber Memorandum of the parish church at Barnwell in the Nene Valley, which stated that parish youth would gather on the day to sing songs and play games.[17] A Christian monk of Lilleshall Abbey, in the same century, wrote:[17] In the worship of St John, men waken at even, and maken three manner of fires: one is clean bones and no wood, and is called a bonfire; another is of clean wood and no bones, and is called a wakefire, for men sitteth and wake by it; the third is made of bones and wood, and is called St John's Fire.[17]

      Does bone mean literal bone here?

    3. If Christ's conception and birth took place on the 'growing days', it was fitting that John the Baptist's should take place on the 'lessening days' ('diebus decrescentibus'), for the Baptist himself had proclaimed that 'he must increase; but I must decrease' (John 3:30). By the late sixth century, the Nativity of John the Baptist (24 June) had become an important feast, counterbalancing at midsummer the midwinter feast of Christmas.— Professor Éamonn Ó Carragáin

      By the late sixth century is early enough for me!

    1. Neutrophils also harbor one of the immune system’s most terrifying armaments: They can unspool the genetic material that’s normally packed into a tight wad at their center, freckle it with toxic proteins and compounds, and then spew it out their side like a lethal sneeze—a weaponization of their own DNA. The end product is a gummy, poisonous net called a neutrophil extracellular trap, or NET, that can massacre scores of microbes at once. But NETs are a double-edged sword: When cast under the wrong circumstances, they can harm their host, seeding serious blood clots or driving the symptoms of diseases as catastrophic as cancer, lupus, and COVID-19.

      I thought DNA was really small relative to the cell, not just packed tight

    1. Boiling Wand "This portable water heater—the better to make tea or bouillon in the privacy of your hotel room—was a must for every Soviet traveler," Idov says. "Russians abroad had a reputation for shorting out whole city blocks by plugging these babies into 110-volt sockets. The infinitely more terrifying homemade version consisted of an electrical cord, two matchsticks and two razor blades."

      I don't know what the matchsticks are for but this is great

    1. And so we wander through our country as if in parallel realities. We walk through teeming, crowded cities where only a few other people really exist — the other residents of our tiny stratum. Our class equals are real to us, manifesting in living color — people we might laugh with, do deals with, make love with, confess our frustrations to. The members of adjacent classes are a bit less real — washed-out caricatures we deal with using simple heuristics. And the members of distant classes are mere shadows to us — moving objects to be avoided on the street, automated kiosks to service our economic needs, statistics in our daily news. The Walgreens cashier, the BART conductor — who could they ever be to you? And who could you ever be to them?

      Upper-class people who don't know any lower-class people are real desperate to consider that a universal, huh?

    2. A rich White boat dealer with a college degree is of a different class than an equally rich White software engineer who went to the same school.

      The software engineer may think so, but it's sheep discerning among sheep.

    3. I find that these people often have in mind an entirely different image of the working class — a member of the educated, downwardly mobile, mostly White “precariat”. In other words…themselves. A deli worker who graduated from Michigan State but can’t figure out what to do with her humanities degree; a struggling public school teacher; a writer for a leftist magazine who gets priced out of superstar cities by dastardly tech workers, etc. It is to the rescue of this precariat and their frustrated expectations that the government must ride, with student loan relief and free college and so on.

      This would be a sicker burn if it weren't absolutely evident that the student loan relief and free college would help other groups more.

    1. Big Tech’s acquisitions might be better evaluated on a case by case basis by regulators

      Strong argument

    2. “Having a buyer always available is what makes the risk worth taking.”

      Does this lead to risks being taken that are not optimal for society? (How much investment is spent reinventing the way we snack?)

    3. Facebook, for instance, began testing its Clubhouse clone in public this week, a move that typically would’ve been preceded by an attempt to buy the company. Facebook’s contemplation of a deal, and the ensuing negotiations, would’ve given Clubhouse some time to grow independently. But instead, Clubhouse is now looking at a carbon copy of itself on a 2 billion-user platform.

      If a company is just a shtick, should we cry for it? Shouldn't they be able to do Their Thing better than Facebook can?

    4. And startups typically press forward even when it’s clear they won’t reach IPO scale, anticipating they’ll sell to a bigger company and deliver a decent “exit” to investors and employees.

      This seems like it just feeds the VC industry.

    5. The prospect of an acquisition — regardless of whether it takes place — tends to encourage productive behavior. Potential acquirers often hold off on copying startups’ products, understanding there’s a chance they’ll one day join forces.

      That's bad, not productive behavior, no? If it's not actually protected IP, any good market wants many actors competing over a new way of doing things.

    1. To a modern reader, the case of nested relations might seem a rather obscure special case.

      Not if the modern reader has spent much time destructuring JSON for queries

    1. I’ve talked before about the non-team team dynamic that is “one person per task”. Where the management and engineers collude to push the organisation beyond a sustainable pace by making sure that at all times, each individual is kept busy and collaboration is minimised. I talked about the deleterious effect on collaboration, particularly that code review becomes a burden resolved with a quick “LGTM”. People quickly develop specialisations and fiefdoms: oh there’s a CUDA story, better give it to Yevgeny as he worked on the last CUDA story. The organisation quickly adapts to this balkanisation and optimises for it. Is there a CUDA story in the next sprint? We need something for Yevgeny to do. This is Conway’s Corrolary: the most efficient way to develop software is when the structure matches the org chart. Basically all forms of collaboration become a slog when there’s no “us” in team. Unfortunately, the contradiction at the heart of this 19th century approach to division of labour is that, when applied to knowledge work, the value to each participant of being in meetings is minimised, while the necessity for each participant to be in a meeting is maximised. The value is minimised because each person has their personal task within their personal fiefdom to work on. Attending a meeting takes away from the individual productivity that the process is optimising for. Additionally, it increases the likelihood that the meeting content will be mostly irrelevant: why should I want to discuss backend work when Sophie takes all the backend tasks?

      A "solution": share the ops burden that arises out of the horrible architectural microchoices so everyone has to learn everyone else's code when they've been woken up at 2AM.

    1. In all of my meetings outside of Amazon I had one of three outcomes: * No one read the email/document and I had to explain everything in the meeting * Some people read the document but forgot what it said because they read it days or hours before

      Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

    2. (six-pagers are the longest)

      Aspirationally

    3. our scheduling tools have check boxes to automatically create a document.

      ....what?

    1. Simply put, one of the major reasons Germany has a healthy book publishing industry, beyond its pricing law, is because Germans (like the English, the Irish, the Japanese, the French, and many other nationalities) tend to read more, and more seriously, than Americans. I can’t cite statistics to prove this, but after traveling much of the world I know in my bones that it’s true.

      from What Germans are Reading, "In fact, according to Culture Score Index of the UK-based market research firm NOP World, Germany is tied for 22nd with the United States for the amount of time spent reading per week, just 5.42 hours."

    2. uch crisp professionalism is the norm in German bookstores because clerks are required to study for several years – literature, accounting, and the mechanics of the book business – then pass a standardized exam before they can become certified booksellers.

      It's not that this standard is "unthinkable", but I don't think it necessarily has as much return on its cost as the piece presents...

    1. The fiscal interests of cities therefore align with the financial interests of property owners in rising property values. Because the quality of public goods and amenities is capitalized into housing prices, homeowners prefer higher to lower quality in public services. At the same time, homeowners prefer lower property tax rates. One way to prop up property values though high-quality public goods without paying exceedingly high property tax rates is to concentrate spending on high-quality services near wealthier homeowners while providing them at lower quality for renters and poorer homeowners. But this is impossible if these populations are mixed in together. To gerrymander the quality of public goods, each population needs to be clustered together and separated in space. Because proximity to poorer populations is bad for property values anyway, the motivation of wealthier homeowners to keep their neighborhoods uniformly higher-class is overdetermined. Segregation allows them to focus public spending on themselves (they’re paying for most of it, after all!) and leave those on the “other side of the tracks” with rusty water, overflowing sewers and self-patched potholes.

      Ha ha ha... this is .... depressing

    2. Whites and wealthier people receive substantially more ideological representation both from local government officials and from municipal policy outputs than do nonwhites and less wealthy individuals. The inequities in representation we identify are frequently shocking in their magnitude. For example, we find that it is only when blacks make up 80–100 percent of the community population that they receive the same amount of ideological representation from elected officials on municipal councils that whites attain when they represent only 20–40 percent of the population.

      Holy shit what a number

    3. [L]ocal institutions, designed to enhance participation, actually empower an unrepresentative group of residents — who we call neighborhood defenders — to stop the construction of new housing.” Compared to all local voters, commenters at public development meetings were considerably whiter, older, more male and much more likely to be homeowners.

      YES THANK YOU

    4. Local land-use power just is delegated state power.

      This is a weak argument. The last sentence of the paragraph makes much more sense.

    1. # V. My questions

      I like this section of the piece. I should think to do this kind of thing!

    2. surrounded by heterogenous political ideas

      I wonder if this really does map onto political purpleness, though.

    3. Miami Beach is famous for its street cats who roam the island. I don't think it's possible to spend more than a few hours exploring Miami Beach without crossing paths with at least one of them.Miami Beach also has adorable wild parakeets that migrate to Miami in early spring and tend to disappear around November.

      ngl this may have sold me on a visit

    4. Miami Beach itself sprays larvicide on the streets so there aren't many mosquitoes here.

      The link mentions:

      The substance sprayed is not a pesticide but a larvicide - Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis (Bti).

      Nontoxic to people and pets! Nice!

    5. To be honest, I didn't really notice it until my mom texted me "Are you okay?!?!" and shared a CNN article about how Miami Beach had declared a state of emergency due to the Spring Breakers.

      Yup, this kind of thing was also really notable with the CHAZ...

    6. My favorite detail about Key Biscayne is that electric golf carts are one of the primary ways of getting around the island. With 1 golf cart for every 13 residents, they dominate the streets. The speed limit in Key Biscayne is 20mph, and car drivers have seemed to accept that they are guests in the golf carts' kingdom.

      This sounds sick as fuck.

    7. Since WWII, Miami's mayors have alternated between Democrats and Republicans mostly evenly.

      If you just look at the equivalent page for NYC Giuliani and Bloomberg and etc. etc. gives a far more centered impression than the reality of the city reflects.

    8. Among the people I've met here, there's a much greater level of civility and tolerance of others' viewpoints.

      My cynical first reaction: is that about "the people ... here" or "the people she's met"?

    9. In SF, I quickly learned that if a stranger approaches you on the street you should be careful—this is partially because it's not part of the culture for normal people to talk to you on the street, and partially because there is a lot of homelessness and crime and so talking to strangers on the street is a bit unsafe.

      I always wonder about this stuff ever since a friend was like "I've gotten in more weird conversations with strangers hanging out with you (a couple times) than I probably have in the rest of my life combined." Is this an attribute of the city? The neighborhood? The person? The time?

    10. I accidentally went through the back doors rather than the front doors. I looked up in the darkness, and there was a shining gold mammoth fossil gleaming down on me.

      I cannot imagine a better way to come across it! I sort of want to visit now...

    1. Much as Gladwell carries water for the official AAF position, so does he lend credence to the narrative preferred by the Japanese government. Never mind that the LDP has been led by many of the very people (once designated Class A war criminals) who plunged Japan into its calamitous war. Never mind that most survivors would beg to differ. Gladwell is perfectly content to parrot this interpretation.

      Clearly I am very ignorant of Japanese politics and need to learn some more

    2. What do we get when we finally encounter a Japanese perspective? An expression of gratitude for the raids that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and wiped out over a quarter of housing in the country. “In the end, we must thank you, Americans, for the firebombing and the atomic bombs,” states an unnamed Japanese academic at a conference in Tokyo. Of the millions of Japanese impacted by the firebombings, we hear from a sum total of one, who just so happens to tell an American audience exactly what they want to hear.

      ...what

    3. The answer, in reality, lies in the history of air raid survivors and their postwar crusade for remembrance. It’s no accident that the museum sits in the very heart of the neighborhoods targeted for destruction in March 1945 — the Shitamachi (the Low City), the densely packed, working-class district that had long tantalized American air power strategists. The Center is a site of local as much as national memory, a reminder that not all Tokyoites suffered equally. Area bombing, after all, is not nearly as indiscriminate as its name suggests. From the beginning, war planners set out to concentrate their payloads in the densest, most flammable — and thus usually poorest — parts of urban Japan, giving rise to a particular social geography of incendiary destruction.

      For all my suspicion of "targeted sanctions", I do appreciate how they are the opposite of this

    4. The Bomber Mafia is not so much a “case study in how dreams go awry,” as Gladwell claims, as a case study in how narratives of this incendiary campaign sidestep unsettling moral questions about the deliberate targeting of civilians. It pins responsibility for the destruction of 64 cities on one man, thereby absolving the AAF and, by extension, the American government.

      Great man theory problematic, sidesteps complicity

    1. the median salary for a college counselor at independent schools is $94,000 but the median salary for a teacher is $60,000, according to the National Association of Independent Schools

      This is a system that needs to be burned down

    2. Some independent schools enroll a number of low-income students on scholarship, and these “privileged poor,” to use Anthony Jack’s term, account for half the low-income students at some highly selective universities, further evidence of the advantage granted to these schools in the admissions process.

      Hahahaha fuck.

    3. Harvard’s admissions policies gave advantages to legacies, donors, athletes, and underrepresented minorities, which hurt Asian American applicants.

      I'm mad about exactly three of these, though

    1. The union threatened vendor Kinki Sharyo that it would launch environmental nuisance lawsuits unless the company agreed that the plant be unionized. In reality, the benefits of this style of protectionism go largely to managers and sitework consultants; blue-collar labor only gets scraps.

      I am both skeptical and interested. Blue-collar labor must be protected by its unions.

    1. Higher education is a proven pathway to opportunity, so we looked for 2- and 4-year institutions successfully educating students who come from communities that have been chronically underserved

      YVCC? Sorry, YVC....

    2. we are all attempting to give away a fortune that was enabled by systems in need of change. In this effort, we are governed by a humbling belief that it would be better if disproportionate wealth were not concentrated in a small number of hands, and that the solutions are best designed and implemented by others.

      That last clause brings powerful humility to a project that otherwise might well have been another "let's let Zuckerberg run the schools."

    3. Any wealth is a product of a collective effort that included them. The social structures that inflate wealth present obstacles to them.

      Mackenzie! I like it!

    1. When I caught her slipping back to the one computer still running Mac OS 9 just to take notes, I knew I was going to have to write her a notepad.

      This is a very sweet story. Coding as creative act; creative act as act of love; coding as love.

    1. I don’t believe in these French-style laws that say you can only work 35 hours a week. If you want to work 100 hours a week, go for it.

      🙃

    2. I think people are really hungry for an alternative to the Chicken Little narrative that the sky is falling and tech is melting our brains. They want to be able to do something about it, and they just don’t know what to do yet. You could be waiting for Washington to do something about the problem, or you could hold your breath waiting for the tech companies to do something about the problem. Or, instead of waiting, you can do something about the problem today. You can learn one technique to manage your internal triggers better. You can plan one day a week in your calendar. You can turn off your notifications on your phone. You can start small.

      But will that work? Systemic vs. individual choices? Maybe individual choices work well where only some kind of individual impact is implicated?

    1. Row One = Act 1 Row Two = Act 2A (first half of Act 2) Row Three = Act 2B (second half of Act 2) Row Four = Act 3

      Oh great I love having hybrid numbering

    1. Seeing the protagonist come to the smarter, wiser, healthier way of being can be a big part of an emotionally satisfying ending.

      also contributes to a hackneyed feel, tho

    2. As Goldman and McKee say, respectively, endings should be “satisfying and surprising” and “inevitable and unexpected.” So: No, the boy doesn’t get the girl – but here comes another, and maybe she’s The One

      This is the kind of thing I love consuming but don't know if I could come up with.

    1. Doing so has the effect of making the achievement of the goal more meaningful to the protagonist.

      This also makes more sense than simply external terms.

    2. So this event increases the opposition because it weakens Clarice’s position by taking away her source of help, but it’s effective because we understand what it means to Clarice emotionally.

      Emotional sabotage makes more sense than Yet Another External Obstacle...

    3. The two most common ways a Midpoint functions to inject new energy are: Increasing the opposition Raising the stakes

      One gets the sense we're constantly making things worse and worse for our protagonist. I would love to see some contradiction of this in older fiction.

    1. That can include: how tough the problem is and/or what the protagonist will be up against by taking on the Act 2 Adventure, what the character believes to be the best or only option for addressing the problem the Inciting Incident created (and the reasoning to come to that conclusion, such as eliminating other options), what happens if he doesn’t attempt to solve the problem at all, what the protagonist is risking by taking on this huge task, what he’ll gain if he succeeds, what’s at stake and why those stakes matter enough to the protagonist to embark on the crazy Act 2 Adventure anyway, plus any additional plot-logistical stuff that needs to happen for us to understand how the protagonist moves from the new problem of the Inciting Incident, to embarking on what they think will be the solution to that problem at the Break into Act 2.

      This makes much more sense than "no I don't wanna okay I'll do it"

    1. Connect the Inciting Incident and the Break Into Act 2 by creating a problem or opportunity for the protagonist and then showing us how the protagonist intends to solve that problem or take advantage of that opportunity with a solution that is dangerous, risky, or audacious in some way – ingredients for an exciting Act 2.

      The debate in between: the stakes!

    1. Instead, the situated needs of letter writers expose the varied historical conditions of what Joy Lisi Rankin terms “acts of computing,” lived experiences with computers almost wholly unrelated to the technical specifications or commercial success of one or another machine.

      I want to read more computer history like that!

    2. For Wicks, being a user is a hobby on the basis that he enjoys computerizing everyday tasks, such as managing his local Mensa group mailing list (the remainder of the letter extensively discusses his experience using Mail List Database from Synergistic Systems). Readers like Wicks represented a new “hobbyist” identity uncoupled from as-sembly language arcana and soldering irons. Much as earlier hobbyists enjoyed master-ing the internals of the Apple II, user-hobbyists like Wicks took pleasure in the expert application of microcomputing to everyday life.

      I've run into one of these online, and it's a persona we should have a lot more respect for.

    3. Dur-ing the magazine’s final year in print, an overwhelming majority—approximately 92 per-cent—of the letters represented an interaction between readers.

      It's just stunning to think of public conversation mediated by editors deciding if a response would have public merit to print.

    4. Microcomputer users were users precisely because they used micro-computers at a time when use still embodied a complex range of technical proficiencies, self-education, and confusing possibilities. Engagements with these machines could not yet be passive, plug-in-and-play, or reduced to input-output (even if that is much of what mainstream consumer computing has become).

      Interesting -- the disposition to remain uncharmed engaging with all that shit, paired with the determination to get something done with it...

    5. For decades, our descriptions and imaginations of computer culture have been powerfully shaped by the anecdotal experiences of those who founded or worked in these industries rather than the impressions, actions, or concerns of a broader public. Yet no individual’s historical experience is entirely transparent to themselves nor singularly adequate to explain the massive technological transformation that was learning to live with computers.

      This is so interesting. In some ways I think the discourse these days focuses a lot on the average user, to the exclusion of all hope of a wide understanding of what it is you're really interacting with when you unlock your phone.

    1. ust as the mall, because of its enclosed, surveilled nature, has become a place where parents feel safe leaving their children, the electronic panopticon of the monitored Prodigy network appeals to many parents because they feel their children are somehow safer there.

      Network as space here, again

    2. Rheingold's assumptions about the public nature of cyberspace miss the accelerating shift of new technologies now under public management to private ownership.

      Privatization: is there anything it can't undermine?

    3. What, in the age of virtual environments, is a city, a community, public space, or public life? It is troubling that the illusory language may, if unexamined, subvert the very ideals it promotes, in particular the ideal of 'community'.

      I like this. Calling something a community when it isn't is active subversion of people's ability to engage with the concept.

    4. Cyberspace is the "American Dream II", according to an August 1995 conference organized by supporters and advisers of Newt Gingrich (http://wvvw.townhall.com/pff).

      This is disarming! Gingrich!

    1. its killer feature

      There's something almost disturbing about trying to define "uselessness" as a "killer feature" simply because "killer feature" is language of the hyper-competitive startup scene, and really does seek to "kill" its antecedents. Gemini has no such aspirations

    2. To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system.

      Hmm, I need to read this book....

    1. > When i read on HN and realize just how many people there are like me, or that there’s people that are also way too into disc golf, acoustic guitar, or any other semi niche activity i wonder why it is so hard to make more regular connections and interactions with them.That hit me in the truth. I feel like that a lot: if I know these people exist, and care deeply about the things I care about, why am I not building lasting friendships with them?And then I realize that it's not a flaw in the medium but in myself. I lack the confidence and determination to go form those connections. I could write to any of those people and say, hey, I'm coming through Cincinnati, and would love to see your project/talk with you over coffee about your research/drink beer and yell about liberty. But I don't, and that isn't the internet's fault.

      Who do I wish I were connecting with more?

    2. I think it's easy to forget we're not the same people we were 20-25 years ago. I see all sorts of lamentations about various things in the world changing and becoming less magical. But as far as I'm aware, I could still go and argue about bands in chatrooms. I could talk to other writers and dream about my future best-selling novels. I could go read random opinions about any subject and get into an exhilarating flamewar about it.I don't want to do any of those things. I'm in my 40s and I have 3 kids. The internet 15-year-old me experienced was magical because _I_ was a blank slate. Every new friendship was thrilling, every new skill opened up infinite horizons, every nook and cranny felt like somewhere I could belong. But life moves on. I'm more than half-way through my career, perhaps not the one I was expecting. I didn't marry the girl I met on IRC. I don't have strong opinions about Radiohead anymore. I find people, however delightful and kooky they are, quite tiring having got to know 10,000 of them at this point.I know all this is true because my kids love the internet and find their place in it with all the joy I used to. And I'm pretty sure older generations frowning upon it all is part of the rush anyway.

      "The way that I got to engage with technology as a kid was way more interesting and engaging than the way I engage with it now as an adult" underpinning a lot of these critiques: an excellent insight.

    1. That’s not why they code, nor are the skills of writing good documentation even vaguely similar to those for writing good code.

      I wonder whether everyone would agree with this

    2. In common with almost every other initiative of its kind, this approach assumes that the best people to document macOS are its engineers. Those engineers are often selected at interview by posing them a coding challenge, but have you ever heard of candidates for a software engineering post being selected by or for their ability to document their code?

      God, can you imagine if they were?

      I would genuinely love to see an exercise where someone was given a chunk of mess of code and asked to untangle it a bit and document.