Most people are now looking back at 18 months of pandemic, but I’m looking back at 30 months of such craziness. At the end of 2018 my 90 year old mom developed pneumonia, was in the hospital and then a terrible rehabilitation clinic for some weeks, and was then released, and I was left largely alone to nurse her back to health (our society does not offer much support to families in crisis). I’ve written about this in my book ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
A little history
There is a growing tendency in the industry to move away from the traditional monolithic application run on a fully tooled up application server towards running apps defined by the single service they provide, the so called microservice. Here the emphasis is reducing the application to providing independent support for one thing .
The idea behind the microservice is the microservices architecture where a set of loosely coupled microservices are used to build applications using them.
This has, in ...
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I am not convinced that consolidating of the structures is a sign of tyranny. It could simply be a sign of consolidating. Humans living in the same place for a century would presumably build roads that would become more fixed over time. And if there was a dictatorship, we would see more signs of concentrating wealth, such as larger homes. Interesting:
Wondrously, the archaeologists did not find indicators of wealth inequality, social stratification, or hierarchies in prehistoric Trypillian societies – not ...
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This is what I’ve seen as well, large investments in what is described as AI or Machine Learning or Data Science, which break down into two things:
1.) people are actually talking about standard statistics and ordinary Business Intelligence
2.) people are talking about Machine Learning, but the results are difficult to connect to actual business needs.
Interesting:
We found that driving true business impact is amazingly hard, plus it is difficult to isolate and understand the connection between efforts on modeling and ...
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Interesting:
The huge dolmen at Kibbutz Shamir is just one of hundreds of enormous densely scattered structures in this region. It bears witness to the existence of a significant and established governmental system in the region during the “Middle Ages” of the Bronze Age. Archaeologists tend to interpret the past based on material finds. The absence of cities, large settlements and monumental buildings attests to the collapse of the governmental and economic systems during a “dark period” in history. The dolmens ...
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Interesting:
Whenever you have one central table, and you want to outer join it to two separate tables, you are in danger. To see why, think through what happens step-by-step as these tables get joined. All the joins happen before any grouping, so first we make a bunch of rows combining restaurants and inspections. Now for each of those rows, we join to the employees table. That means if we have a restaurant with two inspections, we’ll create rows for all ...
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It is odd that “respect people’s civil rights” is a new policy:
In the 1990s, for example, a deputy group called the Lynwood Vikings, described by a California judge as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang,” was responsible for incidents that led to millions being handed out in lawsuit settlements, and was also the subject of a 1991 lawsuit from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The case later led to the 1992 Kolts report, which called for station commanders to “root out ...
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Self-serving, since they need the algorithms to target advertisements. But also interesting to think that people might sometimes want some kind filter. People pick their friends on LiveJournal, why hasn’t LiveJournal swept the world? Is it the algorithm that made Facebook a juggernaught? People seem to want control over what they see, is there a middle ground, away from algorithms designed to maximize engagement, but offering enough filters to protect people from the most boring material? How much novelty do ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
Over the years, Pinterest had to redesign its systems and retrain its algorithms to better identify and target different types of users and map their interests. Hence the question about gender when you sign up, the topic picker that gives the algorithm an initial sense of what you’re into, and the perhaps slightly intrusive (though industry standard) use of browser data that can tell Pinterest whether you’ve visited the site before and how you arrived there.
The question about language and ...
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Interesting:
Over 6,000 years ago, huge settlements featuring enigmatic mega-structures of obscure function arose between the Carpathian foothills and the Dnieper River in Ukraine. Unique in European prehistory, these gargantuan settlements, which may have housed tens of thousands of people apiece, seem to have coalesced by the merger of smaller, independent hamlets.
Throughout, the million-dollar question has been how, exactly, prehistoric villages of gargantuan dimensions were managed. Now a team of archaeologists is postulating that mega-structures detected in these villages were community ...
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I record this only because, later on, it will be difficult to believe this was real. This is how fascists now describe their conferences:
This May 2020 we’re hosting HERETICON, a conference for thoughtcrime. Here’s why:
From Galileo to Jesus Christ, heretical thinkers have been met with hostility, even death, and vindicated by posterity. That ideological outcasts have shaped the world is an observation so often made it would be bereft of interest were the actions of our society not so entirely ...
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Interesting:
In direct response to biopolitical attempts to control our sexual lives, struggles have been waged; these invoke the “‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs”. Foucault was critical of the pernicious effects of such power: he criticized power’s subjection of individuals, along with the forms of subjectivity that subjection engenders. In particular, he was concerned that power relations today tend to produce submissive individuals who blindly obey authority figures. More generally, Foucault ...
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Interesting:
Some of the properties of mercury (and of copernicium) are due to “lanthanide shielding“, and that is at least understandable in a classical mental-picture way. The lanthanides (and higher elements beyond them) have atoms with smaller radii than you’d predict from just following the trends earlier in the periodic table. But that’s because those atom sizes have to do with the attraction of the outermost electrons to the nucleus (negative and positive charges), and that attraction is partly “shielded” by ...
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Interesting:
Ben-Yosef’s team was exploring a concept called “punctuated equilibrium,” which suggests that societal changes comes through long-term stasis punctuated by short-lived episodes of rapid change as opposed to a slow-and-steady gradual change. To test the idea, the team examined over 150 samples of slag leftover from metallurgical technology in the Wadi Arabah region of the Levant in the Middle East, dating from 1300 to 800 BCE.
Slag, the glass-like byproduct from a metal’s smelting process, offered a perfect indicator of technological ...
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How does this happen?
The Federal Bureau of Investigation says the man who claims to have killed more than 90 women across the United States is the most prolific serial killer in the country’s history.
In a news release on Sunday, the FBI said Samuel Little confessed to 93 murders. Federal crime analysts believe all of his confessions are credible, and officials have been able to verify 50 confessions so far.
Not that this is necessarily about serial killers:
Dawn Wilcox adds more ...
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Interesting:
Last month the archbishop of Kraków, Marek Jędraszewiski, issued a pastoral letter to be read out at all of Krakow’s many churches. “The next great threat to our freedom has appeared,” writes the archbishop. When a child succumbs to LGBT ideology, “for a parent there is no bigger tragedy”.
When Law and Justice was elected four years ago, she tried to be optimistic on her Facebook page: “Come on!” she wrote: “Can they really destroy everything in four years?” As bad ...
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Interesting:
When Mayor Ormanty took his “LGBT-free” resolution to the council in the summer, Dropek’s foundation raised some money to place a colourful billboard poster in Kalwaria’s town centre. Featuring a pair of clasped hands and a rainbow wristband, it read simply: “We’re here.” Within hours, it had been torn down. Then when she found out that the mayor had organised a conference at the community centre on the LGBT “threat”, Dropek decided to go along. The conference, predictably enough, was ...
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Paul Krugman should be pleased:
State pensions have also been boosted. The retirement age has been lowered and the minimum wage raised. In a second term in office, Law and Justice has promised to double the minimum wage by 2023, distribute annual cash bonuses to pensioners, boost farming subsidies and invest heavily in improving transport in the provinces and rural areas.
The huge level of state spending appears to have boosted rather than damaged Poland’s finances. Levels of private consumption have gone ...
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“Every good Pole should know what the role of the church is … because beyond the church there is only nihilism.”
– Jarosław Kaczyński, chairman of the Law and Justice party, 7 September
—————-
This is an interesting line because everywhere else in the West the right-wing has become synonymous with nihilism. Trump is a nihilist who believes in nothing, he is a being of pure lust, greed and spite. Boris Johnson may not be a nihilist in his heart of hearts, but ...
Read More SourceGiven the failures in Israel and Britain and the USA, it seem the type of liberal democracy that grew out of the Enlightenment has run into circumstances which it is unable to overcome. Therefore we need a new kind of democracy, one that offers more stability, while also allowing greater systems of accountability. I know there are many people in progressive circles in the USA who are hoping for a parliamentary system in the USA, but wouldn’t it be strange ...
Read More SourceFor a 3 month loan? I wonder if this was considered a criminal loan at the time, or if this was normal? The only non-criminal uses of 3 month loans, that I can think of is loans to farmers right before harvest time, and then modern loans to governments.
One tablet, found in the courtyard of the pillared house, documents a land sale in the year 698 or 697 B.C.E.. The other tablet was inside a different structure and documents a ...
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Interesting to realize there was a moon god named Sin.
Post external references 1https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/.premium.MAGAZINE-tablets-reveal-2-700-year-old-forced-relocation-by-assyrian-conquerors-1.7906334 SourceThis is interesting. Israel had very few Jews in the 600s BC, which is actually too early to be the Babylonian Exile. So the Exile was real, but it had other causes, and then later when all of this got written down, priests blamed everything on Babylon?
In fact, the former territory of the Kingdom of Israel may have had very few Israelites left during the 7th century B.C.E., archaeological evidence suggests.
The two tablets, made of clay and inscribed in ...
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If elites are bad, what about the foreign oligarchs who buy up London real-estate, drive up rents, drive up home prices, and then leave the real estate unused? Why does the Johnson government only complain about people who write?
She thinks the idea of a liberal elite is an anachronism, partly because in the age of social media and the internet, ideas are less geographically tethered and more widely disseminated. But also due to the effects of high finance.
“It’s more ...
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Interesting:
The argument for Brexit was accompanied by the fantasy that Britain could compensate for the loss of access to its largest market by joining the reassuringly white and English-speaking “Anglosphere” of Australia, Canada, the US and New Zealand. This is why they talk of an “Australian-style points system” and “Canada-style trade deals” and hope against all evidence that the protectionist Donald Trump will rescue Britain.
Brexit has shown that you have to be the right type of Anglo to be admitted ...
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The end of magazines is part of the new world where everyone gets their news from social media, and where everyone reads slogans instead of essays. The resulting extremism undermines the political system. That extremism undermines the support of a tolerant society that allows diverse views. It also undermines support for the freedom of capital, what some refer to as a free market. If the free market allows the destruction of the politics that allowed a free market, then surely ...
Read More SourceInvasive, overly personal, aggressive, boundary testing. Unfortunate:
I’m 58 years old. For the most part I look 58 years old. I’m physically disabled. Yesterday I was at Costco and got a hotdog when I was done shopping. I sat at the first table to eat, and parked my cart at the end of the table. A guy about the size, shape, and age of Trump came up and asked if he could sit at my table. It wasn’t busy but ...
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Interesting:
Post external references 1https://www.apartmentlist.com/rentonomics/reconfiguring-the-american-household/ SourceI first read Graham’s essays way back around 2005. Before he created Ycombinator, he used to write interesting things. But he started Ycombinator in 2005 and his writing went downhill quickly. He lost all perspective. These last few years, I’ve disagreed with just about 100% of what he writes. So for instance:
SourceInteresting:
When you think of monarchy, you might think of an inbred Habsburg – the family’s distinctive jaw, how generations of rulers crippled by a variety of diseases due to their tendency to marry within the immediate family. But for Sean and other members of the subreddit, monarchism is not merely about having a supreme ruler and an inherited throne. Most members of the community deplore authoritarian regimes. They aren’t simply searching for order via a supreme leader, but a return ...
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[ Over the last 20 years I engaged in interviews/conversations with many dozens of female artists, and from the stories they shared with me I drew the anecdotes that went into creating the characters in the Anna Barnev book. What follows is an excerpt. ]
————–
Children accept what seems omnipresent, until the moment they realize that alternatives exist. From farmland, the smell of manure saturated the childhood of Frida Lopez, so much so she assumed the whole world shared one fragrance. ...
Read More SourceI’m strongly pro-metrics and would be happy to see everyone adopt it, but if a magazine decides to use the old British system, that is their choice. But why oh why do the editors allow the two systems to be mixed in one sentence?
Hoole, of 1 Rifles, was carrying 25kg (55lb) of equipment when he collapsed 400 metres from the end of the eight-mile annual fitness test course on 19 July 2016.
On the main topic, why doesn’t the military ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
At the time I joined, the headquarters building in Venice was about a half of a mile away from the office where I worked. If you knew where all of Snap’s buildings were (and most people, even most employees, didn’t), you could walk around miles of Venice Beach streets pointing out unmarked office after unmarked office as you went along. A seemingly empty storefront here, a nondescript house there, the top level of an apartment building over that way.
The particular ...
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With a surprising number of Docker advocates, they advocate for Docker/Kubernetes in a vacuum, as if the question was “Do you want devops, or not?” when the correct question is “Of this set of dozens of devop technologies, which subset is the right one for my company?” I’m often subjected to a three part argument that’s missing its middle part:
1.) Do you want easy development, deployment, consistency, networking, security, isolation and infinite scalability?
2.) ???
3.) In conclusion, Docker!!!!!!
Some of the conversations ...
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Changes to the ways these applications are developed means that the model of keeping everything running smoothly with end-to-end testing is no longer effective, especially for environments that are running at high scale and continually shipping new features. Debugging gets harder as monolithic systems are replaced by distributed systems where every API call causes a cascade of related events. Traditional monitoring tools work better for monolithic systems but fall short for modern cloud-based applications.
All of this means that developers ...
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Interesting:
In the midst of it, a white supremacist writer referenced the essay in an article for VDare, writing that “Hardin’s prescriptions for averting the Malthusian catastrophe—they included eugenics, an end to welfare and foreign aid, and allowing famines to take their course—were too strong for most people.” Another article invoking Hardin on stopping the “refugee invasion” by a Canadian nativist writer was reprinted on the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer which now features a demographic countdown clock on its sidebar. ...
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Interesting:
The Narcissism of Modern Financiers
There are a few key players in this saga. The first is ex-CEO Adam Neumann, who according to the S-1 was pivotal to the company.
Our future success depends in large part on the continued service of Adam Neumann, our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer, which cannot be ensured or guaranteed.
Neumann was an untested CEO with an unlimited line of credit. As I read more stories about him, I noticed reporters dance around his personality. They call ...
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I realize people ask this question about the USA a lot, but it’s also worth asking about Britain. All of this is far removed from the culture that the British have boasted about for centuries:
Maria Miller also insisted that Labour only had itself to blame for the Sulk’s behaviour. The real victim in all this weren’t MPs receiving death threats, it was Boris himself. He had been pushed to the edge by an opposition that was totally unreasonably blocking his ...
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Interesting:
Created in 2009 by researchers at Princeton and Stanford, the online image database has been widely used by machine learning projects. The program has pulled more than 14 million images from across the web, which have been categorized by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers — a crowdsourcing platform through which people can earn money performing small tasks for third parties. According to the results of an online project by AI researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen, prejudices in that labor ...
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Interesting:
And if testing is about uncertainty, you “test” any time you deploy to production. Every deploy, after all, is a unique and never-to-be-replicated combination of artifact, environment, infra, and time of day. By the time you’ve tested, it has changed.
Once you deploy, you aren’t testing code anymore, you’re testing systems—complex systems made up of users, code, environment, infrastructure, and a point in time. These systems have unpredictable interactions, lack any sane ordering, and develop emergent properties which perpetually and eternally ...
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Everyone understands that the West saw a sweeping cultural revolution in the mid to late 20th Century, and that many of the new practices were incorporated into the customs of business. Women entered the workforce, sought higher education, postponed marriage and children. Dress became casual. Modes of address became casual, with even nations such as Germany beginning to allow address by one’s first name. In terms of business, The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
Ideally, individual contributors enjoy building products and solving technical problems. They get to spend most of their time doing just that, and they can concretely see their output. If they’re at a well-run company, their managers have also helped them connect their day-to-day work to some broader mission or impact. This provides them with a sense of purpose. New managers often experience a “purpose vacuum,” since it’s harder to connect their day-to-day work to progress with a larger goal that ...
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Interesting:
Rosie (all names are composites of multiple employees) is the strongest engineer on the team. She can navigate any part of the stack. And when people have questions about the code base, they ask her for help — after all, she wrote most of it. Sometimes she’ll patiently answer, but sometimes, if it’s faster, she’ll just roll up her sleeves and do it herself.
Rosie is fast. She gets things done. I can always count on Rosie.
So as the team grows ...
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Interesting:
From the article:
Aren’t these principles incredibly close to the way that we talk about Lean-Agile? Compare Rule 4 (consider everything an experiment), and Rule 6 (nothing is a mistake. There’s no win and no fail. There’s only make), with the lean concept of the minimum viable product.
….I use these examples to serve the idea that what we now call Lean-Agile principles are principles that are already taken for granted within progressive social movements, and which are deeply necessary to succeed. One ...
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Interesting:
StatefulSet for deploying stateful Pods
StatefulSet is the abstraction that was supposed to solve all these issues. They give each Pod in the set a unique identifier, and the StatefulSet documentation says the following about them and intended use:
StatefulSets are valuable for applications that require one or more of the following.
* Stable, unique network identifiers.
* Stable, persistent storage.
* Ordered, graceful deployment and scaling.
* Ordered, graceful deletion and termination.
* Ordered, automated rolling updates.
Now we’re talking! Stable network and storage! Even ordering in ...
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Interesting, but I worry about the complexity of what is going on here:
etcd snapshot explanation
The second command needs a bit more explaining. First of all, the idea is to create a snapshot of the etcd database. This is done by communicating with the running etcd instance in Kubernetes and asking it to create a snapshot. The reason for the very long command is basically to avoid messing with etcd running in Kubernetes as much as possible. We are launching ...
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Responding to something on Hacker News.
People are not having many children. This has a long term effect, which will last decades. QE will become more and more necessary, as the decades go by, if birth rates remain low. Of course, we could, instead, have the government build things. I live in NYC, I would like to see the government build a new subway system. I’d like to see a system of walkways above the streets, where people can ride their ...
Read More SourceThis is grim, but good:
Fun is what I do to you. You can tell because I am laughing. (I have noticed that you are not laughing.) You must consider that this is all in good fun, good harmless fun, as popping a balloon or stealing someone’s bag lunch or knocking over someone’s drink or holding down a girl until she is terrified she cannot breathe. A cheerful and salutary incident in which nothing of value was harmed or lost, when ...
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This is true:
Post external references 1https://pissvortex.tumblr.com/post/187672349679/pewdiepie-pulls-50000-pledge-to-jewish-anti-hate Source1. pewdiepie gets called a nazi because his anti-semitic and racist jokes have attracted a following of mostly reactionaries
2. to prove the libs wrong and own them he decides to donate $50,000 to the ADL
3. recieves so much backlash from his now exclusively reactionary fanbase that he cancels the donation
i literally can’t see a single reason why you would defend this guy anymore
I’m not sure anyone else will understand this, but Natalie Beach’s story about working with Caroline Calloway very strongly reminds of some of the business partners I’ve had. The style of writing is more personal, maybe because they were young, or because they were friends first, or because they were women, but when I say that my experience of startups has been chaos, I’m using a euphemism for events like this:
I’d always known she couldn’t arrive at the airport at ...
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My mom did not get credit for co-writing the Coty book, but ask Roulhac nowadays and she tells everyone that my mom co-wrote the Coty book.
This type of relationship, between the charming impresario and the quiet writer type apparently repeats generation after generation. I feel like I saw this scene with my own eyes. In some ways, I did. In particular, the way Roulhac would be feeling low and defeated, but then cheer up when my mom arrived to save ...
Read More SourceMy life would be infinitely better if I’d grown up with such an intuitive understanding of brands:
Her account was called #Adventuregrams. “You can have an adventure anywhere, if you’re curious,” she told me as I took pictures of her balancing on a stone wall. “That’s what the brand is about. It doesn’t matter where you live or how much money you have. You could be a teen from Nebraska and by following me you can feel like you’re here.” But ...
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Troubling:
More than 20,000 employees around the world had walked out of the company’s offices to protest that Google had paid out over $100 million to multiple executives accused of sexual harassment in the workplace. In response, the tech giant apologized and said it would overhaul its sexual misconduct policies and that it would be more supportive of workers who raise concerns about problems at work.
But almost a year after the historic walkout, a dozen current and former Google employees told ...
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The West has been admired for its liberalism for 2,500 years, and yet at no time during those 2,500 years was its liberalism the dominant force in Western politics. It has always been under attack, and every implementation of it has been deeply flawed.
Keep that in mind when reading Vox’s concern about this illiberal moment:
On the right, the anti-liberals locate the root of the problem in liberalism’s social doctrines, its emphasis on secularism and individual rights. In their ...
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All of this is good. I touched on a small piece of these issues when I wrote “How ignorant am I, and how do I formally specify that in my code?”
Also see “High Availability is not compatible with a MVP“.
Interesting:
When we say “production,” we typically mean the constellation of all these things and more. Despite our best efforts to abstract away such pesky low-level details as the firmware version on your eth0 card on an EC2 instance, I’m here to ...
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So universal:
A man I used to love came to stay at my flat three months ago. What ensued was probably one of the worst things I’ve ever put myself through.
We’d had a fling three years ago. But that fling was re-flung one or two more times after the first fling ended. I fell in love. I usually preface that sentence with “stupidly,” but I know it didn’t feel stupid at the time. Those feelings, it would appear, were not ...
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Interesting:
When I first moved to London, my new flatmates and I held a housewarming party. I invited everyone I knew in the city. But the morning after, I totted up the number of guests of mine that had shown up: two. Thankfully, my other flatmates’ had more than made up the numbers with their own friends. I prayed that they hadn’t noticed the marked absence of a crowd of my friends.
Darkness collides with hilarity in this show and that’s ...
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Damn, this is very good advice:
Swift says she stopped trying to explain herself, even though she “definitely” could have. As she worked on Reputation, she was also writing “a think-piece a day that I knew I would never publish: the stuff I would say, and the different facets of the situation that nobody knew”. If she could exonerate herself, why didn’t she? She leans forward. “Here’s why,” she says conspiratorially. “Because when people are in a hate frenzy and they ...
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It is frustrating that there are so many good people trying to get into tech, and not being able to, while considerable allowance if given to some other people. For an old reference from 15 years ago, see this bit about Dave Winer.
A more recent example: John De Goes and the FP community
This post is a collection of links about John De Goes that show some clear patterns of behavior:
De Goes defending white supremacists and misogynists.
De Goes attacking critics and ...
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As a point of comparison, if a straight married couple shows up at a convention, and has a public and messy fight, they should assume that will affect how people think of them in the future. What’s odd is that this should be totally okay, even at a professional event:
Larry Garfield, a Drupal core contributor, was demoted and no-platformed from all Drupal events, ostensibly due to his participation in “Gor”, a sci-fi subculture which features consensual slavery (it’s not real ...
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Regarding the turmoil in the Scala community, with some super racists getting banned from a conference for their HBD views (human bio diversity, the super racist lingo that the mass murderer in El Paso mentioned in his manifesto (allegedly Patrick Crusius)) tangled_girl asks the question I myself often wonder:
genuine question: if speaking up your mind so far has cost you your friends, your employer, your professional reputation, the regard of your colleagues, your local support network, and even the gratitude ...
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This idea has been kicked around for decades. I wonder why so little progress is made?
The configuration of a UNIX system is specified and controlled by a huge tangle of plain text files: /etc/hosts, sendmail.cf, syslog.conf, inetd.conf, /etc/uucp/Systems to name just very few. .INI files on some other systems are also plain ASCII. Even MacOS caved in a little with a System Folder:Hosts, although it is a very isolated example on a Mac. Note that just because symbols displayed on ...
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True, but why do social media companies refuse to give users what they want?
SourceInteresting:
Post external references 1https://twitter.com/sunnydaejones/status/1170545938034778112 SourceEvery single day brings some once-in-a-century event, either to amuse or horrify. I’m curious, has any Prime Minister in history ever before lost their first vote?
And there is this:
There is some debate over whether all this – the prorogation, the expulsions – is a series of improvised moves born of panic or, on the contrary, a cunning plan. Within that question is a related one: is the PM’s chief aide, Dominic Cummings, an evil genius or what Marina Hyde calls ...
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Nikema wrote:
Are there really 100s of thousands of unfilled positions in tech or is that an urban legend? There’s a lot of gatekeeping bullshit for an industry that claims to need new people. Also, if that’s the case what’s stopping companies from providing training and financial support…
In 1998 I had an older friend who was experienced. They did freelance work for $125 an hour. Adjusting for inflation that’s almost $240 today. Today I know senior devs that get $125 an ...
Read More SourceAt some point I hope to write more about the Clojure community, for now, I link to this:
Over the last couple of years, the Clojure community has become an invaluable part of my life. It’s a space where all of me has been welcomed and accepted, since day one. The kindness, support and inspiration I have received from people in the community is boundless. My heart has been touched many times by the deep and genuine connections, old ones keep ...
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Interesting:
Hugo later addressed the crowd and asked for Trump supporters to raise their hands, which most did. He declared the president’s re-election would be a “shoo-in”.
Hugo criticized the Boston mayor: “Mayor Marty Walsh said there would only be 20 people here today. Look around. Not only is he intolerant, but he can’t count.”
Despite denying being anti-LGBTQ, the organization allowed several people to the mic to complain about “LGBTQ curriculums in public schools” and children being gay. People clad in Maga ...
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The against child pornography was clearly meant to protect children. It’s sad to see the law twisted this way:
The decision, which upheld a decision from a lower Maryland appeals court, means other minors who engage in sexting could face similar legal repercussions.
Amidst spreading criticism, one expert told the Guardian it was “a ridiculous reading of the statute” concerned.
The ruling, by a 6-1 majority among the judges on the Maryland court of appeals, said: “We refuse to read into the statute ...
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Why get the police involved?. This man is scum, and he likes to throw his power around.
The demands for inquiries into the sacking last Thursday of Sonia Khan, the 27-year-old Treasury special adviser, came amid heightened tension at Westminster over Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament for five weeks.
… Cummings is understood to have concluded that Khan had been dishonest about her recent contacts with her ex-boss, the anti-no deal former chancellor Philip Hammond, and one of his ex-aides – accusations ...
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An interesting article, about an affair:
Did Nicola ever think about his wife? Nicola said she found it “pretty easy” not to think about her. “This sounds horrible, but my feelings towards her were a very weird mix of envy and pity,” she said. “I was so envious that she’d got there first, that she got to have him come home to her. Then pity because she didn’t know, and that made me feel sorry for her in a way.”
Asked if ...
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https://medium.com/s/story/four-lessons-after-eleven-years-in-silicon-valley-d87507b7a4f6:
Success is one of the most dangerous things that can happen to you early in your career. When you’re on a so-called rocket ship, you’re likely drinking from the fire hose daily, making things up as you go along. If you’re given responsibilities that exceed your experience, you’re probably plagued by self-doubt. Then, at some point, if you’re lucky, the company you’ve helped build is declared a success. And those many bumps along the way are ironed out into a ...
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Interesting:
Consider the case of Scheme, again. Since making Scheme object-oriented is so easy, many Scheme hackers have done so. More to the point, many individual Scheme hackers have done so. In the 1990s, this led to a veritable warehouse inventory list of object-oriented packages for the language. The Paradox of Choice, alone, guaranteed that none of them would become standard. Now that some Scheme implementations have their own object orientation facilities, it’s not so bad. Nevertheless, the fact that many ...
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Interesting:
The most remarkable thing about most of these men and their Fabergé-egg-like egos is they’re often the first to gripe about the ills of “political correctness.”
Take Mr. Stephens, a conservative columnist who has railed against “safe spaces,” saying in a 2017 commencement address at Hampden-Sydney College that worrying about hurting other’s feelings might lead to stifling all speech: “If we want to accommodate the sensitivities of our fellow students, shouldn’t that accommodation extend not only to what we say around ...
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Interesting:
In my view, the main reason for the uneven management sex ratio is our inability to discern between confidence and competence. That is, because we (people in general) commonly misinterpret displays of confidence as a sign of competence, we are fooled into believing that men are better leaders than women. In other words, when it comes to leadership, the only advantage that men have over women (e.g., from Argentina to Norway and the USA to Japan) is the fact that ...
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Interesting:
Once in the summer of 2014, David came over to visit our son and we got into an argument about his one-way terms for seeing him at my house at his convenience, especially when he had his own house(s) blocks away. He sat down at our kitchen table and, using my laptop, he pulled up a year-old article from the Daily Mail about Eric Schmidt’s philandering lifestyle. He then passed the computer over to me to read. I was so ...
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An article mentioned that bedbugs had been discovered in the New York Times building. Dave Karp posted a short attempt at humor, as a tweet, suggesting Bret Stephens was the real bedbug.
This is a horrifying response, and a mark against the legitimacy of The New York Times:
Dave Karp responded:
Another response:
This situation is out of control, for sure. Dave Karp throws out a tweet and Stephen replies with a column in the NYT? And the editors allowed this?
Post external ...Read More SourceSamy Dindane asked me a question:
How would you deploy a simple React/NodeJS app?
I responded on Twitter:
Deployment is a big question but I’ll try to summarize. First, ask yourself, do you need to High Availability? When I ask CEOs of early stage startups, they always say “Yes” yet I think only 10% really need High Availability.
I think of High Availability as implying multiple servers, multiple load balancers, multiple failover databases, multiple data centers, multiple regions. Lots of redundancy, probably configured for ...
Read More SourceBefore we get to the AI utopia, where life is supposed to be good because we finally have AI, there are dozens of common life occurrences where I am waiting to see old technology finally come into widespread use:
My mom and I went to Earth Cafe yesterday, on the corner of 97th and Broadway (Manhattan). I love the place, but some of the tables are woefully uneven. Why don’t outdoor cafe tables come with shock absorbers that automatically balance ...
Read More SourceIt is surprising how common this kind of self-sabotage is among CEOs:
There is a version of the story of this company in which idealistic journalists, unconcerned with profit, are posed against ruthless business-doers, concerned about profit above all else. That would be a convenient story, pitching me and my colleagues and friends as people who just care too much about The Truth to yield before the gale-force winds of Capitalism, but it wouldn’t be a true one.
The real and less ...
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Funny:
Post external references 1https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/aug/23/go-old-man-go-mobility-scooter-fugitive-evades-police-in-low-speed-chase SourceInteresting:
As news of the couple’s breakup churned through the news cycle, so did photos of Cyrus kissing another woman, Kaitlynn Carter. Straight people on social media were critical of their spending time together, saying that it seems wrong to go on a vacation and flaunt it in an ex’s face immediately after breaking up, and that Cyrus was being “slutty” and “inconsiderate.” On the other hand, queer women came out in droves to celebrate having Cyrus “back,” glad that she ...
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I saw this on Tumblr:
If you have $10 million then you can buy everything in life that you might find pleasant. You can own 3 houses and a bunch of cool cars and you can send all of your children to good private schools. If you want more than $10 million, then you are no longer seeking money, you are seeking power. $20 million, $100 million, $1 billion — the extra money doesn’t let you get nicer things for you ...
Read More SourceThis is a pleasant summary of failed social networks. It does not touch on the subject that interests me most, which is why this space consolidated. But it does offer some interesting tidbits. In my novel How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer I spend some time making fun of Google+, and I’m pleased this description of its failure so nearly matches mine:
Google’s next stab was a dreary jumble of boxes evoking a digital fulfillment ...
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First I’ll recount the events, then I’ll offer an opinion about what they mean.
——————————-
My friend K, from Germany, had her birthday on Saturday. She was turning 40 and she, with help from friends, planned several events for the day.
Several of K’s friends flew over from Germany to join us, and our dear friend Sonya, with complete secrecy, flew in from Michigan, and then surprised K, and K ended up crying she was so happy to see Sonya.
I ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
As you flick through the New European, you eventually leave Brexit behind for something that would have been unthinkable before 2016: the “Eurofile” section, a weekly paean to Europe and its glories. Another section makes for an equally odd sight in a British newspaper: pages of articles by academics, under the heading “Expertise”.
Expertise matters to remainists. They don’t merely admire it – that admiration is an important part of how they define themselves. “A lot of remainers are proud to ...
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“A woman stares at a distant horizon, viewer only sees her from behind.” I saw this at Barnes and Noble tonight. There are trends in book covers, as in all things. I actually like most of these book covers. I don’t think this is a terrible motif, but seeing these 6 books together made me think this particular idea is being overused.
SourceApparently I never linked to this? I was impressed with this. A few minor hacks that Github already knew about, and had looked at, and had decided they weren’t important. But Homakov found a way to link them together into a serious attack.
Post external references 1 SourceInteresting:
“From our perspective, the big surprise is how little control we actually have. We have to play our cards very carefully and very wisely, or even that control will sort of evaporate,” Gackle said. “There’s often a strong wish to solve these contentious problems by changing the software, and, to the extent that we’ve tried things like that, we haven’t found it to work. What does seem to work better is personal interaction, over and over and over again, with ...
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This sums it up:
tptacek :
I worry that this is the classical HN analysis: axiomatically derived from premises that seem intuitively true but are empirically false.
Actually true of much of the tech world, a deep and abiding distrust of experience; an unwillingness to confront those moments when lived reality contradicts theory, a willingness to take the side of theory and insist that reality must be wrong.
Post external references 1https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20626287 SourceYou have to be inhumanly insensitive to try to minimize these murders by comparing them to things such as the flu. We assign moral weight to murder, we don’t assign moral weight to the flu. If I have to explain why, then there is something wrong with you.
SourceGreta Thunberg is awesome and I wish more people were just like her. But personal shame can not save the planet from destruction. Feeling shame will not stop the coal companies from poisoning the air and water. There is no reason why people should feel embarrassed about the fact that they have a biological body that needs to consume resources so as to enjoy life. Limiting the damage done by corporations requires anger, courage and careful thought, but never any ...
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Four years ago, historian Tamar Novick was jolted by a document she found in the file of Yosef Waschitz, from the Arab Department of the left-wing Mapam Party, in the Yad Yaari archive at Givat Haviva. The document, which seemed to describe events that took place during the 1948 war, began:
“Safsaf [former Palestinian village near Safed] – 52 men were caught, tied them to one another, dug a pit and shot them. 10 were still twitching. Women came, begged for ...
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I live on 98th street in Manhattan and I’m lucky enough to have a rooftop terrace. I’ve put a picnic table there and I often sit there and drink coffee, late at night (I also have many parties there ). Maybe it is the warm weather, but my neighbors have had their drapes up lately. I can look across 98th street and see televisions or computer screens in perhaps 20 apartments. And another 5 apartments in the building immediately west ...
Read More SourceThis was written in 1982:
People who came of age in the forties and fifties enjoyed the good fortune of having their expectations shaped during the worst of times and their achievements realized during the best of times—an unbeatable match. And for young professionals, starting a family on a low budget was not a wrenching experience. “When you’re moving up, even the bottom doesn’t look so bad,” says Herbert Gans. For their children, it is just the reverse. “It’s not downward ...
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I’ve written before about troubles on Stackoverflow
This is interesting:
That was when something became crystal clear: my coworkers hadn’t become monsters, they were still the kind and caring people I thought they were. The monster in this case is not one person, it was created when lots of people, even with great intentions, publicly disagreed with you at the same time. Even kind feedback can come off as caustic and mean when there is a mob of people behind it. No ...
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I’ve realized I’ve never said this before on this blog, and I want to be on the record for saying what is extremely obvious to anyone who can see. This has nothing to do with immigration:
We should all be afraid, because the government is increasingly seizing USA citizens and holding them without charges, for the sole purpose of spreading terror and intimidating the public. This is a government that wants to normalize authoritarian practices with vulnerable groups so that eventually ...
Read More SourceI was engaged in a very disappointing conversation on Hacker News, where most people don’t seem to understand even basic economic facts.
Inflation is low, so the Fed should consider cutting rates. Lower rates means lower unemployment, which should eventually lead to higher wages. As a model for what the Fed rate should be, assume that it should always be 0% plus whatever amount is needed to limit inflation. Since inflation has been low and stable, the rate should remain ...
Read More SourceWhile ending her second marriage and starting an affair with a new man she writes detailed letters to the woman she is in love with explaining her theories of anthropology. Mead was apparently lucky to be in the orbit of Fanz Boas, who put together a scene that sounds like the exemplar of the metaphor “hot house” :
A living room in Grantwood, N.J., has a good claim to being the birthplace, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, of ...
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Everything about this is amazing:
Although the current archaeological investigations on Dhaskalio have been going on for the past four years, it’s only more detailed examination of the resultant data over the past 12 months that has revealed the true scale of the complex, and the transport logistics and construction work associated with it.
But the remarkable nature of the site does fit into a much more widely dispersed series of monumental construction traditions from western Europe and the Middle East.
Intriguingly, it ...
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I’ve previously mentioned that my mom has resigned from the Environmental Commission. See Blanche Krubner resigns from the Jackson Township Environmental Commission. She served for 46 years, from 1973 to 2019.
It was difficult for her to resign. She has many happy memories of working with good people to keep central New Jersey a safe and happy place to live. She protected the drinking water, so we can drink from the faucet without having to worry about pollutants.
In the ...
Read More SourceI grew up in New Jersey in the 1970s and 1980s. Myself and my younger brother played outside, every evening after school, and all day on weekends. On Saturday mornings we would disappear into the woods and play games there till it was dark. When I was 10 years old it was common for us to gather up our friends and initiate a game like Capture The Flag. We were in the woods for 12 hours straight. If we heard ...
Read More SourceWhen I wrote When companies make a fetish of being data driven they reward a passive aggressive style I made the point that leaders often gather up huge amounts of information, but they focus on the wrong type of information. For instance:
Google seems like an example of how a “data driven” company can go off the rails. I’m not sure what their meetings are like, but I know that in interviews the management at Google talks about their focus on ...
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This is a good question, and I think the correct answer is “Don’t waste time on dating apps”:
Your general advice about the pursuit of love always resonates: Build a life alone that you love; hold onto your belief that love exists even when it makes you feel vulnerable and uncool; if you meet someone you think you like but they’re tepid or not fully invested, go ahead and tell them to fuck off. I now read this and think, ...
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I’m sad to say that during my life I’ve had at least two encounters with different kinds of predators, one male and one female. Every time I asked them what they really wanted, they had a different reason. I think they invent reasons, on the spot, when someone asks. Their real motivation is a non-rational thing that is difficult to put into words. The Greeks have the word “alogos” which can be translated “inexpressible” and which covers predators. Maybe they ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
Lisa Taddeo
I started by going to San Francisco. I went to a couple of places that felt like they might be the nucleus of sex. I went to the “porn castle” in San Francisco, which is now defunct, but it was this wild place. I was profiling a young woman who was having sex with men while being filmed and directed by her girlfriend. I was really intrigued by how it must feel to watch your partner have sex with ...
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This is the opening scene of my novel, How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer
—————
Spring of 2010
When they were sixteen years old, Mera traveled down to Atlanta to spend a week visiting her friend Anna. Greeting each other at the door, they both experienced the mild shock of seeing one another after many months apart. Mera could see that Anna had done something about her uneven eyebrows, while Anna could see that Mera was now ...
Read More SourceI passed through Madrid, New Mexico in the year 2008. There was one main bar. If you went to that bar, most nights, an older woman came in. She was probably in her 50s or 60s. She was a regular who had been coming in for awhile. She might have also been an alcoholic. That was not unique there — that is a small town in the middle of nowhere and the people there drink heavily.
Once she had a ...
Read More SourceI think of this often, the civilization that could have been, had gender relations been different:
Unlike the male artists, who moved through life as if unfettered time to themselves were a birthright, the days and life trajectories of the handful of female artists featured in the book were often limited by the expectations and duties of home and care. George Sand always worked late at night, a practice that started when she was a teenager and needed to take care ...
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With the Web, it was common that the inventor of an idea failed to be the one who commercialized it. The team behind Friendster failed to build the social network that took over the world. Overture invented the idea of selling keywords for searches, but only Google turned it into a successful business. And apparently David Sifry was an early pioneer of looking for spikes in sharing:
Addendum: #David Sifry, creator of the Technorati.com, has created the Technorati Interesting Newcomers List, ...
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When the Web first emerged in the mid 1990s, people were astonished at the reality that their existed a “long tail” full of more revenue potential than the “fat body”. Amazon proved this early on. At the time, a large Barnes and Noble might sell 130,000 unique items, but Amazon was getting the majority of its revenue from the millions of items that were not among its 130,000 best selling items.
When we speak of what made the early Web ...
Read More SourceThis is advice that I’ve always followed. It’s why I’m very good at talking to large groups. Interesting:
I hope I’ve convinced you at this point that it’s not about the slides, it’s about the words you speak. My number one piece of advice to people doing presentations is “Write a script.” Know exactly what you’re going to say before you start. Improvisation is insanely hard. People spend their whole lives studying the art of improvisation, and even then usually only ...
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Interesting:
Nancy Darling’s advice on giving a presentation is the best thing I’ve ever read on the topic. Here are her five steps to pulling together a good presentation:
Choose a goal;
Find a storyline that will help the group reach that goal;
Develop a series of activities or a method of presentation that allows you to develop your storyline. Don’t let your media determine your storyline!
Remember that your role is to facilitate the group reaching its shared goal. This is your primary responsibility!
Remember ...
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This is good, but I would change one word:
Passion – if you haven’t got it, kill your talk: you’re going to be mediocre. If you find the material tedious, imagine how monstrously dull it will be for your audience. Don’t settle for a subject you should be passionate about; you need to have real passion that the audience can pick up on. Software testing is the kind of thing that everyone ought to care about in the same way that ...
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Interesting:
In Dante’s Inferno, the moral cowards are not granted admission to Hell; they are consigned to the vestibule, where they are doomed to follow a rushing banner that is blown about by the wind. When Dante asks his guide, Virgil, who they are, he explains:
This miserable way is taken by sorry souls of those who lived without disgrace and without praise.
They now commingle with the coward angels, the company of those who were not rebels nor faithful to their God, ...
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Interesting:
Censorship comes along with traces of governments ALWAYS!
In many contries allover the world, governments tend to block their citizens to access some certain domains/ips across the internet. Some say “It’s there to keep culture and moral healthy!”. They block pornographies and so. Even in US we can find certain domains which are blocked and cannot be accessed like those which contain CP or wild anti-humanism contents.
But in Iran (and most other countries) that’s not the case!
They block many things. We ...
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I just got done reading His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik.
This is a novel about the Napoleonic Wars, but with England and France also fighting it out with dragons, in the most steampunk way you can imagine.
The most fun part of this novel is the recreation of Evelina and Jane Austen manners and etiquette. Here is a scene that shows the best aspects of the novel. The background is that Will was a ship Captain and much admired, but ...
Read More SourceI often think like this about the romances in my life, the permutations, the which would have been better. Interesting:
In one universe, we wake up next to each other every day for 50 years. In another, we don’t know heartbreak or the ripping pain from crying all night. We call each other every night, and you send me flowers. I see you in everything except real life but we’re content. This may be my favorite universe. In the fourth universe, the miles between ...
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Interesting:
Anaxagoras also wrestled with the origins and formation of the moon, a mystery that still challenges scientists today. The philosopher proposed that the moon was a big rock which the early Earth had flung into space. This concept anticipated a scenario for the moon’s origin that physicist George Darwin, son of Charles Darwin, would propose 23 centuries later. Known as the fission hypothesis, Darwin’s idea was that the moon began as a chunk of Earth and was hurled into space ...
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What strikes me is how carefully they’ve thought about the problems with Ethereum, and other blockchain technologies. They deliberately make sure that Pact is NOT Turing complete, so they can avoid some of the hacks that took place with Ethereum. They emphasize a declarative style. And yet they also make it so the contracts can be fairly upgraded.
This is from the article:
However, the added versatility offered by Solidity smart contracts comes at a great cost in safety and complexity, jeopardizing ...
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You know you’re getting older when you can remember what it was like to have thoughtful, intelligent Republican friends. No member of the younger generation can relate to the experience.
SourceJesse Watters of Fox News cheated on his wife, via an affair with a 25 year old associate producer, which was eventually discovered by the wife. Last year they finalized the divorce.
Yesterday he went on Fox News and said we should love America the way we love our wife:
“If you love something, you don’t radically transform it,” he told Fox Friend Steve Doocy. “Like your wife. She doesn’t make you love ballet. She doesn’t make you grow your ...
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As DNA becomes more common, people are finding big surprises about who their real parents were. In this case, a researcher finds out that his mom had a brief affair with a neighbor, who turned out to be his real dad, and his mom’s nominal father was not, in fact, her father. That is a lot of lying about parentage in just 2 generations.
Identifying my biological father was a key first step in overcoming my sense of being untethered. ...
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Trump is correct. AOC and others come from a country where the current government is “a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world”.
SourceInteresting:
As Ocasio-Cortez notes, Pelosi’s attacks aren’t taking place in a bubble; they’re taking place in a media environment where the rightwing have put a target on the Squad’s back. On Tuesday night, for example, Fox host Tucker Carlson launched a racist attack against Omar that could arguably be seen as an incitement to violence against the congresswoman. “[Omar] has undisguised contempt for the United States and for its people,” Carlson told his 3 million viewers. “That should worry you, and ...
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Interesting:
While a man who has never, knowingly uttered a modest statement about his vanishingly small talents squats in the White House, Rapinoe’s victory utterance triggered howls of protest from Donald Trump’s supporters. “Obnoxious”; “rude”; “egotistical”. On it went. The you-go-girl end of American positive thinking was never, actually, intended to unleash the female ego in this way but rather to act as a piece of marketing designed to remind people – women in this case – that there are no ...
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Interesting:
The main thing that changed between 2004 and 2019 is that a lot of hidden pain became unignorable.
In What Do We Need Men For?, Carroll writes that since her encounter with Trump in 1995 or 1996, “I’ve never had sex with anybody ever again.” Mr. Right, Right Now came out in 2004, nearly a decade later.
Read in this light, Mr. Right, Right Now is not only exhausting, it is heartbreaking. All this effort, all this labor, all this single-minded focus ...
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Interesting:
Eva Chen In your two series, [To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before and The Summer I Turned Pretty,] who do you think are the most underrated characters?
Jenny Han Oh, whoa! No one’s ever asked me that!
Eva Chen I am a good interviewer.
Jenny Han It’s hard to say, because I feel like all the characters are very appreciated, and everyone has their own favorites.
Eva Chen Okay, so let’s go the other way. If you had to play favorites —
Jenny Han So my personal favorite characters? From ...
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I am trying to learn Polish, so I resonate with this:
Aside from the stupidity of this view, which seems to assume that all international travel and immigration to and from the UK will cease as soon as the Brexit drawbridge goes up, there is also the fact that having another language is never useless. As a Welsh speaker I have encountered a fair amount of linguistic ignorance: people saying that Welsh is pointless because it is a minority language that ...
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Let’s start by talking about terrible project managers. I was working at a web design agency in 2006 and the project manager was not very intelligent, though he was a spiffy dresser. Stylish shoes. If I looked down at his feet I almost always felt envy. He traveled in Europe, and acquired a collection of fantastic dress shoes from various fashion capitols. But he was a bad manager. His disorganization would come across in conversations like this:
THEM: Hey, uh, you ...
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The best implementation of Agile that I’ve seen was when I was at ShermansTravel.com and Mark Herschberg was CTO. The system went like this:
Herschberg reckoned that each developer could get 5 hours of real work done each day (the rest of the day got eaten up by email, conversations, research, and other incidentals). We had a crew of 5 programmers, so we had 125 hours a week of real programming. The sprints were 2 weeks long, so we had 250 ...
Read More SourceOn a thread about Thomas Jefferson, my comment got flagged by “dang” who is the moderator. I was trying to remind people that Jefferson was a rapist.
I was responding to this fellow, who felt we were too critical of historical figures:
As a side note, his home town, Charlottesville, canceled the holiday celebrating Thomas Jefferson’s birthday[0][1]. It seems to me that our society is too focused on condemning historical persons for their flaws than celebrating them for their noteworthy deeds.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jul/2/charlottesville-drops-thomas-jeffersons-birthday-h/
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/07/03/as-trump-predicted-charlottesville-cancels-thomas-jeffersons-birthday/
...
Read More SourceInteresting:
The beeswax compounds, along with diterpenes from a scraper and a flake from Grotta di Sant’Agostino, showed signs that the resin had been heated. The Sant’Agostino samples contained compounds derived from methanol, which is usually given off by heated wood. That’s a perfect fit with what we know about working with resin. It tends to dry and harden when it’s exposed to air, so the Neanderthals at Grotta del Fossellone and Grotta di Sant’Agostino would have needed to heat it ...
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Trying to fall asleep, I decided I’d try to watch Euphoria, a new show on HBO. There are 3 episodes so far, and I watched them all. The first episode is not great, it feels like its from the 1990s but trying to pretend it is current. I wasn’t won over till the 3rd episode, when the show starts to live up to its own idea about itself. The acting deserves applause:
Hunter Schafer as Jules Vaughn is really outstanding.
Barbie ...
Read More SourceThesis: Every time an organization claims to be flat and non-hierarchical, it is actually hierarchical, but the chain of command is invisible and based on the personal charisma of particular people, or sometimes based on their ability to bully and manipulate others. An organization without a formal structure will have an informal structure made up of various cliques. Is this better? Formally hierarchical structures can be frustrating, but they are transparent about who actually holds power, which is an important ...
Read More SourceI often wonder why these kinds of people become so self-destructive. I suspect that this is a mild kind of burnout. When you find yourself defending the use of the n-word, it’s time to take a break and maybe find a new hobby.
Much of that blame fell, perhaps predictably, on a woman and a transgender editor. In 2017, a fledgling Wikipedian accused Fram of monitoring her activity on the site to such an extent that felt like harassment. The editor, ...
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More interviews like this please:
AOC From there I learned that hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope.
I remember the first day I was school-striking outside the Swedish parliament, I felt so alone. But I was hopeful GT Yeah. I know ...
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I love Kathryn Bertoni to pieces. She was an editor on my last book. She completely re-wrote entire scenes of the book. She is more like a co-author than an editor. And she just wrote a review of the book on Amazon.com. And she, uh, gave it 4 stars instead of 5? So let’s give her points for honesty, right? Here is what she wrote:
I am one of the credited editors of this, Lawrence’s second, book. It was a privilege ...
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I sometimes think that a lot of focus is given to Silicon Valley so the public won’t notice how much the USA has declined:
In the early 2000s, the telecom equipment market began to recover from the recession. Lucent’s new strategy, as Mottl put it, was to seek “margin” by offshoring production to China, continuing layoffs of American workers and hiring abroad. At first, it was the simpler parts of the telecom equipment, the boxes and assembly, but soon contract manufacturers ...
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I don’t know Arabic, but I love reading how different languages handle things. This jumps out at me:
3. The writing system
The Arabic writing system is exotic looking but easy to learn, which is a rare combination. The language uses a straightforward alphabet, but because letters change their shape depending on what their neighbors are it is quite impenetrable to the uninitiated.
For exmaple, here are some “words” consisting of a single letter repeated three times:
ككك تتت ععع ممم
…
6. The Feminine Plural Formal ...
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Kenneth Clarke clearly understands politics in a deep way. He is philosophical. If were to claim he read Edmund Burke and Jeremy Bentham and reached his own conclusions, I’d believe him. I love this article:
Regarding the promises made by Johnson and Hunt in the Conservative leadership election, Clarke said both Labour and the Tories had been pushed towards more fringe views than those of their MPs after altered rules involving party members electing leaders.
He said: “Both parties were doomed, in ...
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I wrote about the general topic in Ambiguity is the mood coming from California Modern business culture seems to love blurred lines. Awkward social encounters tend to work out for those at the top, not those at the bottom. Here is a specific instance:
A few days after I hung out at babe.net’s offices, the staff went out to drink together to toast departing team members; Rivlin, the CEO, had decided to shutter the U.S version of The Tab, in order ...
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I was bit by a tick and I got sick. No doctor could figure out what was wrong. I tested negative for Lyme. I took antibiotics (Biaxin, aka clarithromycin) and 3 months later I was fine. I stopped taking antibiotics. Within 2 months I was sick again. I took Biaxin for 6 months. I felt great. I stopped antibiotics. Within 2 months I was sick again. I took Biaxin for a year. I felt great. I stopped taking antibiotics. ...
Read More SourceAll the Western nations have been shifting to the right since the mid 1960s. I plan to write more about this later. I’ll post this as an example, in this case, the rightward shift among the Labour party in Britain.
The former Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell failed in his attempt to implement Crosland’s message by abolishing Clause IV of the Labour Party’s constitution, which pledged it to the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange. But Gaitskell’s ...
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Blurred lines. Ambiguous commands. Awkward social engineering.
Modern startup culture is, to a small degree, being defined in a number of dynamic centers, such as Stockholm and Berlin and New York City and Austin. But the current culture of startups, and the jargon around them, is disproportionately being influenced by the culture of California, especially Silicon Valley. A number of influential books have come out of California business culture, and certainly all the main innovations of VC finance.
One thing that strikes ...
Read More SourceIt is possibly a bad look for me to link to someone who is praising me, but in this comment is a truth that has nothing to do with me: that technology has become the new inescapable geography. The implication is the business leaders of the future can ignore tech only about as much Caesar or Napoleon or Rommel could ignore geography. Tech is the battlefield that future businesses will fight on, it can not be treated as a minor ...
Read More SourceOut of fear that there is someone, somewhere, who doesn’t yet understand this, we should emphasize that Boris Johnson will be a disaster for the United Kingdom. Interesting and worrisome:
There is room for debate about whether he is a scoundrel or mere rogue, but not much about his moral bankruptcy, rooted in a contempt for truth. Nonetheless, even before the Conservative national membership cheers him in as our prime minister – denied the option of Nigel Farage, whom some polls ...
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What’s happening in Britain is unusual, and we should note how unusual it is. The Fixed Term law suggests that the Tories can sack Theresa May and appoint her successor, without asking the public to weigh in. 150,000 Tory members, mostly older and wealthy, will choose the next Prime Minister. I’m unclear why the Queen would agree to this. Are they even asking the Queen?
The Tory members mostly support Boris Johnson, who will clearly be the most incompetent Prime ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
Anthropogenic climate change is usually portrayed as a recent discovery, with a genealogy that extends no further backwards than Charles Keeling sampling atmospheric gases from his station near the summit of Mauna Loa in the 1960s, or, at the very most, Svante Arrhenius’s legendary 1896 paper on carbon emissions and the planetary greenhouse. In fact, the deleterious climatic consequences of economic growth, especially the influence of deforestation and plantation agriculture on atmospheric moisture levels, were widely noted, and often exaggerated, ...
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Last year I joined a team that was building software for Avis Rental Car. We already had a team, at an external company, that was working on the backend API. I needed to build a team that could work on the frontend code for Android and iPhone phones. So I hired one of the best known frontend programmers in New York City. He met with us a few times, chatted about the project, went home, made a start on the ...
Read More SourceSadly, no one saw this because I originally posted it as an update to “Docker protects a programming paradigm that we should get rid of” but just now, on Hacker News, steve_taylor wrote:
docker-compose up -d
What’s not easy about that?
My response? This is the sales pitch for Docker:
docker-compose up -d
But this Slack conversation is the reality (we lost 3 days before we were able to fix the issue, a complex interplay of the Docker cache and the way the Dockerfile ...
Read More SourceBack in 2010 I wrote “Excessive praise marks corporate peaks” and I was taking aim at Facebook. I wrote:
Circa 1991/1992 there were articles about how Japan was taking over the world and nothing could ever compete with them because they were relentless. But the early 90s marked the beginning of global retreat for many Japanese companies (with a few exceptions, like Toyota).
In the late 90s nothing could stop Microsoft, yet the late 90s marked the beginning of the era ...
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(This interview also appears in the book How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer)
Kelly O’Donnel is one of the co-founders of the Flux Theater Ensemble in New York City.
The following interview was conducted on January 18th, 2019.
Krubner: I’ve done a lot of these interviews, as part of a larger project, and I’m so excited to talk to you. I’ll start off with some personal questions, because even though I’ve sort of known you a ...
Read More SourceBuilding an async system is more complicated than building a sequential system, but it can offer competitive advantages. For instance, you can build mobile apps that work offline, and later sync their data with your system, and this ability to function to work offline can enable uses that your competitors don’t have. This is what allowed Handshake CRM to thrive, even though they started after the CRM market had seemingly consolidated down to a handful of winners. Given the dominance ...
Read More SourceThere was a stretch, maybe from 2005 to 2015, which will be remembered as the era of simple Ajax uses. The era started when Sam Stephenson released the Prototype library, but it really got going once jQuery was released. It was an era of Javascript fetching data via Ajax, and relying on the backend code to decide what data is sent in response to each request.
That era is evolving into something different. Frontends are now complicated enough that the ...
Read More SourceThis is part of the history of our era:
Post external references 1https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20186450#20187934 SourceSimplicity. Why is it so hard to keep things simple? There are many concepts that we use in software which arise from common sense which we then encumber with needless complexity. Why?
For instance, logs. It’s great to have a record of things. If you’ve built some software that gathers information, it is often very useful to know the order in which information arrived in your system. That is, it is insightful to know the history of events that built ...
Read More Sourcean excerpt from How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer:
——————————-
On the lucky side of things, Anna now had several commercial design gigs: an ice cream store that wanted a font that looked frosty, a financial startup that wanted a logo that looked reliable to the point of stolid, opening credit fonts for a documentary about the spirituality of an aboriginal group of Guatemala.
On the less lucky side of things, each of these gigs paid poorly, ...
Read More SourceDespite much talk about Machine Learning and AI improving advertising results, what I’m seeing is getting worse and worse. Despite billions invested, the ads shown to me are much less relevant than that ads that I saw on the Web 10 years ago.
Check out this disaster on Vox:
or how about this at Goodreads:
I hired 3 developers from Fullstack Academy. They were all great, so I went and checked out the website, curious about the curriculum. And now, every website ...
Read More SourceI wonder how common this is, where people find themselves in bad situations, and don’t have a local friend to ask, so they turn to an online community for support and advice?
Post external references 1https://fall-and-shadows.tumblr.com/post/185252092434/12-you-dont-have-to-answer-this-since-its-going SourceAre children spending too much time on their phones? One response I hear is “The same concerns were raised about television, but we all grew up watching television, and we turned out just fine.”
But is that true? Did we turn out just fine? Let’s say the children born around 1960 were the first children to ever be raised with television, this cohort went on to become:
1.) the first generation in USA history to see lower real male wages than previous ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
A small part of the celebration was focussed on the younger ice hockey teams, including the Finnish under-18 women’s team, who came third in their world champsionship this year. Each player’s name and number was called out, and one by one the girls walked out onto the stage, to applause from the audience.
I kid you not, more than half, and maybe as many as three quarters, of the girls were *on their phones* as they walked on stage, and stayed on them for the entire ...
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This is true:
We are living with a new kind of regime that didn’t exist in Orwell’s time. It combines hard nationalism—the diversion of frustration and cynicism into xenophobia and hatred—with soft distraction and confusion: a blend of Orwell and Huxley, cruelty and entertainment. The state of mind that the Party enforces through terror in 1984, where truth becomes so unstable that it ceases to exist, we now induce in ourselves. Totalitarian propaganda unifies control over all information, until reality is ...
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The recent revival of progressive movements, after 50 years of dormancy, have also revived the reality of the progressive movement having fractures. The one that I knew nothing about, until this last year, was the fracture within the LGBQT community; in particular, the conflict between lesbians and transexuals. This is a subject I’m still learning about.
Interesting:
honestly we need to stop engaging in good faith with people who have no respect for the suffering that lesbians have historically gone through/are ...
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Interesting:
Why are women still pleading for their humanity over everything tbh. Saying women will die if we outlaw abortions doesnt matter to the men in charge because that’s not their priority. They literally see women as incubators doing their duty, as subhuman or different and less important than men, etc. How are you going to appeal to humanity when they dont see you as fully human and deserving of the same autonomy and rights? How are you going to appeal ...
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From the 1930s to the 1990s, Silicon Valley generated a lot of slogans that suggested a certain kind of idealism that inspired hopes of a better future. Think of early Hewlett Packard, and the phrase “management by walking around.” There was an emphasis on informality, there was a doubtfulness about bureaucracy, there was the belief that a company could do the right thing and also be profitable. All of that now seems to have died.
Interesting:
Stapleton is a marketing manager ...
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So true:
Post external references 1https://glixbitch.tumblr.com/post/184717455347/facebook-we-analysed-your-entire-internet SourceI once ran a libertarian blog, but I am happy to see a split between libertarians and conservatives, because not having religious and moral conservatives speak up in defense of their values leaves too much of the culture exposed to the idea that consumption in the marketplace is a moral choice equal to any other.
As I said at the top of this piece, the debates over libertarians and conservatives, Sohrab Ahmari and David French, are really about a very ...
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At one point in my life I followed news in Central America closely. And at one time, this used to be easy, because there was more mainstream coverage of it. When Reagan was President, there was a lot of focus on the Sandanistas, which incidentally meant there were a lot of journalists in Central America, writing about it.
Apparently, things have gotten bad in Guatemala and El Salvador in recent years. I knew nothing of this, till this year. Now ...
Read More SourceI’m taking care of my mom. My grandparents are from Eastern Europe, but my parents were born in the USA. We are Americanized, in most ways. Still, I am taking care of my mom.
Here is an immigrant take on the subject:
My husband and I never really discussed the fact that I’d be supporting my parents. It was just a given. I never hid anything. I was open about the fact that my parents had no money. They speak ...
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Seems like straights should also keep this in mind:
When I was 18, I engaged in a intensely unpleasant threesome with two of my classmates and learned two things about myself because of how it went wrong. I’m not okay being ignored for extended time during play and I will not play with someone who’s not willing to give me aftercare. Now, anytime I get with someone new, I ask myself “is this someone I trust with my body, feelings, ...
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Here is a comment that Nils Meyer on LinkedIn, in response to something I said. I can agree that I would see some use to Docker/Kubernetes in a non-virtual world, the irony is that I’ve only seen Docker/Kubernetes used in virtual setups.
I would agree that using packer and treating the VM like a container (or rather a pod in Kubernetes Parlance) is the easier approach. It’s also somewhat bizarre that a tarball of multiple tarballs and shell scripts concatenated ...
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Interesting:
But such nebulous (and, frankly, elitist) labels are not useful in explaining Rowell’s appeal. Her voice is welcoming and inclusive; she’s primarily interested in interpersonal relationships, but she’s also strongly influenced by genre writing and fan fiction, and has been vocal in her admiration for YA mega-franchises like the Harry Potter and Twilight books — both of which had a pronounced influence on Carry On.
Rowell’s success is indicative of the changes mainstream young adult fiction has undergone in the past ...
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There is truth in this:
though Karine Jean-Pierre had both the reaction time and the situation-defusing skills of the Dora Milaje, she NEVER should have had to put herself in that situation.
and:
I’m all for Karine Okoye Jean-Pierre but the first emotion I felt was terror. That nut job got too close too fast and security didn’t do shit for a long ass time.
and:
I love me some Karrine Jean-Pierre. She does not think of herself; she steps up to protect her sister ...
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A reminder:
First, he describes how a tyrannical man develops from a democratic household. The democratic man is torn between tyrannical passions and oligarchic discipline, and ends up in the middle ground: valuing all desires, both good and bad. The tyrant will be tempted in the same way as the democrat, but without an upbringing in discipline or moderation to restrain him. Therefore, his most base desires and wildest passions overwhelm him, and he becomes driven by lust, using force and ...
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I just got done reading “Pretty Much Screwed” a novel by Jenna McCarthy, a novel set in Florida during the period 2010 to 2015. It is interesting to read this novel right after I read Eliza Kennedy’s novel “I Take You” (read my review of I Take You). The central characters could hardly be more different. Lily Wilder, from I Take You, is sexually adventurous and full of controversial opinions. By contrast, Charlotte Crawford, the main character of Pretty Much ...
Read More SourceI recently read “I Take You” by Eliza Kennedy. There are many strengths to this novel. Sadly, there are also some real weaknesses.
(I also recently reviewed Jenna McCarthy’s book, Pretty Much Screwed, which makes for an interesting contrast.)
In my own writing, I lean heavily on dialogue, so I liked that aspect of the book. Many novels use dialogue as a bit of garnish on top of the real meal, but this book uses dialogue as the main course. And ...
Read More SourceYou might recall some of the drama of my mom’s reappointment in 2009, which I’ve linked to before. When the Republicans gained power, they were anxious to push my mom out:
The issue surrounding Krubner came to the attention of the public several weeks ago when Reina did not reappoint the longtime Jackson resident and former teacher to the environmental commission or to the Planning Board.
The mayor said at the time, “Like all other towns, things have to change, and we ...
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This is a good article, but is it appropriate to say that a technology is simply going through some growing pains when the technology is 25 years old? Doesn’t the long history suggest the problem here is a complex one, with a long history of its own? Python was a dying language until Google decided to make large investments in it. Now it is the main language for Data Science. This is a language that started off with a certain ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
Then the girl with the Destiel shirt was being villainized all over the place. I felt bad for this poor girl (little did I know I’d soon take her place). She has something she likes. It got noticed. Lots of people feel the same way. [Just to be clear, I neither ‘ship’ Destiel or Wincest nor am I homophobic – it seems you are one of those three in this fandom]. She got called all kinds of ...
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The hype over Hadoop has died away and many of the investments now seem to have been terrible investments:
MapR Technologies Inc., one of the troika of unicorn startups that emerged from the early days of the big-data movement, may cut up to 122 jobs and shut down its Santa Clara, California headquarters if it can’t secure additional funding.
The company, which raised a total of $280 million in financing since it was founded in 2009 and whose market capitalization once ...
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Remarkable how comfortable some people are referencing the love of Villanelle as an aspirational relationship goal, without regard to her profession.
Post external references 1https://emmaswan26.tumblr.com/post/185199187321#notes SourceInteresting:
Gluon has always been very active in the Java Mobile Enterprise area. One of the big benefits of Java on the mobile and embedded client, is the fact that 12 million Java developers can use their skills to create mobile and embedded applications. In the past, the runtime for mobile platforms always lagged behind the runtime for desktop.
When we announced GluonVM, we said we would aim to bring Java on mobile at the same level as Java on desktop. We ...
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This would be a bizzare exception in most industries, but the video game industry seems rife with abuse. Very concerning:
Bundschu estimated he had three drinks, adding that he remembers everything that happened. (“I want to be clear—I remember this so clearly. I wasn’t so drunk that my memory is impaired or anything.”) Barrera moved to the end of the table, Bundschu says, and then asked who wanted to go to the dance floor. Bundschu volunteered, and then, he says, things ...
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Moby wrote a book and said he dated Natalie Portman when she was 18 and he was 33. She then responded and said no way, he was just an older creepy dude and she was polite to him. Now he has “apologized” but he does not actually retract the claim that they dated:
Post external references 1https://jezebel.com/moby-is-sorry-1835034937 SourceInteresting:
First it was the left, now it’s the turn of the right to fade from the French political landscape. We have a new faultline: one that separates “progressives” from “populists”. This realignment is no accident, but the result of the political world catching up with real changes in society. The traditional left-right divide is giving way to one that reflects a fundamental class conflict that will define the west in the 21st century: the working classes whose livelihoods have been ...
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We continue to pay a high price for our increased reliance on broken software:
In 2017, Magalie Sterlin also rented a car from Hertz and found guns drawn on her at a checkpoint. The cops told her that the car she was driving had been reported stolen, which was news to Sterlin because she had rented it. She got arrested and was held for half a day. In her police report Sterlin told officers “she did not return the vehicle despite the ...
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It takes a lot of religion to keep people from seeing this:
We may have suspected it already, but now the science backs it up: unmarried and childless women are the happiest subgroup in the population. And they are more likely to live longer than their married and child-rearing peers, according to a leading expert in happiness.
Speaking at the Hay festival on Saturday, Paul Dolan, a professor of behavioural science at the London School of Economics, said the latest evidence showed ...
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My new book is out! Check out “How The Young Anna Barnev Established Her Career As A Graphic Designer“.
In chronological order, starting in January of 2019, these were the designs that Leah McCloskey came up, to try to capture the spirit of the Anna Barnev story.
Here was the first batch, which she sent to me on January 14th, 2019:
Of these, I liked the hand drawn version of Anna, because she looks confident, and I thought it was important to have ...
Read More Source[Originally from a longer essay]
Let’s talk about EquiFax. They were hacked and data regarding 145 million people was leaked. When the CEO was hauled before Congress to explain himself, he emanated a nonchalance that offended people. John Oliver had a nice take down:
After this disaster was well known to the public, EquiFax hired ReliaQuest to manage their server security. I have friends who work at ReliaQuest, and I know it is a great company full of great people. If ...
Read More SourceI previously linked to a blog on Tumblr called this-chick-digs-chicks. The woman behind that blog wrote a lot on the subject of an appropriate relationship between transexuals and lesbians. Others called her a terf, but she made good points about the need to have a movement of those whose lifetime experience was that of being a woman. Almost everything I’ve read on the subject I learned either from her or from the stuff she linked to.
But now it looks ...
Read More SourceSomehow modern reality TV reminds me a bit of the explosion fake religious leaders that happened during the English Civil War. In 1649 the English people were acting without precedent — there had never been a political revolution in which peasants rose up and executed a king. The public could only understand it in religious terms, surely this cataclysm must mean that the Second Coming was near? And then more and more people began coming forward who claimed to be ...
Read More SourceGiven the kind of emotionally manipulative and retrograde fiction that he writes, this isn’t a huge surprise:
And now for a bit of news as predictable as his novels: Per an extensive report from The Daily Beast, prolific heteronormative romance bro Nicholas Sparks- who also co-founded and runs the Epiphany School of Global Studies in North Carolina – is currently embroiled in a legal battle for an alleged pattern of discriminatory behavior that took place in his school. If you feel ...
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It’s often said that Gordon Liddy was a symptom. He was not the illness himself. He was a minor character. But the fact that he was tolerated at all teaches us something about the kinds of people who were attracted to President Nixon.
Likewise:
Louise Linton, Baroness of the United States Treasury and Hermés scarf owner, was recently profiled by Los Angeles Magazine. You might ask: Why is the Treasury secretary’s wife being profiled by a magazine for retired sit-com stars? ...
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Interesting:
THR obtained a copy of the sworn declaration, intended to support Behar’s attempt to have Franklin’s lawsuit thrown out. It reveals that Warner Bros. first received a complaint about the Full House creator back in 2016, well before the allegations against Weinstein were made public. The studio launched an investigation into “Franklin’s handling of pregnancy-related requests for time off for doctor appointments as well as concerns about equal treatment for male and female writers for the show.” Though Franklin received ...
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Interesting:
Post external references 1https://feministism.tumblr.com/post/184144643979 SourceThere is truth here:
Post external references 1https://lynati.tumblr.com/post/184648748362 SourceFor any other President, this photo would have ended their Presidency:
It is gross to see a married man flirting with a younger woman so openly. But this photo did not hurt Trump, and likewise, when he was caught on tape bragging about assaulting women, it did not hurt him. I am curious why he is so utterly insulated. There is roughly 40% of the country that is willing to follow him no matter what. There is absolutely nothing he can ...
Read More SourceA lot of modern politics is being shaped by little moments such as this:
“oh man, remember how john green has a This Machine Kills Fascists sticker on his laptop despite never in his life even thinking about doing anything subversive ”
I’m so over the dumb shit with this cursed dead-end site. He and his brother provide free educational videos contradicting white-washed/cis male-washed history and science. He has always listened to reasonable critique on his work and apologized for anything he ...
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Well said:
Post external references 1https://lesbian-of-asgard.tumblr.com/post/184835027852/hey-idk-if-its-just-me-but-something-about-all SourceMeghan McCain is the daughter of John McCain, the great war hero. One thing that bothers me, intensely, is when someone tries to claim someone else’s greatness as their own. I’m curious what has Meghan McCain done that justifies her national reputation? Being the daughter of John McCain is not, itself, a qualification.
This is interesting:
McCain’s response to this polite, reasonable, question was to go on an outraged and borderline incomprehensible tirade in which, in between splutters, she continued ...
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Amazing that this is so important, and yet it is:
Well, this story isn’t in the book but it’s wild. While Trump was meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore, a club championship was held at Trump International, the course Trump built near Mar-a-Lago in Florida. So later on, Trump’s back on the course there with the Secret Service and the SWAT team guys and all that stuff. And he sees Ted Virtue, who was involved in the financing of the ...
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I just watched this while falling asleep last night. While I agree that the battle could have been shorter, I also feel that every single episode of Game Of Thrones could be shorter. I’m constantly stunned about the amount of extra footage that any competent film editor would normally remove, but which somehow makes it into this show. Is this done to pad the time? Is the goal to stretch the show out as long as possible, because it is ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
Brennan circles around the shoes from all angles, and her brief chapters add up to a kaleidoscopic view of feminine public existence, both wide-ranging and thoughtful. She describes the high heel shoes she wore for her own job at the United Nations, and she describes falling down stairs in the course of doing her job while wearing them. There’s another short chapter about the tall tale that expensive high heels don’t hurt, only cheap ones do, so if you’re in ...
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A comment from a friend regarding some fiction I wrote. This is the nicest thing that anyone has ever said about my writing. I can’t even imagine a comment that would make me happier than this one:
That’s about it. Really, Lawrence, I think it is very strong. There is a lot of humor and a lot of great discussion about art and the building of a career outside the “mainstream” process. I love how her various lovers ...
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From my friend Kat:
First, just an overall note about what irritates me in terms of some writers’ dialogue – it bothers me when writers write a scene with a certain tone and then also explain that tone through exposition. So, for example a character says something sarcastically and then the author explains that they said it sarcastically
I feel exactly the same way. Every one else who reads my novels gives me the opposite advice, and I thought perhaps I was ...
Read More SourceThis is from the year 2005:
At first, I couldn’t figure out why there were so many old geezers on the Stairmasters, or why everyone else in the gym was clustered down at the other end. About a minute into my workout, it became obvious. The fitness center is directly opposite the swimming pool, separated by a pane of glass. Olympic synchronized swimmers on one side, old geezers on the other.
As far as they were concerned, it was like being at ...
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Interesting:
Wholesome circa 1998 was the ’50s. Wholesome was father knows best. Wholesome was a mother vacuuming in pearls and high heels.
And for most of the ’90s and the ’00s, “wholesome” and “pure” were nearly synonymous with sexual chastity, with wholesome family values and evangelical Christian purity. Girls would put on purity rings at purity balls, which were a “wholesome event” for fathers “bringing up daughters to live in purity and in truth.” Daughters would pledge to remain virgins until marriage, ...
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This feels like a very easy mistake to make:
Here’s an example where you can get into trouble. Digging through some infra code, reviewing with a new devops hire, we were going through everything with a fine toothed comb. We found that the RDS instance was being deployed in PUBLIC subnet, instead of private.
Alerted to the problem, we first checked to see whether it was accessible from the internet at large. It wasn’t, because we had not exposed a public facing ...
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This article misses all of the Lisps, and focuses mostly on Algol languages, but it does a nice overview of that branch of computer history, and how that branch gave us the syntax of modern popular languages like Javascript.
1883: That’s right, the first programming language was born in 1883. The algorithm for the Analytical Engine was created by Ada Lovelace for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine to compute Bernoulli numbers. This is widely considered to be the first computer programming ...
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Interesting:
Writing the same dull CRUD application over and over is boring. But what if you could figure out a way to get all the simple CRUD applications to talk to one another? That’s a nice and juicy puzzle. This perhaps explains the complexity fetish I see in so many “Enterprise” architectures and applications. Some of it is accidental complexity, accrued from years of piecing together parts that were never meant to work with one another. But I don’t think accidental ...
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For all of you who continue to close your eyes and refuse to look at reality, here is another post pointing out the work involved with “simple” setups:
Also:
A task definition defines the actual container you want to run. The problem I ran into immediately here is that this thing is insanely complicated. Lots of the options here are very straightforward, like specifying the docker image and memory limits, but I also had to define a networking model and a variety ...
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Interesting:
The Archive of Our Own has had a fundamental role in altering the way we think about fanfiction
That empowered attitude arising among fans who built and used AO3 would coincide with a sea change in the way we think about fanfiction.
The creation of the AO3 in 2009 happened parallel to the rise of social media. This was a highly significant coincidence for fandom. AO3 was formed as an independent, fully non-corporatized community just when the internet was dividing into venture ...
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The first startup that I founded ran from 2002 to 2008 and it was focused on weblog software. I spent that time writing code and adding features because I thought we would win by adding features. Towards the end of my time at that startup, in 2007 and 2008, Tumblr emerged. Tumblr boasted a lack of features, which is to say, they were proud of their simplicity. I was irritated to realize that this could be a winning move.
Over ...
Read More SourceAlmost any story about fanfiction doing well makes me happy. Although, I wonder why the stories tend to lead to bland movies? Is that because of the young demographic?
In 2013, a 25-year-old named Anna Todd self-published her work of serialized fan fiction on Wattpad. It blew up almost instantaneously and reached over one billion reads. After became a success largely for its steamy scenes, which drew comparisons to Fifty Shades of Grey—and because its male lead, Hardin Scott, was stylized ...
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Here is an odd article from the Russian press. It seems to be saying that Western feminism is wrong because women are actually very tough:
There’s a railroad in Siberia that my grandmother and other Soviet women built. Married twice and twice divorced, she was always so busy at work that she didn’t have time for her own children. At the age of 17, her daughter, my mother, moved from a small city in the north and went to Russia’s ...
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This is a priceless story:
The day after the Brexit referendum in 2016, I went to Romford. I was keen to talk to people in one of the highest Leave-voting constituencies.
In a pub on South Street, I chatted to an elderly lady who was sitting at a table next to her two sons. Both had voted for Leave. She had voted Remain. Why? I asked her.
“There was this logo on a red bus, saying our money should remain in the UK. ...
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All online communities die, but Facebook’s slow obsolescence seems entirely self-inflicted. They could go back to have a simple Wall, which is all that people actually want. But that would mean accepting less money for advertisements. Apparently that is not an option? Remarkable that they will chase the money straight up to the moment they are doomed.
Interesting:
Instagram is designed to be used as it is actually used: as a posturing tool.
On Facebook you could share a moment with friends. ...
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Suppose you believe in an evil force, such as Satan or Communism of aliens from another planet. You believe this evil force wants to take over the planet and destroy the entire human race. And you believe that I am loyal to this evil force. Is there any reason why you should then respect my right to vote? If my side wins the election, is there any reason you should feel the election was valid?
Promoting conspiracies about the rising ...
Read More SourceI admit, I really like this show. I don’t allow myself much time to watch television shows, but I will make time to watch this one.
SourceVery good:
Post external references 1https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/mar/20/pathetic-incoherent-chaotic-europes-verdict-on-brexit-shambles SourceSome have responded with humour. Nathalie Loiseau, France’s Europe minister, said recently that if she had one, she would call her cat Brexit: “It wakes me up miaowing because it wants to go out. When I open the door, its sits there, undecided. Then it looks daggers at me when I put it out.”
Interesting:
Even if we can’t picture them, the characters are wildly, freakishly attuned to every sensation they experience, surveilling their emotional and physical reactions and analyzing the gestures and comments of everyone they encounter.
In fact, there is so little external physical description that when it comes along it functions as a mental speed bump, drawing attention to the artifice. The spell of the book is broken, temporarily, as if Rooney has remembered to insert some description of rain “silver as loose ...
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Funny and true:
There are sentences we hear in our lives that stick with us and grow deep, strong roots in our souls. We remember these idioms because they are poetic and resonant, disturbing and brilliant. They become mantras, guiding lights. We seek these phrases in times of joy or need. I myself hold onto one of these sentences: a beautiful sequence of words that has rattled around my brain since 2015 when “Mother’s Mercy,” the season five finale of Game ...
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The world is getting more and more informal, but I’m still surprised that Scientific American allowed this use of “fucked”:
Beyond that, the historiography of science in the 60s and 70s centered on distinctions between the “internal” history of science, or the internal logic of scientific ideas and their disembodied development over time, and the “external” history of science, or the grubby social and institutional contexts in which serene natural philosophers built on the work of their predecessors. What fucked Kuhn ...
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Interesting:
In countries where it is more dangerous for L.G.B.T. individuals to be open about their identities, harassment on Wikipedia can be particularly virulent. Once, an administrator on a Wikipedia page blocked an editor simply because that person’s username suggested that the editor could be gay, said Rachel Wexelbaum, a Wikipedian who works to improve L.G.B.T. content on the website. Eventually, she said, Wikimedia’s Trust and Safety Team got involved, and the administrator was blocked for those actions.
In some spaces, the ...
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Back in 2001 I had a friend who needed to hear this, and I told her, many times, but she did not listen to me. She kept writing long letters to the guy who abused her, hoping he would understand what he had done. My feeling is he always understood, he did not need anything explained.
Post external references 1http://uncanny-stars-in-uncanny-skies.tumblr.com/post/183968715320 SourceAs the big tech firms increasingly consolidate their hold on the Web, they are increasingly trying to clean it up and make it look presentable. For instance, many of my favorite LGBQ writers on Tumblr have recently been banned, presumably because they occasionally post photos of a sexual nature.
Google is having a problem with YouTube. Too many of their content creators are creating stuff that advertisers don’t like. So Google is now promoting conventional work from television. And the ...
Read More SourceApparently this is a real quote? If so, I’m horrified.
As far back as last year, Boris Johnson was casting himself as the man “to put some lead in the collective pencil”.
Whatever happened to Britain? For centuries it was regarded as one of the sanest places on Earth. It will be a long time before anyone regards it that way again.
All of this makes me sick:
Happily, not one of them feels miscast in this hypersexualised action hero role. “How ...
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Interesting:
What I’ve got to do is to get a file stream from a remote HTTP server and then upload that stream into AWS S3.
I query a URL with http/get, parse Content-Length header to know the file size and pass that into AWS PutObjectRequest as follows:
(aws/put-object aws {:bucket-name bucket :key key ...Read More Source
I’m glad this is happening, but I wonder why this is happening now? My parents were heartbroken when the nation began to shift to the right after 1968, and I’ve been waiting my whole life to see something like this:
Post external references 1https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white-liberals-race-polling-trump-2020 SourceInteresting:
The declining prospects of America’s working class are widely discussed and hotly debated these days, from the anthems of Bruce Springsteen to the “deaths of despair” research of Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton.
A recent paper from the Opportunity & Inclusive Growth Institute explores this downhill trend for less-educated men and women by comparing life outcomes of two cohorts born 20 years apart. It shows that for the more recent generation, the American dream has undeniably vanished.
“The Lost Ones: ...
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So true:
The Washington Post’s Phillip Bump analyzed Fox News segments between January 1 and February 15 of this year, comparing the number of segments mentioning AOC to those focusing on at least one of the Democratic 2020 presidential candidates. It turns out she got more coverage on Fox than any candidate save one, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who is also a right-wing boogeyman. Ocasio-Cortez got significantly more Fox News coverage than fellow democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.
It’s astonishing that a Democratic ...
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If there is anything that would cause danah boyd to “Just say no” it is probably collapsing contexts. And that is something that Google+ got right:
Google plus had circles
… so unlike with twitter I didn’t have to spam everyone to reach those two followers who’d actually care about that topic.
Example: I could add Norwegians I knew to my “Norwegians” circle so I could share links to Norwegian pages only to people I knew could read Norwegian.
Facebook has this as groups, ...
Read More SourceI don’t understand why this started, 100 years ago, why it lasted as long as it did, or why right now it is coming to an end. I’m pleased to see this nonsense end, but I’m very curious why it happened at all. I suppose this was an expression of some aspect of the class war during the 20th Century, the rising importance of a certain group of professionals?
Scientists should stop using the term ‘statistically significant’ in their research, ...
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Two comparisons occur to me:
1.) to the extent that fanfic suggests the amateurs who can undermine the power of the professionals, there is an echo here for the criticisms that journalists made, over and over again, when the blogosphere existed, during the period from 1999 to 2008. That conversation when the blogosphere was destroyed by Facebook and Twitter.
2.) to the extent that gender is a factor in the hysteria of the reaction against fanfic, there is some overlap between ...
Read More SourceSo very disappointing:
It is easy to be disappointed at this response coming from a liberal administration, one that was born out of the heroic monthslong protests that resulted in the impeachment and removal of the deeply corrupt and authoritarian President Park Geun-hye. Yet polling reveals the dispiriting reason why the Moon administration is at least partially pandering to anti-refugee sentiments: The issue potentially poses the greatest threat to the administration’s stability yet, as it strikes at the foundation of its ...
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The problem in this paragraph is the use of “we”:
Morris, who calls his philosophy “investigative realism,” writes, “I feel very strongly that, even though the world is unutterably insane, there is this idea—perhaps a hope—that we can reach outside of the insanity and find truth, find the world, find ourselves.” Kuhn, for all his faults, goaded Morris into writing a brilliant work of investigative realism. For that, if for nothing else, he, and we, should thank Kuhn.
If we replace ...
Read More SourceThe subject that is very much at the forefront of my mind nowadays:
The YA book world has gone through a few high-profile controversies in the past few months involving authors who pulled their books shortly before publication after a group of angry bloggers accused them of racism. Each cancellation sparked a slew of hot takes, but this New Yorker piece from Katy Waldman is by far the most nuanced and careful one I’ve seen:
The ongoing Y.A. wars are about power—about ...
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I really like this video (created by friends of mine). It makes clear that you have to be very detailed when you talk about a persona that you want to design a product for. The goal is to create empathy, within your company, for this persona.
SourceI’ll have to track down whatever her best book was and read it:
These people are bent out of shape by their hidden selves. There is something of another contemporary, Henry Green, in Johnson’s invigorating harshness. As Elsie passes on her way to school, Parsons ‘gave her a sidelong glance, sniffing up the hairs in his nose. Sidey little runt, he thought.’ Elsie, abruptly adolescent, is in love with her art teacher, Miss Chavasse, who is having complicated thoughts about her ...
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Parents who embarrass their kids is a phenomena as old as time, but doing so on social media means a larger audience, and the possibility the incidents will remain public forever. Parents should really think twice about this.
There, for anyone to see on her public Facebook account, were all of the embarrassing moments from my childhood: The letter I wrote to the tooth fairy when I was five years old, pictures of me crying when I was a toddler, and ...
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As sometimes with the Russian alphabet (and for similar reasons) I can sometimes almost read a Greek word, and it always surprises me. Here is an alphabet that is clearly different from Latin, yet so tantalizingly close to Latin that I can almost read it.
SourceAnyone who has developed for both Apple and Android is aware that the process tends to be easier on Android. But why is this? Apple has a vast pool of money, so they could invest some of it to make iPhone/iPad development easier. And this is a well known path for achieving software dominance. One of the things that allowed Microsoft to win, back in the 1990s, was their focus on building tools that made it easy for developers to ...
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In February, as Captain Marvel’s first pre-release screenings were held for press, the movie became the subject of several negative user reviews posted to the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes by people who hadn’t even seen it, blasting Larson’s performance and trashing the movie itself. Although, to call their assessments “reviews” is generous, as they primarily complained about Larson for being sexist against men, expressing anger that seemed to stem from Larson being vocal about the lack of diversity in ...
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Interesting:
Natural language understanding
I think the biggest open problems are all related to natural language understanding. […] we should develop systems that read and understand text the way a person does, by forming a representation of the world of the text, with the agents, objects, settings, and the relationships, goals, desires, and beliefs of the agents, and everything else that humans create to understand a piece of text. Until we can do that, all of our progress is in improving ...
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Interesting:
Using pre-trained models
We have several different English language pre-trained biLMs available for use. Each model is specified with two separate files, a JSON formatted “options” file with hyperparameters and a hdf5 formatted file with the model weights. Links to the pre-trained models are available here.
There are three ways to integrate ELMo representations into a downstream task, depending on your use case.
Compute representations on the fly from raw text using character input. This is the most general method and will handle ...
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Interesting:
ELMo is a deep contextualized word representation that models both (1) complex characteristics of word use (e.g., syntax and semantics), and (2) how these uses vary across linguistic contexts (i.e., to model polysemy). These word vectors are learned functions of the internal states of a deep bidirectional language model (biLM), which is pre-trained on a large text corpus. They can be easily added to existing models and significantly improve the state of the art across a broad range of challenging ...
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Interesting:
Sen. Martha McSally, the first female Air Force fighter pilot to fly in combat, said Wednesday that she was sexually assaulted by a superior officer, and later, when she tried to talk about it to military officials, she “felt like the system was raping me all over again.”
The Arizona Republican, a 26-year military veteran, made the disclosure at a Senate hearing on the military’s efforts to prevent sexual assaults and improve the response when they occur. Lawmakers also heard from ...
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Interesting:
Cultural misunderstandings like this are growing as campuses internationalize. In recent interviews with scientists at Harvard, M.I.T., Boston University and other institutions, I found that respondents embrace diversity in their workplaces but also raise concerns about puzzling behaviors of their international students. They say that cultural diversity in research settings is crucial but point out that some international students are “too obedient” or “hard working yet lacking in originality.” Without training in cultural sensitivity, they are often surprised and occasionally ...
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Interesting:
“The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it is comprehensible, ”Albert Einstein famously once said. These days, however, it is far from being a matter of consensus that the universe is comprehensible, or even that it is unique. Fundamental physics is facing a crisis, related to two popular concepts that are frequently invoked, summarized tellingly by the buzzwords “multiverse” and “uglyverse.”
…With the advent of the multiverse, this has changed: As unlikely as a coincidence may appear, in the ...
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Interesting:
When Beverly Hills 90210 first aired in 1990, producers miscalculated. They thought Brandon Walsh was going to be our heartthrob. It was an easy mistake to make: Jason Priestley had eyes like the sea, capped with a gossamer mane you just wanted to reach up and push back. The problem wasn’t Priestley. It was Brandon.
Brandon Walsh plays basketball and might have to be home early to study for his trig final. He had a paper route back in Minnesota, where ...
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Interesting:
Jennifer, a young mother and member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in northern Virginia, is honest about the challenges of being Mormon in America today. “It’s not an easy gig,” she says. It’s not just the expectation that you will adhere to strict religious standards when it comes to dating and sex. Or the 10 percent tithing requirement. The prohibition on caffeine or alcohol. It’s the time, she says. “My husband and I teach Sunday school ...
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I worry there is a lot of glib, superficial rhetoric coming out of Silicon Valley about the importance of being agile in one’s development processes. There are too many assumptions being made about the ease of introducing agile techniques, and which problems are solved by agile techniques. This essay is my attempt to offer a corrective.
Over the last 20 years I was the technical co-founder at three startups, two of which grew to modest size and then were sold ...
Read More SourceIt’s interesting that the simple approaches do fairly well:
Smooth Inverse Frequency
Taking the average of the word embeddings in a sentence tends to give too much weight to words that are quite irrelevant, semantically speaking. Smooth Inverse Frequency tries to solve this problem in two ways:
Weighting: like our tf-idf baseline above, SIF takes the weighted average of the word embeddings in the sentence. Every word embedding is weighted by a/(a + p(w)), where a is a parameter that is typically set ...
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This is a really great series of articles:
Post external references 1https://dragan.rocks/articles/17/Clojure-Linear-Algebra-Refresher-3-Matrix-Transformations#orgfb4c0f9 SourceInteresting:
Post external references 1https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/ SourceInteresting:
Post external references 1http://radicaleverything.tumblr.com/post/181865941561/literaturelesbian-unpopular-opinion-safe-spaces Sourceunpopular opinion: safe spaces have to exclude some people to be safe spaces because otherwise those the people in that space need to hide from can literally just enter at any time. An all inclusive liberal “safe space” isn’t safe at all
Interesting:
Post external references 1https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/1/18246233/economic-growth-workers-wages-economy SourceInteresting:
We found no statistically significant alphas — despite testing every possible school with a reasonable sample size. MBA programs simply do not produce CEOs who are better at running companies, if performance is measured by stock price return.
We ran similar regressions controlling for industry and found that — even after controlling for industry — elite MBAs did not produce positive statistically significant alpha. Elite MBAs did perform relatively well as CEOs in healthcare and consumer staples, but relatively poorly in ...
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A year ago I wrote “Why are women being pushed away from the tech industry?” Women made up 35% of all software developers in 1990, but are only 26% of all software developers now. Women are getting pushed out of the tech industry. There are lots of articles explaining why, and I link to some of them in that earlier essay.
But why did women’s participation in software development peak at the end of the 1980s? I know at least ...
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Pinsker: And once people get these sorts of jobs, you write about the importance of “sponsorship”—basically, when some senior employee informally takes someone younger under their wing and helps them advance through the company. What did you notice about how those systems of sponsorship worked?
Laurison: I think that a lot of people, on some level what they think they’re doing when they sponsor young co-workers is spotting talent—they called it “talent-mapping” in the accounting firm we studied. But a lot ...
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I guess I’ve known this for years, but this is a wonderfully clear article:
(defprotocol IFn "Protocol for adding the ability to invoke an object as a function. For example, a vector can also be used to look up a value: ([1 2 3 4] 1) => 2" (-invoke [this] [this a] [this a b] [this a b c] [this a ...Read More SourceInteresting:
“Women, teach your sons to be better!” but why? but why? nobody had to teach me how to be kind, i learned it naturally, i learned it easily. i watched and listened and took turns and sat pretty. i don’t understand. what could i teach them better than they could learn just from breathing? why is it my job to curb my brother’s anger when i’ve got my own well stewing and bubbling? why do i have to reign in ...
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If you live near New York City, then I would like to get to know you better. Once a month I host a gathering. This used to be exclusively a tech event, but lately I have opened it up to the artists that I know. This is very informal. You might have seen my earlier post about one of the dinner parties I threw last summer?
Contact me if you are interested.
SourceA long sad goodbye to one thread on Reddit:
But instead it was always that the the thread was “dominated by” or “only had” or “was an echo chamber for” homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the subreddit was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that the SSC community was dominated by homophobic etc neo-Nazis, which always grew into the claim that I personally was a homophobic etc neo-Nazi of them ...
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When I was younger the Conservatives in the USA had a rhetoric of “small government” and they were nominally anti-subsidy. In reality, the government grew under Republican governments, and no government questioned the many billions of subsidies given to the farm sector. Still, there was a rhetoric that suggested subsides are bad. I don’t see any trace of that rhetoric anymore. It is worth noting how much it has vanished, given that it was important to Republicans for several decades. ...
Read More SourceFirst of all, it looks like Tumblr creates a copy of a post when a blogger decides to reblog it, but how can this be allowed under the GDPR? Here is a case where it looks like the original blogger deleted a post, but the post still exists where it was reblogged. Does anyone know the legal implications? How does the original blogger say “I want all of my material erased from this website.”?
The original post was reblogged here, ...
Read More SourceI wrote this as a comment on Hacker News.
It’s also worth examining if our typical ways of measuring inflation (in the USA, the Consumer Price Index, or CPI) is an accurate guide to the real costs of raising children. The CPI currently takes into account a very diverse range of goods, including canoes and guns and lamps and kitchen wares and music and coffee grinders. The CPI tries to avoid the assumption that some purchases are more important than ...
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Often enough, Wilkes’s code didn’t produce the result she wanted. So she had to pore over her lines of code, trying to deduce her mistake, stepping through each line in her head and envisioning how the machine would execute it — turning her mind, as it were, into the computer. Then she would rewrite the program. The capacity of most computers at the time was quite limited; the IBM 704 could handle only about 4,000 “words” of code in its ...
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This is the kind of emotional impulse that for thousands of years would cause men to challenge one another to a duel:
And finally, I became the exact thing I hated: a toxic asshat throwing his skills around like fists. I don’t do code review for the business, I just like showing the rookies their place. My skills have finally started to pay off.
If a guy brings me his code, and it has mistakes, it brings insane pleasure from how smart ...
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The energy that goes into writing tweets is also energy that could instead go into works of lasting value. I’ve noticed that with all of my favorite writers, the moment when they turn to Twitter seems to be a moment when their production of high quality books/essays seems to go into decline. One of my favorite economists had a 10 year streak when he was absolutely on fire, then he started tweeting on Twitter, and his production of books and ...
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oh! I have to tell you guys a great story one of my professors told me. So he has a friend who is involved in these Shakespeare outreach programs where they try to bring Shakespeare and live theatre to poor and underprivileged groups and teach them about English literature and performing arts and such. On one of their tours they stopped at a young offenders institute for women and they put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet for a ...
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My great-grandmother Nanny came over from Europe and invested in real estate. She taught my grandparents, and my father, to invest in real estate. Avoid the stock market. Apparently economists now have evidence that this is a very good idea:
In general, economists would expect that assets with more risk–that is, more likely to rise or fall over time–will tend to have higher returns on average. From the standpoint of investors, the higher returns are needed to make up for the ...
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Interesting:
I have a saying when my peers compare themselves to the Zuckerbergs and Gates and Musks of the world: How many hundreds of thousands of dollars did your parents spend on your education? Because you have to realize that is who you are competing with. I went to a VERY RURAL high school. We had 3 math classes that everyone went through… none of them college level. My math class decided it was funny to rip up the floor tiles and ...
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I’ve made every mistake that they mention in this lecture. Most of the lecture is devoted to diagnostics for ML, how you should act when your ML is not performing the way you expected:
Post external references 1https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229/36 SourceThe New York Times shows this graph, which shows a dramatic decline in the number of students interested in computer science, followed by a dramatic uptick. I find it frustrating that the article focuses on the uptick, without making any comment on the decline. The article says that enrollment in CS majors has doubled since 2013, but it doesn’t mention that it was only in 2014 that enrollment got back to the level of 2002. That’s a 12 year lull, ...
Read More SourceIt’s an interesting idea, how much autonomy the actor should have, in relation to the showrunner:
it makes me think back to bering and wells. the femslash ship that was captained by the two actresses themselves. and how the showrunner dug his heels in, not wanting them to be in a relationship, but the actresses played all their scenes romantically despite it. and to this day it holds semi-canon ship status. because the actors made sure to show (and say ...
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This is actually an important post, with a message that the rest of the tech community would be wise to listen to:
What the experiment demonstrates is that I will put up with all of that just to use a site that shows me posts that I asked for in chronological order.
and this:
Post external ...Read More Sourcethe key function of this site is not asking me for my real name/phone number and not using my contact list/other apps to find people/let people find me.
Interesting:
In response:
This young man is in the SAME situation as Jazz Jennings. No puberty = no sexual maturation. No sexual maturation = no genital development and libido.
PLUS hormones and puberty blockers that cause genital atrophy, libido loss, urination problems etc.
But HOW FUCKING STUPID are parents like this?? The goal was stopping puberty from ever happening and now they act surprised that their son is basically dead down there. Fucking idiots.
And also:
This is what I meant when I said trans ...
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I missed this at the time. Interesting:
The main counterargument is that the moratorium would stifle web innovation. Since web innovation is currently defined as “emulating native even more,” I think a bit of stifling would actually be a good idea. Once web innovation is redefined as something that’s actually about the web we can proceed as usual.
Another counterargument is “But we need feature X!” Everybody will have a favourite upcoming feature that would be hit by the moratorium — mine ...
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Alexandra Rowland has more to say about her word “hopepunk”. This definition is nearly identical to Camus’s “Myth Of Sisyphus”:
The work is never finished. The work will never be finished. There will never be a nice, comfortable utopia where we can rest on our laurels and sip strawberry daiquiris by the pool and trust that now things are Fine and we can all relax. Utopia is not a stable system. It doesn’t last. The best we can hope for is ...
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People complaining about is the first sign of something ending.
Interesting:
This was science fiction perfectly tuned for the Reagan-Thatcher era. Its connection with punk music and subcultures is, of course, contingent. (Who knows what might have happened if Bethke decided to call his story Techno-Hipster.) Yet the clichéd punk imperative to “Do It Yourself” is in fact perfect for a kind of fiction whose ethos is that you have to survive in a world where unstoppable megacorporations control every aspect ...
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Apparently child abuse spikes when report cards are sent home, but the effect is especially strong if the report cards go home on Friday:
While talking to a pediatrician and fellow early-childhood researcher, Dr. Melissa Bright heard something that stopped her in her tracks: Child abuse spikes after report cards come out.
Bright, a research scientist in the University of Florida’s Anita Zucker Center for Excellence in Early Childhood Studies, couldn’t find any studies to back up what doctors have long observed. ...
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English is a flexible language. Perhaps it is too flexible?
Post external references 1https://www.vox.com/2019/1/10/18171912/tucker-carlson-fox-news-populism-conservatism-trump-gop SourceCarlson is hardly the first right-leaning figure to make a pitch for populism, even tangentially, in the third year of Donald Trump, whose populist-lite presidential candidacy and presidency Carlson told me he views as “the smoke alarm … telling you the building is on fire, and unless you figure out how to put the flames out, it will consume it.”
My mom was recently in the hospital. I gave the hospital my cell phone number, as the official point of contact between the hospital and the family. Suddenly I’m getting spam robots calling my cell phone, with messages about how I can get low cost health insurance. Someone sold my number. Maybe it was the hospital or maybe it was a related 3rd party, but someone sold my number. I am very irritated about this.
SourceNassim Nicholas Taleb has an excellent essay about why science works to advance the human race, and how to structure a research program for maximum benefit. However, it is also the strongest argument I’ve ever seen for ending 4 year school degrees. Consider this bit:
1) Convexity is easier to attain than knowledge (in the technical jargon, the “long-gamma” property): As we saw in Figure 2, under some level of uncertainty, we benefit more from improving the payoff function than from ...
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I’ve been watching the HBO production of My Brilliant Friend. I love it. I think the acting is great, the direction is great, the recreation of the past is great, the tension is constant. Everything about this is great. But I saw this Lesbian review on Jezebel, and I laughed because it seems so true. The two women are often in these situations, staring at one another, close together, bonded by some deed or secret, and its possible to imagine ...
Read More SourceInteresting:
Post external references 1https://this-chick-digs-chicks.tumblr.com/page/3 SourceA good article at Vox, of obvious interest to me:
“The opposite of grimdark is hopepunk,” declared Alexandra Rowland, a Massachusetts writer, in a two-sentence Tumblr post in July 2017. “Pass it on.”
…When pressed by other Tumblr users to expand on her two-sentence Tumblr post that coined the term, Rowland elaborated on what she meant by “hopepunk,” touching on themes present in both her own psyche and in the spirit of resistance and political agitation all around her:
Hopepunk says that genuinely ...
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Interesting:
One of my butch friends is a “They” now. A couple years ago we went to pride and I remember her specifically saying she’s happy to be a butch woman and she likes her breasts. I don’t know what has changed since then but I think the queer stuff has gotten really outrageous. She used to be a happy butch and now she doesn’t feel comfortable calling herself a woman. It seems crazy that women over 30 years old will ...
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An interesting comment over at Jezebel:
When I was single, I remember talking politics with some guy I’d met at a party. He tried to call me out for something, and I sternly nailed him back with facts and data. I sincerely thought he was a jerk because of the way he smugly raised his objections to my argument and rolled his eyes. I walked away.
For the remainder of the night, this guy would not leave me alone. He had to ...
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I’m not sure this is correctly stated, but it is interesting:
Some of this may reflect personal values: Putin, bin Salman and other strongmen are just Trump’s kind of people. But it’s hard to escape the suspicion that Moola — financial payoffs to Trump personally via the Trump Organization — plays an important role. After all, unlike leaders of democracies, dictators and absolute monarchs can direct lots of cash to Trump properties and offer the Trump family investment opportunities without having ...
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Interesting:
// ================================================================== // PLEASE DO NOT ATTEMPT TO SIMPLIFY THIS CODE. // KEEP THE SPACE SHUTTLE FLYING. // ================================================================== // // This controller is intentionally written in a very verbose style. You will // notice: // // 1. Every 'if' statement has a matching 'else' (exception: simple error // checks for a client API call) // 2. Things that may seem obvious are commented explicitly // // We call this style 'space shuttle style'. Space shuttle style is meant to // ensure that every branch ...Read More SourceTwo points which I think are obvious:
1.) The USA should have never gotten into the ridiculous situation where its President is being blackmailed by a foreign power.
2.) However, once we ended up in this sad scenario, it seems to me important that the political system offer the President a full pardon, both so the blackmailers lose their power, and also the President can safely resign.
SourceWeb 2.0 lasted from 2002 to 2008 and it will be remembered as the peak of the fun times on the Web. It was killed when Twitter and Facebook became popular in 2008. But it wasn’t till 2016 that we began to see how awful things could get. This is part of our learning process:
And maybe the things you don’t even need to whisper should be whispered. I’ve been slowly trying, as much as one can who works on ...
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October 17, 2019 4:50 pm
"Can't speak for anyone else, but on my feed reader: 5K bookmarked feeds, 50K regex on the killfile to filter o..."
October 10, 2019 11:17 am
"[...] تاريخ تقنية RSS، مقال قديم ويلقي نظرة على الناس الذين طوروا التقنية [...]..."
October 9, 2019 3:08 pm
"Object-Oriented Programming is Bad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QM1iUe6IofM..."
October 4, 2019 8:44 pm
"Gorgi Kosev, I am working to clean up some of my Packer/Terraform code so I can release it on Github, and then..."
October 4, 2019 5:14 pm
"> Packer, sometimes with some Ansible. The combination of Packer and Terraform typically gives me what I ne..."
October 4, 2019 12:40 pm
"Gorgi Kosev, about this: "I would love if you could point out which VM based system makes it simpler and..."
October 4, 2019 7:31 am
"I won't list anything concrete that you missed, because that will just give you ammunition to build the next a..."
October 4, 2019 1:39 am
"Gorgi Kosev, also, I don't think you understand what a "straw man argument" is. This is a definition from Wiki..."
October 4, 2019 1:23 am
"Alistair Bayley, that is valid criticism. Still, in my essay on Object Oriented Programming, I did suggest the..."
October 4, 2019 12:40 am
"Gorgi Kosev, do you disagree with anything that I wrote? All of your criticism so far is focused on my writing..."
October 3, 2019 9:13 pm
" If static typing lead to greater programmer productivity (via a reduction in bugs) then corporat..."
October 3, 2019 2:12 pm
"Well lets list what you wrote: * an imaginary strawman argument between an advocate and a critic * an actu..."
October 2, 2019 5:08 pm
"Gorgi Kosev, your comment is vague and lacks specifics. I hope you appreciate the irony. I wrote 11,000 words ..."
October 2, 2019 6:52 am
"The thing that bugs me the most about posts like these is that it sets up a nice little straw man argument bet..."
October 19, 2019 3:08 am
From Bernd Schatz on Object Oriented Programming is an expensive disaster which must end
"I really enjoyed your article. But i can't understand the example with the interface. The example is reall..."