Parmenidea

This is a comment for a rather niche audience, but Barth basically had two literary stages: in his mid to late-twenties, he wrote straightforward modernist fiction (The End of the Road and Floating Opera). The bulk of his career was spent writing post-modern fiction, which included the books most often cited in this thread.

I found his earlier work far more diverting: it featured tight, well-written plots with interesting characters and ideas. By contrast, stuff like Giles Goat-Boy was gobbledygook written for other post-modern academics. Gore Vidal actually has a great essay on this: it seems like Barth started out as a great novelist, but turned toward the (again just my opinion) rather fallow field of post-modernism to further his prestige. Which is a shame, because again, The End of the Road is delightful. I guess my point is this: if your introduction to Barth is seeing people recommend the Sotweed Factor, and you find it inscrutable, I recommend picking up his earlier work instead.

Honestly, yes. I had a deep skepticism of a lot of VC-backed moonshots/SPACs in 2021. However, it’s hard to deny that these moonshots were at least aimed in the right direction — way more capital going to EVs, biotech, quantum computing, etc. You get some frauds in the mix (Nikola), but it’s socially utile to have a few of these projects gaining traction instead of highly profitable zombies.

ZIRP also seemed to be shifting investment tides toward green projects and away from oil. The new regime has allowed pollution to continue, and powered tyrannical governments like Saudi Arabia.

Why do you think ZIRP won’t come back eventually?

How would you host the Bob’s Restaurant website?

What is your definition of a human right, and why does AI access meet it?

Do you give any credence to the reports that creatine can cause hair loss? It seems like one study found a link, but nobody has tried to directly replicate it since. Anecdotally, Reddit is filled with stories of people claiming it caused hair loss, though I’m sure there are a ton of confounding variables.

I’d be worried about using ChatGPT for this given its tendency to hallucinate. Did you have to verify each response it gave you, or were you willing to trust the output?

This is such a strange take.

From a legal standpoint, why is it a qualified use of government paternalism to outlaw gambling? We should not be asking the government to set laws based on morality.

Practically speaking, and apologies in advance for how obvious this argument is…when you ban gambling, it doesn’t disappear, it simply goes underground. Criminal actors benefit while the state is unable to enforce any protections or see any recompense. Moreover, it’s unclear what brightline exists between “gambling” and a ton of economic decisions. If I buy a plot of land because I think it might have oil, is that gambling? When I lock in an insurance policy, is that gambling?

I get it’s popular to immediately call for government enforcement whenever you experience personal moral outrage, but the real world contains far more nuance. Making gambling and some of its “sinful” corollaries like drug use illegal has never solved the problem, and has exacerbated it for the worst off.

Where are these leaked emails?

Not just any religion, it’s a Seventh Day Adventist Hospital (an offshoot of the Mennonites, who believed the end of the world was predicted in the Bible). This has all sorts of weird implications; from my memory, they can’t serve caffeine on the premises. There’s a giant mural of Jesus guiding a surgeon’s hands in the front of the Orlando branch when you walk inside.

My hot take is that this story is highly overrated. It’s boring, poorly written, and lacks nuance. The reason people remember it fondly is (1) everyone loves Vonnegut because he’s funny, so they don’t want to criticize it and (2) everyone read this story in middle school and are blinded by nostalgia.

Vine, Yik Yak, and Google+ off the top of my head went the way of MySpace.

The counter argument is that a lot of those games reward “skill”. Through study/statistics your odds improve, in the same way that equity research can lead to a good stock pick. The lottery is naked chance.

A revolver is a line of credit that companies use for financing. You can think of it almost like a credit card for a company — they make some general purpose agreement with a bank for $X of credit at y% interest, and can use that at their discretion. Companies generally raise debt through specific bond offerings, so this is just a quicker way for them to tap capital instead of going to market each time.

Completely agree. I think the prevalence of sequels in Hollywood underscores the point; successful content begets popular content at a higher rate than a complete unknown.

Spielman was my favorite CS professor as an undergrad! Glad to see his work getting some recognition.

Funny anecdote — Spielman was awful at spelling. Every time he went to the board it was 50/50 on whether he’d spell all the terms right. He told us the first day of class that in middle school, he had tested in the bottom 9th percentile of all students in Pennsylvania in spelling. Apparently his brain was just wired differently.

Haven’t read Hoffman’s work, so I could be misinterpreting, but if you enjoy thinking about the self as ontological grounding I would recommend reading Kant. He pioneered a lot of the ideas mentioned in your post.