aporetics

That’s not what “ghost in the machine” means.

That’s not what “ghost in the machine” means

You would think that at the very least our military would not tolerate having to build its machinery with parts from abroad. Can anyone speak to this?

I don’t really understand the categories you’ve set up or the traditions you’re referring to, but it seems like consequentialist ethics would be good as a historical exercise, but not much else. Because we mostly don’t know what will happen when we act, at least not with the clarity that that kind of analysis would need. I think the implicit ethical problem here is that there’s not much any individual can do that will have a measurable effect when it comes to entities as large and powerful as big tech (or any other industry). So then how do you think about making ethical decisions?

That moment while driving when the pavement is wet and the sun is at a low angle and suddenly the ground is as bright as the sun and you can’t see anything. But all the time!

It sounds more complicated than just figuring out how to prevent glare. Even if you do that, the terrain will always be illuminated in this strange high contrast scenario. I find myself thinking about how photographers use reflectors to avoid this in their portrait subjects.

Yikes. The sheer, unacknowledged hubris of this is bewildering. Let’s just remake the arid west?

Stick with QCT, I’ve been coming back to that essay for 20 years. Given your other recs, you might want to go back to a few of the Dialogues: the Apology, the Laches, maybe the Phaedrus. And if you’re serious about the divine origin stuff, after reading the Apology, read the third chapter of Walden.

Now read “Experience” by RWE and your answer will change.

This is good advice.

Thanks, I’m marking this to look into

I thought the point of using observables over promises is that they have cancellation, and presumably an implementation of race would cancel any slower request (i.e., handle the abort controller automatically)? Is that not the case?

I’m thinking: minidisc players!

What a great project, thank you. I appreciate that you can link to specific chapters, for example [0], or the one that I haven't been able to stop thinking about for twenty years [1],--though the latter would really benefit from the illustration.

[0] https://patternlanguage.cc/Patterns/Connection-to-the-Earth-... [1] https://patternlanguage.cc/Patterns/City-Country-Fingers-(3)

I think “Can’t Get You Out Of My Head” may be of more interest, topically, to hacker news readers, because it converges on the use of computing as a means of controlling social unrest.

> This concludes your exercise in pretending to not waste time while actually avoiding your deadline. Now: get back to work.

I suppose this could serve as the unspoken signature line in most communiques. Thanks MW

As though marketing never influences what people want.

Nope

Google docs has no dark patterns. All sunshine and roses.

Well said

Eh, that is exactly the omega-point that end-stage capitalism is converging on.

Nihilism and expressions of futility are not the same thing, fyi. In this case, if the original poster were nihilistic, they would not care one way or another about privacy. It would be meaningless, like everything else.

And the original poster remains correct about power. Power is never willingly given up by an institution (it can, however, be given up by individuals, when they decide that there is something more important than power). That is why we (assuming USA, here) have divided government, so power cannot ever be concentrated in any one branch. In this case, the hearing on 702 is being held by one branch, congress, to decide whether to limit or expand the power of another branch, the executive. It’s an important distinction; without that separation there really would be no hope to restore basic privacy.

I wish they had been working on an endowment like Wikipedia, that would be a better model in terms of the importance of an independent, open source browser. Maybe Wiki and take them under their wing.

The attitude proceeds from the same presupposition, which doesn’t seem—using planetary ecology as a yardstick—to have much keeping it in check.

That's a bit thick. The whole plot ends up being about the search for the true mother. The main contrivances of the story go to great lengths to spell this out: not even a technology as advanced as the primer can substitute functionally for human connection. If it is not already clear by the last handful of pages, it gets hammered in with by acts of courage which show what is worth risking one's life for.

> the singer recorded a few songs for the white musicologist John Lomax

Are we doing this now? Marking the race of people when we report on them?

Anyway, you can explore the Lomax archive of original recordings:

https://archive.culturalequity.org/

The DIY is fun, but if you want to think about it on a larger scale:

https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D81N8CPF

From the abstract:

> This thesis specifically highlights the value of small, mass-manufactured internal combustion piston engines retrofitted to participate in non-automotive system designs. The applications are unconventional and stem first from the observation that, when normalized by power output, internal combustion engines are one hundred times less expensive than conventional, large power plants.

And:

> The largest single component of this thesis is modeling, designing, retrofitting, and testing a reciprocating piston engine used as a compressor. Motivated again by the low cost of an internal combustion engine, this work looks at how an engine (which is, in its conventional form, essentially a reciprocating compressor) can be cost-effectively retrofitted to perform as a small-scale gas compressor.

Ed Kmett talk a few years ago: https://youtu.be/HGi5AxmQUwU?si=zSktsfqBNup2veBE&t=29m7s (starting at a relevant moment, relating inverse semigroups to LSP)

I don't know about technologists who use it in writing or speaking like Rich, but you can trace writers' use of etymology to provoke thinking at least back to Plato. More recent, prominent examples would be Hannah Arendt's acceptance speech in 1975 receiving Denmark's Sonning Prize, in which she uses the etymology of "person", and at least Martin Heidegger's essay The Question Concerning Technology in which he plays with several, including the etymology of "technology" itself.

If reading this explainer listicle awakens any curiosity in you, consider taking ancient philosophy course; coming to grips with the foreignness and yet the claim these terms still hold over wester civilization is one way of describing the basic task of such a course.