bhritchie

Snaptravel | Toronto | Full-time | Full-stack/Back-end/Data | REMOTE ok within North America (preferably legally able to work in Canada)

We're in the travel industry and still thriving - profitable and growing rapidly - which I think tells you something about our focus and potential.

I'm the team lead and hiring manager for our product engineering team, which works on customer-facing features in the broadest sense. I'm looking for a couple of experienced full-stack developers (our stack includes React, Node, Python, and Postgres). There is a lot of opportunity for ownership and growth.

The job posting is here: https://jobs.lever.co/snaptravel/5f2ad904-ce27-484d-8cb3-457...

Feel free to reach out to me with questions: [email protected]

Some of our other teams are hiring as well; see our career page here: https://www.snaptravel.com/careers/

Snaptravel | Toronto | Full-time | Full-stack/Back-end/Data | REMOTE ok within North America (preferably legally able to work in Canada)

We're in the travel industry and still thriving - profitable and growing rapidly - which I think tells you something about our focus and potential.

I'm the team lead and hiring manager for our product engineering team, which works on customer-facing features in the broadest sense. I'm looking for a couple of experienced full-stack developers (our stack includes React, Node, Python, and Postgres). There is a lot of opportunity for ownership and growth.

The job posting is here: https://jobs.lever.co/snaptravel/5f2ad904-ce27-484d-8cb3-457...

Feel free to reach out to me with questions: [email protected]

Some of our other teams are hiring as well; see our career page here: https://www.snaptravel.com/careers/

"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen."

(That's the Wittgenstein, not the German saying.)

And have been! Careful attention to stylistic features has allowed us to get a pretty good idea of the chronological groupings of Plato's dialogues, for example, which helps us understand things like how his views evolved over time. That's a typical sort of use of stylometry.

And then using latinized words also makes normal things sound more technical or scientific than they really are. For example you can say "let's implement business process improvements" or you can say "let's do things better."

It is interesting to notice that when people want to sound official or authoritative (in business documents, for example) they tend to lean more on long, latin-derived words rather than the plainer, earthier words of Germanic origin.

Philosophers tend to be interested in the "foundational" questions about math and other sciences. In the case of math, in practice this means that good philosophy departments will often teach courses on first order logic and set theory, and philosophers such as Frege and Russell made major contributions in these areas. But they may also get more interested than mathematicians would in the questions about about the nature of logic - the nature of truth, propositions, the viability of alternative or non-classical logics, and so on. And then for example various modal logics can be helpful for thinking about possibility, epistemology, ethics, and so on.

Historically there is also a lot of overlap as well. Formal logic was invented by Aristotle. Leibniz and Descartes are equally large figures in mathematics and in philosophy.

Plato is certainly very approachable, and perhaps Athanasius is as well; of course there are examples on the other side as well - Aristotle leaps to mind. Better, probably, to read an account of his logic than to try to read the Prior Analytics, for instance.

It's by jQuery creator John Resig: https://ukiyo-e.org/about

The first paragraph reminds me of the great example by which J.L. Austin distinguished precision from exactness: a stick could be exactly, but not precisely, six bananas long.

In the present case we could say that six random bananas could accurately but not precisely represent the length of a stick.

This is really neat in concept. However, I would be cautious about the substance here. I took a look at one philosopher that I know well---Socrates---and several of the entries seem very doubtful to me.

> We need to know how to conduct our lives and ourselves.

Sure, but doesn't everyone think that?

> Things like 'justice' do exist; not materially, but in some sort of essence.

This is getting metaphysical, something quite foreign to Socrates.

> There can be no cut and dried answers; answers themselves are open to question.

This reads to much in to the conversational aspect of the dialogues. Socrates is always pointing out that in many areas of life there are experts who know the correct answers and can be appealed to. In the moral realm, sadly, there seem to be no experts (though there are pretenders, hence lots of questions), but the point is that it would be great if there were experts here too!

> To the man who preserves his integrity no real, long-term harm can come.

"Integrity" sounds too personal or individual; this should be "the just man", or "the righteous man". And it does not need to "long-term" qualification.

That is four out of seven items. There rest of the list seems broadly ok, though it is a rather eccentric selection of Socrates views. Gotta start somewhere though, I guess.

One the other hand Socrates presents unusual problems of interpretation, so this may well not be a representative entry.

I dropped out of a PhD in philosophy and am now a software developer. Tinkering with some of my old papers is my main hobby these days. I also have little kids, so I don't get a lot of time for it, but I'm hoping to have at least one significant item ready for publication in the next year or so.

Dave Morton left after one month.

I think Austin would consider the "I take it that I'm sitting before a desk" in the second sentence of this article to smuggle in the offending suggestion right at the start. We say "I take it" when we have a general working assumption about things, likely based on second-hand evidence, and on topics about which we are not ourselves experts. On the Austinian view, scepticial doubts tend to rely on intimations like this one: that sitting right in front of something and looking at it is somehow just like hearing about something and then building out some unreflective inferences. And then no doubt it is hard to certify the chain of evidence. But why start there?

Anyway Austin is great, and funny too.

I was just reading a history of the Hellenistic world, and something like this seems to have been common in towns in Ptolemaic Egypt, and functioned as the main check on otherwise rapacious taxation.

I consider it the most fun novel I've ever read. Whenever i have occasion to give someone a book, this is the one I give.

This argument, including the "will the sun rise tommorow" example, is these days most associated (at least in philosophy) with the 18th-century philosopher David Hume. See here for example: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9662/9662-h/9662-h.htm#mnum21

It is failing for me because of the content security policy, which is a different thing.

As far as I can recall, the texts did not get any recognition within Ethiopia until the last century or so. A manuscript of the texts was originally found (in a monastery, I believe) and translated by an Italian scholar in the 19th century, and there were several translations and scholarly works discussions published over the next few decades. Then in the 20s and 30s a couple of scholars argued on textual and circumstantial grounds that this Italian scholar had in fact forged the original manuscripts himself. Basically everyone was convinced and lost interest at that point. Claude Sumner and some Ethiopian scholars have more recently taken up the whole issues again and argued that the texts are authentic, but they remain very obscure.

I probably should have talked about this a bit in my introduction, but none of that stuff is in English and I guess I found Sumner's discussion compelling. But really I'm not qualified to judge, and the forgery theory would certainly account for the sudden emergence.

It's been a few years since I updated it, but I probably still have the only blog dedicated to Ethiopian philosophy: https://ethiopianphilosophy.wordpress.com/

It's one of the most influential papers in epistemology. The paper gave rise to the notion of the "Gettier problem" for the otherwise appealing view that knowledge is justified true belief. A great deal of epistemology since can be understood as trying to figure out what to add to the "justified true belief" theory to get around Gettier-style objections.

Also interesting, it seems to have been basically the only thing he published, and he published it mainly because he had to publish something.

Actually it is a genuine dissent because the majority decision did specifically address that scenario as well:

> Applying patent exhaustion to foreign sales is just as straightforward. Patent exhaustion, too, has its roots in the antipathy toward restraints on alienation, and nothing in the Patent Act shows that Congress intended to confine that principle to domestic sales.

This is by Bram Moolenaar, author of Vim: http://www.zimbu.org/Home/about-zimbu

The article I linked in a sibling to your comment sources several versions of this calculation in the footnotes, though I'm sure there are others as well: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/should-do...

> Had he taken the money he was lent or given at the start of his business career, and invested it into an index fund instead of doing his attempts at business, he would now have a net worth of $12 billion instead of $4 billion.

Matt Levine wrote a great article on this idea: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-09-03/should-do...

Maybe the best line: "For one thing, if he put all his money in index funds and reinvested all the dividends for 41 years, he'd be dead, because you can't buy food with reinvested dividends."

I didn't say it was one way, so I'm not sure what you're calling bullshit on.

Indian philosophy may eventually have equalled Greek philosophy in many respects. But in the Hellenistic period? What would you stack up against Aristotle? Plato?

The book I mentioned, The Shape of Ancient Thought by Thomas McEvilley, is an amazing one. That's the place to start. My now vague recollection is that the influence went first from India to Greece (via various other places) not as what I would call philosophy but maybe "speculative theology" or "speculative religion" (think Vedas, Upanishads) Then more fully formed Greek philosophy influenced Indian thought via the Hellenistic world following the Alexandrine conquests (so e.g. you wind up with Buddhist philosophy like Nagarjuna's Vigrahavyāvartanī that deploys some arguments familiar from sceptical schools of Hellenistic philosophy.

I don't really think they were barbarians in any very interesting sense, just that if there's some contemporary perspective from which you could have seen them that way it would be from a Greek cultural perspective. My point was more just that anything Rome might have lacked culturally was basically right next door in Greece and even familiar to educated Romans - it's silly to skip over Greece and denigrate the Romans from some "Asian" perspective when a substantial amount of that asian stuff derived from Greece in the first place.

And I think the Romans knew they had the strengths you describe and the weaknesses I describe - and in the case of some Romans explicitly preferred it that way. Again that's not well described as a society that is "cut off" from anything.

> Rome’s Asian contemporaries completely dwarfed Rome in almost every respect: heritage, population, cultural diversity, technology, architecture, medicine, philosophy, poetry…

> it’s always made me sad to think of the Romans being largely cut off from the main action on the world stage.

This is incorrect because the Romans knew about Greece - in fact they ran the place.

The Romans were barbarians, in a sense, I suppose, just compared to Greece. They didn't do anything that could compare to the Greeks in math or philosophy, for example. And by, say, the fall of the Roman Empire, India had far more interesting philosophy (sadly little known because not very accessible) than Rome, so sure, "Asia" had better philosophy than Rome (really India specifically). But it turns out that Indian philosophy was heavily inspired by Greek philosophy (highly recommend The Shape of Ancient Thought for anyone interested in Greek-Indian intellectual exchange), and I wouldn't say it was better (though I wouldn't say it was worse either). Rome wasn't cut off from the best of philosophy - they were just too practical to care much about it - and they knew it and said as much.

Philosophy I know something about - I dropped out of the PhD program at Harvard after studying quite a bit of it. But some of the other parts seem dubious or of questionable importance. Architecture? The Romans look pretty good to me there, and I mean they even used concrete. Medicine? Let's be serious: almost all medicine before the 1800's was placebo. Population? So what?

If you enjoyed this, you will probably also like J.B.S Haldane's essay, "On Being the Right Size": http://irl.cs.ucla.edu/papers/right-size.html