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I address my journals to my future biographers. I also maintain a Spotify playlist for my biopic's soundtrack. And I leave digital footprints for ingestion by future AI models.

A while of doing this has shaped my thinking generally. The tone moves along the serious-not-serious spectrum. I can speculate wildly and grandiosely about my plans and ideas from a just joshing or just in case perspective, and then reconsider them seriously.

Hello everyone!

Like the article author, I have always found Harari's work and ideas, if not facile, then uninsightful, and the size of his following unwarranted. But a passage in the article stood out to me:

> According to this notion, our mastery of the world is due to our talent for fiction, for constructing (and believing) stories about things that only exist in our imagination. It’s undoubtedly a simple and easy idea to buy into. But the question is whether this idea is also another one of those stories about things that don’t exist [emphasis mine].

To me, what the author is complaining about here would, in light of the size of his reception and following, in fact be a recursive demonstration of Harari's thesis.

It is possible to write pornographic literature using Microsoft Word — and many do

> the current funding model of post-secondary institutions, which does not prioritize the ratio of faculty-to-students necessary for ever more personalized or real-time assessment methods.

Get ChatGPT to do the assessments.

How about a taxonomy by associated sexual pathology?

https://youtu.be/mZyvIHYn2zk

Last year I bought a copy of The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, first edition. Inside was a folded piece of paper printed in really coarse old dot-matrix that had

  (I
      (BE
          (NOT
              (RATHER
                       (WOULD))))
      (PROGRAMMING
          (LISP IN)))

If only they'd stuck with it until evaluation order was introduced.

If countering blind denialism means conducting mathematics with regard for anything other than mathematics, then blind denialism it must be. I think though this is falsely dichotomous, and hyperbolic, and that such assertions have only served to harm their respective political programs, not least of all by causing resistance to and embarrassment for them.

Set anything against mathematics, and mathematics must win.

The National Socialists rued dismissing general relativity as “Jewish Physics”, and the Marxist ideology was made to look ridiculous by the Soviet state’s support of Lysenkoism in opposition to “Bourgeois Biology”. When Stalin asked for a nuclear bomb, his scientists were explicitly denied the use of “Bourgeois Physics” (the very same theory the Nazis called “Jewish”). Ultimately, of course, the concession was made at the expense of the ideology.

There is just physics, there is just biology, and there is no racist or colonial mathematics — there is just better or worse mathematics, the determination of which is mathematics itself.

I’m sure this comment is facetious, but as many motorcyclists will attest, something absolutely was lost in the 80s with the transition to electric starter motors.

Kickstarting a motorcycle is a truly pleasurable experience (at least for smaller displacements). And the loss is not just aesthetic, but practical too; you needn’t worry about your battery going flat — on some bikes you don’t even need the battery installed at all to start it!

> I really disagree. I think engineers scratching their own itch leading down to trickle-down tooling is what a lot of independent devs _like to believe_, but that it's motivated mostly by self-importance. I think the utter failure of the FOSS desktop is proof that devs are motivated to work on things they find fun and that these things do _not_ necessarily translate to things that general users want to use.

I'm not a desktop environment developer, but I can't imagine it's especially fun compared to other projects. The bigger projects (Gnome, KDE, etc) are definitely being run for instrumentalist reasons, and are supported to quite a degree by companies with a business interest in having them.

Thinking about this reminded me of a highly insightful comment by user Floegipoky[0]:

> By mimicking the Apple and Microsoft tactic of constructing vast monolithic environments and applications, you have all unwittingly been playing to their strengths, not yours. Such enormous proprietary companies can afford such brute-force strategies because they have vast financial and manpower resources to draw on.

> Projects like Gnome and Open Office become like our banking industries: vast, baroque, impossible to regulate effectively, and cripplingly expensive to maintain.

Doesn't exactly sound fun — and whose itch is being scratched by working on these?

> the Linux desktop world (and even the kernel world beneath it) has completely and utterly forgotten its roots. Unix Philosophy isn't merely a neat marketing phrase: it describes a very specific way to construct large, complex systems. Not by erecting vast imposing monoliths, ego-gratifying as that may be, but by assembling a rich ecosystem of small, simple, plug-n-play components that can be linked together in whatever arrangement best suits a given problem.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13573373

There's a real epistemological problem that people of protected classes face that I hadn't considered before reading this article and the comments here; one unintended effect of the current zeitgeist is that, because overt sexism against women is so heavily policed, almost nobody is going to be explicitly sexist against women, so women can get stuck questioning the motives behind potentially any interaction.

For those perceived as belonging to a privileged class, people feel free to (and in some cases relish in and are socially rewarded for) voicing their sexist opinions. A man has a lot less reason to dwell on whether a particular interaction was sexist against them, because when it does happen it is often overt.

After pressing Cmd + Shift + 4, press Space and then click on a window or alert to screenshot it entirely, instead of having to drag out a rectangular region. It works at the level of the compositor so the screenshot includes its chrome and translucent drop shadow, and nothing behind or overlapping the window,

After selling Australia the F/A-18 Hornet, the US refused to give Australia access to its friend-or-foe identification system, making it essentially useless for its role as the country's front-line fighter. Australia had to resort to subterfuge to make it work. This was revealed by the then-defence minister, Kim Beazley, in his valedictory speech to Parliament[0]:

> The radar of our Hornet could not identify most of the aircraft in this region as hostile—in other words, our front-line fighter could not shoot down people who would be the enemies in this region.

> I went to the United States and, for five years, it was up hill, down dale and one knock-down drag-out after another with Cap Weinberger, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. I tried to get the codes of that blasted radar out of them. In the end, we spied on them and we extracted the codes ourselves

[0]: https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display....

I've been wondering lately how and whether Australia could use its position as the biggest exporter to deliberately wreck the global thermal coal market, and consequently, coal usage.

I'm definitely not an economist, but would it be feasible, if coal production could be co-ordinated nationally, to manipulate the market through (I'm guessing) either or alternately dumping coal on it or suddenly cutting it off, possibly in an unpredictable manner? Does Australia have enough weight to make a difference? And would this have any effect greater than cutting off production entirely?

But the Swedish Chef is still, surprisingly, the Swedish Chef in Sweden, which seems to be a cruel joke. https://slate.com/culture/2012/08/swedish-chef-what-do-swede...

We should not be surprised that the environment we find ourselves in is so seemingly well-suited to the flourishing of life. I believe the grandparent post was saying this as a response to the idea that things are too improbably perfectly-suited for us. Far from being a non-sequitur, it is almost stating a tautology. The environment we find ourselves in is the one that has given rise to us, with our ability to think about these things.

I'm sure there is a Douglas Adams passage that illustrates this but I can't remember it.

Great article. It expresses ideas similar to Game & Watch and GameBoy creator Gunpei Yokoi's philosophy of Lateral Thinking of Withered Technology.[0]

> Yokoi said, "The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply."

> "Withered technology" in this context refers to a mature technology which is cheap and well understood. "Lateral thinking" refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology.

When designing the GameBoy, Yokoi realised that the older, simpler Z80 processor would just as well serve the purpose of making fun handheld games as the more contemporary options would (and one might argue that the limitations of the machine forced game developers to be more creative than they might have otherwise). Likewise with the monochromatic display.

The GameBoy was cheaper to manufacture and buy, more well-understood by developers, and crucially, much more power efficient than its several competitors. And it killed them.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunpei_Yokoi#Lateral_Thinking_...

At the risk of flogging a dead horse, the tweeter was technically correct when she said that she had written a book. She said neither that she edited, typeset, printed, bound, distributed, shelved, loaned, sold, nor solely forged a book out of the edifice of the void.

Pedantically-speaking, Spiekermann dropped the ball on this one.

Not exactly what the GP asked, but there’s also Wireguard in the iOS[0] and Mac App Stores[1].

Wireguard from the Mac App Store works successfully with Little Snitch (per-app firewall) and comes with a menubar icon that shows connectivity and allows quick switching. With the commandline-based version of Wireguard (installed from homebrew or wherever), Little Snitch sees all traffic as originating from the wireguard-go process. This is because the App Store version makes use of MacOS’s new network extension API, and Apple has only made that available to apps distributed through the App Store.

[0] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wireguard/id1441195209

[1] https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wireguard/id1451685025

Ergonomics. Text that does not require much horizontal back-and-forward movement of the eyes is easier to read than super wide-set text. Gruber has long talked about typography so I’d guess it’s deliberate.