Join Readup to read with jeff.

Damn, what a tragic story!

“Happiness,” he wrote, “involves the enthusiastic and unambivalent acceptance of activities or relationships that are not the best that might possibly be obtained.”

Really interesting theory about the "what" but unfortunately missing the "how."

Incredibly moving. Heavy but effortless to read.

Interesting backstory and look at who's currently thriving on the platform. It doesn't strike me as much of a surprise that the most popular/successful writers are people who already had huge followings elsewhere given that Substack is just providing a SaaS solution for a business model that was already proven to be successful for people like Ben Thompson.

Excellent news for Readup and other small developers!

Git is definitely hard but I don't know how it could be made much easier without sacrificing some of its best features like the ability to work offline and maintain a complete historical record of all changes. In addition to the CLI which I only use when I need to work myself out of a pickle I also use 3 different GUI interfaces (VSCode, the GitLens extension and GitHub Desktop) which all make certain operations easier but can't do everything themselves.

I'm sold!

I can definitely relate to this. Trebek was iconic.

Really excellent article! The author totally nails it. I love the emphasis on the benefits of learning outdoors which is something I've never heard of before. The pause on mandatory testing is another great idea. Experimentation is needed. The road we are heading down is a dark one.

One of the many ironies of contemporary education is that as we learn more about the importance of emotional connection and face-to-face communication in early brain development, we seem ever more invested in technological quick fixes—“self-monitored” math lessons on iPads and the like—that take young children away from the adults charged with teaching them. What parents are seeing on Zoom is not a radical departure from what goes on in regular pre‑K and elementary-school classrooms, but rather a virtual extension of that.

What a creepy end to his journey! The insight into how partial familial DNA tracing works was also super interesting. Hopefully they can track down the guy's immediate family and we can get an update to this story.

Excellent insights into the current state of voting in America. Maricopa County's mail voting system sounds pretty ideal. I think even without Trump a dip in confidence would have been inevitable given that many changes to voting procedures were made relatively quickly in response to the pandemic so I'm optimistic that it will recover.

Wow. A strong "red wave" in a county where more than half of the residents are born outside the US. Lots of talk about Trump's messaging but not much about the Democratic Party primary and debates which seemed like a competition to see how far left each candidate could go. It's not surprising to me that Biden couldn't shake the "socialist" label.

Grenier’s poll showed that relatively new arrivals from Cuba who immigrated to the United States starting in 2010 were registering Republican over Democrat by a whopping 76 percent to 5 percent.

I would never have guessed the numbers were this far apart.

Great read! Entertaining and enlightening, especially the part about conversations about race in the UK taking on an "American accent."

My first blog post! Happy to answer any questions anyone might have.

This is seriously fascinating stuff. I had never even heard of the Omegaverse until watching Lindsay Ellis's video on the subject last night. It's crazy and awesome that there are such big markets for such bizarre content. It's also pretty disheartening to hear about instances of content creators using DMCA takedowns to attack their peers. After Ellis posted that video Cain's lawyer went after her as well and tried to get it taken down!

Really excellent article! Super smart exploration of the aesthetic attraction to pessimism. Cleverness and subversion are always a great pairing.

I really like this analysis. It's almost boring in a good way and contains plenty of valuable references and reminders.

This is not an indictment of capitalism, government, or technology. They never satisfy—not because they are malevolent, but rather because they cannot. This poses a real dilemma, not just for society, but for each of us as individuals.

I can't blame any of these people for not voting but I wish more of them would instead "throw their vote away" on a 3rd party candidate. It's sad that it's seen as pointless when the plurality of Americans aren't happy with the two-party duopoly.

It's funny to hear leetspeak discussed in such a formal manner. A good reminder though of how tricky it can be for those who rely on screen readers to navigate the web.

Deleting code is always a good feeling but stripping out Google Analytics from the Readup codebase was especially rewarding. It's crazy how desensitized everyone had become to just dropping those script tags in every website almost as a matter of course.

“I can swim as well as the others,” the narrator says, “only I have a better memory than they do, so I have been unable to forget my formerly not being able to swim. Since I have been unable to forget it, being able to swim doesn’t help me, and I can’t swim after all.”

Plenty of dark passages highlighted in this article but this might be my favorite.

Excellent article and at 20+ years old I guess it could be a classic. It's absurd that anyone thinks they can read thousands of words per minute but it does raise some interesting questions about what reading even is. The answer surely lies somewhere between merely glancing at a page of words and absorbing 100% of all the information contained and alluded to therein.

I like the way Carver structured his study and 75% retention seems like a reasonable benchmark to me when you're going for speed. I also appreciated the comparison of audio books to reading and the importance of regression. Distraction also has to be a huge factor. Audio books are marketed as a way to absorb information while you're doing something else.

Damn, I was expecting a relatively light read based on the headline. This was seriously disturbing! I'm glad it had a sort of happy ending for June at least.

Great read! Really well written profile. I hadn't heard of Friston or the free energy principle before. I found the potential application of the theory towards better understanding mental illness to be the most interesting/compelling but I've got some questions about how it explains life itself and relates to artificial intelligence.

But a free energy agent always generates its own intrinsic reward: the minimization of surprise. And that reward, Pitt says, includes an imperative to go out and explore.

This strikes me as paradoxical. If my ultimate goal is to minimize surprise why would I go out and explore? It makes sense to me that all living things would want to minimize surprise in order to conserve energy, but why do any living things want to live at all in the first place? If an AI program was modeled on the free energy principle why would it ever risk trying to allocate memory or polling inputs? Under all circumstances the shortest path to minimize surprise would simply be to self-terminate.

Politics aside, this is an awesome picture.

Really excellent article! Everyone should read this one, lest we risk taking liberalism for granted.

Wow. I had to immediately re-read this after the first pass to really absorb it. Incredibly sad but also one of the most interesting things I've read in a while. Not going to forget this one any time soon.

It's trippy to imagine reading an article like this as a Q-believer. Knowing that others are plotting to try to deprogram you and fracture your faith would only confirm the existence of the conspiracy and strengthen your resolve. It's a difficult situation but it's always nice to hear the stories of those who managed to snap out of it.

Not exactly an easy read but a very worthwhile one. It never hurts to take some time to appreciate the baffling complexity of the universe.

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.

A classic! Reminds me of the quote:

Any idiot can build a bridge that stands, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that barely stands.

Striking the balance between over or under-engineering is an art.

News flash: Getting spammed by random Twitter messages from politicians and "opinion leaders" who hold viewpoints opposite to your own increases polarization.

At this time, respondents in the treatment condition were offered $11 to follow a Twitter bot, or automated Twitter account, that they were told would retweet 24 messages each day for 1 mo.

As Fig. 2 illustrates, we created a liberal Twitter bot and a conservative Twitter bot for each of our experiments. These bots retweeted messages randomly sampled from a list of 4,176 political Twitter accounts (e.g., elected officials, opinion leaders, media organizations, and nonprofit groups).

Oh and then there's this gem:

Similarly, increases in conservatism among Republicans may have resulted from increased exposure to women or racial and ethnic minorities whose messages were retweeted by our liberal bot.

Yeah, no citation or footnote on that one. Guess it's a given that conservatives are just probably racist and sexist.

Together, we believe these contributions represent an important advance for the nascent field of computational social science (46).

This paper is embarrassing.

Loved this! I still think we can handle the post-truth. Articles like this are helping to make it possible.

Fun read! It's sad that anyone would ridicule her for asking such a question but great that she got so many positive, thoughtful responses as well. I hope someone recommended the movie Pi to her.

The best thing I've read in a while! This article explores some of the concepts from "A psychoanalytic reading of social media and the death drive" but takes them to an even deeper level and frames the discussion around popular portrayals of artificial intelligence. I find it pretty compelling that the dream of a super-human AI and the desire to feel numb or waste our time both stem from a "profound spiritual fatigue."

To possess true consciousness is the biggest and indeed the only responsibility in the known universe. AI promises a break, as it were, from the colossal burden of being the only show in town.

I'm also in complete agreement with the author's assessment of the intrinsic limitations of AI.

A machine can be taught when to bend a rule only by supplying it with more rules, ad infinitum. This is not unpredictability, nor is it thought, nor, most importantly, does it result in compassion or love.

Also Zed sounds amazing.

On the contrary, it depicts the soul, with its fear, weakness, and love, as the very thing that reaches for a refuge from danger and uncertainty. Zed simply adds this question as a stinger: If man is saved from contingency, from danger, from struggle, why satisfy his needs at all? Is he not, in a sense, already dead?

Great read! Worth it alone just for all the graphs and data. I've heard lots of complaints from populists on both the left and the right recently about the "libertarians in DC" who are controlling the economy. This article does a great job of highlighting why that's such a laughable concept.

One thing everyone can agree on is that the overall growing complexity is a problem, right? Irrespective of any specific political agenda it's just plain wrong to have so many laws that everyone is a criminal and a tax code that no one person can understand.

I think there's a lot more nuance to be had here. I pay for my email now (FastMail, huge fan) but it's pretty awesome that anyone can get an account for free. Same goes for Google, YouTube and many other ad-supported services that provide access to an incredible wealth of knowledge at no upfront cost.

Would it be less evil to ban ads and require a credit card and monthly payments for such services, denying access to those who can't afford it or don't have access to credit? The whole idea of "free is evil" has a weird sort of extremely online, insular tech privilege vibe to it if you ask me.

Lots to think about here. Published in 2013 but at least as relevant today.

A classic! I started doing web development a little over 10 years ago and reading this now makes me slightly nostalgic for the jQuery era.

Even though I try to keep everything to a minimum I'm sure the author would be appalled at the number of scripts, stylesheets and fonts Readup injects into the page. I have to say though, this site does look much better in reader mode!

Thoroughly enjoyable read! I'll stick with meals for months or years, but like many in the article I make slight adjustments to keep things interesting while still reaping the benefits of the repetition. Switching up condiments and seasonings can really change the taste of a dish without having to learn a new recipe or significantly alter the regular shopping list. I've also found that just toggling between two different options every other day works great, too.

I was ready to completely disagree with this article based on the headline but I think it's actually dead on. Syntax might be the least important aspect of programming but I've seen quite a few online courses that focus on it almost exclusively, probably because it's the easiest thing to test. It makes total sense that helping kids take things apart, learn how they work and put them back together is a better approach. Once they've got that down they can apply it to the more abstract and frustrating version that is programming!

The owner of a gun-themed restaurant called Shooters Grill in the town of Rifle...

Can't make this stuff up! Seriously though, her turnout and fundraising seem pretty impressive. I can totally see the Covid backlash vote being a big thing.