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Great read! Also extremely relevant to Readup:

Instead, as they skimmed the internet in that state of constant distraction that we all recognise, they were carried away with their emotions and their partisanship. The good news is that simply pausing for a moment to reflect was all it took to filter out a lot of the misinformation. It doesn’t take much; we can all do it. All we need to do is acquire the habit of stopping to think.

You've got to have good brakes when you're moving at the speed of light!

This article raises some very important questions and makes some great points! Proper feedback loops are crucial.

Super interesting read if you're into Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies (or retail banking regulation). I fully support Square's position but I think their mother/daughter gifting analogy is a little shaky.

For example, under this Proposal — if a Square customer’s mother gifts her daughter $4,000 in physical cash and the daughter deposits those funds in a bank, the bank would have no obligation to collect information on the customer’s mother. Under the Proposal, if this same transaction were completed in cryptocurrency, the bank would have to reach beyond its customer relationship and intrude upon the mother’s private information in order for the daughter to successfully deposit and freely access her gift.

If Square is acting as the custodian of the daughter's cryptocurrency wallet, wouldn't a closer analogy have the mother attempting to go to the daughter's bank and anonymously deposit the $4,000 into her daughter's account? I'm pretty sure that wouldn't fly.

Great article! Love the overall breakdown and there's nothing I disagree with but I would add a few things:

Crunch is not productive — it is an emergency effort to compensate for the lack of real productivity that is achieved through good planning and sharp focus.

That's for sure at least partially true but sometimes you're going to have to crunch and I think it's very valuable to be able to hit a few speed bumps in the ultra-regimented routine, run some environment/body/mind short-term deficits and be able to recover quickly and gracefully.

Also:

Split big tasks into small ones, so nothing looks overwhelming and daily progress is visible

I mean, yeah! If only it were that easy. I feel like sometimes that's 99% of the actual work. Seeing it as a bullet point feels a bit like "Draw the rest of the fucking owl."

Excellent article!

In the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Berry also began writing about his surroundings. But unlike Thoreau and Emerson, who were simply visitors to the natural environments they wrote about, Pollan says that Berry was actually engaged with nature: “He wasn’t just a spectator. He was a farmer.”

It says a lot that he returned to Kentucky so soon after graduating college and has been practicing what he's been preaching for over 50 years.

Really inspiring article! I found the counter-arguments compelling and was curious about the person who initially criticized the author. Here's the third result Google returned: https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/1347119992462970880

Goes to show what embracing the dark side will do to your soul over time. Count me with the rationalists!

I really appreciate the historical and judicial references here. It's reassuring in a way to be reminded that our system of government has had to deal with contested elections before and that despite all the toxic partisanship the overwhelming majority of those in congress are committed to upholding the Constitution in this instance at least.

Damn, I feel for the author. I know that ever-present "code quality" impulse/obsession and it was tough to see the train going down the wrong track from the beginning, especially since he did a good job of conveying the emotional struggle. It's always difficult to strike the balance between quality and speed when you're building something but I'd say this guy seems to be a rather extreme example of perfect being the enemy of done.

The tough part is that someone could definitely accuse me of the same thing with Readup for refusing to use "app platforms" like Firebase or Heroku but at least I'm posting this comment on a product that I shipped. In fact I remember when you could comment but there were no replies, no markdown/formatting, no comment links, no ability to edit or delete. The commenting experience still isn't perfect, especially within articles, and it probably never will be but if we waited to check all those boxes we might never have shipped anything at all.

I think it would be difficult to pack any more wisdom and good advice into a three minute article. I feel like it applies to programming as well. It's often hard to find the motivation to type out a bunch of code you know isn't quite right and will have to be reworked almost immediately but it's way better than trying to brute-force it all in your head.

No one else wants to read about eels? I didn't think I did either but this article was truly excellent. I didn't want it to end!

Great read! The current situation is bleak but it won't last forever.

Regime loyalty is the herd immunity of the ruling class, a protection against the consequences of their own failures.

The personal spying stuff is super creepy. It's almost hard to believe the ambush scene described at the beginning really happened it seems so absurd. It's also crazy that the bulk data dumps are for sale on the open internet. Don't even have to bother with the dark web! Reminds me of the early days when there were sketchy web sites that hosted pirated MP3 files out in the open before everyone moved to P2P.

Wow! Equal parts horrifying and fascinating. Just give this one a shot, you won't want to stop reading.

I couldn't agree with the author more and I think these are extremely important points to get across. In fact I was saying much the same thing seven months ago!

Maybe I'm overly sensitive because of the pandemic, but I think it should be even more clear now than ever that facts, science and data aren't the be-all and end-all of policy making.

Unfortunately I feel like the problem has only gotten worse since then.

Also related: One of my favorite YouTubers just put out a great video on the issue of Scientism - The Problem with the 'Yay Science!' Crowd

Well told, captivating story. It almost reads like a movie script which might be a hint that Shkreli was always just playing her. Sad either way.

This is seriously depressing. It almost makes it worse that there seems to be broad bipartisan disgust for the process. I'm curious what a proposed solution would look like or if any other country has found a way to solve or at least mitigate the issue of legislation that is impossibly complex and bundled together.

I feel like a "single issue" rule would be hard to define and enforce but it would at least provide some kind of check against an obviously dysfunctional system. Come to think of it that sounds like it would make a great constitutional amendment. They're usually short and to the point.

Yikes! Fun read but unfortunately not too surprising to see how the experiment turned out. If I had to put myself in a political box I'd call myself a libertarian but definitely with a lowercase "L" for many of the reasons highlighted in the article. I'm squarely in the purple quadrant according to the Political Compass but I really think there needs to be an additional z-axis for indicating where you are for different levels of government. There are entire departments of the federal government that I'd like to see done away with but I'm a big fan of local libraries.

There's also the whole social aspect of libertarianism which wasn't even really touched on in the article. I'm much more dogmatic when it comes to supporting policies that allow consenting adults to do whatever they want as long as they're not directly harming anyone else but laws governing drugs, prostitution, gambling, alcohol, etc. are usually not implemented at the local level so there unfortunately wasn't much they could have done in Grafton on that front.

Great motivational read and an excellent mantra!

Excellent article! Love the in-depth background on the philosophy and how it applies to issues with technology and political polarization. We can't fix anything unless we're grounded! The author ties it all together very nicely.

A tragic story, indeed. Jewel sounds like an amazing friend.

This is a seriously awesome project. Powering it using purely mechanical solar energy is really clever. I could totally see this thing being featured in a classic Star Trek episode. Also seeing the years with a leading zero is trippy.

Fascinating interview! The effects of Novichok poisoning sound absolutely hellish. I can't imagine the kind of courage it takes to fight against political corruption in a place like Russia. It's astounding that this guy is going back after all this.

Deeply thought-provoking! I had no idea Denmark offered universal prenatal screening. This article raises so many interesting and important questions.

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.