- @jeff
The electoral beatings will continue until morale improves.
A seriously sad state of affairs all around, indeed.
I'd vote for Oprah.
It's fun to read about things you're not supposed to talk about.
This was published back in early 2013 in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting and I think it's a very worthwhile read. I strongly agree with Harris's point of view. I want to live in a place where responsible adults are allowed to do dangerous things like buy alcohol, drive cars, fly planes, build swimming pools, take drugs, and own guns (maybe not all at once!). So while I'm strongly opposed to bans, I do support much more stringent regulation in the forms of licensing, registration, (re-)certification, training, increased liability, and the like.
Really great post, @thorgalle! This is certainly a bittersweet announcement and not the outcome that we had hoped for, but I am genuinely excited to help take Readup in this new (and in some ways old) direction.
Wearing a mask may still give some people a sense of security, but they could breathe more easily if they’d face the facts.
Every now and then I'll still see someone wearing a mask while walking alone outside. I'm all for people doing whatever they want but I think by now, with the benefit of hindsight, we should all be able to agree that mask mandates don't do anything to stop the spread of this virus.
A real life horror story. I almost never say this but this really is one of those articles that everyone should read. Really incredible journalism and writing. The levels of dysfunction and despair inflicted on those who lived in the Chicago Housing Authority projects is truly unimaginable.
“You get desensitized by what goes on here every day,” the Janitor says. “It’s animalism over here—that’s the prevailing life condition of the people. Animalism—where you worry about those who are stronger and you care nothing about those who are weaker.”
“When I first came here, I used to feel so sorry for the children that I almost would cry,” the Janitor says, “just to know the terror they see. But they’re so animalistic in their own right, in the games they play—I see little kids throwing bricks and bottles at each other, and this is their game. Now I get mad—’Goddamn these little bastards.'”
Just as hypocritical priests can doom a religion, experts doing politics in the guise of scientific rationality actually undermine it.
This whole piece is absolutely brilliant. I wish more people took the time to consider this point of view rather than just blaming big tech and social media for the mess we find ourselves in.
Great read! Solid analysis and I appreciate that the author actually took the time to spell out some thoughtful potential solutions instead of just harping on the problems.
I like most of the suggestions but I think increasing the age restriction for online services would be a huge mistake. I think congress made the right call setting the age at 13. That's how old I was when I built my first computer. If you ban kids from legitimate social media sites you're effectively just forcing them over to places like 4chan.
I also think our institutions bear at least as much responsibility for the erosion of trust as do social media services and viral mechanics.
If we do not make major changes soon, then our institutions, our political system, and our society may collapse during the next major war, pandemic, financial meltdown, or constitutional crisis.
The last major US war was Iraq which we were led into by the outright lies told to us by the Bush administration. Our public health leaders lied to us from the very start of the pandemic and conspired to suppress dissenting opinions and research into the origins of the virus. In the last financial meltdown the federal government bailed out the largest financial institutions which were responsible for the crisis in the first place while leaving individual homeowners out to dry.
In short, our institutions are and always have been kind of a shit show. They may be better than many alternatives and I do think they're salvageable but let's not pretend people on social media are just freaking out about imaginary monsters that aren't rooted in at least some truth.
Honestly with all the lies and injustices that we've been exposed to recently in rapid, high-definition, viral succession I'm surprised that things aren't even more chaotic. I'm also optimistic that the proliferation of social media is making it more difficult for corrupt cops, politicians, public officials, and business leaders to get away with their crimes and coverups.
Really interesting to see how regular citizens in some neighboring countries are directly aiding the Ukrainian military.
A truly epic article! Very readable as well despite the length. Loved all the history and depth of discussion. This is a big, important topic and it deserves all the words. Highly recommended!
Really interesting interview! Definitely a worthwhile read.
Really interesting read! I had no idea Azure was catching up to AWS so quickly. I've been all in on AWS for a while but I'll have to give Azure another look the next time I'm starting a new project.
When I have a choice I usually go with Windows EC2 instances anyway and my main programming languages (C#, TypeScript, and PowerShell for scripting) as well as my favorite development environments (Visual Studio and VS Code) are all Microsoft inventions. I really like the way they've embraced open source in order to stay relevant and their developer ecosystem just keeps getting better and better.
A gripping read! High quality journalism on an extremely important topic. The scale of this catastrophe is just impossible to comprehend and the behavior of those trying to cover it up is unforgivable. As disheartening as much of this story is, it's reassuring to know that some individuals and groups, both inside and outside of the government, kept seeking the truth despite the overwhelming efforts to quash their efforts.
An exceptionally good read! The "how to get it" part remains a mystery, of course, as does much of pinpointing what "it" even is, but the article does a great job of exploring individual pieces of the puzzle.
Energy is both biochemical and psychophysical, vaguely delineated, widely misunderstood, elusive as grace. You know it when you got it, and even more when you don’t.
I also loved Picard's juxtaposition of genomics and energy flows.
“The way of the future is understanding personalized energy flows. The last ten years of personalized medicine has been taken over by genomics. The premise is that if you can sequence it you’ll know whether you’ll get sick or stay healthy. That’s where all the money goes. It’s a lucrative hypothesis, but it’s doomed to yield incomplete answers. The genome is static. Health is so dynamic.”
Eat right and exercise, of course; but managing the charge/discharge cycles and fitting them in to daily work and life is still a huge challenge.
The CDC and botched COVID testing policy: Name a more iconic duo.
Reading about biofuels is always so frustrating. Ending these insane subsidies should be such an easy bipartisan issue.
Really great article! I could swear I read about this guy back in 2013 but he's definitely not the only one who has accidentally thrown away a fortune of Bitcoin. I can't believe how long his saga has dragged on for and the amount of pushback he's received from the city.
It's crazy to think it all might have been avoided if he wasn't worried about the embarrassment he might face if he immediately went chasing after the hard drive at the dump. The advice from the guy who bought the two pizzas with 10,000 BTC is wise and I'm glad he's apparently at peace, but his coins are gone forever. I don't know how one could move on knowing that those ones and zeros might still be recoverable.
I just finished writing another technical blog post. If you think you might be interested in a deep dive into Readup's architecture check it out!
This is a really interesting argument with a lot of data to back it up. One of the biggest takeaways for me is how nebulous the term "affordable housing" can be. There's a world of difference between creating subsidies for apartments and deed-restricted houses vs. creating an environment where homes will be affordable at market rates and buyers can build real equity. Both could be called "affordable housing" but only the latter will result in the beneficiaries actually accruing wealth.
Some good news!
I'm not sure I would call the headline clickbait, but the author's left arm is paralyzed from the elbow down. Not to trivialize the situation, but I have heard of people wanting to amputate their fully functioning limbs which raises all kinds of really interesting bioethical questions. I'd say this case is more straight forward from that perspective but I still could not imagine how difficult it would be to make the decision.
Also, I have to say that none of the responses from those she told about her decision to have the amputation sat well with me, including the stranger on the Zoom call. I get that immediate validation might feel better than some of the more awkward reactions, but having such an automatically positive response seemed to undercut the gravity of the situation.
This seems like a really awesome project but I found the political analysis to be forced, reductive, and boring.
The Future Library is real in that there are books being written for it and there are trees growing to fuel its creation. But its politics are imaginary.
What politics? I just read this article and then skimmed it again. From what I can tell its politics are derived from the fact that it is located in a place and consists of things. If the political analysis can apply to any non-transient Norwegian art project made of physical materials than I feel like it's pretty pointless. It shouldn't be a sin to focus on the aesthetics of a work of art because problems exist in the world.
THE OPTIMISM OF ART feeds off the pessimism of ecocide
Citation needed. Good lord!
An important, eye-opening article!
Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc.
Given the title, I think this article should have been about currency instead of wealth. Currency really is a highly abstract collective delusion whereas wealth is very real. It seems to me that the real thrust of the article is that we're all obsessed with accumulating resources throughout our lives and that we shouldn't be since we won't need resources when we're dead. I think this is seriously oversimplifying things.
Short of being a beggar, living day-to-day off the kindness of strangers, you're going to need to accumulate some level of wealth. This isn't even a problem unique to humans. If a squirrel died with a large cache of nuts, would you shake your head and write a preachy article about how it must have never really lived? Personally I think the squirrel that starved to death because it failed to store enough nuts makes for a better cautionary tale.
Wow. I found this in the New queue with 2 reads and 0 posts. A seriously amazing read! My eyes were welling up towards the end.
An enjoyable read! I get the sentiment and especially the frustration 100% but I'm definitely more pro-update. For one thing, it's generally less painful to perform gapless updates than it is to update from something that's multiple years and multiple major versions behind. Also as a developer I of course always want everyone to have auto-update turned on all the time to avoid the cost of legacy support that was outlined well in the article.
That said, I think the biggest underlying issue was kind of buried a bit: The Oracle vendor lock-in. Even more important than update policy is staying away from licensing agreements that can put you in a situation like that. Also that Docker screenshot was all kinds of WTF. Made me really glad I've stayed away from them as well.
This is indeed an article all about watermelons. Way more interesting than I was expecting!
Great read! It's staggering how many Americans are on antidepressants. How the majority of them are prescribed also shocked me:
And what’s puzzling is that more than 75 percent of antidepressant drugs are prescribed by a general health practitioner, not a mental health provider...
Short but packs quite a punch. Love this!
Damn, this is a powerful read. Highly recommended.
I'm giving this a 10 because I would LOVE if someone else could please read this and tell me if there is a single original thought or idea to be found in this piece about fixing social media.
Carr does a great job of walking us through the history of person-to-person communication and broadcast media and the article is worth the read for that alone. His analysis of the differences between the internet (and social media) and older mediums such as radio and TV are also spot on which makes the proposed fix seem not only inapplicable but nonsensical.
That's assuming of course that shouting "Somebody do something!" even counts as a proposal for a solution. In my experience such utterances are rarely helpful in difficult situations. Saying it in the presence of a politician is really asking for trouble.
As Carr points out, existing (fraught) legislation was passed to regulate broadcasts on limited public airwaves. The internet completely changed the equation. Everyone now has on-demand access to a limitless supply of information. For better or worse (mostly better, I think) the levees have already been breached. The only way to fix social media is to give individuals better options and encourage them to make better choices.
Wretchedness exposed at such a high resolution that the microscopic features of it are almost beautiful. Really great piece.
I genuinely feel sorry for anyone who looks at what's going on with the commercialization of space exploration and sees some kind of dystopian nightmare. We're literally witnessing the very beginning of humanity's venture out into the final frontier and it's positively awesome.
Likewise with the metaverse. I can't wait until I can strap on a lightweight wireless headset and run around playing Team Fortress in a real life full sized arena. Like with every other technology, it's going to be up to you to decide if and how you want to use it.
Yeah, Facebook sucks, but if you can't stop thinking about it, writing about it, and using it, then you're just letting Zuckerberg take up space in your head rent-free before he even has the chance to build his brain implants and I can't think of anything sadder than that.
Great article! I love watching YouTube and part of the appeal is the wide array of genres and seeing how so many different independent creators choose to produce their content in various ways, and also how their production techniques evolve over the years. Getting meta about the channel itself is part of the fun.
A couple months ago I started writing a blog post much like this one, centered on the idea of Dick Proenneke as an influencer. He built a cabin by hand in the Alaskan wilderness back in the 70's and documented everything on 8mm film (Alone in the Wilderness is title of the eventual release and I can't recommend it enough).
It's kind of an absurd juxtaposition but there is a lot of overlap. Also some of my favorite YouTube channels are seemingly totally normal people working typical blue collar jobs who happen to have a knack for talking to a camera. It's fascinating how well it works for some people and how many other people there are who enjoy watching.
A well written and delightful little vignette on how divorce can affect young children.
Great read! I never considered how a rent-controlled apartment could become an inescapable trap the older you get. Also I'd love to read another 15 minute long article that's just an interview with Mr. Jones.
Great reporting but a seriously frustrating read. A really unfortunate case of bad user interface design resulting in lives being lost. Having to rely on touch screen controls in such a high pressure situation seems like a total nightmare, no matter how well designed the software interface may be. I abhor the use of touch controls in cars. I was happy to read that Mazda is removing touch screens from all their cars. Nice to know that I'll have at least one option if I ever have to get rid of my 13 year old car.
Damn, solo hiking injuries are no joke. Here’s to a swift recovery @kellyalysia!
Great writing. Really interesting piece.