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Beautiful. Gosh. Also a great blog post idea for everyone experiencing writer's block on Readup today :D

It'd be great, right?

WHAT A TALE.

RAH.

beautiful.

Okay, this is brilliant.

God, I love Paul Ford.

"An intellectually curious person is a heat-seeking missile programmed to seek out failures in existing epistemic paradigms. God help them if they find one before they get enough political sophistication to determine which targets are safe."

The Kolmogorov option: winking to yourself as you allow yourself be dragged into the orthodoxy party, knowing that tucked into your jacket is the brand of free-thinker booze that is exactly the kind not allowed in this place.

I really like the term 'non-expert explanations'. You're often advised as a rookie developer to write about your own point of view, because your own unsophisticated mental models may be closer to the same mental framework as a new developer struggling with that level of knowledge.

In other words, we need non-expert explanations, and abundantly. Very few topics have been over-explained in the real world.

yet another point in the direction of the love of money being the root of all evil.

As a full-time people pleaser, I find this useful.

Interesting.

Truly an upgrade to the Peter and Dilbert principles. Also easy for you to place yourself in your organization using this framework.

(I still haven't seen 'The Office')

This is, honestly, a masterpiece.

If Crony Beliefs is a developed thesis, this is the abstract.

One of my favorite things in this article is how Byrne pre-empts my context-collapse question with his notes about premature optimization point.

I have way too many corollaries to draw from (one of them being the Prototypal inheritance chain in OOP), but I won't belabor the point.

I thought this was short, sweet, and a great exploration of the 'writing as networking' idea.

Loved it.

This was so beautiful to read.

Old, but gold.

Pardon me, coming through. More hacker stuff. Getting our feet wet before we get into the heavy stuff.

"I see I have made myself a slave to Philosophy, but if I get free of Mr Linus's business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally, excepting what I do for my privat satisfaction or leave to come out after me. For I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new or become a slave to defend it."

Adieu used to be spelled adew. Haha.

"Coding is like that. Try something. See if it works. Try again. If a problem was straightforward, it would be automated or at least solved with some open-source code. All that’s left is the difficult task of creating something unique."

gotta remind myself this sometimes whenever i'm stumbling in the dark.

'why am i so fuckin' stupid?'

no, you're not stupid. you're coding.

i consider myself e-cautious, but this managed to unsettle me lmao,

Disagreeing with this misses the point, I think. The year 2084 is not randomly-selected: it's adapted from George Orwell's 1984.

In other words, it's not meant to be 'seriously predicting the future' as much as it is 'bending projections of the future through the literary dystopian lens'.

I found it entertaining, but give it the same symbolic, rather than literal, merit as 1984.

But the politicians espousing it have missed the insult implicit in the meritocratic society they are offering: If you did not go to college, and if you are not flourishing in the new economy, your failure must be your own fault.

The Twittering Machine is powered by an insight at once obvious and underexplored: we have, in the world of the social industry, become “scripturient—possessed by a violent desire to write, incessantly.”

Interesting idea: the end of history illusion.

Much like George Orwell's A Nice Cup of Tea, this makes me feel like it should be injected into the bloodstreams of prose writers as an example of how to write.

It's so simple yet eloquently expressive, giving you a feeling you cannot say for sure you were directly asked to feel.

It holds your hand and says 'look at my yard', and first you look, then you see. You hear, and then you listen. You smell, and then you perceive.

And you understand.

I highly recommend this. It’s a great framework for thinking about friendships (aside: really digging this resurgence of 2 x 2 matrices lately).

I just realize I need more tier 1 friendships. Good god.

Beautiful.

I feel, oddly enough, that the author was not as committed to this thought experiment as they could have been.

Such an excellent find, deephdave! Way too many things for me to call out a specific highlight.

Highly recommend - while written for engineers, the advice is agnostic enough to apply to non-engineers.