I am also curious about this. I heard that something like one trans-Atlantic flight is worth 2 years of veganism. And that 10 or so freight ships produce as much pollution as the whole of Europe. These are vague statements, and the reality is certainly more nuanced, but it would be nice to have a sense for what the big issues are. For example: Would giving up coffee, with its links to deforestation, be tremendously beneficial or only marginally?
I suppose more concretely "doing something related to what you are writing about". On principle I have nothing against pure philosophers, who integrate old theories and formulate new ones. However, in my experience, writings like that of Marcus Aurelius are more compelling, who was a success in his own right before ever writing anything. Most modern "business" authors don't have any business (other than selling books to people). Taleb is just warning people to not take advise from authors who don't actually have "skin in the game".
I think we might be talking about different things here. Up until very recently it was against the code of most publishers to broadcast things like murders, offensive language, acts of violence and gore. Some might say that the societies of the past were overly prudish, but I believe that this development is predominantly negative. For a modern Netflix series to take off, it is basically mandatory to have full-frontal nudity in the first season. Nothing is shocking anymore, which is what I meant by "sacred".
Growing up I had a mathematics teacher that told me that if companies could get away with it, they would just show real murders all day on the TV. In that way, popular culture is like a barometer for morality of a population.
I don't think anyone here is arguing for gender or racial inequality.
I think this might be what is meant by religious people when they say that nothing is "sacred" anymore. Meaning that there is no longer any value or virtue high enough to not be questioned, even if these are the axioms of the society.
The School of Life infuriates me for many reasons, but I will restrain myself and talk just about this specific post.
Perhaps the small libraries of historic figures has more to do with the availability of books than it does their minimalism. I agree that people should not be reading every new self-help or business book that gets published. The majority of new books are bad. History acts as a great filter, which is why focussing on old books is a strong heuristic to find good books. I also agree with Nassim Taleb, who says that you should try to read the works from people who have actually done something (opposed to modern pseudo-philosophers like Alain de Botton, who is just trying to capitalise on the religion-shaped hole in western morality). I am not a religion apologist, but his videos and lectures are structured exactly the same way as sermons. He even feigns a false pastor modesty. Ugh I am beginning to rant now.
As a civilisation I still believe that we are not reading enough. I can feel my reading habit eroded and tugged by modern media. I feel fulfilled after reading in a way that YouTube or Netflix cannot provide.
I feel the same way. The best-case scenarios on all of the climate change charts have been scratched. 2 degrees of warming is basically a given and the debate is now one of damage control. The lag between action and effect is somewhere between 40 and 50 years.
Just to address the comment above (it has been flagged and I can no longer reply directly). This is not a debate of America vs China. This is a debate of morality. We should not reserve judgement only for "bad guys". The reason China gets a free pass on this is because they are economically valuable to other countries. Chaining up pregnant women is bad, by all nations at all times.
To those that believe that they would not have turned a blind eye during WWII to the systematic extermination of Jews, the current generation has been given a similar challenge. Where is your cancel-culture now? How will our children think of us?
On a somewhat unrelated note, the design of this landing page is fantastic. It is exactly how I like to have new tools presented to me. All the fundamental competencies of the tool displayed on one page, with sufficient, but not verbose, technical detail. Kudos.
I agree 100%. I see many comments here critiquing the fact that this type of programming does not scale. Modern programming methodologies and this low-level hobby programming can coexist in the world.
I felt that the manifesto gave the best description of the community. The homepage is mostly news about specific projects. I'm not directly affiliated with the group, but I follow some of the developers. And their podcast is pretty good too!
I feel like Mozilla does not understand the "old-internet" which it prostitutes to sell itself to users. Lawyers, Amazon extensions, this is how we are fighting Fake News!
I personally would like to distinguish between donations to the Firefox product and Mozilla as a company. I donated every month for a year, but eventually didn't feel that my contributions were making it to the actual devs making a difference. Or even balancing the books. I cannot explain why, but something feels off about Mozilla. I'm not being conspiratorial, but is Mozilla really one of the "good guys"?
Fully agree. This reminds me of the point Peter Thiel makes about modern life being too internally focused. The distinction between stoicism and indifference is so important. The world is starting to loose faith that we can actually make things better, and that there is such a thing as "objective good". So the only thing popular culture can offer us is to meditate on our attachment, and solute to the sun as life expectancy in the first world stops increasing (and in some places decreases). I think yoga and meditation are valuable, but there is a place for dissatisfaction in the status quo.
I don't know why this has become such a hot-button issue. I figured it was quite well established that video games are synthetic goals, and have always been tied to escapism. That is not to say that they are inherently wrong. Unless you are playing competitive games on the highest level (Dota, CS:GO), your charisma and looks are a greater predictor of your success in YouTube and Twitch than anything else.
I would wait and see whether GraalVM would not help significantly with performance. After that I would try running the web service with Deno. Then I would rewrite in Go, then I would rewrite in Rust. That is not to say I think Go is better than Rust in every dimension (I prefer Rust for most things), but I think the Go community have really optimised for this one single usecase.
I think Cameo comes at a weird time in human history, where media is so widely distributed/consumed that the number of somewhat-famous people is enough that it has driven down the cost of getting a "celebrity" to do something specifically for you, but is before the adoption of deepfakes that could produce this type of content at almost zero cost (with celebrities that may no longer be alive).
This is unfortunately not the case. Lots of wood is imported from the third world, potentially the Amazon.
Even if it was grown in the country it is consumed in, it would eventually suffer the same issues that industrial farming does. The soil becomes depleted and requires fossil-fuel based fertilizer.
Burning the Amazon is now progress, apparently.
Something like fusion, or cleaner nuclear, is our only hope.
We don't know how history will pan out. Just wanted to share the weird feeling I sometimes have about current events. For all we know, post-collapse technology could be based off QMX reverse-engineered from luxury vehicles. It's just fun to think about how events can have that unexpected butterfly effect. I sometimes catch myself with the implicit belief that we are "late" in the story of history. But given the possible expanse of time, we might be the "hunter-gatherers" of a civilization we cannot even begin to comprehend. This might just be the second of the dark ages.
The weird thing about history is that it only makes sense backwards. Someone 500 years in the future might think of this as the Gutenberg printing press. It is often difficult to appreciate the magnitude of actions in the present.