b450

Lovely article. I sympathize with Leavis's anger. I recognize the image of the smug technocrat, someone whose confidence in his conceptual scheme is so great that its ontology, its quantifications and operationalizations, come to supplant experience itself. That's not to say I have a particularly positive feeling towards the humanities, as Leavis represents plenty of what is worst about them. He doesn't seem to actually represent wisdom or humility in the face of the open-endedness of life. He presents as a gatekeeper of an elite club privy to special truths, who lashes out nastily at a perceived threat to his clergy's social cachet.

counterargument:

1) let x be a thing

2) I name x "Jeff"

3) all things are nameable (from 1 and 2)

another way to put this is that it's natural to take the paradox as a reductio.

Philosophy students tend to be understandably insecure about the value and prestige of their field, and study often ends up indirectly training students to defend philosophy. Impressive-sounding pontificating, problematizing, cranking out arguments and fallacies and refutations, deploying jargon and historical references. There's a whole toolkit used to dazzle, bewilder, and cow the untrained. Not to mention outright self-promotion, like Chalmers in this article: oh yeah these companies totally desperately need more philosophy graduates!

It's great preparation for law school, as a commenter has already pointed out, since skill in one game carries over to the other. The value of philosophy outside a self-referential intellectual game is extremely dubious, and I think one can reasonably argue that philosophical training does more harm than good by inculcating bizarre/narrow/counterproductive intellectual habits/commitments/bugaboos. But philosophers have tricked themselves into places where they really have no business being, like hospital ethics panels. Cool for these guys though, it seems harmless.

Frasier, at a free sample station: I do thank you, but I'm afraid I'm rather particular about the provenance of my shellfish. To subject a scampi to the radiation of a microwave is not cooking, madam, it's an execution! My god, Niles, is that a '98 Chateau Latour in your cart?

Niles: I've already secured six cases! They're over there, just between the Kirkland Signature Leaf Blowers and the 5 pound bags of "Kickin' Queso Jalapeño Poppers"!

Martin: Oh I LOVE those, where?

It's probably very store specific. If you know the Market Basket in Somerville, MA, it's got a legendary produce section. I've been to locations in NH with crap.

IMO H-Mart is the safest bet in the Boston area for high quality produce (outside of farmers markets, natch)

I've become a Costco person in recent years. At least in my perception, inflation has affected grocery stores unevenly:

Whole Foods: eye-bogglingly expensive (and no, I don't think it always was)

Wegmans: substantially more expensive than a few years ago, and a noticeable decline in produce quality

Trader Joes: incredible value on many prepared foods, but not the best source for staples like rice or paper products.

Costco is not inflation-proof by any means but they have pretty much 0 margins and they're reliably the best value on just about whatever they sell. The selection can be limited in some ways compared to a supermarket, and they can be a bad place to be health conscious (as it can be hard to resist massive containers of ultra cheap and delicious treats of various kinds) or to try to try to be an ethical consumer (and please spare me the HN cynical line on this, I get it, I have no real agency and I'm pathetically guilt-ridden): I've read bad things about their meat sourcing, they rarely have coffee with bona fides like fair trade or shade grown, I see controversial products like bird's nest soup, etc.

We play with a base point being a dime or a quarter. Note also that the function from fan to points is subject to house rules, it's not always p(f) = 2^f (I've seen rules for example that start to "level off" the payout at higher fan values).

I'd add the note that the whole strategy of mahjong really only gets interesting when you play repeated hands (a full game has at least 16 hands, with each player acting as the dealer once per prevailing wind) and when you're gambling (or otherwise tracking points). Most house rules also enforce a minimum fan value for a winning hand, banning the "chicken hand" which wins but scores no points. We play with a 2 fan minimum. If you just play for mahjong (i.e. a a hand that "wins" the round regardless of score), the game is a pretty uninteresting game of luck, and you're not incentivized to gun for the higher scoring hands.

This is the rational response to this "financialization" of brands, and it leads to high-quality goods being chased out of the market entirely (see "The Market for Lemons"), except for ultra-expensive niche brands

There is a section of the article covering precisely this, headed "The external actors: arms to both sides"

Note that node-fetch will silently ignore any overrides to "forbidden" request headers like Host, since it's designed for parity with fetch behavior in the browser. This caused a minor debugging headache for me once.

Stop grinding for a second.

You don't need to be perfect to win. You don't need to spend 100 miles "hustling" in the desert to prove your worth.

The real secret to sustainable growth? Authenticity. Let your natural strengths lead the way.

Let’s get vulnerable—share your biggest professional setbacks in the comments, and I’ll share mine.

The market keeps moving. The sun is rising on new opportunities, and the landscape is shifting for those ready to see it.

The "wild geese" of innovation are heading home. No matter where you are in your career journey, the world is calling for your unique vision.

It’s time to claim your seat at the table. You belong in this ecosystem.

#Mindset #Authenticity #Leadership #Growth #CareerAdvice #FamilyOfThings

This kind of view tends to logically conclude in the idea of a noumenal, unknowable reality. I think it's more reasonable to say that truth itself is gold star we award to descriptions that suit our purposes. After all, descriptions are necessarily approximations (or reductive or "compressions"), since the only model of a thing with 100% fidelity is... the thing itself.

Reminds me of the blog post about Waymo's "World Model". Training on real-world data results in a sufficiently rich model to start simulating novel scenarios that aren't in the training data (like the elephant wandering into the street), which in turn can feed back into training. One could imagine scientific inquiry working the same way.

It strikes me that many of these complex systems have indeterminate boundaries, and a fair amount of distortion might be baked into the choice of training data. Poverty (to take an example from this post) probably has causes at economic, psychological, ecological, physiological, historical, and political levels of description (commenters please note I didn't think too hard about this list). What data we feed into our models, and how those data are understood as operationalizations of the qualitative phenomena we care about, might matter.

Might sound like a rube here, but: is agentic development really this good at novel UIs? The video shows a sort of cassette tape music player, and a fancy looking audio visualizer/equalizer thing. I'm well aware agents are very good at boilerplate UIs, but I wouldn't expect them to be able to one-shot novel, dynamic UI elements like this. I've had Claude attempt some SVG animations and the results were very crude. That was a year or so ago though. Are there established ways of letting agents iterate on UIs, i.e. having them visually verify the visual design and interactions?

I really don't know anything about it, but I'd speculate that the fantasy is plain old 'misattribution of arousal'. The heart gets pounding at the idea of violating the taboo against incest, and that bodily state is interpreted as sexual arousal. Not that I'm suggesting that there is just one explanation of something as complicated as this.

I ran it on the "society if..." meme lol

https://imgur.com/a/nFQN5tx

It's funny reading this take, because I went through a fancy coffee de-conversion myself about a year ago. I have a burr grinder which can produce the appropriate grind for the brewing method. I have a dedicated coffee canister with a one-way air valve for storage. Both have been relegated to storage. I buy cheap cans of pre-ground coffee and make them in the french press, which I decide is done steeping after some indifferently measured while.

This blog articulates some of the reasons well. Many people claim the "ritual" of brewing coffee correctly is calming or grounding or something. I myself realized that the rigamarole was born of a sort of neurotic desire to live up to a stupid social expectation to have the correct tastes. In fact, I like the taste of cheap coffee - thin, vaguely burnt... yum (due to nostalgia? Maybe, who cares). In fact, I often dislike the lighter roast and terroir and whatever of "good" coffee - my wife and I often joke that it tastes like vegetable soup. I take my coffee with cream anyway, which I imagine blows out the subtle tasting notes anyway. It's how I like it!

Saving money is great. Though I'm still very much afflicted by the nagging worry that the cheap stuff, not being organic, shade-grown, fair trade, etc. is brought to me by African slaves toiling in a cloud of nasty herbicides. I hope not though!

> White House Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr defended the post after criticism of the image manipulation.

> “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Dorr wrote.

The banner image on Dorr's X account reads: "oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHiS?"

You're right, and I'd add that the agenda goes well beyond muddying the waters. This administration is deliberately normalizing bad faith, lying, and trolling. Discrediting critics as humorless, pathetic pearl-clutchers. I don't believe that their supporters strictly "believe" in Trump's alternate reality - they know that Trump and his cronies lie non-stop, and they like it. Accepting these lies serves as a shibboleth and lays the groundwork for discrediting fair elections, bogus prosecutions of political opponents, and everything else this administration is doing to corruptly hold on to power and demoralize their opponents.

Oh! :) I saw "philosophy" and "rationalism" in the same paragraph and went into auto-pilot I suppose.

Sure. The idea of raw, uninterpreted "sense data" that the empiricists worked with (well into the 20th century) is pretty clearly bunk. Much of philosophy took a turn towards anti-foundationalism, and rationalism and empiricism are, at least classically, notions of the "foundations" of knowledge. I mean, this is philosophy, it's all pretty ridiculous.

Rationalism in philosophy is generally contrasted with empiricism. I would say you're a little off in characterizing anti-rationalism as holding rationality per se in low regard. To put it very briefly: the Ancient Greeks set the agenda for Western philosophy, for the most part: what is truth? What is real? What is good and virtuous? Plato and his teacher/character Socrates are the archetype rationalists, who believed that these questions were best answered through careful reasoning. Think of Plato's allegory of the cave: the world of appearances and of common sense is illusory, degenerate, ephemeral. Pure reason, as done by philosophers, was a means of transcendent insight into these questions.

"Empiricism" is a term for philosophical movements (epitomized in early modern British Empiricists like Hume) that emphasized that truths are learned not by reasoning, but by learning from experience. So the matter is not "is rationality good?" but more: what is rationality or reason operating upon? Sense experiences? Or purely _a priori_, conceptual, or formal structures? The uncharitable gloss on rationalism is that rationalists hold that every substantive philosophical question can be answered while sitting in your armchair and thinking really hard.

This is the most egregious one in my eyes, too. I've run A/B tests on a few signup forms and without fail it validates the standard practice: the lowest drop-off rate comes from removing every possible obstacle and distraction. I'd bet a few dollars (which is as much as I'll ever bet) that design update would perform worse. The tool is almost intriguing as a _reductio_ of certain design practices.

The "after" designs all replace the rather generic "SV startup with a tailwind UI" with this serif font, parchment color look. It looks very similar to Anthropic's branding. I guess it looks marginally more distinctive? Though it seems to replace one knock-off visual identity for another. But the claim is that the tool here is implementing best practices through a sophisticated "design vocabulary", and in that sense the examples strike me as manifest failures. I find the general legibility of the "before" designs to be much better.

Web frontends have trended towards various forms of isolation (CSS scopes, shadow DOM), namespacing (CSS modules, BEM), or composition (tailwind etc.) because CSS cascading and inheritance cause more trouble than they're worth. So while you're correct, there are lots of available frameworks and patterns that provide a better dev experience, though of course there are tradeoffs involved in all of them.

Neat, have you considered linking to exrx or anything for the exercises?

ORMs come with a lot of baggage that I prefer to avoid, but it probably depends on the domain. Take an e-commerce store with faceted search. You're pretty much going to write your own query builder if you don't use one off the shelf, seems like.

The method in the article is very close to the idea of a "branded type". Though maybe there's a distinction someone can point out to me.

It's amusing to consider how much of a Rorschach test this article must be. But it's a great point, even if it arms us to abusively write off unwelcome ideas as scams. As the author points out, Pascal's reasoning is easily applied to an infinity of conceivable catastrophes - alien invasions, etc. That Pascal specifically applied his argument to the possibility of punishment by a biblical God was due to the psychological salience of that possibility in Pascal's culture - a truly balanced application of his fallacious reasoning would be completely paralyzing.

The authors here are claiming, as your quote states, that biological evolution is just one instance of a more general phenomenon. I'm not sure that's contrary to the views you're expressing. You wrote:

> The expectation that life is somehow special is wrong. There is, as far as we can see, no difference in the quarks in a dog and those in a rock

But the authors' examples do include the "speciation" of minerals! As I read it, the authors describe:

- some initial set of physical states (organisms, minerals, whatever)

- these states create conditions for new states to emerge, which in turn open up new possibilities or "phase spaces", and so on

- these new phase spaces produce new ad hoc "functions", which are (inevitably, with time and the flow of energy) searched and acted upon by selective processes, driving this increase of "functional information".

I don't think it's saying that living things are more complex or information dense per se, but rather, that this cycle of search, selection, and bootstrapping of new functions is a law-like generality that can be observed outside of living systems.

I'm not endorsing this view! There do seem to be clear problems with it as a testable scientific hypothesis. But to my naive ear, all of this seems to play rather nicely with this fundamentally statistical (vs deterministic) picture of reality that Prigogine described, with the "arrow of time" manifesting not just in thermodynamics and these irreversible processes, but also in this diversification of functions.

I clicked through to this article about the chairman of the EPA's Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee:

https://revealnews.org/article/trumps-air-pollution-adviser-...

Making a career out of making the case for air pollution. I hope the money is worth it. This guy should have to live and raise his kids next to a coal plant.

Yep I think that is an interesting point! I definitely think there are important ways in which human intelligence is embodied, but yeah - if we are modeling intelligence as a function, there's no obvious reason to think that whatever influence embodiment has on the output can't be "compressed" in the same way – after all, it doesn't matter generally how ANY of the reasoning that AI is learning to reproduce is _actually_ done. I suppose, though, that that gets at the later emphasis:

> Drawing an overly close equivalence between human intelligence and AI risks succumbing to a functionalist perspective, where people are valued based on the work they can perform

One might concede that AI can produce a good enough simulation of an embodied intelligence, while emphasizing that the value of human intelligence per se is not reducible to its effectiveness as an input-output function. But I agree the vatican's statement seems to go beyond that.