elvinyung

ok, without doing that :p

I think you're slightly missing the point -- for me, a certain unique "awesomeness" lies in specifically being able to literally pipe stdout back to stdin and get back the exact same data structures.

I think they just mean that lithium and sodium are both in the same valence group, but I'm not sure if that has any actual nutritional significance here.

1980s is not "mid 20th century".

On top of the Amazon answer, I think you're sometimes able to get it off of Modernist Pantry [1].

[1] https://www.modernistpantry.com/booker-and-dax-searzall.html

Existing Conditions is probably my favorite bar in the world. I think nowhere else can you get (relatively) unpretentious drinks that are as perfectly executed. (And if you read Dave's Liquid Intelligence, you'll know why.)

I mean, isn't CosmosDB more like Cloud Datastore/Megastore?

Azure Cloud Spanner time?

This reminds me of core rope memory [1], AKA "little old lady" memory, which was literally a ROM that was manually woven.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_rope_memory

One possible interpretation of this trend is that it is yet another manifestation of the neoliberal era. With the steady loss of job security and other benefits from stable employment, along with a society that repeatedly stresses the virtues of individualism and "hustle", it looks increasingly attractive for people to strike out on their own.

Through that lens, one might say that while this article focuses on some successful cases, it ignores the incredible hardship of this ordeal, and the thousands of failures that have happened happening to other people (or even the same people) attempting the exact same thing.

That said, this looks mostly like the future that I want to see. I think that the future is local (maybe even hyperlocal) and a world in which both producers and consumers are more attuned to locality and spatiality drastically widens the possibility space of new experiences.

I think the most radical interpretation of what I actually want to see is a future that's less Darwinian, one in which people can be artisans without also spending most of their lives being entrepreneurs.

Very tiny nit: DynamoDB is not Dynamo. Leaderless replication was popularized by Amazon's original Dynamo paper, true, but DynamoDB is not the same system [1].

[1] https://www.allthingsdistributed.com/2012/01/amazon-dynamodb...

>The city’s goal: To be what it calls a living lab.

Sure reminds me of Foucault:

>But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones.

I guess you can say it's less like a scheme and more like a meme.

Lucas critique is predated by Campbell's law and Goodhart's law.

"But artisans are complete only if they are also prospectors; and the organization that separates prospectors, merchants, and artisans already mutilates artisans in order to make 'workers' of them."

-- A Thousand Plateaus

Exactly -- then how can you claim that the "chaos" of an implicit outside influence is better than an explicit outside influence?

Well, that's just one possibility in a space of many.

The core of the point is this, reiterating from the article: obviously a ministry of truth is bad. But isn't the chaos just as bad, since it is susceptible to be dominated by an "implicit" equivalent of the ministry of truth?

To what extent are people really deciding for themselves when they think they're deciding for themselves? If freedom is our highest ideal, how do we empower the maximal amount of people to make decisions for themselves without these influences?

There Are More Than Two Things [1]. It's a spectrum, not a dualism.

Which is to basically ask that, for example, does it work to have multiple semi-competing Ministries of Truth?

https://twitter.com/_shyextrovert/status/1046004096820539393

The thing that worries me even more is that more and more diverse types of content will be susceptible to algorithmic amplification in more and more sophisticated ways. Right now it's still relatively easy to tell what is a bot and what isn't because it's hard to generate credible text and video (and many other kinds of) content, but that's rapidly changing. It's a game of cat and mouse clicks.

This pervades every single sphere of life. Soon, it will become more and more difficult to distinguish the truthfulness of digital representations. In Baudrillard's words, I suspect that big data is becoming hyperreal. It is not that data is misrepresenting reality, but that it is actively influencing it, changing it to fit its representations.

Furthermore (and somewhat orthogonal), distinguishing fake content is getting harder because you don't even necessarily need bots (technological capital). If I started a restaurant and I wanted to acquire the maximal amount of attention and I had no moral qualms, I could hire 10,000 MTurks (or MTurk-equivalents) to write reviews for me on Yelp, and it will drive a positive feedback loop of legitimate good reviews. (This is exactly what's happening with Amazon rankings and reviews.) Amplification isn't just algorithmic, it can be produced by the application of many different kinds of capital.

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

Cool project!

One minor question, how much does becoming a patron affect rankings?

Totally, but in the North America it seems like we are culturally nowhere near aligned on changing this for the better. The cultural opinion seems to be slowly improving, but it still seems like most of North America has very agrarian/suburban tendencies.

P.S. Japanese zoning is fascinating [1], but not without its faults. For example, the relatively laissez-faire zoning policies can be seen as to blame for the lack of bike lane infrastructure in most of Japan [2]. That said, 東京がとてもすきです :)

[1] http://devonzuegel.com/post/north-american-vs-japanese-zonin...

[2] https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Making_of_Urban_Jap...

I'm going to give the typical leftie answer: neoliberalism.

Basically, large public works projects still seemed possible up to the early 1970s. The hypothesis is that it's only after two near-simultaneous changes, the rise of Reaganism-Thatcherism and the fall of the Soviet Union, that the state seemed to lose all of its potency. It seems like we placed all of our faith in the wisdom of the market, a machine that can never be stopped once given power.

Well, that does fit into what I meant -- Outside North America, it seems to be generally (more) taken for granted that public transit and density/mixed-use feed into each other (such that either can be a prerequsite for the other), whereas in North America, because we're in such a car equilibrium, public transit mostly just spends most of its time apologizing for the poor land use.

Although it is probably worth noting that e.g. Los Angeles has some places (kind of) like what you're talking about [1], but it's basically a drop in the bucket.

[1] https://pedestrianobservations.com/2018/11/11/meme-weeding-l...

Jane Jacobs talks about how cities generally fall into one of two different kinds of equilibria: a public transit equilibrium, and a car equilibrium. In each one, the preferred kind of mobility further shapes land use to make that kind of mobility even more preferable.

Most of North America is so stuck in the car equilibrium that it seems hopeless. There's not even a handful of cities that would be nice to get around or live in without a car. This seems like it would take decades to correct, even if most North Americans actually wanted to. As an semi-extremist urbanite I'm incredibly pessimistic about this.

I'm somewhat hopeful about new mobility methods like bikeshare or even rideshare, but none of them seem to be actively driving land use changes.

Nice username -- I'd like to agree. That said, I think that the city that you and I want to live in isn't quite there yet (but almost!).

Do I have to have the extension to use it? I don't see why this can't be exposed in the form of a Google Scholar/Sci-hub-ish search engine.

Foucault, of course, talks about this. In Discipline and Punish:

>But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as a machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prisoners, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try out pedagogical experiments – and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans ...

It's interesting to note that the argument made in this post is exactly what Deleuze said two decades after Foucault [1], that the mechanisms of "discipline" are moving outside of enclosed spaces because of the ever-longer trails of data that we leave everywhere.

[1] https://www.jstor.org/stable/778828

Shameless self-promotion: I wrote down some thoughts a while ago about this: https://www.notion.so/The-Hyperreality-of-Big-Data-ae0aebb35...

It almost feels like the only solution (for one aspect of the problem) is for the "good guys" to outmeme the "bad guys". But of course, that's much, much, much easier said than done.

I just hope you understand that you're not just doing that.

> Even great noodles aren't much better than average noodles. I really can't understand it.

I have no reason to be mad at this, I have literally no reason to be emotionally connected to this, but... it still disappoints me a little bit on the inside to read this.