idolaspecus

Off topic but I love how this site is designed. It's unique without being wild, minimal but stylish. I really dig it.

Edit: It also looks good (better maybe) on mobile. Props.

This is in my opinion actually a decent interview question. If you know JS in detail, if you know how the "+" operator works, it's a super easy question. If you don't know JS in detail, if you don't know how the "+" operator works, it's pretty tough. If you want an engineer who knows JS in detail, asking this question can be valuable.

FWIW 100m * 100 = 10bn

This is basically how I hope to tackle the problem. I’d like to try and fill my own life with more practical endeavors and then weave in intentional/intellectual/thoughtful moments where we (me and kid) consider whatever slightly more abstract principles are in effect at that particular time. I’m having a hard time believing this is not much much much easier said than done though.

My intuition tells me this is the crux of the matter: If I spend my time in the kitchen and the garden and wrenching and cutting and repairing, then my kid will be drawn to like activities. I hope I can behave accordingly and I hope you're right!

> One big realization I’ve had is that children really grow when their parents aren’t around. Schools may suppress agency, but so do parents.

This sounds like a good point, I'm going to try to keep it more in mind, thanks.

My first child is due any day now and I’ve been thinking a lot about the central problems presented in this article. But I don’t know what to do about them. Should I keep my son home with me, allocate mornings to academics and afternoons to more practical endeavors? Should I teach him to cook? To garden? To build cabinets? To train a dog? To do his taxes? Should I send him to public school but supplement his learning with what I believe he should learn, topics like statistics and probability and finance? Should I teach him Latin? JavaScript?

I personally feel like I am capable of providing an “agentic” education but I almost certainly won’t have the time nor the persuasive powers to convince a (hopefully) rebellious 7 year old that, say, grammar matters and gardening is dope. Seeking any suggestions.

Without context, sure, but when we're talking specifically about the precision of expression, I don't think so. Some philosophers operate closer to mathematical precision than others, and when those sorts of precision-oriented philosophers screw up their precision, it's a bigger problem. In Reasons and Persons, Parfit jumps through hoops to make his statements precise but ultimately trips all over himself (in my opinion).

You say you don't think it's "full on sophistry" then you go on to describe a full on sophist.

Maybe that's true but tbh I'm kinda over Hegel, I don't imagine there will ever be a time in my life where attempting to seriously understand Hegel will be worth the time.

Hegel was quantum before quantum was cool.

I would definitely not say "Reasons and Persons" is clear. It might be precise (I personally don't think so, I think he makes tons of subtle mistakes), but it's at least not clear. It's full of ideas like "rational irrationality" which is at best a poor choice of naming, IMO.

> Every time I've looked at philosophy in my life, I kept searching for this promise - where intellectual giants grapple the truth and discover their secrets.

This expresses an approach to philosophy that I think is, at its roots, ineffective. It treats "philosophy" as "Philosophy", as some thing, some well-defined corpus that deals with truth and can be explored top-down systematically, something that you can "look at" or "come to" or whatever. But that's not really what "philosophy" is or, rather, there is no "philosophy" in that sense. There's just people in the world trying to understand it and to communicate their understanding. There's just questions and people all the way down, nothing else. We use the name "philosophy" because it's convenient but I'd say it's maybe the least useful name for anything we've ever come up with.

Philosophy is ultimately personal, it's the most personal, and most of the most famous philosophers can only be appreciated if you go out of your way to read them from a deeply psychological and empathetic perspective. At least this is my experience. It's not easy and takes a lot of work to get into the headspace of whoever you're reading, but once you get there you'll feel the lightbulb go off. This is especially important when you read older philosophers or philosophers who have a fundamentally different metaphysics from yourself. Of course, sometimes you just can't get there with certain thinkers. For example, I have a really really really hard time taking Hegel seriously.

Thanks for the detailed response!

Could you expand on this idea a bit more? My curiosity has been piqued, but I'm not sure I really understand the system you've described.

Yeah I guess not technically face down, I turn my head sideways.

Oftentimes when I'm working on a problem I lie on the floor face down and think about it for hours.

In terms of what you might call "mentally detoxifying contemplation", physical work on my house and yard and whatnot is great. I think the mentally salubrious effects of hard work are the real deal and too much overlooked these days.

It’s about a million times easier today. Open a browser, open dev tools, open console tab, console.log(“hello world”).

It’s even easier than that though.

Open chrome, type “how to write computer programs” and go from there.

And it's much, much rarer but equally as important corollary: UTFM (Use TFM). UTFM means: when you're designing a system, adhere your design so f**ing tightly to standard usage. RTFM/UTFM with standard tooling gets you so, so far to building high-quality software.

Edit: I actually just made up (as far as I know) UTFM, but I really wish it were a thing.

On the flip side, it wouldn't be entirely surprising if mathematical constructs that we have thought of are in fact very good models of fundamental reality. We should remember that, after all, nothing exists outside of fundamental reality, and if certain basic patterns can be encoded such that the encoding is both high-fidelity and simple, that won't be shocking. It might be awe-inspiring, but not really surprising.

This is one of those books I’ve always meant to read but never have. I guess the time is now. Thanks for the suggestion.

Too close, in my opinion. If I said "Communication is a part of physics", it would be clear that I don't mean "all of communication is a subset of physics" and that I do mean "doing physics involves communicating your findings". I think this is the author's intention.

Edit: Actually, it does seem like the author claims mathematics is a proper subset of physics.

Life’s too short to not learn how to write bash code.

> iMessage combines text messages and its own messaging system in a more-or-less opaque way to the end user

I don't really know what to say about it, but I just wanted to point out how we use both "opaque" and "transparent" in the way the author uses "opaque" here. I know this isn't unique (i.e. "I'm up for X" or "I'm down for X") but this particular instance is, for me and by far, the most confusing.

There's no modern Lapham because we don't "need" (quotes because I actually think we have a big problem here) one anymore. Lapham's role was as a representative of the learned readership at the institution. These days, we're our own representatives. It is quite trivial for me to curate a list of extremely interesting individuals who publish writing or podcasts or lectures or whatever.

Now, the reason I quoted "need" above, what I think is a huge problem with the world today, is that by democratizing production we've done the opposite with consumption. It's super difficult to access high-quality information these days unless you're already fairly well educated and have the tools to filter the noise. I don't really know what to do about this.

I agree with the author about the potential of audio interfaces + some simple additional inputs + integration with certain apps.

For me personally there is a suite of tools involving audio books and note taking that would change my life: A remote with a few physical buttons to rewind, switch to record-mode, skip sections. Speech to text with full text search. Voice recordings tied to what I’m listening to. Basically, I want to be able to work through a difficult audiobook while walking around.

It sounds like Beej needs to write a "Beej's Guide to Writing Guides".

I think the obvious objection is that LinkedIn sees itself in the way you say reflects not "getting" it.

There was a long period of time after I “learned to code” where everything still seemed like magic. Working through this book for 10 weeks in my OS course at school was when the magic finally become real and concrete.

Edit: Just noticed my professor for that class contributed some new chapters! Cool!

My memory was telling me the examples were all in C, so I went just now and picked a few random chapters, and the examples I saw were in C.