This is a common experience for writers, the sense of sentences appearing or almost completing themselves...it just occurred to me that reminds me of something that is asserted by Julian Jaynes in his controversial "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." He claims that prior to the Bronze Age, human beings did not recognize their thoughts as belonging or originating with themselves; instead, they perceived thoughts as emanating externally, from Gods. I have no idea if there are merits to Jaynes theory, but it's fun to consider if the writer's inner voice, this sense of automaticity while writing, might recruit the same mechanisms of which Jaynes is speaking.
Years ago I read an introduction to a collection of Chekhov's letters that provided an illuminating context to the intellectual & aesthetic climate of Russia in the 19th century. It explained that authors like Chernyshevsky asserted that all novels, really all art, ought to be of a politically salient character; that it ought to highlight the suffering the marginal & subaltern. So many of the authors we now revere -- Dostoevsky, Chekhov, even Tolstoy, aroused the ire of the Russian intelligentsia for failing to meet this standard, for writing for purposes other than political and revolutionary utility. The introduction asserted that this was an overwhelmingly unanimous sentiment among the Russian left.
I think this is an overall good move, and very much support it, but many countries with better work-life balance and robust support for new parents still see declining birth rates....I can't help but think that a decline in fertility rates is as much about values -- what the point of life itself is, and how much it should be bound up in what we call the family -- as it is about the material conditions surrounding the act of child-rearing.
If GLP-1 manages to mitigate global obesity, I would say that it would earn a spot against all these other drugs (and maybe even outrank stuff like SSRIs).
What's the status of the game porting kit? The last time I used it to get a game running, it proved to be a bit of a miserable slog (to be fair, I was trying to run UnityModManager for a CRPG).
I think happiness is actually a pretty complicated idea and people mean many different things by it. Is happiness pleasure? Fulfillment? Purpose? Is it a transitory psychological state or a deeper orientation? Or both? If we say money makes us happy, are we saying that money removes problems? That it enables positive experiences or material things that contribute to happiness? All of the above, or some combination of it?
Examining this topic with even two minutes of sustained attention and rigor revels the paucity of our discourse. Money contributes to happiness, but saying that money buys happiness is like saying not getting shot contributes to health. True, but there is so much more to the story.
I am a Christian. Something I have found within my faith tradition (and something I find is lacking in the culture around me) is a sense that I am in possession of an infinitely durable source of dignity and worthiness that is not tethered to who I am or what I have done. I have found this conceit enormously consoling.
I've enjoyed Krazam's other videos, but at the risk of having the joke explained (and thus spoiled), what exactly is this lampooning? Not asking from a critical place, I legitimately am curious about dysfunctional business processes at other companies and want to know if people really are drowning in SaaS access requests
There's a peril in translating the Greek word that is often used by Aristotle and the other Virtue Ethicists -- eudaimonia -- into happiness. Happiness in English often maps to a transient & discrete emotional state, whereas eudaimonia is a much more expansive conception of flourishing and fulfillment that is not as simply as "feeling" happy or joyful all the time. Indeed, in virtue ethics, it is sometimes possible to endure hardship and feel quite negative emotions while experience eudaimonia (at least in the Stoic version of this branch of philosophy).
It seems like the splendor and comfort of student life varied wildly depending on class and wealth (see: the depiction of Oxford in Brideshead Revisited).
I adore James Baldwin...I think he is an intrepid sojourner of what being an American means, of our fraught and compromised inheritance...when Baldwin bounces against a boundary, a prejudice, an assumption, in Europe or America, it is always so generative for us, we learn so much from it, we are a little less ignorant of ourselves.
I really disliked my Chromecast...despite being able to output 4k, the OS was sluggish and it barely had storage to hold the streaming apps I was interested in using. I ditched it for the Apple4K.
I can see his point. That being said, part of what is fun about reading Elizabethan literature in a relatively original style (with helpful annotations) is that I can see configurations of English I’ve never encountered before, configurations that are alien and yet familiar because they are the ancestor of the very words and phrases I use today.
Most alarmingly, many of the fruits of SV can be used to make dictatorships even more capable in crushing dissenters and extending the aegis of state into everyday life. Technology is morally neutral, it can be used for ill as well as good, and our worship of it as a panacea has blinded us to this possibility
Camus famously broke with the french left over (certain aspects) of Algerian Liberation, for the simple reason that his mother continued to live there. He famously quipped:
"At this moment bombs are being planted in the trams in Algiers. My mother could be on one of those trams. If that is justice, I prefer my mother."
...which won him no small amount of censure. I always think of this moment when I am asked to co-sign, wholeheartedly, the measures endorsed by certain movements.
I will never understand how entitled or mean people can be towards OSS devs. I sympathize with this post a great deal and wish the author all the best in whatever he does next.
Compiler tampering is a species of malevolence I try not to think about so I can continue to code in a somewhat sane matter, lest I crumble like a lovecraftian protagonist
I weirdly think the inhumanity of brutalism is well-suited to churches, in part because the divine is not human: eternal, omnipotent, unambiguous, fundamental.
I'm a trinitarian so I actually don't agree with this
I was very impressed with Montreal and its decentering of cars the last time I visited...it seems to be a city that is leading bike and public transit-friendly development in North America.
Surely news publications benefit more from Google/Facebook providing links to their content? It's a mutually beneficial relationship. I'm a bit puzzled as to why this was pushed, I'd love some context for this.
"What we really seek in our nostalgic reveries, I want to suggest, is the inertness of the past." Extremely well said. I have never thought of nostalgia in this way but I think it's true.
It's funny to think that the fantasy/speculative fiction trope of "precursor civilization that has advanced tech" was probably grounded in the historical memory of people happening upon ruins, weapons and artifacts of extraordinary craftsmanship.