lordleft

When I met my wife, I discovered very quickly that she had savant-level hosting skills. She is an amazing cook, she prioritizes space to dine in our home (we made sure to have a dining table in our NYC apartment) and she thinks carefully about the experience of her guests. It's a quality that I benefit greatly from, and I'm grateful to her for it.

Something I really dislike about modern consumer products is that companies simply don’t care if their decisions leave their customers embittered and feeling negatively about their decisions. It seems like that used to be a salient factor in how firms designed, sold and pitched their wares.

I don’t agree with this characterization of the article at all. What you see as clickbaity I see as using a reductive idea to set the stage for a more complex one. I just think this is good, engaging writing.

It blows my mind that Russell invented (formalized) types. Such an elemental concept, but so useful.

While 42 minutes would be hard to beat, I think that stenography was and remains a highly mature and impressive skillset.

I’m a heavy KOReader user and absolutely adore it, but I think it definitely trades user-friendliness for power and flexibility. The Kindle proprietary store has a far more user friendly UI imo, though it’s getting progressively worse (and the fact that kindles now default to showing you the store pisses me off to no end). KOReader plugins really close the gap though.

Fagles was what I read when I first read the Iliad/Odysseus years ago, and I was happy to see him pop up as my revealed preference via the test. I'm also a big fan of Lombardo.

It's almost refreshing to see intense debate about something DBH wrote that isn't about theology.

Not only Linux/BSD, but MacOS. Not that Apple isn't annoying either, but it tends to avoid the windows bloatware stuff.

Forgive my ignorance; I'm not a Sanskrit speaker (Malayalam is my first language) -- but I love the sound of Sanskrit.

I have lots of questions: what's the use case for this? Primarily religious / liturgical? It also seems that the fact that this tool works means that any arbitrary Sanskrit sentence can be translated into a chant by some sort of procedure (dare I say algorithm)? I'm terribly curious and fascinated by this!

Got a message that I owe 37 million on an account that I haven't used in probably...6 years?

Naomi is an awesome writer and she's been doing many of these deep dives into literary journals. She's also reviewed entire historic genres (like old westerns), IIRC. She has a really unique ability to plainly grasp what's special about a group of related writing.

Beware the Sea Peoples

All Cambridge Elements volumes are made free to download 2 weeks after publishing.

I remember burning this on a CD as a preteen. It's what got me into Linux. It blew my mind that an OS could be live-loaded off a disk. Ever since then, I tried to daily drive linux, but came back to Windows again and again for gaming...until this year.

I switched to Bazzite from CachyOS and while I really appreciate how accessible it is, the immutability of the core OS doesn't do enough to scratch my Linux tinkering fix. So I'll probably install this in a few days.

You’re not wrong, but then we ought to pump the brakes in telling everyone and their mother to hop onto arch based distros that make installing AUR packages seem as safe as any other action (via Shelly on cachyos for example)

This is especially gnarly as more people have been picking up arch distros as of late (like CachyOS).

I sincerely hope this man get seek redress for this disgusting miscarriage of justice.

IIRC, Bell ended up wanting to spend his life after inventing the telephone as a scientist and a researcher, rather than tending to the running of Bell Telephone and AT&T.

The return of Xenix :)

I had no idea Boox made these. I have two of their tablets and one of their e-readers. I can't wait to see e-ink progress as a technology.

Yep. And it doesn't help that the people selling AI products act as if they're going to build God. Going, "well AI can't do that" isn't going to fly when you are lax about communicating its limitations!

I love Orwell, he ranks as one of my favorite writers, especially his non-fiction. Unfortunately, I think too many writers take his famed writing advice as doctrine, and ignore the possibilies of a richer and more elaborate style.

I've started doing this as a kind of creative and mental exercise. It can imbue even a day filled with drudgery with something worthwhile.

I knew vaguely that Troy had many layers of settlement, but I didn't realize that Troy had an extensive life in antiquity that extended into the classical Greek age (Post-Bronze Age) and Early Roman Age. It's funny to think of Roman and Greek Tourists visiting Troy VIII in 300 BC.

I live in Brooklyn and have spent about a grand outfitting my apartment with ACs. I would absolutely take advantage of this if the law passed.

There's a dark irony in start-ups appropriating names from the work of a devout catholic attached to beautiful, old modes of life.

I've used a kindle for years and have bought hundreds of ebooks through Amazon's platform. The convenience of being able to carry a library with me in a single device is undeniable. ~14 years of support seems reasonable, especially in the context of modern tech. And yet decisions like this always upset me. For all the limitations of physical books, I can hand my physical books to my literal children and grandchildren when I die. As long as I tend to the book, I have it. The fact that this isn't guaranteed for DRM-locked ebooks, for all their advantages, makes me feel like we are somehow going backwards, despite our progress technologically. Instead of a future where products get unambiguously better, the future seems filled with products that come with significant trade-offs. The trade-offs are beginning to not feel worth it to me.

Pushkin is eternal, to writers and mathematicians alike