mrpsbrk

This seems to be the version published in an Argentinian magazine:

https://borgestodoelanio.blogspot.com/2017/05/jorge-luis-bor...

Totally agreed. Also feel this feeling of "moral superiority" is at play even when the complainers are not in a position to exert any power -- otherwise worthless people throwing mud just to feel worthy. That probably counts as practice for when they can get the upper hand.

"It's not that power corrupts, but that power attracts the corruptible", said mr. Frank Herbert...

A point i didn't see mentioned is that the talk about "having the balls" is all about the fear-of-monads being overblown and unjustified, and in this context making unfunny jokes about overblown and unjustified bravado conveys a point -- and does so in a way that no amount of explaining that "it's not so bad really" would. I actually think saying he was being exclusionary in this instance is downright bad faith.

Not exactly answering the question, but: Many times "You're so arrogant!" is just a way to stop an argument. It is a way to derail the topic into some unmeasurable subjective trait. And some times the part doing the accusation is the one who does not want to negotiate.

Regarding (3) -- To grasp someone else's approach or point of view is inherently difficult. Thus we are all arrogant by default.

Even though every person has their own way of expressing this, i believe in this sense arrogance is pretty much a given, and overcoming it to some level (which is never completely) is the challenge. In other words, you don't become arrogant, you're born this way, but you can change.

To listen is something you can learn. You can practice. It might not seem so at first sight.

Dance.

I'm serious. In dancing your bodily similarities and dissimilarities to your partner are in your face all the time, the fitting of them is (in a way) all there is to dancing. You both have to be aware of it and not fight it, you have to work with it. You have to learn to let the differences flow (so it is not enough to learn the choreography, you need to be able to enjoy the dance).

Words do not make justice to the experience.

2¢

Also Lynn Margulis. http://discovermagazine.com/2011/apr/16-interview-lynn-margu...

Be that as it might, that is not Dawkins' idea (i believe the foremost thinker in that regard is W. D. Hamilton), what Dawkins did was just giving it the catchy name.

'Guns, Germs and Steel' is pure geographical determinism, dressed up as something else.

I think the whole issue is that Facebook prioritizes the "addictive" nature of the feed. That is, their number 1 metric is clicking, so they have a very very narrow idea of what "engagement" means. But, as far as i see it, that is unavoidable...

one fax machine alone...

actually, a shortcut to the message queue (https://www.facebook.com/messages/) has the same effect to me...

anyway, i can't help thinking this forms such a powerful combo with another post very close in time... http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5247237

To me, it all his arguments about "truth" boil down to "I'm into AI and don't bother me with Sociology", which is a terrible shame once he actually tries going into sociology. Since, you know, his own advice of following who has done the research is contradicted here. All he does is dismissing every argument he does not like as "discussing politics". Which is fine if you are an AI researcher, but very very poor advice to the other 99.999% of the world's population.

We all have pandoc, and <3, and we can all choose between RST and Markdown, and we all know RST is a better spec (as in, there is one), but we keep on coming back to MD.

I suspect the reason is that MD does conform to the end-to-end principle. Having a spec is, itself, putting too much intelligence in the pipes. Not having a spec leaves all the intelligence into the ends: The person who's writing (which is very bad at following rules and specs) and the parser program (which can be as elaborate as needed).

That is why no spec (and Gruber's attitude) is a feature.

so basically trolls == Dunning-Kruger?

Having been involved in something like web development around 99-2001, then living under a rock for some years, then coming back around the time mozilla "phoenix" thing started rolling, i remember how odd it sounded that people would hate IE and love the others, it was exactly the opposite of my expectations...

He hates that the skeumorphic things are patronizing, but, there you are, in a word, the very nature of Apple: patronizing.

Structural complexity (the internals) against functional complexity (the use) reminds me that worse is better because overengineering selects orthogonality into unimportant problem-dimensions, that is tends to enhance the structure while hindering the use.

I really like the opening statement of the post "all good design is moral design", but i find it completely baffling to see it dispensed like that, like simple statement of fact. I do agree with it, but i also think it does lead to very unintuitive consequences that most people and most designers would not accept easily, edge cases that the post does a neat job of hiding.

I'll try to find time to write a little more about that, but in the meantime, i dearly deeply heartfelt-ly recomend "The Shape of Things" by a guy named Flusser, and inside this particular book an essay by the name "War and the state of things". It will really bake your noodles later on.

http://books.google.com.br/books?id=2vVGCdt0EAkC&pg=PA30...

Though we don't have to. The real point of the web is that a poor view (standard html view) should suffice. That is what make WWW and Mosaic instead of Xanadu. It is a pain to have to close browser tabs to stop my fan rotating, since most of the times mplayer wont activate it. Bigger apps than anyone ever dreamt? Everyone dreamt them. It's just small apps are better. Worse is better.

The whole point of the "Turing Machine" is that code is data is code, so... In effect, "automation" is code, just bad code, brainless code in a way, as the other poster says way too easy.

The guy in blitzlang (something) does programs as XML that only convert to text as a "view", so you can see the same "code" as a variety of syntaxes just as you can, say, change icon size in a file manager.

The very word is tricky: Code. Like in cypher? Like in codex (book)? Like in instruction code?

Once you take algorithm out of the hardware realm, then how can we really say which code is script and which is real? Every single thing that ends up in github has been algorithmically transformed. Isn't a config file a Domain Specific Language? Why not? And could we not say an endless stream of mouse-pointer coordinates together with clicks is just as code: Non-executable data that has somehow to be "compiled"?

Just random musings...

Alas, not gonna happen indeed.

I once believed that BSD with an Apple interface was the Utopia of computing, but no. And it took me a couple of years to understand why. I came up with a different way to say the same thing: Apple is about productizing computing ideas. But it does mean closing them down. A product is not a platform. And Xcode is just a nuisance to Apple, a requisite rather than a goal.

Sometimes productizing means making the same thing much cheaper, like their first mouse. Sometimes it is making the same thing much more expensive than necessary, like present Macs.

But the common thread is to upsell your costumer. To make him come back. This is all Apple is about. It has the advantage of pampering a prized costumer, but it has the disadvantage of locking you.

To the people saying Apple is the new MicroSoft, at first Apple was the one and only personal computer company. It used to be king of the hill. It was busted when the open-ness of the IBM PC turned out to incur cluster effects.

For all we know, this post-PC era can also witness a similar disruption. esr really thinks Android is already doing it. Lets hope.

But Apple can't do open. It is not that it would "diminish returns". It is that it goes against the very company strategy. It is cute that Woz prefers not to acknowledge it, but that is all.

Another way to say the same thing the article says is that «science has been rewarding creativity less and less». In that case, both (a) and (b) start to seem subtly related. Because once your hero ceases being a random wacko who was curious about weird stuff and comes to be a laborious researcher that climbed a lot of ladders, then the amount of effort you give to weird ideas decreases.

Another way to put it is that big science is replacing science, and i think it is. (Feyerabend's perspectives, albeit very different from that, seem to point out many of the problems...)

nevertheless, Einsten didn't pause much for advanced Maths at his "wonder year", and seem to have given the subject more thought only when older...

Compare with http://jcs.biologists.org/content/121/11/1771.full another post at HN at around the same time, about the importance of stupidity in science. Two very different conceptions of dumb.

I would also like to stress that it is not really about looks, only, but about being always "in character" for the woman, which is pretty and dumb, true, but would be much better described as "good marrying material".

Finally, please, anyone who cared about this, check out "Ada Lovelace Day", to happen this year a month from today. http://findingada.com/about/

Man, judging by such mythical stuff as the "Courrier Tablet", that cool "Surface" whathchaisit, and a host of other theoretical stuff i hear all the time, i would venture, as weird as it might sound, Microsoft Research...

This i would say lends loads of support to the "RNA world" hypothesis (that says RNA replication is the basic mechanism of life and DNA is just like storage of sorts, like RNA=RAM, DNA=HD)...

Yeah, totally, where exactly does the energy flow chain lies there is somewhat beyond me!