superb-owl

> First, what is the nature of it? how did it come about? what is its constitution, origin, and history? And second, What is its importance, meaning, or significance, now that it is once here? The answer to the one question is given in an existential judgment or proposition. The answer to the other is a proposition of value, what the Germans call a Werthurtheil, or what we may, if we like, denominate a spiritual judgment. Neither judgment can be deduced immediately from the other. They proceed from diverse intellectual preoccupations, and the mind combines them only by making them first separately, and then adding them together.

Exploring the gaps between science and spirituality

https://superbowl.substack.com/p/church-of-reality-ernst-mac...

Vice, for one, has basically commodified HST-style journalism. They have a whole show where a guy just tries different drugs [1]

And you can find all sorts of heterodox political and cultural takes in both mainstream news and the blogosphere, as well as the huge continuum of media between them.

The problem isn't that these writers don't exist anymore (or that they're being somehow silenced by congress). The problem is there's no mainstream culture anymore, and therefore there's no place for counterculture to consolidate. Instead we have a bunch of people shouting different things into voids of various sizes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton%27s_Pharmacopeia

https://www.uap.guide/

https://superbowl.substack.com/p/uap-evidence-summary-skepti... (mine)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Ching%27s_influence

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

I wrote a general apology for my post-rationalist stance here, if anyone is interested:

https://superbowl.substack.com/p/you-dont-always-have-to-be-...

I'm part of said universe. And--I mean this genuinely--I care about you.

Seeing the universe as enchanted or disenchanted is a point of view, a value judgement. It's not a matter of fact or sobriety.

This article smells like Google PR.

"X Considered Harmful" lets the reader know very precisely what it is they're about to read: a warning about a particular pattern or behavior that is common but tends to backfire. This goes for all meme-ified headlines ("X I love you but you're bringing me down", "Unreasonable Effectivenes of X", etc etc)

It's important to bring nuance to a discussion rather than taking an extremist position, and I think that's the author's main gripe. But nuance also adds confusion and waters down the message. Sometimes it's better to stake a clear position at the outset, and then address the nuances.

You can't just have balance; you have to balance balance with imbalance, balancedly [2]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33865030

[2] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/

Even if you continue to host your data on Dropbox or Google Drive, you have total control over the underlying data--you can audit, modify, or delete it at any time.

From the application side, it also means you no longer have to deal with persistent state, which means you can ship applications with no backend. That's an order of magnitude easier to develop and maintain.

The downsides are real though: the user experience is often jankier, and the lack of a central database makes it really hard to do anything social/realtime. I'm rooting for Solid but am not yet convinced they'll make it.

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I do think the latter does generalize the former. I vaguely remember seeing it derived as essentially linking +/- infinity so the function is "periodic" on the real line. But I could be misremembering

This is the class I took, it's incredible: https://see.stanford.edu/Course/EE261/137

It's sad to see humans lose their jobs to automation. But (without knowing much about the details) if the company thinks they can automate what this person was doing with AI, it was kind of a bullshit job [1] to begin with.

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

This would be an important step forward.

https://twitter.com/SteveRattner/status/1640733289722920963

Interesting times.

Those of us that have deep architectural skills, are able to deal with ambiguous requirements, balance UX with technical limitations, etc, will be safe for a good while.

Those of us that were trained in bootcamps to crank out MEAN/MERN/etc apps might be in a bit of trouble.

I say this not to disparage the latter group--many are great engineers who do great, reliable work. But it's ultimately rote work, something LLMs excel at.

There is a huge tranche of SWEs who are going to become redundant soon. Lots of them gave up careers as teachers etc for a more lucrative career in tech. It's unfortunate.