zzzbra

I always find it annoying when people or media breathlessly circulate something that is “written by bots” and then it patently is not in any meaningful sense. this is clearly the work of someone imitating what they think a bot might produce.

Firefox is also really worth checking out again.

Was it just me or was this article a bit pedantic? Of course just playing trees alone isn’t going to solve climate change—but is anyone saying that?

this is completely unrelated to the content of the post, but, since when has lesswrong have such clean web design? 0.o

lack of infinite scroll != no scrolling.

I would argue that there is something about the physical interaction that is scrolling. you can scroll at the same time you are reading--this makes the text more of a moving target, and then your "reading" becomes mere scanning. it's hard to shift out of that shallow level of engagement once your there because it's by definition a distracted state, you're trying to just get the gist of this and move onto the next thing you just know is out there which you will actually want to read.

thank you for the link! I'm happy to see other people making this point--raises my hopes some future UX designers will bring it to the platforms someday.

I think part of the problem today with individuals trying to figure out how to moderate their social media usage is that it's not clear what specifically within social media constitutes harm.

Is it the like/upvote mechanism? Hacker News would constitute harmful social media in that case. But what might be lost is a powerful lever for democratic input in terms of content curation and moderation.

My vote for what's more harmful is the scroll. I have a web extension that just removes the scroll on my Facebook feed. A few months after setting it up I all but stopped using Facebook, checking in once maybe every two months to visit folks individually. I haven't done this for Twitter or IG, but then the quality of my main feed is such that I don't want to remove it outright and want that aggregation of content, somehow.

I think that scrolling in general is harmful as a UX pattern, but the obvious alternative of pagination could create all kinds of complexities around deep-linking and fragmentation of content. All the same I'd love to see more platforms adopt this intentional cap on content associated with a given URL. It turns my engagement with content online from scanning to actual reading.

Ian Bogost a luddite...? interesting.

not relative to their time. in a world of weak institutional and little in the way of medicine, most children die before adulthood. those that do are your only insurance policy in old age.

Please, do elaborate

I think the main thrust of the article is that Peter Thiel's libertarianism is hugely unprincipled and inconsistent with itself. which might describe of lot of the more famous libertarians out there actually...

the correct timeline

“breathless fulminations” — this is such a a great expression, thank you!

Because normies generally aren’t aware of Zappa, Beefheart, et al., whereas Yoko’s improbable connection to what was probably the most popular musical group in the world for much of the 20th Century out her squarely on their radar. Also, honestly, there’s probably a little misogyny at play.

greatly appreciate that this could make it to the top of hacker news.

no idea why this isn’t more popular.

to think that some people called the new godzilla movies dumb…

I guess Snyder is all the remains of the Beats before they are, properly speaking, history...

Century of Self is pretty self-contained and portable as far as having takeaways go.

Rosa Parks was a militant activist and part of a large activist network that was consistently staging public acts in defiance of Jim Crow segregation. This is misleadingly left out of most folks’ intro to her most successful action.

always hated that this company had the same name as the already established open source SRS software

I understand where this is coming from. All the same I find its devaluation of the variation of language one can naturally access when writing both dangerous and simpleminded in its utilitarian assumptions. It's a strawman argument. Writing is a creative act and not simply a matter of communication.

Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind and Mindfulness in Plain English are excellent texts.

However I recommend that the single best thing you can do early on, either to figure out if this is anything your interested in or to actually get to the matter of the thing, which is to say to appreciate the practice of it, is to visit a zen center and take some sort of intro to zazen. It wasn't until I tried zazen that I felt I really 'got' what all the thinking is about.

I also found this article on Nietzsche and what impact the lineage of Buddhist thinking had on his thought (and by extension, Freud, who is widely speculated to have taken a lot of his ideas about the unconscious from Nietzsche) to be instrumental in deepening my understanding of Buddhism: http://www.westernbuddhistreview.com/vol1/god_is_dead.html

Without exception, Anki is the way to go.

http://ankisrs.net/

I've found the philosophy extolled on these blocks to be especially conducive to the programmer mentality: http://alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/ http://www.hackingchinese.com/