What I'm reading 6/13-6/20
2016-06-20
Facebook is wrong, text is deathless - Tim Carmody
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"Bet for better video, bet for better speech, bet for better things we can't imagine – but if you bet against text, you will lose."
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"Text is surprisingly resilient. It's cheap, it's flexible, it's discreet. Human brains process it absurdly well considering there's nothing really built-in for it."
The Nigel Farage Show - Bagehot
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"The referendum has been marked by a pin-striped nihilism dressed up as common sense."
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"To some extent the referendum has revealed things that were already present: the growing void between cosmopolitan and nativist parts of the country, the diminishing faith in politics, the rise of populism, the inadequacy of the left-right partisan spectrum in an age when open-closed is a more salient divide."
The Forest for the Trees - isis agora lovecruft
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"Personally, I would be completely ecstatic if Jake decided to move to Alaska."
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"Additionally, we would likely have had more diverse contributors to Tor, if we had dealt with Jake sooner, since, for years, many people have been warned about Jake through a whisper network and disuaded from becoming involved."
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"I have spoken personally with every person whose story was published in the original set on the anonymous site. I am convinced beyond reasonable doubt that each of them is true."
Evil tip: avoid "easy" things - Yossi Kreinin
- "Failing at easy things is shameful; succeeding is unremarkable."
The German School of Lisp - Fogus
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"Fluchtpunkt Lisps skirt the vanishing point between theory, practicality, and art."
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"I suppose the fundamental philosophy of newLISP is to not necessarily provide everything, but to make everything possible."
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"The core types provided by Pico Lisp are numbers, symbols, and lists."
Living with yaks - Chas Emerick
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"We all struggle with whether we did good work yesterday, whether what we're working on now is what we want to be working on, and whether it's a stop on our path to something else, or a place where we might rest for a while."
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"All of this was done in order to do other things."
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"These computers we pound and tap on are things of our own creation: we choose our own legacy through our use and abuse of them."
All the lonely people - André Picard
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"Being lonely also has stigma attached to it: it's often associated with having poor social skills or being odd. We look upon those who are reaching out to make a connection with suspicion. How often have you heard: "How can I meet people?" For most, the answer to that question is not Tinder or Grindr."
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"Yet, we underfund and devalue places that bring us together like libraries, parks, recreation centres and community gardens."
The Story of Haskell at IMVU - Chad Austin
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"In fact, one weekend, Andy went home with the explicit goal of proving that Haskell was stupid and not good for writing production software. He came back on Monday glowing."
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"We learned two things: teaching Haskell was a nontrivial problem. BUT, Haskell newcomers hacking on the codebase only caused one regression, and that regression actually exposed a bug in some of our infrastructure."
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"From my perspective it was kind of a weird experience. Highly-skilled people that I respect just got really angry and irrational and basically refused to even try to learn Haskell, which resulted in a culture divide in the company."