The part of this that really blew me away is how hard it was to listen to the article without putting the author in one of two boxes:

1) On MY side of the issue

2) An enemy of MY side

No matter what he's talking about (from persecution to John Green) I was always trying to either say "I hate this because it endorses what I hate!" or say "I love this because it endorses what I love!" but the piece only allows either mode for a moment or two before reminding you that it's talking about feeling like you have to think that way.

Hey I forgot how to read complete lists in my hiatus.

Wait what?! Hubski pays to use a video as its first post?

I'll have to give this a look-see when I have more time! My gut is that I don't use a ton of tools at work but there are a buttload of tools that help me not think about the boring parts of web development. Those tools seem great. Libraries I'm kinda in agreement with the quote you posted.

But who wants to write their own sign-in code when its been done a million times?!

Haha thanks! Had a friend in real life recommend hubski to me and I waxed nostalgic and now here I am! Glad you're still here! Just before I left I unfollowed literally everyone so now I have to go around and click names and things again. It's been kinda nice- like unexpectedly meeting people when you visit your hometown.

Crap. People keep using tools to make beautiful things. :(

Wow. Probably the best bug of all time is "The Wall Street Bull moves a little over the years, resulting in some blurring."

The failure cases are my favorite! The twilight effect is gorgeous!

Thanks! Deleting this one

Right, but everyone thinks of themselves as good people. The chiefs who resigned for being overtly racist would have lumped themselves in with the good cops the day prior. And very few people will label others as "definitely bad people." It's easier to stay on the line and be half-friends with everyone.

Asking people "Who's good?" won't reveal much. Asking "Who's racist?" or "Who's had the most accidents?" or "Who wouldn't you want with you when you're pulling up on someone?" are much more telling. Not just for police- for any group of people.

The article is a sort of unfocused warning of internet DooooOOOoooooom! I'm not wholly convinced. Facebook is one of the largest traffic drivers of the modern web: true. Giving Facebook a monopoly on publishing would be dangerous: true. Facebook Instant is Facebook monopolizing publishing on the mobile web: absolutely false. Every time facebook makes a product a dozen other companies spin off their own version of that product. Sometimes FB's product wins out, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they're all wrong.

When you drop the hoopla and the fear, I think you're left with one really solid quote:

At the very least, Facebook has put everyone else on notice. Your content better load fast or you’re screwed.

Great read! Although the direct sexual implications are fascinating, this was the most interesting piece to me:

Womens’ supposed greater sex drive was an argument for their inferiority, but once the assumption became reversed, no one argued that mens’ lustfulness was a sign of a fundamental irrationality that should preclude them from business and politics. Rather than a handicap, a large sexual appetite was positive once it came to be seen as a characteristic of men. Women, being passionless, supposedly lacked the drive and ambition to succeed. Much like sex, the public realm of work was dirty and distasteful, hardly suitable to womens’ delicate sensibilities. Since their instincts were maternal rather than sexual, they were best suited to staying virtuously at home with the children.

Seems like the stereotypes around sex/gender are far stronger than any moral views about sex as an act! Really fascinating.

The most interesting part of this was imagining having such a large ego you can't step around it for just the duration of a single email. I agree with Chomsky on every political and ethical point made here (that I'd had any thoughts about beforehand) but his constant talk of "evasions" and his imagined slights are just ridiculous.

Pretty friggin' sweet! I wonder how common this is?

As great as this might be, how do you determine who's a great teacher, and how do you hire people based on it? Answer, you do not. So unless you know cold that someone is a great teacher you should stick with smaller class sizes.

moral distancing that enables one to laugh at a cruel joke (and most, perhaps all, jokes are cruel, a point to which we might return later).

Both Kant and his modern interpreter may have thought a bit about the kind of jokes they might hear (knock-knock, party jokes) but most of the humor theory in this is laughably stunted. The graphing, the basic incongruity theory, and the sidelining of humor as a whole emphasizes how much of his time Kant spent not having fun.

If you're curious about humor, there are some good books on the subject, and some better interviews. I recommend anything with TJ Jagodowski or Dave Pasquesi (not purely comedic, but there you go), Truth in Comedy by Chandra Halpern & Del Close (and someone else), and True and False by David Mamet. They talk a lot less about comedy as though they understand the whole of it, but they would actually give an appreciation for the kind of thought and difficulty involved in humor. (Mamet's book is about acting but the majority of it applies to performing humor as well as anything else.)

This was originally posted around a year ago (not the same exact version, but this looks like a fork of the same git repo) and my biggest issue with it is that the ground didn't change- your cars don't evolve to be the best possible cars, they evolve to be the best possible cars for whatever random track you get, meaning that comparisons will be based entirely on whoever got the easier track! Womp womp.

Hopefully this version is different! Happy breeding!

Haha! Well, I'm back for some amount of time! Got an email when someone mentioned me and decided to poke my head back in.

If the drug trade were harmless then the statement would be a lot easier to agree with.

If personal drug ownership and use were decriminalized, a whole lot of the violence surrounding drug trade would dissipate. I mean, look at some common decriminalized drugs! You don't see a lot of people getting killed or making cartels for alcohol or tylenol. Because the people who want those things can go to a distributor without fear, and distributors don't have to keep themselves in the shadows and try to fight off the law and other distributors. If someone comes to my house and steals a bunch of alcohol, I can call the police and get shit settled. But if they steal cocaine, suddenly I have a problem that I can't get help on, and that's when violence starts to look better and better.

And your last sentences:

The risk of addiction in some drugs is so high that it seems foolish to allow them to all citizens, but this leads to questions about lazy citizens or citizens who don't strive to do their best.

This is a direct disagreement with the original tenet:

So long as they do not harm others, individuals should be free to pursue their own ends.

Just some issues I thought of!

What's more important, telling someone about your problem or hearing their support?

Socializing is weird- media and networks only change the ways in which it's weird. I think that the main point stands- this is a healthier social landscape than it was 20 years ago. As someone who grew up at the same time as social media, I think that's been the trajectory of my life as well.

On the other hand, I would agree with you that I wouldn't say that any of these positive social ramifications are making them better writers. I think that's stretching the term a bit. Sure, it's great if you're comfortable writing about what's dear to you. But you should also know a language and some composition.

I actually found this very unsettling. If this really happened then Michael Cera sounds like an incredibly self-centered jerk. If it didn't really happen but he really wrote it then I'm not sure how much that changes things.