RGS1811

I’ve been leaning into audiobooks for the past two years and it’s completely revitalized my intellectual life. I feel alive in ways I’d forgotten. And it extends beyond audiobooks too. I started carrying a paperback around with me, reading philosophy and history again. I even got a subscription to the NY Review of Books! Someone I know got me into neo-pragmatism and I fell in love with Richard Rorty. There’s something qualitatively different about sticking with a person who goes really deep into a topic, and benefitting from their years of reflection and research.

I got a lot of questions about the names of root level linux directories, which while good knowledge doesn't seem to fit under the title description.

There's a download button at the bottom of the player.

True, and penalizing misbehavior is a big part of the solution here, but it's also true that there are practical social limits on behavior (including competitive behavior), and these can wax and wane culturally, giving rise to greater or lesser degrees of trust and good faith in commerce. ("What can I count on from people in general?")

The standard scored against was mostly good, although his preferred column width was pretty arbitrary, and the best line-height can depend on the context of a piece of text and its use.

Plato's procedural/dialogical approach to learning is also vastly superior to the Kantian/illuminist 'one and done' understanding of proof and discovery. Kant was a funny sort of progressive, who also believed that his work in metaphysics and epistemology laid the absolute foundation for the field.

It's odd but only enlightenment and post-enlightenment thinkers seem to approach their work this way, as if it were an absolute step forward which will never need to be revisited. You don't generally find it in ancient or medieval philosophers, who are much more interested in eking out nuance and exposing difficulties than in laying absolute groundworks and so on. In the enlightenment (at least in philosophy), progressivism and delusional absolutism always go hand in hand.

His Master's Voice is the most philosophically rigorous and profound piece of Sci-Fi I've read. Yes, it's hard to get through. It doesn't really have a plot. But wow, Lem really thought through the difficulties and implications of the scenario, and the science in the fiction is either intelligent and plausible or simply correct. And to top it all off, he appreciates how much the socio-political dimension of science impact the trajectory of the project, and explains the dynamics of that side of it really well.

What made me concerned was the discovery that, on an old iPad mini I rarely use (without touch id / face id), entering the standard four digit unlock code is enough to get access to the full list of logins/passwords stored by iCloud Keychain. I would like to have to at least re-enter my apple ID to get at this full list.

Keychain doesn't prompt for your user password on iOS. Just your unlock code. That's what bothers me.

The most disturbing thing about iCloud Keychain is that you can get access to all of your stored passwords just by unlocking a device linked to your Apple ID. Not just the ability to log in with them, the actual plaintext.

I've often enjoyed smalin's visualizations, which I find a little easier to follow visually than andy filebrown's. E.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlvUepMa31o

It's a 2017 MBP with touchbar (and a Radeon GPU).

I came for the filesystem bugs, I stayed for the absurd root exploit, but its the little crashes, rendering glitches, and feeling of general instability that made me fall in love with High Sierra...

APFS. That's the big addition. I've had a few horrific problems with High Sierra, two of them leading me to do full disk wipes. My current problem is this odd occasional screen scrambling bug, that happens for a split second a couple times a day. Could it be related to the random colors that show up sometimes when I wake my MBP from sleep? I have no idea.

Until this past summer I was doing all of my (design heavy) workload on a 2013 15-inch retina MBP, without any problems. I would still be using it, except that the display died on me and it made more sense to buy a new laptop than replace it. I was irritated at the time, because I'd wanted to wait another year in the hopes that they eliminated the touch-bar from the top-end lineup, but I've been really happy with the Kaby Lake MBP overall. It's quieter (except for the keystrokes), cooler, has a great display, etc. The things that bother me most about it are not the USB-C only thing, but the absence of a traditional power/eject keyboard button, and the relatively high occurrence of phantom keystrokes that result from brushing the touchbar with stray fingers. Otherwise it's a wonderful machine and I'm very pleased with it.

The bit about error reporting was the best part.

Ed is generous enough to flag errors, yet prudent enough not to overwhelm the novice with verbosity.

I agree with this approach. My experience has been that having a primitive mental framework in place really helps with retention (and interest) when you're doing in-depth reading on a topic (which you probably are if you're reading a book). Start superficial, mess around, and then things not only make more sense, but are also more exciting and easier to remember, when you really dive in.

I've been in a non-tech work environment (specifically, publishing) where management followed this philosophy. In that case it yielded a disgruntled workforce with terrible leadership who were variously ignored and exploited by the divas. Ultimately the place would have done better with a boatload of knaves and no more than 2 divas.

It's really nice. It makes me think she would have been a great person to know and be around.

Right. While I actually believe society (and students) would benefit by converting a large fraction of our "liberal arts" colleges into more practical trade schools, your point stands—the problem with the "choose your own adventure" model of undergraduate education is that 18-22 year olds are distinctly bad at choosing the adventure that's best for them, especially when it comes to getting a liberal education. Trade schools for STEM and the trades, but stronger core curricula and less highly-specialized BS in the humanities.

Ugh, same here. That killed it for me.