aaachilless

Then I don't understand this, from the article that was cited:

In the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the principle has a more literal meaning: that every possibility at every interaction which is not forbidden by such a conservation law will actually happen (in some branch of the wavefunction).

Disclaimer: I am absolutely not a physicist, and so the following might be quite incorrect.

It seems that your interpretation of the rule is actually an assertion of the many world's interpretation of quantum mechanics. If you don't mention that caveat then you're actually asserting determinism in this particular universe.

I assume you're referring to the gif of the German goal from the world cup. "Afraid" is a bit of a misinterpretation. When you're 5-10 feet from the other player and he's shooting on goal, especially if that other player is one of the best in the world, turning around is the only sane thing to do.

One of my maths professors was a humorous guy and in his lectures would, as an ongoing joke, only explicitly credit Heaviside and Hungarians.

Yeah I agree it's a bit idiosyncratic.

Doing this really drove home how neurotic and generally distracted I had become. I'd do some reading at lunchtime and by bedtime couldn't recall much of it at all. I don't know for sure, but it really felt like my memory was being thrashed by the music, websites, podcast, etc that came between lunch and bedtime.

First I'd like to say that I think this particular critique, that of considering to what extent we ought to offload our skills into various technologies, is definitely worth engaging in. It seems to me that at some point certain new technologies might very well have negative marginal value.

That said, this is a perplexing comment. Surely shunning writing "as much as possible" would include shunning HN comments.

I'm pretty sure it's a quote from the co-founder, Wiktor. There's a picture of him with his name just below the quote.

This is technically true but in practice Docker for Mac hides this from you and does not require a prohibitive amount of memory. 99% of the developers at my company have 16gb MBPs and we all build multiple Docker containers daily.

Who would risk building their company on a stack that you lose the license for if you do too well?

You could frame this in a different way and come to a different conclusion. Instead of describing OSS as a "stack you lose the license for if you do too well" you could say "stack you don't have to pay for unless you're successful".

One might believe that OSS's raison d'etre is to increase equality in economic opportunity. If you see OSS dev that way and you see corporations like Google and Facebook as opponents of that cause, then if you agree with GP's statement on who the beneficiaries are, you might also agree with GP that there's a problem.

Chapter 6 is block ciphers, Chapter 7 is stream ciphers.

Also, the first lines in chapter 7: Let’s try to build a stream cipher using the tools we already have. Since we already have block ciphers, we could simply divide an incoming stream into different blocks, and encrypt each block...

The First Law trilogy by Joe Abercrombie (the Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and the Last Argument of Kings). They're quite dark but surprisingly funny and maybe the most readable novels I've ever read. Absolute page-turners.

also known coloquially as 'blue car syndrome'.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Blue%20Car%2...

i think that's an interesting idea. instead of "how many jobs did we create?" you could ask "how much socioeconomic mobility did we create?". or something along those lines

I'm pretty confident the tendency to think you have it all figured out is not scoped to nerd-dom.

I'm not sure what the spirit of your comment is, but I feel like I should point out that this is to some extent the "point" of technology: to create more value with less human capital.

Contrarily, I'd say that these questions were picked precisely because the author understands the profound difficulty we've encountered in the pursuit of formalizing them. Also, at least one of the other questions has a very precise formulation (number 2).

Not OP, but it could be a sweat issue. For me a half mile is plenty far, especially in direct sunlight and/or if I’m wearing a backpack, to work up a sweat walking at just a leisurely pace. If I had to hurry, I’d be visibly sweaty by the time I got to my office.

My experience has also been with a decaying amount of customization. As I get better with Vim I learn more and more how to do things in a "Vim-native" manner which I had previously needed plugins for. For example, when I first started using Vim, I relied heavily on NERDTree. These days, netrw works perfectly fine for me.

Isn't this exactly how it goes though? e.g. "They're selling books, Bob. Books. Not widgets. We're fine, Bob".

This is the sort of experience I’m looking for. Specifically, there’s a number of writers/journalists who I’d like to follow and Twitter seems ideal for following them.

So what do you think the causal difference is between your experience and others? Are you just more diligent about curating the list of people you follow?

Is it for some reason not a viable solution to just stop following people who shitpost? Or does Twitter push random users' posts at you? I ask because I've been circling around Twitter for a month or so, but if you can't isolate yourself from public tweets, I'm definitely not going to jump in.

My point isn't really about a distinction between information and knowledge. While high quality notes might witness the existence, or creation, of knowledge, that knowledge is not contingent on the notes' continued existence. Put another way: If the note-taking process results in the creation of knowledge inside my head, why should I keep the physical notes any more than I should keep the book?

Edit: I should say I thought your article was interesting and useful in general, and I don't think my disagreement takes away from the general message that owning things is pointless, what matters is engaging with the world.

I use this site pretty regularly to bootstrap reading about topics that I haven't much familiarity with. Even if the 5 books aren't the best, they're almost always enough so that I can direct my own continued reading. A great site for going from 0 to 1 in some topic, so to speak.

I think we’re talking about two different ideas. It seems like you’re talking about a publishing problem, not a problem with books qua books. That said, I haven’t ran into this other problem either. If I thought an author was padding a book just to make a page threshold, I’d never read that author again.

Thanks! That's sorta what the woman said at the shop I bought my needle/thread. The sweater is definitely just poor sewing from whatever factory it came from, the jeans a combination.

Given that you have some experience, do you have any resources you can recommend? Maybe a good book with a bunch of the fundamental skills?

The author says we shouldn't keep books, we should assimilate books into our model of the world, and then dispense with the book. To an approximation, I agree. I also agree with the idea that sometimes collecting books and bookmarks can lead to a false sense of satiety with our intellectual progress.

I disagree with his point that notes actually do represent assimilated information in a way that the books themselves don't. Notes might guarantee a certain level of assimilation, but they don't qualify as "knowledge" in the way the author maintains. There's other good reasons to keep notes, but not because they're more a part of your knowledge base than the book itself.

One of the rationalizations I use for collecting books is that, by organizing them in a certain way, I can constantly reinforce my model of the structure of certain topics. On top of that, the physical presence of certain books is intermingled with what they contain in such a way that I think it_might help retention.

That said, I've given away a ton of books lately, and plan on keeping the books I own to a minimum until I have the means to construct a really strong library, which I do think is a positive endeavor.

Also, tangentially related, does anyone have any suggestions on a good org to donate books to? I've seen one too many awesome sets of books mangled in Goodwill bins, and am looking for a new option.

I've seen this sentiment many times before, and I usually respond with a variation of the following point:

If I took a book and stripped it down to the bare information, as you'd like, and then read this new information-pure skeleton, I wouldn't remember it as I would if I just read the book. I might only remember a few facts about Thomas Jefferson after reading a bio about him, but I wouldn't remember any facts if I just read the facts.

My hypothesis as to why this is true (disclaimer: this comes almost entirely from introspection): My mind doesn't store memories like a hard drive, you have to tell it a story (so to speak) to get it to remember what you said. My mind doesn't integrate purely relational data, it integrates narrative data. Yes, an important part of a narrative is context and relational information, but another key part of it is the cadence, the spaces interleaved between the stuff we remember. Unless your point was that we actually need a new architecture for our brains, I strongly disagree, albeit on a purely anecdotal basis.