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Serious question: what's utility?

Self-esteem is one of the most useless abstractions I know of. Its currency is tied together with this nonsensical emphasis on "feeling good about yourself" prevalent today. I really would like to know how popular psychology concretely became so enamored with ceaseless optimism as a guiding principle in life. I'm dead serious about this because it's clearly not scientifically discovered nor is it historically enduring (Aristotle lists such optimism as dangerous and medieval Christianity would've listed it as pride). Moreover it presupposes consciousness has some sort of exhaustive mastery over the psyche, such that it can just pull itself up from the bootstraps were it wished. This leads to a lot of bad decisions, dangerous decisions, being made and I genuinely think it would be a contribution to our well-being when we finally throw it out the window.

Shouldn't the headline read "Android Sales Overtake iOS in the U.S."?

Does anyone know if there are amateur news sites that do things like collect shit people just report like "oh shit, this guy just got hit by a car on Damen & Wolcott" or "Hey, guys, the regime is cracking down on our protest", or has Twitter somehow filled in that gap?

The Coming Community, Giorgio Agamben: A series of reflections on medieval philosophy and language that culminates in a notion of community that isn't grounded in any kind of commonality. It's a brilliant work that still serves as the terra firma for understanding the rest of Agamben's more popular works such as Homo Sacer and Means without Ends. This is one of the most influential and brilliantly conceived books I've ever read.

"You can't make people happy against their will" would be the smoother translation.

Any comments on how instructive HTDP is with Racket for introducing a non-programmer to coding?

some people like proper gtk integration

As someone with a philosophy degree I can say that your thought is immeasurably underestimated. Every philosophy 101 course teaches you Plato, but the differene between the Plato you find there and the actual Plato under scholarly anaylsis is immense. Aristotle is even worse: his Attic Greek has almost nothing to do with his common English translation EDIT: when it comes to the key terms.

In today's culture that's damn hard for a lot of people.

Wait, so Ballmer talked over the insight of his highest software engineer? Is that really what happened?

Giraffes don't swim. Simulations demonstrate they could, kinda, but it'd suck. Giraffes don't swim.

I'd rather keep Tumblr and WP.com apart.

No surprising picks there.

This is one of the more sober commentaries on the internet and power I've read in a long time.

I'm curious as to why lifestreaming never caught on: why entrust all your data to a single service (Facebook) when you can entrust specific data to specific services (photos to flickr, status to twitter, bookmarks to delicious, etc). This fragmentation produces specific competition for hosting particular data (this is already the case: Flickr, Smugmug, Picasa etc) which should keep hosts fresh and honest as they don't want to lose users.

All lifestreaming did was aggregate all of this into a discoverable point with privacy controls.

What happened?