JasonFruit

Will you, or will the urge to make more take over? I don't know you, so I can't assume, but I've heard a lot more people talk about retiring at 40 than do it when they could.

Listen to you telling me where I can and cannot discuss things, and explaining to me what my comments mean!

I agree with a lot of this article, but much of the suggested action at the end strikes me as flawed.

> Don’t force yourself to do anything you hate. If you get too good at this, you won’t be able to figure out when to quit.

I'd moderate this a bit. Maybe, "If you are forcing yourself to do what you hate, step back and think: is the goal worth the slog to me?"

> Be suspicious of roles that compensate you with status or non-financial rewards.

This is the worst, to me. Purely financial motivation is one of the surest ways to be trapped in a role you hate. Make sure what you do offers you personal and social rewards that you value.

> Join Twitter — there’s no better way to reduce tunnel vision.

Twitter is the most awful social-pressure tool ever created. Please, I beg of you, do not join Twitter!

"+", apparently.

You're missing the point. American censorship doesn't have to be comparable for the question of what can be learned about our cultural bias from what we censor or self-censor to be interesting. What do we eliminate or simply refuse to produce because we can't bear to have our children see the world that way?

Though it is true that a lot of older string instruments weren't designed to take the tension of modern strings at modern pitch, and some of them really open up at a slightly lower pitch. I'm building lyres, and many lyre people are from that "A432 resonates with the universe" crowd, so I've been using it — and I can't deny that there seems to be a sweet spot in sound for a lot of instruments at that pitch. I honestly have wondered if there's some physiological reason so many people prefer it.

We actually tend to approach Pythagorean tuning, according to the Catgut Acoustical Society.

My Unicomp is the only mechanical keyboard I have not sold.

I have considered it, but there is, after all, a reason I sold it: I do not need to have so many keyboards.

I sold my Model F to a collector, who wrote back to tell me he didn't care for it. I have regretted that sale many times, because I loved that keyboard.

Finnish is a beautiful language, and I love to hear it sung — there's a wealth of Finnish folk groups doing great music that melds tradition and innovation, borrowing from musics from all over the world. But that's the drawback in learning Finnish: what if, understanding the language, I no longer wished to hear the music? The great advantage of Finnish, for me, is that I am unlikely to ruin a song by accidentally becoming aware of its meaning, since it apparently completely lacks cognates with English.

Or maybe do? Maybe they were right that, from a societal rather than individual point of view, their industrial revolution was a disadvantage, at least at that stage.

What does the hashtag "#tweet source removed as fascist tendencies have been pointed out" mean? I'm assuming they decided not to provide a source for information on this post because... they don't like the source? I hope I'm misunderstanding; if you're using a sketchy source, it's probably more important to note that, and you're still obligated to cite people you don't approve of.

Why get a bachelor's degree in music? Why not study with the best teachers you can afford, play with the best groups you can get into, and upgrade both when you can? The degree doesn't really get you anything you couldn't get faster and better without all the fluff that comes with a degree. (Source : got the degree.)

Maybe it's the year of Linux on the desktop!

There were governments when those rules were formulated. Unless you mean, "Older than all governments in existence today," which might be true.

I think we pamper people too much, and it makes them easier and easier to upset. Our cultural overcaution about what may upset someone is lowering our average threshold of offense. It's sad when a fictional person or a fictional dog dies, yes — that's the whole point! — but life has a lot more to throw at us than fictional death.

I'm not really sure your analogy helps; in either case, there are people who would agree that it matters, and people who would be baffled that anyone could get wrought up over it.

I don't immediately understand why Kaizala is a stupid name, in or out of English.

I regret that I didn't run into Tcl and Tk back when it really made sense to put in the effort to learn them. Such a capable little language.

If I can take the outrage down a notch, political parties survive and thrive on opposition, especially in a two party system. "If the other side wants it, we're against it" is the motto of both American political parties. A voting system that could encourage a multiplicity of political parties, reducing the attractiveness of pure opposition, would be a huge improvement to American politics.

I agree that it's a quibble with the article, not Deutsch.

There are several good independent bookstores in Madison, WI, the medium-sized college town near which I live, and I'm happy to say that most seem to be well-supplied with customers who actually buy books, and have not resorted to the shenanigans this article describes.

One of my favorites, Leopold's, does have a small coffee shop that serves the best coffee in town. That's not what makes me love it, though: its small collection is arranged by country (or in some cases region), and it's exquisitely selected. Every time I go in, I find several books that I would never have noticed or thought to search for in a more traditionally-arranged bookstore: Turkish religious wisdom stories, a history of the Russian revolution, a volume of Sholom Aleichem's stories, the autobiography of a woman who lost her family to the Khmer Rouge — it's a treasure of a collection. I expect to keep going back there for a long time.

I wonder if other bookstores could stand out like that by structuring their collections in a way that helps their customers find interesting things they might not otherwise look for. I think — though I'm no expert — that most people go into a bookstore thinking not, "I need to find a copy of X," but "I hope I find something good to read!" A bookstore that solves the second problem connects better with actual customers.

A quibble with the article:

> “Browsing” itself is an agricultural term, he points out, in one of his book’s many divagations, often entertaining but sometimes a bit twee, on the culture and language of bibliophilia: it’s what cows do in a field, and only started to be used to describe reading habits in the nineteenth century.

Cows don't browse; they graze, evenly cutting the omnipresent grass. Goats are browsers, picking bits of what they believe are the tastiest, most nourishing plants, and leaving the ones they don't care for.

It could be, "With all the excitement going on, finding a nice programming project to distract me seemed like a good idea."

Maybe my standards are low, but the ones categorized as Total failure strike me as kind of okay. Not great humor, but tbh better than half my son's jokes.

I'm honestly a little disappointed at how smoothly everything works on my Linux machines. It ruins the impression that I'm doing eldritch magic, issuing gnomic commands inherited from the primal hackers, immersing my very self in the unknowable gnostic wisdom of Unix.

Maybe I need to run OpenBSD.

It seems to me like the data source would welcome the free advertising.

I'm a Westerner, and I'm completely okay with people eating whatever animals are a) not exceptionally intelligent, and b) not exceptionally rare. Cows, pigs, chickens, dogs, horses, sure; whales, chimpanzees, crows, no.

I had wondered when I first heard of this if it was some sort of performance art in support of the unborn. It appears not, but it was still thought-provoking.

"The government would like to outlaw encryption" == "This website would like to show notifications". They'll keep trying until they get their way, and then you'll never be asked again.