Me three. I used to get colds that would regularly ripen into sinus and ear infections, and I haven't experience a single such infection in several years since switching to about 95% plant-based eating.
When an author is (1) simultaneously lamenting the loss of "roots" and "real culture" and attacking internationalism, (2) taking gratuitous shots at "wokeness," and (3) dressing the whole thing up in an intentionally vague "intellectual" wrapper that doesn't actually add anything substantive, it's not that hard to see where he's heading. All this article needs is a light sprinkling of references to "cultural Marxism" to reach full Jordan Peterson status.
This resonates with something I've thought about as a surfer, which is that humans have a really perverse tendency to overvalue scarcity and undervalue what is good but common and easily accessible. In the surfing context, humans cluster very densely on waves that are deemed "good," and then complain about crowds, while endless miles of coastline with different waves go totally unridden. We all want that "rare" wave, and have trouble being happy with the sort of waves that are commonplace.
>literature (or art) is not "something that makes people feel good".
The notion that art can't be "good" if it makes people feel good is really misguided, in my opinion. People turn to art for all kinds of reasons, but most of all because of the satisfaction involved in consuming it. Even if a story is tragic or explores sorrowful experiences, we derive aesthetic pleasure from the recounting if it is well done. Art is not cheerleading, but neither does it need to be just some predictable narrative about how life is terrible and hopeless.
I'm not a coder, so perhaps I'm missing the appeal of this project. My main takeaway is that I can't understand why somebody would go through the hard work of re-creating this but not bother writing a single line explaining to casual readers what the advantage might be of using the app compared to other more obvious solutions for playing music files.
Attack Magazine put out a book called The Secrets of Dance Music Production, which has some fairly good "beat starter" breakdowns of how a 16-step beat would be sequenced different styles of electronic music, such as deep house, tech-house, trance, etc. https://store.attackmagazine.com/products/the-secrets-of-dan...
Turing's work has some independent value, it's not just a mess of philosophical/moral opinions like Wallace is offering up in this speech. If nothing else, Wallace's suicide illustrates to me what a gulf there is between "saying things that sound wise" and actually living wisely. One has very little to do with the other.
I'm constantly repeating Justice Holmes' adage that "the life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." In my opinion, non lawyers vastly overestimate the extent to which legal writing and legal argument have anything to do with logic.
>People on HN are already primed to appreciate this style of writing.
My perception is the reverse. Probably 60% of the articles linked on this site, day in and day out, are a thicket of impenetrable jargon. Endless blog posts that make no attempt to explain to the non-initiated what the various acronyms mean or why the concepts might matter for a person who is not deeply, deeply immersed in whatever technical field the author is writing about. I wish more people who write about coding/tech would realize that a larger audience is interested in what is going on, but that the communication of the concepts needs to be approachable. This is not just a shortcoming of this field, obviously, as people in all sorts of technical/specialized fields tend to write the same way, speaking only to the in-crowd.
Well I agree that there are some bigger societal shifts going on that are indeed pretty destabilizing. I was just commenting that nuances of the curriculum of high schools, or even undergrad education, around questions of race/gender/capitalism (or whatever woke themes) is not really quite as consequential as I think some folks, including the author of the article that is the subject of the post, make it out to be. All these elite schools, no matter what their political posturing, are still basically just manufacturing future elites who will be perfectly content to perpetuate the status quo in whatever way is advantageous to them. If that involves more racial equity, or different pronouns, or whatever, nobody actually gives a shit as long as their own economic ox is not gored.
>There is simply no possible way this country can survive when the value systems are so opposed to each other.
That strikes me as a rather hyperbolic take. It's rather like the Jordan Peterson vision of reality in which certain ideological shifts in the educational realm are portrayed as being a wholesale reworking of society in general rather than what they actually are -- namely, just some aspects of the life of schools, which don't actually do that much to change or affect anything in the power structures that overwhelmingly dominate the rest of life.
>What the article calls quietism has to do with inner non-resistance. That doesn't imply outer non-resistance.
In the abstract, I agree. But certainly for many people they may seem intuitively to go together -- see, for example, the comment of another user in this same thread, who asks "I wonder how does this feel in practice? what does it feel like to be without striving? to surrender? I understand this intellectually but I struggle to understand this in practical terms."
All I was trying to emphasize was that the practical, real-world side of Beckett was substantially more bold and generous than one might suppose based on some of the themes in his art, which is a point your anecdote about the jacket also makes.
I think the quietist thread in Beckett is a strong part of his aesthetic, but let's not omit (as the author does) the reality that Beckett also worked with the French resistance against the Nazis. His art explored the suffering and futility inherent in the human condition, but his actions were not those of a person who simply surrendered.
It occurs to me to that sometimes "silly" projects can also lead to practical applications. Mainly I think I'm struck by how many techy people have the impulse to pursue these quirky projects, and how there is sort of a poetic spirit to it under the techy exterior. As you say, it's certainly a more interesting and creative use of time than sitting on the couch watching TV.
It's interesting to me how frequently on HN I read about people using their formidable technical expertise to pursue projects with really impractical and anachronistic technology, whether it's this project, or retrofitting some really old laptop with scarcely any processing power, or whatever. I understand the impulse to reject practicality and not let "the market" or merely pragmatic considerations dictate one's creative/intellectual impulses. But there is also something perverse about devoting so much brainpower and energy to these kinds of niche projects, which seem almost like a sort of performance art or a thought experiment made real. I find it kind of appealing, but also kind of odd.
For a couple of years I wrote a blog called Drug Law Blog, back in the days when medical marijuana was getting going in California. It became pretty popular, but I felt uncomfortable about monetizing it bc my interest in drug regulation really is mostly intellectual/libertarian and as a parent I didn't really want to take money from the marijuana industry. I eventually shut the blog down prior to legalization of marijuana. (I had thought the blog would help me build my practice as an appellate attorney, but that part did not pan out.) I think if I had had different values I could have made a tremendous amount of money, but it just wasn't for me.
>Why would I want to spend my leisure time experiencing that? How is that entertaining?
As another commenter above noted, it's a form of wish fulfillment and imaginary transgression, which is particularly appealing to teenage boys, since virtually all forms of actual aggression are off limits. Sports are the only arena where boys are allowed to be physically aggressive in real. Other than that, we have an entire group of young people who once would have been learning to hunt and kill and defend their clan but who now have to sit around and do very little besides read, write, and stare at computers. Arguably it's a positive thing to have less violence, but it leads many young men to wonder why the hell their bodies are strong and powerful. In video games, they at least get to pretend that there is some utility to being able to be forceful.
I don't think the person to whom you're responding was trying to "ruin" anything, they were just pointing out a complicating fact that is objectively true, which is that Frito Lay is in the business of selling junk food. The inspirational part and the problematic part are both real things, and acknowledging one doesn't mean the other is unimportant.
I don't love the terminology either, but it's like a lot of evolving linguistic culture: it tends to stick in the craw of those of use who grew up using different words, not because it is "wrong" per se but because it is different. I think the linguistic shift actually does map on to a notably different attitude toward the way cultural products are produced and consumed, as other commenters have noted, as well as the democratization of the resources for creating things like video due to the ubiquity of smartphones.
Automate the Boring Stuff is one of the sources I have used. I think perhaps I just need to be patient and keep at it and trust that I will find an application for the techniques.
I think it's true, as the blog author notes, that although is a great deal of intro python material, there is a lack of discussion of what useful stuff can be done with intermediate python skills. I've tried studying python three times now. Each time I get a little further, but also each time after a while I start to go "but what the heck can I do with this in my own life that is actually useful?" Probably it's a failure of my own imagination and/or simply a function of the fact that I work as a lawyer and so don't have any obvious examples in my head of how I'm going to use the code, but if I can't see even a potential application down the line I find it difficult to slog through the tedious work. I had originally got going in this area because I had a data-mining idea in mind, but that fell by the wayside.