i hate living through history.
it was easier to mock the idea of it being over when you could squint and believe maybe kind of it might be.
“The clearest example of plagiarism: uncredited ghostwriters, but we all accept that for some reason.” @Atrios https://www.eschatonblog.com/2024/01/plagiarism-feeding-frenzy.html
your data can’t tell me what i am experiencing.
"Blogging was not just a thing you did, a solitary practice: it was a thing you took part in; the thing you did was merely a means of entry, a contribution to a collective thing, a complex emergent system." @PaulGrahamRaven https://www.velcro-city.co.uk/you-can-never-step-in-the-same-blog-twice/
// i think nostalgia and realism are less divorced than we sometimes feel. yes, we can't recreate the past, what will be will be new. but what existed in the past is an existence proof, that kind of thing can exist. from the past we know the possible.
you try to punch down, but you and everybody else are all floating in open space.
as it all falls apart out here, they will write an emulator in javascript or wasm or something and we'll all be browser-based.
we'll drag and drop ourselves into a file-upload form and the it'll be like "whoosh!"
kind of like tron, except without the cool lighting.
we will pray for the persistence of localstorage.
what i mistook for human kindness was really just my bargaining power.
maybe harvard is just… not very interesting.
sometimes it feels like the universe is glitching out and you realize how improbable are all the things you took as ordinary while in its spell.
All these plagiarism scandals remind me of #KarlSmith's argument that, in a "meritocracy" (a hierarchy structured by triumphing in a series of not-remotely-independent competitive tournaments), we should expect those near the top to be disproportionately lucky cheaters, even if most cheaters get caught and most people don't cheat. https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/06/20/the-dark-secret-of-meritocracy-reality-is-rigged/?sh=6fd35b955245
It’s gotten worse, but it could be worse.
"Once Jesus left conservatism, it ceased to have any intellectual foundation at all, and so became profoundly vulnerable to a strange kind of capture that produces Not Liberals. Call it MAGA or the new right or whatever you would like, it’s an ideology based on getting annoyed at self-righteous Democrats. The dark irony, of course, is that this is just another way to let liberals dictate your life." #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-goes-on-in-the-public-bathrooms
nothing is more corrupting of academic work than policy relevance.
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@peachfront @jannem @uastronomer @mike rebuild discoverability. there’s a bit of an RSS renaissance, web mentions, bridges to/from the Fediverse etc.
who needs planned obsolescence when you can have programmed breakdown and repair? https://www.404media.co/polish-hackers-explain-exactly-how-they-fixed-trains-that-the-manufacturer-bricked/ by @jasonkoebler ht @steve_zeke
When I write, what I want is links. Not from Twitter, or even from here, Mastodon. I want pieces of text that link my pieces of text, that I might link back to in conversation or from a writer I might read and link in the future. I want tendrils from individual human minds, rather than graffiti on undifferentiated scrollwalls. There used to be a symphony of links, melodies playing out over time and space, each of us could jam. There might be again.
"What we can do is simple: Start writing stuff again. And recording stuff. And filming stuff. And put it out in public - not on the corporate social media, but in your own blog, in your own web page, on Mastodon, on Peertube and wherever; put it where anybody can find it and react to it and link to it." @jannem https://janneinosaka.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-web-is-broken.html ht @uastronomer @mike
One way to understand the world as it is, why it is, is we are just so goddamned disappointed.