nico λ

Elsewhere, you can slowly feel the internet enshittifying everywhere. Google search results are clogged with paid results, and X breaks down frequently. Hell, it feels like our web experience, in general, has gotten worse, not better, over time. Part of this is the push for monetization, but another aspect that drives the internet's... See more

Defining yourself by your suffering is an effective way to keep suffering forever

With that investigative spirit, Halsted had embarked on experiments with cocaine—then touted as a wonder drug—with a group of colleagues in 1884. Submitting themselves as test subjects, they explored the drug's pain-numbing abilities by injecting it into their peripheral nerves. In doing so, they would advance the concept of local anesthetic, a... See more

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in... See more

Consequently, in its idealized form the scientific method limits freedom of the will, while technology amplifies freedom of the will. Technology is by no means derived with certainty. It is the extremely particular result of someone’s will, based on rationalizing through the concrete and contingent circumstances of the world.

At the end of the day, much of this really will come down to a choice: How important is winning to you versus feeling good about yourself and being congratulated by your peers at your ever-shrinking coalition’s annual conferences and galas? I strongly suspect that in the case of many anti-Trump stalwarts, I know the answer — and it’s depressing as... See more

There are people who use these, apparently. And it just feels so... depressing. There are people I once respected who, apparently, don’t actually enjoy doing the thing . They would like to describe what they want and receive Whatever — some beige sludge that vaguely resembles it. That isn’t programming, though. That’s management, a fairly different... See more

He categories different biases:

• Availability bias - the tendency to judge the likelihood of an event by the ease with which relevant examples come to mind


• Confirmation bias - confirming what you expect to find by selectively accepting or ignoring information


• Affective bias - the tendency to make decisions based on what we wish were true