The Democratic Party was haunted by claims that it had "lost" China to the Communists, and it did not want to be accused of also losing Vietnam. Thus, the decision to intervene in Vietnam militarily was based on political expediency, the need to win a second term, and not on rationality.
Decades later I'm tuning YAML files that trigger ansible runs on CIs that compile docker images in which we embed hundreds of npm packages that get transpiled from typescript. Which gets released to cloud serverless edge thingies that store stuff in a database and on some block storage. All to serve a page that's similar in information and... See more
Text can convey ideas with a precisely controlled level of ambiguity and precision, implied context and elaborated content, unmatched by anything else. It is not a coincidence that all of literature and poetry, history and philosophy, mathematics, logic, programming and engineering rely on textual encodings for their ideas.
Addiction is in all of us. This argument has come to matter a great deal to me. The reason I care about it is that when I truly felt this notion in my bones, reading accounts of addiction and recovery from across history, it was profoundly reassuring and comforting. As I write at more length in the book, I developed a sense of fellowship with all... See more
When we dress our beliefs up in rational argument, we ironically end up constructing an iron-clad fantasy world. We convince ourselves that we’re immune to emotional appeal, that we alone have the pragmatic sobriety needed to see the situation clearly. But often all we’ve done is add a protective layer of reason around something that feels true.
All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working... See more
V8 has a snapshot feature that serializes the generated Isolate Context state and deserialize it to reduce overhead and accelerates the generation of Isolate Context.
We are living through the emergence of a new business category which I believe will become an important part of our digital lives: community-curated knowledge networks
(a thread on why) https://t.co/ZNg3FHiGUD