nico λ

The government lost control of controlled substances. The Sackler’s main crime, which doesn’t really come through in these dramas because it’s actually a difficult thing to narrativize, is knowing precisely how to exploit America’s thin, hollowed out, and very weak regulatory state. And that’s just not a very sexy Netflix style crime. It’s a crime... See more

At some point you will discover the Right Way to program, the thing which makes this all make sense , and you'll be convinced that the whole field would be so much better off if everybody else programmed the Right Way, too. For me the Right Way was test-driven development; for you it might be functional programming, lisp, formal methods or one of a

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1+1=3.

But the informational value of the web has been nearly destroyed. Fake News isn’t even the biggest problem. It’s the digital ecosystem’s insistence on stifling curiosity by prioritizing ANSWERS over questions.

Most impactfully, the web has been systematically re-engineered to hinder discovery in order to drive people as quickly as possible to... See more

Life has gotten very chaotic incredibly quickly. It has become increasingly difficult to parse anything from the static. People started coping with this lack of meaning through a kind of ironic detachment (which is very much still around), but it has matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness. This isn’t nihilism per se. (Even... See more

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. This often requires breaking old ideas, which is much easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that ” or rely on the fact... See more

The serious scholars in non-Western thought should bring us the powerful texts they know of to help us. For the true canon aggregates around the most urgent questions we face. That is the only ground for the study of books. Nietzsche did not seek out Socrates because he was part of the classical canon German boys learned in school. He did so in... See more