nico λ

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

“It’s where cultural identity and cheap viral consumerism intersect,” D. Andrew Price, head of content at Memes Media Group, said of how Mr. Kirk’s T-shirt has proliferated in recent days.

Susana Tosca, a scholar of internet culture at the University of Southern Denmark, said, “Online culture thrives on templates that can be endlessly remixed and... See more

We have to give up. You surrender to the reality that things just take the time they take, and that you can’t quiet your anxieties by working faster, because it isn’t within your power to force reality’s pace as much as you feel you need to, and because the faster you go, the faster you’ll feel you need to go. If you can let those fantasies... See more

One can expect to find among the cultural, intellectual, and economic elite, says Lasch, a “snobbish disdain for people who lack formal education and work with their hands, an unfounded confidence in the moral wisdom of experts, an equally unfounded prejudice against untutored common sense, a distrust of any expression of good intentions, a... See more

1+1=3.

It's the same with most successful people. They're never more engaged than when you disagree with them. Whereas the obstinate don't want to hear you. When you point out problems, their eyes glaze over, and their replies sound like ideologues talking about matters of doctrine.

You might wonder: why bother with this, when we could call len(user_db.users) ? One answer is that len(user_db.users) is more tightly coupled, which is usually undesirable. Coupling is when one part of the system depends on another part.

, “Almost the only position of spiritual dignity left to men, therefore, is a kind of stoic silence, made bearable by the amusement of seeing, hearing, and knowing the full historical irony that its victims are blind and deaf to, and disciplined by the act of withholding comment on what we know.”

Anyone who’s spent a few months at a sizable tech company can tell you that a lot of software seems to exist primarily because companies have hired people to write and maintain them. In some ways, the software serves not the business, but the people who have written it, and then those who need to maintain it. This is stupid, but also very, very... See more