nico λ

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.

“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

When working on a team, you should usually ask the question

There’s a spectrum of “trying to figure out everything for yourself” to “bugging your coworkers with every little question”, and I think most people starting their careers are too far on the former side. There’s always someone around that has been in the codebase longer, or knows... See more

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

Moreover, depending on something to function, in and of itself, is not pathological. Many people require a daily medication to keep a chronic condition in remission, for example insulin, blood thinners, anti-retroviral therapy, and anti-hypertensives. Dependence becomes a problem when people persist in using a substance despite its use causing harm... 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

If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing

My favorite manager in my career had a habit of pressing me when I would claim something was difficult to implement. Often his response was something along the lines of “isn’t this just a matter of sending up X when we Y”, or... See more

If we insist on argument as the essence of education, we will defend democracy not as the most efficient but as the most educational form of government, one that extends the circle of debate as widely as possible and thus forces all citizens to articulate their views, to put their views at risk, and to cultivate the virtues of eloquence, clarity of

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1. Some therapists have an overly reductive understanding of psychiatric diagnosis. They seem to think a diagnosis of mental disorder necessarily implies there is some intrinsic brain abnormality. They think if someone’s symptoms can be explained with reference to a history of abuse or trauma, then a diagnosis doesn’t apply to them. The logic is so

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