nico λ

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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But for me, for now, the friction is what I’m looking for. I am grateful — genuinely — for what Google and Apple and others did to make digital life easy over the past two decades. But too much ease carries a cost. I was lulled into the belief that I didn’t have to make decisions. Now my digital life is a series of monuments to the cost of... 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

I don’t think back on those days too often, but with Matthew Perry’s death, the memories have coiled around me because of how honest he was about his own addiction. I want to tell you something about addiction: No matter who it is or what substance that person is hooked on, loneliness is at its root. For whatever reason — and I have no theory as to... See more

Fentanyl laced weed has been endlessly debunked. So where does the claim come from? Who keeps on believing that weed is laced with fent? Police do. Politicians do. People who want to believe it keep on believing it. It’s confirmation bias. It sails right through their tunnel vision. Of course fent is in weed! Because there’s a plot by nefarious... See more

Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.

We have a problem here, folks. The word “intelligence” is a semantic catastrophe. Whenever doomers use this word, I have no idea what they’re talking about. I often don’t know if they’re talking about a real thing at all. And when they say things like, “AIs are approaching human-level intelligence,” I start to bang my head against the table. What... See more

And Appelbaum does not pause to contemplate a pressing question. Should America import a permanent servant underclass, economically crush the majority of working citizens, and allow communist satellite states to make luxury shoes with the equivalent of slave labor so that the asset-owning class can go on ever nicer cruises? Whether Appelbaum likes... See more