Twenty-Eighteen
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A weird side-effect of living in SF is cities in movies start to look fake: where is all the feces and shattered glass and tent cities? I’ve always assumed the city govt was just disfunctional, but the speed with which they removed the menace of convenient, ecofriendly scooters makes me wonder if they’re actually malevolent, somehow.
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government is the entertainment division of the industrial-military complex – Frank Zappa
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Up and up the bitcoin goes, beats dollar and the rouble. All at once it drops like shit - Pop goes the bouble!
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“Nothing is cheaper than someone else’s time.” – Charlie Gibb
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The only thing that can’t be solved by another layer of indirection is too many layers of indirection.
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Can someone explain like I have a degree in computer science from a good university, but opted for a career as a software engineer in some relatively high level languages?
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I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Trolls “R” Us kid There are a million sites on the web where I can post shit I don’t wanna grow up, cause maybe if I did I couldn’t be a Trolls “R” Us kid
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What’s the difference between Sarah Palin’s mouth and her vagina? Only half the stuff that comes out of her vagina is retarded.
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A man walks into a pharmacy, and heads to the birth control section. He is looking at condoms when an employee approaches him and asks if he needs help.
“No, I’m just buying condoms for my teenage daughter” he says. “Oh, so she’s sexually active?” the employee asks. “No, she just sort of lays there like her mother does”
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20 years ago I wrote my dissertation using LaTeX. Two years ago I found it in old backups and immediately stuck it into a git repo, built a LaTeX hosting docker container and built the whole ~120 page doc using the makefile I made at the time. I then proceeded to marvel at the ingenuity of people, the hubris of a young man and the futility of it all. I then quenched the rising tide of existential angst with a few craft beers I purchased using proceeds from my day job building silly web-apps in JavaScript for a big multinational mining company.
Had I written it in word I would have tossed the disk into the trash, and watched a movie.
LaTeX, the gift that keeps on giving.
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The Boss, however, is maintaining his reserve.
There are five main exercises undertaken by managers who don’t have the wherewithal to do their job but want to look like they’re contributing:
- A Review of “lessons from the past”,
- The big push for documentation,
- An anal-gazing “Look-to-the-future” exercise,
- Team building and/or Group Dynamics, or,
- A comprehensive review of something to reach the conclusion they’ve already thought of.
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“But you must have thought about things,” I said. “About your life, about the human condition.”
Chris became surprisingly introspective. “I did examine myself,” he said. “Solitude did increase my perception. But here’s the tricky thing — when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. With no audience, no one to perform for, I was just there. There was no need to define myself; I became irrelevant. The moon was the minute hand, the seasons the hour hand. I didn’t even have a name. I never felt lonely. To put it romantically: I was completely free.”
“What I miss most,” he eventually continued, “is somewhere between quiet and solitude. What I miss most is stillness.” He said he’d watched for years as a shelf mushroom grew on the trunk of a Douglas fir in his camp. I’d noticed the mushroom when I visited—it was enormous—and he asked me with evident concern if anyone had knocked it down. I assured him it was still there. In the height of summer, he said, he’d sometimes sneak down to the lake at night. “I’d stretch out in the water, float on my back, and look at the stars.”
– Christopher Thomas Knight, the the North Pond Hermit of Maine
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The Internet used to be SMART PEOPLE in front of DUMB TERMINALS. Now, the reverse situation prevails.
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The Internet - the mother-ship of people who don’t know much and aren’t afraid to go public
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I doubt that it will get better. There’s a whole generation starting to fill the FAANG bullpens that never saw anything beyond the cordoned appscapes of their indistinguishable mobile devices. Maybe someone will notice that “hey, I’m using this insanely clever federated way of connecting my microservices with <rpc-du-jour>, what if…”. Probably will end up on something like the suckless/unixpr*n pages and go a few steps too far, banging ASCII rocks together to summon the holy gopher.
-- seen on Hacker News
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There is Pleasure in the Pathless Woods
There is pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society, where none intrudes, By the deep sea, and music in its roar: I love not man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal.
– Lord Byron, Childe Harold Vanto iv. Verse 178
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Ginsberg’s Theorem: 1. You can’t win. 2. You can’t break even. 3. You can’t even quit the game.
Freeman’s Commentary on Ginsberg’s theorem:
Every major philosophy that attempts to make life seem meaningful is based on the negation of one part of Ginsberg’s Theorem. To wit:
- Capitalism is based on the assumption that you can win.
- Socialism is based on the assumption that you can break even.
- Mysticism is based on the assumption that you can quit the game.
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Why I Wake Early:
Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.
– From Mary Oliver’s collection Why I Wake Early.