Why software sucks.
And why I cannot do anything about it.
sark’s Tweets
It is not so much that you should take the ontological consequences of your theories seriously and believe in the implied existence of fairies, so much as that the objects are irrelevant, and it is the relations which matter.
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Let us be clear. It is not so much that the market knows best, so much as that the planners know jack shit.
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In a sense what is abstract is what endures, whether it be something which is yet to be discarded by thinkers as unworkable, or simply what has survived the indifferent process of natural selection.
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My criticism of rationalism and software engineering is one and the same: doing at runtime what should be done at compile-time.
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Rationality is metacognitive cheesecake. It wasn't present in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
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You cannot grasp the thing in itself, but you do not interact with it in itself either! Focus on how you interact, not what is "objective" or "subjective". This is "abstract", since you focus on relations and not things, yet also "practical", since you work with your exposure.
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The universe is mostly a mass of confused movement, but some of that movement is free.
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Eichmann was banal. But perhaps you are, despite all that sound and fury, banal too.
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Do not confuse passion for non-banality.
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It's a bit like exercise: you should do it when you least feel like it. Ironic isn't it, how such atrocities as can be described as banal evils originate essentially from an unwillingness to go exercise.
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It's a bit like exercise: you should do it when you least feel like it. Ironic isn't it, how such atrocities as can be described as banal evils originate essentially from an unwillingness to go exercise.
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Types should be used to enforce freeness, not prove every goddamn property of your code under the sun.
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We are obviously not going to hurt someone if we don't believe it to be somehow justified. Therefore, it is precisely when we feel it to be morally justified where we have to be careful.
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At least not yet. It might start becoming vertically transmitted and civilisationally-aligned when its prevalence becomes universal. A little like globalisation, really.
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Software replicates via copying, scaled across number of users. It is not built upon previously written software, and it is not scaled over civilisational time.
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The lesson from structuralism isn't that isomorphic objects are identical, or that structures exist, but that identity and existence are instrumental stances which may be adopted for certain things according to fittedness to context.
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The universe makes some sense, but only so much as satisfies the survival preconditions for sense-making things. Not less, because there wouldn't be sense-making things. But not more because, by a counting argument, there are overwhelmingly more ways for things to not make sense.
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Why does it happen fairly often in mathematics that purely formal manipulations are proven later on to be semantically sound? I think this is because referential semantics is besides the point, and that intuition was grasping at the essential relations.
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It is the curse of a far from equilibrium thermodynamic process that life sustaining flux can be the same as structure destroying volatility.
The meta trap spiral: going meta handicaps your mental performance, worsening your already inaccurate understanding of how you think, leading to worse thinking, and worse mental/meta performance.
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Mathematics contributes to science, and science contributes to technology, entirely non-teleologically, strictly from the unearthing of new affordances, in the form of a greater imagination, leading to the expansion of theory and engineering spaces.
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When you are stuck, ask yourself: do you need validation or do you need search? This one question can save you from confusing P and NP an unprovable amount of times.
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Some years back my wife and I got into the habit of asking each other
‘do you want comfort or solutions’ when the other was having a bad time. That one sentence can save us from an argument 9/10 times.
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