your data can’t tell me what i am experiencing.

"Blogging was not just a thing you did, a solitary practice: it was a thing you took part in; the thing you did was merely a means of entry, a contribution to a collective thing, a complex emergent system." @PaulGrahamRaven https://www.velcro-city.co.uk/you-can-never-step-in-the-same-blog-twice/

// i think nostalgia and realism are less divorced than we sometimes feel. yes, we can't recreate the past, what will be will be new. but what existed in the past is an existence proof, that kind of thing can exist. from the past we know the possible.

you try to punch down, but you and everybody else are all floating in open space.

as it all falls apart out here, they will write an emulator in javascript or wasm or something and we'll all be browser-based.

we'll drag and drop ourselves into a file-upload form and the it'll be like "whoosh!"

kind of like tron, except without the cool lighting.

we will pray for the persistence of localstorage.

what i mistook for human kindness was really just my bargaining power.

maybe harvard is just… not very interesting.

@dpp no!

@ttpphd we are enshittifying always.

sometimes it feels like the universe is glitching out and you realize how improbable are all the things you took as ordinary while in its spell.

@22@octodon.social @sqrtminusone@emacs.ch (do people lie about cramming tech interview books to prepare for this particular ritual? if they don't lie, i wouldn't call it cheating, just signaling interest through costly time-wasting. if they do lie it's cheating, but would interviewers hold prep against candidates to motivate the lying?)

@sqrtminusone@emacs.ch if there is a large-ish population that is "top" relative to the number of slots above some rung in the hierarchy, then (number-of-top-cheaters * (1 - chance-to-get-caught)) would dominate above some given height regardless. the two strategies aren't mutually exclusive. however good ones meritocratic skill is, as long as there are others of similar skill, the winners of the tournament will be unusually lucky and/or seek (and however luckily win) other advantages.

All these plagiarism scandals remind me of #KarlSmith's argument that, in a "meritocracy" (a hierarchy structured by triumphing in a series of not-remotely-independent competitive tournaments), we should expect those near the top to be disproportionately lucky cheaters, even if most cheaters get caught and most people don't cheat. https://www.forbes.com/sites/modeledbehavior/2012/06/20/the-dark-secret-of-meritocracy-reality-is-rigged/?sh=6fd35b955245

It’s gotten worse, but it could be worse.

"Once Jesus left conservatism, it ceased to have any intellectual foundation at all, and so became profoundly vulnerable to a strange kind of capture that produces Not Liberals. Call it MAGA or the new right or whatever you would like, it’s an ideology based on getting annoyed at self-righteous Democrats. The dark irony, of course, is that this is just another way to let liberals dictate your life." #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/what-goes-on-in-the-public-bathrooms

nothing is more corrupting of academic work than policy relevance.

the reason they don't like DEI is because it's analphabetic.

#DEF #GHI

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@peachfront @jannem @uastronomer @mike rebuild discoverability. there’s a bit of an RSS renaissance, web mentions, bridges to/from the Fediverse etc.

who needs planned obsolescence when you can have programmed breakdown and repair? https://www.404media.co/polish-hackers-explain-exactly-how-they-fixed-trains-that-the-manufacturer-bricked/ by @jasonkoebler ht @steve_zeke