I have a JSON formatter called Virtuous (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=karyfoun...) and till now I thought that is the best way to format JSON, and I most confess that I'll throw away my own formatter in favor of this one. What a great job.
Well they really destroyed everything that I knew was Punkt: Great design, minimalist, e-ink like displays with an android cheap design, no e-ink, and Phone as a Service? are you kidding us?
I have many books from Chomsky, and I want to throw them away because it disgusts me to have them. Then I think, why should I throw away things I spent so much on? It makes me more angry. So I have pilled them up somewhere to figure out what ti do with them and each time I walk past it I feel sad to ever passed by his work.
There's an interview with Dan schmachtenberger where he talks about the worst book ever written (his opinion is that it's 'the 48 laws of power'). He made the point that being consistently wrong is actually pretty impressive, and there are worthwhile lessons from watching someone getting taken seriously despite being wrong. Maybe you could revisit them with that approach.
Actually, it's both. I wanted to study media theory, and it was interesting that his work both appeared in compilers and philosophy, so I thought, “Let’s buy some books and dig into them.” The content was stupid, but I didn't need to throw the books away. After writing that comment here, I actually went and sent all of them to paper recycling...
It's not about the science, I keep all the deprecated or rendered wrong/irrelevant books because they shaped me at some point and I'm proud of that. But finding out an author sitting on your bookshelf can possibly be a child abuser and definitely in-ties with Epstein disgusts me and I no longer keep anything from them.
I actually put in the time and searched many times. Again and again. I'm more confident of his guilt than of innocence. The very fact that he even walked past Epstein devalues his work altogether. I don't need to hear of his guilt, just the fact that he required Epstein's help with his finances makes him no one to talk about the elites in power.
Make sure to vet your entire circle - friends, relatives, books, movies, everything... it's going to take a while. In the meantime you'll stop learning/growing too.
Mine is as ludicrous a suggestion as it is to damn by association.
I assume this comes from his views in politics and/or association with things like Epstein. I would say, independent of that, some works of him can be very valuable. Private life of persons and their work, are better put in totally different context, and not mixed.
The thing is, nothing that usually changes things applies to Chomsky. What he did was most certainly not a normal thing to do in his time. Like one might say about George Washington or even further back, like Clovis. By today's standards they were morally wrong, but not by the standards of their time and they advanced morals. They made things better.
Chomsky is wrong by the standards of his time and is making things worse rather than better.
It was very much the opposite of Chomsky's ideology as well. So it additionally means he's fake. BOTH on his morals and politics/activism, from both sides (ie. both helping a paedophile, and helping/entertaining a billionnaire).
So it's (yet another) case of an important figure that supposedly stands for something, not just demonstrating he stands for nothing at all, but being a disgusting human being as well.
> It was very much the opposite of Chomsky's ideology as well.
On the contrary. Chomsky was open about his civil-libertarian principles: If you are convicted, and you complete your court-ordered obligations, you have a clean slate.
Tell me, did that attitude extend to helping billionnaires who are having sex with minors? Because that's what he did. Is that what this ideology stands for?
Read the article above. There is a link at the top of this submission to an essay by Peter Norvig, arguing (correctly, in retrospect) that Chomsky's approach to language modelling is mistaken.
Obviously I did read the article. And I know how the hn site works.
I have a passing familiarity with the debate over Chomsky's theories of universal grammar etc. I didn't notice anything in the article that would cause disgust, and so I wondered what I was failing to understand.
If you have read many books by Chomsky, it might make you angry that you have wasted so much time on what turned out to be a fundamentally mistaken theory.
The fact that he wrote volumes about manufacturing consent, death of the American dream and Israel's invasion of Palestine while he used to travel in luxurious jets with Epstein who was everything that he pretended to fight against.
Sounds like bit of an over-reaction if I am being honest.
Some of his books are deeply insightful even if you decide to draw the opposite conclusion. I wouldn’t say anything would create disgust unless you had a conclusion you wanted supported before reading the book.
Regarding the Epstein thing, bizarre to bring that up when discussing his works, seems like you hate him on a personal level.
Pretty massive stretch making that inference based on the data don’t you think? Or is this an underhand way to get back at someone you disagree with politically?
Dude would talk about manufacturing consent, elitist circles, and what Israel is doing with poor Palestinians and then go aboard Israeli-spy, super elitist, consent manufacturing, sex trafficker, rapist, Epstein's private jet. What a total insult to everyone who ever read his things
Chomsky had a stroke a couple of years ago and isn't capable of speaking; the family is trying to maintain their privacy and so there isn't much public information about it but it came out that he can raise his arm when he sees something he dislikes and it doesn't look like much beyond that.
He already said he had nomoral objections to deal with Epstein knowing about his first conviction for sex trafficking, because in Chomsky's view the man served his time and justice had been served. Yes, to Chomsky Epstein was an innocent man after serving a few months for sex trafficking and having sex with a dozen of minors. The socialist anarchist Chomsky had no ethical objections when he asked a convicted billionaire sex trafficker how to invest a few millions.
What I cannot understand is why they left Dynamicland and made it a product. (Which is against everything that Bret Victor stands for). And there is nothing mentioned anywhere.
I'm a huge fan of Brett Victor's previous work and a lot of it was a huge inspiration. I used to think Dynamicland was extremely cool and followed the updates excited where it would go but that was many many years ago now and honestly Dynamicland is the worst use of a major talent like that.
A mix of the worst of Academia where knowledge is trying to be locked to a single place and network for gatekeeping, a rebuild everything from scratch within that single place meaning all effort put in by anyone there only advances within those walls, locking everything within that system meaning the time and effort is ultimately wasted when the most beautiful thing about computing is 1 person can write something that empowers millions.
If the whole thing had been built with the ideology that the first Dynamicland was built to die as in the knowledge and idea should have had virality built in at its core by providing the tech and instructions for how to recreate it then yeah I'd be fine with the indulgent thing of it being the one phyiscal space.
Dynamicland by building with the ideology that it's building with if this idea ever takes off then it deserves to be a footnote while the system that manages to bring it to the masses deserves the credit.
Oh that’s what this is? Finally! I’ve been waiting for someone to do this for years (assuming this is an open source thing like the Github implies, the site has been hugged to death).
I live in Baltimore, I don’t know anyone in Oakland and have no occasion to visit there, so there’s no way I’m ever going to see the original Dynamicland. Bret Victor’s insistence that Dynamicland’s ideas can’t leave that space have never made any sense to me. I can’t see something like this as anything other than a positive good.
Is it a product though? So far they've just released all their code as open source (which Dynamicland did not do) and helped people set up their own Folk systems in other cities. I don't think they're selling anything.
I would buy one of these if they sold a kit. Although I have the skill-set to assemble an working copy of folk myself without the kit, it's something that I just haven't prioritized doing. And a kit is probably enough for me to get over that hump.
Imagine if the 3D printing movement ideologically refused to sell kits. 3D printing would have remained irrelevant instead of starting a revolution and creating millions of home makers. Same for Arduino and so many other devices.
If the goal of dynamicland & folk is to empower everyone to participate in computing by moving it into the physical world, I'm not sure why lowering the barrier to the necessary hardware is off limits. That's what dynamicland is doing with the UI, but how can anyone interact with the UI if it only exists in Oakland, CA?
Folk is doing the messy work of making dynamicland-style physically interactive computing available on hardware that normal people have access to and in the environment where they currently are.
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