amagumori

i think there's some way in which the brain "crystallizes" as one grows up, and the modes of cognition which are the most used in daily life are deepened at the expense of others. i'd compare it to trails being worn into the dirt by foot traffic; the most trafficked paths will remain for years and years, while the unused paths slowly disappear, until eventually they show no sign of their existence at all.

the example i'd give is to think of a kid playing with hot wheels. the kid is not playing with the physical toy; the toy is an avatar from which the kid is building a vivid imaginative playground. the kid is playing within the world of their mind's eye. adults, for the most part, can't play with hot wheels and dive into that same mental landscape of imagination and association. an adult just sees a small die-cast car. rather than being an inherent part of growing up, i think this power of the "mind's eye" is simply a mode of cognition our society doesn't reinforce and select for; so, for most, it's lost as they grow.

however, there's really a lot of utility in the power of imagination, and so we also see people who either never lost the ability through repeated reinforcement, or went to great lengths to re-activate it - artists like Katsuya Terada or Kim Jung Gi. notable with these artists is the way they're able to draw photorealistic pieces of eye-watering detail, without construction or perspective layout; they simply start from any point and draw, somehow putting every line in its exact place. when asked about how they possess what is essentially an artistic superpower, they've both related that they are able to visualize the scene in a vivid, consistent, and complete way in their mind's eye, and they simply draw from the mental image. both have said that they drew for hours a day in this "rakugaki" (doodle) style as kids, and never stopped the habit. in doing so they were able to retain and reinforce the power of visualization, a mode of cognition that emerges naturally, but is not retained if not practiced.

ok, so i'm curious how people feel about this, but i believe, for road riding, wider tires actually do make you faster, to a point of diminishing returns around 32c, because of cadence.

when you hit a bump with high PSI / road tires, your wheel bounces, you're momentarily unweighted from the pedals, and that means your cadence is interrupted. anyone who has raced cyclocross knows; there's a LOT of skill involved in applying pedal strokes at just the right times to absorb bumps while also continuing to apply power, and it's way less efficient than just riding clipless on a freshly paved road. every bump "resets" your muscle contraction cycle, and after a bump, you're often not at the right crank position to apply a hard, sharp pedal stroke to try to catch up.

i believe a ton of efficiency is lost through this biomechanical effect on cadence alone, and that's saying nothing of how much energy you lose in the transfer of forward momentum to an upward bounce impulse.

More so than even the choice of editor itself, I think the biggest argument for vim or emacs, especially for students, is that you “live in” the *nix cli.

The amount of stuff you soak up being a unix tool user is just night and day compared to using sublime text or something. Because using a cli text editor implicitly sets you on this path of learning through the command line. So you start with cding and lsing around, opening your file in vim, typing gcc or whatever. In a very frictionless and natural way, pretty soon you’re reading man pages, writing shell scripts and makefiles, etc.

In a very real way, the Unix command line environment has you poke around an interactive “boiler room” of your computer, and that type of learning, learning by exploration, is something far different from learning individual tools at a higher level of abstraction.

It’s like letting a kid loose into a master’s workshop instead of showing them one tool at a time. By seeing everything “together” and exploring what the different tools do, the “fog of war” of unknown unknowns clears much faster for a novice, and this provides a MUCH more solid knowledge footing to build on.

i'm usually not so pessimistic, but i was in a bad mood, especially because youtube-dl is such a essential tool for me. things aren't hopeless. they just feel that way sometimes.

what we've seen over the past decade or so is the creation of commons on the internet; however, these commons, like Youtube, Twitter, or Instagram, are centrally managed, owned, and controlled. the buy-in to these commons has grown and grown, and now that they are essential parts of the way the world communicates and consumes information, they're being "tightened down", with ever increasing ad loads, censorship, and "steering" (influence via search and recommendation visibility). as global inequality increases ever more starkly, these services represent a powerful means of control over a disaffected and disenfranchised populace - everyone has been herded into the walled garden.

the collective dream we had of the internet as a species-level advancement has, in fact, been a mirage. the idea was that the internet would allow free and uncensored communication across the world, perhaps allowing the citizens of the earth to organize against injustice, corruption, and repression, and to share information freely. in fact, what we see now is a global internet and computing backbone compromised to the core by nation-state actors, and a centralization of internet services controlled by an oligopoly.

not to put too fine a point on it, but the idea of a "global commons" or "collective good" cannot coexist with a world economy of globalized capitalism. the capitalization of the internet is a situation that is unprecedented in human society - we may have crossed an event horizon where societal control has grown to such a level where the very ability of people to fight repression and organize a more equitable society has died.

anyway, happy sunday

A CoC type clause requiring mesh mask listings to be posted with a “Not a Covid preventative mask” type notice seems like it’d make sense. Idk how the implementation of that requirement would go though.

Yeah it’s a weird situation where I feel like a lot of the people who the OP-1 is aimed at either can’t afford it, period or aren’t going to pay $1300 on a “toy”. Because of its market positioning it ends up being this unattainable luxury item that only professional/ established musicians use, instead of a MPC-esque everyman’s tool. The “toy” design positioning and huge price tag work in tandem to keep it unattainable- it’s not that people can’t afford it (although a lot of people can’t afford it) but at the high price tag, people start seriously min-maxing what they’re getting for their money. People are really reticent to spend an entire paycheck on something that’s even somewhat limited, and possibly the best “feature” (the high level of polish in design and UX) is sort of invisible and not looked at as a utilitarian “feature”.

H.R. Giger is up in heaven fist pumping

Yeah, dish soap is soap for washing dishes. Us Americans can get pretty craaazy with our naming conventions!

Oh shit, it’s authored by the Kolmogorov!

this comment is kinda the best possible case of "extremely literal reading of the OP's comment"

lcamtuf (don't know their real name) is an absolute whiz, the write-ups on their website and tools they've built are great.

also, their website is an example of a great, no-BS web design, for the reason that it's one level deep. there's no "articles", "tools", "contact" links adding a further level of indirection and hiding what's on those pages. all content titles and descriptions are in the same area and are all visible at once when the page loads - at a glance, you can see everything their site has to offer, and get an overall idea of their work almost instantly. side note - i don't think we talk enough about how important visual locality is for information design.

i mean, another angle is the parents that are posting videos of their kids online are not asking their kids for consent first, and the kids may be themselves unable to give consent. requiring videos of children to be unlisted seems completely reasonable to me.