jvergeldedios

Wanna know a great way to lose a race? Check your rear view mirror and see how far ahead you are and then let off the gas. Or worse, start braking.

We don't even know if Socrates not writing his teachings was a principled stance to begin with, so "Socrates was right" is a shaky place to start your argument. Also "Socrates said writing is bad, so don't write in this piece of writing that you didn't force me to buy" is one of the weirdest pieces of circular logic I've ever come across.

Even if we take for granted that it was principled, it almost certainly wasn't pointed at marginalia. The argument (that Plato put in his mouth, through written text, no less) is that writing that substitutes for internal recollection can't answer back. It's an argument against outsourcing a thought to fixed text. A margin note is the opposite: it's the reader talking back to the text.

You have a personal preference about buying unmarked books, and you retreat to a Grand Unifying Socratic Theory whenever someone challenges it.

> it almost certainly harms their own understanding of the book

What? For all people who ever mark up a book in the margins or highlight passages? How could you possibly know that?

> they're doing something that is guaranteed to harm overall human knowledge

Also what? Human knowledge is necessarily a collaborative effort. Reading a text with another person's notes alongside it is just another way to engage with it. I'll maybe grant you highlighting since it's been shown to not help with retention all that much.

We have a deeper understanding of some of the most famous thinkers in history because we have books that they marked up to help us understand how they engaged with specific texts. This is invaluable for "overall human knowledge."

Herman Melville marked up his copies of Shakespeare's works and that shaped how scholars read Moby-Dick. Did he "harm overall human knowledge" by doing that?

There is line that connects gov't subsidies in wealthy countries for the last 50 years funding private R&D to poorer countries being able to afford it. Arguably the poorer countries don't get to make the "decisions based on economic reality" in favor of solar without the subsidies in wealthy countries happening first. There is also an argument to be made that the R&D isn't finished and it still makes sense to subsidize it to drive the cost down further.

Hey that worked, thanks!

Yep also happening to me on Firefox w/ uBlock Origin turned on.

Even more interesting is the small establishments that skipped over credit cards straight into Venmo/Zelle.

So you're erecting a straw man and attacking that. My assertion is that policing in the US has structural issues that need to be addressed. I disagree that it's helpful to remember that it could be worse as evidenced in other countries. That's irrelevant to the original assertion.

Also the argument that there are proposals on how to address structural issues in policing that you deem "ridiculous nonsense" is a straw man that does not address my assertion.

I also have a feeling their definition of "attack" would differ from mine.

I've never understood the "be happy you're not in authoritarian Russia" type of argument for papering over the shortcomings of circumstances here in the US. Like, ok? Why are we comparing ourselves to places that are worse? Shouldn't we be striving to make things better relative to our own ideals and standards?

> you're essentially the new guy on your own project

Holy shit that's the best description of this phenomenon I've heard so far. The most stark version of this I've experienced is working on a side project with someone who isn't a software engineer who vibe coded a bunch of features without my input. The code looked like 6-8 different people had worked on it with no one driving architecture and I had to untangle how it all got put together.

The sweet spot for me is using it in places where I know the exact pattern I want to use to solve a problem and I can describe it in very small discrete steps. That will often take something that would have taken me an hour or two to hand code something tedious down to 5-10 minutes. I agree that there's no going back, even if all progress stopped now that's too huge of a gain to ignore it as a tool.

Does Amazon make any of this any easier?

Wouldn’t that just be fraud against the shareholders of company B by the management of company B?