oofnik

41,481. Nice. That was a fun time waster.

For fellow fans of Crawford's writing, he publishes on Substack at mcrawford.substack.com.

I had a similar experience just today when trying to debug a script that serves as a connector between AWS Athena and our internal log querying platform. I got fed up with trying to understand a bunch of arcane logic and asked ChatGPT to write me a new one.

After a couple of back-and-forth rounds of copying and pasting error messages and sample data, I got the ChatGPT script working as a drop-in replacement. The new script is more readable, the logic is simpler, it took me less time to complete than either debugging the old script or writing a new one from scratch, and it was an overall more enjoyable experience.

There is little doubt in my mind that in the not so distant future we will gawk at the thought that humans used to write production code by hand. Sure, the artisans and the enthusiasts among us will still be around to keep the flame, but day coding will be a mostly automated endeavor.

> If you don’t work somewhere that rewards curiosity, find somewhere else to work.

I wish everyone had this privilege.

This was delightful. Thank you for the reminder that a simple hobby driven by curiosity can be the source of so much joy.

> Inside, a 47-year-old man struggled to mix ashy heroin with fragments of crystal crack, crushing both into a souped-up speedball. Observed by a nurse, he took the needle and jabbed it into a vein in his neck. “The veins on his hands have all dried up,” the nurse said matter-of-factly.

I don't really understand how anybody sensible can read a sentence like that and think to themselves, "yes, this is fine."

If individual bodily autonomy is the god you have chosen to worship above all other paths painstakingly eked out over the ages through much trial and error toward human flourishing, I guess it makes sense, but for those of us who ascribe to more, dare I say, traditional ideas about what constitutes good human life, the thinking that underlies the kinds of policies which lead to the outcomes detailed in this article seem utterly abhorrent.

It's astonishing how much human misery and suffering some people are willing to put up with and justify when wearing ideological blinders.

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are intertwined in ways we are only beginning to understand, upending centuries of philosophical assumptions about human cognition.

Matt Crawford discusses this theme at length in "The World Beyond your Head" which I highly recommend:

> This brings up another uncanny fact about motorcycle steering: the bike goes wherever your gaze is focused. Most important, if your eyes lock on some hazard in the road, you will surely hit it. This is not a superstitious motorcyclist’s version of Murphy’s Law; it is a reliable fact, and it reveals something deep about the “intentionality” of our prereflective sensorimotor negotiation of the world. Inhabiting the kind of bodies that we do, our gaze and our locomotion are connected in ways that work for us, and we don’t have to think about it. But this accomplished integration becomes a liability when riding a motorcycle, and must be deliberately short-circuited. You have to learn to unlock your eyes as quickly as possible from every hazard, and instead look where you want to go.

What you have to understand about the contemporary media industry is that their primary business objective is to sell advertisements. Your attention is the product now; the more of it they can sell to advertisers, the more profitable the business becomes. It's much easier to present positive quarterly earnings reports by selling eyeballs and clicks than it is selling pretty much anything else. In the before times, when media companies were primarily in the business of selling content for a monthly or yearly subscription fee, this was much less of an issue.

You can't block access to their most profitable raw material and expect them to just sit and take it.

Closed ecosystem? Sealed environment? Prison? What do you suggest to use instead? The last term would seem apt given the term "jailbreaking"

I find it really interesting that until ten minutes ago, historically speaking, there was an implicit assumption that there exists a moral dimension to drug and alcohol consumption. I mean, referring to such substances as "stupifiers" really drives the point home - Tolstoy says these are things you consume when you wish to act in a way you know is morally questionable, or after the act to dull your conscience.

The overwhelming shift in the social sciences from the political to the personal, and the related shift from the moral to the psychological over the course of the twentieth century, has led us to the point where we are no longer able to even conjure up language necessary to condemn excessive drug and alcohol consumption in terms of moral failure without sounding like a religious lunatic.

It makes one wonder what Tolstoy would have to say about harm reduction.

I bought a copy.

Thanks, Jeff, for being interminably helpful.