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We had our child's photo taken at Walgreen's in his car seat instead of the white reflective backdrop thing they usually use The worker told us "don't worry we can take that out." I was pretty interested to see what kind of software they were going to use.

A few minutes later, I look over at the worker's computer and she's manually scrubbing it out around the kid's head with a hard-edge white rectangle tool in something like MS Paint.

The state department didn't mind apparantly.

> If intelligence is now meaningless and being perceptive is worthless, all that remains is the ugliness of stupid power.

I don't disagree that there are some truly awful people in power in certain places right now, but this statement is ridiculous. Many intelligent and perceptive people are very cruel or foolish.

Your observation is sharp, but it's not just metainfo—it's load-bearing text. To remove it, you need to delve deep and alter the tapestry of carefully selected words.

edit: almost forgot the "—"

Yes, but I think the missing ingredient is that building societies "bid" to decide who gets to go first. Whoever is willing to take the smallest loan/pay back fastest gets preference.

Reinventing building societies seems very cool to me -- it's a little more nuanced than the birthday thing, but it's a system that can work with assets that generate value.

> > “it is blasphemy to delete a test”,

> was ever a thing. i still don't.

I experienced this when working at a giant company where all the teams were required to report their "code coverage" metrics to middle management.

We had the flaky test problem too, but I think another angle of is being shackled to test tech-debt. The "coverage goals" in practice encouraged writing a lot of low quality tests with questionable and complex fixtures (using regular expressions to yoink C++ functions/variables out of their modules and place them into test fixtures).

Fiddling with tests slowed down a lot of things, but there was a general agreement that the whole projected needed to be re-architected (it was split up over a zillion different little "libraries" that pretended to be independent, but were actually highly interdependent) and while I was there I always felt like we needed to cut the Gordian knot and accept that it might decrease the sacred code coverage.

Not sure if I was right or what ever happened with that project but it sure was a learning experience.

> The funny part about the young author example, how older authors are not exciting to discover? Yeah the richest and most successful author of all time was discovered when she was 32. J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit at age 45. Little House on the Prairie? Published when Laura Ingalls Wilder was 65.

Agreed. I felt like this article was grasping for something good, but remark that "45-year-olds aren’t discovered, they’re uncovered, like toxic waste, or a political scandal" is ass-backwards.

Tolkien and Wilder and both great examples of writers who produced landmark works basically as a byproduct of leading full and interesting lives -- not by orbiting the publishing world and champing at the bit to churn out some flashy yet forgettable novel at a record young age. When this happens, the only embarrassment is for the establishment "publishing world" which pretends to represent "literary greatness," not for the author who is "uncovered." Personally, I suspect that "uncovered" authors will endure at a higher rate than the "discovered" ones.

Also I have to add that I rolled my eyes at the "evidence" of Emily Dickenson killed herself. So did Hemmingway, who was first published at 26. What's your point?

Despite all this, the core insight that "suddenly you’re old, and find yourself in a permanent state of imperfection, which you must reckon with" I believe is very true. Even those who succeed in one area of life (being published) have to grapple with it. What options did they leave on the table in order to have that success? What options have been lost due to fame and success (only a fool would believe there are none)?

Becoming a particular (and necessarily, imperfect) person instead of a potential person is a kind of horrifying first taste of death. I think that the healthy way to deal with it is to make peace with the fact that our ability to change ourselves is limited and our ability to change the past is even less. The serenity prayer and AA-adjacent ideas do this.

As a last note, I thought the movie "The Weatherman" did a really good job exploring this.

I also started noticing this headline pattern ("something A as something B") all over the place a while ago and now automatically break it down as:

* Something A (probably) happened

* Something B (probably) happened

* The author/publisher are slimy weasels and I'm not going to give their stupid article any more time

Good review: I hadn't heard the Christian Science take on The Secret Garden before and am surprised the wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but it's pretty obvious now. The title imagery really makes me think of:

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good.

I think this is actually hitting much closer to the intention of Levitical law than people realize. Data and debt are very strongly connected, and I think probably always have been.

I recently heard a priest say that all bad theology comes out of Germany. I'm pretty sure it was a joke, but sometimes I wonder...