whatgoodisaroad

what an unbelievably hostile cookie banner

I recommend John Berger's Ways of Seeing for a much more elaborate (and accessible) way to think about art

the Comstock act was unconstitutional at the time that it was actually enforced. i don't want to get into politics but there are many dynamic factors at work here

the US federal government historically banned books under the Comstock Act of 1873 which is still on the books and is still active federal law. it only currently isn't being enforced following some cultural changes in the 1960s. another change in the cultural winds could bring it back unfortunately

are you contending that every battle where someone is killed by an army counts as genocide?

the linked article describes military campaigns between state armies, not genocide

once we've refactored humans out of driving, the speed limits can go way up

it's a dynamic system where we feel less able to see ourselves as adults each time we gain therapy language to articulate trauma. something is gained with this language, but something is lost too

it could be fun to make a toy compiler that takes an arbitrary literate prompt as input and uses an LLM to output a machine code executable (no intermediate structured language). could call it llmllvm. perhaps it would be tremendously dangerous

i love Linnea Sterte books, stages of rot is also excellent

intelligence is an abstract concept, and sure, iq is a lossy way to measure it. but the idea that you could quantify intelligence into a scalar is absurd on its face and impossible to take seriously

i would argue that when you say "alphabetical order" you mean "lexicographic order"

there's a really interesting book called "When Prophecy Fails" that documents a doomesday cult. the cult had predicted a huge flood sometime in the 1950s and some sociologists infiltrated the group posing as believers to document their psychological response to the calamity not occuring

one of the core theses of the book is that adherents to a prophecy paradoxically believe in it much more strongly AFTER it's been disproven

Java is an Oracle product