zupatol

There's a healthy way to be a critic, which is helping people find and enjoy works they didn't notice.

There are also unhealthy ways of being a fan, for example if you admire someone there's probably someone else you despise. It's much better to follow the title of the post and believe in people in general.

I asked it what are some famous squares around the world, and it gave me a list of squares "with historical significance" that included Tienanmen. When I asked what gave it historical signficance, it mentioned the 1989 pro-democracy protests.

Deepseek wouldn't name any squares in Beijing.

According to wikipedia, it's not certain she converted to christianity. She was raised as an agnostic, so was only jewish "ethnically".

It's not very surprising to find math in Perec's work, he deliberately put it there.

This joke, that the Germans or the Swiss have no sense of humor, I never found it funny. But maybe that's just because I'm Swiss.

I justs finished reading the book and the idea that a simulation universe need not have another universe simulating it indeed baffled me. How do you make sense of that? I was disappointed there wasn't a clearer motivation for it.

Ah, visual anagrams, that was exactly the idea I had for a project that would allow me to learn. I hadn't dared looking if it already existed. I will try to pretend it doesn't and try to find my own way...

We don't seem to have the same taste, but you made me really curious by mentioning comics.

What are your recommendations for bandes dessinées that are stronger than Flaubert?

Haven't read all of that, but it strikes me that some of these authors like Freud and Levi-Strauss are perfectly understandable without much background. Haven't tried Kant but other authors consider him very methodic and logical, about the opposite of Deuleuze, and he's a big inspiration for the very readable Schopenhauer.

Maybe Hegel and Heidegger are where things get complicated.

I read a few pages of thousand plateaus and I didn't get the impression he really wanted the reader to make sense of it.

It's full of quotations of works you would certainly know if you had enough culture. It feels like an violent attempt to humiliate the reader into submission. Apparently the english version came out with a lot of footnotes to provide context. This probably betrays the spirit of the original.

I'll try to listen to the podcast though, maybe some civilized people did manage to find something valuable in his writing.

I've been using it for years on windows. Magit is much slower but still great. Some people run emacs inside wsl, and I've done that once or twice to try out unix-only modes, but they were never good enough to convince me to use them.

My life improved a lot when I switched to Doom emacs, which takes care of a lot of emacs stuff I don't know that well.

Their first point is that saying the values are already there. The most obvious value of science is truth, which can be reached by the scientific method, which allows paradigms to change. Giving so much importance to truth is a matter of faith, you don't derive that from somewhere. It's interesting that they're going further than that and apparently find awe and meaning even just from the scientific method. Awe and meaning are in short supply in this world, so it's worth asking if we can get more of it from science, instead of pretending it's not there.