Religion/Spirituality Mythologizing Me Like I Do You Until I got my turntable last year, I had forgotten how satisfying it is to slide a record out of a paper sleeve, put the needle down, and listen to a whole album from start to finish. There’s an element of ritual that feels not unlike the start of a prayer or a religious observance.
Programming On Composition as the Guiding Principle of Functional Programming One of the most important concepts in functional programming is composition. If you’ve ever used Unix command line activities to pipe commands together, you have used a form of composition.
Insert Pithy Quote Here When an author litters their text with quotes from others, it always reads to me as very amateur writing. It feels like a kid writing a term paper who needs just x more
Politics Slacking Off as a Revolutionary Act The worker becomes a revolutionary not by becoming more of a worker but by undoing his “workerness.” And in this he is not alone; the same applies to the farmer, the student, the
Politics On Silent Pogroms If a Jew and a Gentile happened to be arrested on the same charge, it was certain that the Gentile would go free while the Jew would be sent to prison and sometimes
Politics On the Commodification of Everything Beautiful After my first medical appointments of the day, I find myself hanging out at a Panera and dreaming of a world there were public spaces I could sit on a democratically controlled Internet,
Politics What “The Economy” Means …“the economy,” which was a short-hand term for corporate profit… (A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn) This is a very useful thought technology. We should all implement a
Politics On Meritocracy and the Role of Capitalist Inoculation Undoubtedly, ordinary people benefited to some extent from these changes. The system was rich, productive, complex; it could give enough of a share of its riches to enough of the working class to
Programming What I Like About Haskell: Data Structures As Control Flow When you first encounter Haskell-inspired structures like Maybe, Either, or Reader, they might seem needlessly complicated. I myself was guilty of thinking that these abstractions only served to obfuscate control flow that would
Politics On Revolution, Reform, and Capitalism’s Terrifying Escape Room The problem of democracy in the post-Revolutionary society was not, however, the Constitutional limitations on voting. It lay deeper, beyond the Constitution, in the division of society into rich and poor. For if
Politics On Ineffectiveness When I walked into Starbucks this morning, I ran into a guy with a shirt not unlike this one. Maybe he hasn't been keeping up with his daily pledges?
Politics On Disruption and Underpaid Labor MoviePass says its model can realize a healthy profit margin, provided it can monetize its user data and sign up enough casual moviegoers. This one sentence says so much about what's wrong with
Politics The Intersection of Exploitation and Privilege During the Cold War, defense companies like Lockheed in the Santa Clara Valley drew scores of ambitious scientists; these workers seemed to share certain personality traits, including social awkwardness, emotional detachment, and, namely,
Gardening Dandelions “About this grass now. I didn't finish telling. It grows so close it's guaranteed to kill off clover and dandelions-” “Great God in heaven! That means no dandelion wine next year! That means
Nature Lawn to Meadow Progress Pic When I look over my back garden, I really think this meadow thing is starting to happen. This is definitely a project that will evolve over the years rather than mere months.
Nature In Full Bloom The black-eyed susans at the front of the garden are thriving. More blooms appear every day.
Programming A Balm For Gaslighting Myself I know it's a stupid and rather meaningless indicator, but when I have moments where I doubt that I'm a “real” developer, my GitHub activity chart helps reassure me that I'm a real
Politics A Passion for Things At IKEA, I found possibly the best short description of capitalism ever.
Link Article Apologies as Commodities A huge multi-national company like Starbucks is inextricably plugged into the system of global capitalism and, as such, is complicit in all the forms of oppression that this system engenders or heightens. But
Religion/Spirituality Genuine Discourse vs. Attempted Conversion Is genuine dialogue possible if I (as one partner in the dialogue) am already convinced that I possess the fullness of truth, and so the other does not have something to tell me
Gaming Without Going Over The "highest-bid-without-going-over" mechanic in The Price Is Right is ultimately a way to turn a lower variance game of skill into a higher variance game of chance. FIGHT ME.
Gaming Of Witchers and Child Soldiers Throughout the Witcher series, especially in the earlier anthologies and the video games, Geralt makes the claim that he no longer has proper emotional responses because of the mutagens and potions the witchers
Nature Spring Is Here For Real Yesterday, our first black-eyed susan bud opened in all it’s glory, and if you look closely, you can see a tiny spider chillin’ on the petals.
Programming Effectful Haskell: Reader, Transformers, Typeclasses Here we’ll be looking at Reader, starting with a common use case – accessing application configuration – and working our way to effectful bliss, starting from first principles. Once we’re there, we’ll
Programming Time After Capitalism A large part of what makes hobbies enjoyable is that, freed from the profit motive, practitioners work at the pace they choose, allowing them to experiment, mess up, quit, and start over. My