Politics On the Tyranny of the Herd This morning, while writing in my journal, I found myself wondering if pencil sharpeners are allowed on airplanes. This is precisely the sort of question that the human mind can only ponder because the rules for what one can take onto airplanes are arbitrary
Nature The Little Things Back in April, after several months of allowing our garden to grow out with native Florida plants and wildflowers for pollinators and other wildlife, we got a notice from our
Programming Monoids as a Way To Keep Code DRY We have a maxim in programming circles: Don’t repeat yourself, commonly abbreviated as “DRY.” It’s not uncommon to see a comment on your PR asking you pull something out into a repeatable function in order to “keep your code DRY.” function getFileContents(
On Neurodiversity, Category Theory, and The Discourse I have recently discovered something important about me and how my mind works that feels like precisely the sort of thing that I should note. Maybe some day it will
Religion/Spirituality On Religion, Righteous Anger, and Smashing Structures I don’t write about religion and my religious beliefs as much these days because, after my year and a day of study and reflection, I feel like I’ve answered most of the big structural questions in a way that works for me.
Politics On Social Media As Inoculation This is not to say people shouldn’t seek comfort in art, in TV, in movies. It’s the only way to not go mad! But, in our view, do it knowing what you’re doing is fun and aesthetic, not militant and subversive—
Not Exactly Seeing Eye-To-Eye I feel awkward writing about autism. In an article from the past year, I summed it up nicely with the following footnote: Because I’ve never been diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, I usually feel awkward taking on that mantle.I first
Politics Can I Talk To A Manager? “Speaking to the manager” is a sort of tyrannical helplessness; it is the haughty demand for intercession on one’s behalf by an array of greater forces you assume are servile. It is worded like a demand, but it is in fact a plea.
Politics Nothing to Syndicate It should be clear what all these changes in the nature of work mean for syndicalism: It is difficult to organize the workplace if there is no workplace. It is even harder if there are no workers. Of course, there still are workplaces, and
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 pages to meet the minimum set by their teacher. Am I
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,
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 even shot. They were all the time exposed to insult and
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, spaces truly open to all that didn’t require you to
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 substitution in our heads for these two phrases. s/the economy/
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
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
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 some people had great wealth and great influence; if they had
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 the tech industry from my perspective. Users aren't buyers in a
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
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
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
