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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 enforc…

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 someth…

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). c…

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…

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 infi…

Java is an Oracle product

If we're being pendantic it should say "Pierogi in low earth orbit"

at the end of the day, if you run it on an iPhone, it's iOS that renders the text, and apple is routinely subpoenaed

In fact there are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_terms_with_diacritical...

I have no first hand experience of Pyongyang, so I have no way to say what's typical, but I really enjoyed this YouTube video of a morning commute https://youtu.be/CDcfiEX__cA?si=t…

Keep in mind, in the really malicious cases where an extension has changed hands, they often just sell the credentials to the Google developer account, so this won't detect those c…

Lunar illumination was once used by Abraham Lincoln to defend a murder suspect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duff_Armstrong#Murder_trial

There's a straussian dynamic at work here where the company wants to informally encourage generic use of their brand, but must also formally defend proper use of their brand for le…

this story does more to persuade me to switch to 1.1.1.1

This isn’t an example of shooting the messenger because you dislike the message. The SF Chronicle just has a track record of anti SF bias, then turning around and complaining about…

To preface: I don’t really have an opinion on affirmative action per se: That said, the elephant in the room is that institutions like Harvard and UNC aren’t really about education…