You've found the right market. There's an awful lot of tech folk who don't read but want to feel like they do.
I gotta rep my favorite though, even if it's typical. "Call me Ishmael." It's not the narrator's actual name - he just feels like an outcast. It sets the pace for the mythic and worldly talk throughout the book. A high bar with complete follow-through. I'm a total sucker for it.
As a long-time web/app developer getting into game dev, it feels like I'm entering "the big leagues" of software engineering. Tougher problems, more problems, more _interesting_ problems, and problems without prebuilt solutions. Much more fun than making yet another dashboard.
Combining player control, multiplayer, non-player control, and physics is one of the tougher problems. I got it handled (enough) for my project, but I'd be very interested to read the source if Easel's physics engine gets open-sourced.
Theory and practice are both important. A few analogues:
- fundamentals on an instrument vs performance
- low-level graphics programming vs using a game engine
- comp sci vs software engineering
The theory side here gets to the root of things, is valid for any sort of DAW/DSP software, and has the benefit of being easier to teach. Practice is obviously more important though, especially in the arts. It's better to grope in the dark than do nothing.
Living in LA, the LAPD helicopter noise really is incessant.
It's hilarious to hear flying cops try to be intimidating through when dispersing illegal concerts or singling individuals out in non-violent crowds. It's impotent posturing and an obvious waste of money. They really don't need to send 5 squad cars and a helicopter for noise complaints.
I will say though that the loudspeaker on those things are surprisingly clear, even through the buzzing of a helicopter.
You really ought to never trust the output of LLMs. It's not just an unsolved problem but a fundamental property of LLMs that they are manipulatable. I understand where you're coming from, but prompting is unacceptable as a security layer for anything important. It's as insecure as unsanitized SQL or hiding a button with CSS.
EDIT: I'm reminded of the hubris of web3 companies promising products which were fundamentally impossible to build (like housing deeds on blockchain). Some of us are engineers, you know, and we can tell when you're selling something impossible!
Love this article. If you'd like a book that works deeply through the topic of commodified humanity, Minima Moralia by Adorno is painfully pertinent here.
To explain in the clearest terms: unlike the SS insignia, the lightning bolt in the logo has tapering at the bottom. The second element in the logo, the slash, does not have tapering at the bottom. The general shape of the logo is the same as the SS insignia: two diagonal elements side-by-side (which would be all good on its own). The mind tends to see repetition, so it has a tendency to "mix up" the two elements of the logo. The mind also has a tendency to remember similar things. Putting it all together, the logo has a chance to evoke the SS insignia.
I may just be reading too much Theweleit and W. Reich nowadays, but I think you'll get catch some flak for this logo if it becomes recognizable outside the tech milieu.
Imagine typing a description of your ideal self into an image generator and everything in the resulting images screamed at a semiotic level, "you are not the correct race", "you are not the correct gender", etc. It would feel bad. Enough said.
I 100% agree with Carmack that guardrails should be public and that the bias correction on display is poor. But I'm disturbed by the choice of examples some people are choosing. Have we already forgotten the wealth of scientific research on AI bias? There are genuine dangers from AI bias which global corps must avoid to survive.
Definitely Guattari! Anti-Oedipus, which he wrote with Deleuze, is a trip and really wonderful. That's actually how I came across Reich.
Guattari is interesting for pioneering schizoanalysis at the La Borde clinic. He's also one of the most confusing writers I've ever come across, so I recommend the books cowritten with Deleuze over his solo stuff. He's got some whimsy to him just like Reich does.
I agree that would feel pretty artificial, if we understand it the utilitarian way.
But Wilhelm Reich doesn't really follow a utilitarian calculus. I.e., for him pleasure is not the equal yet opposite of unpleasure. Rather, the calculus is one of material tension and release, or intensity, which I think you get at quite well in your example.
And yeah, if Marx, Bataille, and Spinoza are called philosophers, I guess we can call this a philosophical thought as well. Though it certainly reaches beyond the bounds of philosophy into psychoanalysis, biology, and cybernetics.
He has a stellar analysis of fascism in "The Mass-Psychology of Fascism." It's almost frightening how prescient he was not only for it's 1933 publication but for our current day as well. I wish more folks would check him out.
His fascination with orgone adds a lot of color to his work. I hope people don't write off his radical analyses for that. Despite the pseudoscience, he does get to the root of things. Great life-affirming stuff.
Of course this message comes off as rude. Some open source leaders have immense skill in being nice. Dan Ambramov and Matz (Ruby community's motto: Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice) are positive examples of a high order.
I might have given up on learning FP without Evan's work on Elm. The Elm community when it was lively oozed niceness, and much of it was thanks to Evan setting a positive example. Yes there were flaws in Elm's leadership, even fatal flaws, but why revisit a message like this?
Maybe it's just an unfortunate example of how, with one message, betraying one's frustration can damage a reputation.