621 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2015
    1. Even compassion, the concern we feel for another being’s welfare, has been treated with downright derision. Kant saw it as a weak and misguided sentiment: “Such benevolence is called soft-heartedness and should not occur at all among human beings,” he said of compassion. Many question whether true compassion exists at all—or whether it is inherently motivated by self-interest.
  2. Aug 2015
  3. Jun 2015
    1. What is within the circle of appropriate investigation for philosophical enquiry? Demonstration by the abstract sciences should be limited to quantity and number. Reasoning beyond this boundary is sophistry. All other enquiries regard matters of fact and existence and are incapable of demonstration. It is just as conceivable that something does not exist as that it does. Both ideas are clear and distinct.

      Isolation of qty and #. It is sophistry beyond this.

    1. Schrödinger thought that the Greeks had a kind of hold over us—they saw that the only way to make progress in thinking about the world was to talk about it without the “knowing subject” in it. QBism goes against that strain by saying that quantum mechanics is not about how the world is without us; instead it’s precisely about us in the world. The subject matter of the theory is not the world or us but us-within-the-world, the interface between the two.
  4. Apr 2015
  5. Jun 2014
    1. Technology leadership is not defined by patents, which history has repeatedly shown to be small protection indeed against a determined competitor, but rather by the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world’s most talented engineers. We believe that applying the open source philosophy to our patents will strengthen rather than diminish Tesla’s position in this regard.

      "Technology leadership is....defined by...the ability of a company to attract and motivate the world's most talented engineers."

      The key components of this applied "open source philosophy" seem to be about increasing input, visibility, and collective motivation by taking fear out of the interaction equation.

    1. This later formulation points to the beginning of an important transformation of the public sphere as it moved from being a space of public authority to one in which private citizens came together to form publics capable of holding public authorities accountable.

      This is a key point, so I want to make sure I understand it correctly. Is the claim that a 'public world of readers' is already a transition away from an earlier conception of the public sphere as simply the site of dissemination for authoritarian mandates?

      How does the private/public distinction function when it comes to private citizens forming publics that hold public authorities accountable?

      Maybe the phrase 'private citizen' is throwing me off here.

    1. A fundamental task for public philosophy is to attend to the work the public is doing in developing its own self-conception.

      This strikes me as a very productive way of identifying an important aspect of public philosophy. On the one hand, it allows us to distinguish between philosophers who think more people should be listening to them and philosophers who think they should be listening to more people. On the other hand, it suggests and leaves open a number of questions that can be addressed in and through the work public philosophers are doing in developing their own self-conceptions.

  6. Feb 2014
    1. What is missing is a space between the $( and the following (, to avoid the arithmetic expression syntax. The section on command substitution in the shell command language specification actually warns for that:

      This is a very good example of why shell scripting does not scale from simple scripts to large projects. This is not the only place where changes in whitespace can lead to scripts that are very difficult to debug. A well-meaning and experienced programmer from another language, but new to bash scripting, might decide to clean up formatting to make it more consistent-- a laudable goal, but one which can lead to unintentional semantic changes to the program.

      Flat, short bash scripts are extremely useful tools that I still employ regularly, but once they begin creeping in size and complexity it's time to switch to another language to handle that-- I think that is what (rightly) has driven things likes Python, Puppet, Ansible, Chef, etc.

      Despite the syntactic horrors lurking in shell scripts there is still a beautiful simplicity that drives their use which is a testament to the core unix philosophy.

  7. Nov 2013
    1. And just as every porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, supposes that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his action and thought.

      Wow! He has a thing against the philosopher.

  8. Oct 2013
  9. Sep 2013
    1. while the teachers of philosophy impart all the forms of discourse in which the mind expresses itself. Then, when they have made them familiar and thoroughly conversant with these lessons, they set them at exercises, habituate them to work, and require them to combine in practice the particular things which they have learned, in order that they may grasp them more firmly and bring their theories into closer touch with the occasions for applying them

      How teachers of philosophy train the minds of their students

    2. physical training for the body, of which gymnastics is a part, and, for the mind, philosophy, which I am going to explain. These are twin arts—parallel and complementary—by which their masters prepare the mind to become more intelligent and the body to become more serviceable, not separating sharply the two kinds of education, but using similar methods of instruction, exercise, and other forms of discipline.

      Nice

    3. They characterize men who ignore our practical needs and delight in the mental juggling of the ancient sophists as “students of philosophy,” but refuse this name to whose who pursue and practise those studies which will enable us to govern wisely both our own households and the commonwealth—which should be the objects of our toil, of our study, and of our every act.

      Pointing out the idea of philosophy should be reconsidered.

    1. when I see a youth thus engaged,—the study appears to me to be in character, and becoming a man of liberal education, and him who neglects philosophy I regard as an inferior man, who will never aspire to anything great or noble. But if I see him continuing the study in later life, and not leaving off, I should like to beat him, Socrates; for, as I was saying, such a one, even though he have good natural parts, becomes effeminate.

      Studying philosophy should be done in adolescence, and should not be carried on by adults.

    1. They also started to standardize and very deliberately reduce the supported infrastructure and configurations. One decision was to switch everything to PHP and MySQL. This was a philosophical decision, not a technology one: they wanted both Dev and Ops to be able to understand the stack, so that everyone can contribute if they wanted to, as well as enabling everyone to be able to read, rewrite and fix someone else’s code.

      NOTE: "This was a philosophical decision, not a technology one."