51 Matching Annotations
  1. Sep 2023
    1. This is one of the challenges of being reactive to the public mood, rather than shaping it. Donald Trump, too, launched his first presidential campaign by elevating arguments and rhetoric from right-wing media, but he also shaped what the media was talking about. DeSantis has largely followed the trends, and the trends shift.

      While Donald J. Trump seemed to hold say over what was trending and the media was discussing, Philip Bump notices that Ron DeSantis seems to be trailing or perhaps riding the trends rather than leading them.

      Is this because he's only tubthumping one or two at a time while Trump floats trial balloons regularly and is pushing half a dozen or more at time?

  2. Jul 2023
  3. Jun 2023
  4. Feb 2023
    1. “How to Write a Thesis,” then, isn’t just about fulfilling a degree requirement. It’s also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with “the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.” It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of one’s own voice.
  5. Jan 2023
    1. Note 9/8j says - "There is a note in the Zettelkasten that contains the argument that refutes the claims on every other note. But this note disappears as soon as one opens the Zettelkasten. I.e. it appropriates a different number, changes position (or: disguises itself) and is then not to be found. A joker." Is he talking about some hypothetical note? What did he mean by disappearing? Can someone please shed some light on what he really meant?

      On the Jokerzettel

      9/8j Im Zettelkasten ist ein Zettel, der das Argument enthält, das die Behauptungen auf allen anderen Zetteln widerlegt.

      Aber dieser Zettel verschwindet, sobald man den Zettelkasten aufzieht.

      D.h. er nimmt eine andere Nummer an, verstellt sich und ist dann nicht zu finden.

      Ein Joker.

      —Niklas Luhmann, ZK II: Zettel 9/8j

      Translation:

      9/8j In the slip box is a slip containing the argument that refutes the claims on all the other slips. But this slip disappears as soon as you open the slip box. That is, he assumes a different number, disguises himself and then cannot be found. A joker.

      Many have asked about the meaning of this jokerzettel over the past several years. Here's my slightly extended interpretation, based on my own practice with thousands of cards, about what Luhmann meant:

      Imagine you've spent your life making and collecting notes and ideas and placing them lovingly on index cards. You've made tens of thousands and they're a major part of your daily workflow and support your life's work. They define you and how you think. You agree with Friedrich Nietzsche's concession to Heinrich Köselitz that “You are right — our writing tools take part in the forming of our thoughts.” Your time is alive with McLuhan's idea that "The medium is the message." or in which his friend John Culkin said, "We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us."

      Eventually you're going to worry about accidentally throwing your cards away, people stealing or copying them, fires (oh! the fires), floods, or other natural disasters. You don't have the ability to do digital back ups yet. You ask yourself, can I truly trust my spouse not to destroy them?,What about accidents like dropping them all over the floor and needing to reorganize them or worse, the ghost in the machine should rear its head?

      You'll fear the worst, but the worst only grows logarithmically in proportion to your collection.

      Eventually you pass on opportunities elsewhere because you're worried about moving your ever-growing collection. What if the war should obliterate your work? Maybe you should take them into the war with you, because you can't bear to be apart?

      If you grow up at a time when Schrodinger's cat is in the zeitgeist, you're definitely going to have nightmares that what's written on your cards could horrifyingly change every time you look at them. Worse, knowing about the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle, you're deathly afraid that there might be cards, like electrons, which are always changing position in ways you'll never be able to know or predict.

      As a systems theorist, you view your own note taking system as a input/output machine. Then you see Claude Shannon's "useless machine" (based on an idea of Marvin Minsky) whose only function is to switch itself off. You become horrified with the idea that the knowledge machine you've painstakingly built and have documented the ways it acts as an independent thought partner may somehow become self-aware and shut itself off!?!

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNa9v8Z7Rac

      And worst of all, on top of all this, all your hard work, effort, and untold hours of sweat creating thousands of cards will be wiped away by a potential unknowable single bit of information on a lone, malicious card and your only recourse is suicide, the unfortunate victim of dataism.

      Of course, if you somehow manage to overcome the hurdle of suicidal thoughts, and your collection keeps growing without bound, then you're sure to die in a torrential whirlwind avalanche of information and cards, literally done in by information overload.

      But, not wishing to admit any of this, much less all of this, you imagine a simple trickster, a joker, something silly. You write it down on yet another card and you file it away into the box, linked only to the card in front of it, the end of a short line of cards with nothing following it, because what could follow it? Put it out of your mind and hope your fears disappear away with it, lost in your box like the jokerzettel you imagined. You do this with a self-assured confidence that this way of making sense of the world works well for you, and you settle back into the methodical work of reading and writing, intent on making your next thousands of cards.

  6. Dec 2022
    1. I often think back to MySpace’s downfall. In 2007, I penned a controversial blog post noting a division that was forming as teenagers self-segregated based on race and class in the US, splitting themselves between Facebook and MySpace. A few years later, I noted the role of the news media in this division, highlighting how media coverage about MySpace as scary, dangerous, and full of pedophiles (regardless of empirical evidence) helped make this division possible. The news media played a role in delegitimizing MySpace (aided and abetted by a team at Facebook, which was directly benefiting from this delegitimization work).

      danah boyd argued in two separate pieces that teenagers self-segregated between MySpace and Facebook based on race and class and that the news media coverage of social media created fear, uncertainty, and doubt which fueled the split.

      http://www.danah.org/papers/essays/ClassDivisions.html

  7. Nov 2022
    1. Trope, trope, trope, strung into a Gish Gallop.

      One of the issues we see in the Sunday morning news analysis shows (Meet the Press, Face the Nation, et al.) is that there is usually a large amount of context collapse mixed with lack of general knowledge about the topics at hand compounded with large doses of Gish Gallop and F.U.D. (fear, uncertainty, and doubt).

  8. Oct 2022
    1. Today, the people in politics who most often invoke the name of Jesus for their political causes tend to be the most merciless and judgmental, the most consumed by rage and fear and vengeance. They hate their enemies, and they seem to want to make more of them. They claim allegiance to the truth and yet they have embraced, even unwittingly, lies. They have inverted biblical ethics in the name of biblical ethics.
    1. Your Alternator Is Not A ChargerYes, you read that right. An alternator is designed to MAINTAIN your car battery, not recharge it from a deeply discharged state. Its designed to run at only 35-50% of its fully rated output. When you use your cars alternator to recharge a dead battery, you force it to run at nearly 100% of its rated capacity and that overheats the alternator and dramatically shortens its life.
    1. Anybody who writes knows you don’t simply write what you believe. You write to find out what you believe, or what you can afford to believe. So when I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, usually, to see what it sounds like to someone else. To somebody else it might sound awful or brash, but I want to be able to have the courage of my brashness. I don’t leave things in that I know to be terrible, or that I don’t, as it were, find interesting—I don’t do that—but if there’s a doubt about it and it sounds interesting, I’ll leave it in. And I want to be free to do that, because that’s why I write. When I write, things occur to me. It’s a way of thinking. But you can perform your thinking instead of just thinking it.
    1. But this sounds like spreading fear and doubt when the Ruby parser has no such concepts :) {} always binds tightly to the call right next to it. This block {} will never go to using, unless it's rewritten as do ... end.
  9. Sep 2022
  10. Aug 2022
    1. work/actions and harmful effects.

      X causes Y. Seems simple, but what the opposition wants is to create doubt with the word "causes", thus taking advantage of scientific method's careful and controlled use of the difference between causation and correlation. All of these groups have turned scientific method's greatest strength back on itself. There is a big difference between doubt and skepticism.

    2. manufacture doubt

      Echoes of Chomsky and manufactured consent.

  11. Jun 2022
    1. This fundamental tension—between quality and quantity—is atension we share as knowledge workers. We also must producework to an extremely high standard, and we must do it fast,continuously, all year long. We are like sprinters who are also tryingto run a marathon.

      Do we? Really? This definitely needs reframing and books like this that play on these sorts of fears are both partially responsible, but are also preying on an atmosphere which they're propagating.

      This is the sort of sad thing that a productivity guru would say...

  12. Mar 2022
  13. Jan 2022
    1. enum can contain both concrete methods and abstract methods. If an enum class has an abstract method, then each instance of the enum class must implement it 

      Yet to explore abstract methods for java enums

    2. We can’t create enum objects explicitly and hence we can’t invoke enum constructor directly.

      Color c1 = Color.RED;

      Color is the enum and "RED" is internally a class object of class "Color".

      In which language though, can invoke the constructor directly? I guess by using the parameterized constructors, one can invoke other constructors easily.

  14. Sep 2021
    1. always checking

      This reminds me of Descartes' methodic doubt, and is a good lesson to apply for our age of near limitless access to information. Whatever we find striking enough to remember could at least be doubted until the information we compartmentalize is both specific to our experience and generalizable enough to share, that way truth can be found in its application to reality as we see it and as others see it.

  15. Aug 2021
    1. powerful idea

      Have I rightly understood? The idea is powerful because I do not know how my class will be used. I used thinking an idea would be good if I could 'imagine' the way, step by step, for solving problems, 'before' its application.

    1. Before you go like “Wow!!!”, understand that the packages highlighted above take a lot into consideration when detecting timezones. This makes them slightly more accurate than Intl API alone.

      What exactly does moment do for us, then, that

      TimeFormat().resolvedOptions().timeZone;

      doesn't do? Name one example where it is more accurate.

  16. Jul 2021
    1. Dr. Tara C. Smith. (2021, March 26). ‘What motivation could anti-vaxxers possibly have to spread misinformation?’ Story: ‘Organizers of the course attended by CBC journalists said that 400 people had signed up, which at $623 per student, adds up to almost $250,000 in course fees’ + tests & supplements she plugged. [Tweet]. @aetiology. https://twitter.com/aetiology/status/1375468823508348928

  17. Jun 2021
  18. Nov 2020
    1. Begins his dire attempt, which nigh the birth [ 15 ] Now rowling, boiles in his tumultuous brest, And like a devillish Engine back recoiles Upon himself; horror and doubt distract
      • I like this quote because it shows Satan and how he used to be. At first in the quote, it reflects on the fact that Satan was angry and furious because of the situation. However, after a moment he becomes more troubled and doubtful. I think this demonstrates that Satan used to have morals and such before becoming the devil. He took the time to think about things before he went on with his task. 
      
  19. Sep 2020
  20. Jul 2020
  21. May 2020
  22. Apr 2020
    1. In the past, I've had people approach me with all sorts of creative means by which I could store this data and make it available to people. But no matter how good a crypto solution I come up with, being able to hand-on-heart say "I don't store passwords in HIBP" is enormously important. Not "I store them but I've been really, really, really careful with them" because that always leaves an element of doubt in people's minds.
  23. Jan 2020
    1. Store items into a database.

      is this misleading? because it is not until, the txn here is committed, that the changes from mdb_put are propagated across the environment.

      while the description reads

      Store items into a database.

      which isn't what's happening. the write might be happening in the copy-on-write area, but the description could be more precise.

    1. Databases must always be opened with the same flags once created.

      Can a case not arise where a dbi needs to be re-opened with different DbiFlags?

      What if an Dbi is reopened with different flags nevertheless? Will the api throw?

  24. Sep 2019
    1. C=RC=R\mathcal{C}=\mathbb{R}.

      What is R here ? Is the data set and label set have same space?

  25. May 2019
    1. Notice that in every case are no pre-specified constraints on the lengths sequences because the recurrent transformation (green) is fixed and can be applied as many times as we like.

      What does it mean to have fixed recurrent transformations ?

  26. Mar 2019
    1. Kenome Technologies that has been trying to use so-called knowledge graphs to mine dark data

      what is knowledge graphs ?

    1. AWS is primitives at scale; that, though, is also how you can describe every part of Amazon’s business.

      what does primitives mean here ?

    1. In other words, what matters is not “technological innovation”; what matters is value chains and the point of integration on which a company’s sustainable differentiation is built; stray too far and even the most fearsome companies become also-rans.

      what ??

  27. Feb 2019
    1. companies like Amazon and Google have understandably sought to build modular ecosystems — that is what they do.

      What is modular ecosystem ?

    1. Christensen’s second concern is that although integrated approaches in technology can be quite successful for a period, in the end modular approaches to technology always defeat integrated approaches.

      Why ???

  28. Jan 2019
    1. physically-limited lowest common denominator winners from the “good old days.”

      what does this mean ?

    1. Many older users today see Snapchat as frivolous or a waste of time because they think Snapchat is social media rather than a faster way to communicate. Changing the design language of our product and improving our marketing and communications around Snapchat will help users understand our value.

      do adults really need these many ways of communicating - FB, Whatsapp, messenger, Insta, SnapChat ?

      How is SnapChat better than FB Messenger/Whatsapp/FB for communication ?

    1. Or, to put it another way, if you want to know where in a value chain an Aggregator is likely to form, figure out what and where the “job” is.

      ??

    2. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale

      how ??

    3. Distribution is free

      What does this mean ?? How can it be free?

  29. Feb 2017
    1. When an alleged fact is debunked, the conspiracy meme often just replaces it with another fact. One of the producers of Loose Change, Korey Rowe, stated, “We don't ever come out and say that everything we say is 100 percent [correct]. We know there are errors in the documentary, and we've actually left them in there so that people [will] discredit us and do the research for themselves” (Slensky 2006).

      "Campbell makes a similar point about the dangers of paraphrase: Since we must be in doubt about the precise meaning of the original, any paraphrase must be consid· ered an interpretation."

  30. May 2016
    1. But in all your seeking and all your striving, let it be with faith and trust in Me, your True Selfwithin, and without being anxious about results; for the results are all in My keeping, and I willtake care of them. Your doubts and your anxiety are but of the personality, and if allowed topersist will lead only to failure and disappointmen

      To trust..... to not worry about the outcome............ recognise that any anxiety and doubts are my egoic self..............

  31. Dec 2015
    1. PAUL: Raj, as you know, nothing has apparently changed since the first conversation we had—objectively, at least—although subjectively speaking, I feel a lot has occurred. As we have progressed into the last few weeks, I have become more and more concerned about the dire straits I find myself in, objectively speaking. It has been very difficult for me to relax and to have faith in the validity of what you have been telling me. Nevertheless, something keeps me coming back, and here I am again. I will do my best this evening to be still and attentive and receptive. I will listen to what you have to say, and not busy myself with arguments and questions and doubts and fears.

      Paul last spoke with Raj 4 days ago, he's been rocked due to the fact that Maitreya did not announce his presence and that he did not receive a visitor that Raj said that he would.

      Paul wonders if he can trust Raj and he's honestly expressing it. And yet something inside keeps bringing him back. He is allowing his doubt, in effect, he is trusting there is something valuable in this relationship with Raj.

      So now, he's going to lay aside the doubt and distrust in order to discover if that is true.

      This is a very good demonstration of walking into the unknown, of not listening to the critical part of the mind in favor the something that brings him back, an intuition or knowing that comes from a deeper part of the mind then his critical thoughts.

  32. Nov 2015
    1. PAUL: Raj, I am failing miserably at demonstrating or seeing the omnipresence of my Being in terms of supply. It’s true that from day to day we have what we need, but it’s far from a comfortable way to live. All we’re getting are basics. The larger debts we owe are not being met. RAJ: Paul, I want you to be aware that you are beginning to give up your faith, trust, and belief in the validity of our conversations. This is indicated by the flip-flopping back and forth between knowing they are real and doubting they are real. I point out also that the doubting comes into play when you are challenged by opinions or circumstances. This certainly is a natural response, but it is not the consistent vantage point which you will find necessary if you’re going to be free from being dangled like a yo-yo or blown to and fro on the breeze of chance. PAUL: Well, if you are wanting me to develop some inner strength which will not yield, no matter what I’m confronted with—and if I’m supposed to do this while it’s my family’s lack that I’m faced with—then I don’t think you should be surprised! Theoretically, intellectually, I can grasp its value. But when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of life, it often seems like nonsense. RAJ: I understand, Paul. I want to refer you to what your Supply told you about how to set the Law in motion. I want you to begin doing this on a regular basis. A word to the wise: Be sure of what you are asking for, because you shall surely get it. PAUL: Alright, Raj. I shall forge forward. I will tell you this: It would be much easier if my family’s needs were being better met.

      Paul's Trust in his conversations with Raj is challenged by his inability to meet his financial needs. He's doubting Raj because he is not seeing evidence (in terms of money) that what Raj is saying is true.

      A consistent practice of Trust and Faith of what is known to be true, even if it has not yet been experienced, is necessary to be free of uncertainty.

      Link to the section where Paul talks with his Supply.

      Quote: Be sure of what you are asking for, because you shall surely get it.

      This quote links to

      • I and I alone am responsible for my experience
      • Your life is your prayer.
      • Common knowledge "be careful what you wish for..." (see brainy quotes)