13 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2024
    1. As Thoreau said, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us”;and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed,Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?

      another variation of Thoreau on tools... source?

      It's Walden. (see: https://hypothes.is/a/b10mJsGoEe6rgteMdxbwKQ)

      Joy may have more profitably quoted the earlier Walden piece from p.41: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools."

      There also seems to be the idea of our slow evolution into cybernetic or Borg-like beings hiding not only in Joy's argument, but in Thoreau's. If we integrate so closely with our tools, where do they stop and we end and vice versa?

      Compare this with the infamous problem of the ship of Theseus.

  2. Aug 2022
    1. What I find surprising in the frequent heated debates is that the nature of the type system is rarely even discussed. People talk about static vs. dynamic types as if there were only one static and one dynamic type system.

      Good point.

      We can go further. Suppose I have a project written in TypeScript, and your affinity for TypeScript is well-known. Only—surprise!—I'm actually using TypeScript 1.x from n years ago. Are you still happy?

    1. Quine's book Word and Object (p. 3f) made famous Neurath's analogy which compares the holistic nature of language and consequently scientific verification with the construction of a boat which is already at sea (cf. Ship of Theseus): .mw-parser-output .templatequote{overflow:hidden;margin:1em 0;padding:0 40px}.mw-parser-output .templatequote .templatequotecite{line-height:1.5em;text-align:left;padding-left:1.6em;margin-top:0}We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction.
  3. May 2022
    1. At every step of the process we target a specific risk: the risk of not shipping on time. .... Improving your discovery process should come after regaining your ability to ship.

      You can have the best strategy in the world, but if you can't act on it, what good does it do?

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  4. Apr 2022
    1. The moralist critique of ostentatious book owning articulated by Seneca in the first century CE was at the core of Sebastian Brant’s complaints in his Ship of Fools (1494).19

      Compare this idea to the recent descriptions of modern homes using books solely for decoration or simply as "wallpaper".

  5. Sep 2021
    1. Documents of the time

      This would be a good place to have one or two illustrative primary documents inserted.

      One of the most well known is:

      Description of a Slave Ship. London: Printed by James Phillips [for the London Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade], 1789. Two broadsides.

      A digitized copy of the original can be found here: https://dpul.princeton.edu/wa/catalog/qj72p788s

      along with some additional context here: https://blogs.princeton.edu/notabilia/2020/05/28/teaching-the-slave-ship/

  6. May 2021
  7. Apr 2021
    1. The ship of Jaume Ferrer departed for the River of Gold on the 10th of August of 1346, the feast of St. Lawrence.

      The Black Plague began in 1346. Throughout my readings on the Black Death I found out that Majorca (the city Ferrer was from) was not affected until 1348. Jamume Ferrer's crew would have had time to avoid the Bubonic plague if they did not disappear at sea.

  8. Aug 2020
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  10. May 2020
  11. Nov 2016
    1. The 1620 agreement (first called the Mayflower Compact in 1793) was a legal instrument that bound the Pilgrims together when they arrived in New England. The core members of the Pilgrims' immigrant group were Separatists, members of a Puritan sect that had split from the Church of England, the only legal church in England at that time. Others in the group, however, had remained part of the Church of England, so not all of the Pilgrims shared the same religion.

      The Mayflower compact was a signature sheet that would be used for the signers to go to America for religious freedom.