apocalypstyx

23 ms·

61.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
There's a difference in the individual level and the species level. An individual does not necessarily have to be concerned with direct propagation to participate in propagation. A bee that kills itself stinging something that is a
62.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
> And yet, industrialized countries fall below replacement level and world population plateaus. Yes. Reproductive rates vary over time and due to environmental conditions. See Calhoun's Mouse Utopia Experiments for an extreme examp
63.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
The evolutionary urge for reproduction is all-consuming. So much for humanity's claims to have transcended nature. EDIT: (stealing a half-remembered quote from someone else) "Humans beings are unique in that they are the only know
64.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
HN discussions have too short of a half-life, and I'm too lazy to type that much (and, yes, that is taking into account that my posts already tend to be verbose.) And to be overly generous to myself, you never actually asked for that i
65.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
Isn't that always the case? Someone says 'you can't say X anymore', which by definition means saying X. Nothing here concerns 'that which can't be said'. If something truly can't be said, it'
66.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
I understand that. But what I think I'm trying to get at is that utterances such as "I'm a free person...I'm a good person...What I'm doing is important...etc." can be truth statements within the context of the
67.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
May I offer one proposition? Sanity and insanity (as with morality) are meaningless propositions outside of social interaction. So there is no sanity or insanity in the nature of the universe except in this regard. It is merely the evolu
68.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
At this point, I think it more resembles lying to children about Santa Claus. I don't understand why people do it. I feel no need for subsequent generations to recapitulate my mistakes. I may have learned something the hard way, but
69.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
I'm going to say the unsayable: Paul Graham has a sophomoric understanding of art and philosophy, at best. As with people such as Elon Musk, he attempts to leverage success in one narrowly defined area into an authority over vast domai
70.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
Even this isn't correct. The only thing the Church told Galileo was that he couldn't state his hypothesis as fact. And this was correct; the science/technology to prove the hypothesis was not yet extant. (We tend to misap
71.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
Unfortunately, the joke misses (or misses me) a bit. But it does seem like there is a critical distinction between 'this is not a pipe' and 'this pipe does not exist'. The original targets the distinction between the ima
72.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
Achilles had overtaken the Tortoise, and had seated himself comfortably on its back. "So you've got to the end of our race-course?" said the Tortoise. "Even though it does consist of an infinite series of distances? I th
73.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
There is one distinction between your list and the present situation: there is a difference between the opinions of an individual scientist and scientific consensus.
74.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
So Inspector Clouseau, Barney Fife, etc etc. As the quote from Charles Babbage goes: > On two occasions I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am no
75.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
You've kind of flipped the script here. First you argue everyone's discounting the author. But then you state "as an allegory of", which would fundamentally be about authorial intent. Instead such would have to be sta
76.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
Twilight Zone season 3 episode 10 titled "The Midnight Sun"
77.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
I have one and run KOreader on it. The stylus is good for highlighting passages, but as for being a contender to my paper notebooks ... I'd still take my worst pens over it. There's just something so ... one-dimensional about th
78.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
The thing of it is, so far as I can remember because this was years ago, it was just rather normal forums and subreddits, news, what's going on today type of stuff, not particularly 'edgy' areas of the internet. It reminds me
79.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
An interesting thing I noted some years ago on several forums, when someone would post images or news articles about younger people using typewriters, the comments would very often turn extremely vitriolic and invoke violence, the 'the
80.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
It depends on the process. If you take it that the 1st draft is supposed to be as close to the final as possible (or 1st draft only draft) then computer-first is the only option for modern distribution schemes (excepting typewriter bloggers
81.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
The only thing I can think of is the quote: “The paraphrase of Gödel's Theorem says that for any record player, there are records which it cannot play because they will cause its indirect self-destruction.” ―Douglas R. Hofstadter, Göde
82.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
We speak not strictly and philosophically when we talk of the combat of passion and of reason. Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. --David Hume Th
83.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
Putnam --- A prime example of the metaphor of a dominant technology re-conceptualizing the notions of the social sphere. Human relationships are reified as 'social capital' and the fundamental functioning of such is interrelated
84.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
The French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre was sitting at a café table working. A waiter approached him ‘Can I get you something to drink, Monsieur Sartre?’ he asked. ‘Yes, I’d like a cup of coffee with sugar, but no cream’, the philosopher
85.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
Slamming Nietzsche and Hegel together and expecting a peanut-butter-chocolate moment might be ... more so a fried-chicken and used-panty vending machine.
86.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
Labour != work The former is a necessary precondition of the functioning of biological life (until gods, aliens, or AI show up to feed us lemonade.) The latter (as with the modern concepts of national borders, for example) is a system root
87.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
I didn't claim it was new and revolutionary, rather just the likely result of a cynicism toward notions of conferred insight (or insight at all, really.)
88.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
This seems to me a milder version of the trope of the artist doing drugs to 'expand their mind' beyond what the normies can handle. Which reminds me of a supposed story about a Buddhist monk who supposedly dropped acid in a club
89.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
You could get (in US dollars) 3 Kinesis Advantage 2s for the price of the basic kit here. As an Advantage user (I also built a couple of Maltrons from scratch at one point) I'm not giving up symmetry to fulfill what I suspect is a fun
90.
by apocalypstyx 5y ago
Maybe it's the opposite. Maybe our anxiety is increasing because we can no longer read minds and make generalizations without the subjects of those mind readings and generalizations intruding of their own will into the realm of our co

More ›