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Books Ethics Fiction Philosophy Working

  • Lots of spoilers here if you haven’t watched Succession. I talk about the show’s ending, and how tragedies should end.

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  • Recently on Mastodon the watchdog types I follow have been discussing what we should be doing about AI. There’s something potentially bad going on, certainly something with 𝔈𝔱𝔥𝔦𝔠𝔞𝔩 ℑ𝔪𝔭𝔩𝔦𝔠𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔰, but how should we be talking about it? Is it a matter of the possibilities AI poses? Or is that too broad and giving AI too…

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  • In April, my pandemic was winding down (for the first time…) and I was ready to get back into the world. I started joining. A political group, a neighborhood group, an exercise group. I wanted to be around some new people. Some threw me in as one of the group right off the bat. Other…

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  • It takes so much time to learn, but it’s worth it, right? You know, maybe not. I’m reading St. Augustine’s Confessions, and though it was written 1600 years ago, the way he was taught doesn’t sound all that different from today. (Less focus on STEM.)  The way he describes how he learned, and why, is…

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  • Good morning! I don’t like email. I generally don’t like having email addresses, I don’t like receiving emails, I don’t like having to check and reply to emails. An email in the inbox could mean anything from nothing to multiple conversations of coordination and followup between multiple people. And they just stack up. The tone…

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  • I made a list of the books I most often recommend, re-read and reminisce on. Making the list was fun. I want to put down all the books I’m reading now and dig back in to a few of these. Seeing it all laid out is also itchy and uncomfortable, in that I feel like…

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  • If you wanted to be a great race car driver, you could look at the best race car drivers in the country and their winning races and decide, “The best drivers are always turning left. They hardly ever turn right and if they do it’s only a tiny bit. If I want to be a…

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  • I heard a story once about a group of scientists who went down to Hill Country in Texas. In that part of Texas they have caves with huge amounts of bats. In one of these deep caves hundreds of thousands of Brazilian free-tailed bats roost together. Each evening at dusk they come flowing out of…

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  • These are the books I liked best I read in 2017. They’re not all published in 2017, because who is so caught up on reading they can only read current books? The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate―Discoveries from a Secret World Peter Wohlleben, 2016 I wouldn’t’ve guessed I’d get in…

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  • There’s a vibrant industry around user experience (UX) thought today, but as UX  moves beyond flat screens we’re finding that a lot of the best practices and known methods are too specific. What applies to call-to-action styling and page navigation on desktop web and mobile is often totally inapplicable when interacting with Alexa or Siri,…

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