branweb's comments

ah ok. I thought the board decided to remove Altman, then Brockman quit in response, so there was no deliberation about his (Brockman's) removal.

ah ok makes sense. I thought he just resigned in response to Altman's ouster, so there was no board decision to remove Brockman.

wait...isn't "the decision" referred to in the parent comment about the removal of Altman?

New evidence was released in the DOJ vs Google case. The judge for the case called this evidence "embarrassing" to Google.

It's a bad headline. There's no a complete sentence here. "DOJ vs. Google evidence release" is a noun phrase ("release" here is used as a noun), modified by the clause "that judge calls embarrassing exhibit". In that clause, "judge" is the subject, "calls" is the verb, "that" is the direct object, and "embarrassing exhibit" is an object compliment, which refers to the same thing as "that". So basically we just have a big noun phrase.

In light of this fact, I'd guess "their" preferred pronouns are he/him/his.

So put more simply, what you're saying is that the reader can tell by the context. When the writer says "this begs the question", if that phrase is followed by an actual question, the reader knows the writer is using it in the newer sense. If it isn't, the reader knows the writer meant it in the older, logical fallacy sense. I understand that. My claim that it makes it harder still stands. The reader must use context to determine meaning when he didn't have to before.

It does make sense. "Begging the question" is a term of art from philosophy meaning to assume the thing you set out to prove--e.g. God exists because the Bible says so, and the Bible must be right because it is the literal word of God.

This shift towards using the phrase to mean "raise the question" makes it harder for a writer to tag a claim as being guilty of that particular logical fallacy.

But your first point is right: language changes, and we have to accept new usages, even bad ones.

exactly correct. The question is not: "was software bloated in the 90s". It's: "given that hardware capability increased in by several orders of magnitude, did software quality/speed see a similar increase?" The answer is a resounding no. It would be like moving from a tricycle to a supersonic car and somehow taking longer to get from point a to point b.

I haven't read War and Peace, nor (presumably) have I tried this app, but I will gladly come into the comments and shit on it. Gotta love hacker news.

"the news media is a for-profit business whose interests are tangential to telling the truth" <- That's well put.

And yeah I guess I wasn't that surprised by MSNBC, but definitely didn't expect the percentages to be so high for the "paper of record" and NPR.

I'd buy that except the major media outlets are the corporate power.

Manufacturing Consent is a book that had a big impact on how I perceive media, and I think it's wise to examine who's saying something and what their motives are, but I don't totally understand what you're saying. What's their motive here? I can't see a link between the narrative that people distrust media and their pr work for a bunch of gross corporations.

yeah it's a questionable claim for sure. This was a widely cited poll that asserted for the first time ever, the majority of Americans mistrust the mainstream media: https://www.axios.com/media-trust-crisis-2bf0ec1c-00c0-4901-...

You'll note that trust varies widely by political party, with 18% of Republicans trusting the media vs 57% of Democrats. So the post in the op seems to equate "educated" with "democrat" perhaps. Even if that's valid (don't really have the facts to dispute it personally) 57% is nothing to brag about.

Another interesting poll on this subject here: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/01/americans-m..., which asked people what their political affiliation was and what their main source of news was. Of those that said Fox, 93% leaned Republican...no surprise there. But what's striking is that of those that said MSNBC, 95% leaned Democrat. The NYT, 91%. NPR, 87%! Kind of makes me wonder what the trust numbers would be if the media outlets weren't increasingly becoming echo chambers.

right exactly, that's what I was trying to say. The constriction happens mainly in the imagination rather than in the writing. That's the theory at least.

I love the series but I think this is an astute observation...though I have trouble articulating why I agree with this. I wonder if the world constricts or if its possibiilties just narrow (as they necessarily must) as the story plays out?

Nice to see something about Gene Wolfe here. I'm a big fan. I just finished re-reading The 5th Head of Cerberus and have been eyeing The Book of the New Sun series on my shelf. Probably time for a re-read of that soon.

If I may put on my pedantic hat for a second: the article writes of the world of the New Sun tetrology: "The sun is so old that it is dying." I thought it was pretty well establish that the sun was dying of unnatural causes--possibly an artificially created black hole.

I seriously doubt a bunch of first-year cadets with a looming calculus exam sat around in their dorms thinking "what would Trump do?". Yours is one several comments here expressing this sentiment, and aside from what it says about your capacity for independent thought, it illustrates an inability--all too pervasive these days--to conceive of any issue in non-trumpian terms.

considering iraq wmd, the financial collapse, the bailout, syria, libya, russia-gate, and the pandemic (among other things) I think the x-axis should go back further and resemble a negative sloping line instead.

  the cadets — all but one of whom are first-years...

Please read more closely.

Agree. The argument seems to be:

1. individuals are blasted with a firehose of data

2. individual-focused systems to manage this data--like GTD--are ineffective because the left hand (one person working autonomously) doesn't know what the right hand (another person) is doing, so they end up just creating more data

3. therefore, we need some sort of collective--as opposed to an individual--system so we can get a better picture of the whole and distribute work more effectively, thereby increasing productivity.

Maybe a good idea. But the "call to action" there is clearly addressed to managers rather than actually producers. They're the ones who'd control any collective system. And in my experience those always decay and get in the way...though of course that could just be me resenting limitations on personal autonomy.

I'll have to think this over more. One thing I dislike about the article is several places they say things like "Following the lead of software developers, we might use virtual task boards..." where I think I'd be more appropriate to substitute "engineering managers" for "software developers".