Nate Cull @natecull@mastodon.social

Novas: The Whole Ridiculous Thing

http://natecull.org/wordpress/2019/09/09/playlist-notes-novas-chronology/

Six episodes in and Legend of the Condor Heroes 2017 continues to impress me as the best TV version yet of probably *the* most famous Chinese martial arts epic ever.

If you like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, etc, then this is a great time to get on board the Jin Yong train.

Genghis Khan! The Jin-Song wars! Kung fu princesses! (multiple of) Kung fu witches! The forbidden NINE YIN BONE CLAW skill! A martial arts tournament! (of course) Romance! (multiple of) A big war!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4crHldKx6c&index=1&list=PLJIYzNjvxw8v2TkPFnjYx-xD2IqOKjbYk

That's it everyone, my timeline is now tuned (chef kiss) perfectly

@Gargron @enkiv2 @kitkat @eq

A writeup which has been a year in coming.

Novas 6: The Leaves Which Tremble At Dawn

Act 1:
http://natecull.org/wordpress/2020/07/14/playlist-notes-novas-6-the-leaves-which-tremble-at-dawn-act-1/

Act 2:

http://natecull.org/wordpress/2020/07/15/playlist-notes-novas-6-the-leaves-which-tremble-at-dawn-act-2/

(there will be ongoing maintenance for a while as I go back and tweak various parts of the "book", but I think Novas is finally done.)

@Azure

Well, Marx and Keynes might not have, but *I* think that if *I* were doing something that had bad effects and I understood this and I could change things to fix this situation but I deliberately didn't.. then I think that *I* would judge *myself* to be a bad person, by my own ideas of what makes for good vs bad behaviour. It's why I vote left even if voting right might be in my personal self-interest - I feel that putting self-interest first is bad.

But I take your point, it's complex.

And again I repeat:

It should be obvious to everyone by now that no, the left and right just clearly do have completely different ideas about how markets and capital work. And that these different ideas inform all the rest of their policy proposals. And also, that these two ideas can't both be true, and that we could look at reality and try to find out what's really going on.

But this obvious fact of different economic ideas does not seem to be obvious at all. So it seems worth mentioning.

And therefore:

My theory is that the right really, truly, think that markets are social equalizers that generate perfect opportunity for all - so they also think the left MUST be lying when they say markets are bad, and really just want to vote themselves power and control people by force and make them poor.

Similarly, the left cannot comprehend that the right truly can't see that capitalism is a death machine generating poverty and feudalism. So the right must be lying about their intentions.

Now it may seem that I'm saying nothing new and of interest by recapping these two surely very well known and understood economic viewpoints.

but!

My third observation is that somehow, here in 2020, it seems like both left and right *have literally forgotten what the other side thinks*. And more, that both sides believe that their side's view of markets and capital is not only correct but self-evident *to even the other side*. And therefore, that the other side is talking about something else.

The left, on the other hand, think that markets do the opposite: that every unregulated trade naturally takes money from the poor and gives it to the rich, because the rich have more leverage. This implies first that the rich aren't rich because they're good, and the poor aren't poor because they're bad, but further, that the rich are not just "not automatically good people" but actively bad people if - knowing how things are - they keep this broken system running without trying to change it.

I feel like the important difference between the economic right (which is confusingly named 'neoliberalism' for weird historical reasons) and the economic left (which is now everyone from Keynes to Marx) is that they literally don't agree on how markets and capital work.

The right think that markets produce meritocracy and redistribute money to the best people; that the rich can only keep their money by working very hard to satisfy customers, and that the poor get rich unless they're just bad.

Thinking about @enkiv2 's Guidelines for GUI Composability

https://hackernoon.com/some-tentative-guidelines-for-gui-composability-2900abead1d9

All of which I think are very good, but particularly number 10:

"Every object has a visual representation. Every visual representation corresponds to an object."

I think that one is very important, almost totally alien to mainstream UI/UX thought right now, and I would love to know what it implies.

I think it would lead to a "design language* that was an *actual* language in the formal sense.

It seems to say something quite important about the self-awareness of the field of computing that the MIT Technology Review magazine has deliberately excluded its website from being stored for academic and historical review by the Internet Archive

but I don't have enough data to understand what

"I'll try to tap into the command pathways. You see if you can access and disable the file server."

but Riker, why are you trying to DISABLE the file server when you want to read the data from it

I love it when TNG (S6:E24 Second Chances, May 1993) tries to talk "hacker".

Writeup for Novas 0.02: A Case Of Goodbye

http://natecull.org/wordpress/2020/07/11/playlist-notes-novas-0-02-a-case-of-goodbye/

Writeup for Novas 0.01: A Blaze Of Stars

http://natecull.org/wordpress/2020/07/10/playlist-notes-novas-0-01-a-blaze-of-stars/

A good overview of Xanadu from @enkiv2 in 2018

https://hackernoon.com/an-engineers-guide-to-the-docuverse-d080cdbb73a6

<< The caskets contain two telephone receivers through which radio code is sent to the sleeper. It has been demonstrated that the sleeping student can be taught code faster than by any other means, for the sub-conscious self never sleeps. Students who have failed in their studies have passed examinations after being taught by this method.>>

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/60944/60944-h/60944-h.htm

I want to know more about how this interesting real-world sci-fi device inevitably failed.

<< The author was greatly astonished to read the results obtained by J.A. Phinney, Chief Radioman, U.S. Navy, who, having tried the system himself, in 1923, introduced it at the Pensacola, Florida, Naval Training School. Here one may see naval students stretched out on long benches asleep with casket-like coverings over their heads. >>

Alpha Ralpha 124C 41+ Boulevard

It would sure make people run away from the Internet and get some sunlight and fresh air

What if we had tech company employees sign draconian "non non disclosure agreements", in which upon leaving they are legally forced to blog, in public and in terrible detail, everything that happened in the office every day

Okay I'm overexaggerating (only slightly) but reading Michael Sean Mahoney's "Histories of Computing" a few years ago brought home to me just how much the computer and "information processing" industry is.... really really bad at storing and processing information about itself. Like, terrible. Imagine how bad programmers are at documentation, mix that with most surviving documents being from marketing departments... now add clickbait farrms... and that's tech media.

https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674055681