Writes and Write-Nots

https://paulgraham.com/writes.html

AI has blown this world open. Almost all pressure to write has dissipated. You can have AI do it for you, both in school and at work.

The result will be a world divided into writes and write-nots. There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write.

Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to disappear when technology makes them obsolete? There aren't many blacksmiths left, and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

Yes, it's bad. The reason is something I mentioned earlier: writing is thinking. In fact there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing. You can't make this point better than Leslie Lamport did:

If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.

Cathedrals: Enormous Sacred Space

https://apricity.me/2024/10/22/cathedrals-enormous-sacred-space/

Joyful indeed, they smiled and hugged, celebrating the journey’s end. The singing was full and exuberant, their ebullient mood infectious. There was no energetic or frenetic shouting that I associated with Protestant charismatic worship. It was a measured exuberance. This time, being present at a cathedral—an ancient structure that I mostly associated with secular history and practices foreign to my Baptist roots—stirred my spirit. Next to the old gigantic stones, my heart was warmed. I cried tears of fond memory. The fervent faith of youth can be naively hopeful and sunny (pray and the world will bend to your prayers), but it also can be inspiring. The Spirit punctured through my assumptions and experiences, and touched me.

Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/the-tragedy-of-google-books/523320/

Many of the objectors indeed thought that there would be some other way to get to the same outcome without any of the ickiness of a class action settlement. A refrain throughout the fairness hearing was that releasing the rights of out-of-print books for mass digitization was more properly “a matter for Congress.” When the settlement failed, they pointed to proposals by the U.S. Copyright Office recommending legislation that seemed in many ways inspired by it, and to similar efforts in the Nordic countries to open up out-of-print books, as evidence that Congress could succeed where the settlement had failed.

Of course, nearly a decade later, nothing of the sort has actually happened. “It has got no traction,” Cunard said to me about the Copyright Office’s proposal, “and is not going to get a lot of traction now I don’t think.” Many of the people I spoke to who were in favor of the settlement said that the objectors simply weren’t practical-minded—they didn’t seem to understand how things actually get done in the world. “They felt that if not for us and this lawsuit, there was some other future where they could unlock all these books, because Congress would pass a law or something. And that future... as soon as the settlement with Guild, nobody gave a shit about this anymore,” Clancy said to me.

How Cheerleading Became So Acrobatic, Dangerous and Popular

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/22/magazine/cheerleading-jeff-webb.html

Varsity’s market power has made the cheer world a paranoid place. In my reporting for this story, dozens of people spoke about the company in conspiratorial tones better suited to a spy thriller. My sources were at least right that the company was paying attention. Not long after beginning my reporting for The Times, a managing director from Teneo — the high-powered public-relations firm whose clients have included Coca-Cola, Dow Chemical and Saudi Arabia’s public investment fund — contacted me. I soon found myself dealing with separate P.R. agencies representing two private-equity firms, Varsity and Jeff Webb himself, who invited me to interview him. “I don’t think I’ve done a great job marketing myself,” he told me. “I would rather let the deeds speak for themselves.”

Varsity had been hit with a raft of antitrust and personal-injury lawsuits, which provided an unprecedented glimpse into Varsity’s operations: Thousands of pages of documents and emails showed how Webb, a former cheerleader himself, built a company so powerful that its market position has not been meaningfully challenged by the many lawsuits and controversies. In July, KKR, one of the largest private-equity firms in the world, bought Varsity and its affiliate companies from Bain Capital for a reported $4.75 billion, a clear bet that Varsity’s control of cheerleading will survive the current scrutiny. Since the KKR sale, a sense of foreboding hangs over the world of cheer: Is there any scandal big enough to shake Varsity’s grip on American cheerleading?

Being the adult you needed as a kid by giving out snacks

https://v.redd.it/d54afvz80vud1

People think they already know everything they need to make decisions

https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/10/people-think-they-already-know-everything-they-need-to-make-decisions/

The world is full of people who have excessive confidence in their own abilities. This is famously described as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how people who lack expertise in something will necessarily lack the knowledge needed to recognize their own limits. Now, a different set of researchers has come out with what might be viewed as a corollary to Dunning-Kruger: People have a strong tendency to believe that they always have enough data to make an informed decision—regardless of what information they actually have.

The work, done by Hunter Gehlbach, Carly Robinson, and Angus Fletcher, is based on an experiment in which they intentionally gave people only partial, biased information, finding that people never seemed to consider they might only have a partial picture. "Because people assume they have adequate information, they enter judgment and decision-making processes with less humility and more confidence than they might if they were worrying whether they knew the whole story or not," they write. The good news? When given the full picture, most people are willing to change their opinions.

Anand Menon on racism: the UK has made progress, but this year’s riots show there’s a long way to go

https://www.tortoisemedia.com/2024/10/04/anand-menon-on-racism-uk-has-made-progress-but-far-right-riots-show-theres-a-long-way-to-go/

Writing this, I’ve come to realise how appallingly selfish I’ve become. How my relative security made me blind to the insecurity of others. In my anxiety not to appear hypervigilant, I’d not called out as clearly as I should have the careless and provocative rhetoric, the talk of immigrants as vermin, the scaremongering about an “invasion”, the lazy elisions of “British” and “British-born”.

One of the big changes between then and now is the presence of social media and the ease with which fake news can spread (like claims the Southport murderer was an Islamicist who had arrived in a small boat). This has resulted in the paradox pointed out by Sunder Katwala that, in a society with ever-fewer racists, there might be wider experience of racist abuse and threat than was the case 20 years ago.

I’m still sensitive. So, too, I imagine, are all those who were on the receiving end of the casual, cruel, continuous racism of the 1970s. I hope my recollections about my childhood help explain why.

The $1,000 Wheelchair

https://newmobility.com/not-a-wheelchair/

How the YouTubers from JerryRigEverything are Making Affordable Wheelchairs Without the Red Tape

We have cancer

https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/we-have-cancer

When procedures proliferate unchecked, they impair our bureaucratic functions. We should treat this as seriously as we treat cancer.

Ellen DeGeneres Is in Her Boss Era on Her New Netflix Special

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/24/arts/television/ellen-degeneres-netflix-for-your-approval.html

In a serious interlude that stood out among many references she makes to caring what others think of her, she says that in show business you must care, because “it’s the only real currency.”

I believe she believes that. Popularity and how people see you clearly matter a lot. But there are other currencies to measure success: A joke well-told, the satisfaction of a thought perfectly expressed. DeGeneres has had a remarkable, pathbreaking career, but one of her greatest legacies — having her sitcom character, essentially an avatar for her, come out of the closet in the 1990s — led to a drop in the show’s ratings and ultimately its cancellation. Only a doomed worldview sees that as failure.

She probably understands this. But you hear it more in the jokes than in the serious parts, the punchlines about the little lies we tell ourselves. “I used to say I didn’t care what people thought of me,” she says wryly. “Looking back, I realized I said that at the height of my popularity.”

RESCUE AT SEA: Fishermen Reunite With the Girl They Saved 35 Years Ago, the Sole Survivor of Six

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwjR37keKs0

The Canary - Michael Lewis on Chris Mark of the Department of Labor

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/interactive/2024/michael-lewis-chris-marks-the-canary-who-is-government/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzI1NTk1MjAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzI2OTc3NTk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MjU1OTUyMDAsImp0aSI6ImQyZTIzZDVjLWZiYTgtNGZkMy1iZjdjLWQyNTNlMzdjOGUxOSIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd2FzaGluZ3RvbnBvc3QuY29tL29waW5pb25zL2ludGVyYWN0aXZlLzIwMjQvbWljaGFlbC1sZXdpcy1jaHJpcy1tYXJrcy10aGUtY2FuYXJ5LXdoby1pcy1nb3Zlcm5tZW50LyJ9.Ej8f5wr9mAhAoZixnV0LqwkbifeupQvSVB10tzpLVsY&itid=gfta

Each year, I finish reading the list of nominees with the same lingering feeling of futility: Democratic government isn’t really designed to highlight the individual achievement of unelected officials. Even the people who win the award will receive it and hustle back to their jobs before anyone has a chance to get to know them — and before elected officials ask for their spotlight back. Even their nominations feel modest. Never I did this, but we did this. Never look at me, but look at this work! Never a word about who these people are or where they come from or why it ever occurred to them to bother. Nothing to change the picture in your head when you hear the word “bureaucrat.” Nothing to arouse curiosity about them, or lead you to ask what they do, or why they do it....

But this year, someone inside the Partnership messed up. Spotting the error, I thought: Some intern must have written this one. It felt like a rookie mistake — to allow a reader of this dutiful list a glimpse of an actual human being. Four little words, at the end of one of the paragraphs.

Christopher Mark: Led the development of industry-wide standards and practices to prevent roof falls in underground mines, leading to the first year (2016) of no roof fall fatalities in the United States. A former coal miner.

A former coal miner. Those words raised questions. Not about the work but about the man. They caused a picture to pop into my head. Of a person. Who must have grown up in a coal mining family. In West Virginia, I assumed, because, really, where else? Christopher Mark, I decided, just had to have some deeply personal stake in the problem he solved. His father, or maybe his brother, had been killed by a falling coal mine roof. Grief had spurred him to action, to spare others the same grief. A voice was crying to be heard. The movie wrote itself.

But then I found Christopher Mark’s number and called him.

Herculean tasks, Sisyphean tasks, what else have ya got?

https://another.rodeo/tasks/

The whole thing started on the Midwest Dev Chat Slack, when someone posted a screenshot from their work Slack that read:

The fact that we only have "Herculean task" and "Sisyphean task" feels so limiting. So here's a few more tasks for your repertoire:

Icarian Task: When you have a task you know is going to fail anyways, so why not have some fun with it before it all comes crashing down.

Cassandrean Task: When you have to deal with people you know won't listen to you, despite having accurate information, and having to watch them fumble about when you told them the solution from the start.
Odyssean Task: You'll complete but it will take 20 times longer than it should and involve multiple side quests and mini-adventures.

From those first screenshots it took off, with the wits on Midwest Dev Chat adding more:

‘People need to see it’: How politics hung up a $42B Biden internet buildout

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/04/biden-broadband-program-swing-state-frustrations-00175845

The 2021 infrastructure law contained tens of billions of dollars intended to help rural parts of the country like southwest Virginia — but mounting political snags will mean the administration will have virtually nothing to show for it by Election Day.

 

I Never Expected To Run For Office—Here's What I Learned

https://www.offmessage.net/p/what-i-learned-running-for-office-stancil

“All politics is local,” goes the cliché. It’s wronger today than ever before. In 2024, all politics is, if anything, national. But local politics are where you can glimpse what politics used to be—before 24/7 cable news, before Trump, before social media sloganeering. Today's hyper-polarized elections are simpler, flatter, and meaner. They reduce people to numbers in a bloc, and strip away the voices of everyone in the smaller share. In these local campaigns you can still see the vestiges of a more complicated, less-certain style of democracy than we have today. Once seen, it's hard to unsee, whatever the electoral benefits of doing so.

Into the Valley of Death: The crash of American Eagle flight 4184 and the ATR icing story

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/into-the-valley-of-death-the-crash-of-american-eagle-flight-4184-and-the-atr-icing-story-29e64faee67c

The legacy of American Eagle flight 4184 is not free of controversy, and probably never will be. The answers to some of the questions posed in this article about the safety of the ATR will still depend on who you ask, and although I’ve tried to approach every argument with an open mind, I obviously have my own opinions that not everyone will share. Readers are free to draw conclusions that differ from mine, but I hope this article provides a solid informational basis regardless.

At the very least we can say, all controversies aside, that the tragedy at Roselawn was caused by a failure of imagination, a failure to ask, “what would happen if things were a little bit different?” The pieces of the puzzle were there, and ATR even assembled some of them, but whether due to complacency, arrogance, or disinterest, no one ever quite went far enough. The miracle of flight does not forgive these qualities — not in pilots, not in manufacturers, and not in regulators. One cannot observe an anomaly, no matter how seemingly minor, and leave it unexplained simply because it didn’t matter this time — because next time, it might, and then it will be too late. And because of that careless indifference, flight 4184 rode headlong into the valley of death, and 68 souls were lost, having been ripped from the sky as though by an invisible hand, and yet it was not the hand of god, but the hands of real people who possessed the power to change some small thing for the better, and did not do so. Now it’s up to those who have come after them to ensure it never happens again.

Japanese Medical School Accused of Rigging Admissions to Keep Women Out (2018)

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/03/world/asia/japan-medical-school-test-scores-women.html

A Japanese medical school has been accused of manipulating the test scores of female applicants for years to artificially depress the number of women in the student body, a scandal that has triggered sharp criticism.

The revelations have highlighted institutional barriers that women in Japan still face as they pursue work in fields that have long been dominated by men.

Tokyo Medical University reduced the test scores of women to keep their numbers at about 30 percent of entering classes, the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper reported on Thursday.

Two decades of Top Gear and The Grand Tour — by Clarkson, Hammond and May

https://www.thetimes.com/life-style/celebrity/article/top-gear-grand-tour-jeremy-clarkson-hammond-may-tx9m9zrjm

Then again Top Gear was never really a show about cars. It was about three blokes making a show about cars. It scratched some of the laddish itch, but we weren’t laddy. Women watched us as well as men. We got to a stage where if we forgot our lines or cocked up a stunt, everyone was delighted because that’s exactly what they wanted to see. In a weird way at that point we couldn’t lose. But we always believed in what we were doing. An audience can sniff it out if it’s not authentic. Every discussion between us was driven by passion. It still is. We really did care about the difference between oversteer and understeer, and four-wheel and two-wheel drive and 50-50 weight distribution — all of those things.

Seeing America by train

https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/interactive/2024/amtrak-train-travel-diary/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzI0OTA0MDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzI2Mjg2Mzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MjQ5MDQwMDAsImp0aSI6ImIxNjczYWY5LTJhNmMtNDU3NS05ZGI2LTc5NjNmZGY2NmQyMiIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS90cmF2ZWwvaW50ZXJhY3RpdmUvMjAyNC9hbXRyYWstdHJhaW4tdHJhdmVsLWRpYXJ5LyJ9.6YRU2fjGQ0Csf8P2DilQUC6vSiuJdevXShIRExumEws&itid=gfta

What it’s really like to travel cross-country by rail.

@michaelhobbes.bsky.social‬ on social media

I wonder if this is a side effect of social media. When I post a bit of data or something I learned, I think of it as throwing a fact out into the ether. People who read the post, however, experience it as someone they know telling them *as an individual* something that should be relevant to them.

So when someone like will points out technically the economy is "good", it feels like obliviousness to the overall shitty workings of the system as is at best, and rubbing salt in wounds at worst. It feels like he's gaslighting\bullshitting people, even if that wasn't the intent.

— Space Man (@spaceds8008s.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 11:39 AM

— Michael Hobbes (@michaelhobbes.bsky.social) Aug 27, 2024 at 11:47 AM