I once had an LSD-induced episode of psychosis where I thought my entire existence was a 2 minute loop on display in some higher dimensional art exhibit. Sounds silly but it was horrifying
To call Le Guin’s version of the Tao Te Ching a translation is misleading—she knew little Chinese. Le Guin leaned heavily on existing translations, alongside her intuition for Taoist philosophy.
From the her postscript:
> This is a rendition, not a translation. I do not know any Chinese. I could approach the text at all only because Paul Carus, in his 1898 translation of the Tao Te Ching, printed the Chinese text with each character followed by a transliteration and a translation. My gratitude to him is unending.
For the interested, the original paperback contains diligent notes about her sources and word choices.
I’ve been working with https://fractal.boston/ and adjacent communities for the last year and my loneliness has been cured. I now have the opposite problem where I don’t get enough time to myself!
I’ve been helping build https://fractal.boston/ for about a year now and it’s been a massively rewarding experience
Like the author, I highly recommend _building_ rather than simply joining a community. If you’re joining an already established scene, get involved! Host events, and bring in new members, establish new norms
Some seem to think this organization was “anti free speech”. Thing is, if you believe in free speech, famously, you have to agree to let people disagree with you!
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.“
The federal government putting its thumbs on the scales in debates about what can and should be broadcast (on both traditional and social media) should worry anyone who cares about free speech.
Lots of hate here, but I think this is clever and some iteration of it will sell well
I get that folks are worried about what AI-generated art will do to kids sense of creativity. Will they still learn to draw? Play instruments? Write stories?
But I genuinely believe that tech like this will only whet their imaginations. I would have had so much fun with this as an 8 year old, and would have spent hours just in my head, dreaming up ways to use my limited stickers.
Ofc parents will still need to encourage them to pick up hard skills (as has always been the case). But having an AI companion will mean they start seeing rewards for their efforts much faster. A shallower learning curve will prove to be a very good thing for most.
The title seems a little click-baity and basically wrong. Gabor transforms, wavelet transforms, etc are all generalizations of the fourier transform, which give you a spectrum analysis at each point in time
The content is generally good but I'd argue that the ear is indeed doing very Fourier-y things.
Probably true. Most mass-appeal science communication is bullshit.
But TBKTS helped to bring "somatics"--the idea that physical and psychological issues are often interwoven--to the mainstream. There is very clear evidence that this is true [1], and underappreciated by a medical field that has a heavy bias toward specialists over generalists. How many people are experts in both gastroenterology and trauma? And yet we all know intuitively that stress and stomach problems go together.
I'll always appreciate TBKTS for this, despite its flaws.
Honestly the fact that we don’t have a sovereign wealth fund invested in US equities is just silly. I get that you don’t want too much central interference in the economy but it feels like leaving money on the table
I often go down rabbit holes like this, trying to collapse and simplify the application stack.
But inevitably, as an application grows in complexity, you start to realize _why_ there's a stack, rather than just a single technology to rule them all. Trying to cram everything into Postgres (or lambdas, or S3, or firebase, or whatever other tech you're trying to consolidate on) starts to get really uncomfortable.
That said, sometimes stretching your existing tech is better than adding another layer to the stack. E.g. using postgres as a message queue has worked very well for me, and is much easier to maintain than having a totally separate message queue.
I think the main takeaway here is that postgres is wildly extensible as databases go, which makes it a really fun technology to build on.