Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’ | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/descartes-was-wrong-a-person-is-a-person-through-other-persons
Trendism is a complicated inversion of the aphorism ‘mediocre minds talk about people, and great minds talk about ideas’: we value most those who talk about whether or not people are talking about an idea.
Trendism is the idea that, in Dellio’s White Noise, when people photograph the Most Photographed Barn In America, they are not acting absurdly but creating net value for society.
A belief in meritocracy is not only false: it’s bad for you | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/a-belief-in-meritocracy-is-not-only-false-its-bad-for-you
Bad idea of the day: make UBI contingent only on compulsory voting
At the end of the day, think outside the box about clichés | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/at-the-end-of-the-day-think-outside-the-box-about-cliches
Esquire’s March Cover Is a Monument to Whiteness and Toxic Masculinity - Pacific Standard https://psmag.com/ideas/why-esquires-march-cover-is-sort-of-dangerous
The Real “Dangerous” Ideas | Current Affairs https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/05/the-real-dangerous-ideas
Big Idea Famine https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-negroponte
Why no-platforming is sometimes a justifiable position | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/why-no-platforming-is-sometimes-a-justifiable-position
Bad idea of the day: a repl for inform in inform that describes your desktop environment as a haunted house
‘Playing the victim’ is politically vital and morally serious | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/playing-the-victim-is-politically-vital-and-morally-serious
Bad idea of the day: One of those franchise-themed fighting games, except it’s a rap battle. You get dealt a hand of possible lines, with points for internal rhyme and novelty, & multipliers for referencing previous lines & opponent backstory. External rhymes are combo attacks
The Green New Deal’s Big Idea - The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/green-new-deal-economic-principles/582943/
The revolutionary idea revealing the body’s hormonal democracy | Aeon Essays https://aeon.co/essays/the-revolutionary-idea-revealing-the-bodys-hormonal-democracy
I feel like the simplified and cliched ideas about slashers that informed Scream kept me from discovering the strange and wonderful world of actually-good slashers like Sleepaway Camp, Happy Birthday to Me, Tourist Trap, etc. Like, a lot of them are surreal and moody and great.
Bad idea of the day: Do a free machine-generated text class at a library (using tracery or something), self-publish the course materials as a book (with proceeds going to the library as donations), & get a couple copies for the stacks.
Misbehaving: being clever and wicked is a form of creativity | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/misbehaving-being-clever-and-wicked-is-a-form-of-creativity
Gossip was a powerful tool for the powerless in Ancient Greece | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/gossip-was-a-powerful-tool-for-the-powerless-in-ancient-greece
This is math-heavy but the idea that ‘keys are meta-taxonomic dimensions’ reminds me of ZigZag & other elements make me think of parallel prolog-likes like mycroft – should re-read carefully later: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/m2009002_qod.pdf
Apparently, when I pitched the idea of replacing backtracking with forking (with lazy side effecting of course) a ~year ago, I was reinventing STEPS work from 2008: http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2008003_john.pdf
Interesting idea: create a search-by-meaning for functions using the memoization database http://www.vpri.org/pdf/rn2017002_memoization.pdf
One of the ideas I was playing with in MfoM was the distinction between player & player character with a ‘possession’ metaphor, & how that relates to the time loop. I didn’t go so far with it. Maybe in Book of the Damned I’ll have the player be a possessing-spirit.
Legal standards invoke the ‘reasonable person’. Who is it? | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/legal-standards-invoke-the-reasonable-person-who-is-it
USA Wants to Restrict AI Exports: A Stupid and Dangerous Idea – Lauren Weinstein’s Blog https://lauren.vortex.com/2019/01/02/usa-wants-to-restrict-ai-exports-a-stupid-and-dangerous-idea
Bad idea of the day: train chess engines to play like specific historic players
Why symmetry gets really interesting when it is broken | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/why-symmetry-gets-really-interesting-to-physics-when-it-is-broken
Why a market model is destroying the safeguards of the professions | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/why-a-market-model-is-destroying-the-safeguards-of-the-professions
Bad idea of the day: Evangelion fanfiction in the form of Kaji’s hand-annotated copy of a Fire in the Valley style popular history of the development of Tokyo-3, casting Gendo as an Elon Musk type figure.
Modernist Microfiche Minotaur : “‘User agent’ is a great idea that has been weirdl…” - Eldritch Café https://eldritch.cafe/@/101360959314313478
Bad idea of the day: A shuffle-novel in the form of an oracle deck, with strange or absurd predictions & the premise that it is describing the life of the parallel version of the reader who lives in the world described by the deck.
Bad idea of the day: International ‘journalist exchange’ agreements – newspapers in different countries have an arrangement where they’ll trade journalists periodically & reprint each other’s stories in translation, by entering into clubs.
Slaying the Snark: what nonsense verse tells us about reality | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/slaying-the-snark-what-nonsense-verse-tells-us-about-reality
Folding Ideas - End of Eva Follow Up - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTAQhgXD75I
Folding Ideas - End of Evangelion and the Audience Author Membrane - YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAMAwErYRpQ
Bad idea of the day: autonomous self-driving solar-powered vending machines
Bad idea of the day: set your terminal font to Brand New Roman before starting to code
Bad idea of the day: bumble bee mounted wifi mesh network APs
Why your favourite film baddies all have a truly evil laugh | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/why-your-favourite-film-baddies-all-have-a-truly-evil-laugh
Sedimentation: the existentialist challenge to stereotypes | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/sedimentation-the-existentialist-challenge-to-stereotypes
An ant colony has memories that its individual members don’t have | Aeon Ideas https://aeon.co/ideas/an-ant-colony-has-memories-that-its-individual-members-dont-have
‘User empowerment’ is a useful idea that gets abused to glorify user-hostile design. It’s usually used to refer to situations where the user is empowered to do as we (devs or PMs) tell them, or where the empowerment is too abstract to be proven.
One of the reasons I’m so hard on the original macintosh is that the team appropriated fantastic ideas from better projects that they were totally unprepared to do justice to, then delivered warped & broken versions of them.
Bad idea of the day: a campaign to ensure all life extension therapies are completely covered by medicare, medicaid, & ACA-compatible insurance
The best argument against the idea that AI will replace programmers wholesale is the relative unpopularity of prolog. As an industry, we don’t take advantage of fantastic automation tech from the 70s, and instead write Java.
Bad idea of the day: Instead of a greatest hits album, a greatest failures album: a collection of all the tracks that made the least money and got the least attention (despite never being intended as deep cuts)
Since related ideas are circulating again, here’s my freshly reheated take: making sure your criticisms of reprehensible people are on-topic (focusing on the represhensible parts of them) solves all kinds of problems.
Bad idea of the day: a browser extention that requests the wayback machine spider whatever pages you visit as you visit them
Why A Fringe Idea About The Supreme Court Is Taking Over The Left | FiveThirtyEight https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-a-fringe-idea-about-the-supreme-court-is-taking-over-the-left/
Bad idea of the day: live your life as though it is a bayesian poisoning attack on the basilisk