Quotes

  • I guess there are ways to tell, right?

    They saw in the dim light, the headless figure facing them. H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man Your local library may have access to apps that carry audiobooks. The Invisible Man is an H.G. Wells scientific fantasy that I haven’t read yet and the audiobook is damn fun so far.

  • If you hold the banhammer, can you banhammer yourself?

    Like, an early subset of Twitter users are Something Awful forum goons — the most prominent of whom is Dril — and they love fucking with people. Elizabeth Lopatto, “Elon Musk learns the hard way that being a Twitter troll is way more fun than being a mod” at The Verge Did not think I…

  • Looking forward to the “Outliers” episode (there will be one, right?)

    This is classic economics-guy thing, where they act like the narratives that they map onto the data, are themselves just as infallible as the data…The idea that there is always something hidden, right, seems to be lurking here… Peter Shamshiri, “Freakonomics,” If Books Could Kill I’ve read enough college composition history to know that there…

  • How I’m going to tell people to f*ck off from now on…

    “…you round the argument off by yourself.” Gorgias to Socrates, Gorgias by Plato, Oxford Edition translated by Robin Waterfield.

  • Five, Seven, Five

    The winning haiku at the top of the article is a cold, hard comment on our current American political environment, yet Sanki’s poems, written on one year after the bombing in Hiroshima, produce a different, deeper chill. Sanki was imprisoned by Japan’s Special Higher Police for writing haiku like the first one. The second was…

  • Everything in content moderation…

    Content moderation is what Twitter makes — it is the thing that defines the user experience. It’s what YouTube makes, it’s what Instagram makes, it’s what TikTok makes. They all try to incentivize good stuff, disincentivize bad stuff, and delete the really bad stuff. From Nilay Patel’s “Welcome to hell, Elon” at The Verge