Ian Bicking @ianbicking@mastodon.technology

This somehow strikes me as a great example of how mommyblogging goes wrong: https://themamalifeblogspot.com/2018/06/30/the-left-shoe-movement/

"It is simple, when you get in the car with your child you take your left shoe off and place in the floor board behind the child’s seat [...] You can think this silly all day long and there is no way you would ever forget your child, but what if?"

There's this emergent system of escalating what ifs in this community, an anxiety feedback loop.

And maybe I'm peculiar, but I've known many people who specifically keep their income levels under certain levels because they know they can't afford to go without certain benefits. Or they don't and get a shock when they lose benefits – sometimes based on undocumented limits.

Adversarial systems even build up: people learn the math of the systems, and the systems become overwhelmed, and they obscure the math or other conditions in order to stay sustainable. It's madness! UBI could remove much of that.

The Right has claimed a great deal of concern about marginal tax rates, and how they disincentivize earning, but the issue is much more real at low incomes when you add need-based benefits to the mix.

I don't know the right search terms to find the research again, but researchers who have looked at all the need-based benefits find a lot of cliffs – income levels or situations where an increase in income cuts off aid. And not just one cliff, but over and over at different income levels.

So many thought pieces about Universal Basic Income, and I must admit when I first heard the concept long ago its goals seemed so much simpler: instead of directed help give general (i.e. monetary) help, and instead of need-based give universal help.

The second part – universal help – is currently being thought about as futureproofing society, but there's very contemporary problems that it addresses. Specifically low or negative marginal benefit to increased earnings.

I've been thinking about scholarships and educational inflation...

Scholarships try to make elite institutions more inclusive. But the institutions remain elite, definitionally exclusive, and the scholarships become funded by the elite itself. Ironically this makes everything more exclusive! Tuition goes up, and the very progressivity itself is built on and depends on a financial elite.

I think there's an analog in affordable housing. And maybe a bunch of things.

"In all of this, the ‘viewer’ feels powerful and is indeed necessary; the ‘author’ as traditionally understood is either relegated to the status of the one who sets the parameters within which others operate, or becomes simply irrelevant, unknown, sidelined; and the ‘text’ is characterised both by its hyper-ephemerality and by its instability."

"Battles involving thousands of individuals have really happened; pseudo-modern cinema makes them look as if they have only ever happened in cyberspace. And so cinema has given cultural ground not merely to the computer as a generator of its images, but to the computer game as the model of its relationship with the viewer."

Ugh, I have a hard time engaging in action movies because of this, but I have to acknowledge it's probably not an accident or technical failure.

"Postmodernism, like modernism and romanticism before it, fetishised [ie placed supreme importance on] the author, even when the author chose to indict or pretended to abolish him or herself. But the culture we have now fetishises the recipient of the text to the degree that they become a partial or whole author of it."

The Death of Postmodernism And Beyond
https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Death_of_Postmodernism_And_Beyond

Given media portrayals, I assume all amputees are attractive young women. Who is stealing the limbs of all these young women?! That's where the real story is

Via a PyCon lightning talk: use ad hoc coverage reports as a debugging tool. E.g., if I'm trying to understand something or debug something, the coverage report gives me a map of where the error might be.

This is a "screenshot" of Powerpoint, except made in Powerpoint instead of as an actual screenshot (via https://www.reddit.com/r/UnusualArt/comments/8m2pks/im_hoping_this_is_a_place_to_share_this_i_created/)

As such, I suppose it is a kind of representational art. Is it? I certainly reflects careful inspection of something considered mundane, and recreating it... though with no particular voice on the part of the artist, who does not meaningfully change the image. Is that required? Or is this like copying a painting?

I thought I'd make a JupyterLab extension (the new beta version of Jupyter Notebooks). Ugh, totally whiffed – a day of work, and I can't get it to actually run anything.

The worst-to-debug stuff IMHO is when you can't even write a bug, can't even produce errors, when nothing at all happens.

I guess in some sense this is talking about closures, as in closed-over-a-set-of-values... which is hardly ever what we mean anymore.

Proper tail recursion is then like a full delegation to a new set of values, and a new closure.

A weird little aside in https://www.quora.com/Why-is-functional-programming-seen-as-the-opposite-of-OOP-rather-than-an-addition-to-it/answer/Alan-Kay-11

The notion of recursion, and perhaps tail recursion, as a way of thinking about little points in time: "To just pick just one of these, Strachey in the early 60s realized that tail recursion in Lisp was tantamount to “a loop with single simultaneous ‘functional assignment’ ”. And that writing it this way would be much clearer by bringing the computation of the *next* values for the variables together."

Except of course you'll mess up your new space too, and then you'll have a meta-mess, a series of archived living spaces each full of junk along with just enough precious things that you need to go back and look around every so often.

There's no good answers. It's as though this is a hard problem.

And of course you have to build your home, it just can't be the same if you are given a house, no matter how lovely it may be.

We're surrounded by the computer equivalents of turning your books backwards.

There's an emotional appeal to it of course. I like things organized too.

With computers there's the potential that you could take your cluttered and overwhelming space and wave your hand and turn it into a perfect modern minimalistic design, then wave your hand and put it back.

It's nice to stay in a hotel. Someone else makes the bed. But it's not home.

And of course we got here because people were building terrible homes, periodically crushed by natural disasters (failed hard disk), or invasion (viruses). I don't want to deal with that shit either!

But it makes me wonder how some of that could be reconstructed, recreate the feeling even if we've discarded the particulars. The username and the avatar are our tchotchkes... more of that. Emotional cues.

I mention this all because I was listening to a user study we did on young people and computing (college age). Contrary to expectations, about the same number of people felt more emotionally attached to their laptop, as felt more emotionally attached to their phone. And I think this sense of space and ownership had something to do with it.

The researchers used the term "domestication", as in the domestication of technology to your life. It makes me think about the sensation of "home".

The extreme example is a phone, where the ownership is limited to the arrangement of icons on the screen. Though the silos of each app do add a certain hierarchy to things, but a very flat and non-self-referential hierarchy. All of it overlaid with a series of user accounts, which is where things get relational – my views are the intersections of these accounts, the cursor of timelines and "seen" states, and the abstracted cloud-based relations that form the notifications.

Hierarchical systems have certain spacial qualities: a sense of distance, of isolation, reasonable patterns of exploration. Inside certain domains they are also user-organizable. One frustration I felt with Windows was that I no longer owned C:\, because moving anything would cause things to break. That frustration feels quaint now, I own nothing now. Even in ~/ I feel a bit like a tourist.