This is a “crônica” about my relationship with computers in Brazil in the 1990s.
The crônica is a uniquely Brazilian format that emerged in Brazilian newspapers in the 19th century. The crônica is very short. It is characterized by a mix of fact, subjectivity, and often fiction that is supposed to reflect or say something about reality (this one has no fiction). Oddly enough, I wrote this crônica directly in English. It was an interesting experience to write something so profoundly Brazilian in English.
I know this is a website for programmers and I am not one. I like LLMs for quick answers and simple tasks like proofreading (just to fix errors, not to add or change anything) and simple text formating. I absolutely hate for everything else. I am a writer and LLMs prose may be correct and sometimes whimsical but it has soulless quality to it that makes me forget about what I just read after five seconds. My friends use Meta AI on our chat groups on WhatsAppp and I hate it so much, I delete every single AI message as soon as I see it.
Deleuze is a fairly traditional philosopher once you get to know him. Derrida kinda wants to burn the very things he needs to convey ideas, so understanding Derrida feels like something Derrida wouldn't approve.
Derrida is not even particularly difficult to understand (compared to later era Wittgenstein, he's downright straightforward) --- if you read him in french he's actually really funny (the man loved puns).
There's this idea in popular culture that he only wrote incomprehensible nonsense, which is just not true, and he's become a punching bag for some people who cannot handle the (somewhat made-up) "continental v. analytic" divide.
Yes, Derrida is fine if you’re just in it for wordplay. But it has always struck me that that’s about all there is to it. I don’t take him/deconstructionism seriously though beyond that. It was a cul-de-sac that was finally escaped.
I say this as someone who loves both Gadamer and Quine, not an erstwhile philosophical culture warrior.
By the way, I’d make a similar criticism of, for example, later Heidegger. At some point he collapses into a kind of solipsistic logorrhea. Sein and Zeit and his lectures from the 1920s, though, had real philosophical meat on the bone (this is not an endorsement of his views, by the way; I think he was just wrong about some stuff, like getting the ontological priority of ready-to-hand and present-at-hand exactly backwards—-but early Heidegger is philosophically substantive and engaging in ways later Heidegger absolutely isn’t).
Maybe it's precisely wordplay that is at stake here. Heidegger is no less stranger to it than Derrida. In fact a lot of his philosophical complexes are grounded explicitly into etymology and new ways to hear old words.
Concerning Heidegger I stand in the opposite corner of the room: I liked his later writings more and despite having read him profusely, I'm not able to articulate his thoughts like you did by contrasting present-at-hand with ready-at-hand which however pinpoints very well the divide between analytical and continental thought.
You're right to say that he "collapses into a kind of solipsistic logorrhea", and it is pertinent to what we are discussing since in heideggerian terms this should be expressed as "language bringing language to language through language".
An example: the linguistic proximity between explicate vs implicate that is another instance of the ready-to-hand vs present-at-hand dichotomy.
I agree with pretty much everything you written here. I think Wittgenstein (PI era) is the only convincing philosopher working in a similar "method" and for similar aims.
Now guess which countries staged a coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran in 1953, which brought the current oppressive regime to its power:
A very narrow minded view. There are plenty of undemocratic and authoritarian countries around the world, Iran is hardly unique and perhaps not even the worst. And so-called democratic countries are sometimes not much better - a trip through US foreign policy over the years is pretty horrific, the violent oppression of the Palestinians by Israel, and others. None of this should have anything to do with whether a country’s citizens and academics should have access to scientific knowledge and conduct research. In fact scientific knowledge and a better educated population is one of the best ways to combat authoritarianism and oppression.
American/Westerner tries not to condemn a nation of 90 million people because of their government's actions (impossible!). This is the same twisted, devilish logic that murdered millions of Iraqis, Libyans, Syrians, Afghans, and Viets, etc., because why not?
Condemn a nation? What part of "affection unspeakable" do you not understand?
All you have to assert is that Iran is not a totalitarian theocracy, and that academic research reliably benefits the Iranian people at the expense of their oppressive overlords' agenda.
I don't understand the rest of your comment. The answer to "why not murder millions of" any given nationality is because it is unspeakably horrible, grossly detrimental to human flourishing, and a violation of our highest ideals.
I really don't know why you're attributing to me the sentiment of "because why not?". I certainly don't intend to express it.
Sanctions against totalitarian states exist to prevent private companies from empowering murderers like Khamenei. You can argue that they're not murderers, but you can't argue that sanctions are imposed "because why not."
> Good! Iran is an undemocratic, authoritarian theocracy run by violent, repressive misogynists.
I can practically replace Iran with US here, and this would actually still be true.
Trump is a massive misogynist. Both Biden and Trump are internationally violent and both would actively support a genocide happening through their closest ally.
The next president of the US is either Misogynist Trump, or Kamala Harris which no American has voted for in a primary for - making it undemocratic. In this regard, both Iran and the US are picking from a pre-selected pool of candidates.
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So, govt bad therefore people shouldn't be able to access research material?
> The trick is, really, how to make these libraries accessible to individuals but only insofar as they're not pawns of the regime.
Research is going to mostly be happening in universities, which are usually regulated by the government. Education is also connected to the government. The answer is you don't.
> Individually, I love you all with affection unspeakable; but, collectively, I look upon you with a disgust that amounts to absolute detestation.
edit: FWIW I didn't flag you or downvote you. I upvote you for taking me seriously enough to contest.
> I can practically replace Iran with US here, and this would actually still be true.
That's valid! The US is predominantly bought and paid for by an oligarchy of monopolists who set restrictions on research. Political donations and lobbying efforts significantly influence grant eligibility by shaping the priorities and policies of funding agencies, and that imposes a chilling effect on academic attention.
If you, a cosmopolitan, say that the US' system is less free than Iran's, then I concede. The sanctions are cruel and unjust. I didn't realize that US academic institutions were more stringently curtailed than Iranian ones. I assumed that the Revolutionary Guard would penalize/harass individual researchers or labs for producing subversive research—above and beyond a preferential allocation of funds.
> Kamala Harris which no American has voted for in a primary for - making it undemocratic
This is undemocratic, but not in the way that you mean. Our first-past-the-post primaries ignore second picks, so it's unimaginable that she'd have gathered no votes in a runoff. That being said, you are again correct: the United States' two party system is undemocratic in that these private institutions share total authority over the docket. But, again, I don't think that it's worse than the influence of Iran's clerical councils. Is it?
> Thanks?
I don't know what to tell you. I don't hate you. You tell me what you need, and I'll do it.
The thing that’s allowed the Iranian government to keep going, at least in my opinion, has been economic destitution of the people of Iran. Largely caused by the sanctions, and primarily the secondary sanctions set by the US.
Right wing governments love economic hardship because it allows for them to unify a portion of the people under that messaging.
There’s even evidence that with apartheid South Africa, sanctions were actually solidifying their hold on the country there. The fall of that government isn’t really attributed to sanctions.
I think more in terms of enjoyment than pure typing productivity. If I'm using a text editor that I found comfortable and fun, I am more likely to feel good while working. So a text editor is more like a chair -- the gain in productivity is indirect and maybe a little subjective.
In many relevant ways, Windows is more easily hackable than Linux. That is in no small part due to Autohotkey, but also many other tools made by independent programmers.
Autohotkey is vastly superior to anything available on Linux, where one must string together several arcane tools to achieve similar scripting effects. Autohotkey serves for everything, it is extreme reliable and predictable. I know someone will shout "there's Autokey on Linux! And pyautogui!". Rest assured, I know these tools. They're not nearly as reliable and comprehensive as Autohotkey is on Windows.
I would most certainly not compare Autohotkey to Emacs in that way, as Emacs, powerful as it is, is not really meant to be the same as Autohotkey. However, Autohotkey can do pretty much anything you can think of in terms of GUI OS level local automation (for cli, I'd probably use WSL).
On Linux, I may sometimes have to glue xmodmap + xcape + xbindkeys + xdotool + wmctrl + whatever-else in a bash script that will probably require reading multiple man pages and multiple iterations to get right. Autohotkey would only require accessing a single source of solid documentation, as it can all be done in a single Autohotkey script that doesn't rely on any other tool.
More often than not GPT will give you the entire code that you need on the first or second response. But it only knows Autohotkey version 1.
Or for a more "hackable" experience on Windows, you can do what (I expect) AutoHotKey does, and send window messages to apps to trigger "key press" and "mouse down at X coords".
By analogy it's as is there's a single stable interface to the GUI layers in apps mediated by the OS, instead of poking at X APIs.
The crônica is a uniquely Brazilian format that emerged in Brazilian newspapers in the 19th century. The crônica is very short. It is characterized by a mix of fact, subjectivity, and often fiction that is supposed to reflect or say something about reality (this one has no fiction). Oddly enough, I wrote this crônica directly in English. It was an interesting experience to write something so profoundly Brazilian in English.
Crônicas are often slice-of-life.