>The modern American self is best defined by two Enlightenment thinkers who never met but have been arguing in our heads ever since.
This reads to me a little like: "The distracted boyfriend meme can be found at the helm of the Western mind whenever we encounter betrayal and disloyalty."
I get that this is more of a trope or a shorthand than literally saying that a certain thinker invented the idea of a good person being defined by their actions, but to me it's worth saying that these concepts and ideas are probably as timeless as language, not something invented a few hundred years ago, not something invented by Plato.
I don't see your points as necessarily in conflict with the article at all.
The diminishing power differential between regional/great powers seems to be exactly in line with what's being said about the shrinking incentives for conquest and the illustrative quagmires of Russia and America's foreign wars.
The ability for regional powers to coalesce feels like it underscores the way geopolitics have changed in exactly the way the author is arguing. Instead of a new Asean Empire that neatly fits into the patterns of a rising power from the 19th and 20th centuries, disparate polities with shared interests cooperate in a way that preserves their independent sovereignty and resists challenges to the status quo.
I can't speak to the author's sympathies with Project 2025, but if there is some related bias I didn't catch it on a first read where I wasn't aware of it. The mentions of "unvarnished unilateralism" and "U.S. strategy is shedding values and historical memory" and "democracies rotting from within" seem to imply Beckley has some idea of the existential dangers the current administration poses to American hegemony.
The view appears to be that the only credible rival to America (China) faces demographic headwinds that America doesn't to the same degree in trying to capitalize on any broader decline.
It will create demand for electricity. Demand always creates supply. Perpahs that was the missing link to the mass deployment of solar (because there's just no other way similar amounts of energy can be produced).
Perhaps, but Hank Green published a pretty convincing argument recently that electricity supply has nowhere the necessary elasticity, and the politicised nature of power generation in the US means that isn't going to change:
Let's ignore the headline itself for a moment and try to take the rest of the article at face value.
The idea that is being plainly communicated here is that there's a single system of symbols that is so well-understood that it gets passed along to human populations in Siberia that then cross the Bering strait as well as the isthmus of Panama, and these populations over this period maintain this system with such fidelity that they're recognizable as descending from the SAME system of symbols that entirely separate populations in Europe and Southern Africa are also using.
I don't think an alternative intepretation is reasonable to take away from the "Consistent doodles" infographic or the phrasing like "early humans as far back as 40,000 years ago also developed a system of signs that is remarkably consistent across and between continents".
This is either earth-shaking news that demands an entirely new understanding of human heritage, or it's very obvious pseudo-science.
I read through this book relatively recently and agree with the praise here for the core idea that legacy code is code that is untested. The first few chapters are full of pretty sharp insights that you will nod along to if you've spent a decent amount of time in any large codebase.
However, most of the content in the last half of the book consists of naming and describing what seemed like obvious strategies for refactoring and rewriting code. I would squint at the introduction to a new term, try to parse its definition, look at the code example, and when it clicked I would think "well that just seems like what you would naturally choose to do in that situation, no?" Then the rest of the chapter describing this pattern became redundant.
It didn't occur to me that trying to put the terms themselves to memory would be particularly useful, and so it became a slog to get through all of the content that I'm not sure was worth it. Curious if that was the experience of anyone else.
Thanks. After I wrote it a friend said "I think you just gave people permission to do things that they would've felt bad about otherwise." I think he was right, in a way. On the other hand, not everything is obvious to everyone, and it's been 20 years. Regardless of whether people have read the book, the knowledge of these things as grown since then.
> It's harder if they can't read the older examples, but I can google for a more modern example as well. It gives nomenclature and examples.
Don't do that. Ostensibly you're giving these people the book so that they'll learn to deal with legacy code. Those older examples are exactly what they need to see, even if they're in a language that those devs are not using.
Junior developers in javascript codebases of 7-10 years old will not have the experience necessary in some cases. I am coaching them as a manager trying to introduce a concept, not a professor.
I may be doing a disservice to their long term development at the cost of short term gains. However, I don't think this is true. There are a lot of developers who will never work in a C, C++, C#, or Java codebase. And I try to adhere to Krashen's "comprehensible input" theory as it has a lot of application to learning the language of software development as well.
I happen to read this book in my early career. I was mid-level. Beyond struggling with codebases, but hadn't yet developed an intuition with codebases. This book blew my mind then. It gave me whole new ways to thinking. I recommend it all the time to people in early career because how to handle a massive legacy codebase isn't obvious at all when you haven't been doing it for a long time.
The OP did ask that first question, but to me it read as being more rhetorical so that we could maybe get specific answers about what in the DSM-5 would have been written differently otherwise.
True, and sure their ways of life were largely alien to us, but I'm confident that our more modern static assumptions can and should outlive us THIS time.
- Tiktok: "I don't want or need this" -> Delete forever.
- Pixelfed: "I don't want or need this" -> Don't install.
- Instagram: "Still get a ton of value from seeing updates come in from family, don't want the option of getting deep into reels" -> Strict daily timer.
- YouTube: "Still get a ton of value from the network of content published to the platform consistently, don't want the option of getting deep into shorts" -> ??? self control.
The dilemma I have with YouTube feels like exactly what the OP's app is intended to solve.
So then the only theoretical limit on black hole mass would just be how fast you can put matter in black holes and/or merge existing black holes versus how fast the universe expands?
I'm 100% an armchair physician so take my words with a grain of salt but it seems like according to the math there is no limit to how massive a black hole can get. There are limits on the size of how big and small things can get and how hot or cold they can get, the second part is pretty cool, Physics Explained on yt has a good video on it (he's got a lot of good videos) but I enjoyed this one on what the maximum temperature is in the universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVlEQlz6n1k
I heard a joke about a nerd who dies and finds himself in a very hot underground cavern. The devil is there, and says "Welcome to Hell! This over here is the lake of molten lava where you'll spend the rest of eternity". The nerd says "well actually, since it's underground it's called magma rather than lava". The devil replies, "um, you do understand why you're here, don't you?".
I try to remember that when I'm tempted to point out mistakes that are fine to overlook.
This reads to me a little like: "The distracted boyfriend meme can be found at the helm of the Western mind whenever we encounter betrayal and disloyalty."
I get that this is more of a trope or a shorthand than literally saying that a certain thinker invented the idea of a good person being defined by their actions, but to me it's worth saying that these concepts and ideas are probably as timeless as language, not something invented a few hundred years ago, not something invented by Plato.
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