Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness In places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is the same as south, or east as west. Sometimes north, south, east and west are all alike, as they are when you stand within the grounds of a large project. It takes differences—many differences—cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented. Scenes of thoroughgoing sameness lack these natural announcements of direction and movement, or are scantly furnished with them, and so they are deeply confusing. This is a kind of chaos. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities The Image of the CityThe Great Blight of Dullness confusionchaos
Mystery exists in the mind Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality. Eliezer Yudkowsky, Rationality: From AI to Zombies The Tao of rationality mysteryconfusion
scribe.rip An Application scribe.rip I hadn't realized that Medium had made JavaScript a requirement to be able to read any Medium post - I'd had JS disabled for ages on Medium just because of all the extra cruft they added. But now, without JS, you only get the first few lines of content, and the rest is loaded entirely with JS - which is...stupid. Scribe fixes all that and focuses entirely on the author's content. Why Would I Want to Use This? You believe in an open web You believe more in the author than the platform You don't like the reading experience that Medium provides You object to Medium's extortionist business tactics You're concerned about how Medium uses your data Other reasons wwwblogging