Notes

🇳🇱 Mijn langdurige verblijfsvergunning is geaccepteerd! (My permanent residency has been approved!)

I’ve recently discovered David Rutledge’s The Philosopher’s Zone and am bingeing on it.

Today I listened to an episode with Aileen Moreton-Robinson who (rightly) criticizes rationalist Enlightenment philosophy for being reductionist and understanding the world through segmentation, as opposed to her indigenous Australian tradition which focuses on the relationships between things and systems.

Shortly after this I listened to Steven Nadler describe Spinoza, my favorite Enlightenment precursor, as treating the relationships between things and their contexts within systems as fundamental to his ethics.

¯_(ツ)_/¯ philosophy contains multitudes.

I understand why Apple needs to be a “good citizen” and introduce content scanning, but I share the EFF’s concerns about what is being lost. 😞

Competitive cycling is a cerebral sport where strategy can make all the difference.

Take for example Dr. Kiesenhofer, who brings home an olympic gold medal thanks to a bold new approach: riding 137 km faster than everyone else.

We’ve been watching The Newsroom, a typically cheesy-intellectual Aaron Sorkin drama from 2012–2014 that glorified journalism. At times the concerns raised seem quaint when viewed from the Trump era. Mostly, though, it’s easy to get wrapped up in the wistful nostalgia for a time when the news was taken seriously as a public good.

It seems timely, then, that we viewed a few episodes while the streets outside were shut down for a memorial to Peter R de Vries, an investigative reporter recently assassinated. Thousands of people queued in half-kilometer line to simply pay respects to a beloved journalist, in a society that still values the Fourth Estate.

We’re still learning how to discuss the quality of AI training. I hope this concept becomes widespread: participatory data-collection, where tagging occurs in-context.