phario

Check out his podcast with Podcast P. I’m not sure how the book compares but you gain a lot of respect for his career.

A lot of language is subtle.

On this case, the use of the word “obviously” is a backhanded compliment. It’s like seeing someone come last in a race and say “well they obviously tried”. I

I don’t really think if this (the subtlety of language) as a bad thing. If you want to improve as a writer you have to begin dissecting words and meaning and underlying context. It’s part of emotional and social intelligence.

When taking to people, it’s not as easy as “everything is the opposite”. If that were true, then it would be easy since everything is the opposite. Learning the subtlety of language is a skill—you might argue in every way as important as learning to code or learning maths or learning how to walk.

This subtlety of language governs how you treat others, how you write letters, how you give talks, how you parent, etc.

Honestly some of it is a skill, right? Since having kids and being around more children you quickly learn how to feign enthusiasm and excitement.

Also as you grow up you just learn how to pick your battles. Sometimes the gaps between people are so wide.

Science and logic and rational thinking is, in some sense, a religion. Either you drank the kool aid or you didn’t. It’s hard to convert people to it after they hit the work stage.

The first question to ask yourself is: “why do I need to say anything at all?”. If you don’t like the book or think it’s garbage, you don’t need to say anything. It’s not your job to educate your boss on what’s good or bad. So keep your yap shut.

The second issue is how to feign interest or how to steer the conversation. I would treat something like this the same way I treat a conversation about religion, race, or gender, that might disagree with amongst colleagues or people I don’t know.

As others have said, you can turn questions around and ask them. “It’s not my type of book but did you enjoy it? What part did you like?”

The key to it is to leave your ego behind. If a child comes up to me and says they liked some trite novel, I wouldn’t disparage them. I’d feign interest and ask them to talk about it.

The fact that you talk about “redline the shit out of it” makes me think it’s your ego that’s the problem. You think it’s your job to correct your boss and tell them why they don’t understand good writing. That’s an ego thing.

I don’t know anything about small US towns but these stories always remind me of stories from Jack Reacher involving small town corruption. Pretty incredible.

Unfortunately here in the UK there has been systematic defunding of things like libraries.

This wasn’t what I read but this looks excellent.

https://archive.org/details/jonah-edwards-presentation

Another super interesting story is about Marion Stokes, who recorded around 71000 cassettes worth of television media from 1975 to 2000s. She houses them in 9 apartments. I need to watch the documentary about her. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_Stokes

I remember I started reading about about this when I wondered what kind of media is “safe” for storage. It sounds like a simple question but it’s not. Digital media, unlike print media, is so easy to lose.

I love how so many comments and replies ascribe some form of ‘guilt’ to this, as if HP employees would feel shame. This doesn’t really mean anything to a company that size.

One of the great things about moving to the UK is that, despite all its problems, consumer protection Europe is so much better than in the US.

I think expecting someone like them to be reading up on scientific literature is a bit much.

Either you’re the type to understand that this issue is complex and requires some thought, or you think you already know everything.

Just as there are people who think Donald Trump have all the answers, why do we expect everybody on the internet to be capable of rational thought?

Sorry, I think you misunderstand that I’m talking about a large scale problem rather than a personal problem. Of course people can individually download videos to preserve.

Imagine losing YouTube’s videos next week. You would have effectively lost nearly two decades worth of media chronicling human and technological development (more if you take into account that YouTube has repositories of older media).

Someone described it like the Library Alexandria. In terms of density of information, I think the comparison is apt.

A good comparison that might be too old for some readers. Back in the 80s and 90s, the early internet was populated via usenet discussions. Google eventually bought this data and merged it into Google Groups. However Google Groups was disbanded. This meant that some archives can no longer be accessed because to do so requires some active component no longer in service. We have effectively lost gigantic chunks of early 90s internet history. A lot of this history was quite important in many facets of life.

There is already something like this via the Wayback Machine (who indeed do copies of video media but more typically VHS and other things) and things like the Russian Library genesis, which is kept in torrent format.

The problem really is that storage for video media is insane compared to storage of document or even photo data.

If people here haven’t read into it, it’s incredibly interesting to look into the way the Internet Archive works. In particular you have to begin to concern yourselves with how long it takes for HDs, SSDs, and other media to degrade in time.