flâneur

Evan Cater

1 followers · 4 following · 850 views

on the atlas — 51

highlights — 15

  • “We were writing things by hand,” Sanjay said. His glasses darkened in the sun. “We’d rewrite it, and it was, like, ‘Oh, that seems near to what we wrote last month.’ ” “Or a slightly different pass in our indexing data,” Jeff added. “Or slightly different,” Sanjay said. “And that’s how we figure out—” “This is the essence,” Jeff said. “—this is the common pattern,” Sanjay said, finishing their thought.
    The Friendship That Made Google Huge
  • We must overcome the fetichism of the alphabet, of the multiplication table, of grammars, of scales, and of bibliolatry,” progressive educator G. Stanley Hall said in 1901. “The true center of correlation on the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child’s own social activities.”
    In Defense of Memorization | Educators Don’t Like Rote Learning
  • In every epoch of Western history we find educators insisting that their pupils serve an apprenticeship in the work of masters of poetry and rhetoric. Saint Augustine, as a schoolboy in North Africa in the fourth century, studied only a very few Latin classics in school, principally Virgil’s Aeneid, great chunks of which he learned by heart. But within its “narrow limits,” the historian Peter Brown wrote in his life of the saint, the education the young Augustine received was “perfectionist.” “Every word, every turn of phrase of these few classics,” Brown observed, “was significant and the stu…
    In Defense of Memorization | Educators Don’t Like Rote Learning
  • Reasonably-sized services have a significant slice of responsibility such that most feature development can be done within a single service. They are large enough that you don't have too much excess infrastructure. They allow teams to have clear ownership boundaries and prevent teams from stepping on each others' toes during development.
    From Monolith to Microservices to Reasonably-sized Services
  • Shelley was a volatile creature of air and fire: he seems never to have noticed what he ate or drank, except sometimes as a matter of vegetarian principle. Keats was earthy, with a sweet tooth and a relish for spices, cream and snuff, and in a letter mentions peppering his own tongue to bring out the delicious coolness of claret. When Shelley in Prometheus Unbound mentions: “The yellow bees in the ivy-bloom”, he does not conjure up, as Keats would have done, the taste of the last hot days of the dying English year, with over-ripe blackberries, ditches full of water, and the hedges grey with ol…
    “Poets, the best of them, are a very chameleonic race.” — Percy Bysshe Shelley | The Sheila Variations
  • “expert performers not simply as domain-specific experts but as experts in maintaining high levels of practice and improving performance
    The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance « the jsomers.net blog
  • If you work quickly, the cost of doing something new will seem lower in your mind. So you’ll be inclined to do more.
    Speed matters: Why working quickly is more important than it seems « the jsomers.net blog
  • elated by a plane perspectivity, represented by a 3 × 3 matrix called homography H [12,13]. The stitching process is to determine the homography matrices between successive images, and we have developed an automatic and ro- bust technique based on points of interest. This has several advantages over classical stitching techniques based on minimizing color differences: (1) less sensitive to color changes between images due to, e.g., different focus; (2) less likely converged to local minima because the points of interest contain the most useful information and because other textureless whiteboa…
    Digital-Signal-Processing.pdf
  • n the decl ine of mi ddle - class society, contemp lation becam e a school fo r asocial behavior; it was countered by distract ion as a vari ant of social conduct. 18 Dadaistic act ivities act ually assured a rat her vehem ent distract ion by mak ing works of art the cen tre of scan dal. One req uiremen t was foremo st: to outrag e the public.
    benjamin.pdf
  • An analysis of art in the age of mech anical rep roduction mu st do justice to these rel ationships, for they lead us to an all - imp ortant insight: for the first time in world history, mech anical rep roduction em ancipates the work of art fro m its paras itical dependence on ritual
    benjamin.pdf
  • ne mi ght general ize by saying: the tech nique of rep roduction detach es the rep roduced object from the domain of tradition. By making m any rep roductions it substitutes a plural ity of copies for a unique existence. And in permi tting the rep roduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own part icular situation, it react ivates the object rep roduced. These two proces ses lead to a tremen do us shatteri ng of trad ition which is the obvers e of the contemp orary cri sis and renewal of mankind.
    benjamin.pdf
  • Rough Samuel and sleek wheedling James were, and are not. [...] The Bottles they drank out of are all broken, the Chairs they sat on all rotted and burnt; the very Knives and Forks they ate with have rusted to the heart, and become brown oxide of iron, and mingled with the indiscriminate clay. All, all has vanished; in every deed and truth, like that baseless fabric of Prospero's air-vision. Of the Mitre Tavern nothing but the bare walls remain there: of London, of England, of the World, nothing but the bare walls remain; and these also decaying (were they of adamant), only slower. The mysteri…
    When the Worst Man in the World Writes a Masterpiece | Fantastic Anachronism
  • If you find yourself reviewing something you don’t care about anymore, you should act. Sometimes upon reflection you’ll remember why you cared about the idea in the first place, and you can revise the prompt to cue that motivation. But most of the time the correct way to revise such prompts is to delete them.
    How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
  • Writing good prompts feels surprisingly similar to translating written text. When translating prose into another language, you’re asking: which words, when read, would light a similar set of bulbs in readers’ minds? It’s not a rote operation. If the passage involves allusion, metaphor, or humor, you won’t translate literally. You’ll try to find words which recreate the experience of reading the original for a member of a foreign culture.
    How to write good prompts: using spaced repetition to create understanding
  • Jonathan Edwards Out of the Tarpit Conal Elliott Bret Victor Paul Chiusano
    About | Future of Coding