Notes

now i’m really having difficulty dealing with good weather

“Review: Leah Libresco Sargeant’s ‘Dignity of Dependence’”:

Sexism has two pillars: the insistence that female biology is moral destiny, and the insistence that female moral destiny is inferior.

What is at stake is nothing less than affording women access to the tumult of total humanity. To propose that a woman’s biology consigns her to a single corner of the moral universe is to force her to undergo a violent truncation — a shrinkage of the sort that always attends the indignity of specialization.

Nothing innovative here, but the phrase the tumult of total humanity is so majestic that I can’t help gazing at it.

“An Ant Is Drowning: Here’s How to Decide if You Should Save It”:

Queries like ‘Do individual ants deserve moral concern?’ risk conflating the scientific question of whether ants are sentient, the ethical question of whether only sentient beings deserve moral concern, and the practical question of whether a policy of caring for ants in a particular way is achievable or sustainable.

Scientifically, we can assess how likely particular beings are to possess capacities like sentience, by evaluating the available evidence. Ethically, we can assess how likely these capacities are to matter morally, by evaluating the available arguments. Practically, we can then put it all together to assess how likely these beings are to matter – and how to factor this into the way we live our lives.

“The Hidden Costs of Masking for Women With ADHD and Autism”:

The harder someone works to appear ‘normal’, the more their difference disappears from view – and the less the world learns to make room for it. In hiding to belong, they only deepen the loneliness that made them hide in the first place.

In a perfect world, of course, I would lean toward unmasking. And I know many of you who are neurodivergent – and just as tired of pretending – would agree. It would be a relief to move through the world as our full selves, without apology. But the truth is, that kind of openness comes with risk. We still live among people who judge and criticise, who prefer – often unconsciously – those who resemble themselves.

“Women Undergoing IVF” (translations mine):

What makes it even more difficult is that your entire life schedule becomes tied to it. You can’t plan what you’ll do next because it entirely depends on your hormone levels—something beyond your control. All aspects of your daily life—work, socializing, rest—must unconditionally give way to the treatment.

When we say these women have subjectivity, it doesn’t mean their decisions are completely free and unconstrained. On the contrary, what I observed is a form of subjectivity arising under structural pressure, or, a situational, struggling subjectivity. Throughout the long IVF process, they learn, make decisions, and communicate with doctors. This process itself is a profound practice of subjectivity. They internalize external expectations, such as those from family or society, and eventually articulate them as “my own decision.” Behind the statement “I want a child to complete my life,” there may be concerns for marital stability, anxiety about age, or imaginations of a “normal” family life. It is subjectivity operating in complex situations to translate external pressure into internal needs.

I want to portray the resilience, contradictions, and genuine realities of women navigating the intersections of technology, the body, family, and social structures. This fluid and situational subjectivity is the most authentic insight I’ve gained from my research.

“The Goon Squad”:

But I can’t get entirely behind the few-bad-apples theory. Nor can I so neatly separate the gooners as a whole from the rest of us. Think about it for a second: What are these gooners actually doing? Wasting hours each day consuming short-form video content. Chasing intensities of sensation across platforms. Parasocially fixating on microcelebrities who want their money. Broadcasting their love for those microcelebrities in public forums. Conducting bizarre self-experiments because someone on the internet told them to. In general, abjuring connective, other-directed pleasures for the comfort of staring at screens alone. Does any of this sound familiar? Do you maybe know some folks who get up to stuff like this? It’s true that gooners are masturbating while they engage in these behaviors. You could say that only makes them more honest.

at least i was shown the first rung of the ladder

“The Art of the Impersonal Essay”:

By the mid-nineties, the mind you were encouraged to develop, at King’s, was basically unchanged from the one students were expected to form in the mid-fifteen-hundreds. (The college was founded by Henry VI in 1441.) A discursive, objective, ironical, philosophical, elegant, rational mind. I was none of those things. I was expressive, messy, chaotic, and increasingly infuriated. A lot of my fury was directed at the university itself. The more I heard about the prior lives of my fellow-students, the more enraged I became.

I understood all three men to be “personal essayists” in the sense that they cared passionately about their subjects, but they themselves were rarely figures in any particular piece; their energies were directed elsewhere. And I followed their example, channelling my furies into coolly expressed explication, description, analysis.

That tone, for better or worse, has stayed with me. I was trained to write like this, and I write like this. I just can’t bleed out onto the page as some people do, or use all caps or italics to express emotion, even when I know it’s what’s expected and that many people not only prefer it but see it as a sign of authenticity. The essay-writing habits of my school days have never left me. I find I still don’t want people to relate to what I’m saying in an essay, or even be moved by the way I say it. (With fiction, I feel the opposite.) I just want to think out loud about the things that matter most to me.

Full disclosure: these strands are drawn, essentially, from four big isms. Feminism, existentialism, socialism, and humanism. Only the first is still fashionable, and the last has been so debased, misused, and weaponized over the centuries as to be almost unspeakable in polite company. Still, these were the ideas that formed me as a teenager, and they linger on in the way I think and write. No matter what the topic in the rectangle may be, they lie in wait, nudging me, correcting me, reminding me of what it is I really think. What I actually believe.

In practice, they are like an annoying quad of parental figures, tutting if they spy me, for example, treating a living being as a means rather than an end—even rhetorically, even for a moment—or sighing dolefully when I use that totalizing term “the people,” which can obscure at least as much as it illuminates. They make every essay a battle.

Though I’ve never wanted any reader (or anyone, really) to “relate” to me, exactly, I have always wanted to be “in relation,” which is different. We aren’t required to be like one another or even to like one another to be in relation. We just need to be willing to create and enter spaces in which solidarity is one of the possibilities. For many readers, of course, solidarity may still prove impossible. It may be impractical, unthinkable, a betrayal of their own systems of thought, or simply “cringe.” But I try to write in such a way that the possibility persists. That’s what the practice of essaying is, to me: a stumbling attempt to re-create, in language, a common space, one that is open to all. It’s in that optimistic spot that I set out my stall, yes, and my ideas and arguments such as they are, sure, but without demanding to see anyone’s identifying papers in the opening paragraph. Because that’s one thing I’ve learned, over the years. Sometimes, in order to create this more open space, you have to loosen your hold on your beloved isms.

“To essay” is, of course, to try. My version of trying involves expressing ideas in a mode open enough, I hope, that readers feel they are trying them out alongside me. While I try, I am also striving to remain engaged (and engaging) yet impersonal, because although the personal is certainly interesting and human and vivid, it also strikes me as somewhat narrow and private and partial. Consequently, the word “we” appears in my essays pretty frequently. This isn’t because I imagine I speak for many, or expect that my views might be applied to all, but because I’m looking for the sliver of ground where that “we” is applicable. Because once you find that sweet spot you can build upon it. It’s the existentialist at my desk who is best placed to find that spot. She says to herself: Almost all of the people I know (and I myself) have experienced pain. And absolutely all of the people I know (and I myself) will die.

Aside from the fact that I never meant to be an essayist in the first place, one detail that has surprised me most during the past twenty years is that I have, in fact, written more personally in the essay form than I ever expected or intended. Still, as I look back on my “I,” across so many essays, I notice that the person typing out this “I” remains very hard to pin down, even for me. For starters, it’s never quite the same “I” who’s typing the word “I,” because of the way time works. Because of the way life is.

If my own “I” remains a various thing—as I have written about too often—it is its very variousness that forces me to acknowledge the points of continuity: the fundamentals. What I honestly believe, as a human being.

Wong, Sampson. Urban Strollology: Learning From Hong Kong [城市散步學：以香港作為起點]. Breakthrough, 2023.

捕捉和收集城市環境中所有美麗、有趣、啟發思考與聯想的空間與細節，就是我的 Pokémon GO 了。

「看出所以然」的意思，連向的就是所謂的「學術關懷」和「地方關懷」。

[社會學家理查‧桑內特（Richard Sennett）的《棲居》（Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City）]中指出城市必然由兩種事物構成，一種是實體被建造的環境和各種觸摸得到的東西（樓宇），一種是人物生活時無盡的活動與實踐（棲居），兩者互為因果，如何互動影響，千絲萬縷，某程度上城市研究就是拆解它們之間的關係。這本書的知識觀點是，散步與觀看是「棲居」的一部分。我們若有意識地散步與觀看，將有可能進一步改變實體的城市空間。退一萬步而言，當我們持續有意識地散步與觀看，也立刻改變了實踐者本來的「城市生活」，因為頻頻散步的人，不再只功能性地使用城市環境。

當我說散步，我說的是享受觀看城市（第一個目標），以及從帶有反思性的觀看實踐中，得到真切的「地方感」，跟城市更為休戚與共（第二個目標）。

觀看城市時能獲得無窮趣味的訣竅（trick），是先假設每座建築物都值得一看，而每座建築物都可能（可以）打動自己

我很喜歡「習得的口味」（acquired tastes）的說法，有些事物可能特別討好，初遇時就自然喜歡，也有些事物擁有獨特的形態，可能需要經過時間訓練，才能懂得欣賞，而一旦懂得它的魅力，就無法忽視。

遇上每一座建築，我們可以問，它是「高矮肥瘦」？我喜歡它的形狀、比例、線條、組件、顏色、物料和質地（texture）嗎？這建築物座落在怎樣的環境中，喜歡它跟四周的連繫嗎？它有讓我想起其他的建築物？我是否要把它放在我的偏愛清單上？若然把這些問題都記下來，不羞於跟身邊人談論，已足夠讓散步變成繁忙的觀看活動了。

我很喜歡留意中電、港燈和電訊等公用服務、基礎設施相關的建築。這些建築總設在鬧市，但沒有依從旁邊其他建築的設計，往往都顯然有用心。

通道的吸引，必須走在其中才能體會，不能純粹遠觀；若你走得興奮，或有驚喜的發現，就是來自道路上不同元素構成的混合狀態：一條路的寬窄、高低、設施與旁邊建築物的關係，甚或兩端有什麼，種種一切加起來，才是這條路的整體。

通道的美更涉及移動的經驗，而不單純取決於外觀 […]

我們說的開放空間，是人們願意逗留其中，並會因逗留而促成其他事情發生的地方。

留白的空間，不一定是所謂公共的。公共的定義有許多，有人着眼於法理上的擁有權，有人着眼於誰人可自由進出，而有一派城市研究者特別在意空間是否容讓有風險和不可測的事情發生。他們說，真正的「公共」，來自人與人自由而不可預計的對話與互動，而這種不可預計代表空間沒有嘗試計劃一切。當周遭的一切沒有被完全掌控，就代表有風險，或有意料之外、無法計算的事情發生；同時，風險帶來自由，而自由醞釀的，就是觀察公共空間時最具趣味的一環。留白，有機會促成「公共性」。

我們觀看城市裏的留白空間，是在看不同空間有否開創了一種公共性。公共性是指人們樂意在其中逗留，並在逗留時出現不明顯的細微協商。這種協商不是傳統上所指的經談判達致共識，而是當我們都在此活動，可能產生的自行協調與不明顯的細微互動。愈來愈多學者說公共空間之所以「公共」，是因為市民給予它這樣的公共性，願意在其中看見彼此的存在，你眼望我眼，感受到「我們加起來就是公共」。開創公共空間，是拓展人們想要使用的地方，更在體現我們的公民身分。

我想起多番論述公共性的哲學家漢娜‧鄂蘭（Hannah Arendt），特別關心「行動」這個概念。公共，來自眾人的活動與行動，每個人在看見彼此的空間中活動，構想自己下一步的行動，沒有必然的決定與軌跡，由此產生了開創性的力量：創造性來自你我皆不知道下一秒會是怎樣，是以下一秒鐘，我可能會做各樣事情，你也可能會做各樣事情，而我們的活動與互動，或會開創新的狀態與局面，這就是公共性的核心所在。從這角度觀看城市，也是觀察「大家都來到這兒」的時刻，有沒有爆發出意想不到的力量。如果說城市會啟動人的自由與可能性，一方面因為留白空間的存在，有片刻沒有預設我們要做什麼，另一方面因為人們的互動，帶來變數與新可能。

論到留白空間，最先聯想到的是公園、廣場、遊樂場等，是被特意規劃出來的開放空間，然後也有私人、半公共的留白。散步時，觀察它們，可看空間的設計構造、如何形塑人在這片空間的活動與互動。另一種則是市民開創的空間。人的活動挪用了一些空地，是行動創造了新的開放空間，但是開放空間可以誕生，也源於城市有意外地留白，即使有些本意不是讓人使用的剩餘空間。

以物件作為觀看的焦點，延伸的思考與關懷是，從這些物件如何被安放、被安放在哪裏，而看見權力的互動。

城市觀察除了可看物件的存在與繁多，也可看物件有沒有被允許，是不是只是一個臨時的存在，或正在掙扎想長期留下。大眾的意志，有時可以共同決定一些物件是不是留在社區，我們觀看時也值得觀看這樣的意志與進程。

把在城市裏遇上的一切視為「文本」，也就是除了觀察，作出美學上的判斷外，也把城市裏所有東西視為「符號」。當有「符號」，我們就需要解碼（decoding）、消化、解讀、解釋，讓不同東西對我「說話」。更準確地說，有些信息甚至是我們自行產生（generate）的，城市裏的東西接通了我的記憶、思考，產生了一些想法、意義，而通過我的特殊解讀和詮釋，一下子變成了只有我才閱讀得到的信息。這種信息比上述所講的更迂迴了，甚至不是「間接」的信息，而是一種很個人、只有在我腦海出現的想法與想像。

當城市忽然在各個角落重複出現一系列的信息，對我來說，是展現了一種難得的詩意和神秘感。我最喜歡的一個例子，就是農曆新年時，店舖習慣在鐵閘貼上「初 X 啟市」，本身只是一種資訊，告訴客人店舖什麼時候開始營業，但當每家每戶都這樣貼的時候，就像變成一場復工的比較。

當社會上很多人開始談論地方，以至對地方的愛和聯想，就可以形成一張地方的意義網。地方的意義可以由大量的對話與交流被激活。當很多人一起講述一個地方、一個角落、一個城市的不同元素，而你聽過別人講解以後，散步時忽然記起其他人的講法，那就如在街上得到了新的聯想和信息，即便這信息沒有被展示出來──那是社群對話所構造的信息。

千禧年之後，地理學是其中一個最多學者反思「什麼是自然」的學科，而我心目中把這概念論述得最清楚的是地理學家 Noel Castree。他一錘定音地指人們大致對「自然」一詞有三種理解。第一，泛指所有「非人類」（non-human），包括動植物和地球的各種物質；第二，指向一種宏觀的力量和秩序，即當我們用到「大自然」（Nature）去講述世界時；第三則是延伸成一種價值判斷，形容一些比較沒有人為參與和改變的情況，像人們會說，暑熱時不開冷氣，是過着比較自然的（natural）生活。而城市研究學者也接續了這課題，在城市空間中探問、注視「城市中的自然」（urban nature），幫助我們多看到什麼、多理解什麼。

這樣的討論非常有趣，點出了看似矛盾的說法。「都市人造環境」的用法一方面提醒我們，城市裏差不多沒有脫離人為這回事，幾乎所有東西都是人為砌出來的。即使是看似最自然、最綠色、最遠離繁喧的中央公園，都是高度人為的產物，由第一代園境大師歐姆斯德（Frederick Law Olmsted）苦心設計經營而成，牽涉大量的建造與日常維護。另一方面，城市裏非人的東西卻又無處不在，植物和動物自然是其中的例子，一切我們賴以維生的水和食物皆取於自然，鋪地和建屋的物料完全取自地球的沙石。因此，「非人的東西」無處不在，不過它們經過極大幅度的人為改造（reworking），再被安放和出現在這片被稱為城市的地方中。如果採納這種理論性思考，在城市中觀看自然，更清晰的說法，就是觀看「非人」的東西，如何被「安放」在城市中，經過怎樣的「改造」過程而進入我們的視線。

在城市中看見動物的樂趣，其實也源於城市是被人類管治的環境，尋找和觀看其他生物，也像把我們帶離了日常和機械式的工作與生活。雖然這跟散步觀看未必有直接關係，但不少研究者提出，城市這種人造環境也會徹底改變一些生物的行為，改變牠們演化的進程。如此一來，有些我們接觸的生物，是物種在城市的版本，也是經過人造環境的改造，是「原產自」城市的。循這樣理解，即使是野生動物，它們也是在過城市的生活，是城市的一員。遇見牠們是看見「城市真實」（urban reality），正視這是被不同物種分享的空間。

城市研究者創造了一個理論化的詞彙 zoopolis，大意可譯為像動物園的城邦，捕捉在人造環境中，人如何治理各種生物的存在形態。我們許多時都忘記了，動物有牠們的行動力和生命力，有機會活出人類意料之外的模樣。

Craig Mod:

For me, a walk is a way to force practice on a number of crafts manifesting in GOOD WORK (“the reward of good work is more work”).

“Behind the Scenes on How Windows 95 Application Compatibility Patched Broken Programs”:

On very rare occasions, the problem is too deeply embedded in the program, and the only reasonable option is to patch it. Out of safety, the Windows 95 team got written permission from the vendor whenever they needed to patch a program. The consultation included detailed information on what the problem was and how it was going to be patched. In exchange, the team requested information from the vendor on what versions of their product are affected (and if they could send those versions for analysis), as well as a promise to fix the problem in their next version, because the next version won’t have the benefit of the patch.

“Work, After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break”:

The industrial nations of the twentieth century were built around the idea that work was the organising principle of life. Catholic social teaching talked about the dignity of labour. Socialist movements sang about the worker as a hero. Protestant infused capitalism turned productivity into a route to salvation. Even the centrist stripe of postwar politics treated a job as the main vehicle through which adults were meant to find status, income and a place in the world. This hung around through the neoliberal years, even as manufacturing shrank and services expanded. You can hear it every time someone from any mainstream party talks about “hard working families”.

The result is that a lot of our institutions still act as if giving everyone a job is the primary goal, long after the underlying economic logic has started to drift.

There is a strange symmetry here. On one side you have firms quietly routing labour through screens and robots, and repeating that jobs will be fine on aggregate. On the other you have unions and politicians insisting that jobs must be preserved, even when that means attaching people to tasks that are technically obsolete. Neither camp really articulates what it would mean for work itself to shrink as a central organising story. They just fight over where the remaining jobs will be and who will do them.

“In What Sense Is Life Suffering?”:

[M]ental valence works like temperature.

[S]cientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering. Apparent neutral is a fact about human perception with no objective significance. If you start at “very bad” and take away suffering, at some point your perception switches from “less suffering” to “more joyful”, but you’ve just been taking away suffering the whole time. The real “zero suffering” isn’t neutral / blah / just okay. It’s nirvana, which feels more blissful than we can possibly imagine.

“Plato and the Poets”:

Simplifying his more complex argument, Plato offers at least two main criticisms of poetry. Wrongful poets err by producing a third-order imitation, an image of an image of fundamental reality. They re-enact the actions of mortal souls and states that are themselves re-enactments of the ideal forms of city and soul. Plato, in contrast, provides a second-order imitation, an image at only one remove from the ideal polis and ideal soul. The problem is not poetic images, but the distance from fundamental reality of the images of images that wrongful poets offer. In addition, wrongful poets try to obscure how vacant their subject matter is by the rhythmic seduction of poetic meter. Plato, in contrast, will here speak exclusively in prose (or as Aristotle noted, something between poetry and prose).

“We Used to Read Things in This Country”:

But as interest in historical materialism surged after the global financial crisis of 2008, the left rediscovered the financial press as they searched for the rational kernel within the mystical shell. At first, the Financial Times was the center of attention. As Amber A’Lee Frost wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FT “covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.”

[F]or most of human history, culture was exclusively oral. Knowledge was transmitted by speech, and what could be transmitted was what could be remembered. Oral culture was “aggregative rather than analytic”—full of redundancy, traditionalist in disposition, and embedded in the “human lifeworld,” rather than allowing abstract thought. Therefore, it was conservative and traditional, against innovation and any departure from the long-established norms of agricultural life. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential, as in Homer with his repeated phrases such as “swift ships” and “wine-dark sea.” With writing comes precision, analytical rigor, deliberate word choices, analytic remove from life, and abstract thought.

Then, with the emergence of electronic media, Ong sees society regressing/advancing into a “secondary orality,” which brings back many qualities of the first orality (note the supposedly permanent basis of writing)

Looking at social media, Weisenthal sees the return of oral values to dominance in the public square, like loud one-upmanship. Rather than the ideal of reasoned debate, social media sets the stage for constant jousting, rewarding those who can be viral and have memes ready in their memory, as today’s Homeric formula shifts both our political and neurological landscapes.

I do not hold that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” for various tedious factual and periodizing reasons, but I would argue that the history of all hitherto literacy is the history of class struggle.

In the feudal order, there were those who fought, those who prayed, and those who tilled. Since those who prayed were most often those who also administered, what need had most for literacy? Reading was a form of power, which is why the nobility increasingly wanted it for themselves.

The bourgeoisie ascending on both sides of the Atlantic was a class made of ink and newsprint. Aristocracies across Europe were small; they could be bound by common culture and marriages. The bourgeoisie was large, heterogenous, and not able to form kin connections at scale; they required the “many replications” of print to cohere a class identity. Why then would the bourgeoisie allow, much less encourage, their subordinates to also be literate? Because they needed literate and numerate labor from some and hoped to rule others with a Gramscian hegemony transmitted by literacy.

Ong was wrong that secondary orality would remain yoked to literacy. While literacy remains a mass phenomenon, the number of readers and the quality of what they read are declining. At the same time, while memory is traditionally the organizing principle of orality, those immersed in its second coming have seen their faculties of recall replaced by data centers, leaving them bereft of meaningful culture of either the print or oral variety.

[I]t is AI that has given the American ruling class the final impetus to more or less abolish education. As primary and secondary schools prepare to push AI on students, higher-education funding is basically being eliminated. For the first time in centuries, the elite no longer feel they need educated workers and soldiers to uphold and reproduce the system.

“Asian Style Materialism”

Taiwan’s faith is a fundamentally different approach than Western religion, more aligned with earthly superficiality and materialism. The majority of temples, like the above one, are singular affairs, each a varying mash-up of Daoism, Buddhism, ancestor worship, and Chinese folk religion, all jammed with idols, icons, effigies, and other devotional objects. Faith is personal, malleable, and image-based, and most importantly, the connection between humans and their God(s) is very different6. Rather than humans seeking the transcendent Good by devotion to a powerful God, they believe in Gods that can be urged, nudged, and even bet on to satisfy their human wants and needs. Or, rather than building a City of Man to try and approximate the City of God, Chinese folk religions believe the City of Man can win over the City of God, with enough urging, offerings, and temples. That’s a very different relationship, devotional versus transactional, acceptance versus persuasive, even if sometimes the required “proper human behavior” overlaps.

I do believe there’s a direct connection between that lack of/different faith, and the intense Asian-style materialism I’ve now seen in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. In each I’ve seen/felt a pronounced spiritual emptiness, an unbound secular materialism that approaches pleasure-seeking narcissism, that has left me frustrated. The clichéd version of a cultural vapidness akin to gorging on cotton candy, and the collectible industry and its fetishization of the cute, is symptomatic of that.

[China] have a “just good enough” ethos that shows up most noticeably in their construction, where everything is less solid than it appears. This extends beyond the physical, and that “surface level is good enough” attitude makes China a simulacrum, so when you leave China, and land in Taipei, Seoul, or Hong Kong, you experience an unmistakable sensation of, “Ok. This is the genuine thing. It’s all more solid.”

[D]iversity is [the United States’] saving grace. We are a much less united country, with a lot more variations in how we live, how we think, and what we aspire to. The stereotype of the NE Asian countries as being largely uniform in thought, while an oversimplification, is certainly true relative to the US, and that makes the superficiality even more pronounced, and suffocating.

There’s another difference, which is that I believe we still feel bad about our materialism. We still have enough cultural memory of our far more sacred past (Protestant work ethic, civic virtue, genuine community) to recognize the emptiness we are embracing, even as we dismantle it. That tension, that guilt, the nagging sense something’s gone wrong, is largely absent in China, because the guardian class doesn’t allow it, or believe it. They’re building a society that embraces our worst tendencies, without any of our compensating doubts.

“Transitions”:

For weeks, I felt an impending loss: the precious fact of having a son was about to be taken away. I wasn’t hung up on dynastic issues. Yet I think there’s something raw, some product of the primitive brain, that makes a father identify with a son. You see yourself in this other, beloved being. I was afraid of losing that.

Of course, transformation works both ways. A change in the person you love changes you as well: a toddler’s newfound independence, a teen’s leaving home. There is a shift in what I can only call the emotional weather—air moister, light different, mornings oddly new. Part of you embraces the change. And part of you remains tethered to the past, stubbornly loyal to the older version of the person.

He had several trans students, he said—his best students. They were serious, precise in their language. “They’re the only students with whom I can have a conversation about the soul,” he insisted. “For the others, that’s a narrow religious concept.” For the trans students, it was an obvious way to talk about identity. They had already made the definitive discovery that the body was malleable, which suggested that some integral part of oneself was other than corporeal. “These people represent the next stage of evolution,” Ajay said, not entirely serious but not quite kidding, either.

In fact, as I was to learn from a subsequent conversation in Berlin, she had never felt herself to be a man at all. “I certainly was a boy,” she told me. “And, like many trans women, I had a protracted boyhood. You see this in gay men, too—the aging-twink syndrome. Anyway, it was when that started to end, and the horizon of manhood approached, that the dissonance became all too clear.”

“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life”

Readers who prefer their self-help to come with a sheen of erudition can increasingly count on finding similar wisdom about human finitude dispensed in the philosophy section. Turning to philosophy to learn how to live is nothing new, of course. But the explicitly inspirational and instructional valence of much that appears today under that heading, even from academic presses, is striking — as is the apparent consensus that the central task of philosophy is to guide seekers to a greater acceptance of imperfection and insignificance. Sometimes these books focus on a particular school of philosophy, giving readers an “-ism” — existentialism, Buddhism, Taoism, and above all Stoicism, now practically a genre unto itself — with which to identify. Others staple together eclectic smatterings of received ideas into less partisan surveys on how to cope with failure and disillusionment.

At last we have managed to reify not merely social reality but the act of philosophizing itself, treating it, like our uncontrollable world, as a thing: a coping tool you might select, like an ice cream flavor, according to your personal taste.

At some point, however, I realized that I was spending more of my time thinking about my own despair than about the problems outside myself that were supposedly fueling it

While an exaggerated sense of our own importance is a recipe for both political and psychological disaster, it is also possible to overestimate our insignificance. Acceptance shades easily into excuse. With enough practice tolerating imperfection you can learn to forget what it is you’re failing to live up to.

When we are left to fend for ourselves, the conditions that shape our lives tend to feel alien and monolithic, forcing us to choose between the two polarities of self-help: the delusional optimism of positive thinking and the stoic acceptance taught by “philosophy.”

But preemptive surrender is no sign of wisdom. Any reality made by human beings can be remade by them. The price of this power is mutual obligation: we can never let ourselves off the hook. The things we can accomplish together are, by definition, within our sphere of control, even if we have to act through structures that are bigger than any of us alone to achieve them. As grating as it may be to admit, it turns out that some of those hoary positive-thinking cliches the philosophers rail against are true, as long as we stick to the first-person plural. We are responsible for how our lives unfold; we can do things that seem impossible.

Henrik Karlsson on Dostoevsky:

If I think something, I don’t need to go through this big roundabout thing, where I “show” it and make it literary. I don’t need to make my writing ambiguous. If I just pay close enough attention to reality, the complexity of reality will seep into the writing and make it ambiguous and charged anyway. There is no need for me to be clever and artful and introduce mystery. Just “telling” it as I see it, if done with enough detail and care, is mysterious enough.

Dostoevsky, unlike most other authors, treats his character as a full individuals, as if they are too big to fit in his head: he isn’t using them as mouth pieces, but listening to them. His books are polyphonic: they are made up of a multitude of voices, each with their own inner logic and perspective, and there is no voice that stands above the others and knows the final truth. There are, of course, many books that have multiple voices in them, especially after Dostoevsky, but when I read these books, there is nearly always a subtle feeling that the characters are being used as dolls by the author, who is trying to get a view across; you can sense what the author thinks of everyone. But in Dostoevsky, each character is so strong and independent that they feel like authors in their own right.

Another thing I love about Dostoevsky is how he incorporates long essayistic segments in his novels, but he always makes sure to undermine the authority of the person expressing the ideas. You get these wonderful philosophical tracts about free will and the Russian church and utilitarianism and the nature of love, but you don’t know what to make of it, really, because the person saying it seems a bit deranged. This is closely connected to his deep respect for the individual: rhetorically convincing the reader of a perspective would undermine their autonomy. Compromising the characters forces the reader to stand alone, to borrow Kirkegaard’s phrase. Since there is no safe authority that you can submit to in Dostoevsky’s books, it is up to you to meet these hurting, strange voices with compassion, critical thinking, and curiosity; you have to evaluate if anything they say is valuable and true and applies to your life. As Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov says, there is nothing more painful to humans than our freedom, that we are responsible for everything we do, and so we long to submit to an authority. But Dostoevsky just won’t let us do that. He forces us to face our freedom.

“Baby Shoggoth Is Listening”:

PR people, always in search of influence, [] are developing a form of writing (press releases and influence campaigns are writing) that’s not so much search-engine-optimized as chatbot-optimized. It’s important, they say, to write with clear structure, to announce your intentions, and especially to include as many formatted sections and headings as you can. In other words, to get ChatGPT to pay attention, you must write more like ChatGPT.

The hour, in other words, is near, and, instead of being short-sighted or risk-averse, we should set to preparing. But for what? Again, for jumping into the AI mind, both to influence it and to hedge against human superfluousness. And how? The best way, Gwern thinks, for people who don’t work in AI at least, is to simply communicate in public to the AIs that already exist. “Much of the value of writing done recently or now is simply to get stuff into LLMs,” so as to teach them, he writes.

In an interview, he elaborated: “By writing, you are voting on the future of the shoggoth using some of the few currencies it acknowledges. If you aren’t writing, you’re kind of abdicating the future or your role in it.”

After all, you vote in elections even though you don’t expect to have a great effect on the result, because it’s important on some absolute moral level to send your wishes into the world. This sort of general moral thinking seems to me valuable here precisely because nobody knows what will happen, whether influence will compound or diminish over time. Turning to already formed instincts about how to interact with vast and complicated systems is a helpfully familiar way of not being paralyzed by weirdness and uncertainty. That sort of moral thinking is also crucial to mounting a case for human value even when compared to superintelligence.

[T]here’s a reverse wager implied. If you’re one of these people, and if you want to be forgotten—an honorable instinct and possibly a right—and if you don’t want to be resurrected by AIs, then you absolutely must not write for them. In fact, the bitter conclusion is that you must not write at all, ever. For just as it’s now basically impossible to disappear, go somewhere, and start again, soon it will be impossible to be forgotten, and one day that might mean it’s impossible to not be brought screaming back.

The best way to communicate across the gulf between present and future is to place little droplets of values inside larger droplets of expression so that someone in the future, noticing how nice they look, stops to look at them more carefully.

“Do piped programs run sequentially or in parallel?”:

Piped commands are run in parallel. They keep reading from the pipe until they are terminated, they finish their work, or they receive an end-of-file indicator. When a pipe (or the data read from a pipe) gets too large, the command is terminated to prevent the system from running out of RAM.

“Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us”:

“If a wind should rage in the guts, what matters is the direction it takes. If downwards, then the result is a fart; if upwards, an apparition or a heavenly inspiration.”

The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. In particular, Kant argued that time, space, and causality, which we ordinarily take for granted as the most basic aspects of the world, are better understood as forms imposed on the world by the human mind.

[I]t is impossible for us to ever know “things in themselves”—what Kant called “noumena.” We have access only to “phenomena”—the way things look to us, given the kind of mind we have. “What things may be in themselves, I know not and need not know, because a thing is never presented to me otherwise than as a phenomenon,” Kant insisted.

Ordinarily, we think of good will as a kind of emotion: a person of good will is happy when other people are happy. But, for Kant, emotion is irrelevant to morality. In fact, he believes that if you do the right thing because it makes you happy you don’t have a truly good will, because you are acting out of a kind of self-interest. The only thing that should determine how we act is a pure sense of duty. When a man “does [an] action without any inclination for the sake of duty alone, then for the first time his action has its genuine moral worth,” Kant writes.

“Big Tech’s Futile Attempt to Kill Death”:

The Silicon Valley immortalists, too, are Lockeans to a person. They do not want to be remembered; they want to be remembering. They are so certain that the matter of what a person is is so thoroughly settled that we can simply move on to other theoretical questions that confront us in our quest for immortality.

The commitment to substrate-neutrality is almost as widely accepted as Lockean personal identity, but not so widely as simply to be assumed true. A person, in this reigning metaphysics of Silicon Valley, is a special kind of substrate-neutral code that has the peculiar property of being aware of its own existence. Technology, they believe, can enable us to manipulate that code, to improve on it, and perhaps when the time comes, to transfer it out of a failing mortal coil and into a more robust vessel. Their idea of what a person is, and of what immortality might be, is entirely shaped and limited by the philosophy of liberal individualism: an opportunity to keep on “living one’s best life”, and if possible, of doing so in one’s own apartment.

[T]hose who can afford to be early adopters get to set the terms by privately trialling interventions, while public institutions are nudged to ratify a vision in which the extension of time becomes a status object.

Pursuant to 第 374 章《道路交通條例》 [Cap. 374 Road Traffic Ordinance] —

單車 (bicycle) 指經設計及構造為使用踏板驅動的兩輪車輛。 [bicycle (單車) means a vehicle with 2 wheels designed and constructed to be propelled by the use of pedals.]

Which means —

單車或三輪車基本上享有和汽車一樣的使用道路的權利。同樣地，單車或三輪車使用者在使用道路時也有適當相應的責任，並須遵守一切交通規則（例如遵守所有交通標誌、交通燈號及道路標記），猶如他/她是在駕駛汽車一樣。 [A bicycle or tricycle basically has the same right to use a road as a motor vehicle. Needless to say, the rider of a bicycle or tricycle also has the duty to exercise due care when using the road and to comply with all traffic regulations (e.g. to comply with all traffic signs, traffic lights and road markings) as if he/she is the driver of a motor vehicle.]

“與騎踏單車有關” [Related to cycling], Community Legal Information Centre.

See also “道路使用者守則” [Road Users’ Code] by the Transport Department of Hong Kong:

騎單車 [Cycling]

單車被視為車輛。在道路上，騎單車者有同樣責任遵守適用於駕駛人的規例和規則。 [A cycle is regarded as a vehicle. A cyclist has the same obligation to follow the rules and regulations applicable to drivers when cycling on the road.]

一般駕駛人須遵守的交通標誌、交通燈號、道路標記及交通規則，你也必須遵守。 [You must obey traffic signs, traffic signals, road markings and traffic rules that apply generally to vehicles.]

除非巴士線上豎立了標誌，禁止單車駛入，否則你可沿巴士線行駛。 [You may use bus lanes unless there are signs banning cyclists.]

在「綠色人像」過路處前，如紅燈亮着，你必須在「停車」線前停車等候。只有當綠燈亮起及前路無阻時，方可繼續前進。無論何時，都應讓路給仍在過路的行人。 [At ‘Green man’ crossings, you must stop and wait behind the ‘Stop’ line if the red light is showing. You may only go forward if the green light is showing and the way is clear. Give way to any pedestrians still on the crossing.]

單車徑 [Cycleways]

如道路上有單車線，或路旁有單車徑，你必須在該處行駛，不准使用其他路面。 [If there is a cycle lane, or an adjacent cycleway beside the roadway, you must ride on it and not on any other part of the roadway.]

如單車徑旁有行人徑，不准駛上行人徑。 [If there is a footpath and a cycleway side by side, you must ride on the cycleway only.]

須按照交通標誌及道路標記指示的方向騎單車。 [Ride only in the direction indicated by traffic signs and road markings.]

在雙程單車徑上，靠左行駛。 [On a two-way cycleway, keep to the left.]

「終止」交通標誌或道路標記示明單車徑的終止。你要駛入或回到一般道路，與其他車輛共用路面。 [An ‘End’ traffic sign or road marking may indicate the end of a cycleway. You have to join or return to the normal road and ride with other traffic.]

停泊車輛的規則和指示一般也適用於停泊單車。在設有街燈的道路上，只可在指定供單車停泊的地方停泊單車。然而，任何單車均不得於同一泊車處停泊超過 24 小時。 [The rules and advice for the parking of vehicles generally apply to cycles. On a road with street lighting, you may only park your cycle in a parking place designated for pedal cycles. However, no cycle should be continually parked at the same parking place for more than 24 hours.]

Cf.《道路交通安全法》 [Road Traffic Safety Law] §51 of Mainland China:

非机动车应当在非机动车道内行驶；在没有非机动车道的道路上，应当靠车行道的右侧行驶。[Non-motorized vehicles should use the non-motorized vehicle lane; or, where no such lane exists, should proceed on the right side of the roadway.]

“Microspeak: Turn Into a Pumpkin”:

In some fields, the idiom turn into a pumpkin means to regress to a previous level of performance after a period of marked (but perhaps inexplicable) improvement.