johngossman

7 ms·

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by johngossman 25d ago
I see Joyce was already recommended. How about Borges then?
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by johngossman 25d ago
How far are you willing to go? If you want a novel that really emphasizes language over plot and character, read Ulysses.
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by johngossman 2mo ago
Look, I understand. There is a ton of low-value writing in the world: legal boilerplate, press releases, most documentation. That writing can and will be replaced or supplemented by AI. But look up cognitive offloading. It doesn't take
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by johngossman 2mo ago
Sorry but I think this essay is largely wrong. First, there is tons of evidence that working your thoughts on paper, word by word, helps develop the idea and exercises the brain. Secondly, in other endeavors we have defined clear lines betw
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by johngossman 2mo ago
Fun. I studied Japanese for two years, let it slide and now every Kanji is like "Hmmm, I've seen that before but..." I can still read kana though, which is nice to know.
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How to Choose a Translation of the Odyssey(gossmanster.substack.com)
2 points by johngossman 2mo ago|0 comments
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by johngossman 3mo ago
I think you are confusing the scientific process, in particular Popper's falsification principle, with science's purpose, which is to find the truth, or at least sort things into true and false. It's a bit like saying the pur
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by johngossman 3mo ago
Ironic that you should question if the commenter talks to regular people and then cite people who work on laptops from the coffee shop, use Slack etc.
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by johngossman 4mo ago
They wrote a lot of letters to each other. That's effectively how the Royal Society started, as the formalization of a network of letter writers
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by johngossman 4mo ago
According to William Rosen in "Justinian's Flea," this plague also led to an agricultural revolution and population explosion in Western Europe. <quote> One cannot, of course, “know” this in the same way that one can kn
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by johngossman 4mo ago
Lots of serious historians disagree. There are whole books on the topic. Here's just one paper as an example https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-demograph...
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by johngossman 4mo ago
Fwiw, in 1900 my grandfather taught school in Washington State. He was 16 years old. I don't know how good he was, just saying it wasn't so long ago.
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by johngossman 4mo ago
Go look at the demographics of the last election and then tell me which groups shouldn't be allowed to vote.
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by johngossman 4mo ago
Wait...aren't you quoting the Boomers from the 60s?
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by johngossman 4mo ago
If only the olds would die we could build more datacenters! More seriously, why wouldn't older, longer-lived people be more likely to address long-term problems like climate change?
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by johngossman 4mo ago
"The default setting on phones is to save storage by only using 12 megapixels, so unless you've changed settings, the 200 megapixel phone loses 94% of its megapixels as soon as you press the shutter. Bad deal!" The final pict
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by johngossman 4mo ago
Welcome to my rathole: Venetian history. To expand on your thesis, the Council of Ten was the executive power in Venice, but the Doge and minor council attended the Council of Ten meetings and the Doge often chaired those meetings. And even
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by johngossman 4mo ago
Average is probably not what you need to worry about: I'd bet David Attenborough and Mel Brooks still have IQs considerably higher than the average 25-year old. And I'm not convinced IQ is as important as that elusive factor calle
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by johngossman 4mo ago
While I mostly agree... Venice was run by very old men. It was common for the Doge to be in their 80s. Meanwhile, many of their neighbors had kings who were very young, sometimes teenage boys. Venice was the longest lasting, most stable sta
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by johngossman 5mo ago
Businesses are risk averse and in the current environment they are all looking to secure their supply chains, whether to reduce their dependence on silicon from Taiwan, oil from the strait of Hormuz, or digital services from the United Stat
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by johngossman 5mo ago
While I generally do not trust information from "advertisements", in this case I don't see how this is any worse than including a list of sources in the bibliography. What this could be is an attempt to use those other books
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by johngossman 5mo ago
Good list. It does not include "Silk Roads" by Frankopan, which I agree with. That's a good read but much more a history of world trade (hence the plural) and strangely western-centric. I saw strangely because in the introduc
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by johngossman 5mo ago
I got it. And I've played a 1905 Martin and you can still plug a 1950s telecaster into a 1950s amp in turn plugged into wall power and everything works. Just saying, that is not the consumer electronics world in 2026.
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by johngossman 5mo ago
I can understand why one would want to move from Kindle to another device, but this article starts by complaining that support is being dropped for devices from before 2013. I can even understand being upset by this, but I have absolutely n
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by johngossman 5mo ago
That is correct. Biology uses the term fit slightly different than the general public
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by johngossman 6mo ago
In the late 1990s I went to a RealNetworks developer conference and Andreesen, then at Netscape, was a keynote speaker. I was curious and open to his insights, but his talk was so vapid (I remember he kept giggling) and arrogant that I even
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by johngossman 6mo ago
Not really. Think of the experiment as a very, very high speed camera. They can't store every frame, so they try to capture just the "interesting" ones. They also store some random ones that can be used later as controls or i
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by johngossman 6mo ago
Like self-driving taxis where the business model is to stop paying drivers so we can pay more to big tech companies. Viva la revolution!
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by johngossman 6mo ago
It just feels that way sometimes
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by johngossman 6mo ago
"Almost every" is a very strong statement. But even granted that, the interregnum periods (civil wars and revolutions) tend to be so horrific that they are wise to avoid. In fact, people like Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes who liv

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