LeeThree's Links

Letters from Chengdu, my hometown

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

We tend to grossly overestimate the pleasure brought forth by new experiences and underestimate the power of finding meaning in current ones.

The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?) This trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go into know go and no use into know yuse (lol). Abbreviations were not immune, and no go became K.G.. So too all right became O.W., as an abbreviation for oll wright. And all correct became o.k., as an abbreviation for oll korrect.

“There is a sense in which we moderns,” Adler writes, “are inundated with facts to the detriment of understanding. One of the reasons for this situation is that … media … are so designed as to make thinking seem unnecessary.”

Some brutally honest ideas on why you shouldn't start your own business.

...he was surprised by American Chinese food. Americans seemed to eat like kids: they love starches and sweet things, and are frightened of meat and fish with bones in it.

The scientists are so eager to pass this magical test that they start playing around with the numbers, trying to find anything that seems worthy.

But there is, I feel, an ethical issue in such knowing exploitation. I’ve pleaded my case with entrepreneurs, investors, and developers, but it’s like trying to stand in front of a buffalo stampede.

A detailed analysis of how Google uses its data to improve Maps and how Apple falls behind.

It flattens out history into a single fixed truth, so that an event in 2016 is the same as an event in 1805, the most recent election erases the one before, the Obama years turn into an illusion.

It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.

In my lifetime I did not imagine I would see the day when China regressed back closer to its Maoist roots. I am fearing that now.