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Showing posts from December, 2024

Alternatives to Google.

This is the year of migration, away from X, Google. A while ago they stopped putting wikipedia as a top result even though that's what I always want, and I have to scroll down past like 10 Amazon links to get to it. And it flashes the old style, and then switches, which helps me to know what they've done. You can read about it . I'm going to list some and you can comment if you like one. I'll be trying them out and updating. DuckDuckGo . It has it's own browser and you can migrate easily, so I did it. Piccard . Can't get it to work. Freespoke : Like this one so far.  Perplexity : Leans more into the AI, only gives 5 links.  Bing is Microsoft, so not as interested in that. It's like going from X to Threads, doesn't make sense to me. From one fascist to another.  Million Short Yandex

Muhammad bin Muhammad bin al-Husayn al-Khatibi al-Balkhi al-Bakri

We call him Rumi. He probably wasn’t called that in his life. Quick outline of his life(1207-1273): He was born in what is present day Afghanistan in Balkh  or maybe  Sangtuda Tajikistan, which is a 6 day walk or 350 km distance. It was part of greater Iran at the time in the 13th century. At age 5 the family moved to  Samarkand . Like his contemporary Francis of Assisi (1181-1226), they founded the Mevlevi Order after his death. When the mongols invaded, the family moved to Nishapur, Baghdad, to Hejaz and a pilgrimage to Mecca. Then Damascus, Malatya, Erzincan, Sivas, Kayseri and Nigde. They finally settled in Karaman for seven years. Rumi married Gowhar Khatun in Karaman and had 2 sons when he was 18. His wife died and he remarried and he a son and a daughter.  He moved to Konya in Turkey in 1228 where he lived until 1273, with a 4 year soujourn in Damascus. When he was 25 his father died, and he inherited his position as head of a school. His frien...

Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences

Derrida's Grave There's a wikipedia page for this article, a lecture given at Johns Hopkins University on 21 October 1966. Here is the summary on Wikipedia: "Structure, Sign, and Play" identifies a tendency for philosophers to denounce each other for relying on problematic discourse, and argues that this reliance is to some degree inevitable because we can only write in the language we inherit. Discussing the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Derrida argues that we are all bricoleurs , creative thinkers who must use the tools we find around us. Indeed bricolage is a wonderful word.  The essay starts out with the quote: We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things. (Montaigne). It's about playing with the history of philosophy but also with Structuralism and Heidegger, who are Derrida's two great sources in this essay. He wants to show the axioms, the center, the structure cannot hold, indeed confounds itself.   "one cannot in fa...

Derrida

Reddit post,  leads to a reading group, Zoom meeting Thursdays at 7,  and discord group. First reading assignment is:  Structure, sign and play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences (1966) ( PDF ). Jacques Derrida lived 1930 – 2004. He was born in Algeria and died in Paris. "In most of the Anglosphere, where analytic philosophy is dominant, Derrida's influence is most presently felt in literary studies due to his long standing interest in language and his association with prominent literary critics from his time at Yale." (All quotes are from Wikipedia) "His parents named him "Jackie", "which they considered to be an American name", although he would later adopt a more "correct" version of his first name when he moved to Paris." Derrida spent his youth in Algiers and in El-Biar . "On the first day of the school year in 1942, French administrators in Algeria—implementing anti-semitism quotas set by the Vichy government—expe...

AI books

     I saw an article that said a publishing company was gonna print 8000 books next year written with AI. That seems kind of frightening in a way. But if you think about it, there’s going to be some good books in there if it really is intelligence. Now whether it’s uploaded intelligence or artificial intelligence or human intelligence, intelligence is intelligence, so I think that it’s possible. I want to be open minded. It’s hard to believe that there will be a brand that emerges like oh I like this AI named Finger Ferb or something like that. I read Hemingway because I kind of got into the whole mystique about him. I read Virginia Wolff because of her mystique. I read other authors because they seem to have also a sort of interesting narrative behind their art.      We’re going to be relying on brands more and more now and others recommendations now that recommendations should become such a thing.      People are already trying to game rev...