@odd Oooh, yeah. That one looks nice as well.
@artkavanagh Yeah, that page definitely isn’t a good reading experience.
@ChrisJWilson My pleasure! 🙂
@simonwoods Doesn’t inspire confidence.
@fgtech Exactly!
@simonwoods Yeah, tech has long fostered cult-like behaviour but there are parts of the OSS/Free Software communities that are well on their way towards becoming proper personality cults.
@artkavanagh Seems like a constant in life 😄
@fgtech True. True.
@fgtech Yeah, it’s hard to argue with the idea that it’s a key factor in enabling large scale internet monopolies.
@artkavanagh Yeah, I think you're right.
@ohBananaJoe thanks! 🙂
@fgtech true. True.
@fgtech definitely.
@fgtech Yeah, that’s a good point. That post’s idea of good writing is quite limited
@ayjay Thanks! That’s very useful to know. 🙂
Most of those who have a fetish for first principles thinking are actually utterly ignorant about the field they are FTPing™. To the point where they don‘t have enough expertise to even recognise what that field‘s first principles actually are and frequently swap cause and effect.
(As in “every time I see that it’s raining, the pavements are wet, so wet pavements must cause rain” which is a really easy mistake to make when you’re seeing rain and wet pavements for the first time in your life.)
When a techie or finance person develops a fetish for First Principles Thinking™ it‘s almost always due to impatience. They want shortcuts to enlightenment and aren’t willing to put in the work of studying a field for years.
This leads to garbage writing and half-baked ideas.
@artkavanagh This is true! It’s even how I subscribe to 90% of the substacks that I follow.
@fgtech 🙂
@artkavanagh His blog is great! Highly recommended.
@ChrisJWilson Yeah, the idea that automatic/lazy backlinks would end up just cluttering things up and make actually useful links harder to find makes a lot of sense.
@jack Same.
@jack Yeah, that’s a very good point. My impression at this point is entirely anecdotal. Mostly that a writer’s sudden public interest in notetaking esoterica tends to be followed by less interesting writing.
@jack I laughed :-D