Today's world is the legacy of Tolkien. We've come to understand the world through the categories of Tolkien, without which we could not bear to act. We can act out a disavowal of Palantir, but we'd be disavowing Lord of the Rings at the same time. It's not like Tolkien ever overturned the palantir, he only went as far as to show the palantir to be politically dangerous, much like Bush and Obama saw sanctions against Iran. Tolkien never achieved a full critique. He stops at the point of a liberal plurality of knowledge (hobbits have experiential/ethical knowledge, elves have cultural preservation, wizards have lore/interpretation) so that no single group has a monopoly on truth, and they're all locked within their racial categories. He never writes about the erosion of race and the universalization of knowledge.
You should read Tolkien to understand Palantir. This business of "reclaiming" amounts to disavowal of reality.
Did you read the article? the proposal is to learn from the significance of the word and to use it as a generic term denoting it's original purpose, to define more than one firm's tech but a whole class of firms.
Yeah, the author is claiming that Tolkien had a radical message: the palantir is meant to show us that the knowledge it yields is not neutral, not total, and is dangerous to wield politically. I'm saying that the author is wrong and that Tolkien's lesson has been thoroughly integrated into the thought of political actors. Peter Thiel and Obama and whoever else are all aware of the dangers of the palantir, and they act empowered by this awareness. There's nothing to reclaim.
I feel like we read different books. I read a story about the dangers of the desire for power and control over others, and of the outright evils of mechanization and destruction of nature.
The company palantir sells mechanized spying. Something that is clearly evil in a tolkeinian world view.
I remember being asked in class what we all thought was the message of 1984.
I was like, obviously it was about the danger of giving up your power to other people and the corruption of that power.
My classmates were pretty convinced it was about how important it was to have power over other people.
First time I twigged onto exactly how dumb, short sighted, and self interested, otherwise intelligent people can be.
Edit: I swear I remember reading something Tolkien (maybe) said about the eye of sauron being basically an analogy about the press. The eye focuses a spotlight on the thing it is looking at giving it great importance, but ignores everything else. It is not actually omnipotent, it is just propaganda and marketing.
> I swear I remember reading something Tolkien (maybe) said about the eye of sauron being basically an analogy about the press.
Hmm I'd be interested to see a citation for that. As far as I know, Tolkien maintained for his entire life that The Lord of the Rings was not in any way intended as an analogy or allegory (but he admitted that, of course, it was obviously influenced by his lived experience).
No, we read the same book, just in different ways. I'm interested in a symptomatic reading. To complain that Peter Thiel read Lord of the Rings incorrectly because he drew inspiration in Sauron instead of Gandalf is plain boring. Thiel, Obama, yourself, the OP author, and Tolkien himself "claim" Lord of the Rings. That needs explaining, and you cannot do that by reading in the way that you read Lord of the Rings.
No, it's that I think Thiel and Obama are both evil, even if the former is cartoonishly so and the latter is a gentleman. Both separatism (itself plain evil) and multiculturalism (itself morally relativistic) are ideological forms bounded by the limits of capitalism that cannot exist in any meaningful form in any sort of humane world. Is this really not interesting?
Why are you scare-quoting your own words and supposing it is only your interlocutor who is treating them abstractly? Just tell us what you mean. What do you mean by non-threatening? What domains?
Sure, but "every bit as protective and nurturing as the most committed mother" is indeed an overstatement if you believe, as Donald Winnicott did, that there's something qualitatively advantageous about what a mother can provide, namely breastfeeding. Bottle-feeding, if done in an attuned, consistent, and emotionally present way, can support the same psychological processes as nursing does, but it is certainly less likely to unfold so favorably. Breastfeeding can make the integration of bodily and emotional attunement easier. Things can still go wrong, of course, but it is a unique situation.
The distinctive qualities of the mother's womb are not as easily studied, but on the other hand it's pretty obvious that there are functions provided by the mother and her womb that cannot easily be replicated (i.e. replicated by a father).
None of this to say that fathers cannot or do not nurture and protect. It's just that replicating certain things is difficult and we shouldn't be so sure of ourselves yet. It's like trying to grow a plant without sunlight: possible, but only very recently, and still apparently too challenging to do at absolute scale.
You are still ignoring the only distinction I made - the one between nurturing and nursing. I always understood them as having widely accepted distinct meanings, and the author of the article seems to follow it too.
You can either argue that their understanding of 'nurturing' is wrong, or that men can't nurture as well as women, without conflating the two. You can't have it both ways. Labeling it as an 'overstatement' after completely ignoring their definition of the terms is a disingenuous argument.
The author does not lay out their definition of nurturing explicitly. The most complete definition I can derive from the article is that nurturing is engaged caregiving marked by responsiveness and physical closeness that is supported by hormonal changes in the caregiver.
They have nothing to say about nursing other than that it involves oxytocin release (presumably an instance of nurturing).
In your short comment, you didn't make any attempt at determination beyond saying the names "nurturing and protection" and "birthing and nursing". OK, so what is the distinction? Are you claiming that birthing and nursing are mechanical acts that secure existence of the organism, but fail to secure some other thing that is called nurturing and protection? Or are birthing and nursing mere instances of a homogenous nurturing and a homogenous protection, and so one's quota for nurturing and protection are filled in the same way experience points fill up in a video game?
So it's the opposite: your OP and I are the only ones here making a concrete distinction between nursing and nurturing (although your OP didn't really say much, either).
Like I said, Donald Winnicott explores this question at length. Unfortunately he is not a good Marxist who historicizes these categories; he works squarely in post-war British society and so obviously has his limits. But he has the courage to criticize the emptiness of medical empiricism and the fear of determinateness of people like the article's author.
Here's Winnicott in The Child, the Family, and the Outside World:
> The infant who has had a thousand goes at the breast is evidently in a very different condition from the infant who has been fed an equal number of times by the bottle; the survival of the mother is more of a miracle in the first case than in the second. I am not suggesting that there is nothing that the mother who is feeding by bottle can do to meet the situation. Undoubtedly she gets played with by her infant, and she gets the playful bite, and it can be seen that when things are going well the infant almost feels the same as if there is breast feeding. Nevertheless there is a difference. In psychoanalysis, where there is time for a gathering together of all the early roots of the full-blown sexual experience of adults, the analyst gets very good evidence that in a satisfactory breast feed the actual fact of taking from part of the mother’s body provides a ‘blue-print’ for all types of experience in which instinct is involved.
Personally, this aligns with my own observations of my daughter. The sensuous conflict of breastfeeding is a negotiation of the psychic and physical line between self and other where everything is at stake and desires are understood and worked out at the level of the skin. It's practically impossible to make a bottle (or anyone/anything else!) fulfill this function.
Anyway, Winnicott goes on in great detail for chapters. Also relevant is a draft of a talk he gave titled This Feminism, which is probably more relevant to the underlying tensions in these comments:
> This is the most dangerous thing I have done in recent years. Naturally, I would not have actually chosen this title, but I am quite willing to take whatever risks are involved and to go ahead with the making of a personal statement. May I take it for granted that man and woman are not exactly the same as each other, and that each male has a female component, and each female has a male component? I must have some basis for building a description of the similarities and differences that exist between the sexes. I have left room here for an alternative lecture should I find that this audience does not agree to my making any such basic assumption. I pause, in case you claim that there are no differences.
Again, he's unfortunately not interested in how psychic development might be a historically limited category; he naturalizes "nurturing" (he doesn't use this word often, actually), but at least he acknowledges the concrete limitations of mother and fathers (and all the other characters) as they actually exist. And he does this without ever invoking the name of a hormone once.
Colonialism blocked endogenous capitalist classes from developing freely in Africa. Internal dynamics should be understood in the context of the actual history of Africa.
HIPAA was introduced to support the massive expansion of the healthcare market (privacy accountability is a very minor aspect of HIPAA). In the name of profit, amidst the chaos, why not try to eschew what was once politically necessary? This move probably hurts humanity more than it benefits it, but that was the case with the healthcare market in the first place. I wonder what will become politically necessary around AI. Probably not much.
I'd like to see the sources on your claims. you make it sound like privacy and possible protection from harm where just some token throw-ins to hide a mostly for-profit certification which doesn't sound very convincing.
Most regulation is more or less suggestions to prevent widescale exploitation, to give the system a means of holding bad actors liable after the fact. They aren't deeply considerate, domain competent, principle based policies designed with the best interests of individuals, they're compromises between power brokers. Even things that might be explicitly illegal aren't enforced in practice unless there's a political advantage to expending resources on a particular issue.
They dress up the legislation in fancy names like the Patriot act and sell you on bits put in place for public consumption, but the meat and potatoes of US governance is the never ending, unstoppable expansion of power over and presence in every life.
HIPAA is as much or more about regulatory capture as preventing abuses of privacy or protecting individual rights. In practice, there's not even a standard, just a loose handful of suggestions for protecting data, and when massive breaches occur, data that should be protected under HIPAA gets released, institutions and businesses get a slap on the wrist. Depending on the party in power and the politics of the offender, they might not even get a slap on the wrist, they'll just get more contracts and less press coverage until the public forgets.
Anything touting benefits to individuals or citizens is probably being used as a Schelling point for a broader strategy.
These problems get fixed with a proper return to 1st, 4th, 5th Amendment rights, a relitigation of copyright and personal privacy and liberty, legislated as a digital bill of rights. We don't need new amendments or even really new laws, we just need proper enforcement and interpretation of existing ones. Privacy and liberty are inextricable. Anonymity and fungible identity in public communications are non-negotiable.
The whole situation is an exercise in picking the policies that do the most good and the least bad - exactly the type of gray area modern politicians love, because it means they have plenty of cover and fog of war to get away with shit.
I know this sounds sarcastic but I really mean it: For years everyone has been monastically extolling some variation of "the best code is deleted code". Now, we have a machine that spits out infinite code that we can infinitely delete. It's a blessing that we can have shitty code generated that exposes at light speed how shitty our ideas are and have always been.
- A slimmed-down phpBB 2 "remake" in Bun.js/TypeScript
- An experimental SQLite extension for defining incremental materialized views
...And many more that are either too tiny, too idiosyncratic, or too day-job to name here. Some of these are one-off utilities, some are toys I'll never touch again, some are part of much bigger projects that I've been struggling to get any work done on, and so on.
I don't blame you for your cynicism, and I'm not blind to all of the criticism of LLMs and LLM code. I've had many times where I feel upset, skeptical, discouraged, and alienated because of these new developments. But also... it's a lot of fun and I can't stop coming up with ideas.
Unfortunately, the market seems to have produced horrors by way of naturally thinking agents, instead. I wish that, for all these years of prehistoric wretchedness, we would have had AI to blame. Many more years in the muck, it seems.
I resent the idea of an absolute standard of ergonomics or typing technique. I often use my left thumb to key z/x/c/v/b. I often reach with my left index finger to key y/h/b. During certain chords, my hands often cross over the split.
I tried multiple split keyboards over the period of 2 years and never grew out of these habits. I always wished, at the least, that some of the middle keys were duplicated between the two halves.
Eventually I received some permission to accept my personal "kinetic signature" (so to speak). Then the chronic wrist pain that led me to try split keyboards in the first place vanished. So I went back to using a normal tenkeyless. This led me to believe that split keyboards were ideal for some people, but that other people (like myself) are predisposed to a sort of perfectionism that entails physical guarding and chronic pain.
I still wish I had a wireless split keyboard for times when I'm supine and need to type, though.
> Then the chronic wrist pain that led me to try split keyboards in the first place vanished.
The elephant in the room with the 'ergonomics' argument for split keyboards is that you get a marginal improvement using the keyboard this way and ten times the effect by just getting up and going for a five minute walk every hour or so.
The same goes for mousephobia, which overlaps with split layout users. I still use neovim every day, but the quickest cure for the CTS symptoms that 'ergonomic' keyboard purist vim users seem to get much more than their IDE coworkers is just moving your hand to do something other than type in the exact same position for hours on end - something like grabbing a mouse. I strongly suspect that CTS in software engineers will go down in the next coming years as coding agents become more common and SWEs pick their hands up more (or just physically type less).
The same goes for back pain, if you're otherwise ablebodied enough to start resistance training it's infinitely more beneficial than whatever chair you're looking at.
There’s no reason not to try things. I’ve experienced CTS symptoms when using a regular mouse, which got fully resolved for years now by switching to a vertical one. Regardless of whether I should also make lifestyle changes, there’s zero reason to go back to an inferior mouse, just because that’s the design someone came up with in the 1960s.
Thanks for sharing. One of the challenges (always has been probably) with our heavy "influencer" culture is we tend to gloss over that what works for me, might not work for you and vice versa.
I recently switched to a split columnar layout but not for solely for ergonomics sake - I do the same things as you but with my right hand handling b, g, t, and my left hand moving over to accommodate (with "incorrect" fingering for c, and variable fingering for the whole of the left side).
My choice to move to a split was primarily motivated by a need to reset my typing style and a hatred for where the escape key sits on a keyboard (not forgetting the waste of space that is the spacebar.)
It would be neat if someone would make a zmk / qmk keyboard with five thumb keys where the space bar is. Might be the sweet spot for most.
When folks ask about my keyboard preferences, I always state that these things are personal and there is no "one size fits all". Fully realize that my keyboard, layout, hot keys, etc won't work for 99.9% of people.
However, I feel very strongly that if your body is telling you that something hurts or it is in pain, you should take action rather than right through it.
Yeah the handful of times I've tried a split keyboard, I dropped it because of this. Like I use a different hand for the 'y' key if I'm typing my (left index) versus yes (right index).
It's an ergonomic keyboard, not a split keyboard, but I have a Feker Alice 98 (highly recommended!) and it's got two B keys, one on either side of the ergonomic divider. Threw me for a loop when I first saw it. I only use the left one. :)
Today's world is the legacy of Tolkien. We've come to understand the world through the categories of Tolkien, without which we could not bear to act. We can act out a disavowal of Palantir, but we'd be disavowing Lord of the Rings at the same time. It's not like Tolkien ever overturned the palantir, he only went as far as to show the palantir to be politically dangerous, much like Bush and Obama saw sanctions against Iran. Tolkien never achieved a full critique. He stops at the point of a liberal plurality of knowledge (hobbits have experiential/ethical knowledge, elves have cultural preservation, wizards have lore/interpretation) so that no single group has a monopoly on truth, and they're all locked within their racial categories. He never writes about the erosion of race and the universalization of knowledge.
You should read Tolkien to understand Palantir. This business of "reclaiming" amounts to disavowal of reality.
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