Allow me to use this post to give big kudos to the maintainers of Strudel for having put together a brilliant set of official docs. I found them incredibly well put together and hence really useful to learn. I have played around with Strudel many evenings and I am always amazed about how intuitive Strudel is to create beats and sounds, to the point that I prefer to create music in Strudel over the established DAW software. I would love for there to be a good bridge between producing sounds and beats with Strudel code and structurering and mastering an entire track. This is missing in Strudel since it’s clearly build for a live coding environment. Any tips from users about ways or tools to make this bridge are always welcome!
Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in offsetting these tragedies to some other suffering statistics. Why can’t we help but look away from human suffering inflicted by war, even if there’s a moving long read focusing on real people presented to us? And who does this thinking serve?
Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?
Would you let someone beat you to death? Would you let them beat your children to death? If you shot them or stabbed them or hit them in the back of the head with a shovel, would you say it was ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ or would that be a symptom of the 'same thinking'? War is terrible, but it is pretty naive to lament Hiroshima as if it existed in isolation, and not in the context of an aggressive imperialist Japan epitomized in the rape of Nanking. While these things need to be explored and looked at, we also need to recognize that death camps and genocide were happening every day the Nazis and Japanese empire were still fighting.
I do not think Hiroshima existed in isolation. I totally agree that the Japanese empire and the Third Reich committed horrible war crimes in WW2. If there's anything I lament, it's how it seems so hard to feel empathy for the traumas of the real people who die in war, whatever side they are on. The New Yorker piece we are commenting on describes mundane lives of normal people. These were not people who were beating someone or someone's children to death. Sure, many if not all Japanese were supporting a regime that was responsible for immense crulety, and sure, I do understand how that affects our ability to feel empathy for them (it's maybe similar to how I feel less empathy for a fan of a rival football team mourning a game's loss compared to a fan of the football team I happen to support). I understand this way of thinking, but I choose to rebel against it. Because we talk about losing real lives, real suffering - and what citizenship of which empire or nation state should be so crucial that it cancels out a person's humanity? As you write yourself, "war is terrible". It really is. Call me naive, but I dream of a world where that sentence is not followed by a 'but', but by a period.
I understand what you are saying and I agree. I think it is important to look at, and empathize with, the suffering on all sides of a conflict. Thank you for taking the time to elaborate.
>As you write yourself, "war is terrible". It really is. Call me naive, but I dream of a world where that sentence is not followed by a 'but', but by a period.
Unfortunately, I think this is naive. It is akin to saying "violence is terrible", but as long as someone could decide to do violence against me, whether to take things I have, because they don’t like me, or just because they enjoy it, violence will still be around and I (or someone else like police) will have to use violence in defense. How do you stop every human from doing violence? How do you stop every nation from doing violence?
America’s failures in Mogadishu influenced their decision not to intervene in the Rwandan genocide. The violence still happened because at the end of the day, we are just very sophisticated animals. I don’t see how war, violence, and conflict could be eliminated without eliminating humanity. Would we be human without our emotions, the good and terrible ones?
As you ask why this is here. Copied from the guidelines of this site: “What to submit? On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. (…) anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.” So it’s fair to say that this site is about more than entrepreneurship and tech.
Perhaps we need to make some mapbox visualizations about the devastation in Gaza. Then we'll be on theme, but the topic is not going to change. Maybe someone should make a game about it and put it on Steam. Maybe it'll get banned. Then we can have the PERFECT discussion on HN, as so many want:
- About tech
- About a current event
- About censorship
Genocide by itself, that's just not good enough apparently. That's very weird because there's tons of serious discussion on HN about history. This place cares a lot about history. Whatever is happening right now is just real-time history.
I don’t understand, what kind of marketing do you think this is? I’m OP. I setup the blog a while ago but only for the first time I thought of something that was actually worth writing about. Something needs to be the first post! I’m sorry you found it boring.
Good points! Totally agree that people care less than you think, and it’s very healthy to live your life without thinking you have to please everyone all the time. The nuance I tried to make, but I was perhaps not really clear, is that when people talk with each other, people have the chance to make sure a message comes across so that it does not offend a person. That chance for nuance is lost when people post on social media. Not that people do it deliberately, it’s just that social media is designed to be focused on the poster rather than on how that message makes certain people in the audience feel. And I do believe people are bothered not to offend someone, and that they are less likely to do so when you actually talk.
Thanks! That's awesome to hear – if you wouldn't mind me asking, what was the context and tech stack of your side project? We love hearing about the wide variety of use cases people have found for Codebuff!
It's a pretty small, straight forward web app. Think: python backend and a vanilla html / JS frontend, served over flask. The frontend is mostly in one file, so maybe it's not the best test case for crossfile reading, but still very happy with the user experience!
Living without appetite. I get it can help some people with losing weight. But doesn’t it sound a tad sad too? Isn’t desire one of the most complex, beautiful emotions?
I don't suffer from an uncontrollable appetite, but for those who do, I would imagine that compulsive-anything is undesirable and eliminating it is an unambiguously positive miracle.
If a drug can cure an out-of-control appetite, can it cure chemical addictions? Compulsive gambling? None of these are beautiful emotions.
Funny you should say that. There's mounting anecdotal evidence that GL-1's curb addiction more generally, including the two you mentioned, SUD/chemical and gambling. There are currently trials underway to try and prove that scientifically.
The ‘ability to learn’ idea may not be so novel, but I am not sure if I agree with calling it ill defined or it having an agenda for more inclusivity. Generally, in schools, at least from my experience, it will still mostly be abstract thinking and memory capacities that are measured. Curiosity, and the ability to turn that curiosity in new knowledge, also broadens the mind (in addition to abstract thinking and remembering things), which can be an enormous quality that is highly valued on the job market, arguably more than what is mostly measured at schools. I think that’s the point the author tries to make.
