A group of Victorian gentlemen called the 'Eaterateri' wandered various Scottish restaurants, trying all they could. The now well-known Adam Smith and David Hume regularly talked in the group about their ideas.

I don't know if Hume felt bold enough to speak about Atheism, but Adam Smith may well have developed those …

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Any time I hear a patronizing sneer towards hopeful political thinking, I imagine just how insane representative democracy must have sounded when it first reached circulation.

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Oh young one! So you think you have a fun idea to bring down the king. God himself has ordained that he rule, but you disagree.

And instead of …

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People rightly irritated by NFTs often lump Bitcoin et al. into the mix, and some of the complaints go too far.

The Use Case

A friend owed me €100, and wanted to send that money to me online. The traditional banks demanded:

• Looking up the IBAN
• About €15 processing (possibly more for Scotland to Serbia, I never looked …

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I was working on the tech-support frontdesk from my flat when my girlfriend-at-the-time asked how to watch films on Linux. I was maybe 30 minutes into some bullshit ticket, and probably watching a crappy web-interface load.

[ 00:00 seconds ]

I turned to her, stared for a moment, and thought 'popcorntime'. This program …

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I feel like we all need to stop using 'Did you read that on the internet?', in such a derogatory way. The internet contains just about all writing at this point. It contains academic journals, books, and intelligent discussions by professionals, often on Reddit.

Snarky comments about Reddit also apply - the space …

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Fun fact: There's no such thing as a fish.

This 'QI'-style factum results from the notion that fish do not all belong to the same genus (or 'family', or 'phylum', or some other Biological category). If we take one genetic branch of fish as the real fish, then we miss out a lot of animals which everyone calls 'fish'. …

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It's literally three commands:

1. i to insert text
2. Escape to not insert text
3. ZZ to save and exit

An old girlfriend once asked me if she could write a website. This came out of the blue - she had no experience with computers beyond installing Sims.

"Is it easy?", she asked.

I said "yes", then showed …

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Robert Nozick created his 'utility monster' thought-experiment to show a fatal flaw in Utilitarianism.

Utilitarian theory is embarrassed by the possibility of utility monsters who get enormously greater sums of utility from any sacrifice of others than these others lose...the theory seems to require that we all be …

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I've seen a meme trending hard of late. Not a 'funny picture' meme, but an idea: 'Don't compare your thing to another, just show us your thing. Don't say why it's better than the other thing, just tell us what it does'.

This advice might work in some limited way to stop bad writing, but then we may as well just stop …

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Imagine two ladders - one has a metre between rungs, and the other has 10cm between rungs. At first glance, the ladder with three rungs looks like one could climb it faster - after all, it has only three steps to get to the top. However, anyone who knows ladders knows that anyone could climb the second ladder faster …
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