GLASS BATTALION
Here's the Slavic section: как бы.
[Jaron] Lanier envisions a future economy in which everyone has access to free or cheap goods and services but not to jobs. As computers replace human workers, efficiency will skyrocket, but wealth and employment will become more and more concentrated in the hands of the few who write the code and control the servers that crunch the data. The rest of us will face unemployment and financial insecurity, even as the data that we create fuels the global information economy.
Lanier’s critique is compelling because it runs deeper than the complaint that everyone has about Facebook today, which is that it’s “creepy.” If that were the only problem, the easy solution would be for people to quit Facebook. Lanier thinks quitting Facebook, at least for a while, might be good for your soul. But he recognizes that it will do nothing to stop the big-data revolution that is transforming the economy at large.
…In economics, that’s called a collective-action problem. It can’t be solved through individual decisions in a free market but only through society-wide changes in policy or social norms. In many ways, it’s a new form of the same problem that has haunted capitalism from the time of Marx. Just as money begets money, so does data beget data. Instead of landowners and industrialists, the nodes of power in Lanier’s world are what he calls “Siren Servers.” These are the vast networks of machines at companies like Google and Amazon that lure you in with attractive services and then suck up your data to fuel the continual refinement of their algorithms. The capitalists of old required human labor in order to multiply their wealth, and the reaction was a labor movement that insisted on fair compensation for a hard day’s work. The Siren Servers require only your information. And, remember, you’re giving it to them for free.
"A new study suggests that almost one third of scientific reports are published in languages other than English, which often end up being overlooked without contributing to our understanding.
At the other extreme, a vast majority of scientific reports published today are in English. The use of English as the universal scientific language creates challenges for those who are not native speakers of English. This inevitably means that scientific information is reaching a more limited audience. Therefore, researchers urge scientific journals to provide basic summaries of a study in multiple languages or use translators to fill the gap.
This is especially important for subjects where local expertise is also required such as the study of environment and related fields.
“While we recognize the importance of a lingua franca, and the contribution of English to science, the scientific community should not assume that all important information is published in English,” said lead author Dr Tatsuya Amano from University of Cambridge’s Department of Zoology.
(via linguisten)
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
I’m just going to leave these here: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/23497-the-origins-of-totalitarianism
An interesting thread about the discursive function of “waslike”.
Technically speaking, I wouldn’t say that this construction is really a compound verb “waslike”, because it still conjugates like you’d normally conjugate the verb “to be”. (I’m like, you’re like, s/he’s like; I was like, you were like, s/he was like - not I waslike, you waslike, s/he waslikes.)
The linguistic term for it is quotative “like” and there have been several academic papers about it, including this early one from 1990 and this extensive survey of functions of “like” by Alexandra D’Arcy.
(via unfolding)
Neat in their boxes, dolor of pad and paper weight,
All the misery of manilla folders and mucilage,
Desolation in immaculate public places,
Lonely reception room, lavatory, switchboard,
The unalterable pathos of basin and pitcher,
Ritual of multigraph, paper-clip, comma,
Endless duplicaton of lives and objects.
And I have seen dust from the walls of institutions,
Finer than flour, alive, more dangerous than silica,
Sift, almost invisible, through long afternoons of tedium,
Dropping a fine film on nails and delicate eyebrows,
Glazing the pale hair, the duplicate grey standard faces."
-Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine
This is the paragraph of the book that made me finally realize it was okay and actually good to be in a constant state of terror as a software developer.
(via jennschiffer)
Selfie Saturday, featuring laser eyes, gradients, and a copy and paste squad