David Weinberger's Blog, page 5

My new Twitter archive page, and you can too!

I just added a page to my home page where you can search and browse all my tweets from the past 15 years of tweeting. That’s 17,900 of them. And I guarantee that each one of them is worth not just reading but pondering. Let me put it like this: Every one of those tweets […]

The Social Construction of Facts

To say that facts are social constructions doesn’t mean everything put forward as a fact is a fact. Nor does it mean that facts don’t express truths or facts are not to be trusted. Nor does it mean that there’s some unconstructed fact behind facts. Social constructionists don’t want to leave us in a world […]

Quine’s typewriter – and Heidegger’s, too

“Quine … had his 1927 Remington portable modified to handle symbolic logic. Among the characters that he sacrificed was the question mark. “Well, you see, I deal in certainties,” he explained.” [1] This is from an article by Richard Polt about Heidegger’s philosophical argument against typewriters in light of the discovery of Heidegger’s own typewriter; it was […]

Computers inside computers inside computers…

First there was the person who built a computer inside of Minecraft and programmed it to play Minecraft.  Now Frederic Besse built a usable linux terminal in GPTchat — usable in that it can perform systems operations on a virtual computer that’s also been invoked in (by? with?) GPTchat. For example, you can tell the terminal to […]

Why I liked Twitter

I’ve been on Twitter for a long time. A very long time. In fact, I was introduced to it as a way for a bunch of friends to let one another know what bar they were about to go to. It seems to have strayed from that vision a bit. I have not yet decided […]

Life without Time Machine backups

While I’m waiting for Western Digital to replace my external backup drive — it lasted for 9 months, so that’s pretty good, right? — I’ve been finding comfort in using borg (free) (documentation) , wrapped in the LaunchControl UI ($18) to do hourly incremental backups to my flush Transcend SD card. LaunchControl is still a […]

Protected: McLuhan’s LightBulb

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

If a lion could talk about what matters to it, we probably could understand it.

Ludwig Wittgenstein said “If a lion could talk, we couldn’t understand him.” (Philosophical Investigations, Part 2) But lions already speak, and we do understand them: When one roars at us, we generally know exactly what it means. If a lion could say more than that, presumably (= I dunno) it would be about the biological […]

Was FuzzyWuzzy WYSIWYG?

I recently had occasion to remember my proudest moment as a contender for national Poet Laureate. I know we’re not supposed to reveal such things, but enough time has passed that I think I can speak of the grave injustice that was served to me on a platter of shame. (It’s writing like that that […]

Semantic Wordle

There’s a new version of Wordle called Semantle — not one that I “predicted” — that wants you to find the target word by looking not for a chain of spellings but a chain of semantics. For example, if you started with the word “child” you might get to the answer as follows: Child Play […]