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This page contains all of the posts and discussion on MemeStreams referencing the following web page: These Are The Years Of Our Lives | A Noteworthy Year. You can find discussions on MemeStreams as you surf the web, even if you aren't a MemeStreams member, using the Threads Bookmarklet.

These Are The Years Of Our Lives \| A Noteworthy Year by noteworthy at 11:07 am EST, Dec 13, 2009
Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing. One must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-9/11 mentality. Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls. Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released. If you've never wept and want to, have a child. The truth is we're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new. So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard. Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.
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Oughts and Noughts \| A Noteworthy Year by noteworthy at 11:09 am EST, Dec 13, 2009
There's no point in trying to hack apart the connections between the inside and the outside of the mind. Instead we ought to focus on managing and improving those connections. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating. If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. Don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice. So worrisome has the situation become that students at prestigious universities are even talking about becoming butchers. Do not destroy what you cannot create. Don't let your design make promises you can't keep. Before you reconfigure, mount a scratch monkey. Your code should not look hopelessly unmaintainable, just be that way. Otherwise it stands the risk of being rewritten or refactored. Don't forget about forgetting.
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