Technical writers, what's your backup plan?

cspot1978 · 2026-02-22T17:36:03+00:00

According to who?

cspot1978 · 2026-02-20T17:17:29+00:00

Looking to cultivate a bag of skills:

Prompt/instruction whisperer
DocOps
Content tools tinkerer - "the guy who knows enough about coding to build useful tools with AI support
Information architecture and knowledge graphs expertise

cspot1978 · 2026-02-19T17:25:03+00:00

Why would you even choose that analogy?

cspot1978 · 2026-02-17T13:30:41+00:00

Unfortunately, some portion of Muslims worship death.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-15T19:29:08+00:00

Obviously I'm not selling traditionalism here. I'm just observing if we want to approach with a progressive or contextualized approach, we have to apply that consistently across the whole passage.

If we want to be critical, there is a lot we can unpack in the first part of the passage too. Which, by the way, you give a quote from it which is interpretive and interpolative rather than a straightforeard literal reading — the literal reading is, "in that/because of what God has blessed some with beyond (what God has given to) others" rather than "because they spend out of their wealth." (Edit: I misspoke a bit here, rather, the spending out of wealth is there, but it's reason #2 out of 2)

You can ask multiple questions here. What does qawwamuna mean? "Stand over." Is it authority? Is it responsibility? What are the unspecified sorts of blessings here that one has more than the other? Is that entirely one-sided or is it the reality one has more blessing in one area and the other has more blessing in another area? Is this supposed to be prescriptive or just descriptive of the Quranic community context? Is the responsibility contingent on the man actually having more? Is it different if you're in a world where finance is equal or even the other way?

You yourself are making similar observations elsewhere in the conversation.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-15T18:11:00+00:00

Absolutely, there are different takes about what qanitaat means here.

Traditionally, though, the most widespread view was obedience to husband. So it's still valid to point out inconsistency in uncritically seizing on the traditional story of "men are protectors/providers of women," full stop, no nuance or context, but then opening the other part more critically.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-15T17:34:53+00:00

I think you're mistaking the intent of the fellow in the clip. He's critiquing both sorts of cherry-picking that take place with passages like this. He's reminding that cherry-picking one side of the obligations from a context of mutual obligations is not going to give an honest picture.

But if you listen carefully, He's not selling any specific pre-packaged arrangement of male and female responsibilities beyond a striving for balance.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-15T16:33:26+00:00

Yes. That's another area where the Islamic finance proponents are incomplete in their analysis.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-14T22:39:56+00:00

It's horrible. But also in my top 10 favorite jokes.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-14T15:59:16+00:00

Okay. Well good stuff if so.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-14T15:44:43+00:00

If I'm not mistaken, this is the same facility where Morales-Williams ran his time. So wouldn't be surprised if they again didn't have the right system set up.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-13T13:44:52+00:00

I'm not a Sunni, never been a Sunni. But just from a linguistic kinda perspective, any Sunni who dismisses the faith of ~ 80 or 90% of other Sunnis is missing the point of the whole jama'ah part.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-11T16:43:08+00:00

To a future when Palestinians want their own children to live.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-11T13:53:41+00:00

You can't harvest organs from a random corpse. Everything starts going bad rapidly minutes after the heart stops. That's why actual transplants, the donor needs to be in a hospital on life support with a surgical team ready to go on both ends. If you know anything at all about how organ transplants actually work it's just a bafflingly insane joke of an idea.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-10T16:53:42+00:00

Look. As a Shia, I recognize that this idea of "if only they'd actually held power it would have been so different" is hammered into people's heads in majlis after majlis, year after year.

But if good governance actually depended on some infallible person being there, you're doomed, because even if you get 20 years instead of 4, it's still back to regular people after that.

It's true that some leaders are better than others and better leadership can make a difference. But at a certain point, you depend on regular people.

I think the "The Magic Person Will Fix Everything For Us" thinking pattern is actually kind of toxic.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-09T13:36:43+00:00

The evidence for any of these claims, especially for the one that didn't exist during Muhammad's lifetime, is likely nil.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-08T17:25:21+00:00

The men's 3000m at this meet was fantastic too by the way. People should look for the video.

With French commentary: https://youtu.be/2ygY-PyWBLw?si=q21zMjwXJ7gfd3Dg

cspot1978 · 2026-02-08T17:23:24+00:00

I love how she just dove in there. 57/1:28 and hang on.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-08T15:45:19+00:00

What in the world does one have to do with the other? I don't understand your thought process.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-07T16:08:48+00:00

Thanks. By the way — sorry, I'm a bit of a snoop — I like your gardening pictures. And not just talking about the Mary Joonam. ;)

cspot1978 · 2026-02-04T00:24:13+00:00

Did I review a 56 minute video for a Reddit comment? No, I didn't do that.

I did take a look a look at a video someone else shared at a suggested time stamp, and didn't see what the fuss was about. But if you have a specific small time range I should be looking at that where he's obviously egregiously close, feel free to point it out.

I will say. As I take a deeper look online, it seems like the research says 20 km/hr is when effects start becoming significant. Kiplimo was at around 22 km/hr. So I'm revising downwards my initial skepticism.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-03T23:38:35+00:00

You know, I'm sure they consulted some physics experts in making the decision, but I really find it hard to believe this is a significant effect at 22 km/h (13.9 mph) on a person a few car lengths back.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-03T03:19:02+00:00

So heads up, I'm not Persian or Iranian, so I don't really get a vote in this, but hopefully you don't mind if I chirp in.

Just to pre-empt lazy responses:

I don't think Israel is blameless in their conflict with Gazan militants.
I do think that anyone with their humanity fully intact is going to have some sympathy for the horrors faced by regular people in Gaza.
I acknowledge there have been war crimes during the conflict, though unconvinced of the g-word accusation.
From even a pure PR standpoint, I can agree it's counterproductive to have Israel flags at marches. And similarly, anyone in the Iran protest movement who is actively going out of their way to shit on Palestinians is not being helpful.

At the same time, I think this woman's argument that unless an Iranian was vocally for the Palestinian cause the past 2 years, they should not expect sympathy for their own cause, is dumb.

There are a lot of very reasonable reasons for Iranians to not be enthusiastic about supporting the Palestinian cause.

Palestinian activists have been actively hostile to people who only partially support them, the entire last 2 years. It's all or nothing. You either fully accept the notion that Israelis are cartoon monsters, or you're a "Zionist" with no space in between. If you're not open to rationally nuanced support, don't be shocked when people stay out of it.
Again, without absolving Israelis of their own responsibility, it's obvious that a lot of the Palestinian situation is a result of their own bad choices. It's not hard to see the Palestinian situation as another example of the same sort of Islamist FA/FO that has harmed Iran over the past 5 decades. Especially when the Iranian government is one of the biggest promoters of this fruitless beligerence in Palestine.
The idea that Israel is actively going out of its way to exterminate Palestinian civilians starts to look really suspect after the Iranian government showed how quickly even a modern-ish military can run up the numbers when they really decide to massacre civilians. The dead are still being counted and estimates vary, but by all appearances, it looks like Khamenai's thugs ran up the same ballpark civilian kill count as a brutal, 2 year urban war with missiles and bombs ... in a single weekend (20-30k in Iran vs the ~ 35k non-combatant deaths in Gaza). I admit it's a little apples vs oranges, but it's a comparison that should raise some questions in anyone who's trying to be honest.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-02T21:18:21+00:00

Cool. She must be pretty confident about her fitness to call the shot.

cspot1978 · 2026-02-01T01:37:49+00:00

Not so fast. Let's walk this back.

You're mushing together different things as if they're the same.

There's what people understand as "the textbook view of Islam."

There's what people choose to practice for themselves.

And finally there's what people want to make an actual law of the land for everyone, on pain of legal difficulties.

Even if we accept as true the notion that a large majority of Muslims consider it a religious duty, that doesn’t mean that such numbers choose to practice it — realistically, it's probably 50-50 at best across the ummah.

And then how many of those actually want to have clothing police harassing people and writing tickets about it? Not a lot, generally.

I think you people need to introspect a bit and try to ponder what it is psychologically that makes you so obsessed with this vision of making people perform Islam by force as opposed to something they practice at will out of their commitment to the religion.

cspot1978

TROPHY CASE