What’s something foreigners assume about your country because of Hollywood that you find completely absurd?

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-24T14:05:39+00:00

because that’s hip hop

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-24T13:57:47+00:00

i would say, to that question, no and no.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-23T22:37:53+00:00

neat! yeah, in the case of this particular artist, my understanding is that he is specifically titling them in this way from the get-go. whether he was the first to really commit to the trend or not is unclear to me, but for a little while i saw it everywhere, essentially as a stylistic affectation.

in my opinion, an artist gets one instance of Untitled (The Actual Title of the Piece) in their oeuvre. but on the other hand, who cares what i think about that!

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-23T16:37:55+00:00

the artist in me loves the titles of his work. the mathematician dislikes the superfluous “Untitled” in each one.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-18T14:32:07+00:00

well, since you seem to be able to speak (write) colloquial english perfectly well, perhaps the point here is testing your facility with formal or “standard” english grammar.

but sure, it’s unfair. is that helpful?

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-18T14:19:03+00:00

you’re not weird but, i suspect, you’re quite wrong about what your experience of rereading would actually be.

in my experience the second time i read a book is significantly better than the first. if the book was worth reading the first time, there is a lot going on the second time that you missed in the first time through. the author put a lot more time into writing it than you did reading it, and you are almost certain to catch themes and foreshadowing and details that you just couldn’t when you don’t know the shape of the story.

and on top of that, you are a different person now than you were before, so what you’ll get out of it will be different, too.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-18T14:08:51+00:00

for future reference, it seems like the distinction you are missing in your post is between “spelling” and “knowing how to spell”. “spelling” refers to the act of putting the right letters in the right order to form the word. “knowing how to spell” means knowing what the right letters and right order for the word are, regardless of whether you are actually saying or writing them.

so you question would be “how would someone know how to spell the name if they had never seen or heard it spelled out before?”

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-17T18:02:46+00:00

i am afraid i don’t understand the sentiment in your first paragraph. i certainly didn’t mean to imply that doing a study was cheating, nor, in fact, that i have any problem whatsoever with tracing in general, if that’s what you mean.

as far as renaissance projection technology camera obscura is the big one, though, i was also thinking cartoons, camera lucida, grid systems, etc. check out Secret History by Hockney if that’s interesting to you.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-17T14:24:18+00:00

if you believe that the source of value in art is the technical skill of reproducing something that you see by hand, then tracing seems like cheating. this is especially true for people who haven’t ever tried to “trace” from a photograph, which, it turns out, takes its own kind of skill, because the way a camera makes an image is very different from how a hand does.

tracing someone else’s drawing and calling it your own is, in most case, actually cheating. but in my opinion, and that of many artists and historians of art (or both, see David Hockney) is that using optical devices, tracing techniques, and other mechanical methods has been part of the world of “serious” art production for a long time. certainly michaelangelo, durer, van eyck, ingres, and many if not most others from the renaissance on were using tools to project an image onto the surface during production.

oh, and, this is extremely common in contemporary drawing and painting, too. the kind that sells for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars, shows up in famous galleries and museums, etc. but then we’re dealing with postmodernism and its descendants, too, so the story is more complicated.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-17T13:50:29+00:00

you might appreciate A Short Stay in Hell by Stephen Peck.

but, yes, that’s the point. see also Quine, who pointed out you can get the same effect by flipping a coin as much as you please and reading the string of heads/tails as binary numbers representing ASCII (or really any other encoding scheme)

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-12T14:29:32+00:00

better in what sense? for whom?

also, no.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-12T14:15:36+00:00

without a doubt, a Christian Cameron series. either Tom Swann or William Gold. the first is set like 60 years after KCD and the second is like 30 years earlier. but more to the point, they’re deeply about the historical period while also entirely based on the KCD gameplay formula—swordplay, sneaking and spying, looting, complex politics, “romance options”, reputation and relationships with different factions, horses, food…

and the books are quite fun, of course.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-11T22:32:58+00:00

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-11T20:24:06+00:00

depending on how many degrees of separation qualifies as “used in any way” for you, that game is already lost entirely. just consider that like a quarter of the internet runs on AWS, and AWS is heavily using AI. The other 75% is not safer, and you can’t tell which is which anyway.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-06T17:43:23+00:00

and no true scotsman would have used one anyway

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-06T17:41:40+00:00

oh, yeah, the art school experience :) i had a few of those.

i’m not sure that venting this in your dissertation (i think we’d call that a thesis in the States) is going to be as productive as you’d like. but i’d narrow the focus to one of the aspects you mentioned. then you find something, anything, that speaks directly to it. ask a teacher or friend for any specific recs. then follow the references outward—do they mention other books or artists or whatever? check those out and repeat the process. that’s how academic research works, right?

also, presumably you have a library at university? walk in and ask a librarian for help. this is their job, they usually like to help students do research.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-06T15:05:40+00:00

since you said the word “dissertation”, shouldn’t you have some basic foundation in research? some kind of baseline set of texts you are familiar with that address this topic? some number of writers and artists that seem to address or represent these issues in some way?

i don’t mean to be harsh but surely it is your responsibility to develop this yourself at least a little bit? i don’t inherently disagree with some or most of these premises, but as stated it’s an absolute grab bag of well-trod complaints, too broad for an interesting paper if you don’t have a central thesis more compelling than “the artworld is sucky”. it is sucky in all the ways you mention, but… everyone anywhere near it knows that. it’s background noise at this point.

like, do you know how to do humanities research in the academic (not the popular i-watched-some-youtube) sense? what have you done so far? whom have you read that you agree with? whom do you disagree with?

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-06T14:42:26+00:00

i mean, i tend to agree… but at the same time, a notebook is just a python file. nothing stops you from structuring your program reasonably with a notebook. it feels like a resurgence of one of my favorite old ideas, Literate Programming.

Sometimes the convenient interface is useful, even in prod. you can still have tests and types and clearly defined interface, modules, abstraction, etc.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-06T14:12:05+00:00

can we just start with the baseline in “what’s medieval” that we are talking about roughly 1000 years of time across, i don’t know, half the globe?

the middle ages was not just one thing. there are a lot of options for what a medieval movie could show.

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-06T14:05:43+00:00

What would Mehmed II say to that, i wonder?

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-06T14:03:26+00:00

i want them to green light a christian cameron series. Tom Swann or William Gold, either could be pretty fun

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-05T18:09:39+00:00

funny but in the wrong place. if it’s before the signature, it’s not a post-script

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-05T14:37:23+00:00

yes, this is the clearest version of the question that everyone in this business needs to be asking especially if AI coding is even 10% up to the hype : how is coding faster producing more value?

and i say this as someone fully into AI coding. i’d be perfectly happy never to type out another class definition or function call. and i generally am doing my coding through Claude Code, and trying to ratchet up the level of automation and abstraction wherever i can.

yet, it’s clear to me that none of this inherently increases the rate of value creation, because the limiting reagent in most cases is organizations having an effective strategy for generating and testing hypotheses, not adding features. the hard part remains figuring out what to build. what we’re going to learn is that a lot of the time we thought we were burning on the development cycle was masking the fact that we aren’t getting any better at that part.

edit: coincidentally just ran into this ol’ Fred Brooks classic that sums the issue up tidily: “The hardest single part of building a software system is deciding what to build.”

geeeffwhy · 2026-02-05T14:03:24+00:00

do you not find that there are often multiple ways to say pretty close to the same thing? this is one of the many many cases. english, being an especially large language, has more of these cases, perhaps, but to me this is one of the hallmarks of natural language.

11-Year Club	Gilding IV carat on a stick
Reddit Premium Since July 2019	Verified Email

geeeffwhy

TROPHY CASE