> "Knowledge has to be packed and unpacked. And in order to do that we increase and decrease the complexity in semantic waves. One key tool for packing is Nominalization, that helps the reader pack the knowledge they’ve received into a concept to be stored in memory. But if you only speak in tightly packed abstract concepts students get lost. And thus you drop down in abstraction and teach through examples, stories, images, that help students digest the contents."

this is top tier writing. thanks for sharing

Really? While reading I couldn't help but think about how I wish this article on writing well were... written well. That block quote loses me in the first sentence, I had to re-read it a few times.

"Good teaching requires alternating between two views, going up and down levels of detail. Sometimes you zoom out and give students one word for a big idea, calling a whole chain of events a "collapse." This 'Nomiinalization' lets them hold the idea in mind instead of the whole story. But summary words alone can lose students, the abstract loses meaning as details are forgotten. So you zoom back in with examples, stories, pictures, concrete cases. Those reinforce the idea of the summary word."

turns out naming is important

I'm maintaining a document called Tricksy words with multiple meanings that cause endless confusion and strife

Just in the past year I have wasted several months pulling my hair out due to incorrectly named projects.

It really does turn out naming is important!

I've seen a spreadsheet with NATO abbreviations and terms. It's tens of thousands of entries. And the best ones have tens of definitions.

Care to share some highlights?

Forgive me this long list, I hadn't the time to make it short!

Function: a mapping from inputs to outputs, vs "a chink of code that runs and does arbitrary things with global state." Some languages resolve it by using the word procedure (and keyword proc).

(For an amusing read on this subject, see Chapter 5 of Let Over Lambda, which argues that Lisp is actually the least functional language!)

Deserve: can refer to unconditional rights, as well as conditional privileges. (e.g. "every child deserves a safe home", vs. "this person deserves to be punished.")

Positive/Negative have at least 3 separate meanings depending on context (good, present, self-amplifying). e.g. positive feedback can means the system is about to explode, positive symptom can mean "CIA replaced my Shasta again".

Normal can mean "happens all the time" or "is acceptable". Often those two are not in agreement. (People often fuse this one. If it's unusual then it must be bad! If it's common then it must be okay!)

Meaningful: something "means" something if it points beyond itself (as a symbol), or if it doesn't (direct experience).

Example: enjoying a sunset

The experience itself can be deeply satisfying. Or you can project ideas onto it like "I'm blessed", "I earned it", so the experience "points beyond" itself.

(Alan Watts has an excellent video on purpose and meaning, considering our approach to them a uniquely western neurosis.)

Serious: committed, vs overly heavy. People often confuse the two attitudes, which creates a lot of inner resistance. (And ironically produces childishness due to resistance to maturity.)

Selfish: prone to neglect others (bad), vs taking care of yourself (good and natural to every organism, yet often vilified in our culture). You can do both of course but they're kind of independent axes.

Several authors have written in defense of selfishness, but were so abrasive that they did the idea more harm than good!

Meditation can mean 10,000 different things, many of which are opposites (e.g. intentionally directing the attention, vs allowing it to wander freely). (Enlightenment is similarly open to interpretation, even within the same school of thought!)

I've worked at places where it turned out different parts of the organization had a different idea of what a "user" of the core product was.

The team using Salesforce, the data warehouse team, the application development teams, all with different mental models of what "we added 5,000 users today" actually meant in concrete terms.

Oh man. This gets really exciting when in addition the Finance team has to tell the SEC how many active users there are, but they're using different definitions every quarter because they get their numbers in some non-reproducible way from whichever of those other teams has time to help them this month.

Source: my own years on data warehouse and application development teams.

And renaming things is hard, if not impossible

I appreciate the eval design here. And man Claude not doing web searches is killing me bc it just won't offer the most up to date information. At the same time, there's research saying Claude relies heavily on Brave search so I'm not sure how to reconcile

If you want your Claude Code to search you can always tweak your own with a good skill, this should work perfectly! It's more a problem for vendors who can't tell all people in the world to download a specific skill first.

With Cloudflare's third disclosure of an Okta related breach within a year, orgs have no choice but proactively protect themselves.

DarkGuard analyzes your SSO configuration to ensure it meets best practices. Upcoming releases will analyze your event logs for any unusual activity or patterns that might indicate a security threat, such as multiple failed login attempts, unusual access times, or access from suspicious locations.