11
points
gmac
Joined 6,852 karma
http://mackerron.com
https://jawj.github.io/zapatos
https://bytebybyte.dev
http://www.mappiness.org.uk
https://neon.tech
Brighton, UK
- gmac parentWow: horrifying. I've been delaying the upgrade, and looks like I'm going to keep right on delaying it.
- This is essentially why I didn’t do English Lit at uni (which had been my initial thought).
Up to age 18 I did well at English Lit by discovering that the more outlandish and fabricated the things I wrote, as long as I could find some tenuous hook for them, the more ‘sensitive’ I was praised for being for detecting them in the work.
In other words, everything was true and nothing was true.
I worry that the same is roughly true at university level, but with added social layers of what’s currently fashionable or unfashionable to say, how much clout you have to push unusual interpretations (as an undergrad: none), and so on. But perhaps I’m wrong?
- Depends what you’re defending against. Certainly I don’t suggest you get up to bad things using this as your protection!
But if your VPS exit-point is outside the UK, it should defend against the indiscriminate traffic-logging dragnet mandated in the UK. (And maybe even if the VPS is in the UK it does that? I think these provisions might apply only to ISPs).
Basically I don’t mind too much that the spooks can figure out what I’m up to if they specifically make the effort. I object much more to having all my online movements observed and stored and made available to dozens of public bodies. The physical world analogy would probably be that someone is assigned to tail you and record what building you go into every time you leave the house, and I think almost nobody would be OK with that.
- I’m in the UK and have been using a self-hosted VPN for years, since the Investigatory Powers Act obliged ISPs to keep records of what you browse and gave public bodies warrantless access to those records (which I think on principle is entirely wrong).
Originally IKEv2 and more recently WireGuard, configured like so:
- For context: hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people in the UK have now been arrested for carrying banners with messages supportive of Palestine Action, which was 'proscribed' as a 'terrorist organisation' for some acts of property damage.
MPs celebrated the suffragettes -- who burned and blew things up in the name of securing political change -- in the same week that they voted for this outrageously repressive measure[1].
[1] https://www.thenational.scot/news/25287205.westminster-celeb...).
- Haha.
But no, not only that. 90% of economists thought Brexit would be net bad [1]. But at least 50% of economists the BBC put on air thought it would be net good [2].
Edit: here's a longer-form version of this argument: https://mainlymacro.blogspot.com/2018/04/brexit-and-corbyn-h...
[1] https://ifs.org.uk/articles/paul-johnson-leavers-may-not-eco...
[2] Waking up to the Today programme for years (yes, a better source here would be nice)
- This is such a dangerously naïve view. Anyone who's any good at all at politics has learnt that this heuristic is widely applied, and is therefore careful to make a huge fuss irrespective of how well or badly things are going for them.
(Well, I say anyone; I guess I mostly mean bad people, who aren't restrained by fairness or honesty).
- > they were clearly pro-Remain
I would say they were a lot less pro-Remain than the facts were, such that they were effectively heavily biased towards Leave.
Typically they'd interview someone to factually explain how Brexit would be bad, and then 'balance' it up by giving equal airtime to some liar/fantastist telling us how it would be wonderful.
- 2 points
- > an ideologically driven push for renewables
Renewables (especially wind) are now just about the cheapest way to generate electricity, and new battery technologies do much to help with their intermittency, so where’s the problem?
(Plus, the ‘ideology’ in question would seem to be: it’s bad to fry the planet, and also bad to run even a small risk of radioactively contaminating one’s landmass, and IMHO neither of these positions deserves to be called an ideology).
- Agreed. I have a TypeScript library that attempts something similar: https://jawj.github.io/zapatos/
- OK, but words are not only for compiler-writers. As someone who encounters your compiler, if it targets an output language at a similar level as the input language it will give me a headstart in understanding what it does if I see it referred to as a transpiler rather than simply a compiler.
Overall, I find this discussion very odd. It seems like a kind of deletionism for the dictionary. I mean, what's the use of the word 'crimson'? Anything that's crimson is also just 'red'. Why keep 'large' when we have 'big'? You could delete a large percentage of English words by following this line of thinking.
- What I would add to your definition, to make a distinction from the common usage of compilation, is that the target language is on an approximately equivalent level of abstraction to the source. So, for example, Rust -> machine code is not transpilation, but Rust -> C++ is.
I think this is how the word is commonly understood, and it’s not useless (even if there’s no absolute standard of when it does or does not apply).
Edit: sorry, realise I should have read the article before commenting. The article calls out my definition as one of their ‘lies’. I guess I just disagree with the article. Words can be useful even without a 100% watertight definition. They’re for communication as well as classification.
- Nudge theory isn't useless, it's just not anything like as powerful as money or regulation.
It was taken up by the UK government at that time because the government was, unusually, a coalition of two quite different parties, and thus found it hard to agree to actually use the normal levers of power.
This NY Times opinion piece by Loewenstein and Ubel makes some good arguments along these lines: https://web.archive.org/web/20250906130827/https://www.nytim...