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throwaway328
Joined 79 karma
- And the Snowden revelations happened, which programmers and sysadmins and etc saw, and then... continued as before, in the large majority of cases. It'd be baffling, if it wasn't so easily explained by the usual mixture of self-interest and moral cowardice.
- I worked with a fellow who didn't believe me that the shift key upper-cased letters. The slippery slope continues sliding ever downwards.
- https://matrix.org/blog/2021/07/21/germany-s-national-health...
tl;dr is that the French and German governments are really ahead of the curve then
- Hmm. Are you aware that I was responding to this comment?
> Why do people use obvious spyware when free software exists?
So, even though the poster was referring to ByteDance when they said "obvious spyware", I was feigning incomprehension in order to ask the question, how do we differentiate ByteDance from what Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon (and the rest) do.
It's a real question - why do technical people, who arguably should know better, and can do something about it - continue to use these data-harvesting and user-selling platforms? The answer is obvious when it's the case of an employee of those companies, I grant you that.
My apologies if you feel your response did address that, and I missed it. If so, please help me see what I missed.
- > I read what you wrote
I never said you didn't. I said that you were misreading me. We could speculate as to what could have caused such a poor reading of such a simple point, but there are so many juicy possibilities, it's hard to pick.
> you immediately start to lash out
This is upside down - you immediately got snotty when I explained that the point you first made was in no way relevant to what I was saying.
I, on the other hand, accorded you far more patience than your low-effort misreading warranted. I attempted repeatedly to explain where you were confused, only indulging fully in riling you up (with great success, apparently) at the very end there.
And to be frank I didn't feel like I was "lashing out", as I didn't feel sincerely emotionally involved to begin with. Your original argument was laughable, and the way you immediately switched to sniping then came as no surprise.
What has happened is you jumped in with some irrelevant anecdotes, and then refused to back down when it was pointed out, and instead chose to invent a fantasy scenario where I'm making a point that I at no stage make. I've asked you to quote the moment where I say anything more than what I've now repeatedly explained to you - and you won't do it.
So no, as much as it would please you to imagine it to be true, this:
> it was pointed out how stupid what you wrote was
Has not occurred, except in the fantasy argument in your head. I don't mean that something has been pointed out and I disagree, I mean that precisely nothing has been pointed out, you've made no response, instead maintaining I'm making a point I never did.
Outside of your fantasy, then, on the off-chance that you want to step back into reality, I've made the following point, which I invite you to actually respond to instead of getting so terribly worked up: The word "cunt" is used very differently in the US than in various other parts of the Anglosphere, including but not limited to Ireland, England, Scotland, and Australia.
None of that means Matt Trout was using the word in a friendly fashion, and none of that means that the OP in this case wasn't being poorly treated by Mr. Trout.
It doesn't mean that there can't be nuance and variation in those regions of the Anglosphere I mentioned, either. For example, if you personally don't use it much, that would be - for the purposes of this point - of no relevance. Your previous monarch Queen Elizabeth probably didn't use it much either, and that, also, is of no relevance.
> No wonder you’re on a throwaway account tbh.
The real wonder is how someone on a non-throwaway account can utter such inanities and remain so unabashedly foolhardy about it.
> act like a gigantic cunt
You must have really had a hard time in the O-levels to have taken my comment so badly, lashing out with profanities and everything. My oh my. Where's that British decency and propriety the world knows so well?
And what would Matt Trout say, I wonder!
- Yes, why do people use products from Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, ...
- Or you could say they are "tilting at windmills".
- I'd be a very interested admirer, if not user, of such a project. I'm playing with J this past week, and otherwise have a couple of CL books under my belt. No other real experience programming, but I certainly think that sounds like a cool idea.
I wonder where April would fit in, with your idea? Joining forces with the fellow who made April might be a possibility. Strength in numbers, and all that.
- I chuckled at "recovering sexp addict". What possible risk is there in over-indulging in sexp?! I simply don't see it.
Speaking of unconventional lisps, I enjoyed this recently:
https://github.com/vygr/ChrysaLisp/blob/master/docs/lisp/lis...
from Chris Hinsley, author of the (very) cool Chrysalisp operating system. Same author who wrote this in 1995:
- I suspect you might be observing two correlates and picking one as the cause of the other in a way that is ahistorical.
Specifically, it seems to me that colleges becoming more vocational and colleges becoming more expensive are both natural outcomes of the neoliberalisation of all things. I am aware that some students now rationalise their educational investments with the logic you describe above, but I think it's a post-hoc rationalisation.
You can get a good job without going to college, and you can get a good education without paying a gazillion bucks.
A side point, but calling it "vocational" seems a bit euphemistic too. Learning carpentry is a vocation. Getting a business degree is not equivalent to learning carpentry. I might say colleges have become commercialised, rather.
- See my reply in the other thread, where I dutifully elaborate.
- I am not a scientist, and was primarily having a laugh with my comment.
That said, I do know that the type of person who likes configuring things very in-depth can set up intricate and powerful workflows in Emacs. I don't know what kind of data science IDE specifically you're interested in putting together, but here's a general article:
https://michaelneuper.com/posts/replace-jupyter-notebook-wit...
There's also this MOOC on reproducible research in French and English from Inria, where you're encouraged to follow the course in one of three ways: Jupyter, RStudio, or in Emacs' Org-Mode. I'd love to do it, but can't really justify spending the time at the minute.
https://www.fun-mooc.fr/en/courses/reproducible-research-met...
Creator of org-mode is Carsten Dominik, who is an astronomer by trade, so, it's a scientist's tool. A few of his talks are listed on this page, if you're interested in going straight to the source:
- I agree, the deporting of citizens is much worse in real terms.
They're both fundamentally anti-democratic, is what I meant. In both cases, the political / business class controlling the state is utilising private and public institutions to further their aims, with little to no care for law, morality, or even common decency.
- If "centrist liberal" means being critical of all authoritarianism, from Obama to Trump, where would the democrats lie in this political balance?
I ask sincerely here. That would be a centre which would be ten miles left of where the centre seems to be, from where I'm sitting. Curious to know how you view the political spectrum to arrive at this framework.
For example, Macron might be a good example. How would you classify his politics, based on the above framing?
- Reading Barrett Brown's "My Glorious Defeats" at the moment, being reminded of that time Anonymous went after Visa, Mastercard, and others, in retaliation for them blocking payments to Wikileaks.
An action the payment companies took extrajudicially at the behest of the US government because the US gov was't happy with Wikileaks. Wikileaks' crime was that they'd been very successful at getting true information to the public about what governments were doing.
This was quite shocking to me (and at least some others, presumably) at the time, in 2011. I guess if we were taking it seriously, we would have been obliged to say: oh, how fundamentally authoritarian and anti-democratic.
When progressives/democrat/left types shout "fascism!" now on account of something Trump did or said, the cynical part of me says that a lot of them probably just want Obama/Clinton/Biden-flavoured authoritarianism rather than "ugly" lower-middle-class Trumpian authoritarianism.
- Emacs is the only truly next-generation data science IDE, and the last-generation one too.
(Hiding behind my couch after writing that)
- Writing advice from some pleb with the English comprehension ability of a garden gate, who probably wrote a story about his pet dog to scrape a pass in his O-levels - truly, our civilisation descends but deeper into the abyss
- Is there a repo or page somewhere listing the mini-est stuff? Very cool here!
- You mean a kind of "Spectres of Marx", Jacques Derrida, 1993, hauntology type thing?
- Yeah, seriously, what is this about? Dang, etc? Anyone?
- The word for this, we learned recently, is "LLM inevitabilism". It's often argued for far more convincingly than your attempt here, too.
The future is here, and even if you don't like it, and even if it's worse, you'll take it anyway. Because it's the future. Because... some megalomaniacal dweeb somewhere said so?
When does this hype train get to the next station, so everyone can take a breath? All this "future" has us hyperventilating.
- Nice post. I hadn't noticed the "subtle suggestions" of donations myself, to be honest, but maybe I hadn't browsed around their pages enough.
Anyway, if they do mention it, is it not a very far cry from the situation everywhere else? Youtubers begging, screaming, shouting, seducing, murmuring, doing the bug-eyes, repeating, cloying, getting emotionally heavy and forceful, for subscriptions, likes, and comments? Interspersed with violent sudden shifts to advertising products, etc.
So it was a bit of a surprise to hear it mentioned like it might be bad. Are you surprised that the suggestions are so gentle? Or what
- Started learning Standard Chinese this past week, and came across this really amazing dictionary. I was charmed and amused to see this at the top of their home page:
"Our servers have fled the US and found asylum in the EU. Turns out they like bratwurst more than tariffs."
- What did it do for privacy?
I think Gemini is great, and read from Nyxt browser. Don't know if I've seen any references to privacy benefits, so curious.
- The fact that LLMs haven't come up with anything "novel" would be a serious puzzle - as the article claims - only if they were thinking, reasoning, being creative, etc. If they aren't doing anything of the sort, it'd be the only thing you'd expect.
So it's a bit of an anti-climactic solution to the puzzle but: maybe the naysayers were right and they're not thinking at all, or doing any of the other anthropomorphic words being marketed to users, and we've simply all been dragged along by a narrative that's very seductive to tech types (the computer gods will rise!).
It'd be a boring outcome, after the countless gallons of digital ink spilled on the topic the last years, but maybe they'll come to be accepted as "normal software", and not god-like, in the end. A medium to large improvement in some areas, and anywhere from minimal to pointless to harmful in others. And all for the very high cost of all the funding and training and data-hoovering that goes in to them, not to mention the opportunity cost of all the things we humans could have been putting money into and didn't.
- > Capitalism as a whole is the least bad economic system for prosperity, but the least bad version of capitalism is something like the Nordic model, with good taxation and redistribution policies and consumer protections.
Shouldn't we refer to the system by what it leads to in a majority of cases? Like Stafford Beer and the cybernetician's useful heuristic:
POSIWID - the Purpose Of a System Is What It Does.
I mean, the Nordic model is not predominant by any means, right? So why would we use the term capitalism to refer to that, or think capitalism generally leads to that?
The thing we have in most places certainly seems to be dominated by monopoly players, with laws and regulation tending in most cases to protect that entrenched power and leaving the rest of the people mollycoddled and/or mistreated.
Aside from that, I think your line of reasoning is factually backwards. The rights and protections that people won over the last few hundred years were ripped from the hands of the powerful forces of capital every time, and never given gladly. History shows clearly that these advances were won in spite of capitalism, not because of it - ironically, by the same "left" you seem to be deriding.
This famous "capitalism as least bad system" argument, more broadly, of course, presumes we by definition can't do better in any possible future. This is taken for sophisticated wisdom nowadays, but is arguably just the standard modern cynical excuse not to even begin to think.
"The Dawn of Everything" by Davids Graeber and Wengrow does an amazing job of showing this notion that humans are stuck in their economic systems to be a tired modern fantasy at best, driven by our lack of imagination and political sophistication when compared to our forebears.
- Yes, including about Emacs users "hating humans". I use Emacs, and I'm very fond of humans. Plus my reading of the Emacs community is that there's loads of interesting and respectful people. Where's the hating humans bit?
https://www.ponylang.io/discover/
to
https://www.ponylang.io/
On the second link, as another commenter mentions, the "Try it in your browser" is one click away, near the top. On the first link, it's two clicks away, but the first of those clicks is a perhaps surprising backwards-lick to get back to the homepage...
Unfortunately, many of the diehard language enthusiasts here seem to be getting quite worked up over how inaccessible the code examples are. Instead of being able to immediately see the syntax so they can rush back here to make insightful and educated comments on how that syntax compares to $their_fave_lang, they are forced to spend up to 4 or even 5 minutes reading documents clearly describing the design of the language, and being obliged to click on their mouses up to 10 times even in some cases.
If a member of the Pony team sees this: even though it's more than a tad ridiculous and you have in fact made a lovely website with loads of clear information, maybe consider adding the "Try it in your browser" link as another option in the burger menu thing on the left. That way it follows everyone around, and you never have to suffer a HN discussion getting needlessly derailed by the resident PL fanatics.