It is still a bit irritating to see the phrasing "make X Y again" in any context ever. Would really rather not have... any of... the associations that it gives.
It would be as if the people in Plato's cave, instead of contrasting the outside and inside, were to obsess over which section of cave wall had the most pleasing texture over which the shadows might play...
but if you try to begin your practice of buddhist meditation with incense burning on your scalp, you probably will not get very far; you will probably quit. instead, beginning meditation focuses on finding the pleasure in relaxing in a comfortable position, even though that is clearly not what motivates more experienced meditators
(and of course you're aware old don and old ed (rip) spent a lot of effort on typography, though they sometimes understood wirth's work better than he did himself)
I don't think I ever showed you, but when I was playing around with adjoint representations, I came up with an adjoint between plaintext files and PDF, such that (non-ultimate) lines in the PDF would display fully justified, but a simple filter (that did not model the PDF format itself) sufficed to recover the original plaintext file.
That didn't seem very useful, but as you point out, maybe making things prettier is worthwhile (and enabling reversibility so one could always retrieve the lighter representation given only the prettier one would satisfy my technological anabaptism); if it were useful to do so maybe I should try with .gmi (although the vertical layout issues here would keep pagination from being as straightforward...)?
an interesting thing i have noticed is that people living in prettier houses tend to treat one another better, to the point that you can sometimes improve family dynamics by interior decoration. i suspect the humans' direct preattentive aesthetic experience interacts with their psychology in ways that would appall old rené and which they are often unconscious of
The nicest situation we can have between two representations (x,y) is that they can encode each other, so transformations (f,g) "round-trip":
f x == y
x == g y
x == g (f x)
f (g y) == y
Much more commonly (this always happens, if we allow degenerate encodings) is a situation where each representation can encode only a subset of the other, so we only have:
f x == f (g (f x))
g (f (g y)) == g y
[aside: does the 3-in-1 trinitarian nature of these equalities suggest that one transformative application may exist in three coequal, coeternal, consubstantial hypostatic applications? end of aside]
Finally, the situation I'd contrived between plaintext and pdf is where a more expressive representation can encode a less expressive, but not the other way around, so we have an intermediate situation, where Procrustes only affects the more expressive side:
x == g (f x)
g (f (g y)) == g y
I don't think I can do it justice in an HN post, but old János also did a lot with these concepts, both theoretically exploring when the idempotents mentioned above are "regular" (related to regular expressions and the Kleene star) and practically suggesting that we should make Y-combinator-style autoreplicating mining-factory-complexes on the moon (in the asteroid belt?); see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38893829 ...
If you detest what a certain phrase might stand for - work towards changing what it stands for. Don't give it away freely and without a fight. You do a disservice to yourself and everyone else.
It triggers me whenever I see people ceding words like this - and this particularly annoyed me because it wasn't only ceding the phrase "makes America great again" but any phrase of the same grammatical construct!
Growing up trans I was called every name and slur in the book because people learned from others that those slurs might have power over me. The bullies had learned from other trans people that those words had power. That they could make me cry or feel weak or powerless if they held those words over my head. I never gave them that satisfaction though. My response was aways "Yeah, and?" which I had learned from the gay community. And I hate, rather strongly at that, anyone who helps those words retain power so that they can continue to be used to bully other trans children.
Never give words power over you. By doing so you give them power over others. If a word or phrase bothers you so strongly - reclaim it. Turn it into something you control - don't let it be wielded like a stick to hit you with. Why willingly turn it into a weapon that people can use against you?
That goes as much for slurs as it does for "make X Y again". It pisses me off is all.
It doesn't feel analogous to what you're saying about slurs, to me.
I'm saying don't let him own it at all. It isn't his to own - it's a cliché English snowclone that he gave popularity to. It doesn't deserve to be a powerful slogan that makes people think of Trump. It deserves to be a generic, overused snowclone devoid of any significant meaning where the average person no longer remembers the original phrase or meaning.
By ceding it to Trump and wishing to discontinue usage of it you're choosing to give it power and continue a legacy that it doesn't deserve.
You've probably pattern-matched me to a different kind of Trump-hater than I actually am. In fact my complaining about this was more of the form: I and many others would rather not think about Trump while reading unrelated tech news and using that phrase in your title is a tiresome association that is less pleasant than leaving it out.
You are correct that I misidentified you - and I understand your point in the latter paragraph about it being more of an annoyance of politics overstepping into your unrelated Tech news rather than "Ugh, Trump". I'm glad I was able to get my point across clearly and as long as you understand where I am coming from we can absolutely disagree over my opinion on the matter. After all - it is just an opinion.
Thanks for keeping the discussion civil and take care o7