EdwardDiego

> Maxim-gun slaughter of Mahdists in the eighteen-nineties

The Mahdists had a policy, contrary to Islam, of enslaving Muslims who didn't support them, amongst all the usual slaver behaviour(e.g., after the siege, all the women and children in Khartoum were enslaved, which I'm sure went great for them. All the men were of course massacred in fun manners).

I do note that they picked the 1890s to limit it to the war where the Empire Struck Back, not the war beforehand, but nonetheless, I'm not sure the Mahdists were a good choice for building sympathy.

Also, staying that the State of Israel learned suppressive tactics from Britain is rather infantilising in the extreme.

> Maxim-gun slaughter of Mahdists in the eighteen-nineties

The Mahdists had a policy, contrary to Islam, of enslaving Muslims who didn't support them, amongst all the usual slaver behaviour(e.g., after the siege, all the women and children in Khartoum were enslaved, which I'm sure went great for them. All the men were of course massacred in fun manners).

I do note that they picked the 1890s to limit it to the war where the Empire Struck Back, not the war beforehand, but nonetheless, I'm not sure the Mahdists were a good choice for building sympathy.

Trying to remember how Zed Shaw once phrased some of the shenanigans in Ruby codebases, I'm pretty sure it was something about "chainsaw juggling monkey patching."

I take it you haven't seen the documentary Weekend At Bernie's?

Yes, at this point. At the time, they were not.

Thank you for the SNL video, Jimmy Carter talking down a young man who took too much acid is something I find highly plausible.

> They put a lot of effort into not being just a trading hub.

But yet that's still where the lion's share of revenue for their Government comes from.

I feel like lesswrong writers always have an implied "something something, post-scarcity economy!" suffix in all their thinking.

That using AI for everything will be great because X, Y and Z, and then something something post-scarcity economy, now everyone can take the time to learn the Ressikan flute like Captain Picard.

Welp, if you're ever in NZ and want to discuss the saltiness of the scientist who named southern beech "fake beech" (Nothofagus), I'm always keen :D

Wait, your name is literally Bron Gondwana? That must be a hell of a conversation starter.

I'd definitely bore you with tree talk though.

I am an enthusiastic amateur rock botherer, what got me hooked was wondering why mountains on why one side of our island are far more rugged, and the river gorges far harder to traverse, than the other.

Turns out that's what happens when on either sides of a subducting plate boundary.

What I love though, is that the fault that marks the boundary, was initially discovered by someone mapping natural hot springs and noticed they formed a rough line trending SW - NE.

Rachel isn't serving adverts on on her blog. She's not trying to sell you on her consulting business.

So my question to you is... ...why is it so anti-you, and why should it be different?

Britticisms? In English? The hell you say!

> More like a skill issue

Hey, I think you mistook HN for Reddit.

Good on you champ.

So long as you know what If-Modified-Since is, and use it, you can have all or none of the sympathy you want.

If only there were some kind of HTTP headers that could help them stop doing a GET every hour!

Gosh darn, if only I could say "Hey, please only send me the data if it's been modified since I last requested it an hour ago" somehow.

Did you actually write 500KB as 0.5MB to make it sound BIGGER?

Clever.

Because she's old school sysadmin mate, likes running her own stuff her own way, fair enough.

And she posts on it lots because she has a bunch of RSS clients pointed at her writing, because she's rather popular.

And she'd rather people writing this stuff just learn HTTP properly, at least out of professionalism, if not courtesy.

Hey, you might not, I might not, but we all choose our hills to die on.

My personal hill is "It's lollies and biscuits, not candy and cookies".

Yeah, but then who is going to stop them acting monopolistic?

New administration is going to be monopoly friendly.

I was honestly pleased that Gaetz was nominated for AG solely because he's big on antitrust. Or has been.

Yeah that ChangeMD ransomware kinda broke healthcare in the US for a week or so.

Thank you!

Thank you, I'll read your link, but really appreciate your perspective. :)

Oh true, I am really interested in those choices too.

Free market is an evolution of the concept laissez-faire market after early economists realised that leaving market participants to do their own thing didn't ensure a competitive market.

There'd always been a belief in early capitalists that an unregulated market would be inherently self-regulating from competition, in a way that allowed for competition, and yeah, well, I would emphasise the word "belief" in that.

I once met a theologian who had done their PhD on the language used by a politically powerful neoliberal group in their writings on the market and came to the conclusion that it was primarily the language of faith, not the language of science.

You're right in that "free market" is a refinement of the laissez faire market, because a laissez faire market was always assumed by its early proponents to be naturally competitive, and the reality turned out not to be so.

Shit, even Hayek opposed laissez-faire markets in some areas.

They're not punishing you for winning, they're punishing you for using techniques to ensure competitors can't have a fair go at competing.

So your analogy is very terrible, unless Simone Biles was bribing sports officials to change the rules to effectively prevent other gymnasts competing against her.

A better analogy for a monopoly in a free market is allelopathy in plants, where you actively modify the environment to starve out competitors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allelopathy

It's been a very long age since I wrote any F#, really enjoyed it at the time and it was for fun stuff, I wasn't trying to deal with errors, just things like process a prefix trie in a cool way, but does

  Result<'T, 'TError> 

really have no upper type bounds on TError?

I'm assuming that's the case from the fact that he's arguing for a basic interface (Does F# support structural typing, or do you need to say that AtlasError implements IError or whatevs?), and I'm really surprised there isn't one.

Huh, would love to know why leaving it unbounded was decided upon. Might be I don't quite grok the culture of F#.

This reminds me of a very common and awful Python pattern, where, as there's no `message` attribute on the base error/exception classes, despite every nearly every exception or error having one, this is the normal pattern to access it:

  message = ex.args[0]

It gets really fun when you get an IndexError because one exception had no message provided when instantiated, so then you find code like:

  message = ex.args[0] if ex.args else None

Yech.

NZ switched from FPP to to MMP [0] after a few elections where a) the government was formed by a party that achieved <40% of the popular vote and b) parties that received 15 - 20% of the popular vote achieved only a tiny modicum of representation in Parliament.

I'm not sure MMP is the ultimate ideal, but I much prefer it to FPP. It's a very rare government that isn't a coalition government, and while we get the occasional tail wagging the dog moment, we also get a more diverse set of parties in power, and also more diverse representation.

Often what voters want to know before voting is who a party is willing to go into coalition with, there's usually no big surprises (e.g., the righter-wing ACT party and the centre-right (by NZ standards, they're still left of the Democrats at least when measured by public healthcare etc.) National always dance together, Labour and the Greens typically get along via a confidence and supply agreement even if the Greens are not formally in coalition) but then you have New Zealand First, who are openly mercenary about their choices, and the original Maori Party that went into coalition with National which doomed them in the next election.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed-member_proportional_repr...

At least you didn't get these: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02072/carrots...

Fun fact, they evolved to fill the niches normally filled by rodents. As such, they were once the most common prey of the native owl ruru/morepork. Life is cool.