ab5tract

I do agree that Apple and Google both played the game with moves below the table, but that’s what “the market” gets you (amoral profit seeking that has no qualms with cheating and taking measures to ensure that one isn’t somehow suddenly operating under a political regime that cares about the morality of its market participants).

In that system it was the standard to reference the paper that first reported the story.

People understandably have a hard time conceptualizing a highly dynamic and diverse news media landscape these days, but back when it was working like it was supposed to —- before Clinton-era reforms destroyed the laws protecting against consolidation -— it was not as simple to suppress a story because you had actual competition who would profit if you didn’t.

In other words, news wasn’t always so distinctly “entertainment” and the rules which govern news items in a landscape of less than a handful of media conglomerates are nothing like what used to govern in a less starkly dystopian version of the same.

You believe it based on your own (very mainstream) biases of “primitive” cultures. There is no evidence of your position, it’s a fantasy you have wrapped around something you don’t understand or appreciate.

Or the chamber that was “theorized” by crackpots, included into Assassins Creed based on said “crackpots”, and then revealed to actually exist by sonography?

I think it’s far more sycophantic to insist that the ancient Egyptians were “primitive” rather than “advanced” when it was built, but hey, I’m against the grain and thus a crackpot.

It’s not an efficient (let alone moral) distribution system if one of its outcomes is spiraling prices that are irreflective of genuine market demand.

The whole problem highlighted here is that the people who want to sell cannot sell because the buyers don’t want to eat their consequences and man up to the loss on their gambling.

Seems to me the bigger magical leap here is in the observer who considers this to be either desirable or necessary.

Fixed that for you.

More importantly: why does reading about someone using Perl cause you to “balk”? That’s the issue my comment was lamenting, this attitude that everyone should be using something “acceptable”.

Before Perl, it was mostly unacceptable to use a dynamic language in a business. That sea change alone is revolutionary enough that you’d think there would be some room for a little respect or even curiosity, if nothing else.

But that’s not the case and I think that this kind of ahistorical close mindedness (not specific to Perl, to be clear) is a newer feature of programmer culture. And I think it’s worth lamenting its pervasiveness.

Someone can post a tortured looking piece of awk code here and people applaud. Post the same thing being done in Perl and we are likely to see comments like these — despite the fact that the Perl version will almost certainly be more readable and maintainable than anything you can write in awk.

It’s sad to see this happen to such a revolutionary-for-its-time language.

I wonder if it is an exposure issue: only those who use emacs know it is possible and those who know emacs have little incentive to leave their editor-OS.

I guess I’ll have to dig into some of these examples you have shared and see if I can comprehend and/or relocate their magic.

Since I’ve got you here, can I ask you for your thoughts on LispE and how it contrasts with jank’s approach? It seems clear that they both arrive from different lineages of the Lisp kingdom. LispE is also found dangling a few toes at depth within the icy waters of array programming.

Perhaps the only connection between the two is that the one makes me think of the other. But if there’s more, though, I’d love to read about it.

Also: no one has managed to explain to me what makes emacs so uniquely capable of interacting with a running interpreter, despite this usually being the USP I hear for “needing” emacs when attempting to Lisp.

Back in 2004 they withheld publishing the fact that the NSA had spliced themselves into every internet backbone. (RIP Qwest).

Back in 2002/2003, they drummed for war like all the good sycophants.

A few examples of them painting some of their toadies in a good light while trashing some of their enemies is hardly evidence of “leftism”.

If the NYT were even moderately leftist, they would have endorsed Bernie Sanders.

IME it’s not such a large shift for the developer (still easily recognizable as a ternary) while also having the benefit of slightly increasing the visibility of ternary expressions in the coding experience.

Edit: Thanks for the coroutine reading recommendation. I’ve been struggling a bit with them and have a few in use but would definitely like to grok them better.

The early days of the internet were defined by copious options for ISPs because telephone lines were required to be available under common carrier conditions.

The only reason this situation deteriorated is that broadband infrastructure was classified as for “information” and not “telecommunications”.

Is it really your point that “literate” cultures have a long history of genocide and therefore “oral” traditions are 100% irredeemably inferior?

Why is it so hard for you to admit that there may — possibly —- somehow —- be tradeoffs between the two?

One thing can be better overall than an other thing even as that other thing has unique merits of its own.

I am under the impression that one could not get far as a provable liar in a society rooted oral tradition. Compare and contrast that with the success rate of liars in every field of endeavor today.

My point was that using prejorative language against oral traditions is inappopriate considering the supposed superiority of "literate" cultures is yet to be demonstrated.*

Considering how little regard we have for what was written 5,000 years ago in terms of valuing it for any historical accuracy whatsoever, or how much of that 5,000 year old narrative was available to us just 100-200 years, it is frankly baffling that I have to defend the idea that there might be something to a different form of social memory that manually encoded 10,000 years of history generation by generation.

Is it really such a thought crime as "noble savage"-ism to point out that there is a difference between losing knowledge for thousands of years before then regaining it later (to hold in fairly contemptuous disbelief) and remembering it for the entire timespan?

*EDIT: Perhaps a better way to say this: the ultimate inferiority of oral traditions is complicated by evidence to its contrary. I don't mean to claim that there are no advantages to written traditions, only that assigning zero advantages to oral traditions is not only arrogant, it is contradicted by the evidence available to use.

How many cultures that adopted written languages have any 10,000 year old stories which happen to be true, exactly?

It feels like I read claims that dark matter is both a "given fact" and a "placeholder abstraction" -- from the same person, or at least perspective. They just choose to shift betweeen the two based on what serves their upper hand in a discussion better.

Or reading someone mention that "there is no fundamental difference between mass and energy" while simultaneously defending an entirely gravity-based cosmology that depends on the mass of particles... as if simple energy could not also contribute the same impact of said particles.

I think in general there is a feeling that any theory or speculation which is not dubbed into the dignity of mainstream, accepted dogma needs to be kicked out of the discourse. The fact that we are ultimately inferring in all cases is left out of the discussion and that seems to flatten all "outside" perspectives into a single umbrella of pseudoscience, despite this label accurately fitting -- under the above conditions -- onto heliocentrism, germ theory, chromosonal genetics, plate tectonics, the physical existence of Troy, and just about every paradigm that has resulted in scientific progress in the past.

I'm absolutely not claiming that all things currently labelled psuedoscientific are built the same. I only mean to highlight that science highlights "this is all inference" when it suits it best but otherwise -- in my experience -- discourages such frank reference to its own fallibility when confronted with alternative inferences.

Just a single obvious example: What tools did they have to broadcast photoshopped images of you to all of your peers?

If this were a thread about IBM machines of the 1930s, would it be playing “politics” to note that those machines were sold to Nazis and supported by IBM through sub-contractors even while we were at war with them? Is it crossing a line to mention they were used to facilitate the Holocaust?