angst_ridden

It's an interesting problem. If a venue owner rents to anyone, they're obligated to rent to everyone?

I can see this being complicated. One venue owner won't want to host a show because of the race/religion/ethnicity of a comedian. That would be a problem. But what if a band has a reputation for riling up crowds until they riot and tear places apart? Is it a problem for the venue owner to refuse to let them have a show? What if the potential violence isn't as direct, like the venue is threatened with a boycott if a person is allowed to hold a political rally there? Should they be allowed to deny that rally?

I have mixed feelings about your point 1. For example, I fully support employee's right to talk about unions, or discus their salaries with one another. But if I ran a coffee shop, say, and my employee seriously reduced my income by standing on the sidewalk outside the store on his off hours and insulted customers, I'd feel like I shouldn't be forced to fund that activity by employing him. Admittedly, it gets a little more complicated if he were there telling them that coffee is a neurotoxin that will turn their french bulldogs gay. In either case, he's still driving away my customers.

There's a point where freedom of speech intersects with freedom to not be harassed. If someone doxxes me in an argument, that's one thing. If they publish my kids' pictures and the address of their school, that's another entirely. But where the point of "acceptable" lies is difficult to nail down. Intimidation and threats can take many forms, depending on the relative position and power someone has in society, not to mention their histories. What would be a dumb insult to me might be a direct threat to someone else, and vice versa.

I agree that social media and today's news media operate largely on a Lacanian outrage mechanism that is divisive, self-amplifying, and accelerational. I don't have a good solution to that. My general inclination has historically been towards government regulation, but even the law depends on some degree of a shared vision of society. If you have no faith in the community and feel no obligation to it, or worse yet, feel that it is illegitimate on its face, you can always find ways to circumvent the letter of the law. That phenomenon has been increasingly weaponized, and I can't see any good ways to break that cycle.

Should employers be required to retain employees who say things that damage their business?

Are algorithms free speech? Who gets to determine which algorithms I'm allowed to implement to promote or demote comments on my private media platform?

How do you propose altering media incentives without restricting people's freedom of expression? Passing laws?

What a lot of people call "cancel culture" is exactly that, though. For example, when a comedian says something that insults a class of people who are customers of the comedian's sponsor and the sponsor projects lost revenue from that class of people, they stop funding that comedian's work.

That's both "cancel culture" and the consequences of free speech.

Exactly. That's a problem.

For example, I'm in favor of banning speech exhorting folks to violence against people of any specific race/religion/ethnicity/orientation/belief. That seems like a simple enough restriction.

But then, in the event of a law like that being passed, the advocates of violence switch their tactic to explaining why said target group is subhuman, or resort to apophasis, or develop coded language.

The solution often proposed is to consider purely verbal instigators of violence to be innocent of any crime, and consider the individuals who physically enact the violence as bearing all responsibility. Unfortunately, having personally witnessed mobs getting worked up and seeing firsthand the collapse of individual thought, I fear this approach is based on an over-generous analysis of the rationality (and individuation) of the human brain.

I don't have any solution to propose.

I think generalizing on creativity is difficult. There can be incredible creative synergies when people work together. There can be impressive solo works.

A lot depends on the individual(s) in question, their background(s), and the type of endeavor.

Our house has been a dark blue with white trim for over a decade. We built an expansion in our back yard, and painted it a fairly saturated purple. It's not visible from the street (except one very narrow angle).

However, we received hate mail from neighbors who complained that the view from their 2nd story window into our back yard was spoiled, and that we should respect that we lived in society not in some hippy commune.

Other neighbors regularly bring their visitors to stand at the one tiny piece of the sidewalk where they can look down our driveway to see the purple, and point and shake their heads and grouse about it.

It's really kind of amazing how much hostility the color has generated. We used to be invited to neighborhood gatherings and cocktail parties and such. Now, because we callously refuse to repaint the extension and main house some sedate dull color, people literally won't speak to us.

This isn't an HOA neighborhood; it's an artsy-boho community known for creative types and public murals.

TL;DR people suck, colors are cool.

I'm on a team that maintains two projects with over 500k PHP LOC apiece. They're built using a decent framework (Yii 1.x). One of them has a module that's about 25kLOC of AngularJS.

They've each been running over a decade, and while there are some frustrations, it's not so bad. The biggest issue is lack of compatibility to migrate to later versions of the frameworks involved.

They perform adequately for their purposes. These are business applications that are not designed to scale to huge audiences, although one does aggregate ludicrous amounts of sensor data. Both codebases interact with a lot of external systems via APIs and/or batched data transfers. When it comes time to integrate with a new/different backend system, it's not difficult.

Could it all be implemented more elegantly in some other language? Sure. But in long-lived business tools, there's always an evolutionary process going on, and your pristine design from year two won't be useful with the changes they want in year seven. The ability to make fast changes is important.

Lastly, none of this would be possible without functional and unit tests. Those are probably more important than the languages used. They're a pain in the ass to maintain as the business uses and functionality evolves, but it allows the refactors that keep the codebases sane.

Intellectual property as a concept has been ruthlessly abused by large corporations, and as a result, small creators get their labor stolen and it gets justified because “information wants to be free.”

We were pretty ignorant when we started our Monarch garden. It was 20 years ago, and there was less readily-available information.

I don't think dill presents any issues, but we haven't planted any.

We have a lot of bronze fennel (which is non-native but heavily naturalized), and it's a host plant for the swallowtail butterflies. We get a lot of them too.

Interesting. In my area (Southern California), the Monarchs seem to really prefer the Tropical (Asclepias curassavica). We plante it when a local Monarch enthusiast recommended it. Now that we're more educated, we've been gradually getting rid of it.

Dominating? In the way a bacteria dominates a petrie dish until it exhausts all the resources and dies off?

I think history (if there is any) will judge harshly the decision to allow the use of neonicotinids.

In addition to general habitat destruction, the indisciminate obliteration of insect populations is going to bite humanity on the ass in ways we can't even imagine yet.

There was a big trend to planting tropical milkweed (Asclepias curassavica) on the West Coast. Originally, it was considered a good thing. Now, because the plant's a perennial in this climate and is a good place for spreading OE spores, it's considered a bad thing.

Some people advocate growing it because it's fast-growing, robust, and provides plentiful food. My understanding is that, if you do plant it, cut it well down in winter to prevent the spread of OE.

In my own experience in California, the Monarchs really prefer to nectar and lay eggs on tropical rather than the native narrow-leaf milkweed (Asclepias fascicularis). We've been purging our garden of the tropical anyway.

There are also some milkweed adjacent non-natives that they sort of like, e.g., Gomphocarpus physocarpus (aka Asclepias physocarpa). Again, my understanding is that the jury's out as to whether it's a good plant to have around for the Monarchs. It ceryainly is a striking plant that gets a lot of attention!

Nobody cares until the rolling coup finishes up in the next few years. Then it'll be a problem for everyone, just as it is now for folks in the US on foreign visas, US citizens on various welfare programs, and US citizens who want certain jobs.

Around October 2020, there was a group of people putting up battery powered LoRa repeater nodes in the hills around Los Angeles. I had a few LilyGo TTGO units, one with DisasterRadio and one with Meshtastic installed.

I could get occasional packets through to one of the nodes that was about 6 miles away (line-of-sight).

My conclusion was that for a city, a much higher transceiver density would be needed if you wanted viable communications. It's not outside the realm of possibility. The units themselves are less than $20/each in bulk, and could be powered with a $5 solar panel/battery rig. Placement of the units would be key.

I saw some Hong Kong activists online post designs for "throwable" battery-powered units. The idea there was to toss out dozens of them during events where non-internet mesh communications would be needed. Seems like an interesting use case, although jamming and the end points (e.g., burner phones with WiFi->LoRa or Bluetooth->LoRa) are still the weak points in a scheme like that.

It wasn't just his surname. It was his company name, too, and a trademark.

I used to work at a web firm that did Nissan USA's web site. I was in meetings where they discussed ways they would finally get the domain from Uzi. They obviously never succeeded. I did learn a lot about trademark law despite myself.

My response is usually: "I was going to call the police if I didn't hear from you soon! Where is my dog? Bring her back NOW!!"

A magician I know talks about the three kinds of magic: sleight of hand, mechanical, and mathematical. The first requires a lot of skill and practice (e.g., palming coins, manipulating cards). The second requires a lot of preparation and engineering (e.g., sawing a person in half, floating person illusions). The third relies on the nature of reality (e.g., dividing sets of cards in a known pattern that forces a result, or manipulating numbers that force an unexpected result).

So this is a cool example of the second type. All three types require some showmanship, and good patter. Some of the best tricks combine the types.

Agreed. And it's side-splittingly funny too.

Depends on the place and year.

Most years, I've had no issues with ticks. But after a rainy winter (like 2010/2011, or 2018/2019), I've been hiking with people who have gotten ticks in the Santa Monicas and even in the San Gabriels.

Spring of 2011 was the worst. After a hike at the Circle-X Ranch, one of my companions had two ticks, and two of us had one apiece.

I used to play a lot of Space Trader, so when I got interested in Palm programming, I worked with Pieter Spronck to write the expansion for version 1.2.0.

I can see one Timmies from my balcony. There's another around the corner.

My father's family lost everything in the Great Depression. His earliest memories were of moving out of the mansion into successively smaller houses. My mom is the daughter of refugees who often went hungry in their early years in the US. When I was growing up in the 80s, we lived in relatively wealth, but I thought we were poor. We had economizing rituals that are laughable in retrospect: we'd save everything including used tin cans, we would share a single teabag for making tea at breakfast, nothing ever got replaced if it could be fixed (Dad still keeps an 1980s-era microwave working, although over the years he's had to replace half the components on the main board).

My parents' house is now probably worth millions. They had careers and have savings and are living out a very comfortable retirement. There's a house full of stuff that I'll have to deal with one day. It will be hard, but I will try to look at it as a meditation on the challeneges they went through and how they coped.

I expect one of the hardest parts to be books. I was raised to think of books as practically sacred. Every inch of the house is stacked deep in books: art books, science books, old books, mass market books ... Libraries might want 1% of them, but they'd sell the others at fundraisers for a nickel or maybe just send them off to be pulped.

There's also my dad's old computer stuff. I think there's a PDP-11 rotting in the garage. When I was a kid, there was a big old analog computer out there. I suspect these will be re-homable.

I just host on my VPS and use ssh to access. My VPS gets imaged nightly (for one kind of backup) and versioned back ups using Restic.

I only collaborate with folks who I trust enough to give accounts, which means most are just personal repos.

Back in the day, I created a font called "Scribble Flinger" that would put smudges and stains throughout if you enabled the contextual alternates. I came up with several alternates for each glyph, and was pretty pleased with the result.

It's a free font, and I occasionally see it used in posters for rock shows or other "alternate" events.

But your point is right on. I only created three alternates per glyph, if I remember correctly, so if you were to try to use it for an entire page of text, it would reveal its tricks pretty quickly. For just a title or header, I think it holds up.

I just finally gave away a 17" Trinitron SGI monitor when cleaning my office.

That thing was a tank! I bought it at a CG house bankruptcy sale in the 90s for $2k, which was less than half the going price at the time.

But you're right, it weighed a ton. It did need periodic degaussing. And when a communication company half a mile away put in some satellite uplinks, I could see when there was heavy communication traffic by a slight color shift on one side.

"My definition of an expert in any field is a person who knows enough about what's really going on to be scared." - PJ Plauge, Computer Language, March 1983