arximboldi

First, that distinction is not so clear for many because the word "terrorism" is constantly banalized by conservative politicians that use it to attack protesters of all kinds. We have seen a lot of this during the last few years, where austerity protesters, mobs preventing unfair evictions, etc. have all been called terrorists by right wing politicians and media.

The other problem with your definition is that, while it may help distinguishing terrorist actions from other actions, it does not help drawing the line on what kind of communications "are terrorist" or "promote terrorism" to censor? There are many tricky questions, for example:

- Do you censor everything that a terrorist group says, or only whatever explicitly advocates terrorist tactics?

- Do you censor sympathizers with the terrorist group?

- Do you censor people that share the ideas of the terrorist group? Even if they do not defend them with violence? But what if they do not promote violence but they do not publicly condemn the terrorist group?

Etc, etc.

As you can see, the question is tricky. In Spain this debate has been alive for years with regards to the basque independentist group ETA. This was often a mess, with even certain independentist newspapers being prohibited at times. Sometimes these actions made ETA recruiting easier indeed--it's easy to argue that violence is your only alternative when your political voice is censored. In most absurd cases, people that are not even independentist or anything alike are being prosecuted for posting jokes involving ETA on Twitter.

So, it's not about being pedantic. Discriminating what kind of media promotes terrorism and not is hard. The political implications of censoring are huge, and there can be unintended consequences. It basically means drawing a clear political line on the limits of freedom of speech.

I would be afraid if these lines are drawn by private entities, secretly, without a public debate on what is tolerable or not, and with the public not even knowing whether they are being censored or not.

Interestingly, as a native Spanish speaker, when I was a newbie, I found that the programming languages being in English being an advantage. When reading a programming book in Spanish, it was clear what was a keyword or standard library function (English), and what was code written by the book writer (Spanish). When I first read a programming book in English, I was sometimes confused trying to figure whether a function call was calling something that was provided by the language or something that was defined elsewhere in the book. I wonder, though, if this confusion was because I was so used to read books in Spanish, or if native English learners also experience this sometimes.

I'm from Spain and the argument I hear most is the opposite: they use expensive resources (health-care, which in Spain was universally free, with some limitations now after the cuts), pay no taxes, and put just a little bit of money on the bottom end of the economy (restaurants, service, overdevelopment of coast, etc.) This is in contrast with the kind of migrants that Spain exports, mostly productive tax-paying young people with university degrees. But we can't blame brits for this imbalance (and I'd always argue for more open borders not less). It's spaniards that since Franco times and still nowadays mistake easy money in tourism for development, and we hardly know what else to do nowadays.

By doubling the amount of gadgets in the market you are also reducing price of the gadgets (according to offer and demand). The parent's idea is not new, it was already introduced in the first chapter of Marx's Capital. The only capitalistic solution to the devaluation of work introduced by increases in productivity is to increase the demand for things: by increasing peoples consumerism via marketing, reducing the durability of the things, etc.

This vicious circle has to stop, or the planet will stop it for us. We should think about how to work less and consume less.

This article is interesting, but too often misinterpreted.

People most cite it as an argument for why you need hierarchies in your organization. However, I don't think the article gets to claim such thing. Instead, it claims that one should not let structure be implicit, because then it degenerates in tyranny.

People are too used to think that structure == hierarchy that we assume that the corollary is that hierarchy is needed to avoid tyranny. David Graeber in his "Utopia of Rules" [1] makes a good counterargument: if your goal is to avoid tyranny it's little difference to have it implicit or explicit. In the later case, you are just giving some moral justification for it -- you legitimize it, in the most literal sense of the word. What you need is, if you want to avoid tyranny, a resilient and explicit flat structure, with mechanisms in place to identify and reject emergent tyrannies.

I understand, though, why we are becoming disillusioned about the word "flat" in the business world. Most businesses that try to go "flat" still have a vertical ownership structure. What "flat" actually means in that context is: "you have to figure out how to make money for me, but I'm not going to tell you how!" This creates a lot of anxiety, because at the same time that workers are told to feel empowered and take responsibility, everybody spends so much energy in figuring out what are the invisible walls of the cell, and what their patrons actually want from them. I think it takes a lot of alienation to really thrive in such environment.

That does not mean that flat is impossible in the business world, in my view, you just need an explicit flat structure that begins with your ownership model. A company that I know of that has such structure is Igalia [2] (discl: I don't work with them but have acquaintances there)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Utopia_of_Rules [2] http://igalia.com/

I don't know if that would actually be the case, but if it were, the question would be: is it actually a bad thing?

I don't see any moral justification for a software engineer earning more than someone collecting waste [1]. In fact, it is normal that as our society gets more educated and the supply of unskilled workers goes down, a lot of hard manual labor will become expensive. This is already the case with mining, for example. The fact that we software engineers do a job that we like and is well paid at the same time is a very lucky (for us) historical accident.

On the other hand, I see in basic income an opportunity to also do unalienated work. For example, I'd very happily use BI to take buy some time off and to do a kinda "libre software retreat", hacking on free projects for a while without needing to bargain with an employer that owns everything that comes out of my head.

[1] Excluding the cost of education, let's assume university is free as in a few places in Europe.

Agreed. That happened in Spain: after the crisis burst the housing bubble, banks and private owner were simply not putting their property in the market to avoid price falling down. I Andalucia, the goverment actually had to pass a law that midly forced people to rent empty flats, because we were at the ridiculous situation where a lot of people were being evicted for not being able to afford rent, yet there were lots of unused space.

So, yeah, more development might help Berlin, but it will be more effective when accompanied by rent camps and strengthening of social housing banks. Otherwise you are just feeding the bubble and exchanging one population by a wealthier one.

I recently got a Nokia 130 because I lost my old phone. Dunno if it goes above your "piece of crap" line but it serves very well my needs.

It means you can copy Epub files to it without conversion (with or without drm). It has direct integration with various ebook shops (mostly German) as opposed to be tied to the reader manufacturer's bookshop. It's not the panacea but it seems better than the situation with most other readers. I also enjoy the tap-to-flip feature (tap with your finger on the back to flip page), specially when lying on the bed.

For research articles I do this:

1. crop out page numbers: http://briss.sourceforge.net/

2. remove columns and reflow with: http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/

The later one works like magic, it totally made my ebook reader so much useful. (A Tolino Vision, a very fine german device not locked to the Amazon store: http://mytolino.com/)

(edit: fixed links)

Tay + access to military networks = Skynet

I enjoyed this article, which has more details and even worse examples of her tweets: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/03/24/microsofts-...

Interesting rhetoric: first, PG ridicules people that fight inequality by using a straw man, to then call then infantile (ad hominem) and call for an us vs them, wolves and hunters, Silicon Valley against the world, in the most Goebbelian style.

But most infantile is his metaphor of the chair maker. Yes, we know in fact that economy is not zero sum game. But economic inequality is not generated by chair makers that gain an advantage over those who don't make chairs. Economic inequality happens because the owners of chair factories (who, are not, the chair makers) get to own both the factory and the chairs that chair makers make. Hence, while the chair makers get a salary to support themselves, the owners accumulate the surplus value of the chair producing business allowing them to expand their business, acquire more assets and, too, influence politics to turn the game in favour of capital instead of labour. This is too a simplistic metaphor, but hey, it's at least a bit closer to reality than PG's view of the world.

Of course, he is a venture capitalist, not a chair maker. His way of living is extracting surplus of founders that in turn extract surplus of engineers and other workers and contractors that support their businesses. He is in the business of selling ever increasing inequality.

This PG article is pure ideology. Ideological class war. It's a hoot--a network of fallacies building some sort of implausible moral self-justification. PG, you are not a wild animal in a room of hunters. It's more like you are the hunter, and this is a bait that we won't bite.

I'm sure he would argue that my chair makers are exploited only because they are not smart enough to start their own chair making business. His utopia is one in which everyone is an entrepreneur--a CEO or a VC. I wonder who makes chairs in that world (if it's machines, someone has to keep the machines running). See, not everyone can be a winner. It's not about killing the rich. It's about making sure that those that lose in the game--who are in fact, too, valuable and indispensable to society--have a chance to a decent and realized life in dignity.

But even in a legal and political system that are very much (and increasingly) biased towards capital, I've seen coops, foundations, institutions and other forms of sustainable and non-exploitative businesses that succeed and provide real value pushing the game out of the zero sum. We can also see this in the libre and open source world--it's an outcry from software makers to collaborate on producing value in a way that they still own (instead of the proprietary firms that they work for). It provides collectively a leverage to our society that very few SV startups can claim to. In a way, in this other utopia, everyone is as well a business owner. A business owner and a maker, organized in the democratic networks of both competition and cooperation. No VC's needed though. Sorry Paul.

Or Atria's transducers library (a-la Clojure), which can be applied to collections but also to pushy things (e.g. boost.signals, rx.observables, etc.):

Code: https://github.com/Ableton/atria/tree/master/src/atria/xform...

CppCon 2015 session: http://sinusoid.es/talks/transducers-cppcon15/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vohGJjGxtJQ

In fact, the problem with having one single "reference implementation", like in Python, is that other implementations never get to be "compliant enough".

The situation in C++ is saner, since both GCC and Clang are moving the standard forward, and together make sure that the standard can accept multiple valid implementations and code tends to be truly portable.

The problem is really simply that Microsoft was never interested, at least until very recently, to have a truly standards compliant compiler.

  > Intuitively Lisp might be a secret weapon for startups, but not for open source 
  > where the communities of the mainstream choices are more productive, simply because
  > of popularity

Open source is not a popularity contest. In fact, open source, and specially free and libre software, is a great place for leftfield technologies to flourish. In fact, Lisp had a place in free software before Github even existed, with various flavours being the scripting language of choice in popular projects like Emacs, Gimp or Gnome.

It is rather in the proprietary corporate world where there is often resistance to adopt languages outside of the mainstream. The more supply of developers for a technology is available, the lower cost of labour. It's hard for the merits of a technology to argue against this fact in the face of management.

Yep, sorry about the state of the docs... hopefully it will improve over time. As the `status` section highlights, a lot of the stuff here is very green, but we wanted to open-source early and polish it along the way instead of waiting until everything is "done" ("done" doesn't make sense for an OSS project anywayzzz :-)

There will be a tutorial on the transducers stuff coming up at some point. That is the part that is under more active development indeed. We will also talk about that at CppCon next September.

Interesting...

There are not many parts depending on boost and we could make it entirely optional [1] (it would be still be nice for people wanting to use atria::variant::match in combo with boost::variant, optionally).

Could you elaborate on why boost is a total no-go for you?

https://github.com/AbletonAG/atria/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=b...

I see it the other way around. How many bits you need to address something in memory depends on the platform. Thus `size_t` is the only cross-platform type you can use. A fixed-size integral is going to work on some, but not all.

I had good experiences with this one too: https://github.com/Nocte-/rhea

Here is an implementation for Qt/QML that we use at Ableton:

https://github.com/AbletonAG/aqt-cassowary

Edit: Anyone interested in modern implementations and participating in the community of library implementers and users can check this website: http://overconstrained.io/ :-)

Hi!

I see there is still no "expression SFINAE", which makes me very sad, since for me the most really important use-case for decltype() is SFINAE... it basically allow to have C++17 style concepts on top of plain C++11.

I wonder, why is this not planned yet? It feels unreasonable to me that many C++14 features have been added yet this is not there. It is very unconfortable to write cross-platform code this way, since you can not even tell tour team "stick to standard C++11", but instead have to elaborate intricate coding guidelines listing all features that VS don't support (our other compilers, GCC and Clang are quite good at this).

So, could you elaborate a bit on why is this feature not there and what are the plans to add it?

On the other hand, I appreciate a lot that you guys are becoming reachable here. Thanks!

So now Karl Marx was an enterpreneur.

Well, I can't talk about about Italy because I have never been there. But I am from the south of Spain and my family is from the north of Spain and what you just said is both stupid and xenophobic.

I find interesting that while the issue about the connection between race and IQ has been widely commented here, nowbody questions (an many reapeat) the idea that wealth and IQ are correlated. In fact, surveying the Internet one can quickly find that this idea is widely considered wrong. However, the fact that it is accepted acritically here shows a lot about how the American-dream ideology and this false sense of meritocracy is so deep inside the contemporary tech culture.