cybernautique

I've listened to the two interviews you have published, and I intend to work my way through your publications. I'm currently in love with OCaml, but I'm resolving that D should be my next language. Funnily enough, I'd already downloaded it a few months ago; I have a dedicated flash drive for storing compilers, it was a very pleasant surprise to find Walter Bright already chilling in my memory.

I loved the podcast you did with Alexandrescu on GoingNative! The two of you said that you want D to have a million users; how does user accumulation work in programming languages? Intuitively, I'd expect linear growth until some critical point, and exponential thereafter. Do you agree? if so, what do you think that critical mass might be?

Also, on that same podcast, the host evaluated that D is ready for the million users you're shooting for. Do you have any plans to open a software shop or a consultancy to bring D into the industry? I've seen certain other language organizations, like the Haxe folks, do similar.

With regards to D-Lang: why do you ask that contributors assign copyright to you for improvements made to dmd? Is that just so you control the code-base?

Finally, I'd love to see a section of low-hanging fruit for novice contributors to work on. Whatever incentive it's worth: I will personally commit to fulfilling at least one item of any such list, if and when it should ever be published.

I'll be following D-Lang much more closely, I'm very excited to see how it evolves!

Any thoughts on rebasing Brave to Rust, or else picking up the now-defunct Servo project?

Hello Walter!

I'm interested in programming languages and the design of compilers. I'm relatively novice to programming, but languages have long captured my imagination.

Three questions for you: Do you have a blog where I can read about your compiler escapades? have you any advice for the aspiring novice? which is your favorite language, and why?

This is actually one of those instances where I'm not sure how open sourcing a product would make it freer. Don't cloud providers make their dime by what-they-have, i.e. your data, instead of what-they-do (i.e., the source code)? As far as I understand, it's the prices of ingress vs egress that act as the mortar in these particular gardens.

Like if Facebook went full open-source... how does that help, if they retain sole custodianship of my data?

Ah. That, I can do.

Why I Hate Discord (A Manifesto) [Without Sources] Discord is aggressively proprietary.

People ought to own their data, but Discord's architecture ensures everything gets hoovered into the mother-ship. At first, this was for nothing more than to facilitate their client-server communications model; recently, all of the hoovered data gets submitted to their AI moderation platform. (searched for sources on this but it was very hard to find anything. I remember talk about this ~c. Nov 2020, might be wrong)

I should be able to modify an interface to my tastes. Modifying Discord is explicitly against their ToS, including their interface; attempting to do so will lead to a ban. Don't like their painted whore? Prefer to chat from your bespoke terminal? GTFO, Hammer & Chisel knows what's best for We Peons.

Addenda: I find Hammer & Chisel developers and Discord admins to be disgusting. This is hearsay & personal opinion from my time hanging around the developer chats, but they all came across as nasty people. I, personally, believe many of the news reports surrounding the grooming controversies; searching "Discord admin controversy," "Discord allthefoxes controversy," "Discord cub policy," &c. turn up some relevant articles. Most of these articles are from low-quality reporting shops, but I buy in to the narrative.

Fill you in on what? I'd be happy to, I'm just missing context.

Also, it's so disheartening to see people tout Discord's interface as its 'killer feature.' As far as I'm concerned, if I can't mold it into a decent TUI for my terminals, it's okay at best. If an app actively resists its interface being molded, however, that's just evil.

I'm a random commenter with a chip on his shoulder.

<grumble> Please escape Discord links so people don't accidentally click a live one and thereby expose data to Hammer & Chisel, Inc. </grumble>

It's a constant slap-in-the-face how prevalent Discord is in the tech community. Need support with an obscure library? Discord. Want to talk to contributors for a project? Discord.

I honestly don't know why people so greatly prefer Discord to IRC. The interface? Network effects? Whatever it is, Discord and H&C are disgusting, and I pray the tech community finds a way to escape it.

Sorry, you're correct, and I should have made it clearer. This is general advice for getting into math, which is what I took the parent to be seeking advice for.

Thank you! That was really intuitive, it's nice to have a little midnight thought snack before bed. That mapping and description strike me as integral-like in their description. I,ll read into SATs, any resources you'd recommend for topics like this (or related)?

I'd like to propose a constructive and highly novel perspective: I, me alone, am correct. Yours is, once again, an outmoded and discredited viewpoint.

Local implementations. It's so bizarre to me that locality is never mentioned in these discussions. Our overly-globalized infrastructure is a weird, bad, and ad-hoc system to meet essentially local needs. I say to people, "I wish I knew when a new restaurant opened in the area," and the nigh-universal reply is: check Facebook. Sorry, come again? I should look to a global data provider to find information about local resources? It's foolish for our data structures and it's foolish for our lives.

My dream: a federated union of localnets that act like banks and data banks in one. A local facility I can resort to for my financial and computational needs. My email, phone services, VPN, and bank all rolled up nicely into one area. And, of course, it should also keep me anonymous except to the provider. The IT would be a nightmare.

My understanding is that you don't get a choice. You either allow loops, and accept that they might go infinite, or you axe them altogether. I believe this is a direct corollary of the halting problem, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Does a constructivist model allow for infinite tapes?

My advice: swing wide. If you don't know where to start, then judge a book by its cover and read it until you hit a knowledge gap, then slither down that gap and keep digging for resources until you either get bored or achieve something.

I recommend starting with geometric algebra or topology. The aspiring selfstarter has a bevy of great options. Sidney A. Morris' "Topology Without Tears" is fine androgogy, as is the widely-acclaimed undergrad textbook "Intro to Topology: Pure and Applied" by Colin Adams.

The biggest thing, in my opinion, is to realize that there are precious few things you need permission to think, mathematically.

The fundamental mathematical advantage is abstraction. If you can manage your abstractions and approach the math as nothing more than especially pedantic philosophy- it helps.

I tell them that I think they're immoral, and then proceed to not call for their shunning.

Highly agree in the means, not the ends. I'm also rabidly anti-FB, to the point it's had a detrimental impact on my social life. It's a cost I knowingly walked into and one I'm happy to bear. Take a look at my public posts: I categoricaly think FB and their employees to be immoral.

Shunning is likewise immoral.

I've railed against FB and employees in previous threads, but this is already a negative thread. Thank you for engaging openly and honestly. I find your perspective refreshing, and shockingly similar to my own. I'm a self-employed contractor, for reference.

I have not signed up for a FB account and yet they still try to deliver payloads to my browser, in the form of tracking buttons embedded in non-FB sites. They've likewise ceded all control of those buttons, and what I do with them, to me!

In my opinion, it does! However, on my machines, I am the arbiter. Facebook cedes control to me the moment any of their content hits my browser.

I highly recommend Poetry as a way to manage Python projects. It's my favorite bit of software I've had the pleasure of using, period; if any Poetry devs see this, kudos.

However, with pip's native freeze and install -r abilities, I'm also curious what you mean by hunter gatherer style installs. I've not yet had a problem with installing Python modules.

Right, which is why I tried to mitigate that by acknowledging it might only be a seeming on my end due to a bad reading.

As to the context:

(Grandparent) > UK has the highest tech salaries in Europeand trade unions were buried in the 70s.

(Grandparent) > I am fine if you guys seek protection of unions.

(Grandparent) > But never, ever, ever, interfere with my relations with employers.

(Parent) > As a highly paid UK tech worker, this scab does not speak for me.

The GP said that they're happy for anyone to seek the benefits of unionization, so long as they're not forced to participate. Parent simply called GP a scab for this sentiment.

This exchange, to me, seems to imply the parent believes unions to be an unqualified good- or, at least, that the simple desire for individual labor relations is worthy of unqualified condemnation.

Where do you and I diverge in this reading?

EDIT: further, how do I take better care to explicitly mitigate against my biases to ensure I engage with the full goodness of my faith?

Speaking personally, this pressure is incentive away from whatever you're proselytizing.

Any union that adopts such a spirit will have a culture toxic to my character. I want work to go smoothly, unconditionally. Any culture that requires conformity is a bad one, and I dare further say: a cult.

If a manager makes work bad, I will change jobs. If a union makes work bad, I will scab or change jobs. Regardless, I will do my best to deprive my value from whomever makes my productive hours less enjoyable.

I certainly don't think something needs to be an unqualified good to be worthwhile. However, I often see very little nuance in the presentation of unions; either its proponents present it as an unqualified good, or its opponents present it as an unmitigatable cost.

I was originally going to reply with:

> My life, by proxy to the afflictions of my loved ones, has certainly been made worse by bad unions. I like the idea of unions, but...

I mention this to make visible the reflective opportunity our exchange granted me. Yes, my loved one have been afflicted by (bad) unions, but it also seems to me that the proposed benefits of unionization are inherently distributed and therefore likely invisible at the individual level, whereas the harm engendered by bad management (union or otherwise) is hypervisible at the individual level. Thus, the good done for my loved ones by their unions isn't so easily measured, while the harms done by poor union management makes itself as easily known as the harms by enterprise's management.

I'll have to do more thinking and reading on how to gain a better perspective. It seems to me that attaining a measurement of the good done by their unions is further complicated by how relative said goods must be and yet there often aren't easy counterfactuals to refer to. Intuitively, it seems that aggregate data would give a false perspective.

Any advice or recommendations along these lines would be helpful. I remember there was a cybernetics program to engender a science of management and organizational development; I might start there, to learn principles of analysis as opposed to blindly groping for data to mash together.

My faith was entirely good when I asked it. What falsifies its good faith? or, perhaps a better question: how ought I to have asked?

Thank you for clarifying re: the term scab.

Out of curiosity, how perjoratively do you use the term 'scab'? It reads of condemnation to me, which is fine if that's intended. I was just wondering if the difference in our culture (Amerimutt here) caused an incidental tone-shift.

More to the point: I've never seen a union actually benefit anyone I'm close to. The reps have all been awful and the structural incentives were all perverse. I ask, in good faith, why do you seem to imply that unions are an unqualified good? (If this is only a seeming, a bad read on my part, then I apologize; if I'm on the money, I would love to get your perspective)

I actually didn't know about this, nor largely about ignore functionality. Thank you for the write-up, it definitely gives me more appreciation for what the previous contributor meant.

I do not interact with Facebook, the product.

Facebook, the company, increasingly has their grimy paws in every networked enterprise. This is a multibillion dollar corporation dead-set on tracking every individual on earth since before their conception.

Yes, Facebook (the maniacal stalker, their employees, and their demonic horde of advertisers) has caused that much suffering to me.

I'm not sure what your experience was or how long ago, but syncthing is one of very few programs I've ever had 'just work,' like absolute magic. sudo pacman -S syncthing, syncthing was all it took to stand it up, followed by extremely minimal in-app setup that was no more complex than working a modern music player. It keeps everything synced across my PCs and my mobile without any intervention on my part.

Syncthing helps prevent against theft and disaster. Syncthing with an offline backup policy helps mitigate against ransomware, but unfortunately any policy that moves bits from one place to another allows an attack vector for malicious bits to infect the target device to which bits are being transferred.

I replied to your toplevel, which I make note of simply because I don't want to seem as if I'm targeting you.

You dislike their privacy intrusions, and I hate them for it. My life is actively made worse for their stalking, their insistence that they be at the forefront of all things social.

I agree that they're not to blame for the hatred in society, nor are they responsible for all of society's problems. But their utter contempt to just let people be is reason enough that I should make myself heard as often as I can, and especially whenever I see an attempt to relieve any amount of pressure that hopefully weighs on their conscience: fuck Facebook and their employees.