devnonymous

> I don't see how your answer relates to my criticism at all. What I'm pointing out is that the author touches on a variety of topics where he clearly exceeds his field of expertise. I'm not saying that he is incompetent as a mathematician at all, nor that he is ill-intended in writing the post.

Forgive me, I'm confused. You did claim hubris. Which topics, precisely, does the good professor touch upon that is not within his field of expertise as a mathematician and an educator ? ... within this post that you claimed is full of hubris ?

Yes, A blog post from someone authoritative about the content certainly warrants higher consideration before being dismissed as blogspam by a random passing comment by someone who isn't, imho.

I'm not sure you either read the entire post or if you did, you grasped the point of the post. Prof. Delvin [1], the author, has been pushing to make math literacy and mathematical thinking more accessible for a long time now. This post is a guide to what that means.

[1] http://profkeithdevlin.com/

..so much for the irony of calling out hubris and stating 'the author is not even close to being competent'

Ehe ...you do realise you're speaking about this guy here right? http://profkeithdevlin.com/

I wouldn't cast 'I don't want to do this because I need to be careful' as laziness, it's just being smart/pragmatic. Take that statement in the context of home grown cryptography instead of pointes and it'll make sense. People might have different thresholds for the need to be careful.

Also, with regards to 'I don't need/want to understand what's going on as long as it works' ...isn't not needing to understand the implementation the entire point of creating abstractions?

> I would like to share his hopeful outlook (hopeful in the sense that he seems to think there ought to be a counterfactual world where everyone behaves decently towards each other and the planet)

You'd see the point if you think of 'Civilization' as a evolving process rather than an single point ideal.

The world today is factually more just and decent (IOW civilised) than the era of colonial imperialism and this change didn't just come about naturally. It happened because of people who question the injustice and challenged the world to be better. I think that's the role people like Noam Chomsky play. To expect the ideal so that we move towards it, however slowly.

Interesting article. FWIW, although unrelated, this is by John Ousterhout, the author of "A philosophy of software design"

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?q=a+philosophy+of+software+design

Where exactly did I attempt to tear down family traditions?

This entire thread of conversation began with my highlighting the parallels of how the Varana system, supposedly of divine origins, accepted and prevalent, even today in Silicon Valley[1], is not dissimilar to what the original article and the parent comment spoke about.

Though sure, please do go ahead and argue the things that I allegedly said.

[1] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=silicon+valley+caste+system&t=fpas...

Ah ok, so if the daughter of the person you mentioned doesn't get into Yale on a scholarship where as the boy who has Yale alumni parents and didn't need scholarship did get in, then it is perhaps because the girl didn't think of herself as a Yale student. It's all clear to me now.

> It still matters who your parents are, but in a significantly different (and I think more fair) way.

It amazes me when people think the current socioeconomic structures are fair.

You do realise that most people here, including perhaps you are, economically speaking, closer to being poor than being part of the 1% rich, right? The economic gap between those you might consider poor and yourself is a rounding error magnitude of the gap between yourself and the super rich. This is not an accident.

God forbid, but you and your kids are perhaps one or two medical, legal or natural calamities away from that few generations of advancement you talk about.

> It’s sad that some bloodlines don’t make it out of poverty easily, but that’s just how the world works.

Right, right, my mistake, this is nothing like the Varana system.

> the lawyer's kid could go do technology and my kid could grow up to be a lawyer-- it's just a somewhat less likely outcome.

And what would be the likelyhood of the child of a single mom working 2 unskilled jobs to be either of those? Like I mentioned in a different comment, Systematic barriers exist without being consciously built and are then perpetuated as just the natural way of things.

> People are permitted to pursue alternatives and aren’t forbidden.

Systematic barriers are seldom built consciously, yet they exist and without conscious effort to break down continue to be perpetuated.

From the point of view of opportunities/privileges available to an individual, is there really a difference between the caste system and a class system?

An underrated comment this.

For those who don't know, the Varna system, also known as the caste system has long been justified as the 'natural order' of a scholar's child being a scholar, a warrior's child being a warrior, a tradesmen child being a tradesman and the lowest class of a menial worker's child being a menial worker.

The fact that so many are willing color the discussion with - observable trends seem to suggest this is a natural fact of life is only elementary is both disgusting and unsurprising.

I always find it strange that people recommend a different letter for the register when recommending macros. Why not just use `qq` and `@q` (with the added advantage that clearing the register is `qqq`) ?

Alternate blog-post style link from the last tweet: https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/27/bruno-argento/#static-con...

Ah alright, I finally understand you. What you meant to say is the reason why Western classical music is built on the 12 note chromatic scale is because the musicians used the math! It has nothing to do with history. Sound about right?

Hmm, I guess someone should tell those people, like Like Tolgahan Çoğulu who are writing music in microtonal scales with 19, 24 or 31 notes in a scale, that their notes spacing is random.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/31_equal_temperament

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_tone_system

The idea of a semitone in Western classical music is historical not (just) tonal.

It is about opportunity costs. The budget you did not spend could have been spent elsewhere in the meantime and since it didn't get invested elsewhere, it's not a savings, that's a net loss, because of course anything less than 100% utilisation of 100% of "resources", 100% of the time is a loss .. Or some such.

Although, yeah my comment was a passing snark and perhaps didn't contribute much, from your response it is evident that you have a more pessimistic and blinkered view of the world than I do.

> The FSF is one of the last beacons of sanity (regardless of who leads it)

No. Emphatically No. This is what was always unappealing to me about FSF.

They pretend that they are the only ones who care. Furthermore only things that they care about (software freedom) are the only things that should matter. Even your comment regarding pronouns reflects this. In an alternate world, the Freedom to choose my pronoun foundation is the last bastion fighting against the evil FSF.

Why is it hard to see that we won the one battle in making the world a better place. FLOSS is what it is today thanks to FSF (and the BSDs, and Apache, and PSF, and...). It is time now to continue this war by speaking about intersectional freedoms.

Even if you don't believe the battle is won, why sacrifice the war for the sake of one outdated commander?

I don't understand this gloom and doom. Wasn't the /re/instatement of rms whole reason for the current 'world falling around us' ?

Are you saying Microsoft and Google have cleverly infiltrated FSF and reinstated rms knowing fully well that the FLOSS ecosystem would implode?

Are there any other companies besides E-ink Corp that sell ^AMEPD^?

> My experience doing perf optimizations... without realizing it's expensive).

Completely agree and this has been my experience ae well. To this I'll also add, inadequate thought put into data modelling. One would have to think lesser about query performance or cost of overfetching if data is modelled around the needs of the system it would serve instead of just modelling real life entries and their relationships as is, straight onto the database.

IIRC, if you're thirsty, your body has already been dehydrated. Ideally, you'd want to drink before you're thirsty.

The UX tends to be more sophisticated. The mobile experience is way better. The payment options are many and well integrated. The choices are better. Search is better. Delivery (time as well as tracking) is better.

I'm not too sure about that because if that were true the online shopping experiences in these richer markets in Europe would be better than India which is quite demonstratively not the case. Hence my assertion about correlation with age of the population.

Here in Ireland and based on my time living and travelling in Germany I'd say in most of Europe, its hard to get a microwave that isn't just wattage and timer.

Here except for a few things like phones and tvs, smart electronics aren't as easily available as my home country, India.

I speculate this is perhaps related to the age of the population.

I agree, although otoh, the inputrc change is not specific to bash. It is useful for any cli that uses readline (mysql, python prompt, pgcli,...). Other useful inputrc settings I have in mine :

# - when performing completion in the middle of a word, do not insert characters # from the completion that match characters after point in the word being # completed

  set skip-completed-text on

# - displays possible completions using different colors according to file type.

  set colored-stats on

# - show completed prefix in a different color

  set colored-completion-prefix on

# - jump temporarily to matching open parenthesis

  set blink-matching-paren on

  set expand-tilde on
  set history-size -1
  set history-preserve-point on

For anyone who needs to/prefers to use bash:

> One nice feature for fish history is the ability to filter through the history based on what is typed into the shell.

Add this to your .inputrc

  ## arrow up
  "\e[A":history-search-backward
  ## arrow down
  "\e[B":history-search-forward

> Fish does not enter any command that begins with a space into its history file, essentially treating it like an incognito command.

Add "HISTCONTROL=ignorespace" to your .bashrc

> A new addition in fish 3.0 is the --private flag that can be used to start fish in private mode; it stops all subsequent commands from being logged in the history file.

run unset HISTFILE