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Whence and wherefore, for that matter.

earthboundkidon Maine's constitution has unprintable sections

TFA makes it pretty clear: to make it less likely for Wabanaki to win court cases.

earthboundkidon Building a Streaming Platform in Go for Postgres

Yes, thank you.

earthboundkidon Building a Streaming Platform in Go for Postgres

I think the rule is: don't use a channel unless at some point you need a select with 2+ branches. The context.Done is a case in point. You're not just waiting around for a context to finish. You do two things: try some network request and wait to see if the context cancels before it finishes. Because it's made to work in a select block like that, there wasn't another, better thing to use than a channel for context.Done. But for just iterating through some stream, you take a context in and return an iterator object that will do all the channel stuff internally.

earthboundkidon Building a Streaming Platform in Go for Postgres

Use an iterator object that can use channels behind the scenes.

earthboundkidon Building a Streaming Platform in Go for Postgres

Moving to channels seems like a weird choice. Channels should basically always be an implementation detail not exposed in public APIs.

earthboundkidon Mastering DOM manipulation with vanilla JavaScript

https://phuoc.ng/collection/html-dom/resize-an-iframe-to-fit...

There should be a way to do this with CSS and maybe some magic headers. It's super annoying that it has be done via JS.

earthboundkidon Immanuel Kant – What can we know?

Good explanation.

earthboundkidon Immanuel Kant – What can we know?

“we don’t know whether space and time are properties of the outside world, but they sure are part of our mind.”

In the Kantian paradigm (and this is taken from Descartes), space is external and time is internal. You can feel time without an external perception, and space can exist outside even if you’re not there.

earthboundkidon Immanuel Kant – What can we know?

LLMs are a good introduction of evidence to the rationalist vs empiricist argument. It does seem like Kantian thing where what the LLM “knows” is structured by its network layers but also by the data it gets.

earthboundkidon Dengue rates plunged after release of lab-altered mosquitoes

I'm pretty sure when they introduced the mongoose to eat rats in Hawaii, it was knowable that this was an idiotic idea because they don't eat rats. :-P

But yes, introducing new species or new variants of a species is basically a big box labelled "unintended consequences."

earthboundkidon Othello Is Solved?

Yep.

earthboundkidon Shinzo Abe's Assassination

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/11/05/meet-itama...

earthboundkidon Shinzo Abe's Assassination

Another one to watch is the MEK. Any US politician who speaks up for the MEK is a shill who will do anything for money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Mojahedin_Organizatio...

earthboundkidon Othello Is Solved?

They’re humans and humans play games for fun.

earthboundkidon Othello Is Solved?

In Bullshit, I always felt that if you could trick them into taking the hand or not noticing you added an extra card, it was all part of the game.

earthboundkidon First observation of a virus attaching to another virus

It’s a little different. Theseus is about identity over time. This is about identity of wholes from parts. No part of your engine is itself an engine, nor is a collection of engine parts in the wrong arrangement an engine. You need the right parts and the right relationship between the parts. But “right relationship” is not an entity over and above the parts either.

earthboundkidon First observation of a virus attaching to another virus

“You, sir, have been reared in great luxury as becomes your noble birth. How did you come here, by foot or in a chariot?”

“In a chariot, venerable sir.”

“Then, explain sir, what that is. Is it the axle? Or the wheels, or the chassis, or reins, or yoke that is the chariot? Is it all of these combined, or is it something apart from them?”

“It is none of these things, venerable sir.”

“Then, sir, this chariot is an empty sound. You spoke falsely when you said that you came here in a chariot. You are a great king of India. Who are you afraid of that you don’t speak the truth?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milinda_Panha

earthboundkidon If you plant milkweed, they will come

I was surprised when I saw Monarchs in Hawaii too!

earthboundkidon Sally Ignore Previous Instructions

He's wearing the old camo pattern which hasn't be used in decades, which any military veteran would cue in on.

earthboundkidon Rob Pike’s Rules of Programming (1989)

Zig!

earthboundkidon The Beauty of Chalk

The widespread replacement of chalkboards with whiteboards has been the replacement of a good technology by a much worse one. It's terrible.

earthboundkidon Penn and Teller's Lab Scam [video] (1990)

I saw a P&T live show once where Penn was explaining about juggling dangerous things. He light the torch on fire and then said it was not very dangerous, which he proved by catching the fire end and immediately dropping it. Then he broke a glass bottle and juggled that, which was very dangerous (it would leave a nasty gash on the hand). Then he pointed out we had gasped for the fire but didn't gasp for the broken glass because it doesn't look dangerous.

earthboundkidon Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

That was Hume's position, but we're still arguing even after he set out his definitions. :-)

earthboundkidon Can you use your "free will"? Try your hand

Free will is not an event in time and space. It's like examining a program and saying there can't be a programmer because everything the program does is predetermined. Yes, but the predetermining is itself determined at another level.

earthboundkidon .io considered harmful

And posting your comment is vice signaling.

earthboundkidon After 28 years, SSLv2 is still not gone from the internet

No, I never got into Starcraft. I don’t remember when I made up this AIM name, but it was sometime in the early 00s.

earthboundkidon After 28 years, SSLv2 is still not gone from the internet

I want my next username to be 1969-12-31:19:00.

earthboundkidon Why America doesn't build

The Atlantic was A/B testing headlines back in 2015 when I worked there. I don't know why they would have stopped. It's SOP at larger sites.

earthboundkidon Why America doesn't build

There's also the Grand Shrine of Ise which has been deliberately rebuilt every twenty years for the last thousand plus years. Constantly rebuilding it was the only way to ensure that there is always a crew who knows how to rebuild it.