ecjhdnc2025

People who oppose taking down the statue for other reasons who were in a procession shouting "you! will not! replace us!" and "jews! will not! replace us!" which are obvious "great replacement theory" tropes associated with the very white nationalists and neo-nazis who organised the rally, probably don't get to fall back on those "other reasons" without cause.

Trump was trying to equivocate, to offer support in principle, even though every single one of the people in that rally was actually in the class of people who he was supposedly condemning, and he knew it.

Quite aside from the fact that there is no ethical reason to oppose taking down confederate statues that were erected for explicitly white nationalist reasons:

https://www.npr.org/2017/08/20/544266880/confederate-statues...

The strong presumption with the use of parliamentary privilege is that one's career is curtailed in one way or another if it is invoked to tell an untruth.

You are right that this suggestion is in opposition to that, in some ways, but it's also worth noting that the way not to be prosecuted is to continue with the strong presumption that lying to parliament is bad.

In practice this law would be more about official communications aimed at the press, where in the recent election we have seen the former government side engage in some pretty egregious lying without consequence, including misusing the work of non-partisan civil service functions.

"Bipartisan penchant for lies" is an absurd oversimplification of two very different debate performances, and any sane person knows it.

> No, it has to be interpreted in terms of what he said. He was explicit about what he said: “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally.” Nobody operating in good faith could interpret that as ambiguous.

The thing is: that left nobody. It was a white nationalist parade. He was absolutely, deliberately, trying to equivocate his condemnation, so as not to upset his base.

The confederate statues are also unambiguously white nationalist monuments. That's why they were all put up, so many years after the fact. There's no simple "pride in loss" motive: it was deliberate, planned white racist powerplay signalling to litter the South with confederate memorials, and that is pretty well-documented.

No president of the whole USA should be defending that.

I don't think anyone should trust anyone claiming to be a single source of truth. But that isn't what this legislation is about.

It does, unfortunately, go along with other problems we must solve, such as encouraging people to rebuild trust in media organisations, and encouraging media organisations to earn that trust.

How about that they were in a procession with flaming torches (nice-smelling though they might have been) behind people shouting nationalist, anti-semitic slogans?

One way not to associate with that would be to walk away from it, rather than join in.

That is not a lie -- it is a substantial truth.

The idea that there were fine people "on both sides" has to be interpreted in terms of who the two sides were.

One side was made up entirely of white supremacists and white nationalists. That was the reason they were there -- it was also, one imagines, why they were all happy marching behind people shouting "Jews will not replace us":

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/16/charlottesvi...

The only reason to say "on both sides" -- and he stressed "on both sides" -- was to create an equivalence between those sides. When there is no equivalence. One side was an organised white nationalist anti-semitic, racist protest, and the other side was a pretty disorganised bunch of people who think things like that are unamerican.

He had one job, to condemn the Unite The Right protest, and he chose words that made it explicitly clear he did not.

Exactly right. Depressing to see the default assumption here, as usual.

Strategic truth is the status quo in UK politics: it is easy to interrogate, it is expected to answer questions, and the media is used to both spotting it and interogating it.

Bad faith flat out liars do not respond to interrogation, because they do not feel the need to.

It's not that difficult to imagine a set of steps that return us to the pre-social-media days where politicians were expected to colour only within the lines, as a matter of ethics and principle.

And it would be better, not worse, than the kinds of lies that risk our democracies now.

Ahh, here they are: the default HN assumptions that foreign democracies are constructed from people who are either naïve, censorious or abusive, and incapable of nuance or restraint.

Lying in politics, in certain contexts, is already punishable: lying to parliaments has consequences the world over. Lying to Congress, lying to a British parliamentary committee, ministerial ethics codes that punish misleading parliament, lying to the Australian parliament, it's all punishable in various ways.

The big question to answer is this: why should a politician be able to tell a demonstrable lie using their official communications, without consequence? Their official social media presence, their official political status twitter feed.

Why should politicians not be expected to colour only within the lines, like we used to expect them to do in the era before social media?

What, exactly, is the problem with punishing a flat out, demonstrable lie by a politician? Why do people not imagine that a bipartisan/multipartite commission or an ombudsman can't manage that, when we have effective ombudsmen in the UK that ensure basic truth (that is, not flat out lies or misleading claims) in advertising, truth in financial services claims, laws that prevent lying about curing cancer etc.?

Why does everyone -- particularly US HNers -- have to assume measures like this are intrinsically fascist? Just because your own politics is infected with the spiritual offspring of Lee Atwater and Charles Coughlin doesn't mean we have to accept that same downward spiral in our own.

People in the UK believe politicians should want to be held to a higher standard, and we'd like them to try to get back to how they behaved before foreign social media platforms enabled them to lie at scale like drunken sailors with impunity.

I know we're supposed to ascribe the most benevolent motive to a comment.

So the above is both rather absurd and also rather patronising.

Hamilton.

Da da da da-da, da-da-da-da daayyy-ya-da, da-da da da da-dayyy-ya da

Most "bioplastics" like PLA want 60C or so; this is achievable in industrial composting (it's actually achievable in normal composting if you find an expert) but the process of getting and keeping the bioreactor to that temperature is slow. We'd need a lot of these things, so I hope society starts to build them.

But the more I experiment with 3D printing, the more obvious it is that the problems include:

- separating this stuff out in the first place so that you know what can be composted

- parts fixed with non-biodegradable glues

- dyes, pigments, plasticisers that aren't biodegradable either

- difficulty reusing manufacturing waste

Industrial 3D printing is going to be a bigger and bigger part of our plastics use over time, because it enables products to be iterated long before you reach the kind of economy of scale that supports injection moulding. This also cuts down on waste; shocking amounts of plastic goes directly to landfill because of high-scale unsold inventory.

So a significant development would be actually improving the chances of reusing waste. But it's only a small part of that problem.

Salaried !== full-time.

Millions of people in the UK are legally salaried workers on "zero-hours" contracts, where they aren't even guaranteed a minimum number of hours. Paid through PAYE (payroll), have workers rights, just not a guaranteed number of hours.

Most can choose when they work, many have more than one of these jobs.

It's not a good way to live but it's at least possibly a better way to live than the gig economy.

> My point is this: if I tell you to close your eyes and form the image of a teacup in your mind, images certainly have colour and shape, so either your image does too, or you don't have an image. It's really just down to a differing definition of image.

Not really. I mean, I have some aphantasia-type aspects with faces. But my mind's eye is quite amenable to the semi-lucid mental image of a cup that doesn't have colour until I ask myself what colour it has, doesn't have fine shape details until I consider them.

After all, not all of our eye even sees in colour! Part of our visual apparatus only provides black and white imagery to our brain. So there's plenty of colourless imagery within our cognition.

One of the most challenging things I find in life is explaining to a non-programmer how I visualise code. Because I don't really know how I do it; it is simultaneously grammatical and architectural, and a lot of the processes that guide me are really emotional or almost visceral. Code sometimes does not feel right.

> If someone gets a major haircut or changes their hair color, they might as well be a different person to my brain, initially.

That is true aphantasia.

I don't have this aspect of the problem -- indeed, I often have the weird super-recogniser problem of correctly identifying that I have seen someone unknown to me before, and where. I might be able to even describe the clothes they were wearing that last time or something they were holding or doing.

But I would struggle to describe their face to someone else.

It might be that what I am describing falls short of aphantasia (though my difficulties recalling motionless faces do suggest it).

I sometimes wonder if what it actually is, is a kind of fundamentally unexplored thought or experience.

There's a bunch of other examples.

Like... I can't _really_ tell my left from my right on an instinctive level, though I believe this to be inherited because I have relatives who can't.

Ask me directions in a hurry and I'll get them wrong even when I am sure they are right. I don't really have a "left" and a "right"; I have two sides that don't feel that different.

So I also can't really use mirrors well.

I have surprisingly quick and accurate reflexes for catching falling things but I can't catch a ball thrown to me.

The question about all of these things is: are they just things I have never found the right way to deliberately work through into a conscious process? Are they things I can't do now because I didn't learn when my brain was fresh?

> But not a specific teacup

Right, isn't that weird though! :-)

> If you ask someone to actually imagine seeing a teacup but what they're imagining doesn't have a colour or size, _what are they imagining_?

The pure, abstract essence of teacup, to them.

I suppose I assume it does have size and shape (it's functionally an imaginary cup, after all, and not another imaginary object).

Maybe to someone who has only ever seen blue teacups, it's inherently blue?

For me, if I start that exercise it's not even white; its colour is undefined until I interrogate the idea it should have colour.

Or until whichever hilarious infant I am having an imaginary tea party with tells me what colour it is, of course.

The weird thing obviously is that next to nobody with a mind's eye is actually seeing the cow.

A tiny tiny fraction of people talk about their mind's eye being part of their visual field, to the point that they can sort of functionally see -- hallucinate -- an imaginary object on a table like AR.

Another small number of people talk about imagining complete objects out of nowhere that they then have to analyse to describe; the imaginary thing has complete shape before its shape is described.

Most children can sort of whimsically play the imaginary-drinking tea game, imagining the shape of the teacups, imagining spilling tea or milk, but the mental images might not have attributes like colour or weight until they are specifically assigned to the visualisation. Like: what colour are the teacups? They don't have colour until you pick one, and then they do. Is it a heavy cup? It's not, but I do have a saucer. The more you add to the visualisation, the less translucent/ghostly/formless/conceptual it is.

The fascinating thing about broad aphantasia is that it appears to be way beyond even that; it's like things only happen conceptually, yet they still happen. Like the sibling comment from andrewflnr perceptively said: as if it's a conceptual blind-sight.

And when you consider our evolutionary pathway, perhaps it actually is the same phenomenon: a part of the brain successfully doing part of the task, without the support of the visualiser.

There is a Chinese fork of OCC -- I'm away from the computer where it is bookmarked but I think it's called OpenGeometry? No idea if they are really making headway.

> I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it).

Right. This is enormously challenging in itself. And I think because nobody talks about it, it's possible, or maybe the default, to assume that you're simply broken in an obvious, universal way, and not that there might be variation or even routes to change your outcomes with metacognition or thought experiments.

What often comes up is stuff like "oh I thought 'the mind's eye' was just a figure of speech, I had no idea people meant it in a meaningful sense"

OK so -- on this score. I have, I believe, a kind of partial aphantasia. Though maybe it's normal and people just don't really see the distinction?

I used to think -- until maybe ten years ago -- that I could not imagine the faces of friends and loved ones.

That is, if I try to visualise a person's face, I get an incomplete glimpse in my mind that dissolves away within an instant.

(People in my dreams do not really have detailed faces, if I can ever really look at their faces at all; it's like I don't make eye contact. Though they are not face-less horrors.)

This has been distressing, particularly when my mum died.

But then I discovered two really interesting things:

1) I can sometimes imagine a "still" face if I visualise a photograph of that person (maybe only slightly more if I took it)

2) I can bring someone's face to mind much more successfully if I associate it with an emotion or an action, and once I've done that, as long as I keep them in motion I can visualise a lot more for longer.

A quarter of a century after she died, if I want to remember my mum, it's a real challenge. She hated being in photos so there aren't many. But it's possible to start by imagining her angry (sorry mum) or the annoyed look on her face when she was trying to solve a puzzle game on the computer. Then I might be able to keep her face in my mind for long enough.

My dad passed away a couple of years back and for this loss I was ready; I have some photos, but more importantly I had spent the previous years learning his face experiencing different emotions. My favourite route to imagining my Dad's face is to imagine a situation where he might show puzzled, half-smiling amusement or fascination when presented with something he didn't understand or didn't work quite the way he expected. I will be able to recall his face in motion, just as my face starts to leak around the eye sockets :-/

So on the one hand: even now I can't visualise still faces at all! I struggle to describe faces of people I don't really know well. As soon as a face is still, it goes.

On the other hand, I have taught myself a visualisation process that can conjure up meaningful animated recollections that are filled with emotion. I have to do it deliberately, but it's lovely to do.

One final quirk: despite all this, I appear to potentially be a super-recogniser. I can't visualise a still face, but I do not "forget a face"; I can tell you with eerie accuracy whether I've seen someone before and where. And I do rather well with the "which of these faces did you see in this clip" type test, and very well at the tests like "which of these faces is this face from another angle".

The question about visualising three dimensional objects is fascinating to me. Because my answer has changed radically in the last five or so years, and I'm not a young person!

I used to consider myself 3D-impaired -- unable to maintain and rotate a 3D image in my head, which also made 3D software frustrating. (I also have, it turns out, some binocular vision issues and some other mild cognition weirdness).

But a few years back I started on a hobby project, and I started to assemble my own DIY kit (because the commercial stuff is too expensive). To do that I had a lot of mental puzzles to try to solve.

Then I decided the best way forward was a 3D printer so I tried to find 3D tools that would work for me on even a basic level -- OpenSCAD, CadQuery, FreeCAD etc.; as many different ways to approach the problem as would shed light on ways to think about it.

I'm no longer really an OpenSCAD person but once my first successful models came out of my printer, my brain was changed forever, and now I visualise mechanisms in my head.

(One of the most powerful things I have learned about how to imagine any man-made, real world object, is to imagine the tools making it.)

I don't know a thing about LangChain so this is a real digression, but I often wonder if people who are critiquing GraphQL do so from the position of only having written GraphQL resolvers by hand.

If so, it would make sense. Because that's not a whole lot of fun. But a GraphQL server-side that is based around the GraphQL Schema Language is another matter entirely.

I've written several applications that started out as proofs of concept and have evolved into production platforms based on this pairing:

https://lighthouse-php.com https://lighthouse-php-auth.com

It is staggeringly productive, replaces lots of code generation in model queries and authentication, interacts pretty cleanly with ORM objects, and because it's part of the Laravel request cycle is still amenable to various techniques to e.g. whitelist, rate-limit or complexity-limit queries on production machines.

I have written resolvers (for non-database types) and I don't personally use the automatic mutations; it's better to write those by hand (and no different, really, to writing a POST handler).

The rest is an enormous amount of code-not-written, described in a set of files that look much like documentation and can be commented as such.

One might well not want to use it on heavily-used sites, but for intranet-type knowledgebase/admin interfaces that are an evolving proposition, it's super-valuable, particularly paired with something like Nuxt. Also pretty useful for wiring up federated websites, and it presents an extremely rapid way to develop an interface that can be used for pretty arbitrary static content generation.

> Buddy, when two people are having sex in a movie, it's a "sex scene", however you choose to explain the nuance.

I'm not your buddy and I'm trying to draw what I think is a pretty important creative, cultural, artistic distinction. But if you don't see it, that's fine.

> What makes it "misogynistic"?

Have you ever considered how the balance of male and female nudity works in Hollywood? Who is always the most exposed?

As a result it's very nearly intrinsically misogynistic to suggest two actors really had heterosexual sex on a film set. The portrayal and the balance of power makes that clear.

(I mean consider how the distinction works if it is two men or two women... how do you decide what is portrayal and what is sex?)

> Also known as a "sex scene." And at a full five minutes, it's a rather long scene :-)

It has almost nothing creatively in common with sex scenes in almost any other movie ever made, which are usually (lazily, and often misogynistically) used to cheaply bond the damsel to the hero.

It's not a sex scene; it is fully and completely a love scene.

I can think of so few like it.

> It's also one of the most notorious sex scenes in cinema from that era, with persistent rumors that Sutherland and Christie actually were doing the deed.

Persistent, infantile, somewhat misogynistic rumours.

> Be warned that there's a pretty extended sex scene, but otherwise just go in without expectations.

I want to push back slightly against the idea that's an "extended sex scene", or even that it's a "sex scene" at all.

It's one of the most beautiful sequences in all of cinema -- a grieving couple rediscovering intimacy and joy. The way it is intercut with them dressing, getting ready for dinner, the way you can see it brought happiness and affirmation and some sense that life is not over and love survived a terrible loss. It's central to the entire film: to why they are in Venice in the first place, to their commitment to each other, to their determined love for each other.

It will always be somewhat broken; bRep has its limits, and OCC certainly does. But it’s enormously capable and open source, and all we have.

The crashes, by and large, are freecad/qt rather than OCC.

FreeCAD 0.20.2 almost never crashes; I had maybe three in eight weeks of daily struggles with a complex design problem.