jim-jim-jim

Paris was the cultural shot in the arm I needed. All the stores in Australia only stock RBG biographies and diaspora navel-gazing with titles like "The Grapes My Mother Squeezed."

I don't know if it's on the map, but there was a little place in the 5th or 6th or so called "Autodidact" which had so many tomes of bizarre art that you'd never chance upon at a gallery here. I imagine the literature is similarly adventurous, but I don't parler the language it's printed in.

Damn, I was expecting the "drought" to carry on indefinitely due to how strict ratings have become. As the article alludes to, a storm has to get lucky and hit something sturdy to prove its strength and get top marks. There have likely been tornadoes of similar intensities between 2013 and now: El Reno, Vilonia, Mayfield, Rolling Fork, etc, but American houses just aren't built well enough to reliably signal EF5 strength winds when they are annihilated by storms like these. Even an utter nightmare like Joplin only got the rating it did because of the town's hospital was hit.

The classic ideal of terrorism—an underground cell engaged in asymmetric warfare for concrete political gains—hasn't existed since what, the IRA?

All "terrorism" in the US occurs with varying degrees of foreknowledge and encouragement from its own intelligence community. That's not to say that everything is an "inside job" as much as a strange fungal ecosystem with overlapping responsibilities and incentives has bloomed that no one actor can possibly hope to contain. OKC was probably the system at its most chaotic, while post-9/11 they've seemed to stabilize things into a "groom a loner, catch, repeat" cycle with a few oopsie shooties here and there.

While it doesn't have the best track record preventing civilian deaths, this approach has arguably been very successful at redirecting all the energy that could go into coherent resistance towards nihilistic slaughter. As I alluded to in a recent post, there's no way that a platform like Discord isn't riddled with feds egging some of this shit on.

The bro science I've heard around this is that emulsifiers and fake sugars aren't easily digested, and therefore sit around in the GI tract as fuel for pathogens.

My mind was kinda blown recently when I couldn't find a single ice cream brand that didn't have some form of nasty thickener. It's insidious.

Conversely, I'd imagine that conservatives are more likely to "experience a crisis of faith" than their counterparts. And remote jungle tribes are more likely to be hexed by a witch doctor than either cohort. You have to buy into the system for it to affect you.

I'd like to engage more directly with the body of this piece, but since it's paid, I have to extrapolate from the headline. Sorry.

It's 100% a problem of dynamic range for me. I dunno how 128 channel cinematic spectaculars are mixed down to stereo, but I wouldn't mind a little compression. Can home releases offer an alternative "pleb mix" or something?

How is Discord simultaneously a "centralized privacy nightmare" but also the platform of choice for every pedo and terrorist? Couldn't you just sweep 90% of them up with a little SQL querying?

At this point one has to consider if there's an interest in keeping these groups festering, a la Gladio, PATCON, etc.

A late reply, but thanks for sharing this. The names in the table of contents alone suggest that I'm in for a good read.

The donation I sent Ron Paul in 2008 has wound up being the most expensive $10 I've ever spent.

I am not particularly fond of jazz myself. I've logged way more plays of Incapacitants than Mr. Coltrane, but his name seems to come up every time I study harmony. These alternative systems have been a creative boon for me, regardless of the genre I'm songwriting for.

Also if you appreciate "honest racket" you may enjoy Peter Brötzmann.

I could hardly believe it, but I've witnessed multiple men trying to navigate the mean streets over there in Hummer H2s. They were all driven by the Japanese equivalent of "Deano" if that makes any sense: young, hair immaculately coiffed and dyed orange, brash and oblivious. We like to view Japan through the lens of tidy urban utopianism, but this guy seems to exist in every culture.

Is that true? It seems like this was more of a complete non-issue in the last election, suddenly implemented once Labor secured power again. I'm not saying your hypothetical popular support is unrealistic, but I don't think anybody actively voted for this.

Living in Australia has been eye opening. I naïvely assumed that mandatory, ranked-choice voting would draw a direct line from popular sentiment to legislative outcome, but that's anything but the case.

My wife suggested we go to a Latin mass in Paris, and we (in our 30s) were some of the oldest congregants there. Everyone was oddly handsome and there was lots of Barbour. The vibe was unfriendly on the whole; they knew we didn't belong and wanted us to know. Even the homily was markedly martial, with references to historical victories over Islam. I know France has its problems, but it still seemed like such a strange thing for the kids to be into.

Looks like the coolest KDE setup of 2005.

I'm under the impression that women's only spaces are very much frowned upon in the English speaking world, whether it be in sports, book awards, knitting circles, toilets, or prisons.

This isn't an x-has-it-worse comment by the way. I think every demographic is entitled to self-segregate without shame, and the ladies definitely face their own struggles in achieving this.

Total fucking cunts. With any luck their proclivity for overly tight suits will prevent them from reproducing.

Thanks for this, a few Qs though

1. How does this compare to the MUNGG stack?

2. When can we expect compatibility with Curlew templates?

3. I get cryptic build errors when I add Seieki.js as a dependency. Has anybody else experienced this?

I don't know what you're writing, but this sounds like language smell. If you can represent errors as data instead of exceptions (Either, Result, etc) then it is easy to see what went wrong, and offer fallback states in response to errors.

Programming should be focused on the happy path. Much of the syntax in primitive languages concerning exceptions and other early returns is pure noise.

> I would think that, if AI-generated content is inferior, these games will fail in the marketplace.

You'd hope so, but I'm not so sure. Media developments are not merely additive, at least with bean counters in charge. Certain formats absolutely eclipse others. It's increasingly hard to watch mainstream films with practical effects or animal actors. Even though most audiences would vastly prefer the real deal, they just put up with it.

It's easy to envision a similar future where the budget for art simply isn't there in most offerings, and we're left praising mediocre holdout auteurs for their simple adherence to traditional form (not naming names here).

Like other bad ideas (TDD) it seemed to rise to prominence during the heydey of Ruby and untyped JS, when it was so much easier to fuck everything up. I think lots of managers haven't written a line of code since then and still hold such a cargo cult mentality about prescribing it.

It does a massive disservice to everybody involved, especially juniors who are never given the chance to prove themselves.

Sorry, but I don't buy it. It's not like we're milking a secret golden algorithm. If all my company's code were open sourced tomorrow, I don't think a competitor could do much with it, since they'd just be presented with bog standard CRUD. It's still relationships and sweat that's keeping the lights on for the time being.

My income is tied to the labor time I exert in creating/supporting services. I don't sit back and collect royalties on the code itself. Software is one of the first fields where the fundamental worthlessness of content revealed itself, hence FOSS.

When you watch a musical performance, you are also paying for labor. Even when you buy a physical art object, all the costs involved decompose back to labor. When you have a digital copy of something, there is no labor input to its creation, so guess what the inherent value is.

Animators drew actual cels. Theater workers clocked in and screened the films. The guys at the DVD factory pressed the discs. We paid for all of this already. It's double-billing to charge for copypasting the mere likeness of something. Nobody's doing any work for that.

If I paint a picture on a physical canvas, I can charge people to come into my house and take a look. If I bring the canvas to a park, I'm not entitled to say "s-stop looking at my painting guys!"

If you're worried about your work being infinitely reproduced, you probably shouldn't work in an infinitely-reproducible medium. Digitized content is inherently worthless, and I mean that in a non-derisive way. The sooner we realize this, the richer culture will be.

Really all content is worthless. Historically, we've always paid for the transmission medium (tape, CD) and confused it for the cost of art itself.

The author is correct in many ways. Publishing seems like a textbook example of "the longhouse." But even if his ideal author wrote his ideal novel, would any of his peers read it? Almost every educated, polite, and competent man in my life is a total philistine. He won't open a book unless there's a dragon on the cover or a colon in the title. It's definitely a chicken and egg problem.

The last time I worked alongside men (and women) who enjoyed nuanced literature was in a call center, which seemed to attract many fellow wordcels with minimal career prospects.

It's a gripe against booleans in general along with `if` in particular, so I'll refer to them interchangeably. Since you are a Rust programmer familiar with the benefits of `Option`, `Result`, and `?`, nothing I write will be that insightful.

The big one for me: boolean checks are forgetful. If you have a block of code behind validator logic, you've only proven a condition local to that branch, as opposed to encoding it into the type itself. You have to be careful about how you refactor trees of `if`/`else`, and may wind up performing redundant checks elsewhere in the code. With the `guard` examples you are carrying that proof outside the scope of the immediate function, and it's trivial to compose this further, or refactor to a different failure mode entirely.

More minor quibbles might be:

Pattern matching has completeness checks, while it's harder with `if`.

When your only tool is `if`, you wind up with nested and indented code that is more laborious to follow. Most "idiomatic" languages like Go/Python have zero respect for vertical real-estate. The hardest code to read is the one that doesn't fit on your screen.

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If the outermost layer of your program invokes the literal keyword `if`, I don't think it's a big deal, as long as you are parsing that condition into a more complex type, and not just relying on context/passing bools around everywhere.

This is imo one of the most underappreciated features of Haskell and its cousins: how it can contain booleans and banish `if` entirely. I've said it before, but future generations will scoff at our enthusiastic use of `if` in the same way we shame `goto` today.

Don't throw away your CDs yet. Vinyl has been so thoroughly funko-popped that kids can't afford it anymore. Every time I'm at a second hand shop, anyone under 25 is looking for CDs instead. Someone out there wants your Papa Roach albums.

If X is encroaching on Y and you're all the way over in Z, you're not defending yourself; you're deliberately getting getting involved in someone else's problem. Maybe the numbers are in your favor, or it's "the right thing to do," but Europeans have been using similar rationale to destroy their continent over and over again for centuries. I'm not judging at this point—it's probably just in your blood. The rest of the world just wants you to pay for it from here on out.

I think most Americans of various stripes would endorse this. Europe is more than welcome to saber-rattle on its own budget.

This thread is interesting; so many tools and libraries referenced that I am not familiar with at all. I think some of us are writing very different languages.

I've used Scala my entire career at multiple companies, and Typelevel has been the default at all of them. I'm not even entirely sure where Scala ends and Cats begins, so it's hard to identify what's "fancy", let alone justify it. I do like IO, and monad transformers. I think neither of those are native. Flat code tends to be maintainable.

From my perspective, fully baked frameworks and ORMs are what's "fancy" (a readability nightmare). I don't know if it's a cultural thing, but Scala codebases that go hard on FP tend not to introduce these, which I appreciate. Pick your poison I guess.