jonsterling

My belief (which you are free to disagree with!) is that the nature of Yarvin's public statements disqualifies him from acting in good faith with the broader community, at least until he has withdrawn them. I feel that each person is a whole human being, and I do not believe that someone can just leave something like "Blacks are suited to slavery, Europeans to mastery!" at the door. Even if he could, it wouldn't do anything for our speakers and attendees who are not comfortable sharing a stage or a room with him. My job as an event organizer is to make sure that conditions are comfortable for the people who have entrusted me with their safety. I did my best, but to be honest, every possible choice before me was distasteful, and I chose the least odious path I could.

I decline to answer your questions about hypotheticals (a black person who says the same thing, or a hypothetical VC firm, etc.). I believe these are interesting questions, but I do not believe that anyone can come up with a set of rules or laws that captures precisely the outcomes we wish to see; as a result, I retreat to a far less ambitious perspective, where I intend to deal with things like this on a case-by-case basis using empathy and common sense, taking the unique circumstances into account.

I hope that this helps, and I recognize that you may not agree with the choice that I made. But I did my best.

Great summary, thanks!

One clarification—we called it PrlConf intending to talk about proof assistants, but as our program came together, it turned out that most of the talks were about category theory, type theory and denotational semantics. I think these things are even more interesting than proof assistants!

I hope that we can find a way to put it back on somehow.

LambdaConf is the host conference, and PrlConf is a collocated workshop. My boss and friend John De Goes initially suggested that I put on this workshop at LambdaConf.

Indeed. that css is leftover from a previous version of the page. You can view the history of that page here: https://github.com/jonsterling/JonPRL/commits/gh-pages/prlco...

Curtis Yarvin still believes what he said years ago; he has written as much today on Reddit. I would not have made the decision I did if he had renounced his prior views. Lord knows, I had very regressive political views once upon a time, though never as horrid as his.

Correct; we are typically given funding to attend though. (Travel & hotel expenses, free ticket to the conference.)

Sorry about that. This note replaced our "call for proposals", which had much more formatting. Also, I'm a shite web developer, so there's that.

Welcome to 1972, actually! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_for_Computable_Functions

That's what you say, but the argument is circular. Not saying you're wrong---but you're not obviously right.

Um, ok, but I didn't confuse what I thought with what others thought when I was 3.

Unless you are a Russian / Markovian constructivist!

We are implementing the Red JonPRL proof assistant (https://github.com/JonPRL/sml-red-jonprl) in SML (using MLton for builds and SML/NJ for development), and could hardly be happier.

Dealing with unicode is a pain, but so far, we've been able to do what we need.

How does he intend to use social engineering to gain access to a phone whose owners are dead?

What a dystopian future where what you go to school to learn is decided by the industrial job market...

I hate programming, but I couldn't think of a better place to "sunset" my programming career! I'm really lucky to be working with such kind & talented people.

Hey there—I've done my best to be as honest and up-front about my experience with Parse. (I apologize if it has seemed overly harsh; but it ate its way into many different parts of my life and really made my year difficult.)

But I can't really go into much detail about what we did at our company and why we did it, because when I left, I took a severance on certain terms. And in any case, it's not really appropriate to drudge up old arguments, and I have no interest in making comments that might make it more difficult for the people I worked with to do what they want to do now.

Haha, well funny you should mention it---management were also encouraging me to look into using firebase for something too, but I put the kibosh in it because we had had so much trouble with Parse. The truth is, we had no need for any of these products (even though I have heard firebase to be way better than parse); we needed to get serious and just write a little API server + postgres database and toss it on Heroku.

I don't think I'm allowed go go into details based on a contract that I signed, so I will just say "we should have got off it earlier".

Lol yep, it was horrible.

Exactly, exactly, exactly!

> We were also paying Parse an absurd amount of money for extra reliability, which didn't seem to help much.

We were also hooked into the same scam!

> For nearly any issue, a half-assed solution---often not usable in production---by one of their staff was buried deep into their forums. Super painful.

Haha, well put. They always directed people to their pathetic "support forum", where one of their staff would propose a criminally bad "solution" to a problem, which no self-respecting engineer could even sanction putting into production.

I really felt like I was being gaslighted, being surrounded by all these YC alum douchebags who never fail to have some gushing remark about it...

Thanks for your comment; regarding your thought, from my perspective there was nothing that Parse provided that was easier than just building the app on Heroku ourselves. And we wouldn't have been stuck in the horrible node/javascript ecosystem then!

So, I would say, if Parse had been this Parse Server product from the start, that would have been a lot better! But there wasn't really any need for such a thing at my company. We had to use Parse for incestuous "YC alum" reasons---we did not have a technical need for it.

We used Parse, and (contrary to your suggestion) it helped us get to market much slower and much more expensively. We experienced a hilarious amount of downtime, and hundreds of engineering hours that could have been spent developing features for our users or improving our services were spent working around fatal bugs in Parse, which were usually not manifesting on all instances, which made it very difficult for the Parse team to diagnose them.

Fixes for Parse bugs were usually not forthcoming from the Parse team---and when things were fixed, more often than not the fix was reverted within a week because it caused something even worse.

For the first six months of our time using them, Parse would only report downtime post facto and backdated by a day. “F@#$k Parse” was perhaps the most frequently uttered phrase among all of us in our douchebag Mission district headquarters. What a life.

All the time, push notifications inexplicably stopped working for hours at a time---we were running a daily sales app, and this really killed us. It ruined dozens of auctions and pissed off tons of our users. But what's even worse? Parse made my life a living hell for a year, and I'm glad they're gone.

Totally agree. We need to bring Industry to heel.

Ah, OK. It's been a few years since I've worked in the sort of place where anybody would need to be "stern" to anyone, but I can remember it! thanks for the clarification.

Why would you want to work with someone who is "fierce and mean"? Sounds totally unprofessional.

"well-roundedness" includes all sorts of stuff, like sports (especially WASP-y sports, like things involving boats) as well as volunteering and voluntourism.

same...

Awesome, thanks! I just upgraded and it works great.

Oh, interesting... I just looked for it, and I found that there are patched versions of iTerm that are borderless; is there actually a way to configure standard iTerm in this way? that'd be great.