puffoflogic

And if in the meantime they turn their supporters against the rule of law, why, that's just a bonus to them!

> It is commonly stated that freedom of speech doesn’t equal freedom from consequences,

Like many commonly stated things, this is completely wrong. Freedom from consequences is the only possible thing that "freedom of speech" could mean. Essentially every living person has some way of communicating and so if freedom of speech weren't freedom from consequences, then every living person has freedom of speech definitionally. "Freedom of speech" wouldn't mean anything then. Persons living under the most oppressive regime would, by this flawed definition, have perfect freedom of speech.

The common but wrong idea stems from fundamentally confusing "freedom of speech" and "the first amendment to the United States Constitution". What it's attempting to say is that the 1A doesn't guarantee that purely private actors can't find a way to penalize you for your speech. However, what it gets wrong is that such penalties would still be an abrogation of freedom of speech, but a kind of freedom of speech which isn't protected by 1A. Just because that kind of freedom of speech [against private actors] isn't guaranteed by 1A, doesn't mean it's not valuable. Many of us believe this kind of freedom of speech is also valuable.

It's only an invalid patent if you manage to get review before SCOTUS. Otherwise your road ends at the federal circuit which has yet to meet a patent it doesn't like.

As long as Kant's would-be defenders defend counterfactual positions only, then I suppose there's no reason the debate would ever end.

> If you're born tabula rasa

There's lots of evidence that just isn't so. If nothing else, we appear to be equipped with minds which are better suited than random chance to build a "meaningful" model of the world around us.

We'll be stuck with UTF-16 as long as we have Unicode, it would seem. The character set itself has to have a hole in the middle of it for the sole purpose of working around UTF-16 limitations.

Except, as you'll find people in these very comments arguing, if you don't implement utf16 anyways then you're not a compliant LSP.

Don't forget that utf16/UCS2 is Embrance, Extend, Extinguish at its finest. Literally the whole point of utf16 - not necessarily the explicit one, but the point behind the motivations people had for choosing what they chose - was incompatibility with other software supporting unicode back in the day.

It is, but the media will never cover it so you won't hear about it.

Okay, but what other social justice goals are the math teachers achieving? That's far more important than preparing students for success and advancement. If the teacher is using all the right pronouns and engaging in active gender justice, that's what matters.

Notice that we have zero evidence that the recent objects were Chinese in origin except the admin has said so. And we know they never lie about anything.

Admiral Cloudberg et al. have spoiled me; this info is boring without analysis.

When discussing the fossil record it's astonishing that no one ever mentions the possibility that an advanced species would intentionally remove all geological and archaeological traces of its existence. Why would they do that, you ask? Well, quite possibly for similar reasons homo sapiens is currently doing the same thing! The environmentalist ideology holds that we must return the planet to a pre-industrial state, as much as possible, and to leave as few non-degradable artifacts as possible. The movement would achieve success precisely when there is no evidence left that humans ever existed.

Ah, but you see, if this theory were right, then the US government would in effect be pushing a certain religion as a state religion and banning competing religions. And that certainly can't be right, because look, no one is even filing 1A lawsuits on this theory. So your theory must be wrong, QED.

Isn't it obvious? Legalize MAPs.

> All these phony paper entities that you can "move" your stuff into in order to pretend to the government that it's not yours anymore

You make it sound like this was something invented by tax -dodging capitalists getting one over on the government. But in reality the only reason paper entities exist at all is because government wills it so.

Even this is unnecessary. I'd say 99% of people using PCRE-like regexes have never read the documentation and realized `(?x)` exists.

We can write the regex like this, including all whitespace:

    (?x)
    ^\w+            # mandatory leading letters
    ( [-+.'] \w+ )* # optional suffix
    @
    \w+             # domain
    ( [-.] \w+ )*   # domain suffix
    ( \.\w+ ( [-.] \w+ )* )* #tld
    $

Also, btw, I hope no one is really using this regex. It's wrong; for example it appears to be deliberately designed to fail on IDNs.

Now you're getting it.

This is completely irrelevant.

It means I don't need to know what a monad does before I can begin to characterize what it means to, say, traverse a data structure with that monad. Then once I do know what a monad does, the problem of figuring out what it means to traverse a data structure - or do any other operation generic over monads - becomes compositional: the combined knowledge is not more than the sum of its parts.

For example, let's take the Maybe monad and tree traversals. (a) Tree traversals take monadic actions at each node of a tree, nest/sequence them in a certain way, and apply the monad's rules for how to flatten that nesting, with the output being the whole tree with the same structure. (b) The maybe monad is the environment where we can give up on a computation. Now what does it mean to do a tree traversal in the Maybe monad? I don't need to do any additional reasoning, I can simply merge the definitios: "(a) it does some computation at each node and produces a same-shaped tree, (b) unless some computation gives up then the whole thing gives up". There is no novel or sui generis interaction possible between (a) and (b). So reasoning about the program is easier.

Or, for Applicatives: what does it mean to apply a (Nondeterminism (A -> B)) to a (Nondeterminism A)? Well, I don't need to worry about "function in Nondeterminism monad" being some spooky new entity I need to learn or memorize: because I can reason generally about applicatives, I know that the exact same sequencing effect must be used as when I apply a 2-ary pure function to two effectful values. And I know what that is for Nondeterminism: do each possible thing in parallel.

I hope that makes sense, although I think only experience can truly motivate monads. It seems like a bunch of abstract woo because the whole point of monads is to become blasé about monads. When confronted with some bizarre monad, one can shrug and say, "Whatever, it's just a monad, nothing new to see here."

"Value in a box" remains a misleading and unmotivating visualization/example of functors. The train visualization for lists is particularly egregious[1].

Parsers and delimited continuations[0] are monads, and there is manifestly no value there in some terms.

Monads allow us to reason about a computational environment "from the outside", as opposed to "from the inside"; functors and applicatives are restricted forms of the same thing. Functors allows us to reason about values in the computational environment. Pointed functors allow us to reason about pure values embedded in the computational environment, which we are going to demand remain unaffected by other operations. Applicatives allow us to reason about partially applied functions, or suspended computations (as opposed to mere values). Monads allow us to reason about nested computations (or sequenced, precisely in the sense that `a(b(c))` is both nested and sequenced).

My favorite monad: classical logic is just a monad in constructive/intuitionistic logic. That exemplifies the concept of computational environment, not burritos. It also shows that "there is no value in the box, only an opaque box and our imagination" can literally be the defining characteristic of a monad!

[0] For certain systems of continuation primitives.

[1] The "list monad" used in Haskell and elsewhere is actually the nondeterminism monad plus a bit of ordering on the side; the train visualization captures the less important of those two aspects. The nondeterminism monad can be extended to the discrete probability monad; that seems far more interesting.

> Leaving aside the impossibility of comparing one person's burnout to another's

Imagine using this to dismiss the lived experience of, say, a PoC, and not getting instantly banned. But say it about autistic people and you will be lauded. This is the world we live in.

People are enabling serde codegen on every type, for no reason. That's it, that's the whole story. Those of us who don't do this will continue to read these "rustc is slow!!1!" posts and roll our eyes. Rustc isn't slow, serde is slow.

You know what is commonly specified with abstract machine semantics now?

Assembly language. See e.g. the ARMv8 Architecture Reference Manuals, where code for an abstract machine is listed right there in every single instruction listing, and a great deal of appendix space is devoted to providing a library of helper routines for this machine, and also specifying things like the virtual memory system using the AM.

C programmers who think abstract machine semantics are bad are completely out of touch with reality. I put them in the same bucket as people who think all CPUs are 32-bit x86. They in turn are like the devs who maintain old COBOL systems, except less useful because backward compat and huge emulation advances have made it unnecessary to actually run such 32-bit x86 configurations, unlike the COBOL case.

> Why do we not see any of those reports.

Because the bad cop goes to jail and now he's no longer in the department, so the department falls out of the news cycle. I'm not sure what else you'd expect...

Here's a possible example of a couple bad cops in what could be a good department: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/offi...

The history of the c specification is irrelevant to the question of the abstract machine. Other languages developed this way are rust, scheme, and... yep, pretty much every single other language spec in existence.

Food is regularly irradiated to make it safe.

You are regularly irradiated at the dentist, the hospital, in a plane, and in the produce aisle.

You have no idea what you're talking about, and you are the problem.

> spreading radiation everywhere they go.

Radiation is not "spread" in the manner you are suggesting. The only affect on passers-by would be transient exposure - less than ideal, but not a fatal risk.

If the capsule were breached and radioactive material were spread, then that would be a disaster posing actual risk to the public at large.

Let's just wait and see whether (should I say, "when"?) LTL mysteriously breaches the terms of, or simply renegotiates, that very funding agreement. Not until after appeals options are exhausted, of course, but soon thereafter.

Under this abuse of terminology, a pocket calculator is capable of becoming a package/dependency manager. Or any other technology which conceivably could be put to work toward the package management problem, but has not yet been adapted to that need. I concede that these statements are "true", but they fail the relevancy test of communication.

Nix is not capable of becoming a first class dependency manager because it does not manage dependencies. It does not attempt any version or feature resolution. Besides, saying Nix could become a package manager is like saying that C could become a package manager.

Anything at all which inhibits the virus's spread will do this. That is extremely basic evolutionary theory.

Speaking of theories, I have a theory that most people don't actually believe that evolution is real, because they question basic results like this. The only reason they profess to believe that evolution is real is because that is the only socially acceptable option.