ubertaco

I think much of human history (not just recent US history, but that's a prominent example on folks' minds these days) proves that the biggest differentiator that the wealthy can buy is complete immunity from any sort of legal consequences.

Even if you don't already live in a high-corruption society, you can either spend some of your wealth introducing that corruption (which pays dividends), or you can just go somewhere else that's already high-corruption and bribe your way into immediate permanent residence.

Live in a democracy? Just buy public opinion by leveraging your wealth into a highly-profitable propaganda network, which will also give you an appealing platform for opportunist would-be government officials, who will then owe you, making your bribes cheaper. Maybe you can even just directly blackmail or entrap them along the way, so you don't even have to pay.

Live in an autocracy? Buy enough weaponry and PMCs to insulate yourself or even rival the government itself, or just buy the autocrat's favor directly.

Live in an oligarchy? Psh, your work is already done. Just use the system as it's designed: to be exploited by your vast wealth.

Worth noting that F# started out life as an implementation of OCaml for the .NET runtime [1], so most likely the pipe syntax was taken from there, although the pipeline-of-functions construction is much older than that [2]

[1] https://softwareengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/2099...

[2] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/17335/wha...

Basically the modern <blink> or <marquee> tag.

You probably have installed it from the Google Play store rather than from F-Droid, I'd bet.

I recently swapped from the F-Droid version of AntennaPod to the Google Play Store version so that I could use Chromecast, which they strip from their F-Droid builds because the underlying library isn't open-source and is deemed "impure" by F-Droid (it gets you a "This app has features you might not like" banner, when honestly it's a feature I specifically want).

A similar thing is true of Tempo (a Subsonic-client music player), where the F-Droid builds have Chromecast support stripped out, but the GitHub-published builds have it (so I also have to install Obtanium to get those updated).

"I want to listen to my audio on my devices in my house" is a weird thing to exclude in the name of open-source purity.

Otherwise, I love F-Droid. I just wish they had a bit more nuance to recognize that Chromecast support isn't the same as "constantly reports your location in the background to corporate servers", and so those shouldn't have the same severity of warning banners applied.

>But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.

This is an excellent rebuttal to the micro/macro distinction, because it's working in the correct direction, which you've stated well:

>to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.

Using the notion of "species" as a "ground truth", as though it were some biological law, is a self-defeating point precisely because the definition of "species" is "a somewhat-arbitrary taxonomy developed by people to try to group organisms together based on observed common traits."

That's not what falsifiable means. It's not experimentally verifiable. There is no way to conduct a test that would negate it if it were untrue.

It is why, being intellectually honest, the theory of evolution as the origin of species is called a "theory" in the academic sense: it's a proposed model that fits the data available on hand, but which has not been experimentally verified in its premise. Short of time-travel, I'm not sure how it can be experimentally verified.

"Falsifiable" means "I can construct an experiment that could yield an outcome that directly demonstrates this idea as false." This is sort of like the difficulty that exists with the four-color theorem [1]: yes, you can run a lot of examples using computer-assisted proof tech, but at best what that tells you is "we haven't found a counterexample yet."

Except, for non-falsifiable claims like the theory of evolution as the origin of species, there is no experiment you can run to provide a counterexample. The theory covers any possible counterexamples by simply saying "that form of life must have evolved from a different origin point and/or under different conditions (regardless of whether we can recreate those conditions)", and tucks any counterexample in neatly into itself without feeling threatened by falsifiability. It is "total" by having an "escape hatch" for any counterexamples.

That stacks it up alongside "a deity made everything, and designed an ordered universe with certain mechanics, including giving organisms the ability to adapt"; both are explanations that fit the available data, but neither can be experimentally verified. Similarly, that theory is "total" by having an escape hatch: "well, maybe the deity did something different in that case." Young-earth Creationists do this with visible starlight that is a million or more lightyears away: "maybe God just accelerated that starlight so that humans would have a pretty night sky."

That tendency is similar to "maybe the [hypothetical] organisms on Mars adapted from a different common ancestor that maybe was made of non-living substances that are similar to the non-living substances that comprised Earth's first organism." Boom, done, no need to re-examine the premise, you just fold it in with "maybe the same magic worked a little differently over there," just like saying "maybe God made starlight go faster in the direction of Earth."

As long as you don't engage in denial of the available data because of your theory, then I don't understand why holding a particular non-falsifiable theory is mandatory.

It doesn't matter if I hold to the theory that the universe began as an origin-less hypercompressed single point of matter suddenly and rapidly decompressing...if I'm in the lab next to you claiming that vaccines cause autism. The problem is not which non-verifiable theory I hold about an unrelated subject, but rather my denial of the available data on hand.

Similarly, it doesn't matter that Louis Pasteur was a Creationist when discussing the mechanisms he discovered by which vaccines work. What matters is his recognition of the reality of the data at hand, and his work to explore and build on it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem

>We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.

While this is a good and rational awareness of one's own capabilities, as someone who grew up in Bible-belt homeschooling circles and saw a wide variance in approaches and effectiveness, the "homeschool co-op"/"homeschool group" model where one parent teaches one subject to many kids, classroom-style, is super common. See, for example, "Classical Conversations" [1], a pretty common one in my area, that leans on "parent as classroom teacher to many kids", without much in the way of prerequisite qualifications.

[1] https://classicalconversations.com/

Congratulations to Louisiana on improving from 50th-ranked state in education to...50th-ranked state in education?

Pure economics and rational decision making are the exact reasons for engaging in regulatory capture, bribery, and oligarchy.

Why on earth would democracy (or any other form of shared power) be a rational choice for you, from an economic standpoint, if you already are wealthy enough to neuter it to the point where nearly all profits and decision-making authority are allocated to you?

Dictatorship is the ultimate in rational decision-making for a rational self-interested actor. Philanthropy and benevolence are not rational for the wealthy and powerful.

Income inequality and regulatory capture are features of the free market, not bugs. They are baked in by design.

Most countries in the world "patch" those bugs by regulation that moves them away from being pure "free market" economies. Antitrust regulation is a well-known example of this.

To play the devil's advocate here, as someone who grew up homeschooled and in a culture of "micro-scale evolution exists, but macro-scale evolution has not been demonstrated":

>Antibiotic resistance

...is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. Recognizing it does not require belief in a prehistoric common ancestor for all organisms; it just requires observing changes that happen on a much smaller and more rapid scale.

>Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.

This is non-falsifiable conjecture about a pre-historic past based on observation of present structures. It is equivalent to "we obviously know that dinosaurs did not have feathers, because their skeletons do not have feathers, and feathers would have made them more visible to predators, so they wouldn't have had feathers."

>Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance.

...which, again, is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. You can notice pesticide resistance occurring in pests and rotate your pesticides without having to sign on to the unverifiable claim that this happens because all life derives from a single organism.

>Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.

This is more non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture based on observation of current structures. Is it necessary to believe a particular set of conjectures about the origins of mammals' biological similarities in order to recognize the fact in front of you that the mammals are biologically similar, and thus some mechanisms of action may apply across species, provided those similarities are retained?

>Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.

...which, again, is non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture that has no bearing on recognizing the existence of the verifiable current-day reality in front of you: humans have back and knee pain. Is it necessary to accept a particular set of unprovable conjectures about the distant-past origins of this particular skeletal structure in order to make decisions about how best to treat a symptom that exists today resulting from the skeletal structure that you see immediately in front of you?

>Optimising for the majority over the minority is always good.

That's the literal opposite of capitalism.

Capitalism is optimizing for the minority (rich investors -- the "capital holders") over the majority (workers who have significantly less capital).

From the NYT article:

>Some have even suggested “y’all,” a word that reads as much too slangy, regional or what you might even call ethnic to ever gain universal acceptance.

Heaven forbid we embrace something that could be called "ethnic"! Something something must secure a future for our linguistic monoculture.

I wonder if this writer would've written the same thing, but with "bruh" or "fam" swapped in:

>Some have even suggested “bruh,” a word that reads as much too slangy, regional or what you might even call ethnic to ever gain universal acceptance.

Probably not, as that would've been immediately recognized as racist (because "bruh" is ethnic, despite its recent widespread adoption, in the sense that its roots are in black-culture slang – just like how "y'all" is ethnic, despite its recent widespread adoption, in the sense that its roots are in southern-culture slang).

I dunno why the NYT author feels the need to find ways to be linguistically xenophobic.

Seconded. In my entire North Carolina + Georgia upbringing, with frequent visits to Tennessee and back to NC, and some visits to South Carolina, Florida, and Alabama...never once have I heard y'all referring to a single person.

It's literally a contraction for "you all". That doesn't make sense for talking to one person.

Poetry, like humor, involves the use of the reader's expectations, but is typically most effective when subverting those expectations.

There's a lot of bad poetry in the world that just follows readers' expectations. I should know, I've written some of it. Unfortunately, I'd suspect that most readers' understanding of poetry lacks that crucial element of subversion, and so an LLM – which mostly just spits out the most-probable, most-expected next token – looks like what people think poetry is.

An LLM would not have created the curtal sonnet form, because it would've been too busy following the rules of a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. Similarly, an LLM wouldn't create something that intentionally breaks the pattern of a form in order to convey a sense of brokenness or out-of-place-ness, because it's too locked in on the most-common-denominator from previous inputs. And yet, many of the most powerful works I've read are the ones that can convey a disjointed feeling on purpose – something an LLM is specifically geared not to do.

Poetry aims for the heart, and catches the mind along the way. An LLM does not have the requisite complex emotional intelligence, and is indeed a pretty poor simulation of emotional intelligence.

Consider Auden's Epitaph on a Tyrant, which is powerful because it is so suddenly shocking, as it describes something that sounds perhaps like an artist or author, until it very suddenly doesn't, on the last line:

    Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,
    and the poetry he invented was easy to understand;
    he knew human folly like the back of his hand,
    and was greatly interested in armies and fleets;
    when he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,
    and when he cried the little children died in the streets.

It's definitely quirky in its inconsistency, but

   type 'a Tree = 
     | Node of ('a Tree, 'a Tree)
     | Leaf of 'a

Is saying "The possible cases for the type describing an 'a Tree are: a Node of two other 'a subtrees, or else a Leaf of an 'a."

Then when you concrete-ize it, you have an "int Tree" or a "string Tree".

This is a little clearer with thinking of the List datatype: this is a number list, that's a string list, that's a grocery list, this is a guest list...etc.

One nice thing in F# is that there's an ability to "standardize" how you write generics to look more like the (admittedly arbitrary) way that C# or Java or C++ write them:

    type Tree<'a> =
      | Node of (Tree<'a>, Tree<'a>)
      | Leaf of 'a

This is such a weird complaint that it feels like engagement bait.

"Let x be equal to 4 in x * x" is a natural way to express a concept in English.

The equivalent OCaml code is:

    let x = 4 in
    x * x

I'm not sure how that qualifies as "sucks"?

In fact, the `in` makes OCaml's scoping rules some of the easiest to follow. This is valid OCaml code:

    let x = 4 in
    let y = 3 in
    let z = 2 in
    x * y * z

    let x = 5 in
    let y = 6 in
    let z = 7 in
    x * y * z

The phrasing of "let x = 4 in <this expression>" makes it explicit where x is defined as 4, vs where it's instead (in a different expression) defined as 5.

I have an easier time understanding scope in OCaml, which explicitly spells out its scoping rules in plain-English syntax, than I do in Rust or JavaScript, which use the deceptively-simple-looking braces but also wild concepts like lifetimes or hoisting.

> offline and fully customizable, but HN/Reddit went mad over it.

...until it isn't.

A self-hosted open-source project you can download and run (or compile yourself and then run) is very different from a closed-source OS-level component that's developed by a for-profit company that makes at least some portion of its revenue on ads.

Twitter was "the public square of the web", until it wasn't. Google Reader was a best-in-class easy RSS reader, until it wasn't.

If you don't have the source code, you don't own or control the software. And when you don't own or control the software, it's reasonable to have more-guarded views on what data you're willing to give to that software.

If that software suddenly appears installed on your machine, constantly recording your screen and running entirely-opaque "AI processing" on it, unless you go through a series of steps to opt out...it's reasonable to be upset, because the opportunity to choose what you're willing to share has been denied to you.

And since it's a closed-source OS component, it's only something you can opt out from....until it isn't.

This calls to mind complaints from a few years ago about fact-checking as "damaging to the reputation" of the person whose claims were fact-checked and identified as false.

One's reputation is damaged when they choose to tell a lie, not when someone else points it out.

Similarly, when someone accepts a bribe, they have damaged their integrity. That damage was not done by the person who exposes the bribe, but by the person who chose to accept the bribe.

Put another way: unethical behavior is unethical regardless of whether one gets caught while engaging in it.

I am less optimistic than you; I don't see how that would matter to the current MAGA movement.

By the actual numbers, illegal immigrants are by far the group with the lowest rate of felony, violent crime, property crime, and drug-related crime: https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/undocumented-immigrant-o...

The idea of illegal immigration being "complete disregard for law and order" is based solely in feelings of fear or animosity, not in facts.

Are you going to sell the thing you're using Rider to build? That's commercial use.

If you're not going to sell it, it's probably not commercial use.

I watched it for the first time a few hours ago, and did a Wikipedia dive about the Book of Kells. Flip over to HN and see this thread; what a weird convergence.

Sure, but that's why I say

>Living in community can happen by choice, not just by [employer || school] coercion; it just requires that you make that choice.

As other replies have pointed out, the school/work bonds more often than not fade as soon as the coercion is removed. Why is that?

One possible explanation is that those bonds were not genuine or desirable bonds, but were artificial or unwanted-but-required ones. In this case, is it really better to enforce artificial, unwanted constant association?

A different possible explanation might be that the replacement of one enforced -day-to-day coercion with another one leaves no room for the previous-coerced-context's bonds. In that case, is it really better to strangle out all your previous connections by unnecessarily forcing you to inhabit a new space on a constant basis?

This brings up the question again of the false dichotomy between "enforced connections with a single artificially-constructed-and-destroyed community away from home" or else "isolation"; I still think _chosen_ connections with a _multiplicity_ of communities that are _close to home_ is a better option.

I wasn't going to encounter some of my coworkers at the 60-mile-roundtrip job outside of work context _ever_ unless I made a point to suspend my non-work life so that I could go all the way "over there" and away from my family and my local community. Encountering them at the park, or in downtown, and having a casual conversation, or even having them over for dinner -- that sort of thing wasn't going to happen (at the very least, not without a sufficiently-significant amount of planning and commute-time sacrifice as to make it extremely rare).

I recognize that remote work comes with a similarly-high "minimum intentionality requirement" for building connections. I just also recognize, from having worked in the all-too-common situation of "commute to/from the office means driving over an hour each way", that in-office work is not much better than remote work in that regard; it just means that you're spending all your time together in the business-activities rather than in the contexts of what each person actually cares about. When I spend time with friends who live nearby -- like taking a walk with them in the middle of the day, because we're both already close to home -- we're not talking or faux-bonding about the latest deliverable or project, because our relationship isn't defined in those terms, and we're not in an office context that's _framing_ our relationship in those terms.

But the costs that in-office work brings compared to remote work are way higher than the marginal benefit of "now we're in-person more, free to mostly talk about work together while we're in this artificial environment that the company controls, until the company decides to can either of us."

I see this sort of question whenever this topic comes up, and I think it's interesting that there's a baseline assumption of a false dichotomy between "in-office interactions with employees of the same company" or else "isolation", as though those are the only two options (which is understandable, since American culture is pretty skewed towards defining people by their jobs -- the classic problem where people tend to answer "what do you do?" by talking about their job).

I've been working hybrid or fully-remote on and off since about 2009 (with "fully-remote" being my state since about 2019). I get quite a lot more time to spend around people who are close to me -- friends, family, my community -- precisely because I'm not driving 60 miles round-trip every day anymore.

Encountering this same type of dichotomy in my adult context is kinda amusing to me personally, since I encountered it often as a kid, too; I grew up homeschooled, and heard the same baseline assumption (but with "employees at the same company" swapped out for "students at the same school") presented in another frequent question: "but how do you kids ever socialize with other people?"

In reality, I was often involved in daytime extracurricular activities (and weeknight/weekend ones) that had me working, volunteering, field-tripping, or just hanging out alongside multiple groups of adults and other kids on a regular basis.

Living in community can happen by choice, not just by [employer || school] coercion; it just requires that you make that choice.

Well, the immediate initial test failed for me: I thought, "why not apply this on one of my own sites, where I have a sort of journal of poetry I've written?"...and there's no category for "Poem", and the request to add Poem as a type [1] is at least 9 years old, links to an even older issue in an unreadable issue tracker without any resolution (and seemingly without much effort to resolve it), and then dies off without having accomplished anything.

[1] https://github.com/schemaorg/suggestions-questions-brainstor...

That and the fact that it gates progress entirely using a mechanic that had, up to that point, never really been introduced -- you might have noticed it on accident, but the whole design of the game (go fast from left to right, jumping sometimes) and, as you mentioned, the fact that it bounces when you jump on it, lead you to have no idea how to solve it correctly.

My spicy take is this: that particular obstacle is not "they upped the difficulty", but is instead "they designed this poorly."

I mean, the problem with the current supreme court is that their decision-making process -- as demonstrated in the Trump immunity case (where the ruling was in direct contradiction to established law) -- is not a question of what the law says, but what the conservatives on the court (or their deep-pocketed bribers) want.

I similarly grew up with The Incredible Machine 2, and Pictures at an Exhibition haunted me for decades because I didn't know its title. Then finally, one random day NPR played it as part of a block of classical music _and_ said Mussorgsky's name, and that was good enough for me to be able to track it down and experience a wonderful epiphany 20ish years in the making.

I love this bit here:

>The subheading under this rule would be: Try your best to be right, but don’t worry when you’re wrong. Repeatedly. If you feel uncomfortable, or like an impostor, good. You’re pushing yourself. Don’t assume you know everything, but try your best anyway, and let the internet correct you when you are inevitably wrong. Wear your noobyness on your sleeve.

It requires an ongoing practice of humility _and_ extending grace to yourself for your own mistakes or misunderstandings (on the basis of "everyone makes mistakes and has to learn"), which can be a good starting point for showing that same grace to others.