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It's hard because you're wrong.

It's hard because you continue to love pretending that people are calling you names even when they're not. It's hard because you find it convenient to demand people defend arguments they're not making.

My position is that your arguments are bad. I've made my arguments why. I don't have to argue about the policy, because I haven't staked a position on it.

I haven't called you names, so it's disingenuous to respond as if "Don't call people names" is on topic. For sake of contrast, saying something like "You're a dishonest piece of troll shit" might be calling you names; it's pretty clear most of my discussion has instead been focused on pointing out the problems with your arguments, positions, and rhetoric, which is part of why you're finding things so hard.

Though at this point your dishonesty is manifest to anyone following along.

I absolutely said that about cheese.

Then something happened I probably should have died from (80-90% of people don't make it). High blood pressure turned out to be a contributing factor. High salt consumption much of it from my favorite cheeses turned out to contribute to the high blood pressure.

I learned to like swiss. And be modest in my consumption of tastier saltier cheeses. I no longer glibly tell people someday I'll be found dead of dairy poisoning with a smile.

I would probably request cheese in a known last meal situation though.

We should all enjoy things, and many of us can still stand to be more restrained in how we enjoy. And what.

The only thing I've targeted as wrong is how you argue. That's what I hate, and with amply described reasons.

I've spent a lot of words on it under the charitable assumption that you were truthful in your desire for better discussion. At this point, you've persuaded me that was overly charitable.

Instead it appears you're determined to maintain a fictional posture implying bad behavior in others whether or not it exists so you can claim whatever fruits of grievance you're here to harvest.

If the time comes when I care about defending or attacking the memo, I'll do so effectively. I haven't taken a position on the memo. I've only asked you to sustain positions you've taken or honestly retreat from them. And not pretend other people are taking positions that they aren't, which is apparently a big ask.

> Perhaps you can start with the ones stated in the memo.

You could have done that in response to the person who asked you what reasons they had not considered. That would have been one reasonable way to engage, it would have mildly trespassed the bounding attempt in their statement that they had considered the memo, but it would have introduced substance backing up your claim and let you interrogate their claim that they had in fact evaluated the reasons given in the memo.

You didn't do that, though. For some reason you instead chose "I don't support the policy" which, as stated, is a non-sequitur in response to the question ""what reasons have I failed to consider?"

If you'd like to talk about the reasons in the memo or other reasons not in the memo, no one has been stopping you.

> > So saying "I don't support the policy" is a non-sequitur.

> No it isn't. It's not an argument. It's just a statement of fact.

A non-sequitur can be entirely factual. This means affirming something as a statement of fact is not an adequate defense against the charge of non-sequitur, it is actually a further non-sequitur.

> my argument here which is "don't just call people liars."

This may be the argument you intended to make. But because you also asserted that legitimate reasons for the policy existed and then refused to defend that assertion with a reasonable response to the question "what reasons have I failed to consider?" (including "the reasons in the memo" up until this level of the discussion) and also appear determined to avoid that quality of engagement, you've ended up engaging in a way that works against a general ethos of better discussion and the micro-dynamics which support it.

There's also the fact that it's reductive to assert anyone has "just" called the administration liars. Given that the federal judiciary has retreated from traditional presumption of regularity when fulfilling their judicial responsibility[0] (ie, that the executive is acting in good faith), that's compelling reason to believe the judiciary has found a pattern of admin dishonesty in the social/institutional setting where honesty is most critical. Retreating from the presumption of honesty in lay discussion is a pretty reasonable step. This in addition to my previous argument that dishonesty certainly exists in general and reckoning with that should not simply be reduced to "screaming liar."

I can also see how someone may nevertheless feel that calling the memo transparent pretext is not adequate. The productive response to such a failure where you feel it has occurred would be to bring the official reasons from the memo into the discussion, then ask people what they specifically think is wrong with those reasons.

I didn't engage your comments to defend or attack the policy -- I probably could do that, but it certainly didn't seem to be where you've focused. Instead you've focused on the quality of the discussion, and seem to be confused about why people have been critical and even hostile towards your engagement. It seemed like if you wanted better discourse, explaining how some of your engagement draws that criticism would help. It's strange if you're not interested in that, given that your stated position is about policing the quality of engagement in general, but no one can make you focus on what you don't want to, only point out the contradiction in that as well as the problems of your engagement.

[0] https://www.justsecurity.org/120547/presumption-regularity-t...

> What "evasions"?

You kicked off this subthread by saying (among other things):

> the other side actually has reasons that you haven’t bothered to consider?

In response, it's entirely reasonable for someone to ask you to speculate what those specific reasons might be whether or not you agree with those reasons. You suggested those reasons exist, asking someone who expresses confidence they exist is a reasonable place to start.

Here's one of the ways that you're evading answering that question:

> I have repeatedly said that I don't support the policy.

No one here required you to publicly marry yourself to the policy. We're all aware of situations where we can speculate on possible reasons for a position without agreeing with it in the end. So saying "I don't support the policy" is a non-sequitur.

If you don't want to answer the question "what reasons have I failed to consider?" one way of resolving the tension left by your assertion that such reasons exist would be to say something like "I don't want to speculate on specifics, I acknowledge that this weakens any assertion that such reasons exist, but I still think we shouldn't just call the reasons given dishonest." Perhaps there are other ways of resolving that tension.

But saying "I don't support the policy" is not in any way adequate. You were not asked whether you support the policy, you were asked to back up your assertion that "the other side actually has reasons that you haven’t bothered to consider."

> I want you to tell me why you believe that

I don't think I've personally staked a position in this discussion regarding the administration's policy, much less whether or not they're lying, so it's not clear why I'd have any obligation to defend a position before we hear what your reasons are for asserting the administration "actually has reasons that you haven’t bothered to consider."

It's also not clear why someone who has staked a position that the administration's reasons are pretextual and dishonest would be obligated tell you why they think that before asking you to back up your assertion that other reasons exist, though of course you are also free to ask people why they believe something (and some people have at least mildly elaborated on specific reasons they believe the administration is not honest).

And I understand perfectly well what Motte and Bailey means. I specified exactly what I identified as your Motte (“maybe they have honest reasons that aren’t anti-immigrant, ever think of that even though I won’t speculate on what those would be”) and your Bailey (disavowing any investment in defending the new policy). Repeating your Bailey does not defend your Motte. Insisting that people are misrepresenting your Motte as a defense of the new policy does not defend your Motte, it is simply repeating your Bailey.

Your original position was "the other side actually has reasons that you haven’t bothered to consider?" and you have retreated to "I don't defend this policy so I have no obligation to defend my assertion that the other side has actual reasons I just want better discussion."

If you want better discussion, an explicitly acknowledged retreat from "the other side actually has reasons that you haven’t bothered to consider" will look more honest and less evasive. You could also speculate on what those reasons might be, and that would also strengthen your asserted position that "the other side actually has reasons" to the extent those reasons look credible.

Some people may also be considering the possibility that your claim that you disagree with the administration's position is not honest (as well as approaching the admin as dishonest actors). That's always discouraging of course -- we certainly want to be perceived as honest when we believe we are, and it's also convenient to be perceived as honest even when we are not. I haven't staked my criticisms of your engagement on whether or not you are dishonest: I allow room for the possibility that you're honestly wrong, and even some for the possibility that you may eventually make a substantial counterargument as yet unconsidered. Still, dishonesty is a real possibility to be reckoned with, and bringing it under consideration is reasonable enough. In that light, reducing reckoning with that possibility to "just screaming 'liar!'" also looks like rhetorical evasion.

No matter how many times you repeat your evasions, they are unlikely to persuade anyone that you’re simultaneously entitled to your bailey (disavowing any investment in defending the new policy) and your motte (“maybe they have honest reasons that aren’t anti-immigrant, ever think of that even though I won’t speculate on what those would be”)

This may not be the intent of some conservative voters, partly because some are plausibly immigration friendly, partly because many movement conservatives have more of a opinion-vibe than a policy position on immigration (among other things).

But conservative voters that don’t want much immigration at all (especially from some places/backgrounds) absolutely exist, and more to the point so does leadership that’s determining policy with that goal in mind.

Perhaps you and your circle reflect the more egalitarian policy-driven view. Commendable if so. But it’s not commendable to deny that conservatism has a xenophobic streak a mile wide right now.

Effective collective action is impossible without both real self discipline and meaningful engagement in life.

Your point has value to the extent that it’s reminding people we can’t just retreat into personal satisfactions.

But to the extent that it pooh poohs self-discipline or joyfully engaged attention, it’s totally wrong. The necessary practice starts with these things and then grows social and organized.

The social and organizing phase is usually less scoldy and pugilistic than some of your commentary here, too.

And it just so happens that one of the things the new tech is good for is astroturfing.

HTML is content because it inflects content with structure and meaning. It may be fair to say it carries less of the semantic weight than the language and other media it marks up, but it’s content at least to the extent that punctuation is, and perhaps more.

I don’t know anyone whose concerns with “presentation” in markup included the presence of classes — the dominant understanding among people I’ve known who care about this is that classes are semantic in the markup with names chosen for that purpose and they have presentation attached in stylesheets.

Tailwind gives up on that separation. There can be some worse-is-better benefits to that, especially for teams that don’t have anyone whose role is to care about this. But the “ugly as sin” is a signal about the shortcomings in the tradeoff.

> it is important to make the distinction between inlining the implementation of some behaviour and inlining the invocation (or declaration) of some behaviour

tailwind’s biggest problem is that it doesn’t make this distinction well.

In a sense this is a strength because it probably matches the amount of effort most devs/orgs who don’t focus here are willing to put in to the problem; this worse-is-better solution is functional enough especially in settings where component separation has already been adopted. Along with some decent baseline design tokens, it’s enough for people who don’t want to care more, especially if they don’t ever particularly see the consequences of hyperlocalizing implementation.

If your project has someone whose job it is to think through design systems and how they’re expressed via CSS, you can do better. If you don’t, you can do worse.

And personally, I’ve seen a LOT of discussion about separating SQL and app code. There’s a similar tension. Wrapping queries in function calls often means fewer duplicated queries (often painfully verbose) and opportunities for dumb security mistakes, but reduces the expressive variation the raw query language provides, and many systems and devs behind them end up pursuing balance between the two… or outsourcing the decision to an ORM or other data access layer whose tradeoffs also probably have shortcomings but at least they get to worse-is-better stop thinking about it except at particular pain points.

Not with that attitude:

    <style>
    @keyframes blink {
        0% { opacity: 1; }
        50% { opacity: 0; }
        100% { opacity: 1; }
    }
    
    blink { animation: blink 0.7s infinite; }
    </style>

    <blink>This guy blinks.</blink>

The curious thing about that is the transformation of the feed — it’s long since stopped being majority friend/follow posts and clearly is the algorithm picking whatever else it can come up with that will engage. This should mean personal network effects aren’t the moat anymore, for FB anyway.

I only hope this eventually reaches enough coverage to support media production. It’s the last commercial area I care about. I’m entirely willing to pay for good work here (and have) but both major commercial desktop OSs are exhibiting significant warning signs of contempt for the users.

interface and architecture may influence each other, but interface doesn’t determine architecture

And here I thought I was safe from losing months to escapism like I did in the 2000s (learned to ascend with every class though!)

Anyone know why the skip over 4.x, or have any insight into how much play has changed as well as infrastructure?

This one has somehow found its way into the iOS photos app of all places. Something is deeply amiss in the industry if the corporate avatar of design misses that one.

I’ve been using macOS because its creative ecosystem for decades. And over the last 10 years, it’s started to be apparent to me this is an expensive and unstable place to be. It will not be a place where tools find longstanding stability measured in decades. It is and will be a place where various sandcastle taxes are periodically assessed so the particular vision of the platform as a novel current luxury experience will be reinforced, and developers and users will be asked to keep pace on the treadmill and smile.

No. So much no.

It utterly destroys the “quick incremental adjustment” that taps are better for. It makes it more involved to even complete maximal adjustments, which are just press and hold. It makes all adjustments more involved, it’s not merely a matter of locating a physical key, it’s orchestrating movements your eyes and hands have to track together toward a location that can’t be known , through touch detection that can get fussy for any number of reasons.

This is not theoretical. This was my experience with a touchbar MBP. The idea was just wrong for this kind of routine function.

Meanwhile, I can adjust volume blind by feel on a MPB with function keys. I never for a moment when doing this for audio or brightness think “I wish I had a slider” and even if I did I know how to find one for use with the touch interface every MBP ever has had.

Embodiment, social context, and focus.

I’m discovering a renewed appreciation for libraries — never lost in theory but in practice. I’m lucky my community has a good municipal public library nearby, a good university library not too much farther. Book collection at MPL is mixed but plenty of good to great material in the mix. Periodical collection has journalism superior to most freely available web. Periodical archives at university library are incredible (including stuff like Byte).

The environment encourages a better balance between exploration and focus. There are people to greet or not as you wish. There is no algorithm trying to anger for engagement or crumb out just enough other rewards just often enough that you pull the lever for another hit for as long as possible. Search is a whole different game, both higher effort but also passing through a more scholarly tradition and less of the commercial incentive war.

Online advantages still remain (and evolve). I’m not about to give up the web. But I might want more of myself focused through environments and institutions like libraries.

Haven’t seen the bookstore newsstand for a while though, maybe I should see what that’s like these days too.

The word most relevant to this conversation is “influence.” Influence is possible and users observe it and use it to increase margins of useful outcomes. “Control” is incorrect.

You’re right that this has always existed and at times even driven governance and society in the US.

There’s also been times when other values more like what the GP implies have driven governance and social direction in the US. There was a side with values like that in the civil war. There was government and there were movements with those values for much of the 20th century especially following periods of national trial when it was clear we needed governing values that truly drove the common welfare.

A lot of us grew up and are still living with the fruits of that. That’s the America we’ve known. We’ve also always known that there are many Americans who never bought in, who had a vision more like the other side of the civil war, or want welfare that’s a bit more unevenly distributed, perhaps not even distributed in some directions at all.

It can still be a bit of a shock to find out that illiberal portion growing with a grip on a growing number of levers of power.

Can the America with a vision of truly common welfare reassert itself? Maybe. Maybe not.

Thanks. Not the author (the person who's participated elsewhere in thread with an account of the same name as the site probably is).

But I appreciate the elaboration. I don't generally use LLMs for writing, but I'm interested in what people perceive as good and the gap between that LLM output among other things. I actually liked this piece, and could outline some things that I thought were effective about it as is, but being curious about what other people dislike seemed more likely to be educational.

I especially appreciate the criticism of repetition in this piece and LLM output in general. That's a great one to think about because repetition has a place in rhetoric, especially with some audiences, but probably less so with other audiences (perhaps especially an engineering minded audience). And for any audience there will be a point of diminishing returns. All things LLMs may be poorly positioned to dial in.

> Better to say "It's awful writing" then write an extended essay empathizing via guessing what was in your head and what you actually did.

But you did! Thank you. And FWIW the extended criticism that you eventually provided including attempting to guess at the author's perspective boosts signal for me. When someone does that, it gives me particulars to learn from and makes it seem less likely they're just cranky or grinding an unknown axe. Though of course no one has time for essay responses all the time (and the pay usually isn't great).

Personally I just don’t believe “data centers in space” is a sincere goal. There’s no way any of the cooling benefits or whatever offsets the additional layers of significant construction and maintenance challenges, collision and other environmental risks, and unknown risks.

There’s no way. Every proposal is either a bid for capital via moonshot enthusiasm or a stalking horse for something else, and these days I wouldn’t be surprised if it was orbital weapons platforms in disguise.

Being someone who’s used to the “typical REPL” flow, I’m not sure I grasp what’s going on with the no-restarts. The implications I think I see are:

* Clojure is built different in terms of hot code reloading

* the REPL is its own application process in languages Ruby or Python, but in Clojure it’s sortof a client for the system

Is that right? Is there more to it?

> Because this is awful writing.

Can you describe what you think is awful (beyond rhetorical choices that have become LLM markers)?

I wonder if how we build/cycle software would change if we stopped calling it "backward compatibility" and started calling it "future availability."

I realize this is probably said in jest, but just in case there are readers who don’t take it that way:

* someone has to write language specifying a program, natural language or programming.

* a programming langugage is a handle with specific properties at a specific level of abstraction. Whether it’s a popular handle won’t change that it’s far more than a toy.

Easier to run your todo list at the same time as applications that need the RAM for raw function. Maybe that’s CAD, maybe that’s A/V production, maybe it’s a context window.

It’s been convenient that we can throw better hardware at our constraints regularly. Our convenience much less our personal economic functions is not necessarily what markets will generally optimize for, much like developers of electron apps aren’t optimizing for user resources.

There’s a lot of good points in your comment, but fwiw it’s not clear whether they exist to dismiss a complaint or muster focus on the issues.

You’re right to point out that we’re all opted in at multiple levels to tech dependent on mining operations with a terrible human cost. I’d love to see these dangerous mining operations made safer with tech and policy, and you’re quite right that individual opt out is unlikely to have any effect (much less selective opt out from LLMs). Is that the end of the story?

If we’re just here to complain that someone’s marginal harm reduction posture is marginal I’m not sure that’s an effective rebuttal. Collective effort to lay new tracks and untie people off the old ones has more power than complaining someone used their personal trolley switch to shunt to a track with slightly fewer people.

Of course, that goes for people manning their personal switches too. And it’s worthwhile to pause and appreciate the scale and complexity of the problem.