zimablue

It's not disputed that they have a large, well funded state propaganda machine and interfered (through internet propaganda) in the last US elections, the dispute was over whether they directly colluded or just assisted at a distance. The idea that they would push a narrative that get picked up and provide behind the scenes support to geopolitics in their favor isn't some wild hypothesis, it's obviously true whatever your political partisanship. US do the same, obviously.

Thanks for the correction, I didn't know the count was including applications which presumably could be enabled/disabled.

Do you have any idea how many lines of elisp/c the core is? And how gnarly it is? I've read some stories.

I really disagree with your perspective, what you need to recognise is that people in the West effectively have a system of wage-slavery over other places, and it's based on chance not some deep system of justice. I love nature and animals and extinction fills me with existential sadness but at the same time if someone wants to kill Komodo dragons and the alternative is making 5k a year by being worked to death with no security, my aesthetic sadness about declining beauty feels a bit smug, and I certainly can't be moral about it. Until the world has anything approaching rough equality, fair enough go massacre white rhinos if that's what it takes to get a fraction of the freedom I was born with.

Yeah but my point is, are you more likely to migrate to Facebook or from Facebook at this point? Or are you describing a situation where you use both platforms but they have to interoperate so it's winner take all in the sense that you sit in one platform and it views all of them? Even if Facebook thought that could work, why take the risk? They already have a monopoly position, Microsoft didn't try to force Linux to be compatible with it they just tried to crush it.

My own take is that this would be a bad move for Facebook and is either genuine charity or hubris from Zuck, he genuinely might think Facebook is a great platform that can out-compete rather than just a network effect monopoly.

Note that python does have pattern matching, just not to the same degree as some languages.

  (a, (b, *c, d), *e) = [1, (2, 3, 4, 5), 6, 7]

Good for nested iterables, but not supporting dict/object unpacking.

I'd count being written in a small codebase in clojure and not literally a million lines of e-lisp a big advantage that you haven't mentioned

I'm not a Facebook fan but nor do I agree with this article, the analysis seems pretty shallow. Zuck's rules seems like broadly positive things, and like they'd benefit the competition more than this article lets on.

Harmful content => Any government regulation of harmful content will probably hurt small players more, since it's a big fixed cost of moderation. But everyone will realistically pay that cost anyway unless they're something decentralized like Mastodon.

Elections => Nothing to do with size of platform I think, they're just saying that it's disingenuous since filter bubbles are more important. I disagree, election financing is super important and as another poster said filter bubbles are as old as print.

Privacy => It says that GDPR is terrible for small companies, but without any evidence (or spec of "small") I think for anyone the size enough to be looking to challenge Facebook it's not a big deal, and broadly I like GDPR. "Don't store people's data unless you need to, and ask permission". Not a bad first effort to trying to fix surveillance capitalism.

Making data portable => This definitely, definitely would hurt Facebook more than help it. Noone is sitting on Instagram thinking "I'd swap to Facebook if only it was easier". They're the monopolist with the inferior product + network effects, that narrative makes no sense at all.

Thanks for doing God's work! How hard would it be to get LT running inside a browser? Also, does it have a headless mode and how hard would that be?

This post is very antagonistic but I can say that point 3 rings very true, even using advanced/data heavy SQL got very annoying for me relative to SQLAlchemy and I don't think you really want to try and pull it out.

Thanks, I hadn't seen this it's amazing. It's off topic but interesting enough not to mind. It set me on a train of thought about whether github is accidentally dystopic => permanent, completely public record of everything you say or do (inside the platform), conditions that probably magnify the power of social victimizing. PRs are permanent, I don't know about the discussions/etc, they can be deleted? Whilst being also a public record of your work/skills, so you can't really opt out or anonymize without a significant penalty.

This isn't as rare as it sounds, when I was young and a lot more arrogant+principled, I refused to go to my (not actually paying/good) college's Oxbridge interview prep, also ruled out medicine as a career choice partly because in the UK at the time to get in you had to do charity work/specific extra-curriculars.

Insane reasoning looking back, but hey 17 year olds are often principled nutcases. I can definitely imagine doing what you describe re compsci if I was a 17 year old girl in 2019. Hope any principled girls (in my biased opinion the brightest/best people in the end) we lose from information tech go into something else useful, kind of a sad thought.

Except it's not your children, it's your arbitrary fashion-based tribal identity. (Gender isn't a fashion choice, no, but the choice to focus on gender over height, good looks, class, race, etc is very much a fashion that quickly shifts).

Third world country is bad (although maybe the positive racial discrimination will count them in, I don't know) but the people who get screwed by this sort of thing are also the white working class. Most employers have some (fairly rational as well as irrational) desire to screen by class, alongside the people of the upper classes knowing how to game the system of education/etc. So when you push women and ethnicities in, you push white men out, and the ones who feel the pinch are the ones already onto a loser.

No he didn't, because "productive" != "(not?) difficult", they're mostly orthogonal. LISP is productive according to PG because it has a kind of unlimited amount of abstraction, I don't think he would say that LISP is difficult. LISP/smalltalk: PG-productive, not difficult Java: PG-unproductive, not difficult C++: PG-unproductive, difficult (Forth? Haskell?): PG-prodictive, difficult

So there are points in all 4 quadrants I think.

I'm not sure the normal distribution or avoiding reversion to mean fallacy are trivia though.

I like your point, it goes against the lambda-ultimate post linked separately in the thread. If you accept your point (cross-lang-loading) and accept the LTU argument about the benefits of internal DSLs (you're not slowly reinventing a useful turing-complete language) then you would maybe want to use a very simple, easily interpreted language for your DSL and embed an interpreter for that. (I (can't (think (of any though))))

Which variety of options (in negotiations/terms of the deal) do you think that Theresa May has tried?

I think it's "'delayed evaluation' + 'transparent internal structure'". So delayed evaluation isn't enough, because the only thing you can do with N closures is to call them in any order, you can't create a complex new expression dependent on the substructure of the closures.

The closest thing to a macro in (eg. python) imo looks like this.

Instead of

  d = c * (a + b)
  class Adder: 
    def __init__(self, left, right): 
      self.left=left 
      self.right = right

  class Multiplier: 
    def __init__(self, left, right):         
      self.left = left 
      self.right = right

  d = Multiplier(Adder(a, b), c)

Fill out the __call__ function and/or create an evaluator that recursively calls each class instance with it's parameters and you've made a system that works a lot like a lisp with a macros. Now you can do broadly /anything/, eg. replace every instance of an adder in the call tree with an adder+1. That's using the second required element of my description of macros- the complex substructure, to perform arbitrary transforms. You can't do that with just closures, unless they make their bound parameters accessible (and normally they don't directly, in python they do because it's absurdly dynamic). Of course this is not at compile-time, it's at "delayed execution time", but the difference is kind of slight imo. The benefit of a real lisp over doing this in python is that you don't need to rewrite every fn, operator, control flow statement into your own abstracted level by hand, and it's much faster. Also you can complete the loop and trivially write it back down into eval-able source code text.

I massively disagree with this, as the other part said a lot of standards don't make any sense. REST always seemed very suspect to me, and Facebook with some of the best developers in the works basically threw it straight out of the window with graphql, seeming to validate the scepticism. Html also has complicated standards about elements which everyone ignores with divs everywhere. There seem to be a lot of nonsense standards around.

I definitely fit into that second paragraph, and I appreciate you being careful to distinguish patience from being convinced of cost-benefit. I came to the conclusion after some pottering that it would be tough to make emacs nearly as good a python IDE as pycharm, not like a weekend's work it looked like a project in itself. It would again be a project in itself to make it as useful as jupyter for data-things. Someone has worked on embedding jupyter in emacs but it's a bit janky and you're then locked out from any extensions which will be written in javascript and expecting a DOM.

An investment in emacs seems to require a 10+ year time horizon, which means betting that it's going to grow and not decline, the numbers seem against that. I think what I really want is atom/light-table to get a lot better but the second died at birth and vscode is going to kill the first whilst having an uglier inner model that is less friendly to extensibility. I really wish Mr Granger had stuck with Light Table instead of running down a blind alley of VC money. There's a great quote that the threat to emacs is the browser, since it's a completely scriptable environment, I guess jupyter/light-table/atom embody that.

I still use spacemacs for running shells and editing files kind of ad-hoc.

I thought that the article was going to make the more relevant distinction between "transient low income/wealth" and "reasonable expectation of permanently low income/wealth". If we're going to specify a useful word, I think that's more interesting than what she's saying about "so little income it impacts your life stability" vs "low disposable income". I don't think it's useful for this woman to call herself poor, she had an explicitly transient state of unusually high outgoings and low income. She never looked down the barrel of 20 years of the same situation.

You can only reliably say that something which has happened several times is something that will always happen if you know the reason why it happened several times. This article seems to think it's Moore's law, which has ended. I think history tends to go in cycles as people over-index on whatever worked well for the last n decades.

Maybe the answer is just to make them illegal.

I'd urge anyone reading this before the article to read the book. It's one of the best books I've ever read and a lot of that is because I didn't know what it was about, I don't think I'd have enjoyed it knowing more. Just close this comment page and go read it.

I don't think this should be getting downvoted, in my undergrad we treated entropy as a measure of the number of possible "equivalent" states, multiplicity or probability equivalently. So if you had a small enough system you might see entropy go down, by chance.

If someone downvotes this can they reply to explain why?

You've taken my comment about the status we give to travelling, and assumed that it's down to some personal problem with travelling. I love travelling, but still find the status we give it disgusting and can recognize privilege laundering. It doesn't really matter what we think is a substantive action, there's no reasonable definition that includes travelling for the sake of it.

I'm not saying travelling is terrible, or teaches you nothing I'm saying that if someone goes to a foreign country for a long time and it's not as a byproduct (as in they have a career NOT related to travelling, picking a career specifically to travel doesn't count) of their work, then what it statistically indicates about them is that (privilege + propensity to try and socially signal) is greater than some number, but a lot of people seem to take it purely as "virtue".

Deep travelling is also nonsense, this kind of modern travel is largely just status fencing by upper middle class people who can't gain status through thoughts or substantive actions. Which is all fine, where it gets disgusting is tendency to somehow conflate it with virtue. "He's a really interesting person he spent 2 years in Holland". "Everyone should travel.. if you don't it betrays some closed mindedness".

Your previous answer seems to presume that there are groups of people to whom other groups of people are ancestors, and the first have special rights over anything that happens to the artifacts/remains of the second, I was trying to break down how you think about that. Eg. how do you identify the first and second groups unambiguously, and what sort of rights and limits apply.

You can't do value comparison without making dict item comparison a pissed in function or making dict values immutable. If you're doing something that really looks like a mathematical Union that will raise if there's any overlap then it's a really confusing abuse of notation. I don't think there's a way out.