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DagAgren

Re:I Am Deleting the Blog on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @05:13PM (#23620373)
> When people refer to racist views at SSC they don't mean that literally as a rule, they're just disparaging uncomfortable views about very well defined issues in social science and the like, that have zilch to do with superiority or supremacism of any sort, naziism etc. Shooting the messenger, basically.

Do please specify what those "uncomfortable views" actually are.

Re:I Am Deleting the Blog on Tuesday June 23, 2020 @04:41PM (#23619955)
> it works because we as a society have a visceral negative reaction to some labels.

Do you know why we have that reaction? Because of millions upon millions of dead, innocent humans. That is what those ideologies lead to. We learned this lesson once, and we learned it very well. We don't want that to happen again. We don't want to let those ideas spread again. We don't want to see the mass graves again they lead to again. We learned that.

Some people have forgotten, though.

It's still unclear to me what the benefit is, though. The drawbacks are obvious - I have to wear a headset, I lost the physical interfacing, both in terms of input interfaces and in terms of being able to, say, just a put an e-reader down to stop reading it. What do I gain, after giving up all that?
It definitely will not have the relative resolution of a physical monitor.
Yeah, but all the things mentioned are things that require my full attention for longer spans of time. I don't need separate displays for them, I need one single good display.
> we're experimenting with the idea of an app that has a comic reader, book reader, Reddit client, art viewer, video player

Why? I have all of those on my computer without strapping anything to my head.

Regulators were definitely not asleep at the wheel. They were apparently actively defending them, for instance by attempting to sue the Financial Times for reporting on the irregularities.
It is, in fact, not useful for communication, because it does not honestly communicate anything. It exists only to undermine people who try to call you out on making bigoted remarks. It was coined by ESR, and is popular mainly with people with a strong affinity for bigotry, like him, and also libertarians.
You really don't understand how logical fallacies work at all, do you.
Feel free to provide me wrong by showing a non-libertarian source that takes this term seriously.
Ah yes, Wikipedia, with one source form a libertarian propaganda rag. Very reputable.

Nobody but libertarians looking for excuses for racism use that term, deal with it.

"Kafkatrap" is a meaningless term, beyond "stop calling me a racist just for saying racist things".

Acting like it's an accepted logical fallacy is ridiculous. It's a term ESR made up because people kept rightly calling him a sexist and racist and he didn't like it and threw a tantrum.

He also chose the word "kafkatrap", a word coined by a notorious racist.
> The implication is that some external knowledgable entity communicated with the patient

The implication of the actual article, if you read it to the end, is the exact opposite.

The article also mildly makes fun of the people who believe it to be a supernatural phenomenon.
This was to more closely match the behaviour of Objective-C, and it has been removed as better ways of Objective-C interop were developed.
> and Swift is particularly weird.

The way Swift does them is the least awkward and most robust I have seen in any language.

> As an example, the colon and the whitespace are sufficient to separate parameters. So is the comma. So we have...both?

Designing a language around what the minimum requirements of a parser is will not get you a good language. Human language is massively redundant, because humans find it more easy to communicate when there is redundancy. Computer code is also communication aimed at humans, and a bit of redundancy does not hurt there, and can often help.

> There is also the issue that, please correct me if I got this wrong, the label that's in the signature becomes the name of the parameter inside the function.

This is incorrect. You can optionally specify both an internal and external name for any argument. Unlabelled arguments are just a special case of this syntax, where you say "external name does not exist, internal name is this".

This is already the case with the name of your function. And named arguments are basically just an extension of the name of your function.
But this is already the case for the name of the function. Semantically, named arguments are just part of the name of the function.
Re:The American Press Is Destroying Itself on Saturday June 13, 2020 @05:56PM (#23513124)
Do you really want to "culturally reconcile" with people who want to send the army to quell peaceful protests?

That is not a view that you can build a democracy on. To have democracy, you have to exclude certain ideologies and ideas. This has always been the case and will always remain the case. Some ideologies are antithetical to democracy, and that article espoused one of them.

Re:Apple is building an operating system for health on Saturday June 13, 2020 @01:09PM (#23510887)
> But given what we know about the NSA and the context around it, I'm enclined to trust The Guardian and Snowden about it.

None of my options suggested above required not trusting them. Either Apple lies about cooperating, the FBI lies about having access, or the FBI has access without Apple's knowledge.

Anyway, their statements on the matter go much further than what a gag order would require.

Re:Apple is building an operating system for health on Saturday June 13, 2020 @04:54AM (#23507974)
> Apple also said they were not part of any spying program, until it was revealed they were part of PRISM.

This does not seem like an accurate statement. After the PRISM revelations, which named Apple, Apple said they were unaware of the program and were not giving them access. As far as I know, this is the way things still stand today. The leaks claim access to Apple, Apple says they are not providing access. This may be explained through either party lying, or by the FBI being able to access Apple without their cooperation.

> They also said their home button had a hardware problem and you had to buy a new phone, when it's been later demonstrated it could be fixed with software.

This also seems inaccurate. Apple has never claimed you need to buy a new phone if the home button breaks. The actual issue is that the home button is part of the security system of the phone, runs its own fingerprint detection and is paired with the mainboard, and thus cannot be replaced without updating this pairing, otherwise there would be a trivial security break for the fingerprint protection. As a result, only Apple have the required access to replace the button, and thus third-party replacements are impossible.

As far as I know this is also still the case.

Nobody's made anything up?
I did not make any accusation. I was clarifying the position of the people who's thought process you "couldn't imagine".

Now you can.

> but I just can't imagine the thought process behind 'and the bullets avoid white / asian NYT reporters and crew members and specifically target the ones with melanin above a certain level'.

Bullets don't fly on their own accord. Someone aims them.

> He made it very clear he was talking about rioters and looters, not protestors

People actually killing protesters always, without fail, claim to be trying to stop "rioters and looters". This is not a phrase to be taken at face value, ever.

It was handled that way only after first handling it incredlby, horrendously badly. They were dragged kicking and screaming by their entire staff into handling it correctly only after a week of absolutely bungling it.
Why are you asking me, and not the other guy?

Why is it me who is supposed to shut up, and not the other guy?

That sounds like taking a political stand to me.

Or are you going to try to claim that "oh those minorities are such whiners" is apolitical, but "no they are not" is not?

You allow lots of inflammatory and political opinions on the site. But you don't allow people to stand up to them or challenge them. That is pure hypocrisy.

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