downerending

I don't think they are using significantly more force. Looking at the riots across the US, the police appear in general to be showing an almost saintly level of restraint, and being killed and severely injured as a result.

This is simply too much to ask.

This is one of the things the protesters did, and they bear responsibility for it.

https://www.lawenforcementtoday.com/watch-man-tries-to-help-...

You should start looking at the videos. I've seen a couple of unconscious people being kicked in the head this week by "protesters". These people are nothing like law-abiding.

To quote the movie: Gotta be rich in the first place to think like that.

The "targeted medical tents" part sounds rather dubious, but yes, "less lethal" most certainly does not mean "harmless".

What would be better, though? How do you get people to obey the law, in a way that is safer for all concerned?

> I think protestors should be able to be armed with whatever police are.

That's insane. A fundamental tenet of (US) law is that using a weapon while committing a crime is itself a crime.

We're not at war. There are a lot of people breaking the law, and we need to reduce that with as little harm as possible.

This sounds incisive, but I'm not really smart enough to follow it. Certainly narrative as "story-telling" seems crucially important. And probably like many, it's hard for me to see a really satisfying story coming out of what we're going through. People screaming madly, people being senselessly maimed and killed. It seems more like tragic chaos.

These charts point out a lot of issues, most real problems, in my opinion. It's far less clear that this is the result of "systemic racism", though. The idea that "poverty begets poverty" could explain a lot of it more simply.

Also, I am very dubious about survey questions. Asking someone how they feel about the police is going to draw a lot of noise and crosscutting motivations. It would be far more useful to know what they do in a situation where they need a policeman.

No doubt, and at least anecdotally, that seems to be happening in real time.

As to the larger question, I'm having a very hard time seeing adding knowledge and science as a bad thing. Without those, any proposed improvement to policing (including abuse) is simply flailing guesswork.

You may well be right. As far as I can recall, though, as of the last time I was regularly using Prolog, trying to do serious work on a (say) 1000x1000 array was a recipe for disaster.

The exception would be Turbo Prolog, but it was a rather restrictive subset of the language. Fast as hell, though.

I grew up in a very fundamentalist (Christian) area, so the lack of it feels very familiar.

What they want is everyone's butts back in their chairs, in the office. The rest sounds like pretext.

It remains to be seen how that will play out at my job, but I am very seriously considering a "100% remote" policy myself (as in, no office, no travel at all), even if I have to switch jobs.

Arguably in 2020, you should be very careful about expressing any opinion that is in any way unpopular. Or that even could be construed as such.

My impression is the reason is that there really isn't widespread agreement on the harmfulness of such communities, so they're sort of trying to split the middle. And perhaps also to advocate for seeing them as awful, per corporate sentiment.

The principal example that comes to mind is TD, which seems more obnoxious and tasteless than some sort of evil.

Subs that truly are beyond the pale by wide consensus seem to get dropped immediately and without objection.

As to not wanting to win, well, yes, dropping everything controversial means losing a lot of page-hits, and as a business, they're likely wary.

No, it's not. But there is a lot of such painting going on, and you can't solve one evil by committing a second.

In Prolog, backtracking is a fundamental feature of the language, and idiomatic code can do it places you might not think of.

Part of writing efficient Prolog is doing things to avoid such backtracking (by adding cuts or rearranging code).

Bit-blitting is just an example I made up for "large-scale manipulation of array data". There are such cases where backtracking would likely make more sense, though I'm not thinking of an obvious one right now.

This is an almost meaningless question. About all we can add is that in light of current technology trends, it looks possible. Which may well mean that it is certain.

What can we hope for? I dream of an endless dreamless sleep, soon. Every alternative I can think of sounds like horror.

This is all rather beside the point. If you can get a better offer elsewhere, take it. Ideally, develop two or three good offers and take the best.

Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language is not only a great book on architecture, but one of the best books on any subject I've ever read. Highly recommended.

That said, once you've read it, you will forever find the flaming garbage dump that is contemporary architecture severely wanting. These days, and architect could almost be summarized as someone who designs buildings and hates people.

Even worse, what sort of conversation are you contemplating with a round trip on the order of 10K years?

Part of it is the American ethos of "the rules don't apply to me". That often works. But not with bridges.

Here's a 60s attempt:

Prolog was (theoretically) a practical declarative programming language. You describe what you want done, and it "figures out" what to do, as opposed to imperative, where you simply tell the computer each step to do.

That's something of an exaggeration in practice, but yet, there was something to it. A typical program was actually doing depth-first search behind the scenes, so "try this, or else try this, or else try this" algorithms were very easy to express in the language.

As an aid to that, it had unification, which you can think of as pattern matching on steroids. You could write a rule like

something([A, [1, X]]) :- yada(A, X)

which would only match if the argument to 'something' was a list the second element of which was another list that started with 1, and so on. It's far more powerful than this, but it's been many years, and I've forgotten most of it.

As for the cons, implementations of the day were relatively inefficient, although Quintus was fairly good.

The killer problem, in my mind, though is that it didn't really deal well with backtracking through huge data structures. If you were trying to write a bit-blitting algorithm on large arrays, for example, and expecting to backtrack a lot, it just plain wasn't going to work well.

Not sure that helps much. I miss Prolog a lot, but it's hard to see a path forward for it. Even somewhat similar languages like Haskell will probably never get any real traction. Or even Ocaml/F#, which are far more practical.

I suppose the closest we have today are really good Makefiles. Done well, this captures just a bit of Prolog, in a very limited domain.

You can't just hatch experienced law enforcement officers in a week (or a year). And putting inexperienced officers in early can make things far worse, from a police brutality perspective.

Beyond that, though, painting an entire profession as monsters is simply wrong.

Be careful what you wish for--it appears that an upswing in resignations is happening now.

Speaking just for myself, I often end up saying rather stupid things when thinking on my feet.

On the other hand, yeah, the could simply have been a jackass. Greeks, though? Who doesn't love the Greeks? The Turks, I guess, but in America, I think they are well-regarded.

IMO, only real actions, like tutoring minority kids, matters. You can "advocate" up, down, left, and sideways, and it will make not one whit of difference.

Want to change the world? Do the work.

So, like abortion?

This is an important point. Pushing trivia like this uses up the attention and good will that people have to spend on the larger issues. If you want to change the world, lead with what actually matters.

Someone (maybe the Russians?) had a folk saying: May the gods please save us from those who are only trying to help.

> I don't think this has any racist connotations

I have a really hard time making sense of this sentiment. You're stipulating that the words have truly no ill intent whatsoever, and yet you're happy that they're being banned?

And beyond that, does this sort of thing really belong in the top ten thousand concerns of anyone, when it comes to making the world a better place?

Pretty much. Tutoring a minority kid would actually make a difference, but oh so much work. Much easier to change my FB background image to something trendy and downvote the "racists" who don't instead.