goto_self

This is absurd. Something can work in some cases for some people and yet not in all cases. It's not a matter of always working or never working.

There's a line of thought I keep seeing in this thread: a purpose of imprisonment is deterrence by punishment. people still commit crimes. therefore deterrence by punishment doesn't work. therefore prisons should be replaced with free-range daycare for adults.

You don't have to like the idea of restricting someone's freedom. But would you rather that a violent offender be in prison and unable to cause further harm? I would.

The main flaw in your argument is that not all repercussions are legal.

Would I try heroin if there were no negative consequences? I'd certainly be less averse.

> Some people claim to be visual thinkers, but there are blind people who are still perfectly able to think. Likewise with deafness. Clearly neither of these can be the only basis for thought.

I don't dispute your conclusions, but I think you might be taking the idea of visual thought too literally. It doesn't necessarily mean a rendered view of a scene, but rather can encompass abstract visual-like spaces such as control flow graphs when thinking through the proof of a program's correctness

Language is just the mind's way of bragging about how many thoughts it has.

Or in other words, quoting James Mickens:

> My point is that security people need to get their priorities straight. The "threat model" section of a security paper resembles the script for a telenovela that was written by a paranoid schizophrenic: there are elaborate narratives and grand conspiracy theories, and there are heroes and villains with fantastic (yet oddly constrained) powers that necessitate a grinding battle of emotional and technical attrition. In the real world, threat models are much simpler (see Figure 1). Basically, you're either dealing with Mossad or not-Mossad. If your adversary is not-Mossad, then you'll probably be fine if you pick a good password and don't respond to emails from [email protected]. If your adversary is the Mossad, YOU'RE GONNA DIE AND THERE'S NOTHING THAT YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. The Mossad is not intimidated by the fact that you employ https://. If the Mossad wants your data, they're going to use a drone to replace your cellphone with a piece of uranium that's shaped like a cellphone, and when you die of tumors filled with tumors, they're going to hold a press conference and say "It wasn't us" as they wear t-shirts that say "IT WAS DEFINITELY US," and then they're going to buy all of your stuff at your estate sale so that they can directly look at the photos of your vacation instead of reading your insipid emails about them. In summary, https:// and two dollars will get you a bus ticket to nowhere. Also, SANTA CLAUS ISN'T REAL. When it rains, it pours.

The high-bandwidth, low-effort interactions you're talking about might only work with quick, two-way exchanges, as in a spoken conversation. In that regard, I definitely have a weird English variant among friends. I enjoy the broken English of so many memes.

There's an additional layer of language where you can switch to a different variant of the rules as part of communication. Speaking in another register defines the tone of the interaction.

But I'd still like to defend standard English as the default even in informal groups, because the standard makes it readily accessible to many people and ensures as much permanence as one can get from language.

All that said, I have one more flip-flopping disclaimer. I think some of the rules agreed upon before are really dumb. Putting punctuation in quotation marks if the punctuation is not from the quote is monstrous. I will not follow that rule in any context.

There's a common argument that the purpose of language is communication, that mistakes don't matter if the desired information is communicated, and that prescriptive rules for punctuation and grammar are merely pedantry.

However, that argument is self-defeating. The purpose of language is obviously communication, yes. Mistakes might not hinder communication in some cases, sure. The rules of grammar have changed throughout history and are somewhat arbitrary, granted.

However, as the ideas one wishes to communicate become more complex, abandoning the greater set of grammatical tools makes ones sentences more difficult to read. I see this all the time in professional environments of all places. I frequently have to reread communications because someone was too lazy to proofread.

And as for language changing through time? It does. But that's not carte blanche for making whatever changes one wishes. Language change has to come about by collective agreement, not by some cowboy who doesn't like grammatical rules.

Yeah, knowing fewer facts and understanding where those facts come from and how they fit together is better than just memorizing lots of trivia.

But having separate private and personal accounts on your phone is very different from application resource namespacing. They're essentially orthogonal concerns.

In the case you're making, a user (a real actual human user) has different settings when _using_ the phone in two contexts. In the latter case, applications are restricted to sandboxes with well-defined interactions between each other's memory, processes, devices, sockets, and files.

And the advent of containerization is becoming standard practice now, precisely because it makes more sense for certain situations, where the user abstraction has proven less useful and more cumbersome. That was the point of this subthread.

Yes. Line marks are amazing.

I have counterpoints on both ends here.

It's not always possible for a "goto definition" function to work in dynamic languages.

If you're in a large file, it's quite easy to jump around with line marks (a la vim), searching, etc.