r9550684

when I first could afford to but before I had responsibilities, I bought a breguet classique off secondary market, which is already understated, and I wear it with an even more understated leather band. I consciously chose to wear it as a daily cary, which means that on more than one occasion I wore it through ghettos on the way to raves, including through one attempted and failed robbery. By now it's well worn in, and I prefer it to be a subtle signal: those who don't care don't notice, so it's not ostentatious, those who pay attention but don't know will figure it out through closer observation, and those who know, don't need to ask any questions. I do occasionally consciously take them off so as not to be flashing, when that would be particularly crass or foolhardy.

I've lost many watches in my life, but this one has trained me in the discipline of care and attentiveness towards my possessions, which extends to all things and not just the watch.

There was no particularly good reason for me to buy it though, except for the watch maker name's frequent mention in the 19th century literature, including a famous line from Pushkin's Onegin, "he strolls down boulevards, until a sleepless Breguet, calls out time for supper". now it's likely that Onegin specifically didn't wear an actual breguet, because that was a generic name for a chiming timepiece, but the imagery stuck. I grew up on 19th century literature, byronic heroes, this line is explicit reference to flaneur culture, a self-conscious decadent movement, associated with aimless strolling down boulevards dressed in provocative clothing, breguet fits here, and that's the joke of the line: at a time when a timepiece would be associated with a serious vocation, politics or military, it is being used for the most frivolous task of letting one man know when it's time to eat. I reflect on this point occasionally, when I look at my watch.

compare footnote 87 in pdf and 79 in html, the html version of the translation is invalid and reverses the meaning, uses transliteration instead of Cyrillic, but also where did the other 8 footnotes go? I have a feeling the html was transcribed by hand after the fact

for the attentive readers, I found an error in the translation of the Gogol quote, asked Eugene about it, and he said that he also just noticed that the HTML version posted here has "considerable differences" from the original PDF[0]

[0] https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?articl...

there's a handful of rags, the guardian is one of them, that have become entirely unreadable, because what they publish is essentially propaganda.

the outcome of BRICS is that the following six countries will become full members starting January 1st: Argentine, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab emirates[0].

this being the likely outcome has been known and expected for at least a few weeks, with uncertainty about some meme countries (everybody expected Niger to be on the list, even though it has an ongoing military coup, wtf, people) but the official decision was confirmed this past Thursday, aug 24th. Mohamed bin Zayed, president of UAE, important u.s. military partner, had the following to say on his country's membership "We respect the vision of the BRICS leadership and appreciate the inclusion of the UAE as a member to this important group." UAE have already been acting on shared BRICS aligned interests, on July 15th India signs an agreement with UAE to settle trade in rupees[0], and on august 14th they settle first crude oil payment in rupees[1].

Out of the six members, Mr Burke, the guardian writer, only mentions two, Ethiopia, in passing, and Iran, as a mandatory bogeyman and a punchline to a joke. "Dozens of leaders of other countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East are also attending, many hoping to be invited to join the bloc." "Among potential new members are Iran and Venezuela, both hit by sanctions and diplomatically isolated." Somebody else in the comments is under the impression that South Africa, a failed state, is an invited and future member, and Mr Burke would encourage this misunderstanding, because his goal is or appears to be to paint the outcome of BRICS expansion as inconsequential, to remind you that only freaks, failed states and war criminals want to be its members. This is unfortunately not the case, and the outcome is yet another massive failure in the string of many of u.s. diplomatic corps.

[0]https://www.arabianbusiness.com/politics-economics/uae-saudi... [0]https://www.reuters.com/world/india-ties-up-with-uae-settle-... [1]https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/india-makes-first-cr...

cyberpunk in the 90s was a lived experience, particularly so in Eastern Europe. I read Neuromancer, watched johnny mnemonic and blade runner on pirated VHS tapes, and armitage and bubble gum crysis on pirate tv[0]. there were old grandmas selling cd releases from RAZOR 1911 and PARADOX all over the place. "ooh, little munchkin, you're into 3d modeling? here's a new cd I got lightwave 3d, 3d studio max and Maya, cracked[1], $3". there were dozens if not hundreds of BBSes, and your local friendly FIDO point administrator. there were several large markets where you would buy computer parts grand bazaar style[2], so you buy an AMD K6 (in a box? dude, it's back of the truck OEM in an anti-static bag, better pray it works when you bring it home) that runs at 166 mhz or whatever and overclock it to a whopping 300 mhz, which necessarily implies that your desktop box was in a constant state of messing around with. no amount of LEDs and glass covers of a modern gaming rig will give you the same feeling as a boring 90s beige box did, because inside the beige box you had a 3dfx voodoo 6 months after it got released, and it's the first time consumer grade 3 acceleration is within your personal reach. of course some Finn in the demoscene has already made a back of a napkin C program, that you can compile in your pirated copy of Visual Studio, that shows you how to draw a shaded rectangle using your voodoo. everybody was on the same page: scene releases, demos, themes, background pictures, music, bbs styles, nicknames and scene group names were all incorporating cyberpunk aesthetic and contributing the aesthetic at the same time. reality was providing cyberpunk, and cyberpunk authors were providing the way for us to see the reality.

[0]you had to buy a descrambler to watch it [1]she would never explicitly say it was cracked, because of course everything was cracked [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjDHhdx_tGY

I find it odd that Common Lisp implementations for c machines never experimented with region-based memory management. even allegro Common Lisp doesn't support it. regions have been extensively explored by the ml family of languages, with at least ML Kit implementing them, but I guess ml people (for example MLTon provides rationale for why they don't support them) concluded that they are bad for you. still for systems that require hard realtime guarantees, like video games, it's a handy feature.

personally I fist encountered this idea in a video game: Abuse, a 2d side scroller for dos, had its own lisp interpreter, which had separate "spaces" for objects of various permanence, with EVAL, that ran per-frame, discarding its garbage upon completion.

years later I learned that lisp machines also used "areas" extensively to great effect[0]. by allocating to specific area you could affect paging, improve paging locality, have custom gc behavior and of course invalidated an area in a single call.

[0]https://tumbleweed.nu/r/lm-3/uv/chinual.html#Areas

this is a pure grift post, which is what one would expect from a former director of an adtech grift (but I repeat myself) company. it should be obvious that the goal here is not to communicate the poor state of the job market, but to exploit the narrative of the poor hiring market in order to attract attention to a subpar candidate.

I find it amusing that fedir ("ted") skyba was still the ceo of AIR this past January, when AIR reported record profits and purchased another mcn grifter "ScaleLab". google reviews and elsewhere of scalelab are hilarious "don't use! pure scammers!". the co-founders of air decided to get rid of their star ceo just as the company started turning serious profit. no honor amongst thieves!

an mcn, or a multi-channel network, is a company that helps "content creators" promote and monetize their channels. they provide additional services that are generally value add fluff. you go to an mcn in order to boost your subscriber numbers, in exchange for a cut of your profit. if the pimp analogy comes to your head, it's not unwarranted, there are giant mcns for onlyfans and other such services. an mcn becomes successful through aggressive on boarding practices, and then acts as a rainmaker: if the channel makes it on merit, an mcn takes a cut and claims it as huge success, if it doesn't the mcn still takes a cut until the content creators wises up and leaves. if you ever wonder how YouTube channels lose their souls, it's through the deals with mcns.

from this perspective fedir's inflated ego combined with, the way another commenter put it, parody-level fluff cv should not be a surprise.

I think the only reason pen's gratuitous violence stands out is because the tropes and the narrative structure are outdated. a trigger happy scrapper is played for laughs in children's cartoons today, but the joke is telegraphed so that there's no confusion. j.m. barrie instead relies on the reader's ability to keep context in long form.

I think addressing child's inner world on its own terms was attempted by the victorians to begin with, they had the whole cult of child thing, lewis carol serenading a prepubescent girl. but I think j.m. barrie did it with gusto, recognizing the symbolic and the gruesome, like you said. the grab bag of sword fights, scalps, pirates is an old time-y equivalent of going "and then the transformer shot his laser at the dinosaur, and the whole thing EXPLODED!!!"

the deliberately constructed world is essential to the various actual points of the story. it strongly delineates peter pan's world of childhood imagination and whimsy, from the various intrusions into it: Wendy as a romantic partner and a mother figure, the various lost boys accidentally growing up, etc. this is not a complicated idea, and Jim hart and nick castle have a field day with it in their Hook adaptation. like the amazing food fight scene.

I've addressed what he said for exactly one sentence in the beginning of my review: reframing fairy tales or children's tales in cynical terms is a whimsical pastime, rather than a serious literary criticism. The rest of my review is necessary, because I don't otherwise understand what would compel a grown man to engage in such an activity with a kind of serious fervor. From this perspective addressing him point by point is a waste of time, his entire approach is at fault.

Burton Weltman, the author of this article, is a humorless old man, who plays an old game of reframing whimsical and fantastical in cynical terms, but he doesn't do it for comedic effect, no he plays it straight! Mr Weltman has at least two things going against him, he's an old bore (he was a history professor for 20 years, god help his students) so his imagination and whimsy faculties have entirely atrophied, and before that he was a deputy attorney general for the state of New Jersey, so it's a safe bet he didn't have imagination and whimsy faculties to begin with. Reading this article is a literary equivalent of approaching an old man at a dinner party expecting a lively conversation, but the man starts telling you how we should outlaw kids, because they are noisy and rambunctious and make messes wherever they appear, and you think that it's a jest, until you realize with horror and pity that the man is dead serious and is in the early stages of senility. As you attempt to flee you hear his last attempts at your attention, something about hitler being a kid once.

I'm glad Rainer recommended his video, because I learned Concordia purely by word of mouth and exploration. There's a paper by Janet H. Walker, the principal on Document Examiner/Concordia for a hypertext convention https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/317426.317448, but it's more about DE.

unrelated to your point, Sonya keene's book is the only one I know that was authored and typeset using Symbolics's in-house publishing system Concordia. (besides symbolics documentation sets of course)

Concordia (and its display component document examiner) had a pretty novel hypertext approach to authoring. all the content was made up of individual notes, that you could link together either with explicit links, or implicit one-follows-the-other links. I don't know if that's how Sonya used it, but when I authored some documents using Concordia, I discovered that it was very easy to focus on addressing specific points in almost a throwaway fashion. write a note on some subject you want to address. if you don't like it, write another take on the same subject. now you have the option to put either note into the book flow, refine them in parallel, and defer editorial decisions to the very end. the process is very reminiscent of explorative programming in lisp, so in other words symbolics people figured out how to write books in the same way as they write their code. ultimate vertical integration.

a blast from the hackernews past, when obscure hacker's personal home pages made it to the front page. timonoko is a hacker's hacker, but then it's kind of hard to figure that out without attentively going over his website, something there's no motivation to do without some kind of pitch.

it's the recursive clause, that applies gplv2 to derivative works. the prescriptive part is "must cause … to be licensed", and nothing else. what is says is that paraphrasing "the work based on program must be licensed at no additional fee under similar terms as the original program". this part is self-contained and doesn't say anything about e.g. copy and distribution.

the copy and distribution clause is only part 3, where you "may" copy and distribute the program (or its derivative work, as per part 2) provided that you either "accompany it with complete … source code" or some means to get the source code from you on demand.

I can't claim this just from reading the license, because I'm not a lawyer, but in rms's reading and in Lessing's reading, the combination of part 1 and part 2 mean, paraphrasing, "if you make derivative work, compile it, and distributed it, you must also provide source code".

I didn't realize that, cheers!

but how does red hat structure their stuff? I know that gnu projects must surrender their copyright to gnu, in order to prevent future shenanigans. if red hat had their core infrastructure (package manager, package definitions, etc.) copyrighted to red hat, then they can change the license on future releases of red hat to make it restrictive. you're then free to release a gpl source of the packaged code and the red hat specific modifications, since they fall under gpl, but you can't release the scaffolding anymore that make up the rest of the red hat system. I'm not a lawyer, but I've seen this kind of trick pulled on gpl projects before, where version 2 is now bsd/proprietary, while gpl version 1 remains in public access.

it should be clarified that red hat is not violating gpl license. they are free to repackage software, then sell it closed source, and only distribute the source to its paying customers. this use-case is explicitly endorsed by rms and generally follows the spirit of free software.

Derek Thompson, the author of the article, is an embedded Capitol Hill hanger-on, and a self-proclaimed politically progressive. It's entirely tone deaf of him to write such an article, and yet here we are. People like him look at the statistics of the historically lowest trust in the press, and blame online conspiracy theories, or similar, yet they fail to look at their own political biases, and examine their writing from the perspective of journalistic integrity, to realize where the blame lies.

The article itself is the classical piece of "who are you going to trust, The Atlantic or your own lying eyes" propaganda. the only supporting argument for his assertion of "vibrant economy" are select official statistics, where's the concerns of general population are dismissed on grounds of delusion. as an aside funny thing from the article, he says that half of the u.s. population think that u.s. is in recession but in the immediate next paragraph he says "discounting opinions of tens of millions of Americans." u.s. population is 330 million, so it would be discounting the opinions of hundreds of millions. but I'm sure that was an honest mistake. how about you leave your dc apartment, Derek, and actually interview some people and find out why they think that the economy is doing bad. and then having thus catalogued the grievances, explore them individually and the systemic effects that they might have on subjective experience of economic stability. you know, journalistic work.

this article is fluff, that exploits Lancaster tourist take on the amish to clickbait into strange and deceptive conclusions.

there are two important points, ordnung is on per community basis, and second point is that the technology is exclusively used to facilitate business. (with the usual disclaimer that ordnung is often violated, for personal sinful reasons, like making personal, superficial calls on business cellphone, or taking business truck on personal trips).

therefore nobody "runs diesel for light" as a substitute for kerosine lamps, unless in gross violation of ordnung. those are not going anywhere. diesel, John deer tractors, ford trucks, cellphones, and now apparently solar panels are used in some communities to make farming work more effective with a smaller numbers in a community. Lancaster might afford to till soil with drafting horses, because they have large resource surplus, but smaller communities often rely on machinery to give them economic advantage.

from this perspective there's nothing special about the solar panels. they are a calculated and controlled addition to an existing roster of technological allowances.

this is some lovely dark marketing, an innocent insider conversation, prompted by a single developer, Xalavier Nelson Jr., who might or might not have been encouraged by Larian marketing team, gets blown up into a narrative piece by a literally who game news sweatshop. the narrative here is that "the game is so good, how can other games compete", as a concern troll, communicated by the developers of lesser games themselves. so bold as to be comedic! much respect to Dominik Warkiewicz.

I sometimes think we collectively rewrite our past for the common denominator. have people always been doing that, or it's an internet phenomenon? like maybe you listened to Andy gibb or The Bee Gees in the 70s, but you retrospectively remember that you somehow was Black Sabbath's biggest fan, even though that wasn't the circles you've spent time in at all.

I sometimes have to consciously remind myself that I haven't played chrono trigger until 2005, or that I clocked some unreasonable amount of hours playing rise of the triad, Star Wars dark forces and Ultima underworld, rather than the whatever's on the list of top 90s video games.

(hello, you are one of the people that have greatly inspired me many years go!

in the early hackerspace days there was a lot of talk of diy, but it was a kind of consumer lifestyle thing, like stitching a new strap to your laptop backpack. I think the accounts of your projects, and your adventures, put me in the direction of thinking of diy as not some kind of external activity, but as the default mode of living. solving problems from first principles, refining them from experience, solving your own problems with solutions that are fundamentally superior to off the shelf consumer stuff, because they are driven by your own needs and knowledge and experience.

my vessel of choice is a dinghy, and it's built from a kit, and the waters I navigate are much gentler than yours, but everything else is diy and jury rigged, and I sometimes would say some solution is "in the spirit of timonoko", and sometimes people ask "who's timonoko" and I say "oh it's this crazy cool Finnish kayaking guy, he wrote his own navigation software from first principles, and he wrote his own lisp, and he got into all kinds of amazing kayaking adventures"

so, thank you!)

I remember spending some non-insignificant amount of time playing 3dpong, because that was the first time I got exposed to a wireframe game. I thought the formalism was delightful, it felt very cyberpunk. My first 3d game was probably Stunts, a racing game that used flat shading (there was also Abrahams tank, but I never got into it as much as some of the older people in my circle), and then there was a lot of games that used a kind of hybrid sprite, flat shading, texturing mapping approach, from wolfenstein to Daggerfall. I got 3dpong from a Slackware cd, which was also my first linux install, back when linux was cool :> I was democoding, so probably implementing phong reflection on a sierpinski cube which was a style at the time, and here was a game that established an entire 3d experience space with just a handful of lines.

(some might ask "how the hell did you not know about Elite or Tempest??" before pervasive internet discovery was a non-linear process, I think I learned about these games in the early 2000s, from the internet)

don't forget that besides microcode much of the lisp machine logic was implemented with PALs, which were themselves programmed in Lisp. the simple gates, mixers and flip-flops were describe with lisp code, so that the logic could be tested on the lisp machine. I don't know if they built the test tables using the lisp code, or wrote them out manually, but you essentially had multiple sources of truth that could be mutually verified: lisp code, test tables, and the behavior of the specific PAL.

oh look, it's the balanced and measured lisp skeptic.

If you're going to construct commenters taxonomy, you should include yourself in it, because "I really like lisp, but surely we can rationally agree that the world/we/commercial shops/society has moved on to C" balanced and measured meta-commenter has existed since at least usenet comp.lang.lisp lisp days.

oddly enough this kind of meta-commenter primarily appears in lisp threads. possibly because lisp is one of the few languages that started in 1950s and is being used still, to the utter confusion and dismay of the balanced lisp skeptic.

this meta-comment fundamentally has a faulty premise, that the single dominant language development paradigm is the exclusive one. this was not true in the 90s, when it seemed all but inevitable that the computing world is going to standardize on c++ or java, but it's particularly faulty now, when heterogenous stacks are significantly more popular and the overall number of developers, with varied interests and preferences has increased.

the second faulty premise is that the mass of development and corporate preferences somehow matter in viability, particularly in such an individualistic field as computer programming. personally I reach for Common Lisp when I need to solve a problem where I understand neither the problem nor the solution, what's known as explorative programming. having established the parameters of the solution, I can then communicate the architecture to senior programmer team. the solution then will be communicated by people like you as "success story for Java", ignoring the fact that the successful architecture might have not even materialized without a lisp prototype. many lisp success stories are like that.

if you already understand your solution space, then the value of lisp is equivalent to any other dominant language, and things like library support and easy development availability become core differentiator. lisp is not the only language in this space, smalltalk come to mind, Julia, and to a lesser degree mathematica and Matlab.

so we're going to continue to use lisp in our special and mysterious ways to the utter dismay and confusion for people like you "but guys guys we've moved ooon!"

it was bootstrapped on maclisp on pdp-10, but targeted and ran on perq

I suspect if various stakeholders (u.s. senate, various corporate interest groups, etc) understood the implications of the home computers, they would've not hesitated to ban and otherwise regulate them. Up until early 2000s home computers were seen as toys for nerds (people forget!), a perspective that I'm sure many of them now regret.

I'd start by trying to add all the different paths to

  cffi:*foreign-library-directories*
  cffi:*darwin-framework-directories*

and if that doesn't work for whatever reason, patching the library definition in cl-sdl2 https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lispgames/cl-sdl2/main/src...

I'm going to answer to myself, since above is already a tl;dr and it's unlikely that these comments will attract any kind of attention. Note to self. There's a subtler political point that the paper is trying to make, neither vaquero tradition, nor historic accounts by colonists can strongly testify to the existence of indigenous sacred tradition in the 1600s. This are my suppositions, but I suspect what when the various conquistadors were exploring North America, they wouldn't be privy to the burgeoning sacred equestrian tradition of the indigenous tribes. By the time anglos cross the continent and establish strong enough ties to learn of such a sacred tradition, it becomes impossible to date exactly the tradition's beginning. The paper tries very hard (with talk of care, and quotes from tribe representatives) to establish that such a tradition was already establish in the 1600s, so by the time there was a contact with anglos, indigenous peoples really really knew what they were doing.

oh man so much confusion, and everyone's grifting, and I kind of suspect that the paper itself relies on ignorance to stir up a little controversy.

Iberian horses moved from south to north. English horses from east to west. This should be obvious why. Spaniards landed in Mexico, with the landmass northward, which is also the direction of their exploration. Anglos landed on the east coast and explored westward, the whole Oregon trail business. There's a point sometime in 1700s when English riding anglos were interacting, trading and warring with Iberian riding indigenous peoples.

What this paper focuses on is the details of south to north Iberian movement. The specific scientific arguments that it's making, supported by phylogeography and archeology is that the adoption of the Iberians by the indigenous tribes with some probabilities happened sometime between 1516 and 1599, and that with some probability dates of samples in specific states fall in some period between 1600 to 1700.

Next there are two simplifications that exist in general lore, and arguably in historic lore. The first one is the idea that horses were introduced by the Anglos on their westward expansion of the American frontier. The second is that Iberian horses were introduced to indigenous tribes predominantly during 1680 pueblo revolt (in future new Mexico), when a whole bunch of Spanish horses were stolen.

The first simplification exists because there's a lot of cowboy movies, and it's just a pop understanding. Nobody really cares about horses anymore. But equestrians know that there's at least vaquero tradition, and Baja California is one of the last surviving places, where men ride Iberian horses in Spanish style. vaquero ranching was dominant on the west coast, it was never "erased", but it was forgotten along with cowboy ranching in general. little known fact, but "buckaroo" is English riff on "vaquero".

The second simplification is the strawman that this paper for some reason decides to construct. It references a 2017 book, where the 1680 pueblo revolt is presented as a kind of turning point, where downtrodden Indian slaves, who were all trained by Spanish, stole some Spanish horses and rode into various tribes. The problems is that 1910 and 1930 articles that this paper references, and the first person accounts that the articles reference themself, despite being written by colonists and cowboys, were still written by serious equestrians so they don't even remotely support this comedic take. Possibly the Pueblo revolt narrative became dominant recently as an attempt to give agency to indigenous peoples.

So now one is ready to understand the political point that this paper makes: between 1600 and 1700 Indians have developed their own sacred equestrian tradition, and that this happened before and independent of Pueblo revolt and definitely by the time the anglos crossed the continent. The problem is that any serious equestrian (I dunno about anthropologists though) already agrees with this conclusion. Existing historic papers don't disagree with this conclusion either, and support it at least in terms of "yeah we went there and they already had horses".

From this perspective Charles c mann is just straight up grifting, trying to imply that indigenous equestrian tradition existed even before the Spanish, and there's a lot of people in his comments that decided it's a done conclusion.

And the fact that some North American horses didn't come east to west is also a well established fact, that unfortunately very few people know, but it's not a novel discovery this paper made.