snowfarthing

I'm not entirely convinced this is at all true. The American Left fully understood the "paradox of tolerance", and they pushed their own tolerance to the point where, much to the relief of many Americans, President Trump won his second term.

The problem with the "Paradox of Tolerance" is that intolerance of the "intolerant" drive the "intolerant" underground. They may feel isolated for long periods of time, but when they realize that they are the majority, rather than the minority, power can shift dramatically. This is called a "preference cascade" and it's particularly common among totalitarian regimes.

The only way to prevent preference cascades is to have just enough tolerance of views you consider hateful that they don't get driven underground -- and you do this by rigorously debating anyone you find to be wrong, without going after their livelihoods (among other things).

This essay fleshes out a lot of the conclusions that have been nebulously growing in my mind over the last few months and even years!

And now that I think of it, the fear of AI resemble somewhat the fear of runaway nanobots -- the notion that we can create something that will just turn the entire world into grey goo -- which, in order to have this fear, among other things, you have to overlook the fact that we are already surrounded by nanobots! We just call them "bacteria".

When I first saw the headline, I imagined a big huge organ with 100 keys and pedals, lots of stops, and huge pipes. I was very pleasantly surprised to see something small, with maybe 48 keys, and a handful of creatively-placed pipes!

Sometimes when we imagine a project, we think about how big it is, and get discouraged -- but this is a good reminder that some of the best projects are small, and thus, are less daunting and more easily tackled!

On the contrary, the so-called "capitalism" that emerges when we respect individual rights is the one way we can escape this.

Too much emphasis is placed on government regulation and corporate environments to "make things right" when, in the end, they are all just rigid bureaucratic structures that trap people and force them into heirarchies.

For my entire life, I have mostly tried to conform to this -- albeit mostly focusing on startups because they are more likely to value individuals, and less likely to have rigid structure and tradition -- but I'm only just now realizing that my autistic and ADHD tendencies being pigeon-holed even this much is a recipe for the burnout I've experienced for most of my adult life. I need to try something different!

And if I lived in a more rigid society (all non-capitalist countries are far more rigid than capitalist ones -- pretty much by definition) my options for fleeing rigidity would be vanishingly small.

I just had a random thought: perhaps it would be a good idea to have a project that doesn't do optimizations, but just focuses on fast compiling.

Then again, I now can't help but wonder if LLVM (or even GCC) would be fast, if you just turned off all the optimizations ...

(Of course, at this point, I can't help but think "you don't need to worry about the speed of compilation" in things like Common Lisp or Smalltalk, because everything is compiled incrementally and immediately, so you don't have to wait for the entire project to compile before you could test something ...)

I think this is more a problem with the nature of technology in general.

If we want simple and fast, we can do that, but sometimes it doesn't cover the corner cases that the slow and complicated stuff does -- and as you fix those things, the "simple and fast" becomes "complicated and slow".

But, as others have observed about GCC vs LLVM (with LLVM having had a similar life cycle), the added competition forced GCC to step up their game, and both projects have benefited from that competition -- even if, as time goes on, they get more and more similar to what each can do.

I think all our efforts suffer from the effects of the Second Law of Thermodynamics: "You can't win. You can't break even. And it's the only game in town."

I was puzzled by the source at first -- it seemed like Assembler, but was too high-level to be that -- and it looked too complex to be BASIC (or possibly JOSS, I suppose) -- I was a little taken aback to see the extension of the filename as "pl1", because I sort-of thought PL/1 was higher-level than that!

When I was in college in 1995/96 (and later 1999/2000), this was somewhat how I programmed too. While I had access to computers at both home and school, my access to them were somewhat limited, and the tools I had at my disposal were very limited (especially at home).

I cannot help but reflect on how my approach was a "hybrid" between both pencil-and-paper and modern-cli-and-ide -- we were coming out of the age of really simple home computers, but not yet in the age of super fast computers with large monitors.

Many years ago, when I was learning about pair programming, I remember someone (possibly even Kent Beck) saying that "Pair programming is kryptonite for incompetent introverts!" and I remember thinking, "Well, yeah, but I bet it's the haven of incompetent extroverts!"

While I haven't really been in forums debating the merits and perils of paired programming, I cannot help but be amused by this essay, that pretty much confirms this initial thought I had about paired programming!

I recall a psychologist or psychiatrist who challenged the notion of "defiant personality disorder" by observing two things:

(1) Many of these "defiant" people merely didn't trust credentials -- they were perfectly fine with authority who earned deference by virtue of proving they really do know what they are doing, and

(2) That the psychology/psychiatry profession in general, consisting of people who have their Masters and PhDs, have to "suck up" to a lot of credentialed authority, without question, to get their degrees -- and thus it's only natural for them to expect everyone to unconditionally respect credentials!

(For the record, I have a PhD, but it's in pure math, which is possibly simultaniously both the least practical and most practical thing you could possibly learn -- but as such, I'm tangential to engineering and physics -- and I'm pretty sure that all three of these fields have a certain "fine, you have a credential, but can you really walk the walk?" element to them.)

One of the reasons X is being fazed out in favor of Wayland is because X is far more global than it needs to be -- and this is one of the reasons it has security risk that can't be completely removed without API-breaking effects.

There are certainly levels of the abstraction pyramid where mutable global state is unavoidable; however, it shouldn't be too difficult to get to a point where we have enough abstraction so that we don't need to worry about mutable global state for what we do.

And even if those abstractions can't be 100% effective, we'd go a long way to achieving the desirable results of getting rid of it, if we just develop the mindset of avoiding it if at all possible, excepting for very rare instances where it's needed as a last resort.

First off, it's now clear from the evidence that the "insurrection" was the FBI working hard to entrap all the people they could, after everything was done to limit security on the day of the protest.

Secondly, the riots in Washington DC on Trump's first inauguration are rather pretty, the way the fires of businesses glowed in the night.

I'm really tired of pretending that somehow the Republicans are the "uncivil" ones, while the Democrats are perfectly innocent, and wouldn't harm a fly.

If Democrats can incite violence and post information with impunity, yet Republicans get fact-checked out the wazoo (by Democrats, no less!) ... it's very hard for us to take the claim that this wasn't "because of his politics".

For the last several years, they censored the Hunter Biden laptop story (before an election, at that!), the claim that COVID was possibly a lab leak, and other "uncouth" topics that turned out to be reasonable after all. And the positions censored were far more likely to be associated with Republicans than they were for Democrats.

Republicans on FaceBook in particular joked about being in FaceBook jail heavily -- observing "shadow bans", outright bans, and other ways they couldn't communicate with their fans and friends.

Indeed, when Twitter was bought out and the censorship was removed, many of these people were amazed at how much interaction they got afterward -- it was night and day. And we now know from the "Twitter Files" that the Government was behind these efforts all along, so it's not just a "company has the right to moderate content" issue, it's a "government is violating the 1st Amendment" issue.

I intended to include something that I now see I forgot: this phenomenon is called a "preference cascade", and it's a big reason why we see dramatic shifts in power in oppressive regimes.

"Harris’ moral and ethical failings are nothing compared to Trump. You can do what I did and not vote and not support either candidate. Stand up for truth and righteousness and stop trying to justify your support for a person as shitty as Trump. It’s a choice to defend shitty behavior. When you do so you end up smelling like shit."

She implicitly supported Biden. She was complicit in all the lies that were pushed about Biden, particularly those about his fitness for the position. She endorsed going after political enemies with the legal system -- and then had the gall to claim that Trump would do just that himself.

And then to go on and claim that if you supported a crappy candidate, then those people are crappy too, you have basically condemned the 95% or so who voted for one or the other -- for motivations that are well beyond either yours or my understanding -- this attitude right here is why politics is so toxic these days.

"If you want to discuss Biden then start another thread. This one is about Donald Trump."

You cannot talk about Trump without putting him in context. The fact is, the reason why we have Trump for President again, is because the person who replaced him was so horrible, that Trump looked better in comparison.

And what's more, conisdering what I said -- and what you are responding to -- I have to bring up Biden, because my entire point is "both sides do it". If you want to bring back honor and decency to the White House, you have to do it with an honorable and decent person. Neither Biden nor Harris fit that bill.

You aren't aware of what was found on Hunter's laptop, or in Ashley's diary (she had to choose her showering times carefully to make sure her father wouldn't join her), or Tara Reed's allegations. To say Biden hasn't accepted $30 billion in bribes, in particular, is laughably funny, and he was caught having secret documents kept illegally in his garage. He is on record threatening aid from Ukraine unless they fired a particular prosecutor who was investigating his son. He has, for all intents and purposes, withheld disaster aid from North Carolina, who didn't vote for him. He has plagiarized speeches several times over the years -- indeed, this is what derailed his first attempt to run for President, back in the 1980s. And he hasn't been particularly nice to reporters, and considering what he is on record saying to constituents, I can confidentially say that the only reason he doesn't engage in Twitter feuds is because he's too senile to be allowed near Twitter.

Biden, as a person, is narcissistic, self centered, selfish, boorish, infantile, incurious, lustful, and greedy. He’s a despicable person and those who support him are terrible people.

Either that, or they are just ignorant -- because the mainstream press has worked hard to hide these kinds of things from us. It is why trust in them has plummeted over the last few years.

There is a danger to hating something so much, that it goes underground. A major reason why President Trump won the first time around was because hatred against Trump and his supporters was so strong, that many people being polled were afraid to tell the pollsters who they were really voting for, for fear of being destroyed. This is a major reason why Trump outperformed his polling.

In the meantime, when people are lied to by every avenue of culture, they are convinced everyone else believes in the lies, so they feel alone and in the minority, even though they may very well be in the majority. So long as this spell can be maintaned, the dictator can hold his grip on power.

But what happens when that spell was broken? When something happens, and all of the sudden, everyone realizes they've been in the majority all along? This is how dictatorships topple -- and the toppling can happen very swiftly, as Ceausescu discovered in Romania.

Elon Musk acquiring Twitter and taking out the censorship is what initially cracked the spell this time; and when Trump was elected not just by Electoral College, but by the Popular Vote, the spell was broken completely. It's why we're seeing so much change now, and why it's so rapid.

Do you realize the exact same things can be said about the President we had for the last four years?

It's really hard to worry about your own guy being a scumbag, when the opposition supports a scumbag too (and then lies about it).

What I don't get is why anyone would want to allow the automation. Is it really that difficult to use the up-arrow key and correct the mistake? Doing something automatically when it's sort-of correct is a recipe for doing things you didn't intend to do.

According to "The Millionaire Next Door", this is actually a surprisingly common "edge case". The "rich" are the people who diligently save and invest, get their hands dirty at what they do, and don't care about pretenses -- they'll drive a beat-up pickup truck because it helps them at their work, and they can take it out for fishing and hunting, and they can have it paid off -- while that pretty Porsche is going to just sit in a driveway and rust, because it's too nice to take it for a run doing the things you want to do!

Whereas the "high income" people -- typically doctors and lawyers -- are spending lots of money on nice suits and cars and homes, but have little to show for it in terms of actual wealth.

Having said that, I don't mind the rich who aren't pretentious getting a discount. I'd call it a "pretention tax". What's further ironic is that the former tend to appreciate paying a little extra if it ensures that a job is well-done, whereas the latter tend to skimp on paying extra, and often get the poor-quality results you'd expect.

And yes, there's exceptions to both categories, too -- indeed, it's not as if it's hard to live within your means as a doctor or a lawyer, if you don't mind looking a little "lower class" as a result (and if your clientele are the working class, this may even be a bonus!). But it's nonetheless a fascinating dynamic to keep in mind!

I think it's even more complex than that. There's only one human I can understand pretty thoroughly, inside and out, and that's me -- and even then, there are a lot of limitations!

We cannot know all the thoughts and experiences of another human being. Even when that person is 100% genuine, there will be aspects to that person that will surprise you!

And that doesn't even get into the weeds of autistics, ADHDers, and intelligent people (I happen to be all three) -- who learn from an early age they have to pretend to be something they aren't, otherwise they'll face intense bullying and ostracision. And even then, there's going to be something "off" about them ....

Having learned in the last year that I'm autistic, and having learned a lot just about what that means, I cannot help but wonder to what degree Reagan and Trump may be dyslexia and not even know it.

It's very easy to realize you're "different" from other people, but can't place your finger on it, yet manage to make up for the differences in odd and creative ways!

I'm not entirely sure if smugness is the entire reason for doing it -- I suspect that for many of us (particularly autistics like me) there's a certain amount "But someone's wrong on the internet!" syndrome going on.

Some of us just can't work up the energy to answer a question, but if we see something wrong, it doesn't sit well with us, and we have to correct it.

And yes, sometimes when I see a question I can answer, it gives me the energy to answer it ... but not always ...

When working on a test that has several asserts, I have adopted the process of adding one final assert, "assert 'TEST DEBUGGED' is False", so that even when I succeed, the test fails -- and I could review to consider if any other tests should be added or adjusted.

Once I'm satisfied with the test, I remove the line.

Indeed, it's an interesting rabbit hole!

I liked the part where they were looking for someone to manufacture the handles, and the Japanese machinist said "If he could make it, I can make it!".

Indeed, having gone down the rabbit hole of machining (both to see if it would be a viable hobby and if it could even be a career), this was the attitude of the shop teacher: "if you can think it, you can probably make it". I am far more surprised that neither the American nor the Taiwanese manufacturers said this. Then again, perhaps it was because management didn't talk to the guys who made things!

(Now that I think of it, had they done that, perhaps they would have gotten the answer "We can do it, but the fins will wear down the tool too fast, at least until we can figure out a better material for the tools!" instead of "Nope, we can't do that!")

I have concluded, as a general rule of thumb, that if something costs more to recycle than to produce naturally, it is probably more harmful to the environment to recycle it than to create it fresh and dispose of it properly.

There are certain exceptions to this -- nickel cadmium batteries come to mind -- but for things like this, the question isn't "is it more economic to produce it new than to recycle it?" so much as it's "is it more economic to recycle it than to dispose of it properly?"

I find this particular notion to be rather weird. I cannot see how it's a "waste" if something's fed to animals instead of humans!