https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/trump-russia-nra-connection-maria-butina-alexander-torshin-guns/

<< For more than a year, reports have trickled out about deepening ties among prominent members of the National Rifle Association, conservative Republicans, a budding gun-rights movement in Russia—and their convergence in the Trump campaign.>>

Please boost if you would like this site to get more traction

http://www.tractionengine-photos.net/

Neils Bohr himself could not fathom the logic by which Microsoft Word or Windows RDF ordered/unordered item lists operate.

Sometimes you will type '* blah' and you will get a list.

Sometimes you will not.

Delete some more characters and your paragraph will be in a superposition of listness and unlistness.

If we could comprehend how this works, we could probably invent antigravity.

Even Jonathan Zitttrain is confused by it!

And apparently there's a 'contract law listserv' somewhere which is full of lawyers laughing and pointing fingers at this terribad contract

https://twitter.com/zittrain/status/979188426288304128

@mala

Tips to handle low-speed Internet:

1. Make everything cacheable
2. Make everything cacheable
3. Make everything cacheable
4. No, seriously, make everything cacheable
5. That means no ads or trackers
6. Just content.

The only thing that can stop a bad doctor with a cigarette is a good doctor with a cigarette.

The March For Our Lives reporting is the first time I've seen the interesting new framing term (in the Lakoff sense), "gun reform".

I'm interested to see if people pick this up and go with it.

Framing is a dirty subliminal art but it's a large part of modern politics.

_Gun control_ is inherently offputting because it's about a government wanting to _control_, what its citizens do.

But how can anyone be against _reform_? It's about making things newer, and newer is by definition better!

Meanwhile, in Christchurch New Zealand: a foreign-owned company is trying to bottle and export up to 1.6 billion litres per year of our fresh water, at the same time as our city council says they'll have to start chlorinating because our public city wells aren't up to scratch.

(The govt agency that grants water consents overrode our local votes around 2010, at the whim of right-wing neoliberals).

The water privatisation wars. They're happening.

http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2018/03/chinese-company-drills-water-bore-in-christchurch-despite-council-warning.html

https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/102184

Thought:

"Design" as practiced today by computer people tends to be heavily based on the idea of negative space: that good design is what's NOT in a system, and by extension, what is NOT ALLOWED TO BE ADDED to the system by a user.

A "design-heavy" system, then, is inevitably highly restrictive about user actions, lest they "ruin the cool design" by adding their own desired features that "make it messy".

But users WANT control over their own space.

Is there a "design" that empowers users?

@pnathan "Lets build Lisp on Java, so we get a language with the purity and simplicity of the Java standard class library, and the ease of use of Lisp"

@djsundog It is a truth universally recognised that designing your dream Forth system is much more fun than programming in Forth

@SuperLeo It's basically 'what if The X-Files were a sitcom'

Shaenon's a long-timer in the webcomics scene. Her first one, Narbonic, was about mad scientists.

http://narbonic.com/

Oh Stack Overflow sometimes you are pure poetry

https://mastodon.social/media/K5Xi8Qff_01Dec2ajnM https://mastodon.social/media/rSKWSe-c9Ir4l5QGkDo

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

@clacke @jhertzli

See also: Marcus Rowland's amusing tabletop RPG 'Diana: Warrior Princess'

I've never played it but just the description sounds WONDERFUL

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana:_Warrior_Princess

<<The game is a parody of Xena: Warrior Princess, and its setting tries to portray the present day with the same level of accuracy that Xena portrays Ancient Greece – i.e. not much.[1] >>

@h I would love to see more easily-accessible world maps and timelines that illustrate our best available knowledge about the cultures and empires of the Americas, Africa, India, Eurasia, Pacific, coordinated with each other.

There's a huge gap in understanding just what was going on in all parts of the world while our Euro-centric history was going down.

Something like a Google Earth with culture/empire boundaries or trade routes and a scrubbable timeline would be awesome.

@lnxw48a1 @notclacke @clacke

Right. The use case I'm thinking of is basically in the ballpark of Named Data Networking - either analogues of it, or what fediverse-type systems could run over it if NDN gets off the ground and we think it's a sufficient basis for, eg, stuff like Scuttlebutt.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking

https://named-data.net/

NDN is not content-addressed but uses path strings (and returns packets, I think)

Why I Don't Think Content Addressing Is The Answer

There's a lot of interest in content-addressed distributed stores today, where you punch in a hash of your content (a file) and get that file back.

tldr: Superficially this looks nice, but I think this is a bad idea and we will deeply regret it if we go this route.

The reason: you need BOTH a hash AND a formal 'location' . The hash is there to warn you if the document has been altered in transit.

It can't do that if it's ALSO the location!

This Thing Called Videotex

"Its potential market is huge. After all, it's limited only by the number of phones and TVs in use."

Byte, October 1982

https://archive.org/stream/byte-magazine-1982-10/1982_10_BYTE_07-10_Computers_in_Business#page/n11/mode/2up

https://mastodon.social/media/kE5P8J83nf54T3J3ijE

My thoughts:

There is of course the valid argument that the Unix command line simply lets you do things you can't in our existing GUIs.

This is true.

What we actually need are GUIs that visualise the command line, and command lines that take realtime feedback from GUI elements.

Aww right, Brett Victor's DYNAMICLAND website is finally online!

https://dynamicland.org/