@h @enkiv2 @a_breakin_glass @mareklach @Gargron @mairin @paulfree14 @loke @clacke

For me, I think it's more that

"There is a rise of fascism internationally; and Russia is acting as a banker and coordination center for it. And now it's spread to the GOP."

It's not "homegrown fascism OR Russian espionage".

It's BOTH.

However: Russia also backs fringe left-wing parties, and the message Russia is especially anxious to promote from all sides is "Everyone, ignore what Russia is doing".

There are many problems with this take, because it's a bit *too* glib and easy. But Obama and both Clintons kinda do fit this picture rather closely.

I would like to see an actual economic left rise again.

(On a world stage, in the 1930s FDR was an economic centrist. The current Democratic party are center-right, while the Republicans have moved from right to far-right to Actual Nazis.)

But I'm also kind of worried that an 'actual left' might resemble the USSR.

Anyway, the end result of a night of hacking: a text file that adds *slightly* more value to CC-CEDICT, at least for the hopeless foreigner

刚gang1 [ 冈gang1 刂dao1 ] hard/firm/strong/just/barely/exactly
剜wan1 [ 宛Wan3 刂dao1 ] to scoop out/to gouge out

in that it just shows individual characters AND THEIR DECOMPOSITIONS, and puts them next to their pronunciations SO THAT YOU CAN REMEMBER THEM or at least have a faint hope of being able to look them up

Needs more work, but it's a beginning.

Huffington Post claims possession of a Daily Stormer 'style guide' for writers: written by Andrew Anglin, the site's founder, and promoted by Vox Day and Andrew 'weev' Auernheimer.

Unless the provenance of this document can be disproved (because it is the Internet), it appears very explicit that yes, these are in fact *literal*, not ironic, Nazis and they are in fact committed to anti-Semitism and an end game of genocide.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/daily-stormer-nazi-style-guide_us_5a2ece19e4b0ce3b344492f2?m3a

@vertigo @akkartik @seanl @h Electronic circuit diagrams are another interesting counterexample. They evolved before computers, of course, so there wasn't a need for them to be easily serialisable across a planetary information network originally designed to host 5-bit Teletypes.

It would be *super cool* to have graphical languages - I've expected it since the Commodore PET's graphics symbols in PETSCI. But interop is the big problem. Things like PETSCI just died, and so much was lost.

Eg, you'd THINK that

[name: Nate age: 42]

would be something like a JSON object, where the colon bits are property names? But nope nope not even close.

I THINK this translates as 'a function which literally executes and assigns the symbol "Nate" to a local variable named "name" '

So a block is something like a *compiled closure*, with its own environment, not an object, I think.

But it's ALSO a closure where runtime code can PARSE AND ALTER THE PROGRAM TEXT.

These are properties I like.

Man what if Trump doing the Jerusalem thing turns out to be actually the Antichrist.

"Gaze ye heavens, and despair! Our planets baddest ass of all time! The One Who Shall Make War Against Eternity!"

Guy should at least, idk, be a nine feet tall genetically engineered superman with spiky black armour and a pet dragon?

What if it's this guy and the angels are just sitting there with this frozen look on their faces trying not to smirk.

"That's... right. That's your contender is it. Ok."

I have a knee-jerk hatred of compilation, and an instinctive orientation toward interpretation.

This is because I keep looking for a language that can be used to safely run small snippets of code across the Internet.

It seems clear to me that 1) no-one's gonna run machine code over the Internet, lol wtf, and 2) no-one's gonna 'finish' 'the compiler' before you boot the network. So 3) any 'compiler' must operate in and on the language itself.

There don't seem many languages suitable for this.

Help, I Accidentally Clicked On A Promoted Tweet And Loaded A Corporate Web Page Selling Big Data Cloud Coffeemakers When All I Wanted To Know Was What Fundamental Pillar Of Democracy And Life On Earth Is Being Permanently Destroyed By Evil Enemies Of Humanity Today: An Anonymous Twitter User's Confession

One of the things that most annoys me about computing circa 2017 - which has kinda always been true but I hoped it would get better, and it hasn't - is that we have a serious lack of truly fundamental, correct concepts.

Information is almost literal thought-stuff. Costs a bit of energy, space, time, yes, but compared to bricks, it's like magic super-Lego. Almost anything we can imagine, we can create.

But we've created a vast tangled web we can't really understand. Didn't mean to. Just did.

Inform 7 is a weird hybrid of a beast. It's a bunch of separate models clunked together:

* a logic-like language describing a bunch of relationships about a game world

* a class and object model

* a type model

* imperative procedures with global variables

* a rule-like language describing unnamed procedures which get invoked by a complex, baroque, compiled-in logic based on classes and types

* the whole thing implemented in *natural language English*, or what looks at first glance like it.

<<Here is an open secret known to bug finders: The set of bugs found by tool A is rarely a superset of another tool B,
even if A is much better than B. >>

That... is a problem, though, isn't it?

If the tools are genuinely improving, shouldn't they be converging on finding the same bugs?

Why are our bug-finding tools NOT converging?

@pnathan So what formalism (I'll use that word instead of 'language', to reinforce that I do NOT mean 'compiler and typesystem' but something simpler and deeper) can I use to compare and contrast the type and function and data semantics of Rust, Go, Swift, D, ObjectiveC, Java, Elm?

What primitives must that formalism have? What's the smallest, simplest possible core?

So far I guess Inductive Calculus of Constructions is the only one that's actually worked...

1984: When you could still legitimately think of computers as "a shift of the power balance" towards individuals and not giant mega-corporations

and you could think of software as sort of modules you plugged into your brain and suddenly 'I know kung fu'

I mean if you were Stewart Brand you could

https://archive.org/details/Whole_Earth_Software_Catalog_1984_Point

https://mastodon.social/media/23II-0GhisYI6uhhDwY https://mastodon.social/media/4XXQpiOhVmSL63ybC9U

@strypey my weird ideas about programming languages are mostly coming from the same general use case as this guy's proposal, which I like:

https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/extending_Scuttlebutt_with_Annah/

but I don't think that typed functional languages as we know them are going to cut it in this kind of environment, for the future, because I don't think they're either general or extensible enough to support all the data that such distributed persistent data-based networks will want to model.

Korean-American writer Leonard Chang had a novel rejected because his characters didn't seem 'Asian enough':

http://www.booklistreader.com/2017/05/30/books-and-authors/publishing-u-how-do-i-keep-my-head-up-while-finding-a-publisher/

<<We get too much of the minutiae of [the characters’] lives and none of the details that separate Koreans and Korean-Americans from the rest of us. For example, in the scene when she looks into the mirror, you don’t show how she sees her slanted eyes, or how she thinks of her Asianness.>>

@dartigen @benhamill There's a temporary marriage of convenience between:

* 'I hate society burn it all down' (4chan)
* 'find and amplify anyone who's causing trouble inside the UK / USA' (RU)
* 'we must make Americans scared of liberals to preserve capitalism' (Fox/Breitbart)
* 'we need anyone who's engaged to vote, and the alt-right are young and engaged' (GOP)
* 'angry means clicks, and we need clicks' (social media)

Related: I really want to understand why 'life is a warzone and we must all make TOUGH CHOICES, ie, do not-nice things to the designated out-group and follow not-nice leaders' has become one of the dominant stories since the Bush years.

Eg, Walking Dead. Why is that whole survivalist mentality so super-popular? Why aren't people critical of it? Why did it just take over pop culture?

It's a wrong and bad and dangerous idea and we shouldn't be thinking in those terms. imo.

I often wish there were a way to know what choices in life are good.

Life in an advanced technological society sometimes seems like one of those really nasty 1980s graphic adventures. It looks like you can do anything you want, but 99% of the choices will lead to the Earth burning to the ground.

I hope the answer to saving the world doesn't turn out to be something stupid like 'combine the rubber duck with the lederhosen and use it on the politician, but only when the dump truck is yellow'

Newsweek: At least 30 new monuments to the Confederacy have been built, mostly on private land, since 2000. That estimate may be low.

http://www.newsweek.com/new-confederate-monuments-are-quietly-going-across-us-690798?amp=1