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Most rock and roll thing I heard today :)

BellsOnSundayon 56k.rip – the 1996 dial-up internet experience

Hard to argue that things haven't gone downhill for many since then but saying that mainly means that's when you were in high school or college.

BellsOnSundayon A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

I thought this was going to be https://web.archive.org/web/20120106121645/http://wiki.alu.o.... Brings back memories of following comp.lang.lisp, not least as a sort of soap opera. Lots of characters and drama, as well as programming wizardry.

BellsOnSundayon Police officer investigated for using AI to 'create evidence' in multiple cases

Apart from the bit about killing people, for the most part.

BellsOnSundayon We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

Who says that's the advice "in England"? I'm in England and it isn't my advice.

BellsOnSundayon Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking

Recently like in the last hundred years?

BellsOnSundayon Carl Sagan's Rules for Bullshit-Busting and Critical Thinking

More likely but not certain. People who rely on this rhetorically tend to ignore it isn't a slam dunk.

BellsOnSundayon Leaving Haskell behind

There is the Simple Haskell initiative, which encourages what you're talking about, but no flag or pragma that says "this project uses simple Haskell". Obviously, simplicity is in the eye of the beholder. Fancy type features do have their use cases where they make types more expressive, the code safer and even simpler, so long as you've internalised how they work.

BellsOnSundayon What happened to Wirecutter?

In the UK the Consumer's Association and Which? fulfil the same role, and has been going since the 1950s. Before the internet the magazine was a part of everyday life for many - if my parents were going to buy something like a new washing machine my mother would go to the library and find the relevant issue. Online you can see some of their reviews but I think you need to subscribe to get all the (very rigorous) detail. The CA is a charity and has a sort of NGO status, able to issue a "super-complaint" if some industry is not working for consumers. I suppose I'm a lot less careful with money than my parents were, I never use it.

BellsOnSundayon When did people stop being drunk all the time?

I've just finished Pamuk's novel A Strangeness in my Mind, where the protagonist is a street vendor of the traditional Turkish beverage boza. Boza is a mildly alcoholic fermented barley drink considered ok for Muslims to drink. The gradual disappearance of boza sellers in the street is an index of the changes in Istanbul and Turkish society in the late 20th century, really enjoyable book. From what I've read I can imagine it's an acquired taste.

BellsOnSundayon All foster kids in California can now attend any state college for free

There are university leagues for every kind of sport in the UK. Most of the people involved take it very seriously but it's still just a form of recreation and doesn't attract crowds and money. I've never spoken with anyone who admires or envies the US system. If it came up in conversation I suppose most would find it utterly bizarre and likely to corrupt the purpose of a university, as I do.

BellsOnSundayon Akan Names

Given what he did to the British economy in the shortest tenure of any chancellor, it's easy to believe he doesn't know what day it is.

BellsOnSundayon Pink Floyd, 'The Wizard of Oz,' and me

Whoever worked out how to light a fire must have been very popular for a while, and then rapidly lost ground to the person who gave it a name.

BellsOnSundayon My ranking of every Shakespeare play

Most of those words weren't coined by him, his writing was just the earliest source that the dictionary makers could find. He didn't invent the word 'elbow', for instance.

BellsOnSundayon Medieval Arabs ate sandwiches too? (2021)

Same way that Shakespeare "invented" the word "elbow" and thousands of others.

BellsOnSundayon Fakespot Is Acquired by Mozilla

In the 19th C it was a word in the West Country dialect Thomas Hardy knew well, and appears in Jude the Obscure to describe the pig's member that is thrown at Jude. Apart from this description, it gets called "that part of the pig which is thrown away" and other euphemisms, so I suppose Hardy must have thought pizzle was already obscure enough not to get him into trouble.

BellsOnSundayon Just Simply – Stop saying how simple things are in our docs

    C-h f butterfly

BellsOnSundayon Worst Opening Sentences of 2022

Yep. That's me. I bet you're wondering how I got myself into this situation...

BellsOnSundayon Donald Knuth’s 80th birthday will be celebrated by two events in Piteå, Sweden

What's the little book of his about a man and a woman trapped on an island where they geekily explain things to each other? I might be misremembering the setting...started it once but it was pretty cheesy.

BellsOnSundayon Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Free Will

I think the tobacco industry has been no slouch in the marketing department, but the real difference is that there's no way to use tobacco that is safe and beneficial for you.

BellsOnSundayon “It is never a compiler error”

Yep, I was going to comment that if you write your own compiler you'll find plenty of bugs, which is the same point.

BellsOnSundayon Reflecting on Haskell in 2016

I know I won't be thanked for pointing out non-technical infelecities in the writing, and I'm not a grammar nazi or anything but... "There was a lot of excellent Haskell writing this year. One can’t possible enumerate all of them..." A lot of excellent writing is a singular noun, then it refers to "them", plural. Exactly the same mistake made in the next paragraph.

I don't want to be picky but if you're writing something public, learn how to use your language right.

BellsOnSundayon How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

It doesn't matter where Alec Guinness was born, he sounded about as Scottish as the Queen. Ewan McGregor's English accent OTOH sounds fake.

BellsOnSundayon How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

I found out how to pronounce sal volatile just the other day, perhaps thirty years after first reading it (crops up quite a lot in Victorian novels). Fortunately, I never once had occasion to say it out loud in the intervening time.

BellsOnSundayon How a Fake British Accent Took Old Hollywood by Storm

I don't know who John Cleese was talking about but the great comic actor Ronnie Barker (of The Two Ronnies, for you Americans) was like that. Always playing a Cockney barrow boy, Welsh housewife, upper class patrician, so when you heard him on a chat show actually being "himself" it seemed very weird. He was a notoriously private person so those masks might have been part of that. It worked for him anyway, and he must have made at least as many people laugh as did Cleese.

BellsOnSundayon A list of all Android permissions

You need this ominous sounding permission to intervene and pause an app when a call comes in.

BellsOnSundayon The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien (1956)

A lot of the points you raise aren't much to do with it being dated IMO, merely the style in which its written. You say "we'd do this, we wouldn't do that" (where "we" is presumably modern day fantasy writers), but he made those artistic choices. It sounds like you consider writing fiction to be a technological domain, where advances are made that make old forms obsolete. Maybe fantasy writing is -- I don't read it, although I have read LOTR -- but that makes fantasy sound like an even more limited genre than I thought it was. I'm an avid reader BTW, but of literary fiction, for want of a better term.

I absolutely agree that no one can write sincerely in the style of a bygone age. But having been written in the past doesn't in itself make, say, Anthony Powell's books (to pick someone writing in a different style at a similar time) dated. It's not like we learned more about how to write novels since then, or novelists of today would be easily able to do better than Powell, which I don't think they are.

Your points about racism etc do make sense though, things like that can be jarring, and it's always a bit disappointing to me to remember that our favourite writers were subject to the reality tunnels of their time.

BellsOnSundayon The Fantastic World of Professor Tolkien (1956)

What's dated about it?

BellsOnSundayon “It's The Future”

It's a humorous lament on the fragmented state of devops, not to be taken too seriously.

BellsOnSundayon How to Read a Book [pdf]

Ezra Pound's ~ABC of Reading~ changed the way I read poetry and literary fiction. When, much later, I started to be interested in technical things I don't think I found it too hard to adapt, but I still focus on style, allusion, irony and so on in the things I read. That's generally a recipe for disappointment of course but when you come across technical writers with a voice of their own it's a lovely surprise. Wilfrid Hodges, for instance, is a great writer who becomes a friend as you work through his books.