ByteJockey

What made you go CL instead of something like, say, racket? Is it being a lisp-2 as much of a pain as it looks from the outside?

Any tips for groking the package/namespace system? I've taken a couple runs at CL and that's where my brain always breaks down.

TLC died and burned its credibility around when (or a bit before) Toddlers & Tiaras.

If Netflix wants the same cultural clout as TLC, it's a defensible decision. Up until recently, they've had significantly more.

> I think your "ease of iteration" point will still probably win for PHP vs any compiled language.

While I don't think you can beat straight php/js/python for this, there's still a lot of room for improvement over the rust/c++ magnitude of compile times.

For example Go/OCaml/Common Lisp (at least, SBCL is a compiler, there are lisp interpreters), all have reasonably quick compile times. And the latter two have repls, which really does help improve the iteration cycle.

I haven't had to play with crystal, where does it fall on this spectrum?

It works fine if you're working solo, but companies have to pay for it.

> To have a low-level developer tool that’s required to be in my menubar and administered through a closed-source GUI is IMHO an insane departure from web software development norms.

Yeah, this is why I mentioned the mac/windows shop part. Desktop is only required on mac/windows. On linux, it's just the cli, which works just fine (it's also free).

Docker desktop works pretty well, and I'm not saying they don't deserve the money, but I'm not going to spend my own money to do enterprise work, so I have to investigate alternatives (minikube and podman worked the best, in my experience).

I wasn't aware that there were any existing C compilers made in asm for modern architectures. I guess I shouldn't be too surprised.

That's cool, thanks for showing me.

The main use case right now is that your company won't spring for a docker desktop license (and you work in a windows/mac shop).

It works well enough for single docker images, but I've never gotten it to work well with a complicated docker-compose set-up (I haven't tried in a couple months though, so go check the docs before you write it off).

You can also bootstrap the way lisp did and write the fist compiler in the language and get a bunch of grad students to hand-compile it.

But, yeah if you don't have a bunch of grad students at the ready, an assembler hand-written in machine code is the only option if you want to trust the entire stack. Though I'm not sure what that would get you. I don't know of any higher language compilers that are written directly in assembly these days, so you'd never be able to compile your C/C++ compiler.

Oh, gotcha. Sorry, brain wasn't parsing right before the coffee today.

Don't most toolchains have a rather large C++ component?

Just parsing C++ is a rather large undertaking (my understanding is that it's syntax is turing complete).

> but I don’t think calling it a fallacy is correct as a fallacy means incorrect

The (logical) fallacy is in the word "must". Let's look at the statement again:

> if an aspect of a system benefits a group, that the group must have planned said system aspect

This is incorrect because sometimes groups benefit from things they haven't planned. If the statement were changed to "that there is a good chance the group planned said system aspect", it would no longer be a fallacy.

It's the same as the slippery slope fallacy. Slippery slopes are real things. Sometimes A does get out of hand and cause B. Saying that if A happens, B must happen is where it becomes a fallacy. Changing this to "If A happens, there's a good chance it will snowball and B will happen" also removes this fallacy.

Yes, but it's also very much not the kind of statement PG is talking about. It's not generally something someone would be concerned about the truth value of.

Probably something like: "food delivery near me"

Fair, those are the same words, but it's not the same meaning. The "I" in this term refers to two different people depending on who says it.

Are they really the same statement if they have two different meanings?

A fair point.

I'm not sure how the FTC would be involved here. My understanding is that the exchange between twitter and most of its users doesn't rise to the legal designation of "trade" (excluding twitter blue users, of course), unless the OP meant the FTC would get involved between Twitter and their advertisers.

I think they're using it so that they can use nil as the zero value to indicate the buffer is empty in cases where the zero value is a valid result.

I feel like the comma ok idiom is a better idea here.

Almost certainly. It's really only C++ and Rust that monomorphize everything (this is one of the reasons their builds take so long).

Depends on the authority they're claiming. If they claim to be regulating trade, that's probably gonna get slapped down really quick. The feds don't really like that. Doing background checks on the drivers would probably also get slapped down. Freedom of movement once you've been permitted entry to the US is pretty settled.

If they're claiming it's to make sure the trucks are safe enough to drive on Texas roads, it's a little different. The truckers, presumably, are allowed in the country, but they can't use any of the roads in Texas. That's the same effect, but a much more grey area. That would probably have to wind its way through the court. I'm also not sure how federal highway vs Texan maintained road would play into that.

That's really only an issue if enough of the shareholders decide to sue or you're straight up abusing your position (i.e. embezzling).

Otherwise, you can always make some stuff up about it being a long-term strategy. But, fundamentally, making a bad call isn't a violation of fiduciary duty (unless there's documents saying you know it will tank beforehand and you do it anyway).

And yet religious beliefs, generally speaking, are protected.

How hard does someone have to believe something before it crosses the line into religion? Or is it just a matter of paperwork?

> Neither was I.

Then I may have misinterpreted your statement. Would you mind elaborating on exactly which part of the essay confuses the paradox of intolerance with heresy?

Yes, but it's in the context of someone already having said that an "x-ist" statement can't be true.

The quote in question is immediately after this paragraph:

> If you find yourself talking to someone who uses these labels a lot, it might be worthwhile to ask them explicitly if they believe any babies are being thrown out with the bathwater. Can a statement be x-ist, for whatever value of x, and also true? If the answer is yes, then they're admitting to banning the truth. That's obvious enough that I'd guess most would answer no. But if they answer no, it's easy to show that they're mistaken, and that in practice such labels are applied to statements regardless of their truth or falsity.

Which the quote about the variation of a statement is given as an obvious counter argument once someone has already said that x-ist statements cannot be true.

> Really? He can’t think of a statement that is racist when a white person says it and not a black person?

He can't think of a statement that is false when a white person says it and true when a black person says it (or vice versa).

I think you're the one who is confused here. The paradox of tolerance was not conceived to describe people who merely hold opinions.

To quote Popper (this is also quoted in the wiki link you posted):

> In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Which is fair. If someone is going to respond to you by beating and shooting you, you shouldn't have to tolerate them. The justification for the intolerance of the intolerant is that the intolerant use violence to get their way.

But rounding up a mob because someone holds an opinion is not what Popper is describing. It is much closer to hunting down heretics.

> Basic hygiene when cooking is not perfectionism, and is not only done at elite restaurants.

Ok, so let's continue this analogy on the other one.

It's less like basic hygiene, and more like refusing to cook outside a clean room.

> Dismissing basic development good practices as "perfectionism" is just gaslighting people into believing that any form of thinking is overengineering.

Basic development good practices are something you develop during the "portfolio building phase", not before.

I think your examples are unfair. Getting stuck on needing the perfect architecture is closer to scrapping a building plan because it wouldn't hold up to a 2km asteroid strike than it is building something that will ultimately kill people.

Also all of your examples have wildly different impacts than a dev "portfolio project". They all cause physical harm to people, which a poorly coded website/cli tool/etc almost certainly won't. Unless this person's hobby is writing code for MRI machines, in which case, go ahead and make everything is perfect, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.

> So for clarity, they will jump to do 10 hours for 5-7 technical interviews at $0 but won't do 10 hours of paid contracting work where they get $2,000?

It's a 30 hour contract, or at least the comment I was reading said that.

I would. I can just stop showing up to interviews if I don't like the company via the normal interview process. Once I agree to a contract, I have to do the whole thing (I take my contracts fairly seriously).

> That's $192,000 a year if you put in 20 hours a week (half the normal 40 hours that most folks put in).

192k presumably 1099 work. Which is roughly equal to 95k W2 work. Even with that it's not the same. They aren't offering me a guaranteed 20 hours a week of work ever week for a year. If they were, that might be something I would take (unless I particularly disliked the company for some reason).

Extrapolating out a short term contract to full or part time work is dishonest, it ignores all the work you have to put in to find that many short term contracts (lowering your effective hourly rate).

> I think there’s a lot of WFH folk who are worried less about promotions than they are the availability of WFH jobs in general.

I feel like this was covered in the "tanking their career" part of my statement, but fair. It's rather important, I guess it deserves an explicit call out.

At this point, the mere existence of the other group is a danger to what the first group sees as their interests. The human instinct is to minimize the other group, making their group appear larger, and strengthening the argument that their interests should prevail.

Someone who wants to be completely untethered from the office is threatened by someone who wants to work in the office a couple days a week. It means they will have to choose between moving and having job prospects within a much smaller area.

There are two camps that want something mutually exclusive (work from home vs work in office). Additionally, in order to get what they want, they need the other group to comply.* The struggle is spilling over into the comment threads.

* If everyone works in the office, and the work from home people are still remote, they get passed over for promotions and basically have a good chance of tanking their career. If everyone works from home, the work in office people lose a lot of human interaction that they need on a human level.

> What is this mainstream media garbage about tumblr being racist.

From my memories of the meme wars and the last time I checked in on tumblr, tumblr had a lot of niche communities. A lot of those revolved around sexuality.

There were some nazis, but there was also a lot of bad poetry and art. Also porn. Porn was everywhere. When porn got banned, enough people left and enough communities were exiled that the nazi communities (without growing at all) passed some arbitrary percentage of users that declaring the entire site racist became in vogue.