tempguy9999

I'll check your link, thanks.

Could you explain what you mean by svn being super complicated inside? I presume you mean from a user's not a programmer's perspective; I never found it confusing, ever.

It has it's flaws (tags are writable, unless that's been cured) but it's really pretty good, and far better than git for a beginner IMO.

Agreed with this, SVN (short for subversion) is a good alternative.

I understood and was comfortable with SVN within a few minutes (using the TortoiseGit front-end, which I highly recommend).

I wrestled with git for months and at the end still feel I haven't subdued it properly. I can use it reliably but SVN is just so much friendlier.

So my suggestion is go with SVN + TortoiseGit. SVN is your butler. Git is a hydra that can do so much, once you've tied it down and cut off its thrashing heads.

It's not just me, our whole (small) company moved to it it burnt too much of our time and mental resources.

Edit: after learning TortoiseGit, learn the SVN command line commands (it's easy), and learn ASAP how to make backups of your repository!

> that Intel chip that gets a bad rap

I wonder why.

<<<According to the New York Times, "the i432 ran 5 to 10 times more slowly than its competitor, the Motorola 68000" >>>

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432#The_project%27s...

From memory a quote from a user of it, something like: "on a good day it walked, on a bad day it crawled"

IIRC every main memory access needed 3 pointer derefs and 3 array lookups (from memory).

Not agreeing or disagreeing, just pinning stuff down here...

> Sounds almost like intentionality (sentience) there

Hmm. Clarification needed - does the concept of deceit mean the deceiver understands what it is doing ie. has theory of mind? If so, I'd guess plants do not deceive but do something similar driven by evolution[0] that we need a different word for as it's not sentience-driven.

I'm open to the idea of evolution itself has some sentience but I'd not waste time on it as I don't see it's a testable hypothesis.

> If we 'have' any advantages on plants, sentience may not be it.

Agreed, but sentience may actually be an advantage. After all it's not the sentience in mankind that genuinely makes me despair but other features such as greed and short-termism. Fix those and maybe our chances of racial survival would be hugely increased. IOW we have many mental aspects and sentience is only one of them.

> around for oh, 50 times longer than us

Plants separated from aninmls ~1.7 billion years ago (figure from memory), humans have been around a few hundred thousand years, by various definitions of 'human'. I guess you dropped a few zeros :)

[0] eg. natural variegation in plants (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variegation) seems to make insects attack them less as discoloration makes the plants look to the insects less healthy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variegation#Defensive_masquera...).

> Why?

Physics. Entropy.

If it absorbed energy that touched it, it would heat up. You could then use the difference between it and its cooler surroundings to run an engine. Waste heat from the engine could then be absorbed to keep the engine running. You'd have created a perpetual motion machine, which is considered impossible.

I guess people just get tired of having to be machines of continual creation. It must be terribly wearing. I'm not surprised it becomes just crank-turning after a while.

Unrelated but I'd like to plug this which is brilliant, though it seems the author burned out a while ago. One of the best comics I've come across https://abstrusegoose.com/

Hit Random a few times and you'll start getting some good ones. He seems to be a high level physicist so there are some impenetrable bits of maths etc. which you can safely skip.

In addition, not read this paper but it's high on my to-do list:

"Learning by Association in Plants"

extract of abstract: "the possibility that plants are also able to acquire learned associations to guide their foraging behaviour has never been demonstrated. Here we show that this type of learning occurs in the garden pea, Pisum sativum. By using a Y-maze task, we show that the position of a neutral cue, predicting the location of a light source, affected the direction of plant growth. This learned behaviour prevailed over innate phototropism"

https://www.nature.com/articles/srep38427

Incredible, if validated.

Plants can be parasites, practice deceit, produce poisons to kill animals and other competing plants, kill other plants by strangultion as well (and likely other ways). Perhaps that was your point and I missed it.

"Brainless fungi trade resources with plants like a stock market"

"In soils across the world, fungi trade resources with the plants they colonise in a mutually beneficial relationship. But it turns out the fungi are savvy traders, taking advantage of their partners by shuttling goods to nutrient-starved areas where plants are willing to pay more than usual"

(from https://www.newscientist.com/article/2205604-brainless-fungi...)

FYI. Sort of relevant.

Nitpick upon nitpick, the base may be 2 rather than e but IIRC the difference between lg(n) and log2(n) is a constant, and the log/lg term dominates, so it still is 0(log). I think.

Big fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em \ And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so, ad infinitum.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Siphonaptera>

Starting from definitions, you're saying that our consciousness is different from animals.

But we have no definition of consciousness and no way of quantifying differences between animals and us (ignoring the fact that we are animals).

> What if consciousness is illusory?

since we don't know what it is nor can measure it (other than in degrees of unconsciousness, which I guess isn't what is meant here), how can we say that is is an illusion, and if so, compared to a non-illusory what?

Finally, who cares? I don't and I guess many people would these days shrug and say, descartes-like "I am what I am" and carry on. It's like religious people saying their morality comes from the bible and the threat of hell, but as secularity emerged over the centuries, the non-religious still behaved pretty much the same morally (I use this as an example of fundamentals turning out to be less important than expected, I don't want to start a religious discussion here)

Agreed. It's such a strange statement I suspect he meant something else but I can't see what.

Can anyone make sense of this? I tried but it's rambling, claims absolutes, pushes his book, uses long words that always make me suspicious that someone's trying to hide something simple (or it may not, but damned if I can tell here).

I am not at all familiar with this situation, but these quotes

> but I understand why so many Catalonians are angry and protest for

and

> But I also understand what different police forces are facing

gives the impression the police may be paying the price for some politicians' bad decisions.

I picked up a religious leaflet that said (this from memory, approximately) that nuclear war would have to actually start, then god would step in to sort things out. Can't remember the sect, might have been jehova's witnesses.

Excellent post, now I really see what you're getting at now.

I was unclear. I'm not against anything, just saying let the user control it, just make sure some great idea actually works (user testing shows many great thing aren't; people are complex and so are their mental models) then not force it on users.

True, upvoted. My point was that these facilities are of questionable value (I'd like to see how much time they really save, or indeed even lose when triggered accidentally), and that they have to be in easy control of the user. With MS there's too much "we invented it so you're getting it", and bad designers (who always outnumber good) will do the same.

Actual example, was working with vis studio with another guy. Open a bracket and VS automatically added a closing bracket. That is fucking annoying and saves you a whole keystroke while breaking muscle memory and interfereing with our work. We had trouble turning that off.

I use them rarely because my vocabulary is reasonably large. Also, given a choice of words I'll prefer the more conventional one.

For people learning, perhaps it could be a good thing.

> that does not incentivise good service as much

I don't mean this in a bad way, but are you american? It does seem a very US viewpoint that goodwill etc. don't really exist (or matter? something else?), and that people need concrete incentives to treat others decently.

Sure money's an motivator but perhaps a bigger one is to have a client treat you with decency. Sure money helps but to have a client just make you feel OK instead of crap, that would matter a lot more to most people. A big tip wouldn't negate bad attitude, even if it got staff to pretend to give a damn about you.

Happened to read this yesterday, not tasteful but relevant <https://theoatmeal.com/comics/tipping_tooting>

To address just one point, in emacs you've dabbrev-expand (bound to M-/). I like it and use it but it is not automatic. I have to invoke it myself which means it can't get in the way.

If you want larger clumps of code then you have various options such as skeleton mode, but again that's something the user has to ensure happens - again they remain in control.

> But then again I wouldn't trust Apple or Microsoft to do it right

Oh hell yes!

Does it? Any links? Perhaps from the greek Andros? I'm curious.

> we can get great benefits from a system that expands abbreviations, ... emmet-style powers

I can't agree here (excepting perhaps the unicode char replacement which a non-english speaker needs to comment on the viability of, vs actually having a non-english keyboard (excepting huge alphabets like chinese where that is used already AFAIK)).

Writing is fundamentally a thinking process, the text entry for a touch typist is relatively quick. If you are to propose expanding abbreviations, how much time do you expect to save? I mean, actually measured it?

> runs little scripts and inserts the output

What is the purpose of this?

> gives you quick dictionary/thesaurus lookups

I use those perhaps once a week or less. If you use it say 3X a day, you'd save little time, perhaps a couple of minutes.

Dunno what emmet powers are though.

MS word & libreOffice does some of what you want and the first time I install them, I spend several minutes tracking down each setting and turning them off - they drive me bonkers. They think they know what I want but they don't. Touch typists can hit many keys a second and kind of pipeline their typing. Having the input modified automatically is rarely useful IMO.

Your idea may be good but like many other ideas such as graphical programming, except in restricted cases they don't work. Perhaps if you measured it I'd be convinced but I can't accept it now as an obviously great benefit.

> it definitely is unreasonably burdensome to create XML

Disagree. You open the tag, you close it. Nested. I worked with a non-developer who had some KML (https://developers.google.com/kml/) dumped on her without any training whatsoever and when I explained a few basic thing, including the above rule, she got the principle of it in a few minutes. Because it's not hard (although dumping a KML task on a non-dev is a bastard thing to do).

> but people weren't using XML editors

I personally think that lowering the bar to let as many people in as possible isn't necessarily a good idea. Just IMO

I'm all good with this. Nice to get straight answers to straight questions. Thanks.

> all the stuff in your dwelling, etc., all from capitalism

The value of those things depends on whether they were produced in ways that takes externalities into consideration ie. I fear we're destroying the ecosystem to create those.

You haven't made clear where you stand on that, and it's crucial to understanding each others positions. I'd be grateful if you'd address that.

re. enron, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#2001_Accounting_scandals:

"Enron used a variety of deceptive, bewildering, and fraudulent accounting practices and tactics to cover its fraud in reporting Enron's financial information"

That doesn't fit in with what you said.

> It consistently delivers results

Perhaps. Whether those are the results intended are another matter qv. Enron and many more.

Edit: Then again, it depends on what you mean by capitalism. If you mean as generally practiced my criticism stands but if you mean pricing that reflects all aspects inc. externalities rather than ignoring them (as with fossil fuel use) then I'd agree. Which do you mean?

I can't at the moment, but as a hint, if I search for X Y Z then I expect the first results to contain all those terms, not 2 out of 3. Like others complain, it seems necessary to quote each on "X" "Y" "Z" to get what I want.

If you have to have a clever read-my-mind search, then instead of blending it into the main search, have 2 search types of 'intelligent' and 'precise'.

IANAdrugologist but that rule is about bioactivity rather then psychoactivity. Open to correction though.

Long dead, don't worry you're safe!

Edit: useful lesson though.