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thwest

681 karma · joined September 27, 2011

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thwest··on They Took Our Myths
Pinning a massive culture shift away from ancient mythos on something as particular as copyright law seems absurd. The move away from historical knowledge in general and towards a permanent-present is evidenced across our media, from entertainment to news to politics.
thwest··on How to Fight Unconscious Bias and Become a Better Ally
There are some other things you can do that don't rely on your effort level to police your own thoughts:

- don't speak, let those you want to support speak instead

- remove names from resumes on first few passes

thwest··on The Patagonia Clothing Company’s Anti-Growth Strategy
> Companies that use group/political identity

Isn't this every brand since Bernays came along?

thwest··on AMD says Nvidia’s GameWorks “completely sabotaged” Witcher 3 performance
The legally mandated disclaimers in their compiler manual are quite scary about this.
thwest··on Oh My Zsh
OMZ provides opinionated defaults and doesn't expose you to all of the choices that the typical zsh config process does. Which is the exact opposite of the Arch Linux mantra of being aware of every choice that you are making in which software runs on top of the kernel.

I use OMZ mostly because of dotfile inertia. There is some slight weirdness (vaguely remember something about negative/exclusion globs) compared to vanilla zsh, but it isn't bad.

thwest··on Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)
Do you care to cite those conflicts? Are 18th century reformers beyond a mote of cynicism? That sentence isn't claiming to describe the entire world view of the reformers, but to specifically note that they would have been aware of the number of examples where the masses were not deterred by the spectacle of executions. (You seem to take offense with specificity in a claim?)

It is possible to declare the system of executions a travesty, while also observing that the lower classes are willing to phsyically intervene in them. Perhaps it is even possible that the reformers were made aware of the injustices by the lack of respect the lower classes demonstrated for them.

Perhaps a reformer with the goal of abolishing executions would pen a treatise that was justified in the moral terms of the ruling class, rather than based on the emotional state of the working class. One would look to address your audience after all. I'm not familiar with the cited reformers you claim are conflicting but it sounds more like aristocracy convincing aristocracy, rather than an aristocrat attempting to sway the masses with pamphlets.

I question whether you read this text in good faith, or are simply searching for bits you can pick out to summarize on a message board and construe as contradictions.

thwest··on Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)
Perhaps prison is more frightening than executions.
thwest··on Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)
Holding philosophy to the standard of utility brings a lot of assumptions to bear on your reading. Conciseness is a virtue that one can overindulge.

Many philosophers aren't concerned with providing readers with ideas in the system of efficient exchange of language and labor hours. For many in critical theory the project is the opposite: to show how the systems of exchange and efficiency dominate our meaning-making.

thwest··on Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)
> Foucault "proves" his opinion not by citing a single document but rather by simply stating his opinion that "executions did not, in fact, frighten the people."

That quote is the concluding sentence of a paragraph which cites at least three documents:

* Argenson, 241

* Hardy IV, 56

* Richet, 118-19

Does your copy have the parenthetical citations removed?

thwest··on Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)
> This is a C programmer refusing to learn Brainfuck or INTERCAL.

Right, and refusing a Brainfuck's assumptions does not deny it turing complete status, or render it unable to produce ELFs.

For some, it illuminates the nature of an abstract turing machine. For others it appears to be nothing but sound and fury.

thwest··on Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)
I found "The Cybernetic Hypothesis" to be a great antidote to the Neo-Reactionaries' take on the contemporary immanence of capital.

I'm extremely torn between "The Coming Insurrection"s call for drop-out politics and Marxist production reforms.

thwest··on Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)
No one will deny that there are charlatans and poets posing as philosophers in the continental tradition. Tatterdemalion's post even prefaces with that. There are also straight up falsifiers and a endemic of p-value smudgers in the hard sciences. A good rebuttal to this Chomsky quote are the lovely debates he had with Foucault himself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wfNl2L0Gf8

There is a plethora of writings of substance in the continental tradition. Writings that we should not ignore. 'Discipline and Punish' is one of them. I recommend 'The Dialectic of Enlightenment' by Adorno as your complement to Popper's writings.

On another note, I don't generally see the value in antagonisms between paradigms or presentation forms. I find value from the analytical perspective and from critical theory, and being able to dance both dances is illuminating. I don't think the empirical process can reveal the entirety of the human experience. Steadfastly stumping for one paradigm over the other is no more useful than being a vim/emacs zealot.

If Deleuze or Foucault don't grok for you, it doesn't mean the authors are _wrong_ or lying to readers to obtain mystic status. Just like someone not caring to study Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory shouldn't write off the entirety of mathematics.

thwest··on Foucault’s lecture notes from 1970–71 demolish caricatures of his thought (2013)
Do you care to cite the supposed gobble-dy-gook in the GP's recommended 'Discipline and Punish'?
thwest··on A Tale Of Two Latino Areas In Miami And San Francisco
I agree, and imagine your downvoters are praising themselves for identifying some fallacy in your sarcasm.

Enforcing a uniform profitable culture where all real estate is available for developers' whims is not a "neutral" act.

thwest··on A Tale Of Two Latino Areas In Miami And San Francisco
Another piece of the formula is the state constitution forbidding increases in property taxes. If these real estate holding corporations faced profit pressure in the form of property tax, they would be more inclined to reinvest.
thwest··on The Toughest Test in Cycling
Do you have a link for the Moulton record? The Moulton site has a weird phrasing about top speed and doesn't provide the time. If there really is a design advantage to small wheels, I wonder what the physics there are. Large wheels are good on road where you will encounter potholes etc.

Anyhow, those small wheels are too ugly to be seen riding.

thwest··on The Toughest Test in Cycling
I would be interested in seeing recumbents used in individual time trials perhaps. However, they seem to be significantly less nimble which is flat out dangerous in the peloton. Their wheel base is longer, so I wonder if a peloton might actually be slowed by being spread farther apart. Also they are absolute trash for climbing.
thwest··on Socket.IO C++
That's fair. C devs are also a little more used to being tied to specific OS facilities such kqueue/select. For me boost shines as an ASIO implementation. When that becomes stdlib, I'm not sure I would be compelled to use it.

This is along the lines of the traditional abstraction level debates, rather than anything particularly wrong with boost. I think it gets singled out unfairly as being a particularly difficult 3rd party library.

thwest··on Socket.IO C++
Yes there is always a balance of concerns. Build management with 3rd party deps is not trivial but its part of the lifecycle. In my experience boost integration really is "a day" on windows (including stashing the .libs as their own repo and reproducing a fresh 'git clone' build), and 10 minutes on a platform that you can use the package manager to obtain it. You can always excise it from a project later if you dont abuse 'using' statements. FWIW, I only really use variant and ASIO.

If you were adding boost to a project just to do some weird spirit/preprocessor hacks, I'd be wary. But if you told me you were going to write yet another cross platform ASIO wrapper because you couldn't figure out how to compile boost I'd be even more concerned.

thwest··on Socket.IO C++
Devs who happily use C++ yet balk at spending a day to get a large third party library integrated into their build are a curious bunch.
thwest··on Comparing Rust and C++
Like C++ interfaces that contain std::unique_ptr, you can encode Rust types in your mangled names during linking.
thwest··on Lab Notebook: Single Pixel Camera
Compressive Sensing using the Radon transform associated with radar has extensive literature. Not sure about the OPs imager. The optimization techniques are applicable to most sparse signal reconstruction transforms. Formally you would look to show the Restricted Isometery Property. http://users.ece.gatech.edu/~justin/ECE-8823a-Spring-2011/Re...
thwest··on Lab Notebook: Single Pixel Camera
We founded InView Technology with a few of the professors heading up Compressive Sensing research at Rice. We make Short Wave Infrared cameras with these techniques utilizing DLP chips. We also sell research platforms.

Our website is a bit thin but we have experience with imaging at XGA and 1080p. The spatial-temporal dimensions of the data with this sensor are quite different from pin-hole FPA imagers. You can trade off spatial resolution and temporal resolution with more freedom than readout ICs. You can also skip the image and go straight to information measurements for pattern/event matching.

thwest··on Military uniforms – Expense and stupidity too big to camouflage
There are plenty of free outlets for political and economic news. Some examples include CEPR, DemocracyNow, Tom Dispatch, http://ceinquiry.wordpress.com/, etc
thwest··on A SWAT team blew a hole in my 2-year-old son
General optimism, hoping that certain culture wars (the 60s) will age out generationally, some positive evidence from countries with harm reduction focuses (Portugal).
thwest··on Why C++ Sails When the Vasa Sank [pdf]
Statically typed i.e. without a inner loop dispatch penalty? Which others? I've considered an implementation in Fortran and OCaml as well. OCaml is attractive but doesn't cross compile to ARM officially. With C++ we can target x64, ARM and TI DSP with the same core processing module.
thwest··on Why C++ Sails When the Vasa Sank [pdf]
In C++ I can write a generic vector math routine that operates on any scalar type and still simd specialize it for particular scalar types.
thwest··on Dear Marc Andreessen
The degeneration you fear sounds like a fine alternative to me. I'd rather deal with happy drunks than stressed out angry workers. Idleness doesn't bother me. The crime you allude to is usually committed by the young men who have no income in those situations and result to crime to obtain funds.
thwest··on LAPD adds drones to arsenal, says they'll be used sparingly
Arsenal implies they will be armed, right?
thwest··on Mouthbreathing Machiavellis Dream Of A Silicon Reich
What? How is California's federal tax revenue relevant to the article? If California secedes these people will still argue that you shouldn't have a vote and the state should transition to monarchy.
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