wtbob

> But I also noticed that some new cars ship with infotainment systems that consist solely of a (bad) touchscreen; as new cars slowly replace old ones, the number of cars with actual physical buttons for the music player or radio is dwindling. This is awful because the lack of physical buttons prevents the tactile feedback needed to operate the device without having to look at it.

This is a huge issue. I'm fortunate that my car's infotainment system is controlled by buttons & knobs; I worry about folks in e.g. Teslas who are forced to take their eyes off the road.

Not the worst idea ever: it's large, inhospitable and the climate is not especially conducive to layabouts (although the long winter darkness would probably be well-correlated to depression and violence).

I wish they hadn't broken their images — they require JavaScript for functioning <img> tags(!).

> Is Common Lisp still worth considering?

I think so. The more I use it, the more I realise how well-put-together it really is. There are numerous places that annoyed me once, before I understood them, and which I now appreciate (pathnames, logical pathnames and Lisp-2 all jump immediately to mind, but there are a few others). The only thing I don't like is the upcasing, but by setting PRINT-CASE appropriately I rarely have to notice that.

The ecosystem is actually quite wonderful these days. Quicklisp is a godsend — xach deserves an award.

All in all, Lisp feels like a well-engineered solution. Not perfect, but really damn good — and better than anything else I've used.

> Most people aren't in a position to get a replacement delivered from a vendor that quickly

Back when I worked in enterprise services, it was a requirement that we had good support contracts — 1-, 4- or 8-hour turnarounds were standard.

If you're running a serious business, support contracts are a must.

What blows my mind is how, after seeing that, some folks would want to program in anything other than Lisp. Code, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, all with a single uniform representation!

Seriously, anyone who's not taken a look: take a look.

> It seems that perhaps (while oil prices were high) these coal miners should've moved to North Dakota and Texas.

Easier said than done when one's entire social structure is rooted in one place, and has been since before one was born.

We forget how lucky we are that we can do our work from anywhere in the world; those of us who've moved around also tend, I think, to forget the real value of staying where one grew up.

> I haven't seen much in the way of specific predictions from Stallman.

Try The Right to Read[1], which predicted ebooks, DRM, restrictions on reverse-engineering, electronic marketing profiles and hardware which refuses to run free operating systems — in 1997. When I first read it, I thought it was well-intentioned hysteria, but it was completely, 100% correct.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

> The observation is typically used by scumbags in Scottsdale to trick women waiting for a 'ride' into getting into random cars, which is why the taxi company I drove for lobbied to force ride-vehicles to have some sort of branding.

I'm sure that the cost and bother to the competition had nothing to do with that lobbying effort.

Yup, you're right. I've been so annoyed at folks claiming that either of them got the majority of the votes that I completely misread your claim.

I'd say that it's homicide. Sometimes homicide is justified, and sometimes it's not. I think that defensive homicide is okay, and I think that's fairly uncontroversial.

And there's definitely a difference between directly killing someone and withholding extraordinary measures. What's extraordinary and what's ordinary will, of course, change over time with the progress of technology.

I'm not troubled by not tasking medical staffs with regulating hormones &c., as is required to keep brain-dead people alive. I'm rather more troubled by keeping them alive only to remove their organs piece by piece (but I find dead-donor transplantation morally problematic at best, anyway).

Yes, I'm an idiot.

Yup, professionally it's all-Go, all the time. But I've always been gluing libraries, not programs, together. I think I'd still reach for Go over Python for gluing programs together, but I've not done it enough to be completely certain.

> I understand there's obvious use cases for Go, but an amazing amount of what we do is taking data from place 'A' (web, socket, file), sending it to place 'B' (another web, socket, file), and then returning a result. Go doesn't buy you much that asyncio won't.

Static typing. Oh Lord is it nice.

When I wrote Python, I never quite knew if there'd be a runtime error (in my code or a library). With Go, there are a lot fewer of those.

> Are you using Go exclusively?

Pretty much, in my career. Sure, i know plenty of languages, but my day job is slinking Go.

I honestly don't want to program in Python any more. I never thought I'd say that, but it's true.

> Clinton received the most votes, that is, the votes of most voters. The number of votes she received didn't represent a majority of the votes cast, but she still received the vote of most voters.

No, that's precisely not the case. She received the most votes, but not most of the votes. She did not receive the votes of most voters: 52% of voters did not vote for her. If we had instant run-off voting, we might know who would have come in first in a head-to-head matchup, but we don't.

Some folks like to blame third parties for their candidates' loss (Bush in '92, Gore in 2000, Clinton in 2016), but I don't think that's fair: we have multiple parties, and the parties are free to nominate the candidate most capable of winning the votes across America. People who voted for a third-party candidate didn't vote for either first-party candidate.

> Clinton was a centre-right corporate insider candidate. Trump was a far-right corporate outsider candidate.

I'll posit that Mrs. Clinton is centre-left, not centre-right, more authoritarian/right on economics and more authoritarian/left on social issues. But I really don't consider Mr. Trump to be far-right: he was a liberal Democrat for much of his adult life, more authoritarian/left on economics (opposing free trade), and more libertarian/left on social issues.

I really wish that there had been a good libertarian/right Republican this national election, but there wasn't.

> most voters were actually #WithHer.

No, they weren't. According to the latest results, Mrs. Clinton received 48% of the popular vote: that means that most voters didn't vote for her.

More voted for her than for Mr. Trump, but neither earned a plurality of the popular vote.

Former Python developer here. The problem was two-fold: Python 3 broke backwards- and forward-compatibility (in a practical sense: there were workarounds, but libraries didn't necessarily use 'em, and Python is nothing if not a glue language); and for the longest time there really wasn't a good reason to switch. I think it wasn't until last year that it really started to make sense to go with Python 3 — and by then I'd already switched to Go.

> I didn't say otherwise.

Well, you wrote, 'he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him),' which means that the reason Mr. Trump received less than half the votes is that Mrs. Clinton received more than half the votes, which isn't true: both of them received less than half the votes because some voters voted for neither.

It's interesting that I'm being downvoted because folks think I'm a Trump partisan (I'm not!) I'm just pointing out facts, not opinion.

His phrase, 'he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him),' implies that Mr. Trump received less than 50% because Mrs. Clinton received more votes than him, which is not true: they both received less than 50% because a significant portion of voters chose not to vote for either.

> Of those, he got less than 50% (as Clinton got more votes than him).

Mrs. Clinton also got less than 50% of the votes. Neither one won a clear majority of the popular vote.

> When I think about writing my own language, I think of something with as few parenthesis as possible

Just swap [] with (), then they're a lot easier to hit. It's weird that parentheses are shifted but square brackets are not: the former are a lot more common in English text than the latter, as well as in many programming languages.

I'm reminded of Mitt Romney's fabled ORCA system[1], which was also an epic failure. Indeed, it's something which has since caused me to re-evaluate my opinion of Romney: if he was as great an executive as I thought, how could he have helmed a disaster like ORCA?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORCA_%28computer_system%29

I don't see anything about them being okay with hurting the country, but I see a lot about them wanting President Obama to fail, and fail badly. Do you blame them? Do you not think that Democrats want Mr. Trump to fail badly, and are having these same conversations?

> The vast majority of their time is spent in less than a dozen states, who have a total population less than that of New York and California combined, just because the race in those states is neck and neck.

Those are the swing states, which are the most politically-balanced — this means that they are the most-centrist states. Campaigning to win them is campaigning to win the centre.

> The executive branch isn't bicameral so applying federalism to it is just depriving the majority of their choice.

Why should 50.01% get their choice and 49.99 suffer? Why not build a system which encourages centrism and attempting to appeal to all? That's the one we have.

Note that no candidate got a majority of popular votes in the election.

> The national and state legislatures is where our federalism belongs, not in our executive branch.

That makes no sense: the federal executive is the federal executive, and should be just as federalist as the rest of our federal government (hence my support for returning to state legislatures appointing electors, and getting rid of the popular vote altogether).

> They quite explicitly said the exact opposite the day after Obama was elected. They didn't just want Obama's policies to fail. They were willing to accept failures that hurt people, so that those people would associate the pain with Obama and vote the other way next time.

What was the exact quote?

> The electoral college is a net-negative contribution to the federal nature of the US because it allows a tiny, extremely unrepresentative minority to decide for the whole country while eroding the legitimacy of the executive branch, a legitimacy that is a key component of our system. Californians deciding policy for MA or WY due to sheer size is bad but that's how democracies and republics are supposed to work. A single precinct deciding for the entire nation is a perversion of the process that does nothing but destroy faith in our electoral process.

But that's nonsense: no single precinct determines anything, any more than a single precinct within a popular-vote election would. Each state votes, and the states send electors, and those electors as a whole elect the President. Obama didn't win because one precinct voted for him; he won because thousands of voters across dozens of states voted for electors pledged to him. Likewise Trump.

And likewise Bush. Regardless of Ohio or Florida, plenty of people across the nation voted for electors pledged to him.

Destroying the Electoral College would be one more step in destroying the federal nature of the Unites States. Perhaps you think that's a good thing, but I think it's a terrible idea: I think that we should be more, not less, federal. What works for the people of Massachusetts is not what works for the people of California, or the people of Wyoming.

I'd like to see state legislatures selecting electors again.

Also, the Constitution states, 'No State shall, without the Consent of Congress, lay any Duty of Tonnage, keep Troops, or Ships of War in time of Peace, enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State, or with a foreign Power, or engage in War, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit of delay.' Has Congress consented to this interstate compact?

Have you considered that Republicans might consider their opposition and obstruction to be in the best interests of America?