karatestomp

1- We fundamentally don't agree, you think I'm irrational on this topic and I think you are. That's fine. Personally I believe that any conversation that doesn't involve disagreement is not intelligent, it's dogmatic. So I have no problem agreeing to disagree. In my country they say 'no one owns the truth'.

Could be, but I do not think you're irrational. I am pretty sure you misread the prompt and suspect (that it's at least in part because) you're not used to these kinds of things—specifically, thought-experiment prompts in this kind of format and having this sort of character.

2- Your fundamental position from the beginning was: agree with you or I'm ignorant. This is not only arrogant, but extremely ironic in a series of posts where you are arguing that people should be more open minded to what they don't like and more self aware of the limitations of their perspective.

I think seeing the prompt as pro-authoritarian or as asking the candidate to empathize with an authoritarian position is likely the result of misreading. Seeing that as the primary difficulty or challenge in fully addressing the prompt would represent a further misunderstanding. I actually think its inviting this misreading without being overtly misleading or deceitful is very clever for a prompt like this, and probably improves its utility as a tool for evaluation.

I think any amount of concern that this prompt is part of or representative of some authoritarian grooming or selection process, intentional or otherwise, probably does betray ignorance specifically of how these kinds of questions are used and the character they often take, especially given that, by my reading, the degree to which it's "authoritarian" doesn't place it outside the mainstream of Western liberalism any time since there was such a thing (and I think not being used to these sorts of prompts or questions is likely to manifest as misreading it in the first place).

[omitted: A lengthy analysis of the prompt, including exactly what it says and doesn't say, and what it asks and doesn't ask, and how, as it went over the post-length limit. In short I'm even more convinced that a reading of it as pro-authoritarian, or especially that the primary focus or greatest challenge of a good response would be to empathize with and defend authoritarianism even if it plays along very closely with the premise and request, is all quite off the mark. The main challenge is tailoring a message to an audience to achieve a (not specified by the prompt, crucially!) goal.]

This is very confusing. I believe you've entirely misread the bit of my post you quoted here and taken it to be about your mentioning Chomsky. Particularly at issue is to whom "their" refers.

I took your accusing me of caricaturing you (where?) based on your quoting Chomsky to mean you thought I thought you were a leftist (phew). I'm still not sure what else that accusation could be taken to mean.

As for the matter at hand, you seem to think (wrote that) the position the students were asked to defend qualifies as indefensible and defending it represents "iron manning" (I know it as steel-manning but that probably just means we read different things) and that the value it has is (roughly) comparable to any other exercise in iron-manning.

It's not at all clear to me that this is the case and I'm pretty sure the value of the exercise is, in a sense, well past that issue. I think its use in an evaluation is precisely in the layers it presents—a student who gets hung up on steel-manning the position, especially if they've mis-read the prompt as stating things about the prime minister, government, and situation which it does not and so has read them as harder to defend per se than they actually are, hasn't even noticed the difficult part of the prompt, nor what actually might be indefensible about it, which is the political position the prime minister is in—and defending that well would be very unlike steel-manning an argument one disagrees with.

It is a good exercise, but it is not a steel-manning exercise.

But please, again, don't let facts and reality get in the way of the narrative you are creating with your powers of assumption and strawmanning. I'm probably just unable to grasp your position since according to you I'm ignorant.

But... well, heh. Ignorance is one of those words that's very risky to use narrowly or precisely, that's for sure. I almost avoided it for that reason. Assumptions can lead to mistakes, it's true.

Neither's a perfect synonym for "systemic", but "systemic" is sometimes thoughtlessly or reflexively applied when it's not quite correct. Though that's true of most words, really. When life hands you "systemic", everything's a nail.

I didn't slam a humanities education in my post—I applied one. Poorly, perhaps.

Maybe you don't like the word "systemic."

I do, though. :-)

I intended to communicate that "systemic" is a very common word in certain (largish?) circles, maybe providing insight into its recent mainstream prominence. Since it was a short comment I took some liberty with the tone. I'd hoped the (rather gentle) "snark" would read ironically against the content, but may have missed the mark.

If you think that post meant I dislike the word "systemic" or hold it in contempt, you should try an academic literary critic's paper on their very favorite and most-highly-regarded novel. (Ooooh, more sick humanities burns based on semiotics and the sociology of academia! The hits keep on coming!)

Yes, I read it. I double-checked to make sure it wasn't actually anywhere near indefensible from most main-stream perspectives on the role of the state first, in fact. Which part makes it indefensible? Why might it have been the only (acceptable, reasonable, effective; any of those might be assumed to be implied and which one chooses might matter) option available? Context from the full prompt might help there. Why might that have been necessary? (Ditto). Which obligations might prompt the prime minister to consider that necessary? How could meeting those obligations, despite the cost, be moral? How could those things be reasonably seen as true?

Not one of those seems anywhere near an insurmountable challenge, even without going all jack-booted. Do they? How's it an indefensible position? It's tense and uncomfortable and grey, but not indefensible nor even requiring an extreme perspective to defend it.

[EDIT]

P.S. people who assume a lot generally get it wrong. Chomsky is not my favorite political guy. I tend to like Jordan Peterson more as he speaks more to my libertarian tendencies. But again, don't let facts get in the way of you making a caricature of what I think so you can attack it.

Where'd I imply (what I gather you think I thought) that you're a leftist? For that matter where'd I imply I'm not, or that I don't have libertarian tendencies/sympathies? In fact this new information fits my model of what I reckoned your perspective to be pretty spot-on, so if I'd incorporated that into a caricature of you (where's that, incidentally?) I suppose I'd have nailed it.

Oh, I see the value in ironmanning indefensible arguments.

The original premise does not call for any such thing, though. The position is uncomfortable. It's far from indefensible. One can even adopt a position well outside what most would consider "authoritarian" and not render it indefensible—and which position the student is able to adopt, or feels they must adopt, to defend it, may be instructive. What else they do with the prompt, which is pretty open, is also valuable signal. Express any regrets? Shift blame? Cite history? Take responsibility? Make promises? Resign? Why does the student seem to have chosen to do these things? Do they do them effectively? This on top of having some basic ability to understand and articulate[1], if not agree with, any of the many common or uncommon positions that allow that state violence can be morally justifiable to maintain order.

You assume much.

Yes.

[1 EDIT] Understand and articulate and express to a broad and diverse audience which includes many of the very people who were upset in the first place, that is! Simply quoting their preferred political philosopher won't do. The prompt in fact probably asks so much of the student that there's almost no hope they'll do a great job, but then, that's not the point—how much of the subtlety of the task to they even notice, and so attempt to take on? How effective is the attempt? It's a damn good prompt, really.

I'll continue to take the assumption that asking a (prospective) student to conduct an exercise involving a thought experiment implies support of the premises of the exercise on the part of those asking it, an expectation that the student supports them, or an attempt to shape the student to support them, as a sign of ignorance within at least the confines of what those sorts of questions are used and useful for.

That the position the student is asked to assume is a bit uncomfortable is very likely part of the point. Seeing what they make of it—the tone, the message, what they choose to add or leave out, how and whether they fill in the gaps in the prompt WRT the events, circumstances, the state of mind of the prime minister, the mood of the people, and so on, which are numerous, how and whether they balance all this with the particular limitations and goals of the message itself, or hell, whether they reject the prompt and walk out in a huff (bad) or do something else by ignoring all or part of the prompt and its explicit and implied constraints (potentially very good if done just right)—can all be useful, and in ways "craft a message about how awful this was and why it should never happen again" wouldn't be.

Humanities programs issue a license for unlimited and liberal use of the term when you're admitted. Along with some others like "hegemon". Sprinkling those sorts of words in sentences when appropriate (and, if inept, when not) is part of code-switching to "humanitese".

Even Excel has (had?) a secret flight sim.

Yeah, that's the one. Fake "controversy" playing on ignorance.

Reminds me of a story that made it onto HN some months (years maybe? how time flies) back about an entrance exam prompt to some British university program requiring the candidate to craft a message defending some unsavory deed on the part of the UK government. That kind of "gaming" is super-common and very valuable in (for example) political science circles, so wasn't, per se, a bit weird or bad or even unusual, but was made to seem so for a headline.

[EDIT] specifically I think the prompt was something like "It's 10 years in the future, such-and-such party has control of government and can be assumed to hold policy positions basically the same as they do now. General world situation is X. The government has just violently put down mass protests over [something]. Craft a statement for the prime minister defending these actions as necessary for the preservation of the government and protection of general welfare." Which is a completely normal—if simple—sort of poli-sci exercise.

Can I agree with his overall premise but disagree with thinking that scheduling weekly one-on-one's with your wife is in any way a good idea?

Some folks have a gut-level extremely bad reaction to structuring or treating relationships (romantic or otherwise) "scientifically" or in some structured way. I'm one of them. Grosses me out as surely as seeing maggots burrowing in my steak. It's not rational and goes against everything I rationally believe about the power of systems and environment to engineer success, and I've had to learn to work against that feeling pretty often, but, there you go. Knowing that doesn't get rid of the feeling and tendency toward aversion.

I suspect the people making posts that "pissed off" OP were largely having this reaction and didn't get that not everyone has it.

Fridges are one of those product categories for which the magic of the free market misses completely for me.

I want a basic fridge with maybe $200, tops (manufacturing & material cost) of improvements to things that actually matter (castors on drawers make a huge difference for the feel of fridge drawers, for example) + non-ugly exterior. Counter depth (so less material!). No ice maker, no water integrated, none of that stuff. Certainly no damn screens. Just a compressor with a cabinet. A good and useful layout, or "UX" if you prefer (this adds no cost, or very little, past the initial design, which can be re-used indefinitely). I will pay a $600-800 premium over the most basic model for this, retail. Call it $1500.

... but in fact the nice parts I want aren't available except on very "high-end" models that start at like $2.5k from a dent-n-ding outlet (let alone full retail) with tons of extra crap, and you pay significantly more for counter depth in most cases (I guess economies of scale make them solidly 10% more expensive, despite the savings in materials?). It sucks, I just want a basic fridge that looks & feels nice and doesn't stick out into my kitchen like some kind of menacing mechanical monster, but is not a rip-off. Pretty much doesn't exist.

[EDIT] actually it's fair to say that "nice, simple, and reasonably priced for the extras it takes to achieve 'nice'" is a category markets often fail to deliver for me. They seem to be great at delivering cheap and crappy, cheap and kinda OK (think: all non-Ikea flat-pack furniture for the former, Ikea for the latter), expensive and crappy, and expensive and actually good. There's a middle-market that seemingly never gets served and sends me looking for antiques, when possible. I suspect the reason for these outcomes boil down to information asymmetry, like lots of problems with markets.

That doesn't let you tell graphviz how large you want to draw each node, right? Just how large graphviz would draw them? What I'd like is a way to take styling and drawing outside GraphViz. It's important (for what I'd like) that graphviz know how large each node is going to be so it can route around them. If you apply, say, a typeface or padding even very slightly different than what graphviz was using, or if there are just slight differences in, say, how a given browser renders a <div>, it could change the size of the rendered nodes, and you end up with edges drawn under/over nodes.

Much cleaner (and way more useful) to be able to tell graphviz "this is how large I need this node to be, and that one this size, and the other one such-and-such, and they are connected thusly, now please give me coords for a layout"

This isn't just for looks, either: if you want the resulting graph to be interactive, and perhaps even graphically (drag-n-drop) editable after the initial graphviz auto-arranging, you're probably wanting output that's not exactly in graphviz's wheelhouse. You want to tell it node sizes and have it tell you where to put them.

Do most libraries use static types? Or have something widely-used and well-supported available like the @types project for TypeScript to provide them, fairly seamlessly, to consumers of those libraries?

Are you using an actual GraphDB like Neo4J? Are you putting a graph frontend on Postgres like PostGraphQL? None of the post really makes any sense because GraphQL is a Query Language, not a data store. What are the CAP theorem tradeoffs in the new backend? What does more robust mean? What does more performant mean? This is a source control app. Those tradeoffs are meaningful.

GraphQL isn't particularly "graphy". Its name sucks. But don't worry, plenty of half-techy middle managers are out there making the same mistake and going "we do graph things, why don't you guys look into this GraphQL thing that's getting so much buzz?" It's not a great fit for graph operations, in fact. Not more than SQL, certainly.

As for N4J in particular, don't count on that to improve performance even if you're doing lots of graph stuff. Depends heavily on your usage patterns and it's very easy to modify a query in a way that seems like it'd be fine but in fact makes performance fall off a cliff. OTOH Cypher, unlike GraphQL, is a very nice language for querying graphs.

There are automagic GraphQL layers that sort-of make sense to me, since at least they remove the biggest pain points. But AFAIK they're all single-database.

Actually stitching together multiple services or DBs with it manually seems like it'd be a hellish experience that'd end in a massive data breech or repeated accidental dataloss + restore-from-backup. Or else valid GraphQL going to such a system would be so restricted that the benefit over just using REST (or whatever) is zero.

I don’t get why WSL is better than a Linux VM in hyper-v or virtual box, until it’s way smoother than it currently is. You can full screen the VM to work entirely in dwm or i3 or whatever if that’s your thing, plus Xpra and SSH exist if you want to run Linux stuff alongside Windows (I assume there are free clients for both in Windows?). With that way of working you can even run Linux somewhere else to offload the resource use almost entirely, and if local it takes seconds to suspend the whole thing.

The last thing I’d want, working with Linux tools, is to have another thing I have to eliminate as a source of trouble when anything breaks.

Aha. Is this how folks actually attain worthwhile rates of return on very low-return, low-risk investments?

[EDIT] well no that can't be it because it requires even more money coming in for those loans, which can't provide more expected return than the bonds they're buying or the whole thing would be pointless.

Firefox Focus also serves as an adblocker for Safari, if you like having all that sweet apple integration but want free adblocking. It’s alright at it.

I'd rather have graphviz expose a kind of layout engine such that it can take the size each node will occupy (determined by whatever's going to draw them) and use that to create a layout, feeding path info to something that can handle the actual drawing, than have more drawing options in Graphviz itself. I think that doing so is (so far as I could tell, last time I tried) extremely awkward at best is why it's not embedded in basically everything that has any need whatsoever to draw graphs.

So, I guess:

- it would be a big effort, but move the core algorithms to a framework that supports interaction with layout generation

If that's what you mean by that.

It'd make it way easier to pretty up Graphviz output. I'd rather have "renderer" applications that run on top of Graphviz and have Graphviz itself lose all but its most basic build-in drawing capabilities, than have more of that built into Graphviz itself.

Holy shit I was just looking at their site the other day and bounced because the price was way beyond anything I'd consider spending. It didn't occur to me that they price differently for individuals, or that it'd default to showing me organization pricing, and after reading theses posts and checking the site my first guess was that individual pricing would be higher (it's much lower for some reason? Are the org. ones multi-seat? They don't seem to be. WTF.)

I'd never have even looked at their site again if I hadn't happened to read these posts. Yikes. They need to call that out much more vividly if they're gonna have weird pricing like that.

Landscape monitor just means you tile your windows and prefer scanning side-to-side rather than up-and-down.

A lot of PHP work is digging around in Wordpress themes & plugins with a bunch of other (third-party) themes and plugins installed, some of them paid which can add another layer of annoyance to testing and deployment and such. Hosting's usually some managed thing rather than anything under your direct control, and usually quirky or limited in some way or another. It's a pretty miserable ecosystem to work in.

PHP itself is, secretly, actually kinda OK. Some major codebases written in it are no fun at all to work with, including the 800lb gorilla that is WP.

Ten years ago "looking at a cellphone" was still universal shorthand for "is a dick" in fiction. So was "talking to no-one" (bluetooth headset) which carried a further meaning of "business douche" ("carries a cellphone at all" was shorthand for this for most of the 90s—see the movie Hook for an early example). Both are normal and common now.

Ten years ago much of the population still considered paying any attention whatsoever—any—to a cellphone in the company of others, maybe unless it actually rang (remember phone calls that weren't spam?), to be incredibly rude.

All that changed very fast over the following 5 years or so.

To `useradd` or to `adduser`: that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

the slings and arrows of outrageous manpage,

or to take up `file` against the output of `which`,

and seek "Perl script text executable"?

I must forget to give grep an filesystem path argument at least 10% of the time I invoke it. What I'm intending to do in all of those cases is recursively grep in the current directory. "Warning: recursive search of stdin" might be my most-seen console error message.

Lichtheim edited a 3-volume "Ancient Egyptian Literature" which contains a lot of funerary inscriptions. I'd second wl's post above: if you don't have tolerance for really dull writing, avoid.

Almost all of that "genre" is of the "seen one, seem them all" variety. Most of it's very formulaic—think nicene creed or traditional church hymns, but less interesting. There were a bunch of standard texts that were reproduced on many tombs, and as time went on this body of necessary texts grew, so that's very likely what a lot of this is. Sometimes you'd get some passages of history but those are usually about as dry as the tombs themselves. More often those are on monuments, not buried in tombs, anyway.

"Mirrors for princes" (instruction texts for rulers, often both moral and practical in nature), scribal training texts (yes, really), and their few actual stories that survive, are all way more interesting than the stuff inscribed in tombs, in general. A lot of those don't survive in hieroglyphs, though, but in hieratic or demotic script.

And have to update each software package manually as in windows/macos? (even worse, have a backdoor updater build-in on packages)

I only use Windows for gaming so IDK there, but almost everything I use on macOS is installed with Homebrew (a package manager). Even crapware like Slack. Though yes some of those do decide to use their own built-in updaters after that—no helping that, if you must use their software, but being able to script installation of them through one interface is really nice.

But why?

It shouldn't be possible to break one's system with the same tool, commands, and privileges one uses to install Tux Racer. Installing normal user-facing packages shouldn't require privileges that even allow for screwing with basic system software.

Any and all security updates should be installed as soon as possible, regardless if it is a kernel update or a browser update.

God damn I guess I picked a bad example because folks are really stuck on that. Reverse it then: if I want the latest drivers, xorg, and kernel, including feature updates, what's that got to do with my installation of Tux Racer? Why are those connected in any way whatsoever? Why do the same tools manage installing and updating both? "Build it from source then" yeah but I like package managers except for oddball stuff like dwm, I'm not saying get rid of them.

I could use Homebrew or Nix on top of some distro but that's a road full of jank and more fiddling-with-trivia than I have patience for these days. I'll crankily live with Void Linux for now and pine for a robust, small, tested, rock-solid base system built for using one or more complementary and supplementary user-facing package managers on top of. I mean macOS isn't even built for that, exactly, it just suits the case very well. I wish there were a Linux distro that did, too.

Unix (and hence Linux) was designed to make efficient use of these limited resources by installing popular software system-wide with shared dynamically-linked libraries because that was the only way to even _fit_ a few hundred users on one system. As a sysadmin, I get cold sweats thinking about what would have happened if every user wanted their own personal copy of Emacs on such a system.

I think this is largely beside the point, and not because concerns about resource use are outdated. Linux already has the concept of user groups. Just make packages installable per-group or per-user. There, issue almost entirely mitigated. The default case for single-user systems could even be group-install, since it'd look basically the same anyway—it's multiuser systems where true per-user package management might make sense, but isolation from basic system software management makes sense in either case.

If you're looking for a Linux distro that behaves more like Windows and Mac, you're in luck because Ubuntu is hurtling themselves in that direction as quickly as they can by making snaps compulsory on every desktop install.

I'm no old-timer (yet) but my first couple computers had actually-floppy floppy disks, so I remember resource constraints well and remain conscious of them to an above-average level, I think. Ubuntu these days is buggy bloatware with little extra going for it in exchange, and has been for a long time. For ~3-4 years early on they were doing a good job of curating a decent Linux desktop experience with reasonable defaults (as in "Epiphany? LOL no, our desktop metapackage will install Firefox, TYVM") but those days are long past. Snaps are so plainly godawful that it's got to be internal politics that let them get this far, and keeping them alive—but such a thing is only a tempting development target because software management on Linux is all mixed up with keeping the system bootable and fundamental hardware features working to a basic level, which is the thing I'm not happy with.