sago

I'm wondering to what extent social working has to be within a company.

A fitness club I was part of a decade ago had this amazing 'cafe' space that was often used by folks with laptops and the odd bit of chat. It felt social. If work anywhere becomes the thing, is there is scope for work 'clubs'? Or without the fitness reason to be there at all, is it a nonstarter?

I don't disagree with your conclusions. But I think it is easy to oversimplify this. Until it is obviously just... obvious. I think reality is more interestingly complicated.

ownership of digital goods which can't be owned?

One interesting fact it is what the ownership means legally. If there was a successful image that an expensive NFT owner had, it wouldn't surprise me to see some legal shenanigans. This has not been tested yet. Capability does not give you the rights to make copies of digital art. "Can't be owed" is a rather brave claim I think.

You can make unlimited indistinguishable copies

Interestingly it is not dissimilar to a lot of physical art. To the extent that some 'restorations' of damaged art contain a lot of paint of the restorer rather than the original artist. I believe there are many professionals who are capable of creating something visually indistinguishable from the Mona Lisa, say.

Without specialised equipment you would have a very hard time telling reality from a good copy. So I am forced to conclude (what dealers will say quite explicitly) that most of the value is in the provenance not the physicality. "NFT is rubbish" becomes less obvious, to me.

Somehow I think I skim read and didn't retain that paragraph! Thanks. I'm sure that says something about me...

I just don’t appreciate the idea that we as software engineers can now sit back and believe we’ve made some kind of positive change, coz we haven’t.

Boom.

So I'm indirectly asking a black software engineer by virtue of reading the blog: What are the things that should be done instead? Not a lot we can do it about stop and search. How do we actively bust bias? He slams the 'meritocracy' meme: I know that is widely backed here. So what can be done instead?

Personally, I have no attachment to any of these words.

Sadly, I think a large proportion of people absolutely have a very strong attachment to not changing anything. Who will agree with you on this front but be against anything more substantial? I've been told on this board that the only racism is antiwhite.

YouTube is the same way

I had seen that claim before but I never noticed it. I subscribe to about 250 YouTube channels. They seem to appear in my subscriptions, in chronological order, as they're released. Are you referring to the homepage rather than subscriptions?

Yup. And DHTML over a Java applet before XMLHttpRequest. 1999 at least, iirc.

I think there are two slightly different approaches.

Your point is completely correct. As is the other comment here at about night and day. The lists are frequent. And not unique to European cultures.

But it's also not reasonable to say that in our particular culture, meaning as a political and social context.

Because I'm trying to make a bigger point than just race, I could imagine reading a similar things to what you're writing back in the late-C20 saying that 'Man' has been nongendered for centuries and in many cultures and in all kinds of language. Hi wouldn't disagree.

But then the next step: so women shouldn't have been worried about companies wanting to hire businessmen. That just doesn't seem ok.

So I definitely think that 'Black equals bad, white equals good' Has all kinds of historical significance, non racist links, and would not have been considered weird until very recently. But in our context I'm not offended that it would be something we find alternatives for.

The problem is that you're not thinking about the context of the word and instead are using it in a different context to be offended by it.

Please be a bit more careful. Please don't assume you know what or how much I'm thinking.

I think the situation isn't as binary as you seem to be presenting it. The context of the word is a metaphor. The metaphor is commonly used for 'good versus bad'. This being a common metaphor in western language might not be helpful to some people. It's not difficult to be more explicit or to use a different metaphor.

you are the one who needs to think about ... I am able to think on my own.

:) You know the classic idea: "I know I'm right, therefore you are either less intelligent or haven't thought hard enough!"?

You know how easy that is to think and why our brain gets us to think that way?

'blacklist'.. is as logically coherent ... 'black pudding'

Really? Regardless of what you think about racism, I don't want to be funny isn't it obvious that one is a metaphor and one isn't?

This is not a racism question, but would you think 'Concrete' in 'ConcreteList' is functionally the same as in 'Concrete road'?

I can't imagine how a blacklist is the colour black. Blood sausage is. Except the Irish version I know. Which is called white pudding.

all I see is white people being shit on

I figured that would be the feel of the objection.

Maybe I should be grateful as a white person that that's not the world I find myself in. Happy to pick my variable names.

I can't help but feel that the antagonism here is very similar to the antagonism I mentioned about Gendered language. The anger seemed mostly caused by being surprised by being asked to think about something.

I'm disagreeing with this thread. So I guess prepping for the down votes.

it trivializes all this historic pain to some inane game of word association

I think addressing one issue does not 'trivialise' everything else. It can be horribly overstated but changing small fry can help provide momentum to change something more significant.

It's complete bullshit,

It is obviously associating racism with something not intentionally racist. But does it not strike to you at all problematic, at the moment, that 'black' is a synonym of 'bad' and 'white' of 'good'? Does it not occur to you that it might improve our language to change that? Given changing a metaphor 'black' into a meaning 'block' doesn't seem to me a generally bad idea.

I understand the logic of 'that's just what languages is.' But language changes when people use it differently. It seems to me very reasonable to say let's use this language a little bit less unfortunately.

I'm not suggesting this is 100% the same but re: language change. I remember that time not too many years ago when people would argue that referring to a 'man' or 'him' at work was non-gendered. And those women complaining that we only talked about business men were just being unreasonable. I'm sure there are still places like that but I'm very glad that my co's & clients changed.

I agree, and definitely what I was hinting at.

I can understand why he enjoyed building mathematical models. And why reviews of "Balance of the Planet" praised that. But assuming that was the point, I think missed the point.

I think it would be like creating Demons Souls, loving creating the back story, getting lots of praise for it, and deciding that the best thing is an interactive fiction game with nothing but unlimited detail back story. Then wondering some years later why you didn't change the world, no one has gone further than you did, and all games seem shallow compared to your imagination. Fortunately Miyazaki went a different way.

Not a surprise that Will Wright and Sid Meier (who I know is very much a fan of complexity theory) went in a more successful direction.

Oh my!

"Why have I failed? ... The simple answer is that ... I’m too far ahead of my time... I’m a misunderstood genius. ... the world doesn’t yet perceive a need for the ideas I peddle. In 1885, physicists didn’t perceive a need for special relativity, and they would have rejected it out of hand."

Or... you're wrong.

[In the movie "Matrix"] "Neo has been revived and looks down the hall at the agents and sees the reality of the Matrix: that it is numbers. I see the same thing when I look at the real world."

I've been following his work for years, And spoken to people who have been to his 'conference' (and who I suspect will be rather bemused by the way he described them here!). The general consensus was it's horribly self-referential impracticality.

There is a reason he hasn't made anything practical in 35 years. Since the time when his success at 80s game development made him think it was the wrong thing that caused the success. (Hint: it was not his ad-hoc mathematical models, no matter how much post-doc justification he can ladle on them).

I have wondered about him, but sadly this post is rather damning in my eyes.

If "A Is almost certainly not a hoax, Therefore it is much more important than B."

"Why is B a hoax?" doesn't seem to me an unreasonable response.

Text is important, but its datum is rarely independent. More undo is useful than the text in the current text control. Anything else requires (and rarely gets) more substantial command undo/redo. I'm not making a black&white point, I am honestly surprised it so easily became "non-essential without apology".

Is "editing things" (i.e. data) not central in the majority of apps?

I keep vainly hoping for undo/redo, configurable keyboard shortcuts, cross-app files, app help, you know... the wins of the Windows 3.x 90s.

I'm honestly amazed some (especially undo!) were shrugged away so easily.

I don't understand your reference. It seems negative, but it's hard imho to go down on the success of Minecraft. Or am I misunderstanding you?

I miss lowsrc. It had a point.

I found this response surprising.

Code that has worked for 30 years is more technical debt than the ability to support 'new languages' or 'pivot' the code? Maybe I am an old fart, but the opposite seems right to me.

Large code bases are difficult to add functionality to.

A code base that is easy to pivot and switch languages sounds more like a nightmare. Isn't it more likely that your new, zeitgeist-capable software would torpedo development in far less than 30 years. As I understand "new programmers", the 'reinventing the wheel' speed is measured in a few years not decades now.

Or did I misunderstand you?

So not changing a spec for over a decade

The problem was there was no _specification_. It was a 'how to use' summary, And each implementation could be (and was) different in subtle edge cases.

The point of CommonMark was to define the specification and stick to it.

I agree with GP, I thought it rather sucky that he objected to using the name.

Various markdowns have extension mechanisms, they always have. That's not what the GP was talking about.

Right, the mirror doesn't actually flip.

Isn't the point that it does? It flips front and back.

A labour of love, I think, rather than extreme functionality (compared to the surely-hundreds of alternative Helveticas).

Reminded me of an element of Helvetica that bugs me (that different versions / boldness mitigate but this one has, definitely) is that capital letters look a little bolder than lower case. Just a fraction. But noticeable.

Almost that effect when you need small caps, by dropping the font size. Not that garish, but doesn't quite look right to me. Anyone else?

I've been reading some Kafka this month. Issues like this article are the 21st century realisation of his pessimism.

The Castle, and The Trial particularly.

I wonder if there's anyone writing Kafkaesque fiction about the modern world. I'm sure it could be Googlified. Any ideas anyone?

It's great to see some geometric algebra.

But I'm not quite sure what the package is for.

Is it for playing with geometric algebra? It is really rather simple to implement geometric algebra. As easy as understanding the internals of this package (which is not small for what it does). And in some ways a necessity for understanding the math. Like I wouldn't expect someone to just use quaternions and matrices to do 3-D, without learning how a matrix or quaternion multiplies. And I wouldn't start with a package of dozens and dozens of files in multiple directories, with a ton of inter-imports†.

So I'm assuming the package is for practical use, so it will be nice to see what they envisage it for. The only example is a single trivial operation. I'm aware it can be used for quantum physics. But my experience has been 3-D graphics. And there it is very meh.

So my long-standing problem with geometric algebra in software engineering has been... why? A frustration because it is a lot of fun.

My (imho) advice if you find it fun: you can write your own version in an evening.

---

† I wonder if packages are equivalent of books 20 years ago. I remember that temptation to buy a book, as if that was how you acquired some knowledge. I was guilty of that so many times. Now, want to get geometric algebra? There is a package for that.

There are more than 1500 NT hapax, and epiousios (and others) aren't exactly hapax (they appear twice ['dis legomena'], or more, though often in bits arguably copied from one source). A minority are names (e.g. Epicurean only in Acts 17:18), most are words that appear in non-NT texts (technically hapax, but often meh, obviously), most others (like 'epiousios') are compound word that are easy to understand (e.g. if you read an English writer saying 'she metathought about the problem' it wouldn't mystify you), but that still leaves plenty of oddities.

But the juicy ones have theological significance. If more significant, even simply compound words can generate debate, even words known outside the NT ('What did they mean in this context?'). Off the top of my head: Theopneustos (a hapax) from 2 Tim 3:16 is the forceful example (forceful for evangelicals at least). Authenteo in 1 Tim 2:12 is important in feminist theology. Arsenokoitai in 1 Cor 6:9 is a crucial question in LGBT theology (a dis legomenon, strictly, [oh hai 1 Tim, again], though I guess this post is allowing those ;)

Tanakh hapax are more difficult because we don't have masses of other/earlier Hebrew and Hebrew is less often based on compound morphemes. So 'OT' hapax are more widely known, imho.

Not the only one in the New Testament, but definitely one of the most juicy. Even Wikipedia calling 'daily' the 'traditional' translation is dubious: 'daily' comes from a particular Latin translation, not the earliest, nor the most common ancient one, nor the most famous.

A more denomination/sectarianism musing:

https://irrco.wordpress.com/2010/06/13/give-us-this-day-our-...

I'm not the physicist (my mother was), but as I understand it the 'came into existence' is not part of the big bang model.

Big bang only makes sense to a particular energy/time/space limit. All the energy that came to be all the universe already existed. What happened 'before that' doesn't even make sense. I was told that 'creation' type language is a misunderstanding of the big bang.

Is that not still the way it works?

Fascinating. Thanks for responding.

Can I ask what age-group you/they are? And it sounds like you had to write joined-up at school. Why would you stop? Isn't it so much faster?

I went to a snooty high school where fountain pens were compulsory (this was the 80s, not the 50s!). But writing was taught joined-up from pencils in infant school, from when you knew your whole alphabet. It never occurred to me to not join. It would have looked like a very small child's writing. Interesting though that has changed.

My wife is a grade school teacher, and disagrees, but I totally think that teaching handwriting is a waste of time. I wasn't anywhere near as fast writing as typing. I would have been much more productive with a laptop in school.

Anyway. I'm rambling now. Thanks for the response! I stand corrected.

I love his books. Gorgeous.

I think this was more his graphic design style for his books. As you say, the justification shows there's nothing impromptu about it. Here's how he wrote his letters, notes, drafts and so on: https://www.grough.co.uk/lib/img/editorial/wainwrightmanuscr...

I'm not splitting hairs on what 'handwriting' means. I'm fascinated by that era when books with complex text/visual interactions were far cheaper to create by hand. An example of an old magic book I have: https://imgur.com/a/8Bu9ML1 It's hard to beat Wainwright though.