star-castle

Ideally we can move to a more humane system of sending both children and parents right back across the border.

we should readily engage in political discussion

You must mean political lecturing, because 'discussion' implies more than one side, which means hearing from more than one side, which means not censoring or aggressively punishing voices apart from one side, which means "giving a platform to hate". Where 'hate' is one them magical words that is taken literally and figuratively at the same time, whichever is tactically convenient.

And before the 1980s, people were medicated into living like zombies. There might be a cycle of skepticism and liberalism, but what what hasn't changed is that doctors can't feel your pain for you, and they can't know where the medication goes after they prescribe it.

Both of these are technical problems.

As for where it's more desirable to be on the cycle, in a climate of skepticism you can at least argue strenuously that you really, really need it. You can improve your own situation, by your own power. In a climate of liberalism we just have to hope that someone will notice and intervene on behalf of someone killing himself with drugs. One of these climates will result in an excess of pain; the other will result in an excess of death. Since neither is desirable, I suggest you focus on technical solutions rather than rabble-rousing to advance the cycle.

You think horrifyingly painful medical conditions are extremely rare

Yes. In particular, they are much less of a concern than the epidemic of people killing themselves with opiates. This is so blatantly the case that I see this piece as simply axe-grinding of a certain agenda. The author is distressed and annoyed that sympathy is going towards this suicidal population. The author wants to direct your sympathy towards people like this guy.

And this guy's problem is not 'pain'. There's medicine for that. This guy's problem is that doctors are skeptical of his pain. And that is way, way, down the totem poll of things I care about, vs. an entire population group killing itself by whatever means are handy.

When I was eight I was worried about people not believing that I was really sick.

I think it's a good idea to initially assume most things you read were written in good faith

When a journalist writes, I only look for the narrative.

I'd rather be fired by a machine than fired by a database. In this guy's case, everyone of importance was on his side, it was just a technical matter to get the situation resolved in his favor.

In my case, there was a decision that employees like me would be paid out of the server budget. And then a subsequent decision came down: fire the employees that are getting paid out of the server budget! Of my department, regardless of how well we did our jobs, regardless of pay, regardless of length of employment, some of us had the 'paid like a server' checkbox checked and some of us didn't. The ones that didn't were kept on.

They've already released "a game". The ultimate failure will come in the form an announcement: it's done! tadaaa! click here to purchase!

But the SC as imagined by the 1000th "what money is still coming in? promise something! promise more!" new stretch goal, that will never be released.

I want my descendants to have at least a minimally functional civilization. Dramatic (staged) pictures of dead children don't change that. A single border agent being meeeeeeeeaean to chhiiiiiiiildren doesn't change that.

The immigration debate hasn't caught up to the maturity of the gun control debate, where the left is at least no longer (really) surprised when nobody changes their minds after a school shooting. But it'll get there. Once people realize where the butter is on their bread (or where the cyanide is on the bread), you're not going to change their minds with Hollywood productions and media campaigns.

"Oh, my insignificant family life is ruined, but at least I still have options when it comes to a fulfilling and meaningful career!"

"Oh, I have cancer. But at least I'll be saving money on haircuts soon!"

... not quite good enough.

"Going on an air trip with your family of four? Well, if you divert your attention to handling four parachutes, you're more likely to make a mistake, so you'd better just prepare one parachute just your yourself. That way, when the plane's in its terminal dive, you can abandon your family to their deaths and make it out alive."

Something more like that, although that's absurd.

Your view of the situation is inverted and immoral. A relationship is what might actually make life worth living for you. Your skills are how you get a job, and "ten years of home-making" just means that your lonely, pathetic existence, post-relationship, has a few less luxuries in it.

Google manipulates its results in a variety of ways. The end result is that if you and your networked peers aren't already searching for things related to Dragonfly BSD, then you're less likely to find it, because Google will be 'helpfully' biasing your search towards other stuff.

Why do you trust it? You got into a car on an arranged deal and the driver immediately wants to back out of it--this is already a shady situation. Why do you think he'll drive you anywhere after he gets the $10? Why do you think he won't charge you for the trip on top of the $10 after alerting Uber to their own GPS records that show your phone and his car taking you to the destination you said you wanted to go to?

I don't believe you. No offense, but it's easier to learn that the Earth is flat, or that a place called 'Australia' exists, or that reality is entirely a consensus affair and that strenuous wishing can change it, than it is to learn that Uber is easy to contact. Some lies people don't bother spreading.

Just look: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=complain+to+uber

Or look at this article about Uber deliberately hiding a contact number "to test discoverability" (meaning: if users find it too easily, it should be made harder to find) https://www.theverge.com/2016/3/10/11196352/uber-secret-emer...

If you lucked out and found that your specific issue had a UI entry in the app, that's not the same thing as being able to explain a situation to a human and have that human do the (paid, drudge) work of wading through obscure interfaces to find the button that fixes a given problem.

How? Uber is a current-year tech company. Like Google, there technically is a support line that technically exists, but just forget about it.

I called Uber 10 times, in Houston. Got scammed 5 times. Part of the "the driver just keeps driving and never acknowledges letting you out of the car" scam is that the app takes the same approach to "uh, I'm not in the car anymore" as it does to "uh, I would like to complain to Uber". (The way to say that the ride has ended is to cancel the trip, an operation that feels like you're trying to scam the driver, so an honest person will avoid doing that while searching for the nonexistent "the ride has ended" UI.)

4/5 scams: the driver goes past your position and then waits a mile down the road to pick you up. The moment the driver was near, Uber switches to "ok go get in the car" mode. It never switches out of it. If you cancel, rather than hike an unreasonable distance to catch the car that deliberately drove past you, then Uber charges you $5.

c.f. https://github.com/deech/LeftPad/blob/master/left-pad.org , in particular "At the type level we have:" and "At the level of sorts and refinements:"

Or take this silly code: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50658528/how-do-you-repl...

At the type level, nothing changes between the first program and the second. At the level of sorts and refinements, ATS2 is given more information in the second program so it's able to turn the two noted error conditions into compile time errors, when in first program they could only be runtime errors.

I haven't heard anything bad about Hongwei Xi. Who are these ill-regarded researchers?

2015 MacBook Pro, compiling his 'first cut at it' example:

    # time idris -o Foo Foo.idr
    
    real	0m31.683s
    user	0m30.646s
    sys	0m0.876s

Click the [-] at the top right of that doc page. You won't find it so overwhelming.

OCaml has a type-safe printf and isn't purely functional.

ATS is essentially 'C with dependent types'. And optionally some other languages with dependent types. You can think of its dependent type checking and theorem-proving as 'pre-compilation', since there's no runtime overhead to it (and since you can separate it out into its own compilation step, including swapping out alternative solvers). ATS's relationship with C is good enough that you can take an arbitrary C program and start tightening its screws by injecting a bit of ATS into it.

I doubt that the svk guy had that problem either.

His problem was, instead, "I took a year off work to produce a VCS and then saw the throne taken by git. My work has been forgotten and nobody uses it--not even me."

Reminds me of the fellow that took a year off to create an amazing new version control system. He made svk, which was pretty good except for being followed too closely by git.

However good Zig looks, there's also Nim, ATS, Rust, and a dozen more. Seems like a good time for programming languages -- which means a dangerous time to quit your day job for one.

Please be nice to each other, regardless of ethnicity

without talking about ethnicities that dislike other ethnicities, I can't explain why this photo means that the media won't talk about the Uyger genocide until it's at least well and done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs#/media/File:Uyghur_gir...

That's basically how it works in the US, yes.

but it is not necessary for the website displaying the advertisements, as proven by ad-blockers.

when I was a child I stole a toy from Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart is still around. Therefore, Wal-Mart's entire existence as a store does not depend on any kind of anti-theft measures, and it should be illegal for them to film my entrance and exit.

What do you mean by "does not depend on tracking"? Do you mean that you can conceive of a way to implement the service as it appears to the user, without tracking? Because Facebook can certainly inject tracking into their chat app. Given Facebook, I assume it's already the case that if I type "let's get married" and then erase those words and never send them, that Facebook's going to start showing me advertisements for how to pop the question.

what? seriously? Do EU citizens have some kind of legal right to Facebook access, now? It's illegal for Facebook to not serve people they can't sell to advertisers?

I'd love it if Facebook were nationalized (or destroyed), but none of the coverage of the GDPR made it sound like it was going in that direction. I thought it was just another stupid "click here to acknowledge our cookies" rule that was going to spam up the internet.