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user-inactivated  ·  1391 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-Ed

People are getting impatient with the old school "one side thinks this, the other side thinks that, and we'll give equal weight to both" idea of journalistic objectivity, because the right takes advantage to make ideas that should obviously be unacceptable look acceptable. The NYT isn't becoming more insufferable because it changed, it's becoming more insufferable because it needs to and hasn't.

user-inactivated  ·  2030 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

"Don't worry America, some of us are lawful evil!"

    It's as if he's writing Biden's commercials for him.

He's not a whiny bitch

user-inactivated  ·  1393 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Happy Internet Maintenance Day

I'm sure they're not representative, but I've been following /r/army since Tuesday because it's the window I've got, and most of the upvoted comments are either along the lines of "I really don't want to do this" or "I'd be ok if they asked us to rein in the police". There's a distinct lack of enthusiasm for beating down people to protect windows.

user-inactivated  ·  2022 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 12, 2018

I've been trying to figure out who the user-inactivated I've been seeing all over is for days. Pour one out for cgod, pubski.

user-inactivated  ·  1533 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: GNU Guile 3.0.0 released

Guile 3 is interesting because of the JIT. They've been working towards it for over 10 years. Guile is made for embedding in applications written in other languages, particularly C, the way emacs lisp is embedded in emacs. It wants to integrate more tightly with the application its embedded in than Python or Lua do, and that imposes constraints that have historically made it very slow.

But you're asking about lisp in general. I'll talk about Common Lisp instead of Scheme, because I know it better.

So every dynamic language has a thing called a repl, but it's not the same thing as the lisp repl. It's only a little facitious to say this is a complete Common Lisp implementation (that only works with sbcl):

    (sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die "dumblisp" :toplevel #'(lambda () (loop (print (eval (read)))) :executable t)

read with no arguments reads the next lisp object from standard input. Type (+ 2 2) and you get a list containing the symbol '+', the integer 2, and the integer 2.

eval takes a lisp object and, well, evaluates it. The language isn't defined in terms of text, it's defined in terms of how eval interprets its argument. (eval (list '+ 2 2)) is equivalent to typing (+ 2 2) at the repl, (eval "(+ 2 2)") is not.

A corollary of that is transforming programs is just manipulating lists, and you can teach eval new transformations. So, if you really miss while loops from some other language, you can write

    (defmacro while (test &body body) `(do () ((not ,test)) ,@body))

And now

    (let ((i 0)) (while (< i 10) (incf i) (format t "~a~%" i)))

works like while in C. You've added while loops to your lisp. That's how most control structures are implemented. If you expand that expression all the way (unfortunately there's no builtin function to do it in CL) you'll get something involving TAGBODY, which is equivalent to a set of labels and gotos in C and translates straightforwardly into jump instructions when passed to the compiler.

Common Lisp's support for object oriented programming, the Common Lisp Object System, was originally implemented as a library using the same mechanism, and in fact most implementations just incorporated the library with minor optimizations rather than modifying their compilers when it was incorporated into the standard. Here's an implementation of Prolog in around 400 lines.

There's other stuff of course. A lot of us just like the syntax. For greybeards it's synonymous with functional programming. Image-based persistence is really cool. A high-level language that can be about as efficient as C if you care enough to give it hints is handy for projects where that matters. Convenient metaprogramming is the feature that really distinguishes lisps from other languages now though, things like garbage collection and strong but dynamic typing started with lisp but have since become ubiquitous.

If you're interested, Practical Common Lisp and Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming (in that order!) are both great books to start with.

user-inactivated  ·  1441 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: In Pursuit of PPE

It wasn't as funny as the dude wearing a gas mask with no filter attached, but it was pretty funny.

user-inactivated  ·  1699 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Labor Econ Versus the World

This was francopoli.

user-inactivated  ·  1373 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 24, 2020

Paste the url of the image rather than the album to embed it:

user-inactivated  ·  1382 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: If Black Americans were to seek asylum, they would easily qualify

    I mean, go do a Google Image search. Just "Burkina Faso."

I'm... not sure what I was expecting, but that sure wasn't it.

user-inactivated  ·  1399 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Some of those who work forces, are the same who burn crosses

user-inactivated  ·  1982 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Somebody sent Hilary Clinton and Obama mail bombs

Dude, could you quit it with the passive-aggressive community tags? All it does is force the rest of us to come up with a second tag so you don't put words in our mouths.

user-inactivated  ·  2015 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong

    And nobody wants to break capitalism.

user-inactivated  ·  1442 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the last four weeks

I was monkeypatching Google maps to make it work in IE6 for years because some of my users' organizations wouldn't allow them to use anything else. Let me tell you about the horrors of government computing.

user-inactivated  ·  2249 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Youtube is serving ads with Monero miners embedded in them

"Why does everyone run adblockers?" asks no one outside the advertising industry.

user-inactivated  ·  1528 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I'm having all four of my wisdom teeth out in 12 hours, kinda freaked out.

When I had mine out the only bad part was the pharmacist persistently trying to make small talk despite my mouth being stuffed with cotton and numbed with novocain while I was getting my pain meds. The actual procedure wasn't bad. I took the week off work because I'm a wuss and figured I'd spend the week only leaving the bed to take another oxy, but it didn't end up hurting so I spent the time writing a path tracer and rendering cheesy fractal landscapes out of boredom instead.

From posts you've made before, you've almost certainly had more unpleasant experiences in doctor's offices than this is going to be.

user-inactivated  ·  1369 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says

Even if there was even a remote possibility Mitch McConnell would allow Trump to be impeached, it wouldn't be done by November. The Democrats might try again anyway if Trump gets reelected, but I doubt they bother otherwise.

user-inactivated  ·  1689 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Sausalito, CA school district “knowingly and intentionally” maintained racial segregation

Charter schools are definitely a thing in the states, but the objection to them here is that they take funding, good teachers (the pay isn't shit), and good students (because funding is tied to test scores, and the easiest way to get the extra funding is to recruit the students who will score well regardless) away from the public schools. I went to one, almost all my teachers had PhDs in their subject, most of the people I graduated with are solidly professional middle class now... but we were the only school with a full time librarian, lab equipment in our science classes, and computers that weren't Apple IIs or PDP-11s inherited from a community college in a school district with a graduation rate around 60%.

user-inactivated  ·  1558 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 362nd Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately"

We only deploy the Hubski police for Daft Punk posts.

user-inactivated  ·  1389 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Minneapolis Votes to Disband Police Department

Police work is less dangerous than you think it is relative to other jobs, and encouraging cops' action movie fantasies to the contrary might have something to do with their itchy trigger fingers.

Besides which, the article itself says they're not going without law enforcement, just that they're replacing the police department with a ' “community-led” public safety program'. Most likely they're overstating a reform that's going to move their policing more in line with saner countries in the hopes that protesters will think they've gotten a bigger concession than they have and be satisfied.

user-inactivated  ·  1396 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Trump says US will designate Antifa as a terrorist organisation

On the other hand. while I didn't go out for this round because the nearest city to me has been very calm and mostly just black protestors saying "hey, we don't want to be murdered", at every protest I've been to since Charlottesville we've had things like church ladies bringing red-and-black cupcakes to the anarchists and aged WWII vets needing to be convinced that the black bloc kids could handle 4chan nazis and they don't need to break a hip helping. I'm not willing to predict a left turn in US politics, especially after the Democratic primary had the most depressing outcome possible, but I don't think a hard turn to the right is likely either.

user-inactivated  ·  1396 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Trump says US will designate Antifa as a terrorist organisation

While I acknowledge that America punishes optimism, I don't think a "red and black scare" is going to happen. I mean, even the NYT is calling bullshit. The FBI is uninterested enough that Christopher Wray had to make himself a wingnut punching bag shooting down Ted Cruz back when that was his obsession.

user-inactivated  ·  1404 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Nearly half of the Twitter accounts discussing 'reopening America' may be bots, researchers say

Back when it was twttr you interacted with it by sending a text message to its shortcode and it relayed it. Also displaying the messages publicly on the web seemed like a privacy issue to techcrunch of all things. They really caught on by pushing it at sxsw for keeping up with other people there.

As for the Ruby thing, I didn't follow it that closely. _why coined the term tumblelog for a blog consisting of really short posts, links and images. Microblogging was the term that stuck, but tumblelog gave tumblr its name. Because _why was excited about the format and he had his weird cult of personality going the Ruby community got excited about it too. Twitter started out as a Rails application, so a lot of its early users where Ruby guys, for the same reason there were a lot of lispers on reddit early on.

user-inactivated  ·  1409 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: ‘Hard stop’: States could lose National Guard virus workers

Rushing to reopen despite the danger to old people, then screwing the national guard despite the military being the only sizable, not-aged GOP-leaning population left. Did a bunch of accelerationists get hired as Republican strategists when I wasn't looking?

user-inactivated  ·  1415 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The dam breaks: Twitter Will Allow Employees To Work At Home Forever

Or have had experience with a nice, social, engaging office, but needed to concentrate and were hindered by people stopping by for a chat.

user-inactivated  ·  1764 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: PSA: 'Join Hubski' is temporary disabled.

I'll figure out the secret handshake if someone else comes up with the funny hat

user-inactivated  ·  1432 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: God damn look at this sheep

It's like every black metal album cover came to life, except kinda cute.

user-inactivated  ·  1947 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Google employees: We no longer believe the company places values over profits

"Guys, this Kool-Aid tastes funny...."

user-inactivated  ·  358 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 523rd Weekly "Share Some Music You've Been Into Lately"