Full Loper-os blogroll review

Due to Alf's recent victory I've decided to go through his hefty blogroll. Here's what I found :

I. Abstract Heresies. Blogspot. Last articles in January current, doing an alist vs hash table speed benchmark (+ detailed description of underlying iron). Takeaway : if you expect 25 or fewer elements, alist is better. Lots of good reads going all the way to 2007, with a peak in 2009ⁱ and then some sustained volume for another couple of years before dropping to monthly rate and then under that in 2015.

II. Angry Unix Programmer aka Peter Keller. Also last active in January current (after a four year break extending since 2011 with one article in March 2012). White on black, hosted on wisc.edu, handrolled html. Lots of interesting Lisp stuff, including "Option-9", which is a (very one-man-made) game.

III. Arcane Sentiment. Blogspot. Last active February 2016, with a very sensible "abbreviate by how common, not by how cognitively central or otherwise important item is". Peak of activity in 2008, including discussions of abstract algebras with imperfect models (Haskell), inept gargle about Wikipedia, as well as discussion of Blogspot's inadequacies (which evidently does not result in resolving the problem). Mostly monthly otherwise, except tapered off this year. 2016 sure is turning out a bad year for intellectual discourse in English, huh.

IV. Axis of Eval aka Manuel Simoni. Blogspot. Last active July 2016, mostly infatuated with something called RDP ("Reactive Demand Programming"). Peaked in 2010, tapered slowly to 2012 then fell off the map. Blast from the past :

Linus on transactional memory
I want transactional memory like the next guy, but comments like this one by Linus indicate that we still have a long way to go:

So that's what it boils down to: transactions are "free" and a wonderful way to elide those horrible expensive locks.

But only if you never make a mistake.

They are expensive as hell even for very low rates of transaction failures. And you really cannot know statically (even if you don't end up reaching some transaction limit, you may easily end up just having heavy contention on the data structures in question).

So I claim that anybody who does transactional memory without having a very good dynamic fallback is basically totally incompetent. And so far I haven't seen anything that convinces me that competence even exists in this area.

V. BLOGDIAL. Blogspot. Dead in 2014ⁱⁱ, closes with an obituary (for Matt Cogger). Loads of material, mostly sociopolitical interest.

VI. Chris Harrison. Looks like handrolled CMS. Lots of UX material, visually interesting, a miserable relationship with timeⁱⁱⁱ, society^iv and context generally^v.

VII. Dmitry Orlov. Blogspot. You probably remember the fellow from the logs - the one publishing trite restatements on US political situation as well as trying to build a nonsensical boat. I won't insist.

VIII. Don Lancaster. Evidently handrolled html from a time before PHP. The retro is something else, what with the 640px fixed width and all the colored buttons. A lot of material, to quote "microcomputer pioneer, researcher, and prolific author Don Lancaster's ezine columns that now include his Resource Bin, Blatant Opportunist, GuruGrams, Tech Musings, Guru's Lair, and similar tutorials."^vi Careful following the link, it arose fierce nostalgia in me.

IX. Doron Zeilberger. Plain html, ~directory listing of pile of pdfs, most of which being scholarly papers on cs/experimental math.^vii

X. Erik Naggum. You probably recall Naggum.

XI. Freedom to Tinker (at www.freedom-to-tinker.com). Site fails to load over buggy ssl issues. Apparently bulk redirecting http traffic to https is a-ok, and then failing to deliver over https is a-ok also. I guess they call this "gracelessly upgrading", the polar oposite of gracefully degrading. Who knew you totally need https to be free to tinker.

XII. Frozenlock (at frozenlock.org). Gone.

XIII. Greg Egan. Another blast from the ancient past (you gotta see that javascript-animated png). Mostly list of guy's books.

XIV. IgnorantGuru. Wordpress. Last active May 2016. Guy maintains SpaceFM^viii. Here's a snippet from "Openwashing And Other Deceptions In Linux" :

The times are changing for open/free/libre software and OSes, and what the words mean. Make no mistake: collaborative, truly open projects are powerful sources of innovation and problem solving. The only way proprietary, corporate models can even survive is through sheer bullying and anti-competition tactics, as have been used for years to keep Linux from wider adoption. Now that that is changing, the tactics are changing too.

Nostalgia. I told you.

XV. Ilkka Kokkarinen (at fourthcheckraise.blogspot.com). Una cuenta. Todo Google. 'Nuff said.

XVI. Imagine27. Ended January 2016 as per the rule. Mostly math, some thought. From "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" :

I can’t say that I agree with all of the conclusions in this series but the perspectives are very interesting food for thought. The Silicon Valley idea of technology holding some intrinsic automatic redeeming value for humans is something that is arguably destructive for society. The outright commodification of human emotion and the mediation of human communication through social media giants is not by default great for society as the technology utopians would have us believe. Also, whether or not technology actually levels the playing field is highly debatable. Love and Power truly are never going away and can never be controlled whether by elite individuals or large groups of every day utopians. Nevertheless this is part of the human drama that many seem to need and that some endlessly crave.

Evidently, the idea is nothing but sheer puritanism (work as redemption, with "work" redefined to keep up with the times). It's a sad testament to the intellectual stuntedness of the inhabitants of our colonies, that they'd find themselves trying to confront the 21st century on the narrow ideological basis of 19th century pop-mysticism.

Whether love and power are going away however is entirely a different matter - large groups manage to lose contact with the essences all the god damned time. This does nothing for the essences in question, of course, but being perpetually stuck in a zombie apocalypse isn't most people's idea of fun either.

But let's continue reading, from "O-notation considered harmful (use Analytic Combinatorics instead)" :

Big O notation, the Big Theta Θ and Big Omega Ω notations are often not useful for comparing the performance of algorithms in practice. They are often not even useful for classifying algorithms. They are useful for determining theoretical limits of an algorithms’ performance. In other words, their theoretical lower bound, upper bound or both.

I’ve had to painfully and carefully argue this point a few times as an interviewee and many times as part of a team of engineers. In the first case it can mean the difference between impressing the interviewer or missing out on a great career opportunity due simply to ignorance and/or incorrigibility of the person interviewing you. In the latter it could mean wasted months or even years in implementation effort and/or a financial failure in the worst case.

In practice the O-notation approach to algorithmic analysis can often be quite misleading. Quick Sort vs. Merge Sort is a great example. Quick Sort is classified as time quadratic O(n²) and Merge Sort as time log-linear O(n log n) according to O-notation. In practice however, Quick Sort often performs twice as fast as Merge Sort and is also far more space efficient. As many folks know this has to do with the typical inputs of these algorithms in practice. Most engineers I know would still argue that Merge Sort is a better solution and apparently Robert has had the same argumentative response even though he is an expert in the field.

The complexity-of-algorithms field is entirely ripe for an overhaul. There's need for "absolute best case" analysis for cryptographic applications ; there's need for "performance-as-graph-of-input-model" to resolve debates such as above and to efficiently find optimization of the grep kind without using one's own hands. Who will be the hero ?

XVII. Irreal. Wordpress. Active. Apparently emacs is up to version 25.1 by now, which the author reports to have built and installed with no problems at all. By looking into the matter we find that gnu.org loads some javascript on trying to download things that hoses firefox ; that space-separated fingerprint (as used on gnu.org) is an extremely unhelpful and downright idiotic format for fingerprints ; that no sks server^ix holds a copy of 28D3BED851FDF3AB57FEF93C233587A47C207910 nor does the sam.zoy.org "google diverter" page load. So there's no way to verify a major emacs release. Nice going, huh ?

XVIII. John Walker. Another blast from the 1996. If you were curious as to the source of all the various "Bitcoin in your browser" things, it's probably John Walker's javascrypt.

XIX. Lambda the Ultimate. Collective blog on programming languages. Active^x. Drupal something-or-the-other.

XX. Lemonodor. Wordpress. Dead with an "Obama 2008" sticker. Very lime. Includes an obit for Eric S. Tiedemann, which links to a post by Len Sassaman which was uninspiredly hosted on rabbi.vox.com and which vox has helpfully deleted. A few years of memorial should be enough for anyone!

In other lulz and blockchain technologies disrupting restaurants^xi :

JoAnne and I had dinner at uWink. uWink is Nolan Bushnell's new high-tech restaurant concept, where every diner has their own touch screen for ordering food and playing games.

The concept may not be so bad, if your goals include minimizing (almost removing) interaction with waitstaff and adding opportunities to interact with other diners, but wow right now this is a terrible realization of that concept. From the perspective of a customer it was ridiculously terrible. As a software guy, I found it totally entertaining and educational -- failure on this scale is compelling.

uwink interface failure

The application ClientController quit unexpectedly. Yes, we did send a report to Apple.

When we first walked in, JoAnne asked the host about some tables that looked like they were set up as multi-player LCD projector-based gaming stations. The host said "Oh, those don't work. I don't really know why not." That could be the restaurant's motto.

Once we were seated, I swiped my driver's license and our waiter/runner helped us login. I entered my name and then JoAnne accidentally skipped past the part where she was supposed to enter her name. There was no going back, so she was "Guest 2" from then on.

404 FOCACCIA NOT FOUND

We ordered food and drinks, and the interface was pretty straightforward, but tedious and slow compared to the old fashioned way of ordering.^xii

After submitting our order we got a screen for paying our bill. So we paid it, before we even got our drinks. Then our screen locked up. We flagged someone down and were told that once you pay your bill your session ends, so we should have waited until the end of the meal. This also meant that we lost the game credits from our previous order. The runner reset the thing and we logged in again. This time JoAnne entered her name but I got confused and skipped past my part and so I became Guest 2. I think we both need to sign up for classes at the Learning Center.

Trying to redeem a non-existent coupon.

About every two minutes a big message would pop up asking if we wanted to join a group game. This was extra distracting when we were busy trying to figure out how to remove something from our order or submit a request for more bbq sauce for my sandwich.^xiii

We played a bunch of games, which were mostly kind of pointless or difficult to figure out. There was a Boggle clone that was fun because we played against two other tables (we smoked 'em).

uwink interface failure

For fun, visit local.uwink.com and check their router settings. Update: It might be down now... intentionally?^xiv Who knows. Another update: Oh, this was my mistake. local.uwink.com seems to be an internal address; I probably just saw the router of the cafe I was in.

There were constant crashes, hangs, resets, error messages and console spew. For a while one of the projectors displaying group game info just showed a big 404 error. Two or three times we had to ask a waiter to go in back and reset our station.

If you need a waiter for something, like more salt or bbq sauce, you need to touch the help icon, then select "I need assistance $0.00" or "I need more sugars" or "I just want someone to explain to me why it costs $0.95 to get my drink up as opposed to on the rocks $0.00" and add it to your order, then submit the order. For real. Only a programmer could come up with an interface like that and then not be ashamed to unleash it on the public.

You're a finger.

The guy with two kids who sat down at the table behind us gave up and left after 15 minutes. If we didn't find the whole thing so funny we might have done the same.

At a conference last year I heard Bushnell talk about how he wanted robot waiters that could serve your food at uWink.^xv At the time I thought that would be fun and awesome, but I'm having second thoughts today. It's true that the restaurant has only been open for a year, but it's in need of something more profound than a few software tweaks.

Summary: Ambitious idea, less than impressive UI design, terrible execution. Food was eh. Once they get robots, stay away -- for your own safety.

Nolan Bushnell founded both Atari and Chuck E Cheese. uWink -- essentially trying to offer iPad-mounted-on-restaurant-furniture -- opened at $4.75 in 2008 and was trading under a cent by the time it finally went away (2012). In those five years it happily burned through ~25 million worth of investor hide, and left behind an angry cloud of stiffed location owners.

XXI. Lichtblau. Blogspot. Dead in 2011, very tenuously alive by that point - about half of its handful of offerings happened in 2007. Deeply uninteresting, experts-sex-change clone.

XXII. Lispian. Wordpress. Dead since 2013. Pretty idiotic throughout, as for example :

Assholes

It’s funny how some folks just love being assholes. Case in point, this guy. As can be seen, he (or she) went to a lot of trouble to make up cards to be an utter ass.

Now, this same ass would probably bitch and moan to high heaven if he needed one of those nasty 99% to come, oh, I don’t know, save his life if he had a heart attack, rescue his sorry ass during a storm, protect his property from thieves and thugs, ensure the roads remain maintained, ensure water comes to his home clean, clean his disgustingly indecent body if he should ever require long term care, and protects his right to be an asshole. I’m sure the fine folks in the military and the countless first responders must just welcome how lovely a person he is and how becoming his attitude is towards his fellow man.

The notion that some folks have that they don’t have to pay taxes at anything resembling a fair amount is utterly unbelievable. The only reason any of these rich assholes made their money was because they reside in a nation governed by laws that is protected by the majority. In most of the world your wealth could easily be confiscated, your freedom forfeit, your life dependent on the vagaries of sundry things. Instead of being thankful that his ass lives in a country that protects not only his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness but also his wealth from unlawful seizure, etc. he (or she) lashes out at the weakest members of society, those that ensure he can enjoy a life of luxury not having to cook for himself or clean after his sorry assed self. The attitude of entitlement evidenced by this bit of asshatery is beyond belief.

It’s galling to know that assholes like this exist. That they have money but no common decency or courtesy. That they only believe in their own self interest to the detriment of all those around them.

The only gallining point in all of this being the delusional notions libertards cherish, these nutty stories about how rich people need them for anything. Hey, dumbasses : we need to talk. Smart people don't want to be with you anymore.

Back on planet Earth, there's a little to be said about the bureaucracy "ensuring water comes to their home clean" ; "protect his property from thieves and thugs" or "protects his right to be an asshole" - to not even go into "ensure the roads remain maintained" or anything. At which point the libertard moves the discussion into "well they do the best they can", which supposedly is fine. The "rich asshole" paying "the best he can" however - that isn't equally fine. This dichotomy - of the exact nature of the psychotic device known as "splitting" - whereby the empire is misconstrued as good irrespective of reality while the republic is misconstrued as bad also irrespective of reality is exactly what puts "tard" in libertard.

XXIII. Micro_Research. Orgmode, which apparently sucks. Hardware blog, in a very... direct sense.

XXIV. Mircea Popescu. I already read this one.

XXV. Moron Lab. Old Curtis Yarvin blog, dead since 2010. Blogspot, of course.

XXVI. Neil Dickson. Wordpress. Dead since 2012. Mostly math popularization, of dubious interest. On the other end of the spectrum :

…The author is a proponent of the so-called “structured programming” style, in which, if I get it right, gotos are replaced by indentation. Structured programming is a nice academic exercise, which works well for small examples, but I doubt that any real-world program will ever be written in such a style. … I am confident that, 30 years from now, the goto will still be alive and well and used as widely as it is today.

–Reviewer rejecting Dijkstra’s idea of structured programming, presented in “Goto Statement Considered Harmful”

… The paper contains no real-world example to convince us that any model of practical interest can be cast in it. Quite the contrary, at first sight I doubt that anything complex enough to be of practical interest can be modeled using relations. …

–Reviewer rejecting Codd’s idea of relational databases, presented in “A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks”

This is a bizarre paper. It begins by defining a computing device absolutely unlike anything I have seen, then proceeds to show—I haven’t quite followed the needlessly complicated formalism—that there are numbers that it can’t compute. As I see it, there are two alternatives that apply to any machine that will ever be built: Either these numbers are too big to be represented in the machine, in which case the conclusion is obvious, or they are not; in that case, a machine that can’t compute them is simply broken! …

–Reviewer rejecting Turing’s proof that there are uncomputable functions in “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”

… I don’t understand the relevance of discrete sources: No matter what one does, in the end, the signal will have to be modulated using good old-fashioned vacuum tubes, so the signal on the “channel” will always be analogical. … The author mentions computing machines, such as the recent ENIAC. Well, I guess one could connect such machines, but a recent IBM memo stated that a dozen or so such machines will be sufficient for all the computing that we’ll ever need in the foreseeable future, so there won’t be a whole lot of connecting going on with only a dozen ENIACs! …

–Reviewer rejecting Shannon’s idea of communication theory in “A Mathematical Theory of Communication”

… The scheme’s security relies on the factorization of n in prime factors taking so long as to be impractical. The authors also stress that the encryption algorithm must be fast and—if their application, electronic mail, is to make sense—the algorithm should run on all sorts of machines. Let us be generous and assume that every computer user has access to a latest-generation minicomputer such as the VAX. This 32-bit machine’s speed considerations limit the choice of n to n < 2^{32} = 4,294,967,296. … Granted, we are seeing the appearance of so-called microcomputers, such as the recently announced Apple II, but their limitations are so great that neither they nor their descendants will have the power necessary to communicate through a network. …

–Reviewer rejecting RSA encryption, now the most prevalent encryption scheme on the planet, in “A Method for Obtaining Digital Signatures and Public-Key Cryptosystems”

Fear the spurned son ; for he will come at dusk with an army from Hell, pluck out your eyes and stuff them into the belly of your woman.

XXVII. Pascal Costanza. Blogspot. Dead February 2016 (previous post in 2014 though, something about "Why I like clisp", of little interest). Nothing worth the mention in 2006 either - arguably the blog's best year.

XXVIII. Peter Woit. Wordpress. Active. Even includes Recent Comments plugin. No need to scroll far for lulz :

Quanta Magazine has over the past couple years been establishing a well-deserved reputation as the smartest and best science journalism around. At the opposite extreme, over many years of interacting with science journalists, the most embarrassingly incompetent one I’ve run across has been KC Cole, so I was surprised today to see that Quanta has published a piece by her.

Back in 2006 she wrote a review for the LA Times, basically explaining that Lee Smolin and I shouldn’t be listened to because we were incompetent embittered failures who didn’t understand the beauties of string theory. When I contacted her and the LA Times to complain that her review had completely misrepresented what I wrote in my book about neutrino physics, she wrote back to explain to me that I didn’t know what I was talking about, whereas she was an expert on neutrino physics. Her other main evidence for my ignorance was this:

As for Woit’s claim that string theory has “absolutely zero connection with experiment,” experiments already planned for a new European particle accelerator will look for the existence of extra dimensions and extra families of particles — both predicted by string theory. In fact, many statements about string theory in these books are plain wrong.

The topic of her new article is The Strange Second Life of String Theory, which makes the claims that string theory has failed as a theory of quantum gravity (which will be news to a lot of string theorists), but that “it has blossomed into one of the most useful sets of tools in science.”

Then the next piece down, on Penrose's last book :

In giving these lectures, Penrose was walking into the lion’s den, bringing a forceful critique of string theory to the academic institution where it is most popular. Congratulations to Princeton University Press for publishing this despite it challenging the hegemonic viewpoint at Princeton (I had less luck with them: when my British publisher sent them my book for consideration way back when, they hired Lubos Motl to write an evaluation of it…).

You would be excused for having no idea who Lubos Motl is, except of course...

Whole thing definitely worth a read.

XXIV. Philip Greenspun. You recall the ArsDigita guy. Handrolled html, dubiously active.

XXV. Richard Gabriel. Handrolled html. Poetry and such mostly.

XXVI. Richard Kulisz. Blogspot. Dead December 2015. Random pop-psych weird (apparently people blush because they're sun worshippers and they can't trade off sexual attention to someone else quick enough) as well as misguided bile (this one worth a quote) :

Life Is Just A Story
To a certain personality type, you don't have a life, you have a "narrative". Because to them, everything is ambivalence, irony, contradiction and theater. Political protests? Street theater! Despot starving the populace? Jester! Everything of any import must be treated non-seriously due to ambivalence. And meaningless and trivial things must be treated super-seriously.

Your life is important to you, yes? And that's why its importance can never be acknowledged. No, the "truth" is that your life is just a story and if bad things happen in it or it ceases to be entertaining, if you cease haing FUN, then you just stop reading the story, you just stop living your life and you suicide. Suiciding to stop crying? Makes perfect sense!

Oh you got raped? How tragic! How wonderful! Now you have such an exciting story to tell about it. Pity the poor fools who haven't lived life to the fullest! After all, what would life be without all the bad things happening? Boring! Oh you got mutilated by some random psycho? Amazing!

Your life doesn't matter because it's entertainment. And the worst part of this is that it isn't even Evil scumbags that hold this despicable view. No, it's the personality type of anarchists, cultural relativists, rebels, freedom-fighters. The gothic moon-worshipers, the con men, the marginals.

It's not that they enjoy your pain when hearing about it. It's just that they don't care. It's all theater, a play, a stage. If your pains really mattered to you, you'd suicide. And the dead care for nothing so you can just suicide to stop crying. Your life has no meaning anyways, given Existentialism. There is freedom in death and freedom is all that matters.

For the same money it could be the bears. Or you know, the "gothic" moon-worshippers etc. Then one down,

Good people don't go for mere victory, that's too trivial and pathetic. Good people challenge themselves by going for win-win-win conditions. Good people don't care about status, because that's an inevitable side-effect of everything they do and just as automatic as breathing. And Good people don't care about building machines or LEGO blocks, because they care about doing The Right Thing. Why would you care to build a computer when you can build a mind? Why build a computer program when you can build a society? Only morons care.

As ever, the fundamental problem of idiots (whether they call themselves socialists or not) is that stupidity is meaningless. Still, guy's worth a read in the sense cancer's worth a watch.

XXVII. Roly Perera. Looks like wordpress ; either dead since 2012 or someone tried to delete it and did a poor job (the original link soft-404s). Unimpressive, on the basis of

Changing the past in open systems

This post is about something I call retroactive update and its significance for editing a live program. Execution environments that allow you to hack running programs are an idea constantly being reinvented. I take that as a sign that it’s a good idea.

XXVIII. Scott Locklin. Wordpress. Active. You might remember the author from How to fail - the Scott Locklin method - in any case I've no interest past that.

XXIX. Shtetl-Optimized. Active. Wordpress.

The No-Cloning Theorem and the Human Condition: My After-Dinner Talk at QCRYPT

The following are the after-dinner remarks that I delivered at QCRYPT’2016, the premier quantum cryptography conference, on Thursday Sep. 15 in Washington DC. You could compare to my after-dinner remarks at QIP’2006 to see how much I’ve “”matured”” since then.

should be sufficient to resolve any doubts. But wait, there's more!

By the way, here’s my #1 piece of research advice to the students in the audience: if you want to become immortal, just find some fact that everyone already knows and give it a name!

I suppose if we hang Scott Aaronson he'll pretend it's because he's jewish, rather than because he's an epitome of idiocy.

XXX. Steve Dutch. Handrolled html. Sort-of active. A sort of sottisier ; altogether not bad.

XXXI. Structural Insight. Blogspot. Active. Eminently readable math-and-things.

XXXII. Ted Nelson (at ted.hyperland.com) . All this holds is a wedding announcement ; the link at the top to "previous home page with lots of stuff on it" is dead^xvi.

XXXIII. Terence Tao. Wordpress. Active. Likbez on complex numbers last up ; various other mathematica^xvii interspersed with random lulz ("It ought to be common knowledge that Donald Trump is not fit for the presidency of the United States of America" - because the ugly little weasel 'bout three-foot nine with her face puffed up from cryin' 'n lyin' is so very totally fit and everything ; and besides Mr. Opinion guy has thought about this and stands ready to delete any mention, so THERE!).

XXXIV. Terry Davis. You know, TempleOS.

XXXV. Theodore Gray. Guy from Wolfram Alpha, wrote some book. Wordpress. Coupla articles this year. To quote,

I don't normally comment on the issues of the day, but everyone has a breaking point, and this is mine. I don't want to wait until it's too late to say something, and I'm far from the only one who feels this way. You know things are getting bad when even sensible business people and cynical politicians decide that they need to be on the right side of history, no matter the cost.

It’s not often that you read something written by the CEO of a major corporation that took real courage to write. Not the sort of courage you get talked into by a PR consultant who says you need to look tough. Real courage, in the face of real danger.

America has done good things in the world. It has fought just wars and it has sheltered those no one else would. America rebuilt a shattered Europe and elected a black man president. These are not small things. But neither are they a guarantee or a moral blank check.

I believe in the essential goodness of people. I believe that very few people get up in the morning wishing to make the world worse. But history tells us that good people, solid citizens, and well-meaning leaders can take their countries to the depths of hell in a frighteningly short time.

It has happened before. It will happen again. And it can happen here.

America has always been at its best when we have been courageous, not when we have cowered in fear. And let’s make no mistake about it: When a country commits outrageous, population-wide violations of long-held rights and freedoms—in response to attacks by individuals and small armed groups that pose no threat to the nation as a whole—that country is acting out of blind fear.

It is beneath the dignity of the great country I live in to act this way.

Aren't they just adorable ?

XXXVI. Uncle Al. Al Schwartz. The Al Schwartz. Ancient handrolled html.

XXXVII. Unenumerated. Yes that Nick Szabo. Blogspot. Active.

XXXVIII. Unqualified Reservations. Another abandoned Curtis Yarvin blog. Still Blogspot.

XXXIX. Xah Lee

.. Looks like some sort of handrolled CMS. More or less active. The usual braindamage.

The word “execute” “execution”, is really hateful.

When you use it, you connote killing and truth-hiding.

First, it's got the sense of “put to death”, which is a euphemism, from the original sense of “to follow out”.

i don't want my tech writing to be associated with the imagery of human animal's behavior of killing another human animal, nor the imagery of certain human concept called law and order. Nor, do i want to be associated with the concept of euphemism — a form of truth hiding.

Which brings us to the end of our review, 39 items and 5`500 words later. I hope you enjoyed the ride!

———

1. Sample : Innumeracy, which takes umbrage with some very broken math, but gives a pass on equally obnoxious idiocies such as "Average yearly retreat of the Himalayan glaciers: In 2006, 30 metres;". It should be self-evident that the average value can not be tagged by the element, there's no "average penis size : for Joe's penis, 5.25 inches" because that's exactly not what "average" means. [↩]
2. Afaik fellow still active on other blogs. [↩]
3. There's no obvious way to establish publication date for any of the articles [↩]
4. There's no way to leave a comment. [↩]
5. Lots of pdfs and assorted crapola. [↩]
6. I had to take out four spurious line feeds to construct this quote! [↩]
7. Eg : "A Motivated Rendition of the Ellenberg-Gijswijt Gorgeous proof that the Largest Subset of F3n with No Three-Term Arithmetic Progression is O(cn), with c=2.75510461302363300022127... By Doron Zeilberger". [↩]
8. "Forked from PCManFM, SpaceFM is a lightweight, highly configurable, desktop-independent multi-panel tabbed file and desktop manager. It features a built-in virtual file system, a udev-based device manager, a customisable menu system, and Bash integration." [↩]
9. pgp.mit.edu and pgp.key-server.io find nothing, while sks-keyservers.net doesn't load altogether. Phuctor is the only source for the key, which is how we know it did exist at some point in the past. Funny how this works, huh. [↩]
10. Funnily enough, the activity seems to have erroded it into a sort of webpage-reimplementation-of-#trilema, all the way down to similar treatment of anonimity, context or history. Entirely dickless, of course. [↩]
11. Saving it here lest the whole thing goes away [↩]
12. But hey - at least they "minimized" waitstaff interaction. That's a goal. [↩]
13. But hey - at least they "minimized" waitstaff interaction.

    I have no idea what's more ridiculous in the (admittedly ample) UStardian set of tools for being ridiculous than this fear of servants. [↩]

14. Whole thing's down solid. [↩]
15. What, you thought Bitcoin invented the expert-ephemeride, going about conferences importantly discussing things that don't exist ?

    Heh. [↩]

16. Links directly to "tedpage-d285.html", which evidently isn't an url. Cursory attempts at manual rescue produce nothing, however. [↩]
17. Has a LaTeX comments thing which I'm thinking of stealing. [↩]