Untitled

I like the "extra conditions should just be extra adjectives" philosophy on first glance, but if we take it seriously then don't we have to give up "field" (and so presumably "fielded" and "fieldic") too? That's a radically different looking name for a commutative division ring.

Someone needs to redo this meme with the proper equivalence classes for ℤ/ℚ/ℝ, and with the Peano axioms or something for ℕ. The only simple construction step here is the complex step!

This is a beautiful sentiment ... but whether other languages are worse or not does depend on the use case. Most saliently to me: even if C++ is currently the least-awful option for personal projects, skill issues are out there, so there's a good argument to be made for collaborative projects to consider languages that don't provide saboteurs-who-think-they're-collaborators with quite as many handy footgun options. You can try to mitigate the problem with linters and formal project standards and so on, but any large enough team has good reason to consider languages where it's harder to write good code if that's the price you pay for making it much harder to write bad code.

WTF you can just turn off endless scroll and also make Tumblr chronological again? Thank you so much for posting this

Don't forget 5) some pages (glaring at Twitter...) will unload the top of the scroll as it loads more at the bottom, presumably to try and recover performance, but meaning you can't Ctrl+F to find a word you *know* you just read, and 6) other pages (glaring at Twitter and Tumblr...) will edit the middle of the scroll, presumably because programming is hard and their programmers make it look even harder, meaning you can have entries vanish on you *while* you're reading them.

I wish there was a browser extension for Reddit that would replace the pertinent comments with 'SIMPSONS QUOTE', 'IASIP QUOTE', 'BOJACK QUOTE', 'SIMPSONS QUOTE AGAIN', 'COMPLETELY OUT-OF-CONTEXT NORM MCDONALD QUOTE' and so on and so on. Would make scrolling a lot faster.

It's fun when people like the same reference sources you do. But one can desire too much of a good thing, especially if we're confusing the language of the whole world. Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra! Excuse me, I mean: 'OVERUSED SHAKESPEARE PHRASE, STRAINED BIBLE REFERENCE, STAR TREK QUOTE'.

Are they getting close to realizing that Harvard University also has origins and subsequent history which are ethically fraught? The problem there might solve itself...

if i keep using greek letters in articles i'm going to have to get a customizable keyboard so I don't have to look them up each time.

Custom XCompose entries (standard on Linux, though you have to map something to be "the compose key"; Windows and OS X seem to have third party programs) are the best way to do this if you have more than a couple characters you need. E.g. "∀λ∈ℝ" for me is Compose,m,A ("math A" mnemonic), Compose,g,l ("greek l"), Compose,m,i,n ("math in"), Compose, m, b, R ("math bold R"). Not something I can do at 60 words a minute, but better for note-taking than writing out ASCII notes ("did that plain R stand for 'any ring' or does this only pertain to the reals...") or trying to remember a hundred code points or flipping between some GUI character map's pages.

the future has vending machines that dispense fresh, fully-cooked, nutritionally balanced meals but they’re called something goofy like “NomBoxes” so you can’t even fully enjoy the high-tech conveniences of the future without feeling vaguely ashamed about having to say the word “NomBox” out loud with your mouth.

We must look to traditional solutions from the past.

if you were to add a seventh attribute to the classic D&D six, what would it be? Would your answer be different if you were replacing one instead?

"Wisdom isn't real when Intelligence is right there"? Occasionally imparting the fact that Wisdom and Intelligence are two different things, including to stereotypical high-Int low-Wis D&D players, is perhaps the most historically valuable consequence of the existence of D&D! They're correlated, sure, but every now and then you get a very-high-Int very-low-Wis outlier like Thomas Midgley Jr and then you spend decades trying to undo the damage.

Proponents of 0-based-indexing languages originally pointed out a number of benefits, such as those listed in Dijkstra's famous essay, but lost the debate after proponents of 1-based-indexing languages explained their own benefits, such as "If you cry uncle we'll call off the trained mountain lions."

Being a mathematician does irreparable damage to you vocabulary. I have on more than one occasion forgotten that certain words have normal every day meanings

Normal meanings as in, what, they're orthogonal?

You’re thinking of a normal vector! Normal meanings are meanings that are invariant under conjugation.

That's a normal subgroup! Normal meanings are those where any two disjoint closed subconcepts have disjoint open neighbourhoods.

That’s a normal space!  Normal meanings are meanings whose third- and higher-order cumulants are zero.