kenko's comments

> Imagine how open the highways would be if this was how everyone worked/lived.

What does this even mean? If everyone worked away from the city, there would be no city to drive to. And of course the people in the city, or on the outskirts of the city, don't need to drive—they can take public transit anyway, or bike, or walk, or whatever.

More people living outside the city and driving into it is how the roads get congested, not how they get clear. If they only go into it sometimes rather than all at the same time the roads might be less congested at rush hour, but on the other hand, unless they're all setting up in another, similarly dense city, you're just creating sprawl, and the roads between the little towns and suburbs are probably going to be pretty crowded as people go between them to run errands, meet friends, dine, etc., since by hypothesis everyone's all spread out, and therefore so are all the conveniences, shops, entertainments, etc.

> And in any case, the market for lemons is a theoretical exercise. It does not actually happen in real markets, because there are various market mechanisms that emerge to address it.

The "market mechanisms" you speak of are government regulations establishing minimum standards and forms of redress (e.g., and most on the nose, lemon laws).

> Pinboard is great, but it never competed against Delicious. In fact it came out long timer after people stopped using Delicious.

It got a HUGE boost when the announcement of Delicious' sunsetting came out.

> You just did the thing I suggested was insubstantial and said hurts and I didn't like. Please stop. Also it's a logical error to judge a claim by the site it's on, or by the claims surrounding it.

It might be a logical error, but it's not a mistake. If someone tells you lie after lie after lie, and then says something new, whose truth you can't immediately evaluate, the sensible thing to do is to think: this is also probably a lie.

> It's a military AI that correctly interprets a command to kill a particular group of people, so effectively that its masters start thinking about the next group, and the next

You know, you don't need to go that far. You know what a great way to kill a particular group of people is? Well, let's take a look at what a group of human military officers decided to do (quoting from a paper of Elizabeth Anscombe's, discussing various logics of action and deliberation):

""" Kenny's system allows many natural moves, but does not allow the inference from "Kill everyone!" to "Kill Jones!". It has been blamed for having an inference from "Kill Jones!" to "Kill everyone!" but this is not so absurd as it may seem. It may be decided to kill everyone in a certain place in order to get the particular people that one one wants. The British, for example, wanted to destroy some German soldiers on a Dutch island in the Second World War, and chose to accomplish this by bombing the dykes and drowning everybody. (The Dutch were their allies.) """

There's a footnote:

""" Alf Ross shews some innocence when he dismisses Kenny’s idea: ‘From plan B (to prevent overpopulation) we may infer plan A (to kill half the population) but the inference is hardly of any practical interest.’ We hope it may not be. """

It's not an ineffective plan.

Under a minute! How many times did you have to do it to get that fast? (I still can't do it in under ten.)

It is a really wonderful video, and extremely effective teaching.

But at least he's still got some sweet Rick Owens jackets.

"but it's been pointed out repeatedly that he could have obtained an exit visa without a valid passport"

But only by grace of some entity with the power to grant him such a visa, right? He couldn't just ask for one and get it (someone in Slate I think said something like, look, Russia could have given him a visa and Cuba could have let him in—yeah, but those are things Russia and Cuba have to decide to do, not things Snowden can do off his own bat).

> There is if you think the grain is a corrupt and unfair system that needs dismantling. The enemy of my enemy is my friend thing.

No, there still isn't, because you seem to have missed the "in itself" part. Even in the case you identify, what is admirable is going against a corrupt grain (and presumably, we'd want to actually make it "going against a corrupt grain in a way likely to improve matters"; corruption is multiple and going against corruption in one respect isn't necessarily to go in a less-corrupt-overall direction), not "going against the grain" in itself.

incidentally this is a good paper: https://www.princeton.edu/~tkelly/ftawil.pdf

There's nothing admirable about "going against the grain" in itself. Probably most people in the upper echelons of tech wealth don't think it's a great idea to deport Muslims, and don't support Trump. I see no reason to admire someone for having a different opinion on that matter just because it's different.

There are lots of ways to "go against the grain" in the way you point out. You could be an unthinking dogmatist. Nothing would change the way you feel, not even the censure of your peers. (Is Thiel being censured? Sure, by Pinboard on twitter. By his peers? Not that I can see. His richy-rich pals all still love him, AFAICT.) Is there something admirable about having your head in the ground? Not really---and I don't think that, on the broader social level, we tend to applaud people who still think gay sex is shameful and should be illegal, even though, you know, they really go against the grain.

You could be, say, a modern Cato. But Cato is admirable not just because he fell on his sword but because he fell on his sword out of devotion to an admirable ideal.

I see no reason, incidentally, to believe your claim that "Thiel stands alone in his strength to go against the grain". If other people aren't going against the grain, it might be that they think the grain is largely going in the right direction already, and not that they lack the strength to go against it. And, on the other hand, you have to pay a little attention to threads about diversity of race or gender to find a lot of people with the strength to go against the grain. Guess what: the grain they go against, Thiel goes with.

...led

Why would they only be useful in strict languages? You don't need a macro to write `unless` in Haskell, but you do to (say) automatically generate typeclass membership given a datatype, or autogenerate lenses, and that use is orthogonal to evaluation strategy.

Wasn't Midori killed?

None of that strikes me as an explanation for the obtuse jargon in particular.

What people talk about category theory w/r/t Clojure? Since it has almost no type system to speak of, I'd be very curious to know what in the world they're on about.

Macros and the repl were, to me, the best part of clojure.

Why is this newsworthy? It seems like the exact same points have been made hundreds of times.

The idea that The Glass Bees is "little-known" is ... curious. It was republished by New York Review Books, not exactly a small little press no one's ever heard of.

The above scenario was an example illustrating the concept of abuse de droit. No need to get hung up ont he precise specifics.

> Laws that say "forget the law, anything we think is unreasonable is illegal"

Don't look up Scotland's declaratory power if this bothers you. It strikes me as totally reasonable.

> But the variables which receive command line overrides should be set apart in some way for that purpose.

Like by calling them "config" variables?