spedru's comments

The website decided to randomly turn into a blank white page after clicking through a number of items on the timeline. Said timeline also obscures the bottom of the tweet embed on a small viewport. Between that and the cutesy center-justified monospace, perhaps the pessimists were at least right about Web Technologies™.

I can understand the moderation team not going object-level in the name of professionalism, especially given that [whoever this really means something to] probably already know exactly what's up. That doesn't make it any less strange or jarring to someone on the outside looking in. Can anyone provide context?

Sure, this is disputed, but I do wonder if it explains why my unfinished projects make me hate myself so much while my finished ones don't give me any real sense of pride.

Yes. This is exactly what I meant. Didn't mean to come off as obscure, sorry, I'm a little out of it and English isn't my best language on a good day. I meant to tack a “distributed” onto that “panopticon”. A bunch of perverts scattered around tech companies might make for a convincing “actor” to bring up to ordinary people who think talking about government agencies is too crazy-sounding. As for the intelligence bit, I mean to say, “engineers are typically high-IQ, high-IQ people get away with crimes, imagine how many creeps have gotten away with this sort of thing and we'll never know”.

It's sobering to think about this in tandem with the fact that people in the IQ bracket for “engineer” tend to get away with crimes. Honestly, though, at least this can be turned into a concrete example to shoot down “if you don't have anything to hide...” and the like. The banal, lascivious panopticon elicits a real disgust response that might be moving, as opposed to the “shut up you alex jones weirdo” that sticks to talk of the NSA no matter how many Snowdens happen.

I have no teaching experience but plenty of experience as a student. This is right on the money; it would have made me a much less frustrated child. Kids are sensitive to being patronised, and so many adults think they're slick.

I'm not really versed in the idioms/social mores of Python, so please take the following with a grain of salt:

This seems like it usefully solves a problem, but the invocation pattern is suspect to me -- Instead of "glom" taking the target for picking-apart plus a magic little bit of DSL, what if "glom" took a single parameter, the aforementioned DSL, and returned a function that would perform the corresponding search when called on a target? Even if Python or this package optimises away repeatedly searching (by the same spec|in the same manner), the convention the package prescribes is odd to me, right after the first few paragraphs of intro.

My disappointment that this did not actually say "The Forever Monad" is immeasurable.

This sort of article and the sort of thinking underpinning it is a betrayal of the uniqueness (relative to the more ``mainstream'' choices) of languages like Elixir/Erlang. In fact, part of the point of using a language like Erlang or Go (besides more production-relevant claims to fame like reliability or build times respectively) is to break one's thinking out of the object-oriented lens.

Not every abstraction is object-orientation. The notion of not caring about the internals of something (as with the article's mention that "This is possible because Elixir doesn’t care how the process works internally") is something that goes deeper conceptually and further back in time than objects as we know them.

It might be neat for weaning someone off an overwhelmingly OOP mindset, but that's not what it seems to be trying to do. Instead, it's just demonstrating how to use a new language without it forcing you to think differently, and that's worrying. If every language is a fantastic object-oriented language, why bother using any given one?

Betteridge's law is realized.

Every time some link or headline reads "now UTF-8 by default", the only reasonable response in 2016 is "about time".

The only winning move is not to play, as they say. Televisions are overrated anyway.

Two possibilities come off the top of my head.

Vitamin supplements.

Start packing yourself lunch.