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tariqk's comments

tariqk | 14 years ago | on: Why I Hate Android

I saw this on my feed, opened the tab on the background, saw it was from MG Siegler, closed the tab.

I don't deny he doesn't have some genuine insight. I just find that the amount of work I have to do to sift past his bias is so draining that I prefer to outsource it to people who _can_ tolerate his... foibles (read: bullshit).

tariqk | 14 years ago | on: Whe Power users are going to be the 80 percent

Really. So you can write academic material on it, with the inclusion of bibliographic information? You can outline a novel and write it? You can create process documentation and tie it with graphing tools and charts and spreadsheets and tables?

Because I don't think your definition of "great deal of productivity" jives with mine...

tariqk | 14 years ago | on: Whe Power users are going to be the 80 percent

Well, you can’t do complex office tasks on tablets yet, I think. Anything that requires you to input a lot of text input still can't be done well on tablets. That includes any serious amount of writing.

Unless someone here already does their writing on tablets...

tariqk | 14 years ago | on: Evolutionary Algorithm: Evolving "Hello, World"

That's a pretty interesting look into what happens in an evolutionary algorithm.

But for a minute there I was hoping that the OP was going to evolve an actual "hello world" program. That might be an interesting exercise to do over a Lisp-like language.

tariqk | 14 years ago | on: Equality for all? And everyone fails...

If I wanted to read stupid-ass chain letters repeating the same old boring irrelevant political talking points repeated by the mainstream media I'd be reading my Facebook feed.

tariqk | 14 years ago | on: Equality for all? And everyone fails...

You mean like the Republican political party's faithful cheering on the fact that Rick Perry presided over more executions during his tenure?

I think your definition of "disgusting" is different from mine.

tariqk | 14 years ago | on: On the obnoxious entitlement of the “nymwars” crowd

It's certainly very ironic. So the OP is unhappy about people complaining (when the OP could certainly... I don't know, not bother to follow the issue?), and thus OP decides to complain about people wanting to use pseudonyms... while using a pseudonyms.

Maybe it's satire.

tariqk | 14 years ago | on: Is There Anything Good About Men?

First off, the author misrepresents the idea of patriarchy as a "conspiracy of men to subjugate women". That's not how I've heard how it's been defined. Patriarchy/kyriarchy, roughly put, is a series of assumptions and privileges provided to a segment of the population, often at the expense of everyone else.

It's not, as far as I can see, a conspiracy -- i.e. a secret plan hatched by a clandestine group that goes against a larger society's interests. You can have a pat/kyriarchy where each member acts on their own best interests, and yet the results of that unfairly disadvantage certain groups.

A good example of the kind of decentralised, mass-action that disenfranchises a particular social group or class can be found in Michael Young's coining of the word "meritocracy", and how, through the collective action of a group of self-interested actors, a particular social group can be disenfranchised or demoralised. It doesn't require secrets, it doesn't require conspiracies, as a matter of fact it just requires everyone acting to their own best interests.

Secondly, the author doesn't make a convincing argument that the fact that the reason why men get all the risk and all the reward is because of something innate, instead of a self-perpetuating social system that actively encourages one gender to risk it all and reap the rewards, while holding back the other gender to mediocrity and risk-free existences. The possibility is raised for a few sentences, and discarded, as if it's ridiculous, and it's obvious that the reasons are inherent.

Since the arguments in the rest of the post requires me to buy the above premise without conclusively eliminating social mores and non-innate possibilities, I didn't bother reading the rest of the article.

Incidentally, as a member of a nation that was born out of British Colonialism, the statement "the British Empire did a lot more good than harm" is a disgusting, privileged statement that really doesn't elicit much more than pitying contempt from me. Since of course we wouldn't have known what our lives would have been without John Company coming down to "civilise" our barbarian asses, obviously the only feelings we should be having is gratitude, especially since we owe our broken conception of race and ethnicity, our de-facto one-party rule since we gained independence from our Magnanimous Masters, our police force, more intent in beating down dissent and enforcing "public order" that is beneficial to only the ruling class and no one else, to organisations, concepts and social structures derived from British rule.

That's right; it was this or barbarism. Yeah, I hope it helps you sleep at night too, jerk.

tariqk | 14 years ago | on: What RSS reader do you use, and what does it lack?

Google Reader. Mostly because it's available on any machine I can login to my Google account, so I don't have to worry about synchronising my feeds on multiple machines.

What could be improved? Well, access to protected, private feeds that require authentication would be good. The problem is, of course, that the workarounds for Google Reader to access private feeds (http://lifehacker.com/5432277/access-password+protected-feed... and http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/subscribe-to-authen...) kind of worry me.

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