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trealira

1,226 karmajoined 3 वर्ष पहले

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trealira
·5 दिन पहले·discuss
> even GC isn't necessary

Um, isn't it? Don't all Lisp variants have it? IIRC McCarthy's LISP just ran out of memory until the GC was written.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
> So then I question if there are trans women out there who would be satisfied in a world where anyone can wear anything.

So long as they look in the mirror and see a woman. There are trans women already who just wear jeans and t-shirts and other unisex wear in their everyday lives. There are also trans women who will never come close to passing even after a long time on HRT and surgery and wearing the most feminine clothing, and it's just tragic.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
> Transgender people often suffer gender dysphoria.

That's the definition of it.

> You're correct that it's possible that gender dysphoria might be a downstream effect of society. Namely, we are an extremely gender-segregated society. I'm not saying that it's that simple and all transgender people would disappear if we live in a society with no gender roles or expectations, but certainly they heavily feel the pressure of those gender roles and expectations.

I don't think this is the case. Strict gender roles might make trans people's dysphoria worse, but it's primarily about a strong desire to be the other sex and not have your current sexual characteristics. Even in a world where everything is unisex, a trans person would still feel that discomfort - for a trans girl/woman, that you wish your voice were higher and not like a man's, that your face seems alien, that your genitals are wrong, literally anything sexed about the human body. It's orthogonal to whether a man can wear a dress or makeup. Not all trans women are even that feminine. And if it were about gender roles, then you'd expect more trans women to exist than trans men, given "there's truly only one way to be a man, although there are multiple ways to be a woman."
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
> I'm not saying zero, I'm just saying null.

What would happent to the primitive types of that language, then? When I said that, I was thinking of languages like Go and Java, both of which implicitly initialize integers to 0, booleans to false, floats to 0.0, and references to nil or null. That's what I'm calling less user-friendly than disallowing variables that aren't explicitly initialized before being used in all branches.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
I think it depends. Not having uninitialized variables by requiring the user to provide some value, as in expression-oriented languages, makes sense to me, because it wouldn't make sense in an expression for a variable not to have a value. An example of SML:

  1 + let val x = 1 in x * 2 end
That's both conceptually simpler and seems like one of the good solutions.

On the other hand, in languages where you don't have to explicitly initalize variables after declaring them, I think the best solution is to do flow analysis and forbid uses of uninitialized variables rather than implicitly set them all to null or zero. The latter solution just leads to confusing bugs if you ever don't initialize a variable in all branches (which is why I think that should be a compiler error). It's only a little better than C's solution of just letting the value be undefined, or in practice, a non-deterministic garbage value. An error message just seems more user-friendly, particularly for beginner programmers who are more likely to make mistakes like those and not immediately understand what the problem is.

I do get what you're saying about it being simpler, but I don't think it's conceptually simpler for the user to always initialize variables to zero or null.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
Thanks for explaining. I guess that makes sense, but it surprises me: language implementors choosing to do the slightly worse option not due to technical limitations or historical baggage, but just because it's easier. I thought only C was like that. That's not to insult any of them; it's not like I'm the maintainer of a compiler for a major programming language.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
This is a self-response, but I've thought of a case where it might be fairly difficult for a compiler to prove a variable is always initialized, because of the use of pointers. Take this function to copy a linked list in C:

  struct node {
      struct node *next;
      int data;
  };

  struct node *copy_list(struct node *list_node) {
      struct node *new_list, **indirect;

      indirect = &new_list
      while (list_node != NULL) {
          // Pretend malloc can't fail
          struct node *np = malloc(sizeof(*np));
          np->data = list_node->data;
          *indirect = np;
          indirect = &np->next;
          list_node = list_node->next;
      }
      *indirect = NULL;
      return new_list;
  }
The variable "new_list" is always initialized, no matter what, even though it's never explicitly on the left hand side of an assignment. If the while loop never ran, then indirect is pointing to the address of new_list after the loop, and the "*indirect = NULL;" statement sets it to NULL. If the loop did run, then "new_list" is set to the result of a call to malloc. In all cases, the variable is set.

But it feels like it would be hard for something that isn't a formal proof assistant to prove this. The equivalent Rust code (unidiomatic as it would be to roll your own linked list code) would require you to set "new_list" to be None before the loop starts.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
Somehow Rust is able to do it, though. Is it really that hard for compilers to do flow analysis to detect and forbid uses of uninitialized variables? Not even being sarcastic, I genuinely would like to know why more languages don't do this.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
Niklaus Wirth wrote about this in 1995, in his essay A Plea for Lean Software.

About 25 years ago, an interactive text editor could be designed with as little as 8,000 bytes of storage. (Modern program editors request 100 times that much). An operating system had to manage with 8,000 bytes, and a compiler had to fit into 32 Kbytes, whereas their modern descendants require megabytes. Has all this inflated software become any faster? On the contrary, were it not for a thousand times faster hardware, modern software would be utterly unusable.

https://www.computer.org/csdl/magazine/co/1995/02/r2064/13rR...

That said, as someone fairly young, I still don't think that makes it wrong or something only an old man would think. Software seems to perform exactly as well as it needs to and no more, which is why hardware advances don't make our computers run software much faster.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
That is a circular argument. Your basis that I'm arguing against plurality of thought is that you have labeled my comments as having done so.

Yes, I'm calling Republican commissars authoritarian.

I'm literally quoting the letter saying that they demand an external party to audit the student body, the leadership, the staff, and their teaching units for sufficient "viewpoint diversity," which reports directly to the federal government. It doesn't take a conspiracy theorist to see that this is a euphemism for instilling conservative Republican thought in the student body and in the classes they take. And yes, this will privilege conservative students and staff, because non-conservative staff will be fired and students will be denied admission as a result of this.

Do you think dictatorships have never been elected? Trump will not be held accountable for the laws he breaks, because his party would never betray him as their leader. He will not leave office. He will send and has sent people illegally and without due process to a confinement center in El Salvador in co-operation with Bukele, another authoritarian. I doubt there will be fair elections in red states - they'll probably claim mass fraud and throw out allegedly fraudulent votes. They already tried to send fraudulent electors to make Trump president in 2020, and a violent mob to the Capitol after that, as well as pressured election officials in swing states to find votes.

You may not call yourself a Republican, but I make no distinction among those who defend the regime so wholeheartedly. Keep playing the fool; it will not justify your authoritarian apologetics.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
> We have established

No, you have accused without basis, because you know you have no defense of installing conservative Republican commissars in schools, and to privilege the Republican students and workers present, so your only hope is to gaslight and imply that your opposition is the same—again, typical of authoritarian conservative Republicans. You can keep accusing and gaslighting, but I will never submit to your dishonest narratives to justify the Trump regime's actions.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
The House of Representatives just needs a majority vote to approve the articles of impeachment, but to convict, the Senate requires a two-thirds vote. That's what I meant by a supermajority. My bad for the miscommunication.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
Typical conservative doublespeak - speak as though there are commissars suppressing political dissidence so you can actually have an excuse to install commissars to suppress political dissidence. Conservatives have long disdained education for decades and abandoned its institutions, and now that they aren't bowing down, you want to use the government to force them to do so. The disgusting disregard for logic here is on you.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
Yes. The only way Trump is ousted is if Democrats somehow get a supermajority in the House and the Senate and impeach and remove him, which isn't going to happen. Republicans will always close ranks around Trump at this point. He definitely won't leave office peacefully, if at all. What happens after that, I don't know.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
"By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse."

They are calling for Republican commissars in universities and accusing you of being the one who wants to enforce a single viewpoint and call you the enemy of pluralism. Not surprised, but I continue to be infuriated to witness such shameless insincerity from Republicans.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
Compilation threads like those seem to me more like ways to make each other angrier and more racist. I think they legitimately just hate black people. Like, there's definitely some element of smug self-aware memey edginess about being racist, but there's also unironic vitriolic racism. But yeah, I guess we just disagree here on this.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
Well, I believe you that there are lots of kids there that try to seem racist for 4chan cred, and I guess people would know not to post videos of themselves doing those illegal things.

But I remember they had stuff like "n*gger chimpout" compilation threads, and whenever people talk about what they blame on Jews, they seem to be actually bitter and angry, so they do seem legitimately racist. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a lot of overlap with the people who do commit those acts of violence you're talking about, but even if not, I don't think you could say they're not real racists just because they don't post videos of themselves committing violent hate crimes. The board is just diluted by low-effort threads and bait by users of other boards.
trealira
·पिछला वर्ष·discuss
It's not hard to find people with a racist /pol/er's opinions in real life, or on other social media like Instagram or Twitter. Maybe /pol/ in particular is/was filled with bots, I don't know, but such extreme racism is not as uncommon as you imply these days.
trealira
·2 वर्ष पहले·discuss
I've had relationships where I just liked spending time with the person, even when just sitting and not talking, but I've also sat around on my phone not talking to people, and it's not at all the same. When you're on your phone, you're in your own little world trying to ignore everyone. When you're such close friends with someone that you even like sitting around and not talking, it's because you want to spend time with them so much that you want to just be around them even if there's no real "excuse" to hang out.
trealira
·2 वर्ष पहले·discuss
> Women in particular used to work for themselves and their families, building their own assets and their own relationships. Almost like that "founder" status everyone wants. Now they work for the same few men as their partners building wealth for those men and the closest the family has to a home cooked meal is a favourite takeaway.

I'd caution you not to conflate home-cooked meals and family dinners with restrictive gender roles. It's possible to have them without a stay-at-home wife. For example, I grew up with two moms working full-time and had home-cooked meals (or leftovers thereof) for dinner almost every day. It's of course harder to make time to cook when both parents are working, but not impossible.