Tiresas' prophecies come true because of a poetic or literary recursion built into the Oedipus cycle or the Oresteia or whatever. (I'm AFK, where K means "my library.") So when the guy to whom Tiresias prophecies that said guy will commit patricide in fact kills his father, he does so because he tried to not kill his father, and in attempting to escape his destiny, inflicted it upon himself. Stallman's apocalyptic ravings have had their basic gist "come to pass," in this interpretation, because of the actions of the developer community or tech community or whatever, in the struggle to develop software, which software has spiraled beyond all reasonable control, even as the guy killed his father by trying not to do so. Thus this wise guy is hella Greek. And this parent poster is also a wise guy. And this patricide is about to become all-too-ironic, because throwing out one-liners of the parent's (post's) sort is a bleak literacy, which I have now killed. And literacy rises like a phoenix in my child post, and the guy who kills his father is blinded as punishment, and becomes a wandering seer himself. So there.
TLDR is that prophecies are self-fulfilling. Tiresias is the OG self-fulfilling prophet.
Anyone curious about ithkuil should apprise themselves of the attempt of the number two most wanted terrorist in Ukraine's tangential involvement with this language as a result of some Institute for the Harmo ious Development of Man or other (not the institute of Gurdjieff's, just similarly named)
This is outrageous.
Consider math terminology as a so-called "term of art." An attractor, in dynamic systems, is something which attracts. A repellor is something which repels. Should it be called a "repellence?" Wouldn't that mean something undesirable? Should the opposite of "attractor" be a "repugnor," because repugnance is the opposite of attraction? What is the corresponding correct form of something that repels? Repellor (or repeller, for those who prefer American suffixes).
Forms matter. Colloquial meanings also matter, but not as much, particularly when they're an egregious violation of English and decency.
@kjulian, please don't lower the level of intellectual debate on HN by asserting the arbitrary limits of human intelligence. You remind me of a lying Cretan. St. Aquinas had more rigor! Look at the proof of the existence of God by efficient causation! When it comes to Standard Model, we need to address the particulars of the model. Your accusing hands are the ones waving furiously in their accusation of handwavingness. This is the first ad hominem argument I've seen today, and it is egregious. How could you possibly judge a project on the basis of the fact that a bunch of code is out there purporting to solve the same problem at some poorly defined level of abstraction, yet not actually solving the problem at hand permanently and forever? Would you look at the code, or accuse the handwaving programmer of being nothing but an astrologer? No!!
The real problem here is the paywall - where the devil is Aaron Schwartz?
TLDR is that prophecies are self-fulfilling. Tiresias is the OG self-fulfilling prophet.