Lisp was originally supposed to be IL for a compiled language.

At any rate, we got the syntax after (apparently) people who read this made a (better) language having most of the strengths of both Lisp and Algol (including the syntax).

In the Scheme world, Racket has finally made it convenient to have arbitrary syntax on top of Lisp, without all the parens. E.g., there's a syntax module emulating C Algol 60, and another emulating Haskell , etc.

Edit: C link was bogus, and reading my "Haskell" example reveals this tidbit:



So they kept the S-expressions on purpose! And after all, aren't macros the real reason to keep S-expressions around? If you don't base your language syntax on S-expressions to start with, adding a good macro system on top seems to make things much more complicated...

Uhh, why?

Nvm:

In any case, pretty much every Latex environment does this. You want to type in display mode? Kay, you type /[ and it autocompletes to /[/] with your caret right in the middle. So you type your command and, guess what? You didn't save any keystrokes because you have to tap → to reposition your caret.

It literally saves you no time, so ****ing why? But worse, when you type \[ and want to backspace, it doesn't undo the autocomplete, so you have to arrow mash and backspace to delete it all.

I don't ****ing get it. Why? Just why? I have to disable that in any environment I use because it actually decreases my efficiency.

> not using Emacs in 2019

just hit tab dude

If only there were languages other than Lisp with a tree data type. Oh well, I guess we’ll have to stick with token pasting.

(Complicated is not necessarily bad, if it's more powerful. E.g., the upcoming Scala macros will be type checked [edit: well, maybe, but I am still reading that page to see what Odersky and Stucki are saying with regards to how macros will interact with the type checker at compile time], unlike Lisp macros.)

but live pdf preview

Or, much more simply (and what I do):

1. Open your document in a good PDF reader that automatically reloads documents when they are changed, such as Zathura
2. Write a Makefile to rebuild the PDF from the TeX source:
   
   Code:

   all: file.pdf
   
   file.pdf: file.tex
           pdflatex -halt-on-error file.tex
   
   clean:
           rm -f file.pdf file.aux file.log file.out

3. Run inotifywait or equivalent in an infinite loop to run the Makefile upon saving the TeX source:
   
   Code:

   #!/bin/bash
   while true; do inotifywait file.tex && make; done

4. (Optional) Use a tiling window manager such as dwm in order to view Emacs and Zathura side by side

I use LyX

What sort of sicko \centers inline math:



Those sums.. ew.

Real talk though thank you for the suggestions. A new environment would be great

you still didn't take my suggestion to ~install gentoo~

witness all the pepe frogs that come up on Youtube when you search for "latex emacs magic"; how could /g be wrong?!

Claim: Most real numbers are non-computable.

Proof: The amount of Turing machines is countable.

I love proofs like these.

Disheartening when a student lies to you to try and get more points back on an assignment.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/21/facebook-plaintext-passwords/?fbclid=IwAR1qXdloJxWrLOyxPLzQ-bh6BwKQo9eSTVS0f6bX6oOku1Tdn5lB_EcH1ow

what the actual f?

Facebook has 36,000 employees. All it takes is one.

Seems like you'd have at least one or two employees dedicated to security auditing who would catch things like this..

One in six to eight, in my experience. At that point review/audit becomes a full-time job. Juniors firehose an astonishing amount of anti-work, so you'll need even more if you're junior-heavy. Which you will be if your company culture fetishizes youth, inexperience, and engineering immaturity. Of course, if you have that culture you will also repel anybody capable of providing this oversight, so one or two dedicated employees is probably the best you'll be able to manage (at least until you lay them off for being expensive or old).

Note that in other industries, this kind of oversight activity is called management. In the software industry it's called senior software engineering and appropriately disempowered. Correspondingly, marketing is called management and appropriately powered, advertising is called marketing, branding is called advertising, and advertising is called sales. This may seem confusing at first, but an easy trick to remember this is that everybody in the software industry is a child doing businessman cosplay.

TL;DR: Facebook built the perfect culture for ****ty, privacy-wrecking software development practices. This culture is paired with the perfect business model for collecting as much sensitive information as possible.


All of us are already screwed, but for the sake of future generations, Facebook needs to burn on the pyre they've built. That's the only way governments will ever intervene to regulate software security or software engineering ethics. There's too much money and not enough risk in software right now. Facebook's investors need to lose every single cent.

I guess when you factor in that there will be zero economic repercussions for this sort of behavior, it is more profitable to "firehose an astonishing amount of anti-work".

You always make Silicon Valley sound like a hellscape of incompetence.

There are repercussions, but it's more like global warming than a bullet in the head. Like it's an inconvenient fact that everybody secretly acknowledges, but it's socially uncomfortable to acknowledge it publicly, immediately beneficial for the people who pretend it's ok, and nobody feels like they can or should do anything about it themselves. Or maybe another way of looking at it is, technical debt is more like algebraic generalization than analogy; as long as you keep growing fast enough you'll keep ahead of your technical debt until you cash out. Either way, it's not really that there are no repercussions, it's that there's a system that enables managers to say "not my problem".

Silicon Valley does a good enough job of that itself imho.

Dunno what I can really say about it that's positive. They're not solving problems, they're creating problems and demanding money to fix them. Both generally in society and even within their own companies. The one saving grace is that none of them are doing anything particularly hard or important either, so at least people aren't dying yet.

Sorry, for a minute I let myself forget about self-driving cars. Nix that last sentence I guess.

Parents lie about what jobs are like. As far as I can tell a huge amount of them are just copying **** into Excel.

...compared to copying **** onto a paper ledger?

I guess lol I don't know anything.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware

In this week's episode of "this is how software is ruining everything", we've come full circle to where Americans are paying Eastern European hackers to protect them from predatory monopolisic business practices.

Sounds like some farmers deserve life in prison for violating the CFAA and DMCA.

I love that they aren't even PR about it. They just give a stonewall "there is no problem" answer.

There is no problem. I don’t see why these hicks can’t accept the fact that big companies are entitled to however much profit they want. It’s anti-free market to buy equivalent service from a third party just because it’s cheaper, that’s why the government had to make it illegal.

Look, this isn’t complicated. If John Deere were forced to compete then they wouldn’t be able to charge high prices, and that means they’d have to lay off a lot of repair people for some reason. And then all of those jobs and all of the money the farmers save gets thrown into a black hole, so it’s a pure loss for the economy. I don’t think we can risk such a dangerous and anti-market idea when the economy is bad.

Farmers spending money = throwing it into a black hole, decreasing utility for society

John Deere using its monopoly profits to seek rents = good use of money, maximizing utility for society

How will Mike Politician in Whogivesa**** Nebraska get a new kitchen remodel otherwise?

Broken windows are good for the economy, monopoly rents are good for the economy. Econ 101.

Instagram makes it very clear how deeply insecure p much everyone is. Why even have a website nominally about "photos" when it's all ****ty photoshops?

...who are you following on instagram???

I’m rarely check Instagram, but I’m really happy that I’ve somehow tricked the algorithm so now it only shows me content from the Onion and Seinfeld memes when I check my feed, despite following more than 100 people.

https://9to5google.com/2019/05/29/chrome-ad-blocking-enterprise-manifest-v3/

Google is removing a Chrome extension API that modern (effective) ad blockers need. But they aren’t really removing it, they’re still going to provide it for paid enterprise customers.

So I guess they aren’t even pretending that this is a technical decision anymore.

I switched back to Firefox years ago. Time for you to switch back too.

I've been using brave because memes, ill have to look into if that will aeffect me

I use Firefox. It's still a memory hog, but this extension helps (along with uBlock Origin).

I sense something. It's as if millions of web browsers cried out in terror, and were suddenly uninstalled.