I don't know if there's a name for this genre of photography (it's not exactly
"abstract" since clearly things are being represented), but another example is the cover of Modest Mouse's Good News for People Who Love Bad News [0], which looks like a digital drawing or composite but was physically built and photographed by bandleader Isaac Brock.
To flesh this out, the root notes of C and A minor are not that close in the circle of fifths, but the chords sound similar because they share 2 notes (C is spelled C, E, G, and A minor is spelled A, C, E). A common device in major keys is to take a part played over the "1" chord (C in this case) and play it again, or some close variation, over the chord 2 steps down (A minor in this case) to get a "kind of the same, but sadder" version of the same part.
They're using objects, including arrays [1], so I think they would have been more precise to say that they're using objects and arrays as simple data structures rather than using OO features like inheritance and mutation.
This is just semantics then. If you're implementing a linked list or a tree without a class (or at the very least a function that behaves like a class), it's going to be awkward and clumsy.
Data-structures beyond what the standard lib gives you (string and array) are the main reason the addition of classes to JS was so helpful.
Absolutely. The navigation behaviors will have to be in functions though. And from an application code developer's perspective, the connection between these objects and functions may not be obvious. If only there were some way to associate behavior with state.
The whole point of the top comment is that they appreciate how this library chose not to associate behavior with state, and instead organized things as functions and data structures.
With the latter approach, the user is not limited to the bahaviors that the library author wrote. The data (not state) can be used freely. Similarly, the functions are not tied to any particular state - the data can come from anywhere, as long as it has the right shape.
Well, in principle you could have the node objects be created with an object literal in an outside builder function, and the manipulation also be done by outside functions. That's how it's done in languages without OOP. The question is how far are you willing to go to avoid doing anything that looks like OOP.
Americans (and I'd imagine the British) have "eh?" too, it's just not as common ("not bad, eh?"). Among Americans I feel like I've seen it more in casual written online conversation than in speech.
Man, McCarthy's vendetta against semicolons makes sense in his hard-bitten Western prose, but does it really make sense to have zero semicolons in these nonfiction books? When used properly, semicolons reveal a layer of meaning that occurs in natural speech: when you have two sentences that are grammatically separate sentences but have a link in meaning or make a larger point together.
That said, I can't say I would turn down a free copyediting job by Cormac McCarthy even if I had to drop all my semicolons in exchange.
Once you write enough you realize most of these all or nothing pronouncements on grammar and punctuation are more like personal vendettas and affectations. Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability.
Some people think all non-fiction writing has to abide by technical writing standards, but that's hogwash and pointless hardheadedness once you actually know how to write and use complex sentences to capture complex ideas well.
> A lapse from a supposed rule of style isn't an offense against nature. It's just a choice with consequences, and sometimes you want the consequences.
> Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability.
> In 2017, author Ben Blatt discovered that semicolon use dropped by about 70% from 1800 to 2000. The ghosts of several authors are now rejoicing. Writers like George Orwell, who called semicolons “an unnecessary stop”. Or Edgar Allan Poe, who preferred the dash. Or Kurt Vonnegut, who famously advised against their use, saying “All they do is show you’ve been to college.” The symbol is facing the same melancholy fate as the dodo, the dinosaur, and the Soviet Union. Extinction.
This is to our disadvantage. Semicolons are useful because they allow for the long, patient, elaboration of complex ideas in a single sentence. In fiction, in particular, they can also function akin to a jumpcut in cinema, or like montage editing. Many of the incredible scenes in a book like Flaubert's Mme Bovary get their feel from the way he slams units of prose together with semicolons rather than the trudge of periods and short sentences. The same is true of Proust, or Nabokov, or Hemingway, who was way more profligate with semicolons than the meme-ish idea of his prose which has become popular (he was mocked for his use of them in The Sun Also Rises for example).
Unfortunate, really. Everything now is supposed to be distilled into these short and clippy sentences and paragraphs. Like newspaper prose. Modern prose fiction is often so anodyne and lifeless; a semicolon, with the freedom to smash things together in fun ways, would do most some good.
Maybe "endangerment" is more fair, given that it's still massively popular compared to, say, the interrobang.
Also note that two of the three authors cited are known for their bare-bones, economical prose styles; not exactly a cross-section of the literary world. (Poe is debatable--he was probably economical for a 19th century romantic, but not in absolute terms.)
> Semicolons should always be in your toolbelt; they can elevate a sentence's elegance and grace, improve and control the rhythm and clarity, and really improve readability.
They can, but not all prose needs to rely on them. Indeed, the quoted semicolon could easily be swapped for a period with no loss. In such a case it serves more as ornamentation than semantics.
I've noticed that high-performing people often develop idiosyncrasies that shape how they do what they do. I wouldn't use McCarthy's rules about semicolons as a general rule for any writer except maybe as an exercise. Constraints breed creativity. I think the number of successful writers who do use semicolons validates their usefulness. But I would also argue that somehow McCarthy figured out that ditching them was part of what allowed him to write as well as he did.
McCarthy also was averse to apostrophes and quotation marks. I remember when I had my first iPhone thinking that Cormac McCarthy would hate how it turned dont into don’t.
I've done a lot of writing in the past decade and I can honestly say I've never felt the need for a semicolon. I think writers overestimate the finality of a period. If one sentence follows another, readers will understand the implicit connection between them. After all, you put them next to each other.
It's also Kurt Vonnegut's rule, for what it's worth.
I think the problem with semicolons is twofold:
1. It allows you to write these horrible long sentences (that thankfully nobody does anymore, but if you look at like a Dickens novel they are everywhere).
2. They're a sort of mark of sophistication and wordiness, probably for reason (1), and it's very much the mainstream of the US tradition to reject that.
For all their desperation for simplicity, I don't actually think US novelists are particularly simple writers - Cormac McCarthy is kinda purple a lot of the time. So my feeling is just wanting to get away from wrought sentences and superficial sophistication isn't really worth anything in itself - it just brings you to a different manner of expressing sophistication.
As a copyeditor myself, who works in academia, I have to say that such 'rules' usually only work for the people applying them to their own work, but that doesn't mean they have no value. Why do it? It clearly provides a kind of discipline that makes you consider what's necessary for clarity. Do these two parts of a sentence really need to be together, or can they be separate? For technical or academic writers who may have difficulty expressing themselves clearly, a little artificial restraint could help.
Right or wrong, I think the notion of "the cloud" that Oxide is selling is the "elastic" part--the ability to request resources by quantity instead of having to think about the exact servers responsible for serving your request. So physical servers become an implementation detail rather than a developer concern. That's a concept that can apply to how you provision two on-site servers (or even one, really) as much as a whole multi-data-center cloud computing service.
I don't think Oxide is trying to say no one's done this before, more that they're the best and most comprehensive offering to buy an onsite setup for this fully set up from a third party.
That is correct, yeah. Like every company and product, we do think that we are doing something special, but we'd never claim that nobody has done something like this before. Heck, a lot of the choices that we're making have come out of personal experiences of the founders doing that sort of work previously, as well as hyperscalers talking publicly about the choices they've made internally. We build on the shoulders of giants, just like everyone else.
> In my experience, it is rare for a network to correctly generate Time Exceeded messages for both IPv4 and IPv6.
Doesn't that make it more one of those situations where the non-documented behavior has become the de facto standard, rather than "wrong" exactly? (I guess it depends on whether that decision is being made consciously by the implementors or just for lack of knowledge of the standards.)
People who filter out all ICMP are probably unaware of the standard, but router implementors that limit ICMP rates are balancing transparent observability with the need to keep the equipment running.
I guess you could provision the router cpus so they could send ICMPs for line rate incoming packets that must be dropped, but that doesn't seem like a good cost tradeoff.
Chrome is also very big on macOS even though it's not preinstalled, although yeah, that also has to do with the marketing. It seems hard to find good stats on this but it's definitely in the web developer zeitgeist. On mobile, though, people do pretty much just use whatever comes installed.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_News_for_People_Who_Love_...