I agree. Park the handle with a polite "You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy" note and a suggested list of other places for more fruitful discussion.
I still tidy my house using the Settlers resource movement algorithm, moving things closer towards where they need to be even if they don't go all the way to their final destination.
I'm like this too. It's an incremental system that given enough time converges on the tidy state. I can take something to the foot of the stairs that I know needs to go up there, and then when I later go upstairs I can deposit at the top of the stairs, then when I'm accessing the linen closet I'll glance over and be like oh yeah, some of those items belong in here, I'll put them away now and get the others later. In some ways it's a permission structure to do part of a task without feeling like you're now chained to completely finishing it before you can do anything else.
This all drove my ex nuts though; from her perspective the whole thing was an exercise in deck-chair rearrangement that only served to increase overall entropy while in the intermediate states.
Hilariously, I don't cook like that at all. Cooking for me is all about chasing the critical path— get the water boiling, get the stove on, get the yeast foaming, get the butter softening on a plate. I wouldn't have the patience to line up little dishes of measured-out ingredients on my countertop before beginning to combine things.
Another worthy mention in this space is Linus Åkesson's dialog language[1]. From its description:
Dialog is a domain-specific language for creating works of interactive fiction. It is heavily inspired by Inform 7 (Graham Nelson et al. 2006) and Prolog (Alain Colmerauer et al. 1972).
An optimizing compiler, dialogc, translates high-level Dialog code into Z-code, a platform-independent runtime format originally created by Infocom in 1979.
Development seems dormant at the moment, but it feels more like Inform 7 'done right' to me. If my brain was a little bigger and calmer I'd be all over it. It has excellent documentation too. Very portable -- I compiled it locally under Termux on my phone with nothing but Clang.
There has been some Dialog development in the last year or so, after others picked it up (with Linus' blessing) and started work on a Community Edition:
Author here. I agree. It does seem like "Inform 7 done right" and I really like the Prolog evaluation model.
I didn't know about Dialog when I wrote this article (learned of it just yesterday!) but unless life gets in the way I will explore it in a future article.
This is great illustration of the brilliance of Inform 7.
I understand the appeal of Dialog -- Inform 7 can be really awkward for traditional programming constructs -- but I think I'd rather write ZIL if I'm going back to the usual control structures and OOP-style messaging.
> Full of security issues is similarly overly dramatic
It doesn’t seem dramatic at all:
> Finding and exploiting 20-year-old bugs in web browsers
> Although XSLT in web browsers has been a known attack surface for some time, there are still plenty of bugs to be found in it, when viewing it through the lens of modern vulnerability discovery techniques. In this presentation, we will talk about how we found multiple vulnerabilities in XSLT implementations across all major web browsers. We will showcase vulnerabilities that remained undiscovered for 20+ years, difficult to fix bug classes with many variants as well as instances of less well-known bug classes that break memory safety in unexpected ways. We will show a working exploit against at least one web browser using these bugs.
Small meta observation: Gemini Flash 2.5 summarises this discussion as a problem with how ML was used and it's flaws, whereas Gemini Pro 2.5 emphasizes that it mainly a cultural communication problem. Both topics are here, but "fast Vs slow thought" sees different things.
Haha but seriously, Trump is just starting to ramp up full kleptocracy mode. Each tariff change is going to be associated with billions in trades made with foreknowledge of the move. His robber baron friends will fund him and his regime forever. They can do whatever they want now. We might as well tear down the White House and replace it with a Putin style gilded palace for Oligarchs. Oh wait.
ID checks, driven by prudishness, are an absolute gift to the big social media companies. They're the only entities whom (a) already know the check's answers, and (b) have the resources to keep hackers largely at bay.
I am not surprised these laws are landing with such little resistence.
I stopped using Chrome when they started doing the "logged in to Chrome" thing for all Google services. It seemed likely a creepy step in a vaguely defined, unknown direction. The signal seems stronger now.
Same. The removal of manifest V2 was one of the worst and most user hostile moves in a long time IMHO. Though the impending blocking of side loading and other locking down of Android stands to rival if not exceed it. Really dark times for Google
For me, the purpose of logging in to my Mozilla account in Firefox is to sync saved passwords and tabs between devices. If I was a Chrome user, I would want to log in to Chrome for the same reason.
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