@bonifartius @taylan @SilverDeth

> i just don't think that it's that easy to make friends.

Making and keeping them requires you to recognize some unpleasant things about yourself and either fix these things or at least get control of them. People with zero friends, like this guy who is too great to stoop to the level of acquiring friends, end up more stunted than people that live in an echo chamber. It's depressing.

> the point of free speech IS that you can use these words, because they are just words.

Yeah, you can't stop ideas by stopping words; what people have issues with is the idea, and they want to cure acne by cutting off pimples (a metaphor borrowed from Orwell).

> i haven't read your exchange about passwords. representation doesn't matter, as long as it's a reversible operation it doesn't change the strength of a password.

It was conversion to UTF-8 by assuming encoding, which is a destructive operation, and then normalizing it, which is another destructive operation. Treating a password as an opaque token is the only way to handle it; you don't need to do any text processing on a password and shouldn't anyway, especially if you are doing text processing that is opaque to the user, and definitely if you are using something like iconv: imagine the Unicode Consortium changing a normalization rule and iconv reflecting it and then passwords breaking when the library is updated.

> p suggested that arguing with people online might not be the the best way to spend ones limited time alive.

Yeah, and he's not even arguing. He has said himself in other threads that the point is to antagonize people to "expose idiots" or just to take out personal frustrations on people he hates: he doesn't care about the things he is arguing about so it's pointless to discuss anything with him. So I had written him off as an idiot when he first did that, and then when he explained his actual goal, I wrote him off as completely pointless. He keeps hopping accounts, though, so he's hard to avoid.