Notices by Bruce Elrick (virtuous_sloth@cosocial.ca)

@evan
Jeepers, controlled energy generation or warheads?

@evan
It's mesmerizing. And kinda addicting.

@evan
I'm just at the part in Capital and Ideology when he covers South Africa.

@davidaugust
Righty oppressy, lefty liberty?

@evan Yep, we'll done.

@evan I recently learned of the Dual State concept. The normative state and the prerogative state. The latter starts small and targets the most vulnerable and most easily otherwise groups.

The normative state gets shrunk and the prerogative state grows.

Also related is Doctorow's shitty technology adoption curve (not related to enshittification).

@evan I do hope.

@evan My wife and I are in two bowling leagues (32 weeks from early September to late April, each once a week) but I would not have called them clubs.

@evan I'm 56. It would take a huge provocation to invoke an emotion so strong that I would fail to self-edit.

@evan
The most valid and probably most accepted negative thing about the US government is that it takes a lot of work to improve it, and that's only after getting some level of agreement on what needs to be changed.

That, coupled with diffuse benefits/detriments being pitted against concentrated detriments/benefits means the general interest languishes while government policy serves special interests. That's OK for people who need help, but is bad when it's people who are already thriving.

@slothrop @RickiTarr
I'm a native English speaker and took two semesters of German in university.

I was amazed and delighted that I could just learn a small list of pronunciation rules for letters and a short list of letter combinations and that would be it, I'd know how to pronounce anything in German and stand a good chance of knowing how to spell any word knowing how it was pronounced.

@evan
The number of people with power I've seen treat wait staff as non-people is... disappointing.

@evan @Paulatics
Get this. Jesse Brown of Canadaland interviewed Preston Manning and Manning said Trudeau et al should have treated Trump's remarks as a joke. He seemed to think that would have made things different.

I can't (don't) believe he's that naive.
https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/1112-preston-manning-goes-beast-mode/

@evan Not me.

@evan I don't know how many times I've wondered "what were the values of the variables when this happened" and I can look at the code to find the condition. But I need to start looking for how be got into this unanticipated state which means working backwards.

@evan Yeah, saw it going. Good luck!

@evan LOL we both wave hands.

@evan This is why I want the graph algorithm.

Just like a tournament with 3 teams can have A beats B, B beats C, and C beats A, resulting in an inconclusive result, having the weights as well as a global graph algorithm is needed to get a more meaningful result.

Unfortunately I don't know what algorithm to apply (thinks back to undergraduate... source/sink, max-flow/min/cut, hands start waving).

@evan My gut wants to construct a directed graph with nodes being your letters and edge weights/direction being your comparitor function.

Then apply some graph algorithm.

@evan As someone w/ more than 30 years of UNIX, storage, plus a whole bunch of other infrastructure experience, I find many of the cloud technologies to be very inscrutable, almost like they are designed to obscure things. I really don't understand how developers think because it feels like they've never operated a computer system for someone else as a job.

Having integrated 100s of production systems using scores of related but different technologies (many proprietary) it makes me feel stupid.