End the War on Freedom

I don't like social networks as they're currently configured. The idea that it's some kind of conversation -- no it really doesn't resemble a conversation. I would like to try a social network that didn't have the concept of replying to a post. Give each other a little more distance. It still would be a graph, people following other people, but you wouldn't be able to insert something into someone else's flow, which is where all the indecency comes from imho. Or let replies be only visible to the person it's in reply to, so you don't end up getting speeches under your posts. And so that people with a lot of followers don't bother reading anything that's related to what they wrote, and thus no new ideas can enter the flow. We've been doing this, the way we do it, since the inception of Twitter in 2006. For some reason the design of that network is considered sacred. I was a math major who studied combinatorics, specifically graph theory -- and the Twitter way of organizing people and discourse is just one of many ways people could be arranged. Predictably, the weird structure of Twitter is turning into the structure of our society. If we want to change things the fastest way might be to do another look at what Twiiter does and see if we can't intentionally make something that works better for whatever we think we should be doing with it, other than staring at the evil people on the other side and saying how evil they are (or hopeless, or woke or whatever bullshit the influencers have made up). And with that I wish you a good evening and note that tomorrow is another day. 😄

Yesterday my older brother sent me a text about a new gadget he recently acquired in his ceaseless (and annually very justified) quest to perfect his hurricane preps… We had a little back-and-forth about it, and then I forgot about … Continue reading →

…and came upon my Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) tester… In the process of testing I stuck it in a cup of the well water that comes out of my tap, and… Hoooly crap, that’s so much higher than the first … Continue reading →

An anonymous reader requested an implementation of FOLD-LEFT, FOLD-RIGHT and NAMED-LET. Here they are:

https://github.com/jrm-code-project/fold
https://github.com/jrm-code-project/named-let

MIT license, developed and tested under SBCL, but should be portable. Implementation does not depend on tail recursion.

The assault on the Blob has taken up most of the attention in Washington, along with the reproachment with Russia, but the biggest item on the Trump agenda is the restructuring of the American economy. If you listen to what … Continue reading →

Imagine President Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, build that wall.” Crazy, right? And yet here we are, a president indulging in obvious lies while abandoning America’s allies and ending the isolation of Russia imposed for invading a neighboring sovereign nation, and his MAGA faithful swoon with adoration. In the course of a day, Trump has […]

Day 8 is another grid puzzle. We are given a map of antennas. Two antennas operate on the same frequency have the same ASCII character on the map. A “node” is a location on the map that is in line with two antennas of the same frequency and is twice as far from one antenna as the other. We are to count the nodes.

We can create an alist from antenna frequency to antenna locations by inverting the map:

(defun read-grid (pathname)
  (read-file-into-grid
    (char-interner #’identity (find-package "ADVENT2024/DAY8"))
    pathname))

(defun grid->antenna-list (grid)
  (hash-table-alist (invert-grid grid ’|.|)))

This solution makes use of first class functions. antinode-answer takes a function that produces an answer on one side of an antenna pair and applies it to the pair and swapped pair to produce answers on both sides.

(defun antinode-answer (antinode-half-answer)
  (lambda (grid left right)
    (append (funcall antinode-half-answer grid left right)
            (funcall antinode-half-answer grid right left))))

antinode-list takes a function that produces an answer for pair a single pair of antennas and maps it over all pairs of antennas on a frequency.

(defun antinode-list (antinode-answer)
  (lambda (grid node-list)
    (map-pairs (lambda (left right)
                 (funcall antinode-answer grid left right))
               node-list)))

All the antinodes can be obtained by invoking an antinode-list-generator over a set of node lists and appending the results.

(defun antinodes (antinode-list-generator)
  (lambda (grid node-list)
    (fold-left #’append nil
               (funcall antinode-list-generator grid node-list))))

So to solve the puzzle, we call an antinode generator on all the antennas.

(defun puzzle (grid antinode-generator)
  (length
   (remove-duplicates
    (fold-left (lambda (antinodes entry)
                 (append antinodes (funcall antinode-generator grid (cdr entry))))
               nil
               (grid->antenna-list grid))
    :test #’equal)))

In part 1, there is one node to the left and right of each pair, twice the distance from one antenna to the other.

(defun antinode (grid left right)
  (let* ((delta (2v- right left))
         (antinode (2v- left delta)))
    (when (on-grid? grid antinode)
      (list antinode))))

(defun part-1 ()
  (puzzle (read-grid (input-pathname))
          (antinodes (antinode-list (antinode-answer #’antinode)))))

For part two, the antinodes are at “resonant” points, i.e., spaced out equidistantly beyond the antenna pairs.

(defun resonant-antinodes (grid left right)
  (let* ((delta (2v- right left)))
    (do ((antinode left (2v- antinode delta))
         (answer ’() (cons antinode answer)))
        ((not (on-grid? grid antinode)) answer))))

(defun part-2 ()
  (puzzle (read-grid (input-pathname))
          (antinodes (antinode-list (antinode-answer #’resonant-antinodes)))))

Lisp was the first computer language to have first-class functions and lambda expressions.

I started out doing a week to strip blue.threadcenter down to its bones, for a fresh start, but then I started getting ideas, and decided to go for it. I have the time, and Bluesky is having moment after moment and these days I'm using it to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, though I do check Twitter, Threads and Mastodon a few times a day, but usually there's nothing for me in those places. Anyway I'll be pointing to this post from some of my experiments, so maybe nothing more interesting than this will appear here.

I just thought of a good example of a question you could bring to ChatGPT. Here's the prompt.

• I'm thinking of driving from NYC to Jacksonville, FL. I want to do it in four days with stopovers in three places that have good places to ride a bike and a Citibike-style bike rental. Choose three places on the trip, I don't mind going out of my way.

It gave me three places to stop, Washington DC, Raleigh NC and Charleston SC. In each case it told me about the bike-sharing services and notable bike trails.

A logical next question would be to ask it to find hotels in each place that are reasonably priced and near an interesting place to ride.

It also offered information about weather considerations. It's not necessarily a great time of year for bike riding.

I'm not actually planning a trip south, I just used it as an example because I've done this trip a number of times and was curious how things had developed.

Another question I used to have when cross-country driving, where can I find a Starbucks not too far off the route I'm on. If you were plotting the progress of public information systems, AI is strictly on a continuum of services that have developed over the years that make information more accessible in the way you want it. It actually answers questions you have in the way you think of asking them.

Here's a link to the response. I've heard that sometimes people have trouble accessing these files.

So I had a stale tag-end of bread yesterday and nothing better to do with it but toss the chunks into the wash and eavesdrop on it with my game camera. I wasn’t surprised at ravens but I was amused … Continue reading →

For a long time now, there have been people on this side of the great divide arguing that the real source of power in American society is the media. The media has power because they control the moral framework and … Continue reading →

โดย เควิน คาร์สัน เควิน คาร์สัน. บทความต้นฉบับ: Meritocracy is Bullshit 24 กันยายน 2024. แปลเป็นภาษาไทยโดย Kin ในการสัมภาษณ์ล่าสุดกับจอร์แดน ปีเตอร์สัน อีลอน มัสก์กล่าวว่าค่านิยมข้อหนึ่งของเขาคือ “ระบบให้ค่าตามความสามารถ (meritocracy) ให้มากที่สุดเท่าที่จะเป็นไปได้ แปลว่าคุณจะก้าวหน้าได้ด้วยทักษะของคุณเท่านั้น ไม่ใช่ด้วยปัจจัยอื่น” คำว่า “ระบบให้ค่าตามความสามารถ” มักถูกนำเสนอโดยกลุ่มเสรีนิยมว่าเป็นสิ่งที่ดีหากเรามีมันจริงๆ แตกต่างจากระบบที่ไม่ได้ให้คุณค่าตามความสามารถแบบในปัจจุบัน ระบบปัจจุบันมีข้อบกพร่องตรงที่ไม่สามารถให้โอกาสทางการศึกษาและการฝึกอบรมที่เท่าเทียมกันสำหรับทุกคน อีกทั้งความก้าวหน้าในหน้าที่การงานและค่าจ้างก็ไม่ได้สะท้อนมาตรฐานของทักษะและผลการปฏิบัติงานที่เป็นกลางและปรับใช้ได้ทั่วไป แต่ถึงแม้ว่าระบบจะดำเนินการตามกฎข้อนี้แล้วก็ตาม ระบบให้ค่าตามความสามารถก็ยังอาจไม่ใช่ระบบที่พึงปรารถนา ต่อให้ตัดปัจจัยอื่นๆ ออกไป ระบบให้ค่าตามความสามารถก็ยังเป็นเรื่องเหลวไหลไร้สาระ เพราะมันวางอยู่บนสมมติฐานที่ว่า กรอบเชิงสถาบันที่มีอำนาจครอบงำและมาตรฐานของ “ความคู่ควร” ที่กรอบดังกล่าวกำหนดขึ้นนั้นชอบธรรมโดยไม่ต้องพิสูจน์ สิ่งที่เรียกว่า “ความคู่ควร” หรือ “ทักษะ” ไม่ได้ดำรงอยู่ลอยๆ คนเราสามารถแสดงทักษะก็เมื่อลงมือทำสิ่งใดสิ่งหนึ่งเท่านั้น เช่น ทักษะในการปฏิบัติงานบางประเภท แนวคิดเกี่ยวกับ “ทักษะ” ในฐานะลักษณะที่เป็นกลางซึ่งสามารถวัดได้อย่างเป็นกลางนั้นละเลยความจริงที่ว่าหน้าที่ต่างๆ ถูกเลือกโดยผู้มีอำนาจและมอบหมายให้กับผู้ใต้บังคับบัญชาในบริบทที่เป้าหมายโดยรวมของสถาบันถูกกำหนดโดยผู้ที่มีผลประโยชน์ในระบบนั้น จริงๆ แล้ว ผู้คนถูกประเมิน “ความคู่ควร” ตามประสิทธิภาพในการรับใช้ระบบอำนาจที่มีเป้าหมายหลักอยู่ที่การแสวงหาความมั่งคั่ง และตาม...

There are only three branches of government, despite what the bureaucracy believes, and that’s a problem. In the 1935 decision in Humphrey’s Executor, the Supreme Court carved out an exception to the president’s power to remove executive branch officials where the congressionally created position was intended to be independent of the president because it exercised […]

One of the not-good things about Mastodon is that you can't moderate comments under your own posts.

If someone says something abusive, it's there for everyone to see, forever.

I've come to value the feature in Facebook that gives the author full discretion over what comments remain, to head off bad vibes.

I think of a post I write as my house, and I want people who visit to feel respected.

A turd in the middle of the living room is not respectful.

A simple idea, a quid pro quo.

If we want Democrats to support the Constitution, we have to demonstrate that we will support them.

We are the government of the US, Congress represents us.

We have been too passive.

But then, they have to include us in governing.

No more shutting off the connection after the election.

Seems like a fair deal.

Bonds moved lower, but all other asset classes were mixed. The worst losses were in silver, down 5.2%, followed by crude oil, gold stocks, and the Japanese Yen, which all dropped 2.0%. The largest gains were in the CCi30 cryptos, up 4.0%, and the Euro STOXX, up 3.2%. One stand-out was the Russian Ruble (not in table), which rose 4.8%. More on Weekly Update 14 Feb 2025

This is not “partly cloudy.” Which is what you promised me. And your promise is why I scheduled this morning for bread day. You are fired. Happily… (And I’m not done being delighted by this) I can do this now. … Continue reading →

Oleh: Sebastian A. Stern. Teks aslinya berjudul “Statism and the Illusion of Choice.” Diterjemahkan ke dalam Bahasa Indonesia oleh Ameyuri Ringo. Support Ringo by considering becoming his Patron. “Kekuasaan bukanlah untuk ditaklukan, tapi untuk dihancurkan. Ia bersifat menindas secara alami, entah ketika ia dimiliki oleh seorang raja, diktator, atau presiden yang dipilih. Perbedaannya pada ‘demokrasi’...

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