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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I don’t really recommend people learn vi/vim even though I’ve been using it for years and love it. It’s a very personal thing and the time you invest into learning it might not be worth it if you don’t use its features enough.

    I think it’s dependent on your personality and neurodivergence/neurotypical characteristics (I don’t know a word that encompasses all of this). If you’re the type of person who gets really annoyed/distracted by any sort of “friction” in the editing process then I think you may be a good candidate to learn vi. Otherwise probably not!

    Edit: by the way I’m also a LaTeX user!


  • Yeah. A lot of people who use vim don’t know how to use the full power of vi. They’ll often install plugins to do things they could have easily done with built in features!

    The one area where regular vi sucks though is undo. If you want multiple undo then you’ll have to at least go with something like nvi.



  • A few of the things were explicitly designed (such as the rules for elections, the composition of parliament) but a great deal of it evolved (English common law system, electoral districting/Gerrymandering, and many decades of legislative processes by many different people).

    That last one I want to highlight because it seems like it is something explicitly designed. It is not. It’s like a soup pot many chefs walk past and add their own ingredients to. The fact that the soup is not very good can’t be blamed on one particular chef. Thus there is no real designer of our body of laws.

    I also want to further point out that laws are not systems, they’re just words on paper. The system is the combined effect of all the people in society acting to produce an outcome. This outcome may be strongly informed by society’s laws (and also by social norms such as respect for the rule of law) but it’s not determined by them the way a computer’s actions are determined by its programming.

    One need look no further than the Trump administration which has severely undermined the rule of law in the US. Without the rule of law the system turns into chaos. But that is also an outcome of the system itself, since social norms are the product of social forces (which are themselves highly chaotic).


  • Oh I don’t doubt that another violent revolution is coming. But each violent revolution proves the failure of the one that came before. Violence begets more violence.

    Building a stable system that works for everyone is much more difficult. It takes many years of careful work. Flipping the table never gets you there. Table-flippers love to take all the credit, however.

    As for your premise on “non-violent versus violent revolutions”, I reject it entirely. I’m an advocate for careful reforms, not revolutions.


  • The main takeaway I would hope people get from the idea (one that I heard from a forgotten source and then began using in the light of my own understanding I have to confess) is that we are living under a system that has been disproportionately and consistently shaped over much of its history by moneyed interests in various ways for the specific aim of winning the class war for the wealthy. That’s what the system is doing, that is its purpose.

    Another objection to “the purpose of a system is what it does” is that it implies that systems have purposes in the first place. Many systems don’t have a purpose because they were never designed. Ecosystems are the biggest example of this.

    Talking more specifically about our political and economic systems, I think the ecosystem view is helpful. Believing that an elite have conspired over centuries to create a system which entrenches their interests is dangerous, conspiratorial thinking which most importantly does not lead in any positive direction.

    Violent revolutions rarely work, yet Americans have a peculiar affinity toward them, perhaps due to their history. It’s a particular sort of societal sickness which I believe leads to perfectionist, radical thinking and shuns graassroots, reform-oriented work.

    The original topic of discussion (for this thread) was voting systems and two party systems. Grassroots political work can and has been proven to work at solving problems like this. There are many cases around the world where such voting systems have been changed thanks to the efforts of grassroots politics.









  • buried deep in the American zeitgeist

    I think you mean American psyche. Zeitgeist means the spirit of the times. It usually refers to the present way of thinking or the way things were at one time.

    The American psyche is much more of a timeless thing, stretching all the way back to the attitudes and beliefs of the founding fathers when they drafted the Declaration of Independence. Norman Rockwell’s paintings, Robert Frost’s poems, John Steinbeck’s books, the games of baseball and (gridiron) football. These are just some of the cultural artifacts said to be part of the American psyche.



  • The issue is with creating more work for others. Supporting a multi-language toolchain and build environment is a lot more work than a single language one. The R4L folks have made it their mission to shoehorn Rust into the kernel and they’ve explicitly stated that they will not avoid making more work for others. This has upset some longterm maintainers who did not sign up for additional workload.

    Linus Torvalds has been accused of many things but he has always been loyal to his best maintainers. That’s been a big key to his success.