talyian

It makes you a paradoxer if you stopped after the step of finding the consequence that feels absurd.

It's true that Trader Joe's in Manhattan are jammed with lines going out the door and shopping there is mayhem regardless of whether there's an ongoing pandemic.

Plants can be weirdly resilient to smashing -- various bits of plant fragments can decide to grow new roots.

the requirements are easy to meet - you just need to be able to time operations at a suitable precision. The exploits are possible in Javascript running in a browser.

Fair enough. In this case, "Road Neutrality" protects the consumer's access to a restaurant or bank. However, in reality there are civil rights laws that in turn forbid those restaurants and banks from refusing service to customers based on their ethnicity and gender.

I don't think it's a stretch, if we're comparing Networks to roads, to also compare network services like Google and Youtube to public accomodations like restaurants, hotels and banks, and discuss a set of protected classes for internet nondiscrimination.

If only Net Neutrality went both ways...

There's this great book on a similar topic, "The Origin of Species," if you're interested in the phenomenon.

Sadly, the machines I don't want people running commands on happen to be also the machines I don't want to rm -rf everything on as well.

I wasn't convinced about the value of Paul Graham's recent "General idea, small delta" essay until I noticed how easily you can just use those 4 words to justify these things.

Even the obviously laughable stories like Juicero - surely there's issues with bad execution, but as long as there are "juice bars" selling a glass of pulped vegetables for $8 that people are willing to buy, I'm willing to say that there's a niche for a better-executed and perhaps better-targetted juice-related tech product.

Learning math isn't "really, really hard", but it is unforgiving in a particular kind of way: you're basically required to internalize a concept fully before going on to later concepts. (This is coming from being mostly self-taught up through calculus-level math)

Students often don't fully grasp one concept before the teacher moves onto the next topic. Once this happens, the student is missing a crucial building block and tends to just get stuck with all the later things that build on it. This is a common experience in schools and I suspect is the origin of the "math is hard" trope.

It can be hard for a student to self-evaluate whether he/she has full mastery of a topic. This is exacerbated by situations where a struggling student will go to office hours or work with classmates and "solve" a problem, without having acquired the skills to solve slightly different permutations of that same problem on their own.

In programming, we don't have this problem. You can write HelloWorld without understanding console IO, terminal protocols, window buffers. You can write a webapp without knowing the OSI stack. Software is built upon abstractions.

You comply if you think the request is reasonable and lawful, otherwise you don't.

Maybe you get your nose broken and United allegedly pays you $140 million in damages. Maybe the incident causes all warrantless police offices to be banned from hospital ER rooms.

Or maybe the law doesn't stand on your side and you wind up in jail and fined. Who knows.

Compared to say Python, it does act a bit like importing free functions without explicitly naming them, but you do get the bonus of type-based dispatch and overloading.

    using System.Linq;
    foo.Select(x => bar);

    from itertools import *
    imap(foo, lambda x: bar)