/dev/chat - 2020-08-12

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6:45 AM

@AndrasDeak Well, the last sentence is certainly true, but not all languages are described as executable pseudocode. By some people, at any rate.

7:15 AM

@AndrasDeak Dare I ask what baseline levels of insanity are?

3 hours later…

10:30 AM

What is the Indian word for 'lotus flower', which is a symbol of significance in Indian culture? (A lotus grows underwater, its flowers rising above the surface while the roots are planted firmly in the river bottom.)

I just got another upvote for meta.stackexchange.com/q/235322/158763

Is there any way to poke the SE people about this? I'm not aware of them being active about desired features. And feel free to upvote if you think this would be a good feature.

by accusing their wrongdoings?

@Tim India has a lot of different languages. You'll need to pick one.

Hindi is supposedly the standard nowadays, for no very good reason.

The official languages of India

@Tim Huh?

@Tim That would be Hindi.

I think English is an official secondary language, though I could be out of date.

10:35 AM

"kamal ka phool"

I think my question is a good way to tell if someone is a real Indian.

The lotus is a traditional Hindu symbol, I think.

Linking without pinging really seems like a no-brainer. I don't understand why it wasn't implemented like that in the first place.

10:58 AM

Hi @PrabhjotSingh. Long time no see. How are you?

11:39 AM

@FaheemMitha not as such. But I added a bounty, that might help.

@terdon Thank you. Would that draw more attention?

defying the EU (of which we're a member); hugging Putin and Erdogan; destroying the largest independent news site by proxy after 10 years of planning and preparation; banning gender and corresponding name change even on the legal level; declaring that we shall reject the Istanbul Convention (protecting women and children from domestic violence) because "it spreads destructive gender views";
Prime Minister refusing to pay compensation to segregated gypsies despite court order, inciting hate against gypsies when doing so; PM using extreme-right slurs referring to liberals; selling out virtual…

@AndrasDeak Thank you for the summary. It sounds pretty bad. I thought Hungary was in better shape, but apparently not.

Nope.

Some of that sounds quite similar to India. I could attempt a similar summary for India, but it would be even longer and probably even more depressing.

11:42 AM

the current regime under the reign of Orbán has been rushing us back to the middle of the 20th century

Defying the EU on what?

it's a weird mixture of fascist tendencies coupled with hard communist rhetoric and propaganda

@FaheemMitha everything :P

@AndrasDeak Huh. Example? And doesn't that get Hungary thrown out?

EU is one of the main boogeyman in the propaganda. As you know you always need an enemy to show the people. Brussels is perfect because they are far away and don't care too often.

@FaheemMitha by all rights we should've been thrown out long ago... but the EU is fighting hard to stay together, even if we've been net parasites from the start

The Romanys are everyone's favorite target, from the Nazis on down.

11:44 AM

@FaheemMitha I guess we'll see :)

@AndrasDeak I can understand that. The UK leaving was a big hit.

The situation is that the EU pays shitloads of money for us, and in return we erode checks and balances of democracy and erode the rule of law.

@FaheemMitha but we're beneficiaries of the system, whereas the UK was one of the big guys paying

@AndrasDeak You mean the EU gives Hungary money?

@FaheemMitha lots

@AndrasDeak They're not that big. Perhaps by European standards.

11:46 AM

@AndrasDeak Oh, they were also very, very much beneficiaries. As they are slowly discovering now.

But yeah, Orban is one scary fellow...

@terdon well sure, being out is a lot worse :D

@FaheemMitha The vast majority of development comes from EU sources

@AndrasDeak Ha! Exactly. Nobody said being in was that great, it's just clearly better than the alternative :)

I also had the impression that the UK has been doing quite badly for a while now. Much of their traditional economy, including manufacturing, was hollowed out from the 1980s.

@FaheemMitha But there are also specific payments, like giving us a lot of money to handle immigrants here. We use that money to... I don't know what because immigrants are kept in hangars and treated like animals.

I think the "vision" was to transition to a service-based economy.

Well, if it makes anyone feel any better (I don't know why it should) things are clearly going south here.

11:49 AM

An Indian, a Hungarian and a Greek walk into a bar discussing which country has it worse... Sounds like a joke should be coming :)

The richest man in India recently became the 4th richest man in the world. Apparently nobody here sees anything odd about that.

The erosion of rule of law in Hungary is directly against all core values of the EU (insofar as we can speak of such). They tried enforcing article 7 against us but the EU usually ends up being very ineffective at enforcing anything. Partly because of vetoes. Hungary for instance vetoes everything that would put Putin in a bad situation.

Jul 2 at 9:24, by Andras Deak

@terdon "shit is not a unit of measurement" :P

:)

@AndrasDeak That sounds very unfortunate. They can fine MS and Google, but they can't keep their member countries in line?

@FaheemMitha there's the European Parliament party that our government party is the part of (the European People's Party or something). They couldn't even get themselves to give Orbán a symbolic boop on the nose for trying to become (and largely succeeding at becoming) a dictator

11:51 AM

@FaheemMitha Not when every member country has a mini-Orban in waiting, railing about how the EU is infringing on our sovereignty and trampling over our proud, proud history. If the EU starts putting too much pressure on one nationalist demagogue, that will incense all of the other members' local whackos...

@terdon One would hope the wackos don't have that much power. At least in the rich countries of Western Europe.

These wackos he's talking about are the prime ministers and presidents

@FaheemMitha They are in power in Hungary. And terrifyingly close to power in the UK.

@terdon Sure, I meant generally.

The EU’s initial main goal was preventing the rise of nationalism; unfortunately it’s somewhat failed at that (along with the rest of the world).

11:54 AM

We've got major problems along those lines here. But you probably don't want to listen to me complain about India.

It's terrifying how idiocy is spreading like a disease despite more information being available than ever. I'd rather not get into how it's "despite" or "due to"...

How many EU member countries currently have a straight fascist government?

@FaheemMitha officially: 0

Would Hungary count as one?

probably not, but it needs an exact definition of fascism first

11:55 AM

@FaheemMitha Although the specifics may be different, the basic principle is the same all over: far right wing nationalist demagogues with anti-immigrant, anti-"other" (whatever the other may be) and pro-"security" agendas are either in power or have become a very strong voice in opposition.

most opposition people would agree that Hungary is fascistoid, but there's no poltiical statement that would be agreed upon by most people

@terdon in many cases, encouraged by the non-nationalist party in power because it effectively eliminates any other opposition...

Just like in the US, the media and consequently the population is polarized. Government fans think everything's going great, opposition people think the world is falling apart (and of course we're the one who's right)

@AndrasDeak Let's wait and see what Hungary looks like once the covid dust has settled. Will any of the horrible new laws be retracted?

@StephenKitt aye...

@AndrasDeak in many countries, government fans don’t think everything’s going great; all they care about is that everything’s going great for them

11:57 AM

@terdon why would they? The special powers already have been retracted, but they never needed it thanks to their 2/3 majority in parliament (which they got with something like 45% of votes, according to their own new electoral law)

@AndrasDeak Hmm. Exact would be hard. But the basic features are: extremely big-business friendly. Along with lots of talk about "development". Demonizing minorities. Lots of rah-rah about the dominant culture. See how great we are. We aren't respected by the world. Aggressive censorship. Rewriting the history books. Destroying judicial independence. That's for starters. These sorts of setups usually devolve into dictatorships sooner rather than later, because they are not usually sustainable.

@terdon Most of the laws passed during the first wave had nothing to do with covid. Like the anti-trans law I mentioned earlier. Or starting to erode the legal status of public workers (including things like healthcare workers, teachers, academics, museum employees I think theater too, etc.)

@AndrasDeak Yeah, I don't expect they will be. But once there is no actual emergency going on, defending those laws as anything other than the beginning of totalitarianism will be very hard. Making the answer to "is Hungary a totalitarian country" considerably more complicated :/. My very sincere condolensces.

@StephenKitt you have to be pretty evil to accept that everything's going to shit yet you yourself are doing fine. The vast majority of these people will rationalize that everything's fine, because "I'm not a bad person so it can't be that I'm profiting when everyone suffers"

Actually, "Nineteen Eighty Four" is a reasonable basic description of what fascism is. As I might have mentioned here, I read it when I was 15. It's probably part of the reason why I have zero sympathy for any of this kind of stuff. Because Eric Blair explained it to me when I was a child.

I think everyone should read it. I wish I was a billionaire and could distribute millions of copies.

12:01 PM

@AndrasDeak I wouldn’t say evil; in my experience people who look at things that way rationalise it by saying that if people are suffering, it’s their own fault

@FaheemMitha then yes, according to such a definition it's fascist. Laws passed helping large companies abuse workers, building new things, but mostly soccer stadiums, minorities and especially immigrants are the devil, lots of chauvinism, censorship is still voluntary, but very much present (the media itself is brutally dominated by government oligarchs and national media that is reduced to being a government mouthpiece), attempts at rewriting history, screwing with court, yes

@AndrasDeak It's hard to imagine that anyone but a moron thinks anyone is fine. People in India certainly don't. And not just the poor.

the constitutional court has been a puppet for many years, even though they started by rewriting and renaming the constitution...

@FaheemMitha 1984 is more about the practical implementations of communism. The communist rhetoric that I mentioned, yeah, exactly like that

@AndrasDeak It's about general totalitarian stuff. But much of the fascism stuff is in there too.

yeah

I don't have a good (or even bad) definition about fascism and totalitarian communism to try to distinguish them

12:04 PM

The specific details are relatively close to the Soviet Union of the time, yes. Stalinism and so forth.

both end up being megalomaniac oppression

Stalin was dominant when the books were being written.

@FaheemMitha and Orwell witnessed that regime first-hand which made him write the book, I think

@AndrasDeak General totalitarianism isn't necessarily hyper-nationalistic, I think. And also the persecution of minorities is more a fascist thing.

@FaheemMitha I wonder how the uyghurs feel about that but this is getting off-topic :)

12:06 PM

@AndrasDeak No, I don't think so. But he knew a lot about it. As far as I know, he never visited the Soviet Union. But he did participate in the Spanish Civil War. Against Franco.

As I recall, that was the turning point for him. Franco is generally also classified as fascist, but I know very little about him.

@FaheemMitha let me read into it; I only have handwaving memories from 15+ years ago when I first read it

For example, the Chinese Govt is certainly a brutal totalitarian dictatorship. But I'm not aware of them being hyper-nationalistic, at least publicly. Also, there isn't much visible vilifying of minorities.

@FaheemMitha again: uyghurs

@AndrasDeak I'm fairly familiar with the details.

Of Eric Blair's life, I mean.

@AndrasDeak Oh, them. Right, I'd forgotten about that.

"Last Week Tonight" did a segment on them. I'm not sure what to make of John Oliver.

He's supposed to be a comedian. But he's doing the journalism everyone else isn't. It's puzzling.

What's the deal with the Uyghurs? I'm not familiar with the issues.

I was actually just thinking the other day about "Nineteen Eighty-Four". Or rather, I was thinking about that book, and Chomsky.

When I was a child, I tried reading Chomsky. It was total gibberish to me. I could make no sense of it. But I found "Nineteen Eighty-Four" perfectly accessible.

@FaheemMitha 12M people minority living in brutal oppression in China. The base of the oppression is primarily their religion, I think. From what I recall there have been numerous allegations of how the Chinese Communist Party limits their physical freedom, tracks them in real life and electronically, has government agents live with uyghur families to keep an eye on them, putting uyghurs in what are practically concentration camps, etc.

I don't go out of my way to inform myself and most of these claims cannot be verified, but you definitely should read a bit to see what you can find. It's definitely a crime against humanity.

12:17 PM

I guess my point is that that book is an accessible read. And more people should read it. If a child can read and understand it, anyone can.

@AndrasDeak Any idea why they are going after these people specifically? Are they the only people in China with a religion? Or is there something specific about their religion that the Chinese Govt object to?

I think communist dictatorships don't tend to like religion in general, but as I said I'm not very well informed

OK, this seems like a promising section with links en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

> Persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang
Main articles: Xinjiang re-education camps and Cultural genocide of Uyghurs

One thing I should say about India is that, at least recently, is that the country has started to show a willingness to stand up and fight. I'm talking about the CAA and recent stuff. But all that got shut down because of the pandemic. What's going to happen going forward is anyone's guess.

@AndrasDeak They don't, that's true. Taking their lead from Markism-Leninism. Or whatever. Marx himself didn't care much for religion, but I don't know if he would have approved of this sort of stuff. I'm not very familiar with all this either.

@AndrasDeak Wikipedia kind of sucks for politics.

They always reinforce the dominant view.

Roughly what the US Congress and the rest of the Establishment would approve of.

@FaheemMitha I suspect that a child who not only knew about but also tried reading Chomsky is not a good measuring stick for what "a child" can do.

Sort of like comparing children to Aaron Swartz (as a kid)...

12:54 PM

@FaheemMitha if there are factual references about oppression then there's no missing "other side"

Slightly related: middle ground fallacy yourlogicalfallacyis.com/middle-ground (not to say that you did that)

deporting minorities to camps should not be a political question

@AndrasDeak I'm not sure I follow.

@AndrasDeak Deporting minorities to camps clearly isn't a political question.

For the record, "Understanding Power" is actually accessible, and I strongly recommend it, if anyone is interested. Chomsky technically did not write it, because it consists of interviews/talks, compiled by a couple of very hard-working people.

And speaking of Aaron Swartz (may he rest in peace), here is a review of that book that he wrote. It's not a good review - there are almost no specifics, but it does seem to have made an impression. aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany

1:10 PM

@FaheemMitha nevermind, we've already been off topic too long I think. I'll let unix things bloom once again :)

2:04 PM

@AndrasDeak if only ed(1) could solve world peace, too!

3

wat up Jeff

top o' the morning to ya, jesse_b!

I modified my weed wacker, bored out the exhaust manifold and muffler. Thing has way better throttle response now

10/10 would recommend

nice! Every time I use mine, I have to resist the urge to roll over it with a steam roller.

and then back up and do it again

why?

2:09 PM

the 'string' doesn't auto-advance MOST of the time

@jesse_b boring!

so I stop, remove the head, re-wind the cord (or cut a whole new length), and then get going again

@AndrasDeak he's apprenticing to The Boring Co (tm)

ah yeah that would be frustrating

@JeffSchaller it's supposed to auto-advance? :O

You can buy replacement heads for it

2:10 PM

and every time, I think "we can put a frickin' man on the moon, but we can't do this?"

I've only seen elecric ones from close, FWIW

I think they are basically all universal

@AndrasDeak most of them do, don’t they?

mine's a battery-powered one, so I did spend a few minutes looking for a replacement head, but ended in painful failure

so now I use it (at most) every other time, and do a 'severe' job of edging

I've got a ryobi click connect 2 stroke one, I think it was only like $70 and I'm pretty happy with it, I've had it for almost 3 years now and it's seen its share of hot suppers

on the topic of edging I recently found a manual edger at the local used tool store, I think they work so much better than a string trimmer

user image

If you see one cheap I recommend it

2:15 PM

@StephenKitt D:

crap new mobile firefox is crap

severe cutting and grass/weed killer are my go-to's for now

3:15 PM

That reminds me, I meant to research fertilizer.

Apparently it's on topic in Gardening SE.

Too many things to do.

@terdon I didn't receive a notification about your bounty, even though I wrote the question you put the bounty on.

Perhaps that's normal. I don't know.

And the existing answer is actually perfectly adequate. That question doesn't really require an answer. It requires implementation.

@FaheemMitha I think it is normal, yes.

@terdon Oh, ok.

@FaheemMitha which is why I used the "not enough attention" bounty reason.

@AndrasDeak I think Unix is doing just fine. And never pass up an opportunity to explain why someone is wrong.

@terdon And I appreciate it.

3:38 PM

But don't get your hopes up. Chat was never considered important and they are very unlikely to divert devs to a side project like chat. Especially not considering how few people (only the really avid chatters) would care about this.

if I insisted on explaining how everyone was wrong I'd never get any work done

@terdon I just looked up the question. Absolutely no chance of that being implemented.

there are trivial feature-requests such as meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/257949/… which have been ignored for 6 years (trivial because mods can already do that)

chat has always been an orphan, but I think the person who wrote it no longer works at the company

@AndrasDeak It's a rough life being right.

@AndrasDeak Doesn't chat require support/bug fixing?

@AndrasDeak That's more removing a restriction than a new feature.

@FaheemMitha you know it

@FaheemMitha many things are required yet don't exist

@FaheemMitha yes, but still technically a FR. My point being is that it would be really easy to implement (unlike your FR which needs both backend dev work and a way to figure out how that ties in with the UI)

@AndrasDeak Yes, point taken. Quite a lot of people use chat, though. There must be hundreds across the network. And an implementation would be a one-time thing.

Hundreds is quite nothing, alas. At least on chat.SO where the main site's traffic is in the hundred thousands or so

You can't even reach chat easily from the main site. The new UI makes this possible through a hamburger menu I think...

3:48 PM

@AndrasDeak They've been much, much better at this recently. but yes, chat has never been a priority.

Well, I know there's a process where mods can push FRs into dev backlog, but a handful of those just got status-deferred a few days ago

@AndrasDeak Actually, that has basically been implemented since they made the new "move comments to chat" feature.

@terdon do you have a reference for that?

That allows the OP to chat even if they don't have the rep to.

this is the first time I'm hearing this

3:50 PM

@AndrasDeak Loads of experience? It's been this way ever since the "move comments to chat" appeared.

(and that still sounds like a mod feature with a specific trigger)

@terdon OK, so that's probably "mods can already do that"

Almost. It's what you get when you have more than N comments between two users under a question.

@AndrasDeak No, everyone can, but only if you get the automatic notification about moving to chat.

So it requires taking a particular path. It's not an "at will" thing.

That will create a room and the OP can post there no matter what their rep is.

the FR is about letting me, a measly room owner, decide if a specific low-rep user can chat

3:51 PM

So since that happens automatically now, there are very few legitimate use cases for non-mods to allow low rep users to chat.

@terdon huh, I didn't know that even worked with low-rep users

@AndrasDeak Yes. Which is why I said it has basically been implemented :)

Hmm, I only just registered that SO chat is a different url.

And perhaps a different server.

@FaheemMitha yeah, 3 servers: chat.SO, chat.SE, chat.MSE

@AndrasDeak Yeah. It does, since otherwise the OP would be invited into a chat where they couldn't actually post anything.

3:52 PM

@AndrasDeak Ok.

@terdon yeah, I thought that the feature didn't even appear for a low-rep asker

So the solution to make a low-rep user eligible to chat is to find a post of theirs and start an endless stream of comments with them

good to know, thanks :P

heh yes. Although I suggest you don't try that!

I'll just say you told me it's alright

LOL

How is the Python room these days? When I've tried in the past I tend to get ignored. People seem to prefer talking about cabbages.

It's making do. Past its golden age, I think, much like most of SO and chat.SO. If you come on weekends traffic is low, but you will probably get a reply evenually if you ask (unless the problem is very obscure). We only ask that people don't post their python questions there that are fresh on the main site.

3:59 PM

@AndrasDeak So you spend time there, then?

I'm one of the room owners there

there are still some cabbages, though :P

@AndrasDeak Oh, ok. I guess you must write a lot of Python.

Not too much but it's my choice for all kinds of post-processing for research

I have approximately 1 proper python project (also for work)

Ok. I used to write quite a lot of Python. Never internalized the language completely, though.

I love it. The whitespace-for-syntax thing put me off it for years, but I grew tired of MATLAB and I fell in love with it the moment I switched. It's just so much more powerful.

4:41 PM

I almost signed up for my companies 401k but I don't think I can run that far

4:53 PM

@AndrasDeak Yeah. The whitespace for syntax still bugs me though. A lot.

But it's a nice language, no argument there.

@jesse_b hah! Just finish the Moab 240 first, then you should be fine

"In 2017, Dauwalter won the inaugural Moab 240, a 238-mile race that zigzags along the Colorado River. She completed the route in a little less than 58 hours and beat the next competitor, a man, by 10 hours, or 20 miles. She said a one-minute nap on the side of the trail the second night of the race revived her and pushed her to the finish."

one minute nap lol

5:19 PM

@AndrasDeak Never been a fan of that whitespace thing. Syntax should not be whitespace sensitive. It's just wrong.

@terdon and @FaheemMitha yeah, it's a bit silly. I didn't like (before using python) that this would force my hand in indenting code. In trivial double loops for instance I don't like to add a level of indentation. But I got used to the whitespace thing and even grown to like it a lot, at a speed that suggests that it's not just Stockholm syndrome :D And for the trivial nested loop case there's a pattern that can move it into a single loop, win-win.

"at a speed that suggests that it's not just Stockholm syndrome"?

You mean you got used to it fast?

yeah

Personally, I still haven't entirely.

It does make the code more readable.

It's definitely not for everyone

there's a mod on SO with whom we often talk about python and his sense of superiority with C++ :P

5:35 PM

C++ is hardly superior. It's like one of those things out of Greek mythology where an eagle was crossed with a horse. The poor thing doesn't know whether its coming or going.

3 hours later…

8:29 PM

speaking of perl: monkeyuser.com/2020/regex-explained

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