Notices by Don Romano 🍹 (thj@mastodon.cloud), page 6

@masterofthetiger Hacking and tinkering increasingly feels like something I do for lack of more substantial things to expend my energy on. I mean, who will benefit from my nerder?

Why doesn't fiction portray unwritten rules more? It's almost as if writers *also* refuse to acknowledge them, because they're in on the game...

@filkerdave That's reassuring at least.

I mean, it's almost as if there's a secret group that decides these matters.

"Your surname is Einstein and you have *also* had clever ideas? Sorry, that name is already taken by a famous person. If you want to be famous too, you'll need to change your surname."

Tell me...

Why have I never heard of anyone except Charles Darwin with the surname Darwin?

Same goes for Watt, Maxwell, Einstein...

Did these people get special one-surname allocations from the surname council, or is there a rule where families have to change surnames if one family member suddenly makes a surname famous?

There is a Hitler family, but in that case, it *did* change its name, and for good reason.

Still, why do famous people have uncommon surnames? What's the reason?

Numberphile has truly refined the art of nerdy clickbait.

@leila Wait... 3-5...

*counts*

There are five of them in the image...

Why... What...

This is truly intolerable.

@leila They are too small. This is intolerable.

I mean, the only reason anti-assholeism isn't an ideology is because it's ridiculous, but that's what we're all looking for... A way of dealing with the assholes. The people who ruin things for everyone else.

Frankly, just about any ideology you could think of would work just fine and dandy if it weren't for the assholes.

Listen, leftists...

If capitalism is slavery, so is being alive.

I'm not going to say more than that. Just think it through. Carefully. Then think about it again.

We are enslaved to our needs. Leftism is a measure to counteract the natural state of the world. Leftism is NOT some kind of natural state we have veered away from.

Capitalism? It's a system that builds on the natural state instead of opposing it.

Capitalism isn't evil. Some people are just dicks. Fight assholes, not ideologies.

@djsumdog Another fucked up thing is the "peer group truth" system, in which you can't acknowledge a truth out loud, despite everyone being quietly aware of it.

Even if you knew that everyone's aware of a truth, you couldn't bring it up, because you'd risk being attacked. Someone might decide to accuse you of being an outsider (immoral person) even if they, too, know that the thing you're saying is true, because that's just how fucked up people are.

@djsumdog My workplace is special. It's full of people who are either struggling to adapt to this fucked up system (dysfunctional nerds), or people who have fully adapted to it, and my bosses' life mission basically seems to be to run a kind of nerd asylum and rehab facility, branded as an IT business.

It took a good while for me to realise what was going on, and the fucked up part is, if I ever tried to bring this truth up, it would be denied officially, because that's how it has to work.

@djsumdog The world is full of these rules nobody tells you about.

I realised the other day that my boss will essentially allow me to break any rule so long as:

1. He can reasonably pretend that he didn't see me break the rule.

2. No one else is pissed off enough about it to tell my boss.

My response to this: What... the... fuck... That's... Why.... Rule... That's not what "rule" means... Why are humans so fucked up?

@djsumdog Ah, I have not been told that.

Perhaps I'm not considered good dad material by the people I've talked to... or perhaps I don't hang in circles where people say that kind of thing...

...I think it's because I'm in Norway, which is probably the most leftist, pro-gay, pro-feminist country in the world apart from Sweden, which pretty much takes holds the olympic gold medal for political correctness.

@djsumdog Oh god, you're onto something there.

Again, I'm somewhat disinhibited at the moment, because I've had more than one glass of wine.

Yeah, you know what I realised? People will often not acknowledge your viewpoint if doing so would ruin the excuses they have for living in a certain way.

It's like that saying: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

I feel that this applies to life choices in general.

Listen, Google, when I search for "sudden intense itch foot", I do not mean feet, itching, sudden or intense things in general. I want to know why my left foot is suddenly itching like crazy.

My suspicion is winter eczema, but it's showing up in all sorts of unusual locations. I never know what to expect from my body. It's never been a very reliable machine, frankly. There's always problems with it, and I'm only 36.

I strongly doubt I'll get very old, and if I do, it'll be uncomfortable.

After failing the entrance exam for art school, Hitler briefly moonlighted as a crooner, but "I'm dreaming of ein Weiss Christmas, mit not ein Jew or Black in sight" wasn't popular with audiences.

The booing would cause him to lose his temper, however, which turned out to be far more popular than his singing act, but that's a story for another time...

Tried to work out how you would implement CONCAT in a Lisp. Took me a while to realise that this is extremely simple if your Lisp uses proper linked lists.

My JavaScript Lisp uses Arrays as lists, to make it very easy to talk to JS code. JS puts all the Lisp-flavoured calls on Array.prototype.

...it just struck me that I should try to use Symbol.iterator in JS to implement CONS, CAR and CDR in my Lisp.

I think I'll call them LINK, LEFT and RIGHT, or such, though. Easier to read.

Although the Scandinavian languages lack a progressive verb aspect, they do have progressive adverbs:

"Han sover sittende."

"He sleeps sittingly."

"sittingly" is an uncommon adverb in English, but verbs turned into adverbs are very common in the Scandinavian languages, probably precisely due to the lack of a proper progressive aspect.

In the English language, the progressive aspect ("is eating") is prominent.

In the closely related Scandinavian languages, there is no progressive aspect, and auxiliary forms such as "now", "in fare [journey] with" or "holds on" replace it.

"he is dying" would become "he is in fare with to die" or "he holds on to die", for example.

Often though, the aspect is obvious from context:

- What does he now?
- He cleans the house.

No need for auxiliary phrases in such cases.

Woo! My Lisp implementation can iterate a list and evaluate a recursive function!