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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • That's definitely also true, but republicans genuinely want everyone to hate taxation as well, so their interests very much align with the companies that want to fleece you.

    Lots of countries have pay as you earn schemes where your income tax is deducted but your employer and sent to the government and you don't have to even lift a finger, likewise the price on the item at the shop, by law, includes tax and it's completely seamless for you. Republicans will never like such schemes because they want taxation to be hated by all so that they'll go along with tax cuts that primarily benefit such folks.



  • This is great, but republicans are gonna hate it. They want everyone to hate taxes with a passion, so they make it difficult, time consuming and expensive to pay your taxes, and make government services as bad as possible so even poorer people who don't pay much tax feel they get a bad deal out of taxation.

    If ordinary people found it easy and convenient to pay taxes they might notice that they get more out of government than they put in and that rich people are bearing more of the cost than they are. If they thought that, they might support tax increases or things that horrify republicans like medicaid for all.




  • True. But the word Monad has done more harm to the accessibility, popularity and reputation of pure functional programming than pretty much anything else.

    Yeah, I could have said circle rather than curve of constant normal intersection points, but that word is very commonly understood, so it's not that same as unnecessarily calling something a Monad. Maybe it's the equivalent of calling it a 2-manifold instead of a wheel.

    Perhaps just ditch the generalisation, then, and just call them Result or Maybe. After all, circle is a short word, but we just call them wheels.




  • Don't call it a monad, call it a structured data type or something, that's what it is! Calling it a monad is like saying that you're using a curve of constant normal intersection point. Why not just say it's a wheel?

    Yes, it's mathematically true that you're having a smooth ride precisely because the normals have a constant intersection point, but it's also true to say that it's a wheel and it goes round and isn't bumpy and doesn't scrape, and people can get a handle on that.

    So yeah, use a Result or Option or Maybe structured data type because it keeps explicit track of whether there's a value or not, and yeah, you can change or combine them and preserve the tracking, but there's no point calling it a monad unless you're trying to make people believe that avoiding the $1bn mistake of allowing/using null requires category theory. It doesn't, it's just a structured data type. It's simpler than an array! Stop calling it a monad.



  • In his notes, Roszak wrote that Google's search advertising "is one of the world's greatest business models ever created" with economics that only certain "illicit businesses" selling "cigarettes or drugs" "could rival."

    Beyond likening Google's search advertising business to illicit drug markets, Roszak's notes also said that because users got hooked on Google's search engine, Google was able to "mostly ignore the demand side" of "fundamental laws of economics" and "only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales." This was likely the bit that actually interested the DOJ.


  • Elm (for frontend). https://elm-lang.org/

    Nothing is as easy to refactor, maintain, add new features to, work with after a gap, nothing else is as crashless and rock solid.

    No compiler is a fast, friendly, helpful and insightful. Seriously. You don't wait for the compiler. It's instant even on huge code bases. And the resulting output outperforms other major frameworks.

    Its syntax is weird at first (even stranger than python) and the autoformatter is mad keen on blank lines but after a while it's just so clear and easy to follow.

    You have to let go of your object oriented mindset and stop trying to turn everything into objects and components but everything I hated about maintaining old code evaporated once I did. I used to believe that objects detangled code, I don't know why I continued to believe that despite the evidence, because apart from pretty small and simple things, OO code gets extremely tangled. Elm is absurdly easy to refractor, so you just do.

    It's genuinely nice to add new features to old code, something I've never experienced before in a few decades of programming.

    The elm slack is also a very helpful place indeed and you usually get a lot of support pretty quickly.

    Adding the link to their front page, I see they call it "A delightful language for reliable web applications" and the first claim is "no runtime exceptions". I remember thinking that was marketing BS but being intrigued by the bold claim. A few years later and I can honestly say that that accurately describes my experience.

    These last few years I've rediscovered the joy of coding.



  • I was fired for “fraternisation in the workplace”. Teenage me was caught snogging the boss’s daughter, no less, in the stock area by said boss. Cue “get your hands off my daughter” (he didn’t know we were dating) and a meeting later that day being told much more calmly I was being let go for fraternisation. I said it was unfair because he kissed his wife in front of us the previous week, and he said “not that way,” and he had a point, but it was still obviously unfair.

    Anyway, we started deliberately dating in secret instead of her just not really telling him, and when she rang me she always called me Samantha, which I then used to find exciting (Freud eat your heart out).

    I’m convinced that she found it exciting to be disobeying her dad, and would complain to me about her dad saying something like “he’s just trying to take advantage of you” and we would reassure each other that I wasn’t but she would be much keener those days, it felt like.

    When you’re a teenager and you find a magic button that gets you nice things, you don’t hold back on pressing the button, so if she got a bit unenthusiastic about meeting up, I’d just ring her at home knowing full well that her dad would shout at me if he answered and her mum would quietly also refuse to put me through but tell her to stop me from ringing because it might upset her dad. She’d argue with her parents and get revenge by seeing me and behaving in a manner she new her parents to find improper.

    It was really fun while it lasted, but in the end I felt like I shouldn’t have to provoke her dad to get with her and stopped doing it. We drifted apart, I don’t know whether her heart wasn’t in it when she wasn’t cross with her dad or I just started worrying about that too much, but I’m pretty sure her dad had been my unintentional wing man all those months. I really think it’s properly messed up.

    She later dated a guy who I think really was trying to take advantage of her. Also messed up.

    Anyway, I got a job at the big chain version of his store and of course she and her friends started shopping there, which resulted in more arguments with her dad.

    I guess the moral of the story is make sure you’re on good terms with your teenage daughter or she might just go against everything you said just to spite you.