A surprisingly common attitude, historically speaking

It’s always amusing when the Neovim users pretend to like Lua. It’s not like Emacs Lisp is the best language out there (it’s not, and I’d much rather Emacs was configured in Scheme, they’re working on it…), but at least it’s a good fit, by design, for configuration.

The university is still named that way

Maybe unconfigured. Even Jesus Christ wouldn’t be able to handle the Vimscript.

I’ve never understood the need for fish. The shell experience is basically the same as zsh, and although it’s much more pleasant to script for, you miss out on compatibility with POSIX-compliant snippets, and besides, if you’re writing long and complicated scripts that need anything more than a handful of scalar variables you should probably be using Python (or Perl if you’re an old-school masochist).

As if modern websites care about Firefox

IIRC pressing the power button once silences the call (but doesn’t reject it) and pressing it again rejects the call.
Also if the phone is already unlocked, there’s a button to decline. I don’t know why it doesn’t appear when the phone is locked.

Not exactly the tweet, but dropping this again here because of the title.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. … A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. … But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socio-economic unfairness.

The finding held when the researchers accounted for people being right-handed, right-footed and right-eye dominant, and was seen in both male and female walkers.

I think they’ve just been trained on corporate speak

According to the theology of some Christian denominations (I can’t remember which, exactly), the answer is yes.

“Socialism is when the government does stuff. And if it does a whole lot of stuff, that’s communism!”

Doing this sort of work has convinced me that the parallel postulate is a lie

You can go deeper. To prove anything, including the consistency or inconsistency of a theory, you need to work within a different system of axioms, and assume that it is consistent, etc.

even if it’s true everywhere forever, it might still not be provable, because Gödel.

No. Gödel’s completeness theorem says that if something is true in every model of a (first-order) theory, it must be provable. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that for every sufficiently powerful theory, there exists statements that are true sometimes, and these can’t be provable.

The key word is “everywhere”.

That depends on whether you interpret “when” + past tense in English to also assert the reality of the temporal clause. The interpretation which allows the vacuous truth is, in my opinion, not even technically correct (by correct I mean aligns with actual spoken usage). It would amount to formalizing the sentence as

For all meetings between us, if said meeting is at a past time and it’s the first meeting (i.e. before all other meetings), you promised at that time to give me all your money.

Which is indeed vacuously true, if there have been no past meetings, or even if the meetings aren’t well-ordered in time :). On the surface this is a perfectly good interpretation, but it doesn’t really align with real usage (though I would love to see an example of “when” + past tense being used this way, e.g. in a legal document).

On the other hand, most people would interpret “when” + past to assert that the event actually happened, which in this context means

I have met you before, a “first meeting” can be identified, and at that first meeting, you promised to give me all your money.

Or even more formally

There exist meetings between us at a past time, there exists such a unique meeting which is first, and, for all meetings, if said meeting is indeed the first, you promised me at that time to give me all your money.

And this can be reduced to

There exists a unique past meeting between us such that [it’s first, and you promised to give me all your money at that time].

I think this interpretation is most closely aligned with how “when” is actually used in practice. “If” feels different, though. It can act as simple logical implication, logical equivalence, or anything in between, so it may be more interesting to study. Also note that all of this doesn’t apply to “when” + simple present, which acts very similarly to “if”.

The superiority of ISO paper sizes isn’t obvious at all if you don’t know how US paper is different. Seems like different countries just use different sizes. But as anyone accustomed to using A- or B-series papers knows, A4 is made of exactly 2 A5s, and the pattern holds up to A10 and down to A0, whereas the US paper sizes are completely unrelated to each other.
So good!

To be fair, I found a freely accessible version of this with a single search. Also to be fair, it wasn’t the published version.

I think the comment was about Vance

I still can’t quite accept that the French for “what” is literally “what is it that”