Thanks for the heads up! App error it seems, tried to clean it up.
PixelProf
joined 2 years ago
Not op but https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/poilievre-to-run-in-alberta-byelection-1.7525104
Basically he asked a con in the highest % of con votes to step down to trigger a by-election. It's an area where the other parties don't even campaign, they just hand it to the cons.
There are already talks of "liberals rigged the election" so that he can deflect and not make it a personal failing that he lost a riding that's historically always been conservative and lost a 25 point lead in the polls in a few months.
Interesting points, maybe a book I'll have to give a read to. I've long thought that information overload on its own leads to a kind of subjective compression and that we're seeing the consequences of this, plus late stage capitalism.
Basically, if we only know about 100 people and 10 events and 20 things, we have much more capacity to form nuanced opinions, like a vector with lots of values. We don't just have an opinion about the person, our opinion toward them is the sum of opinions about what we know about them and how those relate to us.
Without enough information, you think in very concrete ways. You don't build up much nuance, and you have clear, at least self-evident logic for your opinions that you can point at.
Hit a sweet spot, and you can form nuanced opinions based on varied experiences.
Hit too much, and now you have to compress the nuances to make room for more coarse comparisons. Now you aren't looking at the many nuances and merits, you're abstracting things. Necessary simulacrum.
I've wondered if this is where we've seen so much social regression, or at least being public about it. There are so many things to care about, to know, to attend to, that the only way to approach it is to apply a compression, and everyone's worldview is their compression algorithm. What features does a person classify on?
I feel like we just aren't equipped to handle the global information age yet, and we need specific ways of being to handle it. It really is a brand new thing for our species.
Do we need to see enough of the world to learn the nuances, then transition to tighter community focus? Do we need strong family ties early with lower outside influence, then melting pot? Are there times in our development when social bubbling is more ideal or more harmful than otherwise? I'm really curious.
Anecdotally, I feel like I benefitted a lot from tight-knit, largely anonymous online communities growing up. Learning from groups of people from all over the world of different ages and beliefs, engaging in shared hobbies and learning about different ways of life, but eventually the neurons aren't as flexible for breadth and depth becomes the drive.
At some point, if we aren't already there, the tactic might be to recognize that the ship is sinking (or be pleasantly surprised it floats) and front-run another con to denounce PP to have the next election campaigning on "I was the only con who stood against PP, who lost such an incredible lead over the libs". I've thought it for a bit, and seeing Ford being so vocal against PP now terrifies me given he keeps getting elected in Ontario somehow. I'm not very tuned in politically so I have no idea if this is something thay might happen, but I feel like we need a big push for "Strategic voting BUT let your liberal MPs know that you urge election reform" from day one, every day, until the next election.
Oh yeah, the 365 version is terrible. And post of the time, it could have been a Python Gradio interface or similar simple implementation without having to fight so much to make basic things work. Most of what I want Excel to do it just isn't efficient enough for; particularly with lets and lambdas, it's gotten quite powerful as a programming paradigm where you can visualize and manipulate your data spatially in a kind of Logo / NetLogo style way which is really interesting, but the second you reference a few thousand cells a few times even a solid CPU starts screaming.
I use Excel for a decent number of tasks and can do some magic with it, but only ever really for work where it's easier to share a weird Excel sheet than it is to pass around a Python script (which given I teach Python, isn't actually as often as most people experience).
But what about those of us in R1C1 mode using lambdas to do recursive cell operations across data pulled from multiple sheets? Am I anywhere near the kinda of Eldritch horrors discussed? I've also written indirect references based on Sheet name to populate filters from web scraped tables. I just don't know how deep the pit goes at this point.
Maybe I'm an old fogey, but I usually hear more pushback against visual languages as being too finicky to actually create anything with and I usually advocate for a blending of them, like working in Godot and having nodes to organize behaviour but written scripts to implement it.
I really appreciate the talks from Bret Victor, like Inventing on Principle (https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII), where he makes some great points about what sorts of things our tooling, in addition to the language, could do to offload some of the cognitive load while coding. I think it's a great direction to be thinking, where it's feasible anyways.
Also, one reason folks new to programming at least struggle with text code is that they don't have the patterns built up. When you're experienced and look at a block of code, you usually don't see each keyword, you see the concept. You see a list comprehension in Python and instantly go "Oh it's a filter", or you see a nested loop and go "Oh it's doing a row/column traversal of a 2d matrix". A newbie just sees symbols and keywords and pieces each one together individually.
Any solutions to replace something like Virtual Desktop to wirelessly VR a Quest 3, or any word on attempts to get Steam Link VR working on Linux? It's basically the final ligament holding onto the Windows dual-boot on my non-work PC. I've been waiting for the day I can purge Windows since using Warty in elementary school.