namingthingsiseasy

There may still be lawsuits, however. There are still many ways that he could lose a lot of what he gained.

Why just 90%? Make it 99%! 100%! 150%!

I've never had the chance to use a functional language in my work, but I have tried to use principles like these.

Once I had a particularly badly written Python codebase. It had all kinds of duplicated logic and data all over the place. I was asked to add an algorithm to it. So I just found the point where my algorithm had to go, figured out what input data I needed and what output data I had to return, and then wrote all the algorithm's logic in one clean, side effect-free module. All the complicated processing and logic was performed internally without side effects, and it did not have to interact at all with the larger codebase as a whole. It made understanding what I had to do much easier and relieved the burden of having to know what was going on outside.

These are the things functional languages teach you to do: to define boundaries, and do sane things inside those boundaries. Everything else that's going on outside is someone else's problem.

I'm not saying that functional programming is the only way you can learn something like this, but what made it click for me is understanding how Haskell provides the IO monad, but recommends that you keep that functionality at as high of a level as possible while keeping the lower level internals pure and functional.

Sounds like a great deal... TORILLE!!!

I'm not sure I agree with that. Before suggesting someone wield that kind of power, consider how you'd feel about it if the opposition parties did that too.

At this point, I think the USA is better off just reforming its constitution. And possibly splitting the union into 5-10 separate smaller countries. The country is clearly not an effective union anymore, and to be honest, hasn't been for a very long time. This isn't the first time there's been a north-south divide and it certainly won't be the last, so why prolong the suffering? Just break it up and be done with it. Everyone will probably be much happier that way.

If they all weren't a bunch of cowards, they would have stood up to him already.

What kind of programming work are you doing?

I've thought about situations like yours and what I would do if I were in that situation someday. For me, the plan is to try doing as much in the console as possible, which means Vim/Neovim for development and Tmux for window management.

If you ever feel useless, don't forget that both true and false have manpages in Linux.

They even have --help and --version flags in case you need them.

Looks like some people just don't learn from history.

I remember reading a blog post about how the Dutch kept meticulous records on citizens in the 1930s, including things like which synagogues people attended. Needless to say, that information became very interesting and useful to the visitors that arrived later in that decade. When comparing occupied countries during the Holocaust, the Netherlands probably was the country where the Nazis were the most successful in rounding up victims.

I can't find the exact blog post where I read this - I'm pretty sure it was on tutanota's blog, but I can't find it at the moment. Wikipedia however does include this line:

Several factors contributed to The Netherlands' higher death toll compared to other occupied countries. The governmental apparatus was left relatively intact after the royal family and government fled to London, and The Netherlands was not under a military regime. It was the most densely inhabited country of Western Europe, making it difficult for the relatively large number of Jews to go into hiding. Most Jews in Amsterdam were poor, which limited their options for fleeing or hiding. The country did not have much open space or forest for people to flee to. Also, the civil administration had detailed records of the numbers of Jews, and their addresses.

And now, they're making the same mistake again it seems.

First, we'll take away the headphone jack.

Then, we'll remove everything else!

My understanding from what you're writing (and from this article) is that the phone number is really the account number. That's all well and fine, but then they force you to verify that the number is yours (or at the very least, one that you have access to because you need to receive a confirmation over SMS), so you can't use something more private. And sure, it makes it a little harder to find your new contact, but I don't think it's really that big of a deal - just exchange your other "account number" via some other channel.

Besides, don't think for a second that when this identifying information inevitably falls into the wrong hands that it will benefit you in any way. "What are you hiding, citizen?" and all that bullshit.

The part of it that bothers me is the sense of entitlement that these companies exhibit. The "Give us your phone number or fuck off" sentiment is something I just refuse to accept. If Google forces us to do the same and we refuse, what makes Signal think that we'll do it for them when they're so much smaller by comparison? Especially when you're trying to claim you're more secure and private to people that much more tech savvy than average, this just comes off as not understanding your audience very well. I'm sure I'm not the only one that is holding out against using Signal because of this.

I'm surprised this hasn't been said yet... but what I hate most about Signal is its requirement for a phone number. I don't want to be identified, and I want to be able to create multiple separate accounts with different identities if I want to.

I also hate the fact that it's a mobile-first service. Yes, there is a desktop application (and just one really crappy one at that), but it's clearly designed to revolve first and foremost around your phone and be virtually impossible to use without one. As someone who hates writing on a 3-inch screen, this is a also non-starter for me.

I understand the arguments about perfectionism, but this is too much. I'll stick with XMPP, Matrix and IRC, thanks.