It’s racist to use immigration law to maintain a racial underclass. For instance, many essential agricultural workers in the US do not have access to the courts or law enforcement to protect their rights. If a citizen assaults one of these workers, the worker cannot safely report the assault to law enforcement without being punished for doing so.

How the hell do you wreck lentil soup that bad? Heck, there are lots of different cultures around the world that make tasty lentil soup. There’s German lentil soup with potato, carrot, and ham; there’s Indian dal in a range of flavors and colors; there’s Turkish Ezogelin soup with bulgur and paprika …

Mare-Ih-Joe-Wah-Nah

If you see this, it worked for me.

Okay, let’s skip the formal logic talk then and go straight to linguistics.

The question “Good to merge?” does not contain a grammatical error. It is perfectly well-formed by the grammar that native English speakers actually follow in everyday communication. A grammar that fails to parse “Good to merge?” in context cannot parse native English speakers’ actual output.

Schoolbook English is not native English, because it’s not how native English speakers actually speak. Schoolbook English contains rules that directly contradict native English speakers’ everyday usage.

(Standard examples include the rule against split infinitives and the rule against ending a sentence with a preposition. These are not grammatical rules of English as it is spoken by native speakers. To boldly assert them is silliness up with which I will not put.)

The guideline (as applied) contains a contradiction, so the principle of explosion applies.

Specifically, there is a contradiction between “native-sounding English” and “no grammatical errors”, when the latter phrase is interpreted in the manner seen here. Native speakers quite often use sentence fragments and in other ways do not follow schoolbook “proper grammar”. In fact, second-language learners often use schoolbook grammar where a native speaker would use a more relaxed register.

Since the guideline contains a contradiction, it is either impossible to follow (i.e. forbids all communication whatsoever) or impossible to violate (i.e. forbids no communication).

Good idea: make accusations in plain language. “Trump is corrupt and steals taxpayer money.” “Republican policies hurt Americans with jobs.” “Voting for assholes gets you shat on.”

Bad idea: make shit up. “Trump eats babies.” “Republicans summon Satan in their basements.” “Vote for me and I’ll cure your cancer tomorrow.”

ADOM’s Tower of Eternal Flame will burn you and your equipment if you’re not adequately protected. It’s also harsh on certain characters that usually benefit from heat!

House Republicans want to rape your kids too.

What are you trying to accomplish?

Are you trying to save human lives? Reduce suffering? Reduce some specific harm, such as from pandemics, or from severe weather due to climate change, or from trampling by elephant? Cure the specific disease that killed your great-aunt? Stomp Nazis?

If you say what you think is worth doing, people can point you to specific groups that are doing it.

Live with friends.

• Underpope
• Eggplant vs. Computer
• Mushroom Boyfriend
• Sexually Ambitious Hamster / “Zebra Wants Me”
• Geography Dog
• Your Abstraction Causes Low-Quality Inference
• Super Trogdor Bros.
• Furry Sherlock Holmes / Furlock Mini Mysteries
• Little Red Investing Hood
• Mistress Floggerblogger Teaches Safe Sex
• Classical Realism XKCD

Harry Chapin’s “What Made America Famous?” got an unsuccessful musical, but never a film. In a modern update, the song’s “hippies” are instead gutter punks squatting an abandoned building, and the fat plumber is the one non-MAGA in the town’s volunteer fire department.

Some people who voted for Trump have repented and joined the movement for democracy in America.

But also, there are serious doubts about the integrity of the 2024 elections and a nontrivial possibility that Trump didn’t win the election.

few outside of Germany knew that concentration camps existed

The creation of concentration camps was widely advertised in Nazi propaganda, as a show of force to intimidate dissidents. It was the later death camps that were secret: the ones that were designed for no purpose but to do murder at industrial scale.

It has been obvious for many years that the Trump movement aims at the downfall of America, through the promotion and exaggeration of America’s flaws and the increasingly violent suppression of its virtues.

But if someone creates a file called HEAD, should it overwrite a file called head?

That shouldn’t matter to the “nontechnical” end-user at all. To the nontechnical user, even the abstraction of “creating a file” has largely gone away. You create a document, and changes you make to it are automatically persisted to storage, either local or cloud.

Only the technical command-line user cares about whether /usr/bin/HEAD and /usr/bin/head are the same path. And only in a specific circumstance — such as the early days of Mac OS X, where the Macintosh and Unix cultures collided — could the bug that I described emerge.

I recall a case-insensitivity bug from the early days of Mac OS X.

There are three command-line utilities that are distributed as part of the Perl HTTP library: GET, HEAD, and POST. These are for performing the HTTP operations of those names from the command line.

But there’s also a POSIX-standard utility for extracting the first few lines of a text file. It’s called head.

I think you see where I’m going with this. HEAD and head are the same name in a case-insensitive filesystem such as the classic Mac filesystem. They are different names on a Unix-style filesystem.

Installing /usr/bin/HEAD from libwww-perl onto a Mac with the classic filesystem overwrote /usr/bin/head and broke various things.

I recommend picking up Graham Hutton’s short text Programming in Haskell, Second Edition. Even if you don’t end up using Haskell in “real work” (and you might!) it will teach you a remarkable number of things about how functional programming works.

The term “open source software” was coined specifically to refer to software licensing that recognizes a particular set of freedoms. It is not a generic term for source-available software, and never was.

One of the freedoms of open source is “no discrimination against fields of endeavor.”

Calling the Hippocratic license family “open source” is inaccurate, since its entire goal is to discriminate against certain fields of endeavor.

It’s better described as a sort of source-available license.