Testing Chat IV: A New Hope

[evilsoup]

for the inevitable justice league film, they could totally use robin

[Questor]

Are you out of your mind? These are COMIC BOOK NERDS.

Any executive suggesting that would be fired. For good reason.

[Oxymoron]

Well, they could always have the Batman not be Bruce Wayne but a successor. Kind of like in that animated series where Bruce is all old and shit and it's a young one taking on the mantle in his stead.

You could have Bruce shoveling money into the League, and acting somewhat like a mentor and advisor for the young batman, and as a PR guy for the League. Something like that ?

"I am Bruce Wayne, of Wayne Enterprises, and I support the Justice League. Do you ?"

[Questor]

COMIC BOOK NERDS!!!!! These people make Star Trek nerds look positively accepting. They actually prefer their insanely complicated continuities to any effort at starting over and cleaning it up.

It could be done, but I'd think you'd need a movie to set up the character. If you're just going to introduce Batman with no prep, people are going to be operating off of the standard set of assumptions.

[Oxymoron]

Well, you have a pre-packaged idea for a new Batman movie : "Batman Beyond, the movie"

[Oxymoron]

And really, would those guys prefer to have a shitty movie re-hashing the same plots and the same themes they've already seen and read a thousand times already, or even to have no movie at all ; rather than to have an interesting movie taking the franchise in a new direction and opening a lot of new story-telling opportunities ?

[Questor]

Oh, oxy, its so cute that you haven't had all faith in humanity beaten out of you

[Oxymoron]

It is, rather, that it's the only thing that keeps me from falling into bitter cynicism.

So I keep pretending people are better than that.

Kind of like the same way a Christian can keep believing in God's mercifulness even when his life has completely gone to shit ? Some kind of feel-good faith like that.

And, you know, injecting positiveness into things managed to turn things betters a number of times. So, eh, you know, that's so many reasons to keep it up.

[Oxymoron]

Put in other terms, I was once a pessimist, and when this got to the point where I had a hard time enjoying even the good things in life, I decided a radical change was in order.

I decided that going about things with the basic assumption that "things are shitty and it only gets worse" wasn't productive, and that it was in fact counter-productive. It is the easy way out : "things are shitty and won't get better, so why should I try ?".

It's loser talk. And I'm already fed up enough with being a loser that I'm not going to let myself get defeated by going about things with a defeatist attitude.

Things will get better. Because I say so.

[phongn]

Yeah, yeah, old hat posts by now but I like programming-talk:

otherwise i think it is incomprehensible code golf (Python has this thing called 'list comprehensions'. more like list incomprehensions amirite? though i find if i read them with the part of my brain that speaks SQL it isn't so bad. but more often than not i program with the C speaking part of my brain, and thus tend to prefer stupid simple procedural code)

Merge the two regions of thinking? Much more interesting that way (list comprehensions look pretty natural to me, for example. I wish Java had them.).

what the fuck is a monad anyway

beats the hell out of me

You pretty much need to have a good grounding in maths to really understand it, otherwise it's a bit of "magic happens here". Not to disparage or insult, but if you are a self-taught programmer without much math education you will have some trouble understanding them. Heck, I do, and I took random CS-oriented math classes for fun.

I do like these posts though (via Google): StackOverflow, Hacker News, Burritos.

What's sad is that my favorite series on MS products (X Unleashed by SAMS) doesn't cover F#.

Those books seem to be for, well, a "general practitioner" of programmers or IT guys? Teaching functional languages to that audience might be a step too far for that series.

[phongn]

http://blip.tv/sf-debris-opinionated-re ... ew-6607010

lol Chuck just subtly slammed SDN here

I don't read it as such. I read it as more fatigue with what SDN represents, rather the mindset that worships dogman and placating preconceptions rather than exploring or discussing ideas. I've ranted about this on various ways here enough that people should know I feel the same way about shit like SDN, SB, or vs debating in general, so Chuck's frustrations can really stand out for me as well.

Nerds (most people) hate change and what they cannot understand. Saw it on FB where the usual SDN-type crowd responded to a question of "Literary analysis is ... " and got responses of "bullshit, nonsense, etc". Annoying! I may not agree with analysis and find a lot of it bullshit, but it can lead down interesting places.

Man of Steel continues the recent approach of comics movies in being heavily informed by the comics without feeling bound by them, which is a good thing.

I don't really read comics much, but it feels like a right and proper thing to do, surely? Adherence to 'past canon' - something that in comics is heavily mutable anyways - is poison, particularly if you want to capture the general audience?

[adr]

Merge the two regions of thinking? Much more interesting that way (list comprehensions look pretty natural to me, for example. I wish Java had them.).

Yeah, the more I use it, the more it is ok. But if you are mentally rewriting it all to for() loops it doesn't help so that's a habit I had (and still have a little ways to go) to get out of.

Recursion is similar. Sometimes, thinking "tail recursion == foreach, head recursion == foreach_reverse" is useful, but sometimes it just complicates what is actually a really simple concept when you just go ahead and think of the definition. Like with a recursive descent parser, if you think of it was the definition of the grammer, it is easy. If you try to break it back out into a sequence of instructions it gets a lot harder than it has to be.

Not to disparage or insult, but if you are a self-taught programmer without much math education you will have some trouble understanding them.

Yea, I've done some math but not much of this kind of thing, what I know is more physics related than theoretical CS (i'm very good at integral and differential calculus, and i know the scientific names of some beings animalculous lolol.)

I do like these posts though (via Google): StackOverflow, Hacker News, Burritos.

Huh, I just skimmed it, but it doesn't sound all that complex, kinda like a regular old class.

[phongn]

Yeah, the more I use it, the more it is ok. But if you are mentally rewriting it all to for() loops it doesn't help so that's a habit I had (and still have a little ways to go) to get out of.

Yeah, don't do that. It's easy to try and view those structures in the guise of imperative programming but to do so creates a false analogy in your head that will screw you up. Have you considered taking Coursera's [url=https://www.coursera.org/course/progfun]functional programming course[url]? It's pretty good and forces you to think out of the imperative box.

Yea, I've done some math but not much of this kind of thing, what I know is more physics related than theoretical CS (i'm very good at integral and differential calculus, and i know the scientific names of some beings animalculous lolol.)

Yeah, CS math tends to be more pure maths than what introductory physics plays with.

Huh, I just skimmed it, but it doesn't sound all that complex, kinda like a regular old class.

It's one abstraction to think of it, but not quite right.

[adr]

no, I've never even heard of coursera before. I might take a gander tho I have a big backlog of stuff already

[Questor]

Yeah, yeah, old hat posts by now but I like programming-talk:

otherwise i think it is incomprehensible code golf (Python has this thing called 'list comprehensions'. more like list incomprehensions amirite? though i find if i read them with the part of my brain that speaks SQL it isn't so bad. but more often than not i program with the C speaking part of my brain, and thus tend to prefer stupid simple procedural code)

Merge the two regions of thinking? Much more interesting that way (list comprehensions look pretty natural to me, for example. I wish Java had them.).

List comprehensions are very cool. The closest thing in procedural or object oriented is probably LINQ.

what the fuck is a monad anyway

beats the hell out of me

You pretty much need to have a good grounding in maths to really understand it, otherwise it's a bit of "magic happens here". Not to disparage or insult, but if you are a self-taught programmer without much math education you will have some trouble understanding them. Heck, I do, and I took random CS-oriented math classes for fun.

I do like these posts though (via Google): StackOverflow, Hacker News, Burritos.

I think the standard analogy is that monads are different positions on a factory floor with an conveyor belt carrying the data between them. Not great, but it'll do.

What's sad is that my favorite series on MS products (X Unleashed by SAMS) doesn't cover F#.

Those books seem to be for, well, a "general practitioner" of programmers or IT guys? Teaching functional languages to that audience might be a step too far for that series.

I started using them because they make an excellent "general practitioner's manual" on the IT side, then when I was forced to convert to C# at work, C# 4.0 Unleashed's setup was exactly what I needed - good info on why the language is special and what makes it different from C/C++ (what I learned on). The fact that Bart De Smet has an awesome name and writes exactly like my favorite programming professors teach (where you learn 10x more from following the threads dropped in the asides than you do from the rest of the content) was just gravy.

I'm decently familiar with functional programming (familiar enough to know what I want to do with it, where I want to use it, and more importantly where I don't want to use it), I've just never actually used it, and the need for interoperability with the rest of my department's .NET codebase means I want to know more about this specific implementation of functional programming.

[Big Orangutan]

http://blip.tv/sf-debris-opinionated-re ... ew-6607010

lol Chuck just subtly slammed SDN here

He's not naming names but he gave an accurate enough assessment why a place like SD.Net sunk with intellectual inbreeding and a stifling atmosphere coming from entrenched group think, with even individuals with slightly different opinions or slightly wrong ideas on certain subjects get aggressively flattened.

[Losonti Tokash]

can someone briefly describe this video because there is no way i'm sitting through something from a guy primarily famous for talking about star trek voyager

[Stofsk]

Chuck, in a review about a Voyager episode that deals in historical revisionism as a theme, talked about how after a time any community tends to reinforce the myths they like to tell about themselves, and how this leads to an environment where ideas that contradict the status quo are to varying degrees rejected. Eventually such communities become little more than echo chambers. He was making this analogy for the purposes of going into what history means and why it's so important to get the facts right etc. Part of the episode was that after a particular visit by Voyager, a world centuries later looks back on the day as a tumultuous time and the repurcussions are still being felt. The episode had all the characters wear black hats and have fun being bad guys, when the truth had been distorted, and the main character is essentially a guest character who's that world's chief historian for a museum. A copy of the Doctor gets reactivated and he strives to set the record straight. One of Voyager's best episodes in all honesty.

As far as slamming SDN. He did say 'Don't read anything too revealing in what I say, this is just my observations of many communities I've been a part of over a decade and a half.'

[RogueIce]

And really, would those guys prefer to have a shitty movie re-hashing the same plots and the same themes they've already seen and read a thousand times already, or even to have no movie at all ; rather than to have an interesting movie taking the franchise in a new direction and opening a lot of new story-telling opportunities ?

To be fair to people, "Batman = Bruce Wayne" is one of those things that's out there enough in general culture for people to know it. For instance, you could probably put, say, Wally West in Flash's costume and zero fucks would be given outside of hardcore comic nerds who will whine about it not being Barry Allen, so long as it was a good movie. Hell arguably it would be better with West thanks to the JL/JLU cartoons, because I did hear that John Stewart is more 'popular' than Hal Jordan as GL thanks to them, though I have nothing to confirm that.

Of course butthurt comic nerds will be incredibly vocal once they hear OMG NOT BARRY WALLEN WTF!!!! so that'll certainly distort Internet perception, but I doubt your average moviegoer will give a fuck so long as it's an entertaining movie.

Of course thanks to TDKR you actually could put somebody else in the Bat suit thanks to the ending they gave us, so long as the JL Movie gets made in a reasonably soon time frame and they make sure to remind people about Gordon Blake inheriting the mantle. But there's only so long I'd think before that kind of fades from the public consciousness where you'd sort of have to default back to Bruce Wayne. Though by that point you needn't worry about it having to be Christian Bale either, and you could put in whoever.

[Questor]

On a completely different topic, I'm watching Yes, Minister again, and while I love the show, there's a few moments that just completely throw me because I really don't have the cultural referents for the 80s.

In one of the episodes, they're debating introducing quotas for gender equality, and Sir Humphrey makes a joke that if they allowed women in the defense establishment, M would become F. I started giggling because - to me - when I picture M, I see Judi Dench.

It's that kind of surreal quality that you get with shows from another time, and it made me think about the shows and movies I consider some of the best I remember. MASH is older than Yes, Minister, but because it's out of time anyway (A show in the 70s dealing with the issues of a war from the 60s set during the 50s) it seems to age a bit better, at least to me. The West Wing, which I love, debuted almost 15 years ago, and if I watch it with a modern eye, is very odd in places - and in others its downright disturbing - the idea that so many of the arguments that we were having then are the ones we're having now is disturbing.

When you look back, there are television shows that actually effected the society around them from every era, things like Star Trek, MASH, Cheers, Friends, police procedurals in general. What do you think we're going to say are those shows of the last few years? A huge part of me hopes that Newsroom* will be one of them, but I doubt it.

*What I want is, 20 years from now to be able to look back and say "Yeah, that show completely changed the way television news worked, it shamed the news organizations into behaving ethically." I also would like the sky to open up and rain money, and I think the latter is more likely.

[xon]

The closest thing in procedural or object oriented is probably LINQ.

It's a pitty LINQ doesn't play very nicely with async/await. Those two keywords have some really trippy function re-writing going on in the background which supports some really nice functionality of nearly-free blocking free code.

You could easily make something akin to node.js out of C# just using async/await and the dispatcher functionality provided all IO used the async versions (which have been baked into File IO, networking, and SQL classes). Except with the ability to use a real language with awesome tooling, that actually supports a threading module.

The fact that Bart De Smet has an awesome name and writes exactly like my favorite programming professors teach (where you learn 10x more from following the threads dropped in the asides than you do from the rest of the content) was just gravy.

He has a series of blogs Crazy Sundays which have some insanely awesome C# stunt programming shows some very deap understanding of language design & functional programming. Pitty he hasn't posted on there recently

[adr]

so last night I get an email from a client asking me to migrate his app to a new server. ok I log in to the old one, see the files, then log into the new one....

and my home internet dies. GAH!

after staying up 30 more minutes hoping it will be back, I call the client and tell him i'll do it in the morning and he says ok great



well now i'm in the server and started copying the files and windows is saying the transfer speed is 3 bytes / second

what the fuck. canceled and restarted, now getting 200 kb / sec but that's stil awfully slow

this is why I wanted to get it going overnight

[adr]

lol I just got a call from the cable company asking if I want their super speed thing with 30 megabits per second and they'll thrown in digital cable with HBO included for just $70 / month!!!!!

and i'm like "lol no"

if they can't even keep their basic service up i'm certainly not paying more, even if it was something I might use

actually i'm kinda tempted to switch to dial up.

[Oxymoron]

My first thought was that they fucked up your connection to give you an incentive to take a better offer, one you would not be able to refuse.

[adr]

i don't think they are that devious

though they know any threats to cancel are pretty hollow, since the competition is even worse in my area and alas without the internets I might have to get a real job so fuck that