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Cake day: December 9th, 2023

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  • bitcraftertoProgrammingbjForth v0.0.3 is out!
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    21 hours ago

    In Forth, though, the number of results pushed to the stack after an execution of a word could be a function of the input rather than a single value or even a fixed number of values.

    Likewise, the number of arguments that a word pops from the stack could be a function of a value pushed earlier to the stack.




  • The difference is that, in World War 2, Germany was reduced to rubble and a significant fraction of its population was killed off because of the direction that its society took. This forced it to take a really long and hard look at itself and figure out what it could do to make sure that this never happened again.

    By contrast, the U.S. has never been put in an equivalent position. The bloodiest war in our history was actually the U.S. Civil War in the 1860’s over slavery (and some other things, but mostly slavery). Although the anti-slavery North in that war won and was able to successfully end slavery in the entire country, racism itself was a whole separate issue, and (simplifying the history a bit) it continued to exist formally as a less extreme government-backed institution until the mid-20th century. (An example of this were the “separate but equal” schools that segregated black children from white children and were very much not equal.)

    Of course, this only changed the law of the land, not hearts and minds. Education is very local, so there is no central authority which makes decisions about these things, and people regardless have the option of sending their children to private (often religious) schools, or even to home-school them. Furthermore, unlike many countries, we take freedom of belief extremely seriously, and additionally we extend this to a near-absolute freedom for parents to teach whatever things they want to their children to believe. The U.S. stance is essentially that we might not like the values that our neighbor is teaching our children, but we like the idea of the government telling us what values we are required to teach to our children even less, and this is essentially because our country was founded on a fundamental distrust of government and this general attitude has propagated down the generations.

    So, what would it take for the entire country–and remember that this is a huge and incredibly diverse country–to get together and decide that we really need to, collectively, put aside our own individual opinions of what our values should be and what we should be teaching our children and refashion our entire society around a new collectively held set of values? That is asking a lot of people, so probably the most likely way that would get done is if fascism takes over our country and drives us to start a war that results in the entire country being reduced to rubble and a significant fraction of our population being killed off. This would force us to really take a long and hard look at ourselves and figure out what we could do to make sure that this never happened again.

    (Except that now that nuclear weapons exist, “rubble” takes on a new meaning, so that rebuilding part may not get a chance to happen…)





  • bitcraftertoLinuxFRAMEWORK 16: an almost perfect Linux laptop
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    8 days ago

    What’s more, the entire video content, with timestamps, is readable in-description, because they must have realized people like yourself prefer that sometimes, you just didn’t take the time to look.

    The full description is hidden by default in the link to the video above. To expand it, you have to click on “Show More”, but the only text that is visible is:

    Try out Proton Mail, the secure email that protects your privacy: https://proton.me/mail/TheLinuxEXP

    👏 SUPPORT THE CHANNEL: Get access to: …


  • These particular characters have deliberately been given stereotypical mannerisms that lead the reader to think that they are the kind of people who would act in such a way. The joke then ends up being on the reader because it turns out that they could not have read these characters and their intentions any more wrong, and illustrates the folly of stereotypes.

    If your culture does not have this particular stereotype then I can see how this was lost on you.


  • bitcraftertoProgrammingGreppability is an underrated code metric
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    10 days ago

    I am not a big fan of the first example. If all that a function is doing is pasting its argument into a template string, then I’d rather see that pattern expressed explicitly in a single line of code than have to mentally infer this pattern myself by reading two separately expressed cases in six lines of code.

    (It’s not that big of a deal, but when reading through a lot of code to figure out what is going on, these little extra mental exertions start to really add up.)







  • Which, in turn, is a consequence of the spin-statistics theorem.

    As for why the spin-statistics theorem is true, the answer is that, in a sense, we do not really know. This is because, although we have rigorous mathematical proofs that it is true, they rely on arguments that are very technical in nature, so they provide no real intuitive insight into why the theorem is true. (This theorem is actually really notorious for this; people have been trying for a long time to improve on the situation, but have yet to succeed in coming up with a satisfactory elementary proof of it.)