Paragone

and if you consider that "economic barrier to entry" can make any bigger company, who is able to scoop a startup's code & sell the use of it, can extinguish the startup who created the code ...

then, yes, there are definitely situations where protection-against-competitors, some of whom have DEEP pockets, could be an actual requirement, for opensourcing one's code.

"Coopetition" Bill Gates coined, where you "cooperate" with your competitors, but, being Microsoft, you do it so you can snuff them, soon.

I can definitely see why a company would want to be able to allow limited use of their code, globally, but to legally-prohibit using it to destroy them.

I've been told that to start a fight in Francophones, just demand to know whether grapefruit ( pamplemousse, iirc ), is male or female...

: P

The book "The Alphabet Versus The Goddess" by Leonard Shlain, makes the point that women's-rights simply don't progress as quickly, in countries which have gendered languages...

So, Anglo cultures pushed women's-rights, whereas Latin cultures .. won't, don't, drag their heels, etc...

That book is now a couple ?decades? old?

It's still true.

Conditioning an entire population's System-1 ( Daniel Kahneman's "Thinking Fast & Slow", the System-1 is the default-instinct & the trained-now-automatic-expertise system, it also is the system that is both addiction & prejudice ) into gendering everything, automatically, may well prevent equal-validity from ever having place...

Mind you, I now want to see which Nordic/Scandi languages are gendered, & which Middle-East languages are gendered, to see if that holds in those parts of the world, not just in the Americas...

... digging ...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_Danish_and_Swedish

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender

( that isn't a quick read... may come back to it some day... )

Bingo!

"The grammatical gender of nouns is one of two: a noun may be masculine or it may be feminine, and there is no neutral option. Moreover, masculinity is the default grammatical gender in Arabic and a word does not have to have anything special in order to reflect this. Femininity, on the other hand, is not default and a noun would have to have something special to reflect this gender in Arabic."

from

https://www.learnarabiconline.com/gender/

So, there is ZERO hope of equal-validity in Arabic culture, because the language programs Arabic people's System-1 into 2 exclusive validity-categories, with male being inherently more-valid, by established language-habit.

What about Hebrew?

https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-an-increasingly-nonbinary-world-is-gendered-hebrew-willing-to-adapt/

No wonder women can't get equal-validity in Jewish culture...

( I read a Jewess's writing ~ Nobody EVERY celebrated the birth of a Jewish girl: only boys are celebrated ~ .. which explains the damage in the stereotypical "Jewish mother", a woman whose validity has been contempted by all in her culture, until the damage is her most defining feature... )

So, it looks like equal-rights/equal-validity for women is .. baseless, in some/many cultures...

Interesting, but depressing.

: \

I haven't read the article, but yes, wars do have time-limits:

Once a war becomes domestically impossible to participate in, Vietnam as 1 proof, then the-course-of-war changes.

Economic-collapse means that Biden's hosed in 2024, and the Republicans are Russian allies, not NATO allies.

Yes wars have time-limits.

Simply wait & see: by the end of 2025, NATO will be gutted, Trump will have been crowned GEOTUS ( a term they already use for him ), and Trump will ( passively, at least ) back Russia.

Sickening, but it looks like that's the fact of the unfolding global/geopolitical near-future.

Go read McMoneagle's book of predictions: it is awefully wrong.

Remote Viewing is a modified kind of dreaming:

Remote Viewers are in dreams, and their ( very primitive brain, it seems ) ESP is patching-in pieces of what it perceives, but .. it is patching those things into a dream, so the result is .. rather groundless, with fragments of truth in it.

I trust the hard photos from NASA & ESA more than I trust McMoneable's dreams..

Yes, the youtube vid of him being interviewed about his helping Japan find sites that archaeology says did have to do with an early royal of theirs ( an Empress? ) is convincing, but I've not fact-checked it.

It may well be spot-on: ancient Japanese history isn't my interest.

https://youtu.be/2PxK6M9GbZE

If he was predicting people living on Mars, the same Mars that sometimes comes up to warm-enough to melt water, but has dry-ice on the ground, in the winters at the poles, and planet-scale dust-storms, and CO2 lasering in its atmosphere, and an atmosphere that is 1/1000th as thick ( from the aviation perspective ) as ours, with nearly-no oxygen loose in it...

I'm sticking with the machines that map & photograph the things.

from the article...

"Imperative Readability

< snip >

How does the function execute its logic?

What are the specific steps taken by the code?

Which operations are performed in what sequence?

How are state changes managed and tracked

< snip >

Declarative Readability

On the other hand, declarative readability (or readability-d) uses abstractions and architectural layers to manage complexity. It seeks to answer very different types of questions:

What is the intent of this function or module?

What business rule or domain concept is this code encapsulating?

What is the end goal or output of this code, in terms of the domain?

What are the high-level policies or constraints that this code is adhering to?

... I've no interest in learning Scala or Closure, but damn that is an important differentiation...

IF by "security" one means bugs have been prevented from living in it, there is one coded in Haskell, it may be named XMonad or something...

( .. digging .. )

Yep:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xmonad

from there:

"Due to the small number of lines of code of the Xmonad application, the use of the purely functional programming language Haskell, and recorded use of a rigorous testing procedure it is sometimes used as a baseline application in other research projects. This has included re-implementation of xmonad using the Coq proof assistant,[31] a determination xmonad is an imperative program,[32] and studies of package management relating to the NixOS linux distribution.[33]"

Dig: 2000-ish lines of code.

https://xmonad.org/

https://xmonad.org/documentation.html

Define "Friendly Fire" when it was a bit-error in a logic-board that made an AI butcher our own troops...

This is inevitable, just as autonomous kill-drones are inevitable.

Still jacking-up WW3's tantrum/pogrom as hard as possible, of course..

The Great Filter is going to change the unconscious-mind nature of whatever remnant surivives this century.

( PS: the only climate-model I know-of that ISN'T contradicted by Antarctica's current heating, is a powerlaw, and it predicts between 5C & 9C heating for our current atmospheric CO2 & human-added-methane.

5+C when the methane's CO2-equivalent is ignored, between 8C & 9C when it is included.

That, too, is a Friendly Fire, incident, but planet-scope, right?

Evolution of global temperature over the past two million years https://www.nature.com/articles/nature19798

Factoring in the excess methane, only, that we're producing, brings it up to 8.33C planetary heating, using methane's 20y CO2 equivalent. Other manufactured greenhouse-gasses are not included in that estimate.

Other tidbits...

Just Have A Think, Antarctica https://youtu.be/T0qRoeEcKtY

Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

Emperor’s New Climate Scenarios – a warning for financial services https://actuaries.org.uk/emperors-new-climate-scenarios

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/08/antarctica-warming-much-faster-than-models-predicted-in-deeply-concerning-sign-for-sea-levels )

Isn't the Pentagon & the pushers it is addicted-to, every bit as trustworthy as Big Oil?

There was an item in New Scientist, perhaps last century, of an experiment done at a hospital's ICU ( UK, iirc, the hospital had some kind of religious name, like St (somethingorother) ),

and that experiment tested whether patient-to-patient infections were affected by ionizers ( which charge the air, making particles in the air stick to surfaces, like walls, objects, whatever )...

That experiment had no effect in the control condition, but the ionizer-test condition reduced those infections down to ZERO.

No hospital with any reputation would dare use such "New Age woo", of course, no matter that evidence, combined with the Hippocratic Oath ( 1st do no harm! ), should oblige its use.

Bah.

I couldn't find much of anything through DuckDuckGo.com

and Scholar.Google.com had stuff that wasn't what I was trying to find,

and normal google had this

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22ionizer%22%20%22icu%22%20%22hospital%22%20%22infection%22%20reduce%20patient&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8&amp;client=firefox-b-m#ip=1

Anyways, according to the NO cases of inter-patient infection that was reported in the study I remember, it should have been made globally normal.

Notice that the things are called, by many, "air cleaners".

I'm disputing that air cleaners have no effect on health ( put a box-fan with a 20"-square furnace-filter on the suction-side of it, and it'll reduce the amount of dust, without any expensive products, and in some areas, in industrial or desert zones, e.g. it'll likely reduce the harm done to one's lungs by that air ), and pointing-out that different definitions of "air cleaner" are valid, though not about the same thing.

The problem is the end of civil-rights: WHEN the only internet left is the internet that IS for-profit propaganda, auto-deleting all non-compliant human thought, discussion, intelligence, objectivity, etc,

THEN humanity is just managed "steers" whose lives are being consumed by corporations which graze on us.

Since another dimension of ratchet is the concentration-of-wealth, you can see that working-destitution is being enforced on more & more of humankind, and real wealth being limited to fewer & fewer...

What happens when the working-poor try fighting for a fair share of the economy?

Rigged legislation, rigged "police" ( I used to believe in the police ), anti-education Florida-style for the public, etc...

AI tilts the playing-field, and it does-so for the monied special-interest-groups.

They don't have humanitarianism at heart.

Neither do the politically motivated.

Neither do for-profit-psychopaths ( corporations are psychopaths ).

Living in a Decorator Prison is all humanity can hope for, now: inmates, .. except for the fewer & fewer oligarchs & the financial-class.

'tisn't looking good.

Without Divine Intervention, which is statistically improbable an event, these are The End Times, but not for the reason that the religious claim.

It's actually The 5 F's:

• Feeding
• Freezing
• Fleeing
• Fighting
• Mating

What are the security-recommendations you have for Linux, Wine, & Proton users,

that we simply wouldn't, or don't commonly, think of, given your abnormal expertise/view?

Salut, Namaste, & Kaizen, eh?

_/_

Wikipedia has an ISB# search system, but the only way I know-of to use it,

is to bash around on wikipedia until one succeeds in finding a link that uses that search-system, in some page's References section,

...and then when I get to that system, then change the ISB# to the book I'm trying to find...

I WISH that Lemmy had an inbuilt facility for giving it a book, and it would produce the wikipedia-book-search link that is required for that book,

because then the viewer gets ALL venues for the thing, plain as day.

: )

Here's seconding your vote for OpenLibrary, btw: they showed me that a couple of textbooks weren't skippable or replaceable ( "Principles of Yacht Design", e.g. )

As for links to Amazon: I do that, specifically because the reviews for the books are so important to deciding what the worth of the book is, for any individual reader!

You need to read the sample AND the reviews, often, to decide if it's worth that amount of money.

I wish I could provide both the Amazon link AND the Wikipedia ISB# link ( for the paper version, obviously, as every ebook platform has its own ISB#'s ), and then people could see the sample, the reviews, AND could see all the options for getting it, laid-out before their eyes.

( :