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Posts by Lanny
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2015-09-19 at 2:26 AM UTC in "Welcome to Zoklet!"
Definitely is, I remember it.
I miss that nigga, we was gonna come crash on my couch but then got afraid of rape so no dice.
I'm sure hit little ginger ass would have been sooo sweet. -
2015-09-19 at 2:25 AM UTC in A young nigga got it bad cause I'm brownI wonder if arnox has an alt. I could prolly check if he isn't using a proxy (prolly not) but I'm too lazy to check.
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2015-09-19 at 2:22 AM UTC in Fedoras: Or how I learned to start worrying and became a self-loathing STEM fag[FONT=arial]So I got the idea in my head that I wanted to watch some of those [/FONT][FONT=arial]online university lectures people always talk about but never do. A [/FONT][FONT=arial]while ago I worked on a little project that required some cursory [/FONT][FONT=arial]knowledge of linguistics (a program to generate phonetic puns). I [/FONT][FONT=arial]managed to hack it with wikipedia but found that part of it really [/FONT][FONT=arial]interesting so I thought to myself "Ima gonna go learn some l[/FONT][FONT=arial, sans-serif]inguistics". But when I started looking around at what was out there through I came to a realization: self-education online almost perfectly mirrors the abhorrent superiority complex of dumshit job-hungry STEM undergrads. The first place I looked was MIT and ironically while I'd be willing to forgive them for a STEM focused set of resources (being the renown engineering school) but they actually had one of the better (but still comparatively deficient) representations of the humanities.
Go to [/FONT]https://www.coursera.org/browse/][FONT=arial, sans-serif]coursera[/FONT][FONT=arial, sans-serif]. Look at the categories available there. It's fucking retarded that this thing tries to represent itself as a replacement for a liberal education. "Arts and Humanities" are put on the same level as "Computer Science". In the system nearly every great mind of the modern era has been trained in the arts and the humanities are two separate colleges, entirely different from the singular school that includes the disciplines coursera calls "Computer Science", "Math and Logic", "Physical Science and Engineering", and "Life Sciences". Don't even get me started on "Data Science". Fucking data science is a short lived fad with minimal academic recognition and wholly subordinate to CS which is in turn of a subordinate kind to categories like "Humanities".
Offerings in philosophy out of these sites is laughable. Offerings in linguistics are laughable. The only disciplines that seem well represented are computer science and various "hard sciences" like physics and bio.
Listen, I studied computer science. I fucking love computer science, a lot more than I love myself. I eat, breathe, and live this shit and I can see, plain as day, that this is wong. STEM supremacy isn't a thing that exists at a meaningful level among academics, even a fucking hick like me knows that every interesting problem in computer science is a problem in either mathematics or electrical engineering, this is a hodunk subfield that's been risen above it station by a quirk of human history and an accident of the parameters of the physical universe. I love it to death and it's the only useful thing I've ever do with my life but it's a myopic fucking nothing. That doesn't mean it's nothing, there are plenty of hard problems here for people like me, people with a neurotic drive to solve this one particular kind of problem, to understand one miniscule corner of the universe, but look at how the ignorant slobs of the world look at it.
I've been watching people try to get into this field for a long time. People who made it are treated with some kind of bullshit "reverence". I can't count how many time I've heard people say in a self-disparaging manner "I'm not smart enough to write code" or "I guess I'm too dumb to get this". I want to grab them and scream that this isn't intelligence, it's fucking OCD. They try to grab onto something tiny and zoom way in and they fail, they pull back, and they think they're inadequate when what we need is people who can realize that the world where we solve P=NP in order to make prettier graphs of facebook friends if fucking broken on a profound level.
I'm not saying every STEM major needs to go enroll in a philosophy program, god knows that would be the same problem all over again, and I'm the last person who will ever condone the unmitigated fucktardeness that is the concept of an "idea guy". But the point is that we need to think long and hard about what we want out of our careers (not just picking the career path that gives us the most money for the least misery but finding something to spend half your working life doing that you'd give a fuck about if you weren't collecting a check at the end of the month) and how we, as a society, impose our desires on the youth. There was a time when the US was brimming over with lawyers. Another with doctors. The current "computer science"(read: code monkey) craze was a thing back in the first bubble too. For better or worse, our culture generates ideas about who among us have good lives, which jobs are worth having and who is worth emulating. These ideas condemn literally millions of young people a life-long career every single years. It is appropriate then that we think about the assumptions that underpin what occupations we value and to what degree. Just because Apple needs more code monkeys to churn out the next "revolutionary" consumer electronic and is willing to pay a pretty penny to get them, does that mean we need to pressure human beings to giving up a satisfying career to make that happen? If nothing changes there will come a day when the only people qualified to engage with that question will be too poor to feed themselves.[/FONT] -
2015-09-18 at 10:19 PM UTC in "Welcome to Zoklet!"lol, is that second pic in the first vid arley?
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2015-09-18 at 9:30 PM UTC in Someone explain this hexdump function to me.There's no deep magic here, a hex dump is pretty straightforward, there's just some cleverness in the implementation here (for shorter code, not really performance. I'm tempted to call it "showy").
My comments on lines that seem non-obvious to me, if I leave something out that's unclear let me know.
digits = 4 if isinstance(src, unicode) else 2
the if/else construct here is python's rendition of the the ternary operator. In its general form it can be rewritten
VAR = LEFT if COND else RIGHT
becomes
def f():
if COND:
return LEFT:
else:
return RIGHT
VAR = f()
The interesting difference here is that the ternary form is an expression, that is it has a value, while a traditional if/else can only operate through side effects (changing variable values and such), it's incoherent to ask "what is the value of a (traditional) if/else" in the same way we might ask "what is the value of this function call" or "what is the value of `2 + 2`". In C-like languages the ternary form is viewed with a sort of suspicion, it's considered "tricky" and non-standard compilers have trained programmers to fear promises short-circuit semantics (i.e. that only one arm of an if will be executed) but in functional programming circles a language construct that isn't an expression is variously considered poor style or blatantly wrong.
But that's kind of a tangent on style. Ternary operator aside, the point here is that `digits` is the number of nibbles per character of `src`. The character/byte/symbol/glyph/what-the-fuck-ever distinction is subtle the idea is this: each hexadecimal digit (0-F) represents a nibble (half a byte, 4 bits, 2^4 = 16 possible values). If the text is encoded in ASCII then each 'character' (character being what's accessed by python's subscript notation ('foo'[1] == 'f')) is 1 byte (two nibbles) but if it's UTF-16 (16-bit characters) then it's 2 bytes or 4 nibbles. This is kind of a strange way of doing things, I don't know why anyone would be receiving something over a network in anything other than a byte-string (represented in python 2.x as type `str` rather than `unicode`) but whatever, that's the idea here.
for i in xrange(0, len(src), length):
`xrange` is basically the same thing as `range`, it just has to do with when the sequence is generated. Python has what are called 'generators' which are what we'd call 'lazy sequences' in other languages. It just means that the next number in the range is computed when it's asked for, instead of when the function is first called. For large sequences this is more efficient because we don't need to store the whole sequence in memory, we can just generate numbers as needed and let GC dispose of them when we move onto the next. The third argument just says "increments in steps of `length`", and `length` is the number of characters worth of data to show per line.
s = src[i:i+length]
Slice notation, s becomes a `length` long substring of src starting at `i`.
hexa = b' '.join(["%0*X" % (digits, ord(x)) for x in s])
There's a lot going on in this line. Python has a construct called "list comprehensions" which are a way of defining a list as a function of another list. They look like:
[ITEM_EXPR for VAR_NAME in SRC_LIST]
Which will step over every item in SRC_LIST, assign the item's value to VAR_NAME, and make the item in the result list with the same index the value of ITEM_EXPR where VAR_ NAME is bound. That sounds fancy but it's just a shorthand for a for loop. Consider:
src = [39, 40, 41]
dest = [x+1 for x in src]
# dest === [40, 41, 42]
Although there's special syntax for "enhancement" operations as well but we don't have to worry about that since it's not used here. The important point is that it defines a transformation of a list. So we know what two thirds of this list comprehension is doing. `s` is the 16 characters of data (it's not actually a list, but it is what's called an `iterable` in python, meaning we can use the subscript and list comprehension syntax on it) and `x` will be each character of that data when the ITEM_EXPR is evaluated. So the question is what
"%0*X" % (digits, ord(x))
does. This syntax (more syntax, sorry) is known as interpolation. The general form is `FORMAT % PARAMS` where FORMAT is a string that's like a "template" and some data that's going to be formatted (according to the template) in the output. You see a lot of this in things like
name = "Sophie"
print "Hello there %s" % name
which will output "Hello there Sophie". `%s` is the marker for "format the corresponding input as a string and stick it here". "%X" is the marker for "format the corresponding input as a hexadecimal number and stick it here". You can specify "zero padding", so like "%X" % 32` would be `"20"` but `"%04X" % 32` would be `"0020"` (the output will always be four characters, even if that means including leading zeros which we don't traditionally do). You can also specify the length of the padding as a parameter in the same way we specify the number to be formatted. That's what `%0*X` means, pad with the number of 0s of the corresponding parameters, in this case that's the value of `length`. So the result of the list comprehension is a list of (presumably 16) strings that are the hex representation of the bytes in our length-16 slice of src. `' '.join(LIST)` just returns a string which is each member of LIST concatenated and separated by `' '` (a space).
As an aside, most languages implements join either as a standalone function or as a method on list types while in python you get this odd inversion of it being a method of strings. Guido has an argument for why this is so and it actually kinda works but it's interesting that most programmers consider it a "wart" on python.
Oh, and `ord(CHAR)` returns the byte value of CHAR, so like `ord('a')` is 61 (base 10) because under ASCII and UTF-8 'a' is encoded as the 61 (well, the byte that has the numeric value of 61, whatever).
text = b''.join([x if 0x20 <= ord(x) < 0x7f else b'.' for x in s])
Similar thing here, we're just iterating over each character in src. The difference is that the list built by the list comprehension is of single characters. If the character is outside the printable range (i.e. less than 32 (0x20) or more than 127 (0x7f)) it's represented in the dump as just a simple dot, so things like control characters, you see these frequently in binary data since it's basically random bit patterns (at least when looking at it as a hex dump. This helps because something like a newline has a 1 in 256 chance of appearing in a byte in a chunk of binary and if that gets printed in your dump the formatting will be fucked. So yeah, the point of this line is to produce the right column (like you see here) and the LC replaces non-printables with dots.
result.append( b"%04X %-*s %s" % (i, length*(digits + 1), hexa, text) )[/quote]
More string formatting. Start every line with the "line number", that is the index of the first byte in that line (printed in hex). Then the hex values (calculated two lines up) (and padded with '-', in the case the last line isn't the same length as the others (this is the `%-*s` part). Then the printable ascii representation, the third column (the last `%s`).
And that's it. Maybe it would have been less opaque if the author had just used for loops and stuff but I've found that as you become a bit more experienced thinking in terms of sequence (or in pythonese "iterable") transformations is a really powerful conceptual model. It's kinda surprising how many problems can be expressed/solved in this way and it lends itself to composability/reuse. -
2015-09-18 at 6:48 PM UTC in I'm half way into the 6th hour of a conference call and drunk as shit
Hey, wait, is Lanny still stuck in this call? If so he's gotta be absolutely shit faced by now.
Lol no, it ended in the 8th hour. Got to enjoy waking up at 6 again this morning as well for another, although this one only went for 5 hours. Fun stuff. Wonder what tripping on a business call would be like. -
2015-09-17 at 8:46 PM UTC in I'm half way into the 6th hour of a conference call and drunk as shit
I doubt it's going to come through at this point. Agora is still down and I don't know if it will reopen. I lose what little interest I had in things so easily, it really doesn't matter, but I don't know if I care enough to try something else. Maybe an RC opioid, or whatever has the best mood enhancing/antidepressant effect.
Give it a go, I love when you guinea pig for me.
Hour 7 of the meeting. -
2015-09-17 at 8:33 PM UTC in Hypothetical surefire ways to suicideAs I recall, statistically gunshot to the head is the way to go. You're underage right? If so I think that's not an option, but if you have access a firearm that's probably the way to go. If you don't fuck it up, hanging is pretty solid. In the stats it's not that effective but then that's because most people who "attempt suicide" don't really want to die or pussy out at the last moment and it's a lot easier to half-ass a hanging than a shooting.
But really, you probably don't _really_ want to kill yourself so as far as I'm concerned this thread is purely academic. -
2015-09-17 at 8:20 PM UTC in I'm half way into the 6th hour of a conference call and drunk as shit
Living the life.
You need opioids, then you'll be completed.
It's soooo good to hear it. For once we fully agree on something,
You said you ordered some sort of opiate recently, right? Shipping from China, delayed. Did you get it? -
2015-09-17 at 7:50 PM UTC in I single handedly keep this website afloatyou wanna pay the server bill then? I could buy some cheap as shit bourbon with that money.
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2015-09-17 at 7:47 PM UTC in I'm half way into the 6th hour of a conference call and drunk as shitI called in at fucking 7am in the morning because these niggers are east coast bitches and I normally wake up at 10. Like any sane person I woke up with a gin and tonic and have been pretty much continuously alternating between rolling my eyes and drinking since then. My boss just asked me a question and I had to make a concerted effort not to slur. I don't know if I like this or not. On the plus side I get paid to be drunk, on the down side I need to listen to people blather on and on for hours. Half tempted to masturbate on-call for kicks but I'm not quite far enough into "fuck it" mode to do it.
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2015-09-17 at 4:26 AM UTC in this sucksite sucks a suckhole of sucks
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2015-09-17 at 3:31 AM UTC in being an outsider
i might as well do well at because then i can get that $$$/pussy
im never going to be petty enough to partake in the things humanity does seriously.
Clearly what you and humanity take seriously are closer to each other than you think. -
2015-09-17 at 3:26 AM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?
Well apparently time is affected by black holes:
Gravitational time dilation is a form of time dilation, an actual difference of elapsed time between two events as measured byobservers situated at varying distances from a gravitating mass. The stronger thegravitational potential (the closer the clock is to the source of gravitation), the slower time passes.
This has been demonstrated by noting thatatomic clocks at differing altitudes (and thus different gravitational potential) will eventually show different times.
Are you saying time and light must have mass to be affected by black holes? Maybe not.
nice pasta m8 -
2015-09-17 at 3:22 AM UTC in why do some people not eat meat?Malice, from your own quote:
The analysis of the respective ages at adoption of a vegetarian diet and onset of a mental disorder showed that the adoption of the vegetarian diet tends to follow the onset of mental disorders.
How could vegetarianism possibly be causative of mental disorder if the former is preceded by the latter? If you're not arguing it is then how is it a criticism of vegetarianism? And you accusing people of poor mental health is pretty rich.
P.S. I like how this thread devolved in people complaining about being personally offended by some of the vegetarians they know and malice's laughable to justify anecdotal evidence by claiming he's immune to bias. -
2015-09-17 at 3:11 AM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?
From wikipedia:
A rainbow is not located at a specific distance from the observer, but comes from an optical illusion caused by any water droplets viewed from a certain angle relative to a light source. Thus, a rainbow is not an object and cannot be physically approached. Indeed, it is impossible for an observer to see a rainbow from water droplets at any angle other than the customary one of 42 degrees from the direction opposite the light source. Even if an observer sees another observer who seems "under" or "at the end of" a rainbow, the second observer will see a different rainbow—farther off—at the same angle as seen by the first observer.
So what quality of a rainbow makes it an illusion? Yes, observers in different locations may perceive rainbows that appear to "end" at different locations but why is consistency of apparent physical location the criterion for objective existence? If I wear sunglasses I'll perceive things being darker that people who don't. Are the sunglasses an illusion? Is the lower level of light I perceive an illusion (implying I don't, in reality, experience less light)? -
2015-09-16 at 7:25 AM UTC in why do some people not eat meat?
I've heard that its because they don't want to eat something that was once living. Yet get multiple abortions…
Obviously not every ethical vegetarian gets multiple abortions, it seems like most never have any abortions at all. You can still make an argument that the two can be reconciled though. For example, Singer argues that eating fish is not inherently wrong (it may be OK if the fish is slaughtered humanely) because most fish have no notion of themselves in the future, they don't seem to loose anything when they stop existing since they have no longterm plans/interests that can be stymied. You might say the same thing about fetuses. I'm not sure I really buy this argument in either form but I don't think it's _obviously_ the case that the two positions (pro-abortion, anti-meat) are irreconcilable. And wether you accept such arguments or not has exactly nothing to do with the tenability of ethical vegetarianism, it simply means some ethical vegetarians may or may not be behaving unethically in an unrelated way.they say animals are people too. aren't plants people too?
I don't think many people will argue that every animal farmed for meat is a full moral person, I certainly wouldn't, but that doesn't mean we don't have obligation to them or that they don't have rights. Infants do not have full moral personage in the sense that we don't assign them the total range of ethical duties (if an infant starts a fire we don't charge them with arson or neglect or what have you) but we do obviously have an obligation to not kill infants for amusement or meat.
As for plants having the same moral status as mammals like cows, it depends on what you think grants moral considerability. For me it's mammals' ability suffer or feel pleasure. It may not be as developed of a hedonic apparatus as we find in humans but it's obvious that it's of a kind. We don't seem to have any evidence of an analogous capacity in plants, they simply don't seem to have mental states and thus don't suffer or feel pleasure. Thus we don't have a duty to minimize their suffering and can create and destroy them at our leisure, just as we create and destroy non-living objects like rocks or electronics or whatever as it suits human interests. -
2015-09-16 at 7:04 AM UTC in Do rainbows exist objectively?
Wow you are dumb.
A rainbow is a colourful arch which appears in the sky under specific circumstances and is an optical illusion - there really is no arch in the sky.
The visible spectrum is just the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum visible to the human eye. It is not the optical illusion of a giant arch in the sky.
These things have different definitions because they are different things. You dummy.
From wikipedia (yes, wikipedia is fine to use in this case, we're looking to get a feel for common usage):[FONT=sans-serif][SIZE=14px]An [/SIZE][/FONT]illusion[FONT=sans-serif][SIZE=14px] is a distortion of the [/SIZE][/FONT]senses[FONT=sans-serif][SIZE=14px], revealing how the [/SIZE][/FONT]brain[FONT=sans-serif][SIZE=14px] normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation.[/SIZE][/FONT]
So in what way is a rainbow a distortion of the senses? The light we perceive as rainbows really is hitting our eyes and is interpreted just as any light is. There's no slight of hand at the integration phase nor unusual signal produced by the optic nerve, we perceive what is there perfectly fine. A person might think that a rainbow has a constant physical location independent of the viewer or that it is somehow composed of a solid substance but that's simply a failure to understand rainbows, not an illusion. To someone who doesn't happen to know the standard planetary model it might seem like the sun orbits the earth or travels underground or something but this doesn't mean the sun is merely an optical illusion, it just means one particular person has created an incorrect mental model of what they've experienced. -
2015-09-15 at 7:31 AM UTC in I want to marry a Burmese flower girl
BEEE MY FLOWER GIRLLLLLLLL // BECAUSE WE CANT GET ANY LESS PERFECTTTTTTTT~ -
2015-09-13 at 6:08 PM UTC in Should I buy a legit version of Dark Souls while it's on sale?I just bought morrowind for the third time on steam a couple of days ago. Previous two times were on physical media so I was like "OK, this will be the last time". Don't really mind though, I've gotten so many hours of entertainment out of it I'm happy to throw a little more money at it.
