— Charles de Gaulle

Bayer starts with quoting various chronicles on atrocities committed on the Jewish population at the time of the Hungarian Council Republic in 1919, which he described as a “rat revolt” to show “how the Bolsheviks, majority-led by Jews, were dealing with people of their kind.” Subsequently, he asks, “How did these animals deal with non-Jews?” In this context, he recounts a story that has emerged again and again since the 1990s. At the end of the First World War, Lukács as a peoples’ commissar took part or even ordered the execution of seven or eight deserters while defending the Hungarian frontier against Romanian troops. The truthfulness of this anecdote has often been doubted, most recently and in detail by András Lengyel, a Hungarian scholar on the history of literature. There are no witnesses to the execution, nor graves, nor documents that would testify the funerals. The trial in this matter, which took place in 1919 after the failure of the Council Republic, condemned the allegedly executing red armist merely on the basis of the fact, that the executions might have taken place according to the usual practice. What is spicy about this episode is, that Lukács talks about the event in the autobiographical interview volume Lived thinking and says that he ordered the execution to restore morality. If the executions were carried out, their purpose was to defend the Hungarian frontier against the Western-backed Romanian troops. So questionable the practice of the execution of deserters is, the soldiers were familiar with it from the Austro-Hungarian Army in the First World War. If the execution had been ordered by Horthy or one of his officers, it would be considered a justifiable measure out of patriotic motives by those, who now claim, Lukács was a mass murderer.

Bayer not only uses this episode to insinuate double standards to Lukács’ defenders, who at the same time condemn the antisemite Hóman, but also deliberately creates a parallel between the Bolsheviks “majority-led by Jews” in 1919 and the defenders of Lukács today: “This is an announcement: enough with the intellectual terror, and with the fact, that ‘Lukácsists’ have been deciding who is in the pantheon of intellectual life for a good half century and who is not. And quite generally, it’s enough with you.”

source: https://transform-network.net/blog/article/the-destruction-o...

>wow wow wow buddy, slow down, run this code in a terminal, and paste the result here, this will allow me to get an overview of your code base

The point I wanted to make is that the parallels between Nietzsche and Lukács abound in these passages. Both advocate for a kind of "ethical self-awareness" that is attuned to "sacrifice in terms of the collective action" which leads to the "most profound human tragedy".

>The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering

"Sacrifices his inferior self on the altar of the higher idea" even sounds like Nietzsche concept of übermensch.

As for the accusation that I

>complain all [I] want that Hitler and whole of far right misread Nietzsche's Will to Power

, this wasn't my goal, and the fact you went on misinterpreting my words – whereas someone with a virgin mind with respect to these matters would have seen the obvious parallels I pointed out, and nothing more - shows how bound you are to adversariality, as you fail to realize there is heavy irony in blaming the outcome of Nazism, on top of marxist ideology, which did worse and collapsed onto itself. But I guess marxism is but an avatar of Dionysos:

>Dionysos cut into pieces is a promise of Life: it will be forever born anew and rise afresh from destruction

As Girard once said,

>The peoples of the world do not invent their gods. They deify [vilify] their victims.

>It is not difference that dominates the world, but the obliteration of difference by mimetic reciprocity, which itself, being truly universal, shows the relativism of perpetual difference to be an illusion.

Aditionnally,

    δῐᾰ́βολος: slanderous; libellous

    שָׂטָן (śāṭān): Satan, adversary, opponent

    κᾰτηγορέω: to speak against, especially before judges, to accuse, to denounce publicly. from κᾰτᾰ- (kata-, “against”) +‎ ἀγορεύω (agoreúō, “to speak in assembly”).

https://arxiv.org/pdf/0806.4164

And no, fining people for this behavior isn't an option in a neighborhood with stolen bikes burnt every other day, drug dealing spots every 400m, squats, empty cash register lying on the ground, etc ...

    In other words, only he who acknowledges unflinchingly and without any reservations that murder is under no circumstances to be sanctioned can commit the murderous deed that is truly — and tragically — moral. To express this sense of the most profound human tragedy in the incomparably beautiful words of Hebbel’s Judith: “Even if God had placed sin between me and the deed enjoined upon me — who am I to be able to escape it?”

    … we Communists are like Judas. It is our bloody work to crucify Christ. But this sinful work is at the same time our calling: only through death on the cross does Christ become God, and this is necessary to be able to save the world. We Communists then take the sins of the world upon us, in order to be able thereby to save the world.

    Dionysus versus the “Crucified” there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom—it is a difference in the meaning of it. Life itself, its eternal fruitfulness and recurrence, creates torment, destruction, the will to annihilation. In the other case, suffering—the “Crucified as the innocent one”—counts as an objection to this life, as a formula for its condemnation.—One will see that the problem is that of the meaning of suffering: whether a Christian meaning or a tragic meaning. In the former case, it is supposed to be the path to a holy being; in the latter case, being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering. The tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering ... Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction.

>In my field, there’s an equation that best explains rat population size. Simplified, it states: Garbage in = rats out. When food is plentiful, there’s no check on growth. When the cycle of regular feeding has been broken, then rats will disperse, injure, kill and even consume one another.

Source: https://www.vitalcitynyc.org/articles/rat-control-in-urban-e...

Rat colonies are the exception, they usually live as "nuclear families", separated from each other. Walk 100m away from a metro station with trashcans containing a dozen of rats near the entrance, and you'll find rat families, not colonies.

However the damages they can cause when they settle inside our houses tend to let us think this is their default modus operandi, and as a consequence we tend to project an exterminatory mindset onto situations where they are not problematic–and I'd even add: situations where they are a necessity.

In particular, if you have a compost box, you'll have a rat family settle nearby, and you shouldn't obsess over it unless you have good reason to fear an invasion (it already happened or you have crops drying in a shed, or something like that).

Saying this as someone who both owned rats at some point and have a dachsund/pinscher who killed hundreds.

    Major milestone for ZX-alike calculi: now for all finite dimensions, with completeness theorem.  I.e. for all dimensions any equation derivable using Hilbert space maths, is derivable with pictures!  ZXW moreover allows for differentiation, integration and exponentiation.

This is exactly what I witnessed when finding the example above.

Out of frustration, I tried patching shadow-cljs one afternoon and was able to implement :refer :all as well as automatically generating :require-macros when needed to some extent, but I haven't put the time to make it work fully. I don't think this is a limitation caused by the lack of a Clojurescript compiler that can run in a Javascript runtime. In short, I don't think this is an essential limitation of the way the language is hosted within its target language, unlike things like Vars, which are not introspectable at runtime in js.

Clojurescript doesn't use the same conventions in import/require statements: you're supposed to import macros using :require-macros or :refer-macros (I'm not even sure anymore). Conversely, `:refer :all` was banned in a prescriptivist attempt at fixing Clojure "mistakes", the rationale behind this decision being that with `:refer :all` it's not always obvious what namespace required symbols come from. Yet, with a REPL or a language server, it's very easy to get that info.

The point I want to make is that because of this porting Clojure code to Clojurescript implies a lot of inessential changes to the ns forms in your project. E.g: https://github.com/kachayev/muse/blob/8db4d5de82a8acccb4486c..., but I've done far worse.

It doesn't need to be that way.

Your educational experiment involved 54 schoolchildren, aged 15-17, who were randomly selected from around 1,000 applicants, from 36 UK schools – mostly state schools. The teenagers spent two hours a week in online classes and after eight weeks were given a test using questions from an Oxford postgraduate quantum physics exam. More than 80% of the pupils passed and around half earned a distinction. Were you surprised by their success?

At one point, I was going to call off the whole thing because I thought it was going to be a complete disaster. We’d originally wanted the kids to interact with each other on social media or communicate online, but that wasn’t allowed due to the ethical guidelines for the experiment. I thought, what sort of educational experience is it, if you can’t talk to each other?

This is the Covid generation: none of them put their cameras on [for the online classes], so we were looking at a black screen. None of them asked questions using their voices, they just typed. It was a difficult teaching challenge by all standards. We also saw a self-esteem problem with the students. But the majority of kids liked that we had announced that you didn’t need a complex maths background. The maths had been a barrier to kids who had wanted to access this knowledge.

And then we got back the numbers. They did significantly better than we see from university-level students. Exams were marked blind, so we don’t know how many came in with the aim of pursuing Stem. We are processing that data now.

Albert-László Barabás, a physicist, created a network map that can predict an artist's future success based on their early network connections. His work outlines two key "laws of success":

- Performance drives success, but when performance can’t be measured, networks drive success. This highlights the importance of networks when objective measures of quality are difficult to establish.

- Performance is bounded, but success is unbounded. This indicates that small differences in quality can lead to large disparities in success due to the amplifying power of social networks

Barabási's model can predict an artist's career success with surprising accuracy based on the venues of their first five exhibitions. This model underscores the importance of early connections and the venues where an artist exhibits their work, which can significantly influence their long-term success4.

Homoiconicity is more useful when comparing lisps IMO, and pondering on how they could be improved. To me, homoiconicity is a constant struggle and should be appreciated in degrees because homoiconicity is about immediacy.

A lisp that doesn't allow you to embed data along with code, JSON/Javascript style, is less homoiconic than a language that does, and it's more about what the core library allows than the language itself. For instance I'd say Clojure is more homoiconic than Scheme because it allows you to embed hashmaps in your code natively, whereas in scheme you only have `(make-hash-table)` without the corresponding reader macro. Similarly, a lisp without syntax quote would be less homoiconic than one that has it.

This is why I say it's about immediacy. When you don't have to deal with hashmaps, or templated s-exprs in terms of the process that builds them, the mediation layer disappears.

Things I'd like to be more immediate in Clojure:

- keeping track of whitespaces within s-exprs. Useful when you want to print code as it is indented in the source file. There's a library for that (rewrite-clj), but it isn't integrated in the reader+compiler pipeline, so it's a bit of an headache as you have to read code from files, which implies, bridging the gap between the compilation pipeline and this library on your own.

- accessing semantic info within macros. Which functions use which variables. Which variables are global vs local (in particular when lexically shadowed), which variables are closed over by which lambdas, etc. To do this you have to use clojure.core.analyzer, which is very complex and poorly documented: not immediate enough.

>allowing the definitions to be recalled at runtime and redefined

>Some Lisps compile everything entered into them; you cannot edit a defun because it has been turned into machine language.

Ability to recall and redefine definitions at runtime, even when the language is compiled is orthogonal to homoiconicity. Ruby can do this (interpreted). Clojure too (compiled). To do so, they don't store the program as text, they store source locations (file://...:line:col) and read the files from the disk (or jar). In fact any programming language that does source-mapping and has eval() is inches away from being able to do this. This was the case for Ruby and was made possible by the pry REPL library [1]. And then there are tools like javassist [2] that allow you to edit compiled code to some extent using a limited form of the language.

Note that in the case of lisps, this is entirely orthogonal to macros (the source is passed as arguments to macros in the form of an AST/list rather than a pointer into a file), which is where homoiconicity shines. Storing code in the same format it is written in (strings) doesn't alleviate the headache of processing it when you want to do meta programming.

Additionally, macros allow you to do structured meta programming: macros are guaranteed to only impact code they enclose. Compare this with redefinitions that are visible to the whole code base. This is like global vs local variables: macros don't redefine code, they transform it.

[1] https://github.com/pry/pry#edit-methods

[2] https://www.javassist.org/tutorial/tutorial2.html#before

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38915999

https://mobile-aloha.github.io/

(note: in some videos the robot is teleoperated)