> Gossip, according to Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, does for group-living humans what manual grooming does for other primates — it allows individuals to service their relationships and so maintain their alliances on the basis of the principle: if you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours. Dunbar argues that as humans began living in increasingly larger social groups, the task of manually grooming all one's friends and acquaintances became so time-consuming as to be unaffordable.[51] In response to this problem, humans developed 'a cheap and ultra-efficient form of grooming' — vocal grooming. To keep your allies happy, you now needed only to 'groom' them with low-cost vocal sounds, servicing multiple allies simultaneously while keeping both hands free for other tasks. Vocal grooming then evolved gradually into vocal language — initially in the form of 'gossip.'[51] Dunbar’s hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that the structure of language shows adaptations to the function of narration in general.[52]

> Critics of this theory point out that the very efficiency of 'vocal grooming' — the fact that words are so cheap — would have undermined its capacity to signal commitment of the kind conveyed by time-consuming and costly manual grooming.[53] A further criticism is that the theory does nothing to explain the crucial transition from vocal grooming — the production of pleasing but meaningless sounds — to the cognitive complexities of syntactical speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_language#The_gossip_...

> I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more.

Quoted in The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Hal Abelson, Gerald Jay Sussman and Julie Sussman (McGraw-Hill, 2nd edition, 1996).

This is absurd. Destroying my focus so you can sell your product does not "damage the national economy".

> genuine needs

Capitalism reflects genuine greed, not genuine need.

> Then we go to war in order to make sure some other country can't create artificial scarcity of resources, which would reduce the number of people we have against our wishes

It is about preventing someone else from cutting off your supply lines.

Sounds like Intel is guilty of "illegal tying". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

On top of that, the DMCA has interoperability clauses which may need to be updated https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering

> don't use a hash table

> use the stack

> complain when language doesn't have tail call

wat

...

> Most often, some student will retort with the dreaded question: “So what?”

Insecure snob.

This is a sort of French Revolution type system: the elites can keep shitting and pissing until suddenly a conspiracy forms and KABOOM a whole bunch of dead rich people in the street and NOBODY CARES because they're perverted scum ! ! !

B R I N G

B A C K

T H E

G U I L L O T I N E