> There's a weird disconnect in this vaccine mandate debate: many are still pretending that Covid-19 is of natural origin, which gives such mandates a different feel than they otherwise have.

Contrary to your assertion, this is not clearly talking about vaccine mandates in any particular place. And the tweet I quoted previously is claiming (or hinting) that the same "state entity" had caused the pandemic and mandated the "experimental treatment". I'm not familiar with any versions of the lab-leak hypothesis that claimed that covid escaped from a US lab, so I don't think it's a reasonable inference that he's talking about the US vaccine mandate.

On the other hand, he seems to have worked pretty hard to avoid clearly stating any of his positions here, so who knows what he really thinks? Or thought?

> If a state entity does an oopsie in a lab, then forces its citizens to undergo an experimental treatment because of the oopsie, while suppressing news of side effects, and also denying that the oopsie is anyone's fault ... that's just abusive?

Unfortunately Blow was unwilling to come out and state his position here, relying instead on innuendo, so we have to kind of guess what he was trying to say. I interpret him as making four claims here:

1. The COVID-19 pandemic originated in a lab leak.

2. Some Chinese people were forced to accept experimental vaccinations.

3. The government of the PRC suppressed news of the side effects of the vaccines.

4. The government of the PRC worked to prevent investigations into the cause of the pandemic.

Claim #4 is plainly true; the WHO and several other countries have protested this at great length.

Claim #2 probably depends on your threshold for "experimental" and "forces". https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sinopharm_BIBP_CO... explains that emergency vaccination was available in China in July 02020, and there are plausible claims that Chinese state employees and students traveling abroad were required to take it. This was before results were in from clinical trials, which I think qualifies for most people's definition of "experimental"; the WHO wouldn't add it to its list of authorized emergency vaccines until May of the next year.

Claim #3 seems almost guaranteed to be true, but I don't have direct evidence. The government of the PRC routinely suppresses news, and there are numerous well-documented instances of this happening in connection with COVID, and there are always some subjects in clinical trials of vaccines who have major health problems such as death which may or may not be caused by the vaccine. BBIBP-CorV seems to have been, in the end, pretty safe, but it seems inconceivable that there weren't at least some news of people dying or having terrible health problems after receiving it which were deleted from Weibo or other media ("suppressed"), and that these deletions were carried out because of state policy of the PRC.

Claim #1 seems like the most debatable one, but even that isn't an open-and-shut case. At the time, the lab-leak case was fairly weak, and it certainly hasn't been proven, but it hasn't been disproven either; see https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/practically-a-book-review-r... for an extensive summary of the debate. Because of the truth of Claim #4 it seems unlikely that it will ever be disproven.

More generally, I find deplorable the polarization on partisan political grounds of fields like puzzle games, genetics, and quantum physics. Artistic development, understanding the world, and extending technology are necessarily collaborative endeavors, and rejecting Blow's games because he criticizes the Chinese government seems akin to refusing to use the Schrödinger equation because Schrödinger sexually victimized teenage girls.

______

† As defined in the Berlin Declaration 22 years ago: https://openaccess.mpg.de/Berlin-Declaration

The entire original point of the WWW project was, approximately, providing a better user interface for accessing files on FTP servers. So to me it seems perverse that the current stewards of the Web have broken that.

A colon definition containing five sequential calls to different words without any control flow or stack manipulation is perfectly unremarkable. Here's a sample word from the F83 block editor, which I am using because F83 is generally accepted as highly competent Forth code, if not exemplary:

    n NEW moves the terminal's cursor to the start of line n,
      and overwrites lines until a line is begun with null input
      ( a Carraige Return).

    : NEW   (S n -- )                                                
       L/SCR SWAP                                                    
       DO   [ FORTH ] I [ EDITOR ] T  EDIT-AT >IN OFF QUERY SPAN @   
         IF  P  ELSE  [ FORTH ] I REDISPLAY  LEAVE  THEN  .SCREEN
       LOOP  .SCREEN  ;                                          

The dataflow in that six-word code sequence is, in C syntax,

    t(i);
    edit_at();
    off(&in);
    query();
    &span ...

With slightly different definitions, this could easily have been, for example,

    edit_at(t(i));
    off(&in);
    span(query()) ...

My point is just that reconstructing the dataflow is a problem you have to solve when you are reading Forth code. The author knew what the dataflow was, presuming it's working code you're looking at. An efficient compiler would have to know, too. But, as the reader, you don't know until you reconstruct it mentally with your global knowledge of the things it's calling. It's an extra error-prone decoding step between the code you're looking at and the semantic understanding you seek.

(I said "without stack manipulation", but stack manipulation generally makes the problem more mentally challenging, not less.)

By contrast, with pop infix syntax, the dataflow is represented locally with the parentheses and commas.

The same thing is true of types in languages with implicit typing (like OCaml and JS), of when call/return pairs follow a conventional stack discipline in Scheme (where the possibility of call/cc exists), of variable capture and escape in languages with closures, of which variables are mutated in languages like Python where all variables are mutable (and to a slightly smaller extent in languages like C, where immutability is possible but not default). The author has this information; the maintainer needs it to successfully modify the program; the compiler would need it to avoid producing grievously inefficient code; and there's no way to express it in the language.

My claim is that, while the optimum may be subjective on this spectrum between implicitness and explicitness, the implicitness itself is objective. You claim to disagree, but to me it sounds like you disagreed simply because you didn't understand what I was trying to express.

For example, in https://conservancy.umn.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/a39e5... p. 37, he says:

> That was their [Derwent's] idea. I thought it was very clever and we realized that we couldn’t do it with our current software but that software like that could be written. And KeyKOS was the outcome of that. Tymshare and another company, Key Logic, did not succeed in making that commercial. It would’ve been a high security system with novel features.

Later in the interview, he says Tymshare timesharing on the 370 (the IBM machine) started out on VM/CMS.

If you have conflicting information, I'd love to see it!

G+ didn't have that problem so much, but I don't remember it using invite codes.

    e(d(), c(b, a()))

    a b c d e

    a(); b(); c(); d(); e();  //none
    b(a); d(c); e();
    e(d(c, b()), a);
    {a, b, c, d, e} // all going somewhere else together

On this basis I think it's at least somewhat defensible to claim that stack languages are "less readable": information about the dataflow graph which is easily available in the infix syntax is not present, at least locally. You can reconstruct it by knowing, or guessing, the stack effect of each word. But that's different from just having it plainly written down.

As a result, in Forth and PostScript, I regularly have bugs where I pass a parameter to, or receive a result from, the wrong place. This is not a major practical problem (it's usually pretty easy to figure out in the REPL) but it serves as evidence that stack languages really do require more effort to read and understand than pop infix languages.

Of course, you can make almost exactly the same argument that explicit typing helps readability, and implicit variable capture by closures hurts it. I think there's some merit in that, actually.